Carl Trueman: Psychological Man’s Threat To Liberty
Now is a good time for me to remind you that Carl Trueman’s recent book The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self is one of the most important books of our time, an absolute must-read for anyone trying to understand how we reached this point of cultural insanity.
In short, public policy is increasingly driven by the assumption that private psychological states or feelings are the basic foundation for personal identity — for who we think we are. The idea that bodies can contain the wrong mind and that bodies ought to be fashioned to our inner will and feelings is now widespread.
The political significance of this might not be obvious at first glance but becomes very clear when we reflect upon how our culture is changing as a result. Take, for example, the idea of freedom as traditionally understood in America. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are — or were — basic to the American experiment. They are enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, a placement which surely points to the priority they held in the minds of the founders.
These ideas, though, were also rooted in a certain understanding of humans: that they were made in the image of God and that they were deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet these truths — once thought self-evident — are under increasing scrutiny as new, and even revolutionary, ideas of the human person are sweeping Western culture.
And the alarming news for many is that, as much as religious conservatives might want to view this current trend as a simple battle of good versus evil or us versus them, Americans from across the ideological spectrum are all deeply implicated in the modern revolution of human selfhood. The way out will demand that we capture an older and more truthful understanding of who we are.
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For Jefferson, if something neither picked his pocket nor broke his leg, he did not think it something that the government should take an interest in regulating. But once the self becomes defined not by property or by a physical body but by an inner psychological space, the words and actions that hurt start to become rather more alarming.
That is why wars over words — pronouns, epithets — now dominate the public square, and why a careless tweet can ruin a career or reading the wrong Dr. Seuss book might get you canceled. And it is why society is becoming more authoritarian in the name of protecting the vulnerable. To protect the pursuit of happiness in a time when each decides what that means, some individuals and groups need to be suppressed so that others may flourish, especially if one group chooses to not privilege another’s chosen inner identity.
This is particularly difficult for religious conservatives. When traditional attitudes toward sexual behavior collide with modern notions of identity, religious conservatives may be labeled as anti-social or harmful to the sexual identity of others. When the belief that bodies are fundamental to who we are, and therefore no one can be “born in the wrong body,” crashes up against the notion of inner identities, those who hold such views are considered bigoted.
The causes for this are not entirely the election results over the last two decades or the consequences of a few liberal appointments to the Supreme Court. They are much more long-standing and deep-rooted. What we are witnessing today in the new culture wars is the latest stage in that inward, psychological turn of the human self. Only by recognizing this intellectual error can we find a way forward.
Read it all. We are not going to be able to sustain our political liberties under these conditions. Carl Trueman’s five-alarm essay explains in a powerful way how politics is downstream from culture, and why the soft totalitarianism of the Pink Police State is our fate if we don’t figure out how to turn this around.
If you want to know more about Carl’s thesis, check out this video interview with him.
