Premise
Modernity is obsessed with individual identity at the cost of destroying culture. The modern self has been reduced almost entirely into the sexual self. Carl Truman takes the reader on a scenic tour from Augustine to Marcuse tracing the way in which the modern conception of the self or “psychological self” has become increasingly disconnected from the physical self and its realities.
Good Parts
This book does a fair job of running through some of the intellectual heavy weights of the western cannon (think Rosseau, Kant, Marx, etc). The mainstream bits from these thinkers will be review for anyone familiar with philosophical history, but with some interesting threads being drawn out. Ironically, this book taught me some things about the LGBT community that I didn’t know like the theoretical difference between “gay” and “lesbian”. One of the most interesting points to me was that some feminist refuse to accept man to woman trans people as being technically women because of the fact that they for the most part become patriarchal stereotypes of women. There is also the more common argument about certain biological realities lacking in a M2W trans experience.
Bad Parts
The forward claims that the book was not meant as a “polemic”, or a high horse commentary on how our culture is going to hell in a hand basket. While it does succeed at not being aggressive there is no doubt which viewpoints the reader is supposed to find abhorrent or non sensical. The author claims to not “strawman” certain views yet is fairly quick to call things nonsense. At no point did it ever feel that he was honestly trying to portray his “opposition” as convincing in the least. This leads me to one of my main issues with this book and that is target audience. This probably explains the book’s current high ratings across various platforms. The book is written for those who have never heard of Roseau and are not at all familiar with is work. This is great when they are about to be exposed to a well-rounded take on the strengths and weaknesses of his arguments. This is not what happens in this book. Repeatedly the reader is introduced to yet another name they’ve heard but can’t quite place. They are then given a brief sketch of whatever thoughts Trueman thought were relevant to the narrative. Then are instantly shown why this view from this person is causing all our problems. This would be more impressive if Trueman were a more original thinker, but he doesn’t seem to be. Don’t get me wrong, he is no academical slouch, and I don’t mean to portray him as one, yet for the first half of the book most of his ideas aren’t his, but rather are reinterpretations from three thinkers who I am not familiar with but seem like actual original thinkers. I’ve had this experience before where the author uses so many interesting ideas from other authors the reader is left wondering why he is reading this book and not all the referenced materials.
My next critique is of overall tone. If the past few years have taught us anything it is that “common sense” isn’t common. It isn’t, as most people assume, missing but it is no longer common as in shared. With that in mind any work of this type has to grapple with this fact and understand that not all people shudder when they hear the term “expressive individualism”. This book fails to take that into account, the author is a Christian theologian and cannot seem to take a moment to really see the world through any other lens. He borrows a way of thinking about cultures as first, second, or third world. The difference between first and second seem a little hazy but basically you could think of the first world culture as pagan (i.e., Greek Myths) and second world as a more sophisticated take (i.e., the major religions of today, Islam, Christianity etc.). Finally, there is third world which is labeled as an anti-culture because it is negatively defined as rejecting the other two cultures. Surprise, surprise Trueman believes we are in an anti-culture. He then goes on to say (or rather again borrow) the fact that third world cultures and second world cultures cannot have an actual conversation because they are so fundamentally different. This of course raises the question of what this 400pg book is about then?
Lastly, this book only mentions at the very end the effect that lived experience has on what “makes sense” to most people. The whole book casts thinkers like Marx and Freud as villains who are undermining everything we hold dear, but they didn’t, and their ideas still don’t live in a vacuum. The world has changed a lot, their ideas would have never stuck if in this new world they didn’t find some sort of resonance where older ideas did not. Does that mean their ideas are “better”? Of course not, but it means their ideas corresponded more closely with the experience of their time, and you can do with that what you will.
Conclusion
As quoted in length, Nietzsche’s god is dead speech is used to underline the fact that with unifying meta narratives out of the way we are like a ship without anchor in a raging sea of shifting cultural aesthetic tastes. What is good today might be bad tomorrow. This of course is not a new thought to those who think about these types of things at any depth, yet as is so often the case it is used as a sort of unanswerable statement that defies any future attempt at improving the world. I’ve never understood this. As having been raised conservative, I have a lot of sympathy for the problems that are addressed. For example, I totally agree that history is desperately trying to be erased, and that there seems to be a swing towards the irrational in some radical pockets of society. I do not happen to think that this is the best response to these problems.