Review of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman
Introductory Remarks before reviewing the book
The author delves into ideology of theorists hundreds of years in the past and how he believes they may have shaped current cultural systems. He does so by meshing his interpretation with the insight from more contemporary “thinkers” as they also span back to ideologies that lent to today’s modern thought. These historical figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake are some of the few the author notes as milestones in Social Theory that have affected todays Social Imaginary (to be defined below). Some of these more current people noted are Charles Taylor, Philip Rieffe, Alasdair MacIntyre.
I do not worry too much about piecing together everyone who said what when addressing historical ideologies and summary’s but simply state the insights for my own grasp.
The author does not lament or push a polemic when writing his book. He simply reflects his flow of discourse from one century to next, tracing back today’s sociological condition to its fingerprints in the past.
My goal in reading this book was to personally understand the author’s intent and to gain valuable talking points and insight to communicate to others in my circle why we are where we are today in a godless society. Having read this book, I have determined that Western society has rejected Universal Absolute Truth. My next goal is to produce a synopsis on Universal Absolute Truth in a way to present it in a dialogue on our current condition. I desire to present the problem and the solution clearly and precisely in any discourse within my sphere.
I do make my own comments and observations throughout the review which are easily detected mostly by italics or obvious deviations. And much of the content in this review is not direct quotes but the capturing of concepts of the author. There are some direct quotes that I wanted to capture for accuracy. The number in parentheses are page numbers in the book.
Introduction and into Chapter 1
Reimagining the Self
The author begins his book astonished as to how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” has come to be a civil rights and individual liberty issue. And he wonders how such a strange idea became the common orthodox currency of our culture.
The statement carries with it a world of metaphysical assumptions and grants inner convictions over biological reality.
The heart of the book explores the sexual revolution over the past 60 years which has culminated in the normalization of transgenderism. This sexual revolution cannot be understood without its broader transformation into how society understands the nature of human selfhood.
When the author refers to sexual revolution, he is referring to the radical and ongoing transformation of sexual attitudes and behaviors that has occurred in the West since the early 1960’s.
This transformation into a new understanding of selfhood is mostly detected toward the sexual direction as it tilts so strongly in that direction. (As the presence of a skunk may not be detectable by sight, one can be certain of its presence by its smell – the presence of the new selfhood is detected by sexual expression). The sexual revolution is just the next iteration in the pursuit and understanding or self. (39)
Defining some terminology:
Social Imagery or Imaginary (37) – this is the “trickle down” effect of “Social Theory” from the social elites. Handed down or derived from social theory, this is how the ordinary people think and act, even when such people have never read these elites or spent any time self-consciously on the implications of their theories.
Imagery is the way ordinary people imagine their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc. It is the common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.
It refers to myriads of beliefs, practices, normative expectations, and even implicit assumptions that members of a society share and shape in their daily lives. It is not so much a conscious philosophy of life as a set of intuitions and practices.
In sum, the social imagery is the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it…though that is emphatically not to make the social imaginary simply into a set of identifiable ideas.
Social Theory – An approach to the way things are by a deliberate, self-conscious belief in a particular theory of the world to which I am committed. Social Theory is the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by a large group of people, if not the whole society.
I would suspect that since we have such a world-wide network that finds a seat in everyone’s living room, the social imagery becomes more unified and driven by the social theorists. I would not be surprised that the social theorists are intentionally driving the information platforms and entertainment industry with full knowledge that they are manipulating social imagery. This push is no longer originating from a university podium, but easily from Hollywood, social media, government, corporations, and news studios right into open arms and empty minds. We have all seen how easily corporations control their platforms to prevent and to promote certain narratives.
So, since the majority of the people live in an intuitive fashion, when someone says they are a woman trapped in a man’s body, doesn’t have to make sense to them because they themselves are not committed to an elaborate understanding of the nature of gender, identity, and its relationship to biological sex.
When one hears such a declarative statement, then one responds intuitively to affirm someone in his or her chosen identity and it is hurtful not to do so, however strange the particulars of that self-identification might have seemed to previous generations. (As we shall see later that previous generations that carry traditional thought no longer are endeared. To be on the “right side of history” means that previous generations must be killed.)
The larger society can see such statements from the angle of social imagery as a matter of intuitive taste. And the question of how the tastes and intuitions of the general public are formed is the question of how the social imaginary comes to take the shape that it does. (38)
There is a much wider, cultural phenomenon that has shaped the intuitions of those who are blissfully unaware of its various intellectual origins and metaphysical assumptions. (39) Apparently, the social theory has more trickle-down effect than does the imaginary suspects.
The book will begin to lay down a process by which we have come to accept the injection of theories that become the formation of imageries and what they are.
More on terminology, the following terms connect and relate to social imagery:
MIMESIS and POIESIS. These terms refer to two different ways of thinking about the world.
Mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it.
Poiesis view, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning, and purpose can be created by the individual.
Dominate Western culture shifted from the divine and created view, more mimetic, over time. The culture was more mimetic when society was more primitively agrarian, more dependent on geography and seasons. The authority of the created order was obvious and unavoidable. The world was as it was and we needed to conform to it. Yet, it developed advanced agricultural technology, soil science, fertilizers and pesticides, irrigation for water storage, which began to lift its entire dependency on the environment to machines, transportation of product to and from nonseasonal climates and even engineered foods that are immune to certain conditions or parasites. (This by no way means that the mimetic way of thinking is archaic).
The transition to a poiesis society soon saw the world much more as a case of raw material that we can be manipulated by our own power to our own purposes.
Even broader significance than matters of agriculture was the development of automobiles and aircraft that shattered the authority of geographical space. (41) There is also the development of telecommunications and information technology. Medical technology made it possible to say goodbye to many death sentences and increased ease of life.
We soon became our own self-creators and left the transcendent Creator. Self-creation is a routine part of our modern social imagery. (This “raw material of the world that transfixed mankind into thinking they were their own creators forgot that it was God who created the raw material. Were they really their own creators, they should have started with their own dirt instead of manipulating God’s).
The statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body”, is only plausible in a world in which the predominant way of thinking is poietic rather than mimetic. And a poietic world is one in which transcendent purpose collapses into the immanent and in which given purposes collapses into any purpose I choose to create or decide for myself. Human nature, one might say, becomes something individuals or societies invent for themselves. I can be what I want. (42)
There has been a transformation of therapy.
The traditional therapist was to enable the patient to grasp the nature of the community to which he belonged. These are the things that promote commitment to the community, which is prior to, and more important than, any particular individual. For instance, job satisfaction used to be empirical – a job was only practical and supplied a source of survival for self and family. It was unrelated to ones’ psychological state. There are things that promote commitment to a community, which is prior to, and more important than, any particular individual. (47)
The transformation of traditional therapy and thinking is no longer to serve the purpose of socializing an individual. Instead, it seeks to protect the individual from the kind of harmful neuroses that society itself creates through its smothering of the individual’s ability simply to be himself.
Instead of communal beliefs, practices, and institutions that were bigger than the individual and in which the individual, to the degree that he conformed to or cooperated with them, found meaning. All of them found purpose and meaning to something outside themselves. Now, the commitment is first and foremost to self and is inwardly directed. Thus, the order is reversed. Outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual and his sense of inner well-being. Every institution now is where an individual goes to “perform”, not to “conform”.
We now have “safe-places”, affirmation and reassurance training, hypersensitivity awareness and a generation of “snowflakes”. This is the outcome of the slow but steady psychologizing of the self and triumph of inward-directed therapeutic categories over traditional outward-directed educational philosophies. All institutions must be transformed to conform to the psychological self, or it is harmful.
This is poiesis over mimesis. The individual is king. The individual must simply be allowed to be himself, unhindered by outward pressure to conform to any greater reality. He can be whoever he wants to be. (50)
The individual simply makes himself the creator of any meaning that there might be. External or objective truths are then simply constructs designed by the powerful to intimidate and to harm the weak. Overthrowing them and thus overthrowing the notion that there is a great reality to which we are accountable, whether that of the polis, of some religion, or of the economy -becomes the central purpose of educational institutions.
It is easier to accept the statement that, “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body” since human identity has become so plastic, and the inner psychological life of the individual is sovereign. One’s identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination.
So, if one wants to make a statement about their personal sexual practices then what they are really talking about is their personal identity, not their behavior. This is why the social theorists must dissolve the nuclear family. The nuclear family is an affront to the identity of those existing in mainstream social imagery. The patriarchal nuclear family is a repressive sexual code that must be shattered. It is the enemy.
Personal authenticity is found through public performance of inward desires. The most powerful inward desires of most people are sexual in nature, so identity itself has come to be thought of as strongly sexual in nature.(52)
There are still some societal restrictions imposed on its members which shapes and corrals its behavior, e.g., pedophilia, foot fetishes, snuff sex, and other various sexual proclivities. If society is to appear not to be hypocritical, then that dam should soon break, too.
Though, at the present time, all psychologically constructed identities and sexual expressions and desires considered are not legitimate and protected by law or the general cultural ethos because they just don’t, yet. Social Imagery still considers them taboo but for no real reason.
BUT WHY? Why can some identities be recognized with law and cultural pressure, enjoying legitimacy and widespread social privilege and others cannot? What is the importance and nature of recognition?
The Analytic Attitude.
Why should I NEED my neighbors and society to affirm my homosexuality as a good thing? Why is it not that just being a homosexual is enough if I can still supply for myself? Why must the Christian cake baker celebrate my homosexual wedding by baking me a wedding cake that specifies my homosexuality? The baker will sell me any baked goods that I want, any day of the week without any reservations and will even recommend other bakers that will make me a wedding cake to celebrate my wedding. He has shown amicable tolerance of my homosexuality in all regards. Why won’t that suffice? The identity of the homosexual is tolerated by others in a manner that allows him to go about his daily business. Why isn’t this reasonable enough? Sexual revolutionaries do not accept mere tolerance of their sexual identities. They not only want full equality, but full recognition. It is this…Satisfaction and meaning- authenticity- that is now found by an inward turn, and the culture is reconfigured to his end.
Indeed, it must now serve the purpose of meeting my psychological needs; I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society, for that would create anxiety and make me inauthentic. The baker who would not celebrate with the homosexual is not an act consistent with the therapeutic ideal; in fact, it is the opposite- an act causing me psychological harm. The new societal characteristic on display today is called “the analytic attitude”. It is the attitude that all society must adapt to reflect a therapeutic mentality that focusses on the psychological well-being of the individual. The demand is that others must acknowledge my inward, psychological identity. All individuals must be coerced to be part of our therapeutic world.
Anything that could cause psychological harm must be policed and suppressed, this includes language and words, i.e., hate speech. Individuals have a right to psychological happiness.
Words become potential weapons and thus we lose freedom of speech. These realities signify the death of culture rather than the birth pangs of the coming liberated utopia. (55)
And besides, what is hate speech? It could be something as a simple disagreement with another person’s expressed feelings or needs.
(He will soon answer as to why some are allowed full autonomy in society to force obligatory tolerance and celebration of whatever lifestyle they exhibit and propagate. Thus far, I have seen more of “what” is happening rather than “why” it is happening – He will get to it later).
Even though we are in the rising narrative of the modern plastic, psychological, expressive self, when asked “Who I am”, we do not respond to one’s DNA code or to such generalities as one’s sex. We typically define ourselves in relation to other people and other things – the child of John, the husband of Mary, a professor at Grove City College, the author of a particular book. Our reply likely touches our relationship with others. Humans need to belong. Identity arises in the context of belonging. To have an identity means that I am being acknowledged by others. (57)
If one is ignored, treated as though non-existent, or as they were worthless, then they make others feel worthless. They can be effectively, erased. (note the Amish community - shunning)
Or they can, as we have seen, go on the offensive by Doxing, misrepresenting the truth about others, public humiliation, destruction/annihilation of their reputation, loss of jobs and livelihood, and open, outright threats and wishes of death.
Individual identity is thus truly a dialogue. It is a reciprocal language learned in community. In addition to the communal dialogue, there is another dimension of identity of the modern self. A deep desire in the modern West for self-expression, to perform in public in a manner consistent with that which one feels or thinks one is on the inside. That is the essence of authenticity. And this is also the authenticity that dominates the contemporary cultural imagination.
It’s hard to figure exactly the tension of personal authenticity with a desire to belong to some larger whole, yet both are true. Perhaps as I understand this so far, for the individual mandate to have one’s identity authenticated, society is forced to kneel to the individual. In this bowing down, community with others is now possible, though very complicated. When a whole society bends to the others personal therapeutic needs, then what about the therapeutic needs of those who bend?
Perhaps it is possible that those who are forced to bend and comply to the other’s quest for identity, they themselves find some identity in meeting societies expectations by supplying the void for the “minority” individual. They understand that this is what they must do to be communal. What a whirlpool of delirium. The majority now serves the minority, and a reverse master-slave relationship is comfortable in the social imaginary. During the height of the BLM movement in 2020, I recall seeing a YouTube video of a white woman kneeling and kissing the feet of black men that were lined side by side. I also recall seeing a video of a NC Female Pastor of either the Episcopal or Methodist Church washing the feet of black females’ side by side in a ceremony of foot-washing. There was some therapeutic need met by those doing the kissing and washing. They had found their role in this upside-down society.
This is a society trying to make life up on their own without universal absolute truth. Such a society will ultimately descend into violence and immorality. This society of violence and immorality is observed literally all-around the Western World, especially in America and, relationally. Relationally, it can easily be expressed in a sado-masochistic relationship between the “victimized” and the “oppressor” as labeled. The “victimized” now the oppressor, and the former “oppressor” now a self-flagellating repentant victim without redemption. There is no amount of contrition that can transpire from the new repentant to the new oppressor that would suffice reconciliation. Total dominion is all that one seeks over the other – even then, there is no satisfaction for the new oppressor.
Dr Larry Crabb presents aspects of a society whereas some embrace universal absolute truth and some who do not. Perhaps his “Stages A-C” could be a similar value to that of the author’s First, Second, and Third World Cultures (yet to be discussed in Chapter 2 of the book).
Our western culture use to be in Stage B but only as a moment in history then it took a rapid decent. It is now in a perpetual “Stage C’.
Note what Paul had to say to the Romans and to the Thessalonians about the last days. These godless traits are predominant in this culture. No matter how much the former oppressor bends to the new oppressor class, they will be irreconcilable. There will be no end to this warfare until Christ comes again.
Romans 1.28-32 (Abandoned by God)
28 And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips,
30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful;
32 and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.
2 Thess 3.1-4
1 But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.
2 For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to
parents, ungrateful, unholy,
3 unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good,
4 treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God…”
Defining Significance, Identity and Security in Christ (Stage A in chart above):
SIGNIFICANCE (in terms of Identity):
Dr Crabb states that this is Predominately a Male Trait but compels both male and female.
I will come to feel significant as I have an eternal impact on people around me by serving them and demonstrating the indwelling Christ under the authority of universal absolute truth.
If I fail in business or struggle in my occupation, if my spouse leaves me, if I work in a menial occupation, or if I fail to achieve my most desired goals, if I can afford only a small house, or one used car, or have grown old and seem to have lost my stature in society, I can still enjoy the thrilling significance and satisfaction of belonging to the Ruler of the universe, Who has equipped me and will use me for His eternal work.
As I mature by developing Christ-like traits, I will enter more and more fully into the significance of belonging to and serving the Lord.
Living out Significance:
SIGNIFICANCE is the sense of Eternal Purpose, Everlasting Importance, Abundant Adequacy in whatever one does. Only in Christ can one have meaningfulness and lasting impact. My significance has little to do with my occupation. My occupation is a means by which God demonstrates through me to a languishing and desperate world that only He can fulfill this identity crisis that seems to consume mankind. As He, God, said about Job, “Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, fearing God and turning away from evil.”, He will say about you. The world will watch you in your occupation and wonder at the depth of abundance you bring with you and the authenticity you enjoy at what you place your hands to do. NO job, no occupation, no recognition of your existence from mankind is meant to give you identity – it is too small to fill in one’s heart what only God Himself can fill. Be filled with the Spirit and demonstrate His filling in whatever state you may find yourself.
Don’t confuse Identity in CHRIST with significance in your job, your sex, your status or even any recognition of your existence.
SECURITY:
Dr Crabb states that this is Predominately a Female Trait but compels both male and female. This seems to be where most of society resides, both male and female in today’s society.
My need for security demands that I be unconditionally loved, accepted, and cared for from now and forever. God has seen me at my worst and still loved me to the point of giving His life for me. That kind of love I can never lose. I am completely acceptable to him regardless of my behavior.
I am under no pressure to earn or keep His love. My acceptability to God depends only on Jesus’ acceptability to God and on the fact that Jesus’ death counted as full payment for my sins and any and all blunders after that.
As I mature by developing Christ-like traits, I will enter more and more fully into the security and significance of belonging to and serving the Lord.
Now that I know this love, I can relax secure in the knowledge that the Eternal God of creation has pledged His infinite power and wisdom to insure my welfare. That is security. Nothing can happen to me that my Loving God doesn't allow. I will experience nothing He will not enable me to handle. When problems mount and I feel alone, insecure, and afraid, I am to fill my mind with the security-building truth that at this moment a Sovereign, Loving, Personal, Infinite God is absolutely in control.
In short:
SECURITY is the sense of LOVE – Unconditional and Consistently Expressed, Permanent Acceptance. There is no wrong that I could ever do to shake my identity in Christ. I am His and He is mine, FOREVER.
CONCLUSION:
*WE MUST NOT CONFUSE WHAT DEFINES US WITH WHAT WE DO. OUR IDENTITY IS NOT MY “JOB” OR WHAT I DO OR MY STATE IN LIFE.
*OUR JOBS DO NOT DEFINE US OR GIVE US OUR IDENTITY! NEITHER DOES SOCIETY.
*MY JOB ONLY ALLOWS ME TO DEMONSTRATE MY IDENTITY IN CHRIST.
*MY JOB DEMONSTRATES TO THE WORLD MY SIGNIFICANCE AND SECURITY IN CHRIST.
*MY JOB IS A CONDUIT FOR THE GLORY OF GOD IN ME.
*MY JOB IS ONLY ONE OF MANY WAYS GOD DEMONSTRATES HIS POWER AND PURPOSE IN AND THROUGH ME.
*I DO NOT NEED PERSONAL RECOGNITION FROM THE WORLD TO AFFIRM MY IDENTITY FOR I AM HIS AND HE IS MINE AND THE HOLY SPIRIT INEXPICABLY DWELLS IN ME REAFFERMING MY IDENTITY IN HIM EVERY BREATHING MOMENT.
*I DEMONSTRATE MY IDENTITY IN CHRIST TO THE WORLD –
-BY ENJOYING ETERNAL SIGNIFICANCE AND UNCONDITIONAL SECURITY IN HIM WHEREVER I AM AND IN WHATEVER I DO.
-HOW I DO WHATEVER I DO IS WHAT DEMONSTRATES WHO I AM IN CHRIST.
-MY IDENTITY IS DEFINED IN CHRIST AND WHAT I DO DEMONSTRATES MY SIGNIFICANE AND SECURTIY IN HIM. THE WORLD NEEDS TO SEE CHRIST AND THEY SEE HIM DEMONSTRATED IN ME.
Back to the Book and how we got this way…
The author uses Hegel’s observation of the modern era to springboard into answering the question, “How can one connect the aspirations to express oneself as an individual and to be free with the desire for being at one with (or belonging to) society as a whole?”
Hegel believes that all it takes is that two self-conscious individuals acknowledge the consciousness of the other. A human being is most self-conscious when he knows that the other people are acknowledging him as a self-conscious being. (COMMUNITY)
Identity thus requires recognition by another. In the most primitive manner, there ultimately comes to be a “master-slave” relationship according to Hegel. In a meeting of two primitive self-consciousnesses, recognition or acknowledgement of another requires a setting aside or a denial of oneself. In this exchange, the ultimate dynamic is for one to totally dominate the other or to negate it entirely. The greatest way that my existence can be recognized is that I fight or kill the other. Recognition becomes a life-and-death struggle.
However, killing the other one is somewhat self-defeating because the one killed will no longer be able to give me the recognition that I desire. There must then be some compromise whereby one person holds the superior position to the other who yet remains alive.
There is a hierarchy of master-slave whereby the stronger receives from the weaker the recognition he desires. (60) (I noted above the YouTube videos)
Can we not see that one facet of this is the vast CRT/Intersectionality/Wokeness movement?
Recognition always stands in potential relationship to hierarchy and therefore to potential struggle and conflict.
Those who once considered themselves inferior must now rise and enslave those who were once considered superior. Both inferior and superior are categorized by themselves and total domination is pursued by the superior. We seem to have progressed to there, even though self-defeating, killing and devastating one’s opponent is sufficient recognition. What despots we have become to gain recognition by such terminal ends. There is more and more opportunity for man to demonstrate the depravity of his own heart. Destruction and annihilation are the new revenue. This is Larry Crab’s Stage C from above.
Continuing with a side-step from the book…
Here is now a biblical spin/polemic as to the state of society:
All in all, we need only to start with sound biblical truth about the human nature. All three of these are present and ever driving the human heart. There is a three-car train, an ever-shifting position where the other has it’s turn to be the engine. We would begin in the text
1 John 2.15-17:
Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world,
1. the lust of the flesh and (The “FEEL IT” sins)
2. the lust of the eyes and (The “SEE IT” sins)
3. the boastful pride of life, (The “BE IT” sins)
is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.
The shout from the social justice mouth is the evidence of what is hidden in the heart. The heart is driven by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. It’s that simple. The common cry from the woke community is absolute equality-and even that is a lie. If one see’s someone else who owns or possesses more than themselves, then the heart rises from the abyss and cries that every house must be equal. “I want what you have, and I will take it from you!”. This wolf that howls does so from many disguises. Thankfulness to God and contentment with what blessings He has given to us is a foreign, evil thought. I am certain that should all be taken from another and the balance is shifted, it would still not be enough to contain the heart wild with covetousness. The heart will transition from one that is driven by covetousness to a heart driven with the boastful pride of life and continue to its destruction of anyone but themselves while plowing full steam ahead in their own self-destruction.
Mark 9.47-48
Jesus warns us that if the lust of our eyes causes us to fall, then it is better to be without than to desire the unquenchable. No one can console an envious, covetous heart.
“If your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.
When the Judgement comes to mankind and they stand before the Judge of all the earth, they will be cast into an eternal abyss where all their desires and lusts will be at full rage and ever increasing, yet forever, utterly unquenchable.
In Luke 12.15 when Jesus was observing the dispute between two brothers arguing over possession of an inheritance, He warned them:
“Beware and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.”
If only Western culture were to read this simple word from Christ.
And, as a matter of course, neglecting the simple Word of God, society falls off the cliff to devastation:
Rom 1.28-32
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips,
30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful;
32 and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.
We should not be astonished with the downfall of Western Society and its Third World embrace. It is a matter of consequence and abandonment of The God of Truth.
So back to the book and to the question as to why some identities appear to enjoy legitimacy and widespread social privilege in society and others do not. (61)
Recognition is a social phenomenon. The framework and conventions for expressing my identity are socially constructed, specific to the context in which I find myself.
If, today, I wore a Roman soldier’s uniform it would not mean that I was a member of a brave military unit. I would be insane or be going to a dress party. My dressing that I choose to wear is recognized by a wider moral structure. The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his own existence. As for the LGBTQ+ people, traditional sexual codes are oppressive and life denying. That is why these lifestyles are deemed legitimate and others are not. Pedophiles, for example, are currently unpersuasive as a victimized class given the fact that they appear more as victimizers.
However, homosexuals in general, are seen as consenting adults, and are not seen as victimizers and call on a long history of social marginalization and victimhood. They can thus claim a right to recognition, a recognition that is connected to a further aspect of the modern moral imagination, that of dignity.
The homosexual has gained the recognition of society as a whole and is king, though he may be a pedophile. Because the homosexual claims his sexuality as his personal identity, simple tolerance is not enough. He requires equality before the law and recognition by the law and in society. One must not find themselves on the wrong side of law and social attitudes. The person who objects to homosexual practices is refusing to recognize an identity that society at large recognizes as legitimate and is a moral offense now. It is not simply a matter of indifference. The question of identity in the modern world is a question of dignity. The homosexual society must feel that they are equal members of society because their identity and dignity is at stake. This is why they require legislation. (69) Though the civil rights movement of the 1950’s was based on universal humanity, the homosexual movement of today is based on individual self-determination.
Remember, social imagery is what controls our basic perceptions and intuitions of culture around us. It is largely absorbed unconsciously.
Thus, a sense of self-hood, of who we are, is both intuitive and deeply intertwined with the expectations, ethical and otherwise, of the society in which we are placed. The desire to be recognized, to be accepted, to belong is a deep and perennial human need, and no individual sets the terms of that recognition or belonging all by himself.
To be a self is to be in a dialogical relationship with other selves and thus with the wider social context. My context, social imagery, must shape to recognize my right to identity and dignity.
We are living in a social stratosphere built upon the wants of an individual. If that individual does not get what he wants, he is oppressed. If he is oppressed, he is a victim and the western world bends to his will. We must endow him with total authenticity no matter what it costs the foundations of society. The foundations of society are destroyed. The stability of society just doesn’t matter when weighed against one’s personal identity. As Kirk Kameron said, “Homosexuality is unnatural, detrimental and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations to civilization”.
This has been the movement away from the mimetic view of the world as possessing intrinsic meaning to a poietic one, where the onus for meaning lies with me – the human self as the constructive agent. This is “anti-culture”. (71) It is possible, too, that the social imagery can be shaped into an environment by which we can be recognized by others from which we derive that deep human need of belonging. (73) Remember, the deepest human needs can only be met through Christ (Significance and Security).
Chapter 2 Reimagining Our Culture
In chapter 2 the author asks why does our culture have the particular shape that it does? Why is it that our social imagery makes sex such a basic marker of identity, and attitudes to sex such a fundamental test for recognition? Why does the public need to know about the sexual orientation of movie stars or their attitude toward homosexual marriage when it has nothing to do with their technical competence to pursue their profession? Why is it important to educate every elementary school child in the taxonomy of sexual preferences?
He begins to answer these questions about sex and identity by addressing it in several terms: First, Secondand Third World Cultures. He says that these terms refer to the culture that societies embody. (Note, this is the authors perspective of cultures that I related to the three stages previously from Larry Crabb)
He looks at the essence of the former civilization as ultimately grounded in a sacred order, or at least until recently. We have lost the extrinsic justification for moral codes that is so catastrophic for society at large. There was a time when morality was justified by the appeal to something transcendent, beyond the material world. Here are the three “worlds” (75):
First World – they were/are largely pagan, but not lacking in moral codes. They were rooted in something greater than themselves. Their moral codes were based in myths. For example, Sparta and the Oracle of Delphi.
It was sacred myth, though pagan. It had the stamp of supernatural approval that gave them their real authority. The answer to “why” for laws was always, “Because the oracle at Delphi has sanctioned them.” It was an appeal to beyond social arrangements and pragmatic conveniences of society. It could be as simple as “fate” as the controlling idea. I would add that “karma” and superstition could as well be the transcendent code of how one chooses their choices in life. I am not certain as to which world I would place satanic worship since satan is real but is not God. Any system that is not biblical is satanic. I am probably safe to say that he exists in all three worlds, though cleverly disguised.
Second World – These worlds are not so much characterized by fate as much as FAITH.
The obvious example here is Christianity. The Christian Faith shaped the cultures of the West in deep ways. Law and moral codes were rooted in the will of God revealed in the Bible.
All was built on the character of God. Justice and mercy were shaped by the Bible’s teaching. Society was accountable to the sacred, even courts with the swearing on the Bible. (This is more like Dr Crabb’s Stage A mentioned above).
These two worlds had a stability because their foundations lie in something beyond themselves.
In other words, they do not have to justify themselves on the basis of themselves.
Third World – This is in stark contrast to the previous worlds. They do not root their cultures, their social orders, their moral imperatives in anything sacred. They do have to justify themselves, but they cannot do so on the basis of something sacred or transcendent. Third Worlds have abandoned the notion of a sacred order, that so the interdicts of first and second worlds cease to have any plausibility because they lack any justification beyond themselves. This is unprecedented in human history. This leaves society without any foundation. It is an impossible task to justify itself only by reference to itself. Morality will tend toward a matter of simple consequentialist pragmatism, with the notion of what are and are not desirable outcomes being shaped by the distinct cultural pathologies of the day. (This is more like Dr Crabb’s Stage C mentioned above).
This is also known as “Immanent Frame”. It is not a belief that this world stood under the authority of a reality that transcended its mere material existence. Rather, it is a world where this is all there is. Moral discourse cannot find its justification or toot its authority in anything that lies beyond it.
Whether one sees this transition from Second to Third World culture as gradual or distinct, damaging, traceable events, it is a moral code that renders their culture profoundly volatile, subject to confusion, and liable to collapse.
In any area of contemporary society whether it is abortion to sexual morality, it has become largely a matter of pragmatic considerations –
“Will this make me happy? How can I attenuate the risks/consequences? Does it harm someone else’s psychological well-being?” Such matters are always changing and subjective, they provide no stable framework for ethics.
In the realm of sexual codes, since we have contraception and medicine for diseases, and can practice safe sex, there is huge pressure on deeply rooted sexual taboos. Why should incest be prohibited if it is between consenting adults and there is no risk of conception or harm to anyone else? (79)
What it boils down to is that Third World Cultures are really just therapeutic cultures. It is a culture of psychological man: the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned. Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling. It is a culture that is preoccupied with self-actualization and fulfillment of the individual because there is no greater purpose that can be justified in any ultimately authoritative sense.
It is important to note that all three worlds can exist simultaneously in the same society. This creates a cultural battle zone. The Third world is incompatible with the others. There is no common ground between the Third World Culture and the First and Second.
There is no common authority on which one may agree to terms of debate in order to determine exactly what it is they’re debating. One looks at a sacred order, the other to only immanent order. It even levels at subjective preference as to what constitutes a person. (80)
The only way to resolve such matters is that it must be addressed with reference to an authority grounded in the sacred. We cannot come together on a purely pragmatic or subjective criteria. Otherwise, with no common authority, there is a permanent clash and no resolution. Sacred order and immanent order do not come together. We are dominated by the immanent order and subjective preference. There is no more sacred order. We live in a world in which moral instability and volatility are the order of the day.
Put simply, modern ethical discourse is chaotic because there is no longer a strong community consensus on the nature of the proper end of human existence – what is the teleological reason for man? Can we simply kill someone for the benefit of another? Or is there an innate dignity and value in each person? If morality is just a function of social conventions, then ethical chaos is the result. Imago Dei (we are created in the “Image of God”) is the core of man and it is dismissed in modern day conventions. For arguments to make sense, one must keep asking, “For what purpose?”. If the purpose is imminent then it is not transcendent and has no purpose for tomorrow nor had purpose yesterday. (83) For whatever “purpose”, tomorrow doesn’t count.
Without universal realities and absolutes, even natural law, ethics are overridden by communities and for whatever is next in the buffet of ideas. For instance, the purpose for marriage. The institution of Marriage has been embedded in Western society for traditional ages: lifelong and exclusive bond between two people of the opposite sex in what was the social convention.
The threefold purpose was lifelong companionship, mutual sexual satisfaction, and procreation. This has been the ends of marriage. But an expansion of the demands of the ends of marriage demands the extermination of the essence of marriage. It must go. Gay marriage has a different “telos” … a change in “for what purpose”.
It requires the rejection of marriage in the traditional, universal sense, and a total redefinition of marriage relative to its ends.
The major social assumption today that is dominant in the West is “emotivism”: a doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character. There is no reason beyond oneself for purpose. (85)
Emotivism is a theory not of meaning but of use: it is about how we use moral concepts and moral language. It is a way of granting or transforming what were transcendent, objective authority and values to become my preferences as if they were truth claims. If I think something is wrong, then so should you. Emotivism is a function of the failed history of ethical theory.
Emotivism has become the norm and is universal. However, there is a difference in emotivism as a moral theory and a social theory. (87)
Emotivism as Moral theory is a flimsy argument to base our moral views and is simply based on emotional preferences.
Emotivism as Social Theory is how most people feel today and live their lives. “It just feels right,” “I know in my heart it is a good thing,” and, “Follow your heart.”
And other similar STOCK (Disney) phrases are familiar to us all, and all point to the subjective, emotional foundation of so much ethical discussion today.
Social Theory lacks common ground with anyone on metaphysical or metanarrative framework. It is doomed to degenerate into nothing more than the assertion of incommensurable opinions and preferences.
We live in a society that runs on emotional, subjective convictions and for anyone who disagrees with them, they assert that the dissenters have irrational prejudices. We see this by the increasing number of words ending in -phobia/phobic. Anyone with moral positions out of accord with current mainstream emotional preferences fall into the category of neurotic bigots. We live in a culture of expressive individualism with the rise of the therapeutic self, whereby the good is identified with what makes me feel happy. Inner personal happiness and a sense of well-being resides at the heart of the modern age. There is no transcendent framework, it is dead.
The author begins his next section in this chapter with a definition of culture – it’s a good definition:
Culture is the name given to those traditions, institutions,
and patterns of behavior that transmit the values of one generation to the next.
Morality is chaotic and so is its discourse since there is no connective agreement with anyone outside the Third World Culture. There are other cultural phenomena that accompany this moral chaos. One of the obvious is the overthrow of the beliefs, values, and behaviors of the past. C.S. Lewis calls this “chronological snobbery”. In the past, the first and second worlds’ intellectuals and institutions were conduits for the transmission and preservation of culture. Now the current institutions are dedicated to just the opposite – to the subversion, destabilization, and destruction of the culture’s traditions. In fact, these third world elites don’t even deserve the name of “culture.” They are ANTI-CULTURE. This movement exists only to destroy, deconstruct, and mutilate any sacred orders. There is no reference to God, and He is simply an unnecessary hypothesis.
But I wonder if these “anti-culturalists” aren’t a culture in themselves, albeit a grotesque form of culture.
These third world elites become the norm because they are seen as destroying a tyrannical hangover from an outdated way of viewing the world. They demonstrate their authenticity by crude rhetoric and blistering actions. Relentless cynicism and violent behavior are not only seen in the public foray but promoted in the media and Hollywood movies and sitcoms.
Third world elites destroy history and offer nothing of any significant substance. It is nihilism - the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless. The mark of this present day is that there are no such accepted authorities, and so the cultural
Game is marked by a continual subversion of stability rather than the establishment of greater stability through clarification of the social order in light of the sacred order.
Another mark of third world elites is the attack on stability, the continual marketing of discontent. Marketing says that the future will bring new and better delights. Be discontent with what you have and get a better, newer one of whatever it is. It is a subtle, imperceptible downgrade to the value of the past. And note, nothing lasts anymore after purchase. Things are built to self-destruct with a very short life span.
The destruction of history is to mark the oppression of the past. In our cultural imagery, we now hear repeatedly the cliché, “being on the right side of history”. It is a typical ploy to earmark the repudiation of historical norms. Since history is about victims and victimizers, the former are heroes and the latter are villains, powerful nations are assigned to the trash bin. Nations became great on the backs of the victims. If we can destroy history, we can destroy the oppressors.
The author uses the term “Deathworks”. This refers to all works of art and monuments and naming conventions that represent established culture. Culture is constituted by these things and finds its outlet in art.
In order to destroy the deeper moral structure of society, there must be a deathwork to these important factors in order to change the ethos of society. Deathworks make old values look ridiculous. (Note the destruction of statues and monuments)
A Deathwork can be anything that sets itself in opposition to the second world culture. It is to subvert the kind of traditional, vertical structures of authority that characterize second worlds.
The author provides the example of “Piss Christ”, in which a crucifix is shown submerged in the artist’s own urine. This crucifix is a symbol of something deeply sacred to the second world. The artist, Serrano, is not simply mocking the sacred order in this work of art, he has turned it into something dirty, disgusting, and vile. His intent is not to render religion untrue, but to make it distasteful and disgusting. (97)
Satirical TV and writings have come to make romantic sensibilities look silly and forlorn. The quest for beauty and transcendence in nature is now implausible and even somewhat childish. This is the work of the deathwork.
Pornography is another deathwork. The definition of pornography is provided by the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the productions and distribution of pornographic material”.
The sex in pornography is presented as an end in itself. Yet sexual activity in a second world has a sacred significance as part of a relationship, as part of a personal history, as something that – given its connection to reproduction – links past to future, and as the necessary precondition for culture. Supremely in second world, it becomes an analogue for the relationship between Christ and his church. This analogue must be destroyed for third world to thrive. Pornography aides in that end.
Pornography repudiates any notion that sex has significance beyond the act itself, and therefore it rejects any notion that it is emblematic of a sacred order.
Deathworks destroy the sacred order and has nothing with which to replace it. (99)
Since Deathworks is a repudiation of history as a source of authority and wisdom, it promotes “Forgetfulness”. Forgetfulness is the hallmark of third world modern education. Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education. It guarantees that we will transition into barbarians.
Everything must go into erasing the past. All artifacts of the past and its annihilation of the ideas, customs, and practices of the past. True barbarism is manifested in the destruction of diverse art, architecture, technology, consumerism, and the sophisticated ideologies promoted in former university seminars.
Human identity is even at stake. This is the central theme of abortion. Abortion is deep into the antihistorical, forgetfulness movement.
Peter Singer was the spokesman for the argument for infanticide. The abortion debate is really about human identity, about who and what human beings are. The flushing of human fetuses as though they were excrement is a telltale sign that we live in a third world. Abortion profanes that which the second world regarded as sacred: human life made in the image of God (Imago Dei) from the moment of conception. It revises the definition of what it means to be a person and also makes that which was once thought to be a person into something akin to a piece of garbage or manure. It is therefore antireligious because it takes that which is most sacred in the social order, life itself, and flushes it down the toilet without a second thought. And it is antihistorical because it erases the physical consequences of the sexual act between a man and a woman. It is the acceptance in a world that has repudiated any transcendent framework in favor of the individual preferences of the immediate present. (102)
Part 2 (Foundations of the Revolution)
Chapter 3 The Other Genevan
The author is still addressing the psychological category of identity and the present age of psychological man. This man is the successor of the political man, religious man, and the economic man of previous eras.
The expressive individual is now the normative type of self in society that extends to every aspect of our world: sexual revolution, judgments in law courts and protests on campuses. This expressive self-focus individualism did not emerge in the 20th century from a vacuum, nor was it self-caused. It has a genealogy.
The author explores some historical starting points. He states that it would be too far back to trace everything from the apostle Paul and all the deviations since then, but does begin with the 18th Century thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his work Confessions. He was a self-thinker and thought that looking within himself he could find reality.
One of Rousseau’s key moments was when he was trying to help a friend, Verrat. Verrat wanted him to help steal some asparagus from Verrat’s mother to make some money. He determined that because his motive was to help his friend that the act to steal was not intrinsically sinful but driven to do good for his friend. It was his friend that created the social condition to corruption.
It was not himself but his social accomplices that drove him to do what was wrong. His crime was the result of social pressure, not some internal tendency to depravity.
Society, or at least the society in which he found himself, is to blame for his delinquency. His corruption is essentially the result of his reaction to corrupting circumstances and influences.
Personal gain was not Rosseaus’ motive, and that the crime was not motivated by greed, it was not inherently sinful but driven by social pressure. However, the author bounces the work of Augustine’s work, Confessions,with Rousseaus’ work. Rousseaus’ work is believed to be a counter to Augustine’s work. Augustine relays an instance when he and some friends stole some pears from a neighbor’s tree and then threw them away. Augustine had better pears in his own garden. Previous to Rousseaus’ work and in similarity, he acted with this gang without the malice of personal greed for the pears and he states that there was the influence of social pressure to commit the theft but saw this event in his life as an opportunity to display the depravity of his own heart. Like Rousseau, there was the social pressure, and lack of needing the pears, but his conclusion was innate sinfulness for the act. Not like Augustine, Rousseaus’ conclusion was that he was free from innate sinfulness, it was just social pressure that caused him to act as he did.
Augustine saw that his act of immorality of his innate disposition made him answerable to an external law – a law grounded in the being of God – which his sinful will takes a strange, perverse delight in breaking.
For Rousseau, his natural humanity is fundamentally sound, and the sinful act comes from social pressures and conditioning. He becomes depraved by the pressure’s society places on him.
Summarizing, Augustine blames himself for his sin because he is basically wicked from birth; Rousseau blames society for his sin because he is basically good at birth and then perverted by external forces.
Rousseau thinks that the original impulse of nature is right, but the effect of a depraved culture is that we lose contact with it. Civilization, not individuals, is the source of social ills.
He says that it is the socializing of the human condition that has created the various problems that now afflict human existence. Nature of the individual is okay, culture is not. Thus, the role of social conventions and institutions can be assessed in terms of their role in shaping human morals and behavior.
Rousseau believes that the pressure of society causing one to conform fosters hypocrisy and wickedness because it creates a society where the need to belong and to conform requires individuals to be false to who they really are. Society creates the rules by which the individual must play to be accepted, and those rules are contrary to the simple economy of easily met innate desires created by basic physical needs found in the state of nature. It is society and the relations and conditions that society embodies that decisively shape and, in the description above, decisively corrupt individuals.
Who wouldn’t easily notice that Rousseau’s point is the basic modern liberal thought of today? “It is not my fault, but society’s fault”. The old, but obvious observation to counter this liberal thought of today is that society is made of individuals! And it is individuals that drive society. Further, how do we know that in Rousseau’s case of the stolen asparagus, that it was not the influence of Rousseau that was the corrupting influence on Verrat to steal from his mother? Perhaps Verrat would not have stolen from his mother were Rousseau not present. The heart is deceitful and blinds to the truth.
I would even push to say that were there only two people together on earth, a society itself would emerge. It is impossible to not have social structure. I would further venture to say that were there only one person that existed on earth, he would create his own social structure. Mankind created in the image of God seeks and creates community. Community is innate as a creation of God. Man will always be compelled to create social order even if he is alone. With whom would he create it? Just observe Adam. Adam existed in a social order as the higher of animals. God helped him to learn that he needed one of his own kind. And then there was Eve with its social structure established by God.
I would never create a doctrinal position based on a Hollywood movie, nor expect any great insight from it, but I do find it amusing to recall a movie with Tom Hanks, Cast Away. Alone and stranded on a remote island, he created a society by fashioning a basketball into his confidant.
Since Rousseau had expectations of a society as a whole, society must be shaped to acknowledge one’s identity and not to oppress individual desires. If society forces the individual to conform, then it forces the individual to become inauthentic and untrue to one’s inner real self. One ends up living a lie. (116)
Gone is the innocence of the natural man whose desires and needs were simple and matched each other perfectly. Now there is a competitive social sphere that creates needs that cannot be satisfied for all people all the time. Thus, comes inequality and the strife and struggles that mark human existence. (118)
The author begins to muse through Rousseaus’ thoughts on how to make society better so that the individual remains authentic and retains personal integrity and sovereignty. He says that “Pity” is the first foundation for ethics and it is always directed toward another. The key to pity is an appropriate self-love. Self-love is to connect the individual with basic needs and not to exceed them. Basic needs are enough to eat, a mate for companionship and procreation, and sufficient rest to keep the body healthy. It is to meet the basic fears of man which are pain and hunger. The key is to apply to others the same principles as you apply to yourself. Problems arise when one person tries to dominate another.
The second foundation are the aesthetics of morality. The virtuous person is the one whose instincts, whose sentimental or emotional responses to situations are correctly attuned. No law can make men or women moral if their sentiments are not properly ordered.
Since we cannot make a law to make people virtuous, then we must EDUCATE.
Training must be about allowing the person to mature FROM cultural influences that traditional schooling is designed to cultivate. Ethical discourse is about personal sentiments and preferences – it is emotivism. Though Rousseau rejects the implication that it is moral relativism, but it is that.
In the purview of Rousseaus idea that there is a universal human nature that possesses a conscience that is the same for everyone, it is evident that there is no consensus as to what should evoke empathy and sympathy. On the one hand, an old man being mugged may or may not evoke a sense of empathy from an observer, while some may want to stop it, some would want to join it. One may observe a baby being aborted and feel freedom from a life that would be bogged down with a child while another will feel as though murder of an innocent life had taken place. All we have today is emotional subjectivism. There is no reason outside ourselves to judge what is right or wrong.
The issues lie in how one views humankind. Are they inwardly perverted - born depraved – so that inward sentiment is unreliable, even deceptive? Or, is mankind intrinsically good until they are corrupted by society. What Rousseau wants so deeply is to present a universal human nature possessing a conscience that is the same for everyone. He wants an internal, intuitive moral compass that guides and directs the individual in right behavior toward them. This would work in some world where human beings are not innately perverted, but not in this world. Augustine had it right. Human beings are born depraved and subject to internal moral conflict and confusion that renders sentiment and instinct unreliable.
The reasoning of Rousseau, that individuals are innately good, but society corrupts them, does not see that if society is made up of individuals who are innately good then how can society corrupt the individual. Craziness. Society must be made of corrupt individuals in order for society to corrupt the individual. The force of society is the force of individuals. If society is what pressures the individual to temptation and corruptions, then individuals must be kept from one another and never allowed to come together to protect their pristine nature.
But again, on the one hand, Rousseau argues that it is society that authenticates personhood and ethics, on the other hand, one who is truly free is the one who is free to be himself. One who is shaped by society is in bondage and slavery; he is less human, less authentic. He must walk in obedience to his inner voice that guides him. (Just like Hollywood says).
The fruit of this thinking is too easily seen in identity politics and the LGBTQ/Transgender movement. We can be free from all external influences – THIS EVEN INCLUDES OUR CHROMOSOMES AND THE PRIMARY SEXUAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PHSICAL BODY!
Not only can we free ourselves from cultural constraints, but we can also even free ourselves from nature and pursue our deepest psychological convictions.
BUT here we go again…He says that humans are social animals, and the behaviors and beliefs that validate us or give us a sense of personal worth or authenticity are socially determined. Selfhood in practice is a dialogue even if this dialogue is militantly against personal authenticity. (126)
This dialogue is little more than a feast of multiple ticks attached to one another. They are feeding on one another and destroying one another at the same time.
The implication of Rousseau’s ideas of innate innocence in individuals presses toward a cult of childhood and youth. This generation of youth are transfixed on themselves and view old age as corrupt, myopic, or behind the times. Children are lecturing the older generation on everything from healthcare to environment to matters as Brexit and speech. They don’t know how the world works but see themselves as experts with no view of the past. Rousseau’s basic point about nature, society, and authenticity of youthful innocence has become one of the unacknowledged assumption of this preset age. It is part of the social imaginary. (Where does this leave us when we assume society is filled with dumb adults?)
Since our society views youthful wisdom as higher than the wisdom of adulthood, history becomes a record of corruption and oppression of human nature. History ceases to be a source of wisdom and becomes rather a tale of woe. This is the “tear-down” of history as a class struggle and forces society to be “on the right side of history” and forces us to overthrow historical definitions of social practices, even marriage.
We have moved into a world in which the subjective sentiments of each person determine their own selfhood, breaking away from the divine origin of conscience and the foundation of stability and consistency of a human nature that is separately innate in every individual.
We live in an age of “self-determining freedom”. One demands that one breaks the hold of all external impositions, and deicide for oneself.
Take away the idea of universal human nature and we descend into subjective emotivism. Empathy degenerates into sentimentalism and we have a collapse of the meta-narrative of human nature. (128) (Can this be a contributor as to why a Christian today may support a superficial narrative from a President from the democratic platform?)
Chapter 4
Unacknowledged Legislators
Admittedly, I have only gotten to chapter 4 in this book, but this has been the hardest chapter to read. It is about poetry. Yuck. So, it will probably be the most briefly addressed. I also suppose that for the sake of discipline, one can be forced to read what the poets had to say. And it may help to gain some insight to the liberal arts whacko mind.
Additionally, I just don’t see this current culture as one immersing itself into poetry. Now, if poetry can be stretched to include music, videos, media, and movies, then maybe so. Nearly all references to thoughts that I have heard coming from this society are jingles from musicians, lines from movies and sometimes quotes from politicians.
The author predominantly spent most of his effort on covering the poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake.
He addressed their quest to create and enhance the authentic individual through poetry. And valuable poetry is a product of nature. The author does not seem to directly attribute any substantive roots to the modern-day dilemma of identity to any of these poets.
I think his main emphasis is to simply point out that the ideas of today have been tossed around for many hundreds of years.
Since, as is the common theme so far in the book, society and its conventions are the enemy. Society prevents the real, authentic self from being able to express itself. These poets produced their writings over 200 years ago, so the thought that society is evil to the authentic self has been around for a while. However, the sexual authenticity, though present back then in all the authors writings was present, it was not about personal identity. Present day culture morphed sexual freedom into identity, but its’ thought was evident back then as freedom to personal authenticity. They believed that poetry was the unacknowledged legislatures of the day with hopes that it would influence political liberation.
Wordsworth emphasized inward emotion with priority given to rural nature. Civilization and urbanization were bad and restrictive. Poetry arouses emotion and gives immediate pleasure to a human. Nature was universal, thus if the poets could take people back to nature, then they could reconnect the human nature to the universal. He thought that industry and labor blunted human sensibilities and left individuals dehumanized. Simple country practices would bring people back to ordinary, authentic existence. We must turn inward to find the universal and abandon anything sophisticated. But inwardness might be difficult since individuals may have been corrupted already by the powerful canons of civilization. Poetry was the revolution from it. Nature was our connection from the corruption to the authentic.
How does one make this escape? By going back and focus on what is uncorrupted, untouched and unspoiled. Human nature as it now exists in civilized society is a corrupt construct. We must go back before the effects of civilization. (136)
Shelley is more into the aesthetics of nature than Wordsworth, in fact, he almost says that nature itself produces poetry. Where Wordsworth said that emotional expressivism is closely tied to nature, Shelley says that Nature itself has the power, an unseen power, to move and shape the poet and poetry. Poetry is the result of the forces of nature moving the poet to give literary or artistic expression. Nature creates poetry.
Nature provides the basic unity to existence which neither the refinements nor sophisticated society can do. “…Society has parted man from man, neglectful of the universal heart.”
Shelley says that poetry is mimetic art. We can all experience nature as real, as having its own objective reality.
By escaping high society, we can obtain the universal human nature and become better people. The key to this experience is not reason, it is imagination. Imagination is susceptible to the influence of poetry and poetry is driven by nature. The purpose of poetry is moral improvement of the audience. And the deepest truths about existence cannot be conveyed without the use of poetry because the imagination plays the key role in enabling empathy between the audience and the subject of the poem. (143)
Mere reason does not stir the sentiments or emotions as is necessary for true moral transformation. True morality is always built on a foundation of sentimental morality.
Shelley believes that the poet is both the creation of his age and the creator of his age. Bad ages produce bad poets with their decadence and moral decline and virtuous ages produce virtuous poets with superior morality. This has great political significance.
Shelley was a political radical. He hoped to arouse via poetry a liberation from the constraints and corruption of government and oppression. He sought political transformation through his poetry for moral transformation. (I suspect to produce a more virtuous age)
For Shelley, far more than Wordsworth, poetry was revolutionary because it exposes political oppression. He wanted to drive the imagination to see visions of potential liberation. One might seem to think that his poetry was an agenda to overthrow foundational structures in society by appealing to the common man. He wanted to inspire individuals with a desire for liberty and usher in a revolutionary age when oppressors will be no more, and freedom will be truly realized. (147)
Poetry was an alternative to violence and a call to social revolution. He hoped to free oneself from the alien demand of civilization and return people to the impulse of nature.
The author does not delve into what the poets mean my “nature”, but I would venture to say that it means less civilization. It does not mean hanging out in the woods watching the birds and squirrels play. Civilization, structure, foundations, and constitutions are what corrupts and less is better.
Shelley was not so pure, though. He vehemently attacked institutional religion with the belief that sexual liberation is central to political liberation. Sex, sex, sex is all there is. Religion has historically exerted its power in the policing of sexual behavior and sexual relationships.
He had a disdain for Christianity. God himself is the very prototype of human tyranny, a willful, arbitrary, unaccountable despot. There was a clear connection between religion, political oppression, and restrictions on sexual activity. Chasity and monogamy were bondage.
He had contempt for traditional mores. His connective desire for expressive individualism and sexual freedom was the predecessor for the sexual revolution and modern identity politics.
Healthy sexual activity must be judged by instinct and nature. Institutions prevent sexual freedom and human authenticity and are a problem to the sexual reformers. Religion is the biggest problem. (150)
Since sexual freedom is the milestone for personal authenticity, marriage must go away. It is restrictive. He believed that marriage is a devised institution from civilization and represents an unreasonable bondage and oppression of the individuals involved. Marriage is inconsistent with the natural propensities of human beings and dooms people to unnecessary misery.
Marriage is the most odious of all monopolies because it makes one woman the property of one man and creates the context for jealousy, subterfuge, and general social corruption. There should be one sexual community. Any issues that might be raised about paternity are just social constructs that would vanish.
Institutions and civilization create a market of bondage of which marriage is one of them. Liberty will never be achieved while the market controls everything and while human love is shackled by traditional Christian views on marriage. The destruction of marriage and all the institutions that enforce and police it must go in order for there to be the liberation of humanity and to the cause of justice. Marriage is a racket. It is an unnatural constraint on love preventing human beings from being truly human. They are the primary cause for human inauthenticity.
Shelley believes that the purpose of life is personal happiness – a pleasurable sensation – and inner sense of psychological well-being – the ethic of today’s therapeutic age. And when this pursuit has to do with sexual freedom, it is simply about mutual pleasure and satisfaction of the consenting parties, and that is all.
The author states that this whole rationale of our modern thinking on marriage is defined in the logic of No-fault divorce.
Not really. Surprising he hadn’t read what Ronald Reagan said about the no-fault divorce that was passed under his governorship in California in the 70’s. Reagan said that it was the worse regret of his life and he sponsored it after his divorce. His intent was not free love, it was to prevent the total destruction of the other partner in the marriage in order to divorce. Prior to the no-fault divorce only 20 percent of marriages ended in divorce. To divorce, one must totally destroy the humanity of the other person in order to win the battle in court. Reagan just wanted a way to back out of a marriage on amicable terms. Nevertheless, the disdain for marriage is evident in our culture and is seen as a barrier to personal freedom whether or not we remember Reagan’s reason for instituting the no-fault divorce. Regardless the intent, it was an invisible, “behind the curtain”, satanic play to kill marriage.
Shelley’s rant against Christianity does not end. He says that Christian morality is really immorality dressed up as righteousness. It is immoral. Calls for chastity are an unrealistic response to promiscuity and led to cruel sexual repression, irresponsible lack of proper sex education in schools, and the demonizing of unmarried teenage mothers.
Opposition to homosexuality stirs up prejudice, forced gay people to live a lie, and can even lead to mental illness and suicide. Christian sexual codes prevent people from living free and happy lives – from being their true selves. (His point that civilization creates bondage falls flat when he promotes the institution of education to prevent sexual oppression. Civilization is what instituted the institutions of education).
Another synonymous poet, Godwin, states that the abolition of marriage is the only way sexual relations can be reconstructed in accordance with nature. Apparently, we are animals.
He states that religion and morality is code for misery and servitude from the accursed book of God and we must rather read from the inscription in the heart. The Bible destroys true liberty. (155)
Reiterating the poets’ position on sexual freedom from 200 years ago, they do not yet see sex as a matter of identity. Sexual behavior was something one does rather than what one is. Back then it was a matter of expressive individualism and political freedom – void of social constructs. (158)
To end these comments on poets, the author concludes his chapter by stating that to the poets, aesthetics is king. Taste can drive what we think to be right and wrong. Tastes becomes truth. But if the sacred order collapses and morality is simply a matter of taste, there is no truth.
And those who shape popular taste become those who exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards. These poets are the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian. (161)
Chapter 5 Plastic People
More on the psychological man/expressive individual.
The author addresses several figures and their positions on human nature and society: Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin. (The Three Musketeers or the Three Stooges?)
Though the author has spent time on the sexual freedom of human nature, he says that it is not the sexual content of what it means to be human, but the fundamental plasticity. Our very psychological essence means that man can (or thinks he can) make and remake personal identity at will. For such plastic people to exist and thrive, there must exist both a certain kind of metaphysical framework and a certain kind of society with a particular social imaginary. There must be the emergence of the notion that human nature is something that has authority over us as individuals.
The idea that we can be who or whatever we want to be is a commonplace today. Consumerism, or late capitalism, fuels this notion with its message of the customer is king and of the goods we consume as being basic to who we are. Commercials present this message that particular products as the key to happiness or life improvement. You have the power to transform yourself by the mere swipe of a credit card.
The possession of this thing – car, kitchen, that item of clothing, name brand of shoe – will make you a different, a better, a more fulfilled person. “Atomic Personal Branding”. Consumerist self-creation is the order of the day.
(Capitalism is not the same as this Consumerism of which he speaks – don’t confuse the two. Consumerism is driven by the three worldly desires as mentioned above in 1 John 2 – “the feel it, see it, be it sins”. Capitalism can be a venture resistant to these sins and one in which God can inspire).
However, the negotiation between consumer and producer never seems to be met by the act of possession. We continue the quest of transubstantiation by credit card. Why?
1. There is a range of goods or lifestyles that are available. There is an end to it.
2. Society is constantly changing its mind about what is and is not fashionable, what was cool no longer is and what was acceptable is no longer. Consumerism makes us believe we can be whoever we want to be, but the market always places limits on that in reality.
3. There are always specific individual limitations to our ability to invent ourselves. Physiology, intellectual capacity, income, location in time, and geographical location all play their role. My body, not my psychology, has the last word on whether I am the last queen of France or not.
Nevertheless, the idea of self-creation, that we shape our essences by acts of will, is deeply embedded in the way we now think. Even though my chromosomes can’t let me be whoever or whatever I want to be, I can at least deny them. There is no longer in the social imagery that human nature is a given, something that is intrinsic with nonnegotiable authority over who we are. Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin aided in that perception even though most cannot attribute the origin of the imagery to them directly. (166)
All three of these individuals in their different ways provided conceptual justification for rejecting the notion of human nature and thus paved the way for the plausibility of the idea that human beings are plastic creatures with no fixed identity founded on an intrinsic and ineradicable essence.
Nietzsche
He is the author of “God is dead”. The point is that the foundation of religion is false even though the influence, systems of life and thought were built on it, continue to live on, up until the present day. In the social imagery, God continues to inform, but Nietzsche wanted to put an end to it.
He presented that the universe itself cannot have any intrinsic meaning. We cannot refer to Laws in nature because it implies a lawgiver. He dismisses morality as “herd instinct in the individual.” (This seems to be opposed to the thoughts of the poets, particularly Wordsworth)
His reference to “God is dead” does not necessarily push to annihilate the entire concept of God. Rather, he is addressing those who have used religion as a method to manipulate the populace. He seems to understand that when God is removed, then man takes on the responsibility himself of being god. It is a terrifying responsibility of being god yourself, of becoming the author of your own knowledge and you own ethics. You make yourself the creator of your world. He hopes to enlighten us on the radical consequences of the rejection of God. Not to be mistaken, he does not believe in God and hates Christianity, but he rails against those who use God to manipulate morality and virtue. He opposes the way the structure uses God (though not believing in Him) to construct morality.
He demands that Christianity realize that their claims to truth are not ultimately claims about objective reality but claims about how they want the world to be to suit their own particular ends. He says they are using their strength of position over the weakness of society. He says that they are using a universal imperative to constitute their own personal moral preferences.
Religion is not really the issue. Psychology is the issue. Religion is being used as a tool to control and to establish categorical imperatives.
Christianity represents the instincts of the weakest and most oppressed and embodies the very hatred of life and of living; it desires to truly subjugate the truly noble and strong; it makes men and women sick; it disvalues the vital and strong and natural. Christianity is morally repugnant. He is nauseated by the claims of the Christian faith. He hates any claim to absolute universal moral truth and rejects religion. (Anyone would hate universal absolute truth – origin being the Creator God if one wants to be God themselves – simply a natural resolve).
I don’t think his position, “God is dead” is an attack against God, he just doesn’t believe in God. For those who use God to subjugate others, it is those who he says are dead. The whole system of religion is dead as a means to control others. It is not working.
He thinks Christianity is an attack on human nature. The metaphysical does not allow for claims about how all people should live their lives or for what purpose and destiny they all share.
He believes that human beings are to create themselves, to be free of the demands that the idea of a Creator or a metaphysically grounded morality or an abstract and universal concept of human nature would impose on them. Freedom is freedom from essentialism and self-creation.
In fact, he proposes the idea that if you were accosted by a demon who says that you are “condemned” to relive your life over and over again for eternity, would you be horrified or delighted? (174) This poise he termed, “eternal recurrence”. He is not a nihilist. He is challenging individuals to affirm the life they have and to live every moment as if it possessed eternal significance. He does not believe that life is pointless though he rejects any ultimate transcendent meaning. He still thinks life is worth living.
He focuses on the present, here and now. There are the origins in the pathology of instant pleasure and satisfaction and is the primary human purpose. He believes in self-creation and wants to give style to one’s character.
He does not hold that the individual is simply a blank slate. He has natural strengths and weaknesses and wants individuals to use their nature to invent themselves. We are who we choose to be, who we choose to make ourselves. Life is to be lived in a manner that brings about personal satisfaction. It is deeply personal. Life is not a matter of conforming to laws or to some transcendent status beyond the individual. Rather, it is a matter of creating one’s own satisfactions and determining one’s own form of the good life. “Be whoever you want to be and do whatever works for you.” (176)
Marx
Marx emphasis was between social and economic conditions and the constitution of the world.
He was an early follower of Hegel but departed from the belief that we are not a work in progress with a pressing future of progress. He was a materialist. He did not believe that history moves forward in some historical, intellectual process, but rather it was solely material conditions and relations. He was aware how industrial production and capitalism could overturn traditional social structures and remake society. The way that social structures could transform human beings depends on the economic structures of the society. Human nature was a plastic thing that was subject to the historical change as the economic dynamics of societal change. Everything becomes political, the laws of the land to the moral codes by which a society regulates itself to organizations that would not ordinarily appear to have any political significance. All social phenomena have political ramifications. From the Boy Scouts to the Federal Reserve, all human organizations and relationships play their part in the political drama that is human history.
Religion is an obvious example of this controlling dynamic. Marx is known for his description of religion as “the opium of the people.” It is a statement typically understood as claiming that religion is a means of keeping the masses in an analogous state to drug-induced passivity and false happiness.
Religion, though, is more than just an ideological means of oppression. He believed that man makes religion, religion does not make man. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Marx built upon Feuerbach’s idea of religion that involves the perfection and projection of human attributes onto a fictious being, God, who is then worshiped. They should really ascribe the glory they give to God to themselves. Religion hinders human beings from being fully human.
Feuerbach sees God as an illusory foundation for morals. (182)
Marx takes this idea and adapts it to his materialistic view that man is alienated from his true nature generated by the material inequities of the economic system. Religion offers false happiness to an unhappy world and true happiness comes though the establishment of an economic system that does not alienate the workers from the fruits of their labor. Religion to Marx, as to the other figures, is a matter of human psychology, not a metaphysical interest.
Human nature is always in a state of flux. As the economic conditions and relations in society change, so does the instantiation (a representation of an idea in the form of an instance of it)
of human nature.
All people are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. And technology has assumed a key role in the more radical context of making plausible the separation of biological sex and the concept of gender.
This separation is now basic to much of the modern social imaginary and clearly rests on the psychologized notion of self that emerged in the 17th century and now dominates our contemporary world. We can plausibly separate gender from sex and even revise the relationship of the sexes to the means of reproduction.
The criticism of morality, like the criticism of religion, is a vital part of the political struggle.
Darwin
Marx had some degree of belief that history had a telos, an end – a purpose. But he still appreciated that Darwin was against traditional religion in favor of atheistic materialism. Nietzsche rejected human nature as a manipulative metaphysical trick and Marx redefined it relative to an ongoing historical process, so Darwin provided an account of it that allowed no room for inferring that it had special destiny or significance.
Prior to Darwin all theories had some form of teleology embedded within them. There was some notion that a divine Creator was providentially guiding the process or, as least some kind of vague notion of increasing perfection of progress.
Then Darwin comes along and without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent explains that man is the result of a natural process – natural selection of evolution. The wonder of organisms was brought into the realm of science.
Darwin’s theory of evolution made any metaphysical or theological claim concerning the origins of life irrelevant. One could believe that a divine hand guided the process, but the process itself needs no supernatural hypothesis.
The important factors are biological and environmental. It doesn’t matter the chances of evolution taking place – a billion to one – all that matters is how the world is as it is now and how it came to be.
Darwin’s approach allows that the world as we have it does not need a designer or divine architect. It can be explained without any reference to the transcendent. Nietzsche and Marx dealt a blow to the idea of human nature. They dispatched the idea of teleology from nature, Darwin inevitably dispatched it from human beings, too. This step of Darwin is a fundamental revision of the understanding of who and what human beings are. They cease to be the crown of creation and to enjoy some kind of special, God-given destiny, they have no transcendent ethical standards, either laws or virtues, to which they need to conform themselves.
The intuitive simplicity of his theory is what made him so influential.
The entire world of social imagery is thoroughly permeated by the ideas and attitudes of these three men, or at least the implications thereof…even though of the general public, few have firsthand familiarity with the writings and thought of Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin. Darwin is probably one of the most influential.
Evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. Neither human nature nor human destiny any longer have any transcendent or objective foundation. Any transcendent value of man is nothing more than the manipulative concept developed by one group, notoriously the Christian church.
Chapter 6. Freud
(Whew…. halfway through the book!)
With the backdrop of previous input, “sexual freedom is authentic human freedom”, Freud comes to weigh in. Sex is more than just an activity; it is an identity. (202) Marriage was simply one aspect of the way society unnaturally restricted human desire and forced people to live inauthentic lives. Marriage restricted humanity’s natural sexual instincts.
Though much of Freud’s psychoanalysis has been rejected as myths by many follow-on figures (Carl Jung, Karl Popper), his input still grips the popular social imaginary. He was able to fuse elements of Marx into his own theories to give rise to the New Left in the 20th Century. He helped to front the politicization of sex. Recalling that Rousseau and Hume’s goal of human existence was to be happy, Freud gave that idea of happiness a specific sexual turn to genital pleasure. Sexual satisfaction is promoted as one of the key components of what it means to be living the good life. Freud stated that genital erotism is the central point of his life. (His writings Civilization and Discontent)
Sexual fulfillment is the real key to human existence…sexual gratification is what it means to be human. True happiness is sexual fulfillment. Procreation is subordinate to personal pleasure. (permits Abortion) Sex now dominates the culture; from art to politics, sex is omnipresent. We are categorized as straight, gay, bi, queer, and so on; and sexual preferences, once considered private and personal, are now matters of public interest. It is a means by which we are recognized. (204)
Freud not only places sex and sexual gratification at the center of adult human identity, but he also extends sexuality back to infancy. With the strong arm of the government and the politicization of sexual identity and Freud’s insistence that to be human means to be sexual, one can see how public education, entertainment and all cultural pressures come to bear against children. “Why wait until adulthood before we ‘humanize’ children into their sexual identity”? We see the onslaught of perverse nature and timing of sex education in grammar and elementary school. We see treatment of children with “gender dysphoria”, respective rights of children and parents when it comes to doctors prescribing birth control. It also informs taste in fashion: the sight of even prepubescent girls dressed in a manner that is apparently designed to indicate their sexuality is commonplace today. This display vexes pedophilia which should soon dissolve any sexual taboos and reduce public outrage. There is a profoundly revolutionary phenomenon to sexualize children all the way back to infancy. Freud has been the point man on this.
The author seems to be addressing a possible cause for this movement to induct children into sexuality. Prior to the 18th century, the Christian principle of original sin was the accepted view and thus the belief in the innate depravity of children.
In the latter decades, there was a general decline in this position. Instead of protecting children from the enemy within, society began to emphasize protecting them from the enemy without. The purpose of education became less to enforce social conformity and more to encourage the development of natural talents. There was the innate innocence of the child. They were asexual. Normal childhood development became a medical profession rather than the churches’ responsibility, like sexual issues evolving in children like masturbation, promiscuity, pregnancy, and early STD, to name a few. The movement of sexual problems from the sphere of morality to the sphere of medicine is one that continues today, as society’s strong preference for technical, rather than moral, approaches to everything.
Most childhood sexual activities moved away from being problems toward perfectly normal behavior. They were seen as an infantile form of sexual development. Any sexual activity was not seen as evil instincts that needed taming, but as a prototypical human being in progress. In Freud’s thinking that annexed much of today’s thinking, the authentic child is the one whose inner sexual desires are naturally expressed and satisfied by outward behavior consistent with them. (209)
Freud hoped to normalize any sexual activity for children, even masturbation, since sex is the central element in what it means to be human.
The sexualization of children must be captured as early as possible since “humanhood” depends on sexual development. All of life’s stages are sexual. One cannot miss any level of sexual development, or one may not develop fully human. The goal of all of this is sexual gratification.
Without entering into the discussion of the “id, ego and superego” of Freud’s theories, I will make small mention of his phased sexual development for children. Freud captures all phases of life in sexual terms. First significant sexual stage for the infant is the oral stage, the primary erogenous zone – breast feeding and thumb sucking; then, the anal stage – controlling the defecation and then enamored with the thought of the baby emerging from the mother’s anus. There is then the phallic stage marked by masturbation and finally the genital phase marked by turning away from autoerotic activity to a sexual partner in full sexual intercourse. (210)
Freud considers “morality” as a matter of taste. With education and conditioning, the taste can be changed. He generally considers morality as arbitrary and calls it “herd morality”. It is whatever most of the herd considers animus. Irrational bigotry is seen in such terms coined with the word “phobia” at the end - as homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, and so on. Sexual “phobias” are subjective and a matter of taste.
Sexual phobias are not real. His example is that of one who kisses a girl and finds it delightful but finds it offensive to use her toothbrush. Moral codes are just social consequences that inhibit the basic drive for personal sexual satisfaction and therefore preclude the possibility of society allowing individuals to achieve true happiness. Morality is a matter of taste. And societies taste as a perceived need for order prevents sexual satisfaction as the goal of the pleasure principle and the essence of happiness. Freud blames society’s affliction for “morality” on the phenomenon of religion. (The evil herd)
1. Freud and others consider religion as infantile. It is a sign of immaturity and failure to develop into adulthood. This attitude is the modern-day social imaginary. This attitude also incorporates disdain for marriage. (215)
2. Freud considers religion as an illusion. It represents a form of wish fulfillment. Adherents to religion are not capable to rational thought.
3. Freud does acknowledge, however, that religion has fulfilled some historical purpose. He can admit that is has maintained civilization by providing a rationale for morality. It has held mankind back from personal destruction by indulging in dark and destructive desires. He does not believe that religion has provided happiness to people.
Freud’s alternative…scientific reasoning. It avoids the burden of guilt and anxiety that religion brings. He hopes for a post religious world brought about by scientific knowledge…even though his science is garbage. (217)
Freud believes that civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security. Primitive man must exist again who knew no restrictions, in this case, sexual. (This does seem slightly contradictive to his push forward to science, yet to stretch back to primitive man unless going backwards is the scientific method. In fact, “primitive man” was more moral than his contemporaries).
This primitive existence would be exactly the opposite of what he’d like to achieve since sexual gratification would be monopolized by the strongest male who would use the female for his sole gratification and then would later be overcome by a younger more dominant male. The animal kingdom just doesn’t work for mankind.
Freud sees some kind of tradeoff at the heart of civilization: the curbing of the sex drive in order to make society possible. There is a social contract, exchanging uninhibited sexual license for sexual restraint and the result is civilization. It is this tradeoff that keeps chaos from destroying mankind. It is the curbing of the sex drive that makes society possible. In this sexual contract with society, guilt is the internal regulator of the individual’s sexual conduct. This means that it is impossible for the civilized ever to be truly happy.
We are in a loop here. It is this discontent that is itself the foundation of culture. (220)
The rise of the sexual revolution was predicated on fundamental changes in how the self is understood.
The self must FIRST be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized.
The SECOND is the signal achievement of Freud. He placed the sex drive at the very core of who and what human beings are from infancy and the theories of religion and of civilization that he connects to his theory and does so through scientific idiom and analysis. Science has intuitive authority. Before Freud, sex was an activity for procreation or recreation. After Freud, sex is definitive of who we are, as individuals, as societies and as a species.
Human beings are sexual at their core and that shapes modern social imaginary. The sexual desire is something that human beings experience as among the most powerful and irrational forces in life. Freud became the grand theorist for everything erotic. Sexual fulfillment is the reconfiguration of human destiny. Human life is no longer something set in the future, it is enclosed within the present. To be satisfied is to be sexually fulfilled here and now. The happiest person is the one who constantly is indulging his sexual desires. Sexual activity is that which makes us authentic human beings. Eroticism is omnipresent. (222)
Morality is a social construct. A dispassionate language of science can rid us of restrictive moral codes. Because of religious influence, there is the retardation of sexual development in our children today. Today’s education can be the liberation of our children’s instincts and freedom from traditional sexual codes imprisoned by religion.
Self has been sexualized, now it must be politicized. Next chapter.
Chapter 7
The Politicization of Sex
The author begins with addressing a philosophical approach prevalent today used for personal identity. It is called critical theory. It draws heavily on Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, queer theory, and deconstruction. Its approach is based on the conviction that the world is to be divided between those who have power and those who do not. Western ideology is a construct designed to preserve the power structure of the status quo; and the goal of critical theory is therefore to destabilize this power structure. It is a vital tool in the modern LGBTQ+ movement. One of the beginning principles comes from Marx – the total collapse and overthrow of capitalism. (227)
Skipping over the author’s review of how Russia became communist and how Europe did not, he introduces Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. He says that these are central figures to understanding left-wing ideology.
Reich combined Freud and Marx and developed the concept of what he called sex economy. This is the combined idea of Marx’s notion of class conflict and Freuds sexual oppression – all for a specific political end. (233)
In structuring society, Reich believes that culture/civilization is a product of sexual repression. Without substantiating his position, he states with the new scientific language that society began with the rise of authoritarian patriarchy and was subsequently reinforced by the rise of a sex-negating church. With the hint of Marx, he states that the current repressive sexual codes are intimately connected to the exploitation of labor. This is why the state must get involved with suppressing the authoritarian family and revert society to an authoritarian state.
Reich believes the patriarchal family is a unit of oppression – an oppressive construction.
Those who argue that the traditional family is good for society are “lackeys” of the current suppressive status quo. His position is not new. Previous chapters and figures are referred to here. (234) The author recalls Fredrich Engels, colaborer communist with Marx, who stated that the family created “the cellular form of civilized society.” This unit prevents centralized government control, and it has turned women into chattels – property – and that they need to be freed to take their place as workers in the public means of production. If the family remains, then there can be no authoritarian order because the family is the authoritarian state in miniature. Dismantling and abolishing the nuclear family is essential if political liberation is to be achieved – this is left-wing politics. The nuclear family stands in the way of universal authoritarian rule. The family also retains sexual codes that must go.
Further, in Reich’s book The Sexual Revolution 1936, he articulates the importance of childhood sexuality and sexual identity for the political struggle. In order for the radicalization of a society to fall under political control, the family must be overcome or destroyed. Families are oppressive. They are the main cause for the repression of civilization. They hold the moral codes that prevent sexual freedom.
The key to the dissolution of the nuclear family is through the children. Reich’s idea for destroying the family through the children is through sexual education of children.
A free society will provide ample room for the sexual gratification of children. Any adult who hinders this development must be severely dealt with. (237)
The state must be used to coerce families for sexual liberation. The state has the right to intervene in family matters because the family is the primary opponent of political liberation through its cultivation and policing of traditional sexual codes. The state must be used to coerce families and punish those who dissent from the sexual liberation being proposed. An arbitrary and subjective definition of the “well-being of the mind” of children is the launch point to attack the family.
It begins with some concept of oppression, which is primarily psychological (which is subjective an dwells in the realm of imagery), then victimhood which becomes much broader and more subjective. This affects everything from the Supreme Court to universities to the bedroom.
The oppression/victimhood encompasses economic issue, too. There was a time when your grandfather may have felt actual oppression when he worked a full day but did not receive a full day’s wages. Now oppression/victimhood dwells in “psychological” economic issues, e.g., the refusal to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding.
This does not push the homosexual into starvation, nor does it prevent the homosexual wedding, nor any other economic hardship; rather, it offends against their dignity and inflicts psychological harm if they are not recognized on their terms. It is also now woven into political oppression in a world in which psychological categories dominate more than actual oppression. It was Reich’s Freudian focus on sex that brought the discourse of oppression into modern day imaginary.
Sex is no longer a private activity because sexuality is now a constitutive (as strong as legislation) element of public, social identity. (239)
Patterns of sexual behavior are not simply private; they are public and political because they constitute a significant part of how our culture thinks of identity. To outlaw, for example, homosexuality or to merely tolerate it, is to outlaw or merely tolerate a certain identity. Both are ultimately forms of oppression.
This is where Reich promotes government encroachment on the private sphere. The sexual education of the child is simply of too much social and political consequence to be left to the parents. After all, it is the parents as those in authority who actually constitute the problem. Questions of childhood and adolescent sexuality and gender identity raise immediate and significant questions about the respective rights and responsibilities of parents and of the state. Parents should not have the right to corral the sexual behavior of one’s teenage child.
Reich promotes sociopolitical reform with sexual liberation – freedom and sexual health are the same thing. A happy society is one that has a maximum amount of sexual gratification.
Reich is not a complete sexual anarchist. He has some sexual code, though incoherent. Age and compliance has something to do with what sexual acts are or are not acceptable. A 15 yr. old boy may have sex with a 13-year-old as long as she consents. The 15 yr. old cannot have sex with a three yr. old because of the age difference. It is neurotic and antisocial.
Why would pedophilia be against the social imaginary as antisocial and neurotic? Perhaps the issue of consent is the primary pivot, but then what is the nature of consent? Children are often made to do things without their consent – eat their vegetables, get up, go to school, go to bed, etc., etc. Why should sex be privileged as requiring consent? (242)
To indicate the pure arbitrary nature of law, pedophilia, and morality, I use the “One-minute” Illustration to further make a point of accepting the world’s irrational normalcy:
When an adult male is violating the law with a child by committing indecent sexual acts with another, though consensual for the youth, we cringe. But if that “child” is 17 years old and in one-minute turns 18 years old at the stroke of the clock, the law says it is no longer an indecent sexual act.
Somehow in ONE MINUTE, the pedophile becomes one who is now an outstanding member of society just expressing his personal identity and love toward another adult human being. WHAT HAPPENED IN ONE MINUTE THAT ALL OF A SUDDEN MADE THE VICTIM A CONSENSUAL LOVING ADULT AND THE PEDOPHILE A WHOLESOME, LOVING ADULT? What happened in the heart, soul, and body of that victim in ONE MINUTE? What changed the entire landscape relationship of “victim and pedophile” to two loving members of society in ONE MINUTE?! We must agree that the 18-year-old milestone is simply arbitrary. It means nothing. Why not 15, 13 or even 8 years old? Homosexuality is homosexuality – adultery is adultery – fornication is fornication, no matter what age. There is no such thing as “consenting adults” wherein the “adult” world makes immorality beautiful. “Adult” is just short for “Adulterer”. We see the nonsense of godless laws. It won’t be long before the arbitrary “law” of 18 years-old just fades away. The boundaries for what define pedophilia will be erased.
It probably will not be long before pedophilia is not only tolerable but celebratory.
Reich seems to hold his objections to age difference and its vicinity of puberty – this is not a moral prohibition. Compulsory morality is life-negating. And the primary task of revolutionary politics is to demolish repressive sexual codes that negate life.
He became obsessed with UFOs and developing a machine to focus sexual energy. He was arrest for fraud. He was soon widely dismissed as paranoid and crazy. He died in a Pennsylvania prison in 1957. (243)
The next figure is Herbert Marcuse. He tried to relate societal economic structure with sexual codes. He believed that the status quo power structure in society was built upon sexual regulations. It is the domination of a society. Also, the patriarchal family and the maintenance of monogamy was another domination of society and was emplaced by capitalism. (247)
Marcuse has no vision of what a sexual liberation might look like but is unnerved to promote it. Nevertheless, political freedom and sexual freedom are synonymous with shattering heterosexual norms and is a vital part of transforming society for the better.
Marcuse follows Rousseau in that identity is psychological. And to follow Freud, since identity is psychological, it is sexual. He then meshes this psychological identity of sex with Marx and comes up with sex is political. (250)
Now, in order to transform society politically, then, one must transform society sexually and psychologically. Psychological categories are at the heart of revolutionary political discourse. Once there was the oppression of real economic realities, e.g., poverty, joblessness, lack of property or legal categories, e.g., slavery, lack of freedoms. Now the matter of oppression is much more subtle because it has to do with issue of psychology and self-consciousness. The political sphere is now internalized and subjectivized.
With many a methods brought to light, Marcuse believes ultimately that the political consciousness or psychology means that things such as education and speech need to be carefully regulated in order to ensure the correct outcome. In a democracy, undemocratic means can be used to force compliance. The hope in a psychologically driven oppressive culture that words and ideas come to be the most powerful weapons available – for good and ill. This includes the withdrawal of free speech. (252)
He believes that capitalism is self-destructive whereas commodities have a built-in obsolescence and keeps the populace politically passive and acquiescence to the established authorities. The acquisition and reacquisition of the next best thing captures the hearts and minds of the populace. Capitalism is a false consciousness and will be dismantled as dominant narratives are shattered. The easiest way to shatter the narratives is through the dismantling of sexual codes. (253)
He believes that the dominant group maintains power by repressing the expression of sexual identity.
It makes me wonder if the “thinkers and theorists” just want an authoritarian power structure for government and they are using free sex to acquire it. Do they really believe that a governing body can induce happiness in the populace with a utopia of no sexual inhibitions? Is their real goal free sexual identity? It goes against human nature that one would induce evil in another from selfless motivation. It does make sense, however, that they’ve had to psychologize society in order to get this far. It is like enticing children into a trap with candy and the enticer honestly believes that the free children are now freer when caged.
Next, the author moves onto FEMINISM. (254)
His next major figure that politicizes sexual identity is a Frenchwoman, Simone de Be Beauvoir (1970’s), a bisexual (which is a misnomer) who weaves Marx, Freud, Marcuse, Reich, Nietzsche, Sartre, and more to produce a feminist theory that again use the psychologization of sex to erase the most obvious differences in human beings – biology of the male and female.
Feminism used to be concerned about labor law, pay, voting rights, but Beauvoir pushed feminism into creating ideological constructs of women. With much of the framework of oppression now seated in the psychological narrative, she was able to change the essential reality of what is a woman. She says, “that one is not born, but becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society…” She believes that nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity. (256)
Beauvoir makes a clear distinction between gender and sex. The latter is biological, while the former is psychological. This separation is consistent with patterns of thought already established. (Seen with Nietzsche in his anti-essentialist thinking and then Hegel’s historicizing of human nature, to include the thoughts of Marx and Marcuse).
Human nature is not something we are given but something we do, not something we determine for ourselves via free decisions and actions, why should we tie gender identity to an objective physiological basis? Break free of societies demands. To be a woman is to feel that one is a woman – todays transgenderism.
Society has forced women into the role of childbearing, and they should fulfill their destiny.
Beauvoir rebukes this concept and turns to the role of technology. We can physically change who we are and into what we believe we should be; to include hormonal therapy.
Marx believed that technology and automation of labor would relativize and eliminate the differences between the sexes. Beauvoir believed that from the psychological realm, technological possibilities would eliminate gender difference beyond the area of the workplace.
Technology removes the penalty of promiscuity with birth control with the pill and abortion; thus, with the relief of reproductive servitudes, she can take on the economic roles open to her, roles that would ensure her control over her own person. (259)
Beauvoir’s rhetoric implicates biology as the ultimate form of tyranny, a potentially alienating form of external authority. The reproductive system of a woman is seen as an obstacle to the identity of a woman. Sexual codes are constitutive tyranny of the status quo. The male-female binary must be revised. Sex is biological and gender is socially constructed, and freedom means our self-creation of both.
The distinction between gender and sex is now a basic element of contemporary notions of identity. THE WHOLE TRANSGENDER ISSUE DEPENDS ON IT.
If sex and gender remain connected, then this mismatch of what one was born biologically and what one believes to be psychologically creates a dysfunction of the mind. Once the two are detached from each other – something that can only really be plausible in a world in which psychology rather than biology is seen as determinative of identity – the problem becomes one of the body, to be treated with medication and surgery. Technology defines ontology (a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being). (260)
Beauvoir’s feminism is at the heart of any distinction between biology and gender. Commitment to denying the authority of the physical body and its significance is central for personal identity.
A Second Wave of feminism has evolved – Shulamith Firestone – a further meshing of Marx and Reich. Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction in itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction of itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. One may call this approach pansexuality or Freud’s “polymorphous perversity”. The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by the option of artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother gives way to the small group of others. The division of labor would be ended by the elimination of labor altogether though cybernetics. The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.
This sexual revolution and cultural reappropriation are captured in six points:
1. The distinction between genders based on the physical genitalia will be eliminated. Necessary for true liberation.
2. The norm of heterosexual sex will be replaced by polymorphous pansexuality – free for all sex acts and no more sexual codes of heterosexual norms.
3. Reproduction will, via the application of technology, be available to both men and women. This is the explicit goal for second wave feminism.
4. The role of the mother will thereby be abolished, replaced with a more communal form of education.
5. Differences in physical strength between children and adults will be compensated for by cultural means.
6. Technology will remove the need for human beings to work.
Again, the purpose of the revolution is to abolish the biological family. Its one great goal is the destruction of the family. Why? BECAUSE THE FAMILY IS THE MEANS BY WHICH VALUES ARE TRANSMITTED FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION. (This is solid culture) Marxism sees the family the means by which false consciousness is passed on then replicated over time. Its demolition is essential and its means for demolition is to be found in the tools of technology. (263)
Sex is now politics. Psychologizing and historicizing of the human nature combines itself with the oppression of society of its own values and norms on the individual. The iteration of transgenderism is just the latest phase. Society now intuitively associates sexual freedom with political freedom because we are defined by our sexual desires, and it is at all levels. Look for this concept in marketing, pop songs, corporations, media and of course politics since government power and might is required. All moral codes and modesty must be abolished.
Sex is the answer to human ills and the psychologized, sexualized self over the past 300 years has emerged and is now blossoming.
The thinkers of the New Left may be right in some respect referencing their observation, though their conclusions are not agreeable. They have observed that in matters of sexual morality, we are actually addressing questions about the nature and purpose of human beings, the definition of happiness, and their relationship between the individual and wider society and between men and women. To conclude wrongly, one will lose what it means to be a person and to be human.
With the wrong conclusion, any attempt to corral sexual behavior is an oppressive move designed to make the person inauthentic. Any attempt to set limits on intrinsic nature of certain sexual acts are ultimately arbitrary and politically motivated…soon this will encompass pedophilia. (264)
Epilogue to Part 3 (265)
The question, “why has this expressive revolution taken the highly sexualized form that it has?”
Western culture has unraveled but has not explained the precise forms of that unraveling.
(Interjecting, it is not in the author’s purview to mention the most fundamental aspect to any undoing of mankind, and that is the spiritual war that is raging all around us. In fact, all the figures the author has mentioned so far are not point-men in the barrage of evil in this world. They are but pawns in the hands of satan in a world dominated and led by the evil one. Not that the author is blind or lost in his perceptions, rather he is simply observing and reporting to some depth the playing field of man’s continued devolution. Explanations of sinful and reprobate society cannot be explained because sin makes no since to its very core. As mentioned previously by me, this is a rejection of Universal Absolute Truth.)
The author refers to Freud and his psychoanalyzing of sex as revolutionary. His theories were expressed in scientific idioms which proved to be compelling to intellectual elites. They helped shape the social imaginary of the Western Culture…even though his theories have been debunked.
Part 4 Triumphs of the Revolution
Chapter 8
Triumph of the Erotic
The politics of Marx took a sexual form. The New Left used the principles, structure and arguing points of Marx to advance sexuality. The most obvious manifestation of the Marxist format is how the LGBTQ+ has consumed society.
It has not mattered what poison is deposited into society, the same tool or format of Marxism has been effective for all ills introduced – that of relieving oppression, victimhood, demand for equality and the destruction of the nuclear family that stands against freedom.
Sex pervades every aspect of life, from elementary school, commercials and commerce, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
There are two aspects that the author addresses that served as a bridge for the sexual revolution into the foundations of society: Surrealism and Pornography.
1. Surrealism began in the art gallery and quickly transitioned into the commonplace. (273)
Artistic expression emerged in the 20th century as a project to promote the understanding of self. With Freud still as a backdrop, artistic expression wanted to give prominence to the subconscious. Freud’s psychoanalyst approach to the self-drew attention to the importance of dreams for the understanding of human existence.
The dreamer is able to be whoever or whatever they want to be in whatever kind of world he chooses to envisage.
Since the dreamer in his dreams has no real name and the actor in the dreams is not the actions of a conscious individual, then we must understand that the unconscious is the real bedrock of individual identity, the thing about the person that is most real. The surrealists ultimate end is to obtain the authentic self totally detached from, and uninhibited by, any of the conditions of material life.
The unconscious is the guide to truth. The surrealist position is antihistorical and anticultural. Dreams should be granted certainty more than existence in reality.
The problem with the surrealist and their theory is that since dreams have no bounds, then their perverse sexual deviancy will have no bounds. The imagination can always go further than what the body is capable. Even the attempt to realize in the actual world what is imagined in the dream world would create devastation and chaos to the person’s body and in society.
Marquise de Sade was the worst theorist. (276)
De Sade was an important link between the sexual and politics. He brought his writings to the public square, incorporating Lenin and Marx, and adds that nothing should deny the surrealists their importance. The change is both qualitative and quantitative.
The marriage of the Freudian notion that the unconscious is the true determinant of who we are and Marxist idea that human liberation can be achieved only through the revolutionizing of social relations.
The surrealist is not just to describe the world, reflect the world, or entertain the world.
The purpose is to change the world and by the surrealist, to change it via sexual revolution. In the political realm of the surrealist, they were very aggressive to destroy Christianity and its corollaries – families and moral codes governing sexual behavior. The means by which this was to be accomplished was emphasis on art on human desire and through self-actualization of the individual.
The surrealist tried to accomplish through art what Reich attempted to do in his writings: promote social revolution through the application of aspects of Freudian theory to life. Surrealism, with its blurring of boundaries, its accent on the subconscious, and its obvious sexual connotations, easily penetrated the territory of popular culture.
Surrealism was identified as a key element in the rise of eroticism and also in the fight against orthodox Christianity. Christianity represented the oppressive ideology of the day and needed to be overthrown. And, at the heart of Christianity lay its sexual codes, the means by which regulated individual lives. They believed that the fight against Christianity could only be fought at the level of the sexual revolution.
2. Next after and in parallel to surrealism, was the perennial presence of pornography in society. It had always existed but had become more available. The surrealist helped make pornography, something bad in society, become something good, respectable, and healthy. Surrealists actually helped change culture toward endearing pornography. The triumph of society is that pornography in no longer in the shadows or seedy part of society, it is a basic part of recreational activity for many – children as well as adults. (290)
The “Pornification” of mainstream culture can certainly be attributed to the rise of Hugh Hefner. He was a hero of anti-culture and the overthrow of sexual codes of earlier generations. He helped to enable, “sex sells.” Another popular show that dismantled traditional public attitudes to sex was Game of Thrones.
Hefner removed the social stigma attached to porn and the selling of sex as commercial interest. Playboy was comprised of pornographic images plus serious interviews with many high-profile figures. These figures possessed a respectable presence in society and when brought into the mix with porn, it gave the pornographic world a new elite status equivalent with the positions of figures associated with the news division of Playboy…even the president of the US – Jimmy Carter.
It was soon to follow that there was the cult of beauty and sexuality. More publications promoted a “surreal” picturesque of loveliness and sexual identity.
The process of the “Pornification” of society seems near to completion. Hardcore porn essentially has no social stigma any longer. (284)
Pornography is mainstream culture now. What was formally bazaar is now consumed as a main diet.
The effect of porn is vast and deep. It shapes the sexual expectations, behavior, and relationships of those who consume it. It has even found a place in the Lutheran pastorate. It is called “ethically sourced pornography.” (286)
There was once an early generation of feminists Dworkin and MacKinnon that regarded porn as part of male domination of women within a patriarchal society. There are now pro-porn feminists (Camille Paglia) who are also pro-prostitution. Pornography is a safe way to explore one’s sexual desires without having to act on it and remain safe from rape and disease. It has become part of the “Therapeutic” and expressive individualism on feminism. The moral status of porn is now irrelevant; the big question is whether it works for the individual, whether it enhances the individual’s understanding or experience of her own sexuality, whether it gives pleasure. The new or 2nd Wave Feminism is therapeutic. The only criticism feminism has against porn is that it creates unrealistic expectations regarding the perfection of the female form. It is not bad because it violates traditional codes of sexual morality. It is bad because of well-being with their physical appearance. It is bad as and when it fails the therapeutic test.
Scruton states that actual/real sexual encounters are interpersonal that has some respect for the other person’s body. However, with onslaught of porn, the other person becomes “fetishized” (Marxist term) which is not an end but rather a means to an end, that of the personal pleasure and sexual satisfaction of the individual consumer. In short, the sexual fantasies displayed in porn have potent metaphysical and ethical implications: they project a very specific vision of the world and of other selves. They profoundly shape the social imaginary.
About the only restriction to actual open sexual encounters today is to be sure it is consensual. There is still a stigma against rape because it strikes deeply at who we are at the very core of our being. It denies full selfhood and our identity. Yet, porn strikes against all this. It detaches the observer’s sexual pleasure from bodily encounter and thus renders it as a private, personal matter, and it trivializes the sexual act as third-party entertainment.
The message of porn is that sex is all about the individual and his personal satisfaction and pleasure without reference to another. This porn revolution is consonant with what we have noted concerning the rise of psychological man and the therapeutic society, in which happiness is an inwardly directed sense of personal psychological well-being. If freedom and happiness are epitomized in sexual satisfaction, then porn IS the medium of least costly liberation and fulfillment. In porn there is a detachment of sex from bodily encounter and from the interpersonal narrative.
The framework of sex between a husband and wife has a shared past and present and open to shared future. It has a distinguishing quality. In contrast, porn is about personal satisfaction, pleasure at the moment, without reference to past or future. The one who indulges in porn strips one of ever gaining a view of the opposite sex with dignity, genuine love, and mutual integrity.
Just within the horizon is the swell of sexual fulfillment with robots.
The projection of porn is that there is no ethical context, nor is there any intrinsic moral content. Relationships have a context and living interactive consequences – this is absent in porn. One can see how the destruction of the nuclear family is at hand since marriage is all about selflessness, commitment, conflict resolution, moral codes, and consequences. No one can endure a real-life contextual world of marriage when dwelling in the non-contextual pornographic cyberworld of hapless, selfish, sexual fulfillment. This is the most insidious attack on the family unit thus far. It is invisible, alluring, and contrived by the evil one himself with devastating destruction down the road. (293)
Porn is the logical endpoint of the sexual revolution because it completes the separation of sex from love and relationships. It epitomizes the sexual revolution because it presents sex as merely a physical, pleasurable act that is divorced from any greater relational significance.
Porn is simply one manifestation of our contemporary world of therapy and expressive individualism. Sex itself has no intrinsic moral content and sexual ethics hangs on the thread of consent.
Earlier I mentioned that surrealism has to do with the imagination. So does pornography. One may go much further in the mind with sexual thoughts and imaginations than they could ever attain physically with another person, or with themselves in the autoerotic realm. No real sexual encounter will ever match up to what one has imagined. If one even attempted to physically fulfill in the flesh what one has imagined in the mind, the body would not sustain itself – it would soon expire. The body has limits, and the imagination has none. We push the body beyond its limits to keep pace with our fascinations in hope that science and technology can mend us, but at some point, we will fail. Should take our porn-fascinations to another partner, we are complicit in their demise as well.
Back to Freud’s contribution was his claim that children are sexual beings. Every aspect of life must be addressed in the sexual context all the way back to the children’s upbringing. Sex education is imperative. They must be divorced from the traditional moral framework. The advent of homosexual rights and transgender rights has only intensified the pressure for sex education to begin earlier and earlier in a child’s life.
The erotic has triumphed, nudity and sexual freedom is a sign of authenticity.
Any restriction to this authenticity, e.g., advocating celibacy or criticizing premarital sex is now ridiculous and even immoral and oppressive. Things are upside down.
Traditional sexual codes that value celibacy and chastity actually militate against authenticity, something that is now intuitive.
Porn in the mainstream culture is the rejection of any kind of sacred order. This philosophy of sex has become what it means to be human and is against traditional religious perspectives. (297)
As a reminder, culture is defined by what it forbids. If this is true, then we are living in an “anti-culture” world where what was prohibited in traditional culture is now rejected and the opposite is endeared. The Third World Culture is not built upon the Second World Culture. The Third World repudiates and demolishes the Second World. Sex has been around a long time, even in the First World culture. Porn detaches sex from any kind of transcendent meaning and is lethal to cultures of the first and second worlds.
This whole surrealist project was built on socialism and revolution. Overturning the sexual morality is a means of overturning Western culture that was built on a Christian sexual ethic. Porn was the next step from surrealism for the destruction of sexual norms. It has been the reinforcement of an expressive individualist view of selfhood and the transformation of the West. Individual sexual gratification is the gold standard of personal human happiness and thereby makes sex a matter of the therapeutic ideal, not of any kind of objective morality. It prioritizes the present over either the past or future. It promotes a view of history that plays precisely to the narrative – the past is a land of sexual repression and therefore oppression. Freedom is the rejection of history’s sexual mores and related social practices.
Chapter 9 (301)
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
The author explores sectors of society to display the dominance of the therapeutic way of thinking that has changed public ethics, traditional law, and education. He addresses several cases of the Supreme Court and movements in universities. Expressive individualism in the public sphere is driven by therapeutic concerns.
First, he addresses cases in the Supreme Court.
“Gay Marriage”
He addresses the position of the deceased, Antonin Scolia. Scolia was an Originalist – the conviction that law must be read according to the understanding of those who originally drafted it. However, the conviction of current judges allows their opinions and approach to legal texts to be shaped by the culture around them and by the way they understand society to have developed. Supreme Court decisions have given way to expressive individualism and the psychologizing of the self to the antihistorical tendency that ironically has often clothed itself under the guise of being on “the right side of history.”
(To expand on what the author said about being on the right side of history from somewhere earlier in the book, I best understand it as to allude to the destruction of history – or the deconstruction of history since history has been filled with oppressive power structures that have prevented the true self from emerging. To be on the right side of history refers to disembarking from any association and allegiance to everything that has brought us to this point. History is NOW and is severed from the previous evil hegemonies so that we may start over. Starting history over now is to be on the right side of history – the present, not the past.)
1. The “Gay Marriage” majority ruling in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, which found a right to gay marriage in the Constitution.
This decision captures the spirit of our age and reflects the changing attitudes to sex and marriage. The decision just didn’t happen without a buildup from previous decisions. And it was not the Supreme Court that made gay marriage plausible. It was plausible because of the wider transformation of the social imaginary. (303)
As to the buildup toward the gay marriage decision,
Note the case of …
A. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992).
(Would not overrule Precedence so the Court would not undermine its authority)
The details of the case rests in the definition of personal freedom and is now applied to legal precedent (a guide or model). Personal freedom and self-definition have been given legal status to a subjective and plastic notion of what it means to be human. Poiesis here triumphs decisively over mimesis. The courts key passage reads:
“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”
This definition of self is now without challenge. There is yet hypocrisy that may someday be addressed when we do not allow this definition to extend to the child molester or even serial killer, for that matter.
The Supreme Courts recent rulings on so many cases resonate with social imaginary. Their decisions on homosexuality cement into law the notion of individual freedom and selfhood we find expressed in the sexual revolution.
There is another observation brought to light by the author on the Supreme Court ruling about “Precedence.” To go back and review a case, such as Roe v Wade, to see if it could be overturned, would undermine the authority and stability of the court. Thus, even if a case undermined the developments in constitutional law, precedence would be held; EXCEPT, when it considers dynamics of culture over the precedence.
B. Lawrence v Texas (2003) – (It went against Precedence in favor of Social Imaginary)
The case brought about to men committing sodomy in their home. This was an intentional set up to bring to court for the purpose of establishing precedence for future cases. This decision was used to bring about the gay marriage decision later. There was precedence from a Georgia decision that convicted two men of committing oral and anal sex (1986). The Supreme Court overturned the conviction and ruled in favor of the men thus overturning precedence in favor of cultural and social imaginary. This was anti-culture.
This decision against precedence (from the Georgia case) was arbitrary and counter to the reason why Roe v Wade was upheld. It made no sense to not uphold the conviction against the sodomites based on the Georgia decision but uphold precedence for the sake of Roe V Wade.
Except that upholding Roe v Wade on precedence, even though it was not constitutional, was more acceptable to society and culture than to overturn the precedence against Roe v Wade. The decision to find in favor of the sodomites in TX against the precedence of the Georgia ruling was for the same reason, more acceptable to the culture and public. So maybe said a little more simply, to uphold prior court decisions in a case depends on social and cultural norms, not on law. (307)
When it comes down to what really matters, if society needs abortion rights to keep women happy, then the law must be made to yield such results. If society requires the affirmation of certain sexual activities and identities to affirm certain classes of individuals, then the law must be made to yield those results – no matter what.
Scalia wrote of his colleagues’ decisions as being a culture of therapy not judgments by law.
This was probably foreseen as the inevitable stage setting of gay marriage. There would be no legal resistance to gay marriage since personhood has been redefined and the therapeutic goal of legal decisions has been established.
There is another case that the author cites that sets the stage better for the gay marriage decision. It is…
C. US v Windsor (2013) (Judicial Tyranny and cultural amnesia)
The backdrop to this case was the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). This was the federal definition of marriage which excluded same-sex partnerships. The law was challenged by two Canadian lesbians married in Canada but relocated in NY State. The lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court where the Justice Dept said that it would not defend the Act. The Supreme Court viewed section 3 of the constitution and ruled 5-4 that the law was unconstitutional.
The court stated that DOMA was a disapproval of a class of people and imposed a disadvantage, a separated status, and so stigma upon all who enter same-sex marriages which was made lawful by the authority of the States. (308) (Specifically, had to be Canada)
The court said that DOMA was unconstitutional animus. The federal government had no right to define marriage when states alone had that right.
Homosexuals were protected with full marriage rights as granted them by their states. This court decision is described as emotivism. There was no rational argument for the court to derive this decision. It is also judicial tyranny. States had already outlawed homosexual marriages, even made it part of their constitution. The courts tread over states’ rights with their elite ruling of nine people over millions and millions. (310)
The court ruled that DOMA enshrined inequality. NOT TRUE. Under DOMA, every individual enjoyed the same rights and labored under the same restrictions as everyone else. Men, heteros, and gay, could marry women and could not marry men.
Women, heterosexuals, and lesbians could marry men and could not marry women. So how is it that this can be interpreted as enshrining inequality? The only way this could make sense is to allow the INDIVIDUAL to redefine marriage in the manner in which he or she chooses. This opens up the legal access to ask why a marriage now cannot be defined as one man, or two or more women? Why should a marriage be restricted to a relationship exclusively human? Under this ruling, polygamous and zoophilic/bestiality communities can exist in marriage. The ruling rejected traditional arguments for marriage. The framework now for marriage is whatever is socially acceptable.
The age for acts of pedophilia is arbitrary. When social acceptance becomes broader, then the legal age for marriage could arbitrarily change to erase pedophilia. The new framework for right and wrong based on rational judgment becomes irrational animus against sub-groups.
The three case rulings above set the scene and established the logic (or non-logic) for the gay marriage decision of Obergefell v. Hodges.
1. The court essentially affirmed expressive individualism in the Planned Parenthood decision, 2. The flip-flop use of legal precedence Lawrence v. Texas - the principle of the therapeutic outcomes desired by the wider culture and
3. A demonstration of willful cultural amnesia in the US v. Windsor holding against traditional marriage advocates which could be dismissed as irrational prejudice.
With these three decisions there was little doubt which way the “Supreme” Court would rule on gay marriage; wherein, the court ruled that gay marriage was protected by the constitution in 2015.
Clearly observed, the court bizarrely applied its ruling on the following Four principles:
1. The right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.
This represents the triumph of expressive individualism in society as defined by Kennedy’s passage on “self-definition” in the Planned Parenthood case. It points to the sexual revolution as a manifestation of a much deeper revolution in what it means to be a self. It is a demonstration of what it means to be a free individual that pervades modern culture.
Here is an excerpt of my book review from Saving Truth referencing the Kennedy decision on gay marriage:
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his infamous opinion on same-sex marriage, implied that individual human beliefs determine and define reality, including personhood. His opinion could be the Culture of Confusion’s Creed. One may derive from his statement that every individual person can define existence, the universe, and human life:
“At the heart of livery is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Further, he stated, in order to advocate for freedom from government intrusion into personal decisions, “Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the state”.
This kind of self-definition is at the heart of autonomy, NOT liberty.
Justice Kennedy has taken the principle of self-definition and applied it to human dignity. Unwittingly, perhaps, his opinion struck down voter-ratified constitutional amendments in six states defining marriage as between one man and one woman. It’s ironic that according to Kennedy, the majority voters in those states did not have the LIBERTY to define their own concept of existence, meaning, the universe, and the mystery of life. But Justice Kennedy, an agent of the state, had the right and power to do it for them. In his opinion, Kennedy used the term “dignity” nine times. It appears that to Kennedy, is that we have dignity only when everything about us is celebrated. Human dignity is only “opinion deep” and does not have inherent meaning beyond the agreement of their opinion.
Back to this book…
2. The right to marry is fundamental because it supports a two-person union unlike any other in its importance to the committed individuals.
Social imaginary cannot DENY or DEPRIVE gay couples a chance for happiness. This principle, however, may soon dissolve under the weight of the other principles to permit polygamy and other abhorrent unions.
3. The right to marry is that it safeguards children and families and thus draws meaning from related rights of childrearing, procreation, and education.
This is just reassuring rhetoric. Who would want to undermine what on the surface appears to be verbiage to protect families or jeopardize children?
Really, this is just attractive and traditional sounding language which is a mask for underlying therapeutic concerns. The entire argument for it should fall by the wayside when we admit that gay marriage cannot produce children. Of course, it can be manipulated and twisted via adoption and surrogacy laws. So, granting a gay couple the right to marry does not, in itself, bring in its wake the existence of a “family”; that would depend on other laws and social practices that must be mutilated as well.
4. This court case and the Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of our social order.
Tradition is simply edited. Most amazingly, is that what is now traditional is what is now contemporary. There has been a very successful purge of true history to the point that what was “traditional” due to its historical footprint and value, is now a redefined tradition based on what is the contemporary emotivism. What was truly historical tradition is outmoded or motivated by bigotry or most likely, ignored. Its selective use of tradition just shows the plastic definition of marriage with which the majority operates.
No longer is marriage to be defined as a man and a woman –
a. it has no rational basis,
b. it is motivated by animus,
c. it perpetuates inequality, and
d. is an affront to the dignity of the gay/lesbian community, and
e. it is denying fundamental freedoms essential to what it means to be a human.
In sum, the basis for the rulings:
1. Autonomy, 2. The fundamental nature of a two-person union, 3. The safeguarding of children and families, and 4. The importance of the nation’s tradition
These are an odd combination of reasons for legitimating gay marriage. (314)
The sexual revolution is, as has been addressed, simply one manifestation of the wider revolution in selfhood that has taken place over the last four hundred years. (315)
Second, he addresses cases in the Universities.
The author jumps into the Bioethics Dept of Princeton. A professor at Princeton (DeCamp) refers to Peter Singers expression of ethical thought to proceed with societies ethics. He leaps immediately into the topic of abortion, not because it is a medical issue, but rather a psychologizing issue.
The ethics for such an act of abortion flows out from the theorists at universities and the like. These theories, as previously discussed, reach down to the imaginary of society.
Why is it okay with society to abort babies but not quite yet intentionally and plainly kill them later after birth (infanticide)? It is because it is ahead of the tastes of society; yet both are for the same consistent reasoning – to promote happiness…for the parents involved.
The basis for accepting abortion in society is that it relieves the mother of a burden and thus her well-being is the hallmark of this therapeutic age. Infanticide would be for that same reason if the child were born with such defects, or not, that the mother would be burdened. As of now, infanticide is not wholly accepted publicly. For the same reasons and basis, euthanasia in America is also not fully accepted.
Going back to who seems to be the winner in acceptable ethics of killing – Peter Singer.
His ethics led the way to the rise of modern animal rights and the animal liberation movement and vegan movements. Singer has moral standards, but not traditional, historical standards – there is no more history. His positions on abortion, infanticide and euthanasia are at the heart of what it means to be a person and what it means to be living a fulfilled life. He does not rest his arguments on standard liberal premises and totally rejects any Christian attitudes. He is much like Nietzsche.
He does not find the standard liberal arguments in favor of abortion to be persuasive:
1. Liberals argue that conception simply produces a fetus, not a human. Singer says that this argument is just aesthetics. No one wants to kill a little thing that we can all see, hear, and cuddle. The argument may work for a while until the fetus becomes more image-bearing of a human. That is why sonagrams have changed the aesthetics and attitudes of the parents toward the child. Generally, this liberal argument is losing ground.
2. There was the “Supreme” Court ruling on viability in Roe v. Wade. Singer sees no reason why viability should hold such a key place in the “Pro-choice” movement. Viability is in the elastic category, subject to the availability of medical science, geography, and care. The Viability argument is relative. A viable fetus in the 21st Century is not the same as one from the 16th Century. And Viable fetus’ in New York is not the same as in Mogadishu. All these arguments are metaphysical and do not give the mother total sovereignty over the life or death of the child. Singers’ argument is for sovereignty of the mother as the sole argument.
3. Singer also addresses other arguments such as “quickening” (when the soul enters the body) which is signaled by the baby’s first movement. He says that it is just Theological mystification. There is the issue of when does the child feel pain and Singer calls that arbitrary. It doesn’t matter.
4. He rejects the liberal argument that abortion laws simply drive the abortions underground. Laws just make them illegal but doesn’t stop them. He says that is just an argument against abortion laws and not an argument in favor of abortion in itself.
5. Liberals also say the abortion is a “victimless crime”. Singer says that that argument falls because abortion is really a debate about the status of the baby in the womb and whether it can be categorized as not involving a victim – it clearly does.
6. He finally addresses the feminist’s argument that the fetus is part of the woman’s body and that she can deal with it as she chooses. This argument is powerful in case of rape and incest since she can say that the fetus is alien and parasitically dependent upon her for its existence. Singer rejects the position. He says that there is a utilitarian ground for not aborting the baby if the overall effect of aborting it is worse than her keeping it. This is viewed in overall happiness that would accrue to the world through the birth of another human being. The woman has no absolute right to dispose of the child as she chooses. Supposing that the overall happiness would be found in the happiness brought by a couple who would like to adopt. Or even the immediate or distant family that would be devastated by the abortion of this child.
So, since Singer is probably the most outspoken Pro-abortionist but opposed to all the standard liberal arguments proposed by the liberals, what are his arguments for abortion? (Mentioned earlier in brief).
He rejects human exceptionalism. He says there is a difference between being human and being a person. Merely belonging to the human species doesn’t make one a person. Personhood is the main value of life.
There are two basic arguments he makes for what is a person:
1. He rejects “speciesism.” He does not believe that a human life is any more exceptional than that of an iguana. Whatever value is placed on human beings beyond a chimpanzee is illegitimate metaphysical religious jargon or a legacy of religious doctrine. The sanctity of human life is constructed on a false premise. He says that being conscious or feeling pain for humans is no higher than that of animals. We kill a cow to eat but we let a human live who has cancer. He wants to make animals part of the discussion of the ethics of life and reject human exceptionalism.
2. Instead of any human exceptionalism, he proposes instead the matter of consciousness (probably a level of consciousness) as the foundation for understanding a creature as a person.
Levels of consciousness:
a. A PERSON has a sense of its own existence over time. It is aware that it has a past, a present, and a future. Consequently, such a creature will also have the capacity for desires, for moving itself intentionally into the future.
b. A creature must be autonomous; that is, it must be capable of making decisions. The most critical is the decision or ability to live or die – proving that it is aware of the difference between the two. Autonomy also has a level of rationality in that the decisions are based on reason, not instinct.
Given these arguments, Singer does not consider a child in the womb a PERSON – though human. The child has no consciousness of past, present, or future; is not autonomous; and has no capacity for rational reflection. For Singer, the child in the womb is not a person and does not possess the rights of personhood. This rejection of human exceptionalism is singularly important: the child in the womb should be given no more status than any other creature of similar development. (321)
Given that we kill animals for no more reason than food on the plate, we have no basis for protecting a child in the womb. Does the child feel pain? Well so does the deer shot by the hunter and the deer is as self-conscious as the child in the womb. Why discriminate between the two? There are no grounds.
Singer also regards the newborn (after birth) to be the same status as the child in the womb. Having passed through the birth canal is irrelevant. He draws the obvious implications for infanticide. We can kill those who will never gain personhood such as severely mentally impaired or those who have lost it through the ravages of dementia.
We may ask Singer, “When would abortion and Infanticide be wrong?”
Though each may not be wrong, they may not be legitimate. The times that either would be illegitimate is simple and straight forward: where the effect on the parents would be a profoundly negative one. Singer actually says that it would be a terrible thing to kill an infant if the outcome of the killing will have a negative effect on the parents who have a natural affection that binds the two together…there has been nine months of anticipation and planning and physical maladies to overcome together. It would be different if the child was born abnormal. If the parents would be relieved to kill the child, then it would be okay. Either decision must bring happiness to the parents. Happiness as an inner sense of psychological well-being is the hallmark of the therapeutic age, and here we see it deployed as the primary criterion for deciding whether an infant should live or die.
The “willy-nilly” killing of the newborns would be wrong if we ignored the happiness it could bring to someone in adoption. Killing the newborn deprived someone else of their happiness. Otherwise, it would be alright to kill a perfectly healthy newborn. (324)
One would wonder why mothers who kill their babies in some of the latest headlines are held responsible for murder when abortion and euthanasia is in the social acceptance arena. According to Singer, if killing the newborn by the mother makes her happy, then it should not be murder but therapeutic. Or, perhaps, there are boundaries as to who may kill it. Maybe there should be a whole new category of doctors who have not taken the hypocritic oath. Maybe we should have a clinical county dump for unwanted babies to make the mother happy.
Therapeutic ethics does not consider the intrinsic value of the life of an infant, only the psychological impact of those surrounding the event – only to those who are already persons.
Prior to birth, the mental health, emotional well-being, and desires of the woman carrying the child in the womb are the only decisive factors in whether the child in the womb is allowed to live. The feeling of psychological well-being of the parities is all that matter.
Back to the Campus…Anti-culture.
As things have been moving toward an anti-cultural understanding, the purpose of education has had to change. If society is the problem, and history needs to be redone, then education needs to focus on allowing individuals to express themselves naturally rather than forcing them to learn the beliefs, values, and customs that would actually lead them to be false to themselves and thus inauthentic. Society corrupts. The history of culture became a narrative of power and exploitation, a tale in which apparent heroes are villains, and the true heroes are those who have been exploited, marginalized, and even erased from the dominant narratives. The culture of higher education has been transformed.
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech, once good for society, is now detrimental to society. Due to the changing understanding of selfhood, anything that can be considered an assault on the self must be stopped.
The notion of assault on the person, once considered damage to the body, now becomes psychological and its damage to the inner self or what may hinder the sense of well-being…all residing at the heart of the therapeutic age. Freedom of speech becomes not so much part of the solution as part of the problem. Liberal democracies have long assumed that free exchange of ideas in society is a means of preventing totalitarianism and promoting the common good. In view of this new world of the psychological man, free speech serves rather to give legal protection to verbally assault the person. It must go. (326)
The advent of hate crimes and hate speech grants significant status to the psychological dimensions of criminal action. Murder is murder, but if one hated the person who was murdered then the penalty is increased. In fact, how can someone who murders not hate the person in the first place? Violence has come to be seen to include the psychological and these laws are elastic in scope. They can be stretched to encompass any “crime.” The annihilation of free speech protects various identities that have come to enjoy privileged status in the world of the psychological man.
Free speech has come to be considered violence. It is an attack on a psychologized society and the expressive individualism. (329)
Free speech, once considered to be socially good, now is part of the problem, not the solution. And only by restricting speech will the marginalized voices of the oppressed be heard. (331)
Dignity of the individual is an inference from the Christian teaching that all human beings are made in the image of God.
But in our current climate, this universal dignity has been psychologized, and the granting of dignity has come to be equated with the affirmation of those psychologized identities that enjoy special status in our culture. (331)
The way I see this is that God has superimposed a compulsion to recognize His fingerprint (image) in the lives of all mankind. We naturally give some credence to our fellow members of humanity, regardless of how distorted His image may be in others. However, the natural tendency to regard others is manipulated into regarding not the image of God in them, but rather the image they have created for themselves – a new and perverse identity – an identity crafted from their own minds. We are forced to give to them a solemn honor for whatever image/identity they have created for themselves instead of what is reserved for the honor we give to those who reflect the image of God. This respect that Christians cherish for fellow man creates confusion in the church. They know they ought to acknowledge the image of God in each other, but they don’t know how to do so when the psychologized man has created for himself another image altogether – one that is anti-God. The sad thing is that Christians become paralyzed and yield to the bizarre nature of this predominant third world culture. Even the Christian has abandoned the Truth of Gods Word and hasn’t an inkling of how to apply it. So, they just give either active or passive tribute to the insanity of sin.
On most campuses, the teaching of history is dominated by advocates of Critical Theory and thus preoccupied with categories of power and marginalization. Any history department of secular universities display the new third-world culture. No real history is taught. Rather, one can easily spend a semester on Feminism and Pornography or maybe a glimpse of British Colonial Violence. The game is to abolish boundaries and canons entirely – presumably as constructs of various previous imperialisms, cultural, sexual, and otherwise. The purpose is the destabilization of the discipline, and this all serves to institutionalize the cultural amnesia that is part of the new godless age. Any traditional curricular priorities are dead. They are part of white, Western, heterosexual males. There is no context for discussing such things as the content of a curriculum in a pre- or nonpolitical manner. (335) These are really functions of a wider cultural commitment to the therapeutic and to the idea that human beings are most authentic when their inner life is lived outwardly, without oppressive interference from society at large. The nature of traditional institutions has changed. (333)
Numerous factors have subverted institutional authority. For example, students use to pay for their education. This made professors and institutions accountable for their education. Education was a commodity and the student the consumer. However, Obama federalized almost every financial aspect of education. Student loans were federalized, grants were federalized, and schools became “for-profit” institutions producing low quality, worthless degrees.
The radical individualism of the secular mind sees any corralling individual behavior can be a political assault on personal sovereignty. In this world, everything is politicized and there is no choice in the public square but to accept it and to act accordingly.
The author has addressed different spheres of public institutions to make his point that there is a pervasive, expressive individualism and the therapeutic concern of psychological man and it has shaped the modern society. He made his points by addressing the rulings of the Supreme Court’s path to finding gay marriage in the Constitution, by the Ivy League ethics of Peter Singer, and by the current pressure on freedom of speech on college campuses. All three are functions of a notion of selfhood that places self-expression and individual psychological well-being at the heart of what it means to be human.
A quick sum of the chapter:
All three reflect emotivism and anticulture.
Singer rejecting human essence as meaningful and the non-personhood of the fetus; free speech is simply a license to oppress others with hateful language and arguments. And in each of these there is no common ground in which to build a consensus. Particularly seen in the Supreme Court’s ruling that religious objections to homosexuality are really driven by animus. These positions are used to discredit the opposition: “Your views are irrational and rooted in emotion; mine are rooted in reason.”
The rejection of history is a promotion of anticulture.
For the courts, precedent functions in the arguments only when in the arguments it is useful for it to do so. When it is problematic, it can be ignored.
Back to Singer – The proabortion position is somewhat antihistorical since it eliminates the consequences of history, namely, conception. But Singer goes further with his advocacy of infanticide, justified on the basis of the happiness of the parents, and of euthanasia. These are iconoclastic rejections of past practice and belief. Neither abortion nor infanticide are unprecedented in history, but they have not been widely sanctioned in the West since ancient times, and Singer’s argument is predicated on two very modern notions: the rejecting of human exceptionalism and the imperative of personal happiness.
As to campuses, the protests against free speech are a part of the much wider education pathology. The transformation of the humanities into disciplines by which the past is not so much examined as a source of wisdom but rejected as a tale of oppression is key to this anticultural impulse. Denying free speech on campus is simply an extension of seeing all history as hegemonic discourse (ruling or dominant in a political or social context)
designed to keep the powerful in power and to marginalize and silence the week. All of this militates against any notion of traditional external authority. “Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education.” This concept guarantees that this generation will be the first of the new barbarism, committed to the denigration, destruction, and erasure of the past – not only its artifacts but also its values and social practices.
In recent decisions of the Supreme Court, in the writings and influence of Singer, and in the antics of the modern college campus, it would seem clear that we have forgotten history. Cultural amnesia is the order of the day, a political imperative, a fundamental aspect to the social imaginary. (337)
Chapter 10 (339)
The Triumph of the “T”
This chapter continues to deal with the deep roots of the psychologized self and how it superimposes itself over the differences and contentions of special groups, e.g., LGBTQ+, to achieve political power. The coalition of the LGBTQ+ is an example of identities that coalesce to achieve a common goal, even though they are personal enemies of the other.
This alliance is to date the most powerful example of anticultural, a death work, and rejection of nature, underpinned by the aesthetic and emotive ethics that are so typical of a therapeutic age. Though they have vehement philosophical differences, their drive and desire to achieve inward and psychological well-being over what is outward and natural, overlooks their differences.
The T and Q theory denies the fixed nature of gender, something that the L and G assume. The T and Q aim at the demolition of any construction of reality that takes the idea of male and female as representing something that is at root essential. The L and Q do not see it that way.
The feminist Adrienne Rich addresses some differences between L and Q in the framework of the dominant heterosexual normal standard. She objects to the alliance of the two because in order for the L to survive in the workplace they must make themselves attractive to the heterosexual and act like a heterosexual. The Q does not have to make himself attractive to women. The L, therefore, must deny her identity and live contradictory to it in her social interaction. The Q does not have to do so. There is no requirement placed on him to be attractive to a female colleague. The Q is therefore free in the workplace to be who he really is. In the dominant heterosexual and patriarchal structure of society meant that there is not equivalence between gays and lesbians; their experience of the world is profoundly different.
She is saying that they are two different phenomena because of how they stand in relation to the broader power structures of society that lead inevitably to entirely different experiences of that society. And that indicates that there is nothing intrinsic to the L and G in LGBTQ+ to suggest that they are automatically going to be partners in a common cause.
Rich states forcing the L and G together is an act of oppression. To equate lesbian existence with male homos because each is stigmatized is to deny and erase female reality once again.
It is nothing more than an act of male domination that denies female identity. The LGBTQ+ alliances is not a natural alliance.
The L is a profoundly female experience – like motherhood.
1. The L and G cannot be united because they are physically different – daaa. The link here is lesbianism and feminism is significant. The feminist assumes bodily distinctions between men and women are important and that experiences unique to the female body, such as menstruation, pregnancy, and so on, are vital to the cause. By implication, when the Land G come together, bodily difference must be sidelined. When lesbianism attached itself to LGBTQ+, feminism took a hit.
2. Rich points that there is an erotic difference between male homos and lesbians. The male is focused on penetrative sex and genital orgasm. For the lesbian, eroticism is a much broader category not based solely on genital activity but more of a deep emotional relationship. This enters the idea of a promiscuous female which is a male idea. From the sidelines, the feminist presses to separate the female experience of the world from any male influence. This separation is based on biological realities. However, the LGBTQ+ focus on felt needs and the importance of the psychological. The physiological constitution of what it means to be a woman is out the window. (345)
Further, Freud is criticized for laying the groundwork of denigrating the female body through his theory that women, because they lack male genitalia, constructed the female identity as being that of and incomplete man.
How is it that there can be any cohesiveness in the alliance of L and G? They have become allies in the pollical and cultural struggles of our time. It is a unified movement for sexual liberation. They share a victimhood of marginalization as sexual minorities which ultimately proved stronger than the social, economic, biological, and philosophical differences that theorists such as Rich noted.
Victimhood emerged as THE key virtue out of the Marxist tradition of the New Left thinking. The L and G alliance exploits a history of slavery, exploitation, and marginalization of minorities. This is the catalyst of the LG union.
There were two key catalytic moments in history that aided in the rise of the marginalized and oppressed.
1). The Stonewall riots in 1969 – a police raid in England of a gay bar which propelled the gay militancy into a self-conscious political force. It was the signal moment of the male gay activism. It pushed its way into America. Before the 1960s Stonewall, there was the so-called homophile organizations that argued gay rights were committed to American ideals and that gays could be as patriotic as any American and desired assimilation to the culture status quo. But with the Stonewall incident, the movement became revolutionary, and the gay movement demanded that America assimilate to their agenda. American society must change. To the young radical there was no need to create a favorable image…Now blatant was beautiful. (347) (Who would have figured the weeds would have swallowed up the garden so quickly?)
The political organizing of the homo movement prepared the ground for gay marriage. The movement was determined to occupy a large place in the cultural imagination. They hid some of their radical agenda in the homophile presentation, e.g., Will and Grace sitcom, but rapidly became blatant. The picturesque images of Stonewall resonated within the Western culture as victimhood and aided in the L and G alliance as their common cause.
2). A decade later, and the key event, for the L and G were powerful images of gay men as victims with the advent of AIDS. Initially, the rankers of lifestyle and behavior was the target of those opposing the gay agenda. But soon, the therapeutic culture of expressive individualism won the argument for the movement. The Falwell’s “Moral Majority” movement against them further promoted them into victimhood. It was seen as an annihilation of a class of victims and an obnoxious moralizing.
With the groundwork already laid, sexual activity was not seen as moral, but as simply an activity. Via the post-Nietzsche mind, those who argue that sex acts have intrinsic moral content are merely expressing irrational aesthetic preferences rooted in cultural conditioning of simple prejudice. Sex becomes morally significant only as it is an expression of the self or of personal identity. If gay is an identity, then the narrative becomes one in which AIDS is presented as killing people because of who they are, not because of what they do. They are not responsible for their own illness and death any more than the color of their skin; they are victims. (349)
AIDS is not a moral crisis to be solved by a moral reformation but a technical one to be addressed with the technical solutions: instruction of “safe sex,” distribution of condoms, and the ready availability of drugs such as AZT. Resistance to governmental funding for AIDS made gay men victims. The L and G found further grounds for alliance that is shared in victimhood and oppression at the hands of a heterosexual establishment. Soon “ACT UP” (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) became a force for the alliance in 1987 starting at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center in NY. (349)
The alliance of the L and G is the result of sharing the same enemy and suffering similar marginalization. It is virtuous victimhood. It is the tenor of the therapeutic society, from its psychologizing of oppression to its historical narratives that make history’s victims into real heroes, serves to cultivate the emotional and moral power that claims to victimhood now command. The common cause and common enemy is the conservative culture, epitomized by the Reagan administration, that was subverting the identity and, in many cases, literally condemning them to death. This later set the stage for the T and the civil war with the feminists.
The T joins the party. (350)
The common face of the T movement is Bruce Jenner. With it comes the simple issues of bathroom use, pronoun verbiage and women’s sports. These have all dominated the news and political, corporate arenas.
But the big issue is for T to be coherent is that society needs to place a decisive priority on the psychological over the physical in determining identity. For it to be coherent, we must downplay external authority, whether the person’s biology or of traditional social expectations. Biological and cultural amnesia must be the order of the day. It is fueled by the powerful individualism and facilitated by the technological ability to manipulate biological realities. To these, we must also add the notion that gender is separable from sex, something noted in the work of Simone de Beauvoir and the Marx idea of the difference of men and women in the workplace. In other words, Jenner did not appear out of nowhere, nor is he the result of a single cause. The LGB “T” was established before Jenner – mid-1990’s.
In an interview with Diane Sawyer, Jenner refers to himself as a woman – in his heart and soul. The female side of him is who he is, and he identifies as a female. He acted disingenuously for so long in his life so as not to disappoint people. His language was not due to psycho confusion but a contrast between inner authenticity and outward hypocrisy. He was always telling a lie as Bruce. It was public expectations that caused him to be a liar. Culture forced this role on him that made him inauthentic and untrue to his true self. The demands of society forced him to play the hypocrite as Bruce.
There was another T named Joanne Herman that likened himself to being like a car running on the wrong gas. When estrogen replaced the testosterone in 2002, there was an amazing sense of well-being and harmony. His body just hummed.
These two T’s expressed the language of individualism, connected to the central concern of the therapeutic society, that is, an inner sense of psycho well-being. Bruce was just an inauthentic construct, imposed on Caitlyn, on the inner female self, by society. Herman always felt the wrong primary sex hormone was coursing through his body. The result was a lifetime of pretending to be someone else, someone demanded by wider society and by chromosomes and physiology in contradiction to psycho feelings, and therefore their lives were lived as lies. They were able to break away from culturally imposed norms. Caitlyn was free to be herself, to be authentic, to be outwardly who he was inwardly, and Joanne has a wonderful sense of inner happiness and peace.
The next issue in the alliance of LGBTQ+…how does the T stand in positive relation to the others? L and G operate within a gender binary – that there are biologically such things as men and women and their sexual identity must be understood within that framework. The T and Q deny a biological approach in favor of a psycho, free-floating notion of gender.
The short answer is as above with the L and G – a political coalition forged on the basis of a common enemy – a socially and politically enforced heterosexual normativity. Yet, there is resentment in the lesbian community toward T people, particularly a man claiming to be a woman.
Still, T people have made enormous strides to be normalized. The Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers called for the full normalization of T’s by society.
The American Psychiatric Association joined in the call in 2012. It has even become somewhat accepted in the lesbian community, particularly in the Second-Wave feminism (de Beauvoir and Firestone) where sex is separated from gender and where physical difference make no real difference. Even this current President has stated that he sees no problem in an eight-year-old transitioning from one sex to another gender. The goal is a transcendence of gender differences through technology and enhanced political consciousness. (354)
It is all a political alliance because of a shared sense of victimhood, a common interest in destabilizing society’s heterosexual norms…or by Adrienne Rich’s term – “compulsory heterosexuality”. It is a convenient coalition for pollical and legal lobbying.
Some of the remaining arguments of some feminists and L’s against the T’s are as follows:
L’s eschew penetration and look at women who want to become men, turn their back on women and usurp male privilege. They steal male privilege with false identification and turn their backs on women’s empowerment. Men who transition to women deny their innate birthright of male privilege with a false identification of victimhood. All in all, the T finds meaning in no one but himself.
The L and G alliance where biology had a play, dissipated when they joined the T and Q movement. They lost the oppositional ground they had against the heterosexual normativity over biological sex. The T movement is averse to the feminist campaign for women’s rights. There are many feminists that refuse to accept that a man can transform into a woman.
Female biology shapes female history. All that pertains to being female, e.g., menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, the history of female subordination in a male-dominant society, these unique experiences are skipped by the male who transitions to female identity. To be born with the XX Chromosome has history. Being born female has history and this experience is denied to the T. The T’s are not genuine. All they have done is get rid of what is superficially male and become what may not be male – they have not become female. Once they have medically changed their physical appearance, they can only mimic the female. They are still male born with the XY.
Though what constitutes female identity (gender) in different times and different cultures may vary greatly, these various identities are connected to common forms of bodily experience. To reject that, as T’s do, is to move gender entirely into the realm of the psycho and to deny, in a quasi-gnostic fashion, any significance to the body. The rise of T is part of the rise of the therapeutic society. (359)
The medical response to T is a function of the therapeutic nature of modern society. There is no more moral, social-political, economic, and environment problems associated with the T…all the problems are transformed to technical problems. Where a sense of psycho well-being is the purpose of life, therapy supplants morality – or better yet, therapy is morality. Anything that achieves well-being is good as long as it meets the weak conditions that it does not inhibit the happiness of others, or that of a greater number of others.
The feminist’s concerns are that T depoliticizes the matter of being a woman. Being a woman is now something that can be produced by a technique – literally prescribed by a doctor. The pain, the struggle and the history of oppression that shape what it means to be a woman in society are thus trivialized and rendered irrelevant. More to the point, being a T still operates within the gender stereotypes generated by patriarchal society. The fact is that a man who thinks he wants to be a woman really wants to be a woman in accordance with the male expectations of what a woman should be.
Men that are castrated – surgically, medicinally, or psychologically, do not see women as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex change has ever begged for a uterus - and – ovaries transplant; if uterus and ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. As mentioned above, male T’s only remove the most distinctive elements of the male sexual anatomy; it does not add the critical components of a womb and ovaries that provide the experience that constitute womanhood: menstruation and pregnancy.
The T is identified as such solely on his/her own script, which can be learned as any sex-typed behavior and as editorialized as autobiographies usually are. They only conform themselves to what they think women should be. They simply pretend. Thus, T may be in an odd way, profoundly conservative. Radical feminists are divided on the T issue and is connected to the philosophical sacrifice that the L made for the G.
Foucault and Nietzsche come together to create an extremely unstable society. Gender is a performance and possesses no ontological status. To be a woman is not to have a certain biological substance but to repeatedly act like a woman, and the philosophical origins of Nietzsche’s claim that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.” There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expression” that are said to be its results.
Gender is doing, not being. It stands in line with the anti-metaphysical philosophy that now dominates intellectual life in the humanities.
The subjectivity inherent in the psychological construction of the self serves to render any biologically grounded categories – any fixed categories, whether economic, racial, or whatever is to be highly unstable. I am whoever I think I am and if my inward sense of psyche well-being is my only moral imperative, then the imposition of external, prior, or static categories is nothing other than an act of imperialism and attempt to restrict my freedom or to make me inauthentic. T is merely the latest iteration of self-creation that becomes necessary in the wake of de-creation.
Recently, the LGBTQ+ movement has become too rigid and there is movement now to abandon terms such as lesbian, gay, and bisexual that no longer accounts for pansexuality and the fluidity of gender that is supposed to characterize the modern world.
The problem lies within the idea that all the parts of LGBTQ+ are ultimately defined by maintaining heterosexuality as the norm. True sexuality requires the abolition of all categories. (363)
Should we progress toward this goal, it would be like a glass of water without the glass or a bowl of spaghetti without the bowl. Containment and boundaries give usefulness and order and a measure against total insanity.
The insanity continues when the author examples a married lesbian couple where one transitions to male. The lesbian is at loss to know what she is now. Is she still a lesbian? Is she now part of the Transworld family of queers? Her resolution was to embrace a “queer” identity. She must now repudiate any connection between sex and gender and gender itself as a binary construct.
If gender is completely psychologized and severed from bio sex, then categories built on the old male-female binary cease to be relevant and attempts to maintain them only created problems of this kind described in her testimony. If gender is a construct, then so are all those categories based on it – heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. The world of psychological man is a world in which, to borrow Marx’s phrase, all that is solid in constantly in danger of melting into air – including ourselves. (365)
Nothing is presented in terms of fixed identities but rather of sexual orientation and gender identity.
The author addresses world organizations which have no legal grounds but trend opinion: Yogyakarta Principles, SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity), International Commission of Jurists and International Service for Human Rights. These organizations press for laws and are self-appointed experts.
They operate within parameters of the expressive individualism that characterizes our age in general and not simply the world of sexual minorities. Victimhood is the presenting cause; freedom, equality, and dignity are the moral presuppositions that carry with them imperatives for action. They isolate heterosexual to gender-based violence and gender inequality. They want policing of sexuality so that a world exists based on dignity of personal well-being and psychology as foundational to identity. Sexual orientation must be protected because it is a felt internal and individual experience of gender which may or may not be related to the birth sex. (369)
Principles from which they operate:
1. Sexual orientation is countless and is defined merely by desire. There are no limits set for what does and does not constitute acceptable sexual orientation. It could include anything – animals, dirt, children, the dead – you name it. This is not a good foundation to build a comprehensive sexual ethic, of course.
2. Gender is divided from sex – psychology trumps biology. If one’s deeply felt identity does not match their sex, then the body can be modified. The reality of the body is not as real as the convictions of the mind.
3. Gender is assigned at birth – it is not simply recognized. Recognition = mimesis, acknowledging the inherent authority of nature. A birth certificate that labels the sex is oppressive. Probably, the sex on the birth certificate should be left blank because gender identity and self-determinization are the basic aspects of dignity and freedom.
In fact, within the past few months, The American Medical Association (AMA) announced that the sex of an individual at birth should be removed as a legal designation on the public part of the birth certificates. (2021)
With this subjective fluidity and plastic nature, there is no way to even formulate and apply law to one’s self determined sexual identity.
Further in these Yogyakarta Principles, everyone has a “right” to a family, regardless of sexual orientation. Families can exist in any diverse form. It appears that to have a family gives a normalizing state of existence to non-heterosexual identities. This is a key means to being recognized by society. This “right” turns the family into a therapeutic massage for the abnormal existence of these bizarre sexual identities. The psychological well-being of the parents is above any broader social function of society or what marriage would fulfill. No nation can exist under these conditions.
Where these unions come together, they expect the state to ensure access to adoption and assisted procreation wherein nature has declared impossible, e.g., two females, two males, etc. Wherever technology can aid in this family construction, it shall.
There are no limits to the term or category “family”. Any social grouping of any lifeform can constitute a legitimate family.
The author begins to round out a conclusion to this chapter by reemphasizing the incoherence of the internal unity of LGBTQ+. There is no internal coherence in this alliance. Their only common ground are their ideological and political enemies. It is a political entity as well as anticultural and is defined negatively by its rejection, destruction, and erasure of past norms. It is a death work because it uses the idioms of past cultures based on sacred order (most obviously the language of marriage, love, and family) to undermine and destabilize those past orders by profaning their content and shattering their meaning. To separate gender from sex or to define marriage as a union between two or more people of the same sex is not to expand the traditional definitions of these things; it is to abolish them in their entirety.
The union of the L and G relativized feminism whereas “Gays” were just one more function of male-dominated culture. The bodily experience of being female was reduced to just a psychological experience of being female.
The addition of the T further denied any notion of innate, physical nature of the female. It denies the male-female binary and assertion of gender as a fluid concept detached from physiology. These concepts ran contrary to the L and G. The T enhanced the rejection of the significance of one’s body for one’s identity.
The traditional feminist, and Lesbian for that matter, still reject the ideology that one not born a female can become female. A surgically constructed woman does not possess the essence of femininity because men have not had to live in a female body with all the history that entails. It is history that is basic to female reality and history is based on female biology.
One might say that the T never had to be down with the oppression and struggle of true women…they just cherry picked what was the good stuff.
This is what one reaps when one embraces anti-history and anti-culture, and death works in order to gain the victimhood and marginalized social imaginary. Women lose their history that they so desperately fought to obtain, and the baby is tossed with the bath water.
To the “T”, history is repudiated and rejected, it is an intentional act against culture and the person. It is amnesia. In fact, to the T, “its” mother is their worst enemy – she assigned the sex of the child. Its gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother. Actually, this exorcism and erasure can be expanded to both parents. The parents play no role in the most fundamental level of the being of this T other than its mere existence. I might further add, beyond the author, that the T erases or exorcises its children should it want to build a family (or had children prior to the T-ransition). The child is metaphysically destroyed. The child doesn’t really have a mother or a father…or what was a father is now their mother – Jenner. Imagine the impact on the very nature of raising children. The child is in limbo as to its own sex/gender forced upon the child by the parent and is not sure from what it came – from a mother or a father – insanity. (375)
This whole alliance denies the existence of a natural authority and thereby arrogates to itself the right to create that reality. The T is the most radical form of this mentality: my identity is entirely my own creation – “I claim the right to choose my ultimate gender”. Every single chromosomal cell of one’s own body has no say in determining one’s identity – this is poiesis.
The T has progressed so far in society that any claim that feminists make against the T is dismissed as animus and not on any basis of argument. Any rational basis for debate is gone. Emotional preference rules. Feminists are bigots and guilty of hate speech against T people.
Even in all these contrary ideologies, the glue that holds them together is Victimhood and the goal to destabilize the heterosexual norms of Western society.
T is a symptom, not a cause. It is not the reason why gender categories are now so confused; it is rather a function of a world in which the collapse of metaphysics and of stable discourse had created such chaos that not even the most basic of binaries, that between male and female, can any longer lay claim to meaningful objective status. It is totally an expression of emotional preferences.
Finally, the author exposes the most significant social aspect of the T. The T provides the most potent reason for the dissolution of the traditional family. By the beginning of the 21st Century-
*The psychologizing of the self,
*The sexualizing of psychology, and
*The politicizing of sex
Had all played significant roles in the abolition of the pre-political. If sex is politics, and children are sexual, then children’s sexuality is political, too.
The T adds a dimension to that reality that goes far beyond that created by L, G and B. With the T, identity is almost entirely internalized, so that in theory a parent does not know whether a particular child is a son or a daughter. This is a huge responsibility placed on the child – only the child can decide what they are, not the father, not the mother, nor even your own body can give you any help here. It also places huge power in the hands of the government, of the medical profession, and of the various lobby groups to whose tune they tend to dance. The T is not just a personal matter for those involved; it is not an example of something that, as Thomas Jefferson said, “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”; it is also a political matter of far-reaching consequence for society in general. (378) (I my opinion, there is not a child on their own that will just wake up some morning and believe that they are transsexual. They will have been lured into thinking that by parents, media, or school. This just doesn’t happen.).
I would like to interject now some spiritual observations that may be an umbrella for all that the author is describing, particularly about Jenner and Herman. I have more available in another paper. Jenner and Herman claim some essence of purity and authenticity having found their true selves. Really, they have willfully fallen under the beguiling influence of the evil one and have become satan’s iconic spokesmen. They have dabbled in and consumed the lies that have been covertly pre-positioned for them from the figures that the author has been directing our attention throughout the course of his book.
The author has done an astounding job in tracing the handiwork of the evil one throughout the centuries. He has exposed and sewn together the thought processes that satan has used to bring the world to this brink of insanity. Yet, in the realm of spiritual warfare, the origins of all this sick thinking and desire for dignity and identity are not from a fountain of truth but rather the deception drawn from the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience (Eph 2.1-2).
The narratives that Jenner and Herman are touting, as are all of the LGBTQ+ alliance, are false narratives: “I was born this way”, “I knew I was born in the wrong body when I was two years old”, “I knew there was something wrong with me as far back as I can remember”, “I am a woman in a man’s body”, “I am a man in a woman’s body”, “I am resisting these cultural restrictions that society has placed upon me”, or in their logical sense, “When did you choose to be heterosexual?”, etc., etc.
What is really at hand with these declarative statements is a type of clef-note-apologetic dispensed from the hand of satan through the decrepit minds of depraved theorists to the lost, eager minds that reject universal absolute truth. There is a litany of mantras that work in most venues. Their sound bites and cliches are simply stock answers. We live in a soundbite world and a simple soundbite is usually all that is required for satisfaction.
It is a prescript directly from the library of the prince of the power of the air. It works well for people who need an excuse to imbibe in autonomy. It works well to the rest of Western Society looking for some reason to accept the forbidden, but it is from a worldly reservoir of fictitious clichés provided to an eager audience to accept and propagate homosexuality and immorality.
There is nothing new under the sun. It is simple rebellion against God.
A word for the Church: There are solid, iconic homosexual figures and institutions that contribute these bullet statements to entrap uncertain hearts that are fighting against prohibited attractions. At the same time, some Christian leaders are unwittingly doing the same thing by using “world-speak” and not providing greater daylight for those entrapped.
Christian leaders ought to stop borrowing from a corrupt data base of clichés and lending credibility to the categories that the world prescribes for identities. The church is unwittingly enabling homosexuals. Stop echoing the world and start proclaiming sound doctrinal, biblical universal absolute truth. The author in the last chapter addresses the church about their willing use of worldly categories.
Epilogue 4
Reflections on the Triumphs of the Revolution (379)
The author states that he could have looked at many other examples of modern society to make his points regarding outward expressions of inward thoughts, however crude, they are all a sign of authenticity:
Art, architecture, national identity, globalization, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Performance Arts, cultural elites, politicians.
But instead, for brevity, focused on the triumph of the erotic in art and pop culture, on the triumph of expressive individualism and related therapeutic concerns in law, ethics, and education, and on the triumph of transgenderism and the latest logical move in the politics of the sexual revolution. They represent the individualism, the psychologized view of reality, the therapeutic ideals, the cultural amnesia, and the pansexuality of our present age. These are closely intertwined, and each can be properly understood only when set in the larger context of which the others are significant parts.
All the examples the author has given cannot be understood without some knowledge of the wider impact of expressive individualism and therapeutic concerns on American society.
One must go back to the influence of men such as Rousseau and the Romantics, Marx, and Freud…as he did.
This present age of anti-culture is a repudiation of regulative practices that characterized Western society, particularly in the realm of sexual ethics. Behind this repudiation lies a deeper rejection, that of every sacred order on which they might be grounded, whether it be that provided by a formal religion, such as Christianity, or a commitment to some broader philosophical metaphysics, such as that found in Kant.
They repudiate any authority that might pose a challenge to the present – even the authority of physically determined sex in favor of the fluid concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity. From the Supreme Court to various philosophies, all have touched our lives. And transgenderism has gone even further from notions of privacy to the very language that ordinary people use in their day-to-day lives. The revolution of the self is now the revolution of us all. The modern social imaginary ensures that.
There is a long-term effect. No culture or society that has had to justify itself by itself has ever maintained itself for any length of time. Such always involves cultural entropy, a degermation of the culture, because of course, there really is nothing worth communicating from one generation to the next. This may also be referred to as “Cradle to Grave” living. Cultures that endure live “Cradle to Cradle”.
Concluding Chapter
Unscientific Prologue (383)
This final chapter and its first page revealed to me that I had been affected by this therapeutic culture without being aware.
He reminded the reader that his book was not a polemic (a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something)or a lament. He simply was tracing the origins of how this culture came to be over the past 2-300 years or so. He said that lamentation and polemic have their place: it is important to know that this world is not our home, that things are not as they should be, that we are strangers in a strange land, and that, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, “All life death does end.” It should be the Christian’s natural state to feel that the times are out of joint and that we do not truly belong here.
(This was me – I was guilty of this)
Yet lamentation can too often become just another form of worldliness, and polemic simply a means of making ourselves feel righteous. There is an odd masochistic pleasure to always decrying the times and the customs of the day, and in that sense, lamentation and polemic always run the risk of being less prophetic and more therapeutic in their motivation and their effect.
That previous paragraph grabbed me strongly. That has been me. He gave me a sobering wake up call. And now, I will adjust my heart and focus my “lamenting and polemic” in due season to its end with the haunt that I am not home and one day The Lord Jesus will Reign. All will be right.
The author has some closing reflections on the problems we face in the context in which we find ourselves.
The Secular Age
The LGBTQ+ issues are simply symptoms of a deeper revolution in what it means to be a self. It arises out of the sexual revolution – the sexual revolution arises out of the philosophical ideas back to Rousseau through the Romantics to Freud and then the New Left. LGBTQ+ is but one example of that revolution in selfhood – the most vocal of course. The problem is that we are ALL part of that revolution and there is no way to avoid it.
There was a time back in the 1500’s when belief in God was the cultural default position and being a member of the Catholic Church was the only option. Today we may choose to be Christians but not only that, what type of Christian we want to be: Presbyterian, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, etc. And within these subdivisions there are further sects – choices – Reformed, Arminian, charismatic… So, now when it comes to what we think of ourselves, we are expressive individualists now. There is no escape. It is the essence of the world in which we must live and of which we are a part.
So, when it comes to “us” denigrating the LGBTQ+, we have not noticed ourselves in the broader cultural context that we are as well trying to find our expressive individualism and choice of identity. It is ours, too.
Expressive individualism is not an unmitigated evil. Its emphasis places inherent dignity on the individual. And of course, the closer to Christian, honor-based societies, the more equally based is the individual. The problem with this expressive individualism is when it is detached from any sacred order. The West has become a “de-created” world exemplified by its sexual chaos. It rejected the divine image as the basis for its morality, and there was nothing left but a morass of competing tastes. This untethering of universal individual dignity from the divine threatens to push the West into a kind of totalitarian anarchy (oxymoron). The competing taste that wins is the one with the most might – usually the one that has the arm of the government. In our government, we pay to play and extort those who don’t.
Understanding the Anticulture
The triumph of expressivism and choice fell into the anticulture. It is a break with the past and is decisive. It cuts us off from any agreed-on transcendent metaphysical order by which our culture might justify itself. We are left in a free-floating present, isolated from any higher order or purpose. This is a place where life is lived only for the moment where the pleasures of the immediate moment are the only things that truly matter. One may only name from their imagination the whims of the heart. This is myopic living as opposed to “over the horizon living”.
This is the world of emotivism and deathworks. There is no commonly accepted foundation on which anyone may agree. No constructive conversation can take place. That is the key issue in American society now. The fact that everything is decided by the law courts and why the Supreme Court is so controlled is because no one can communicate from common ground anymore. The ballot box is having less and less legitimacy, given that winning at the ballot box might simply indicate to the losing side that the majority of the electorate are hate-filled bigots of the kind from which law courts are designed to protect people. Critical Theory is now the course of the day: there is a deeply therapeutic aspect to forms of politics that operate on a simplistic them-and-us binary and find easy targets to blame for the ills of this world, whether they be white heterosexual males out to oppress everyone else or LGBTQ+ radicals committed to overthrow civilization. (389)
When we operate by critical theory, each and every opponent is simply an irrational hatemonger, seeking to present as natural a position that is simply a personal preference.
The author says…even Christians can be complicit to critical theory. We have our binary categories, too. We adopt stances on matters such as race, sexuality and sometimes ignore historical analysis…but he gives little example.
The author continues to observe the church in light of current culture by noting that much of the debate about sexuality in Christian circles tends to operate on personal narratives isolated from any larger metaphysical or theological framework. These personal stories have a powerful emotional impact that can easily transform the chief end of human beings into the personal happiness that stands at the heart of the therapeutic culture. (What the author states is so clearly visible in the book I reviewed, Mere Sexuality by Todd Wilson. His book is a polemic for the existence and status of “gay Christians”).
Further elements of the current anticulture in the church is its routine use of sarcasm and cynicism, especially when debating other Christians. We have left the realm of private, face to face adjudication into the realm of public twitter and other secular platforms.
The megachurch phenomenon is another symptom of the anticulture church. Anticulture has penetrated the sanctuary and the sanctuary has departed historic Christianity. Further, the megachurch movement has adopted the aesthetics of the moment of the anticulture society. It is emerging and emergent. However, there is a strange anomaly in the megachurch motif, people can be completely anonymous – attending the assembly and never having to interact, yet craving recognition and community.
Understanding the Debate about LGBTQ+ Issues (390)
(From the wider social and political context)
1. These debates are not primarily about sexual behavior. It is much deeper than the sexual misuse of the body as per the biblical worldview. It connects to matters of IDENTITY. It is about who we think we are at the most basic level. The problem is that expressive individualism, manifested as sexual identity, is the way the world shapes us all.
2. The reality and power of this shaping should not be underestimated, and we need to understand ourselves as profoundly subject to it. Our social imaginaries as Christians are often too little different from that of the culture around us. We can slip into using categories that are actually misleading and that militate against clarity on key issues.
Societies have categories for thinking about people and identity and the real problem occurs when these are simply not adequate or appropriate. That is the question that the church must ask about the sexual identity. The church must ask, “Are the categories that society now prioritizes actually ones that are appropriate?” If the post-Freud taxonomy represented by the acronym LGBTQ+ rest on a basic category mistake (that sex is identity), should Christians not engage in a thoroughgoing critique of such and refuse to define those within their framework? All evidence to suggest that conceding the categories leads to unfortunate confusion. (391)
As mentioned above, I have seen this very concession in the book Mere Sexuality. The author perpetually uses labels and categories that the world uses to define the homosexual discussion in his book. This concession to wrong labels led him to wrong theology or vice versa. His address to the church was a soppy, emotive plea to Christians to accept whatever one labels themselves. He unwittingly accepted the “gay Christian” as his identity and offered no escape, nor was he able to render sound biblical doctrine to rescue the homosexual. How or Why would the author be able to or desire to “rescue the perishing” if he himself was undertow of worldly categories?
I hear church members, pastors and seminarians constantly use the labels and categories of the world in their broad road evangelism. In particular, a common term in Christian circles for individuals who are dwelling in the homosexual community is to refer to them as “Same Sex Attracted” (SSA) people. Christians even go so far as to state that SSA is not sinful as one does not act upon it. One can have SSA and not be in sin. This is what happens when we adopt categories outside of sound biblical doctrine. Rather, the term should be labeled as “Prohibited Attraction”. That term brings lucidity to everyone trying to define what is right and what is wrong. This is a good binary.
The author mentions a resource book published by Zondervan in 2019 that gives full legitimacy to the LGBTQ+ identity agenda. It is titled, Costly Obedience: What We Can Learn from the Celibate Gay Community.
He breaks down the word in the title to expose the real meaning behind them:
“COST” – Only in a world in which selves are typically recognized or validated by their “sexuality and their sexual fulfillment – in which these things define who people are at a deep level – can celibacy really be costly?”
“CELIBACY” - Further, only in a world in which sexual identities – and specifically nonheterosexual sexual identities – enjoy a particular cultural cachet will the celibacy of one particular group be designated as somehow especially hard or sacrificial. It will be if they are lost in their identity.
The thing is that traditional Christian morality has always called for celibacy for all who are not married and chastity for those who are.
It is no more costly or sacrificial for a single person not to have sex with someone than it is for a married person to be faithful or not to visit strip clubs and prostitutes – or, for that matter, for a person not to steal another’s property (even his neighbor’s wife) or to not slander someone’s good name.
But here we are, in a moral framework that has been shaped by the triumph of the erotic and the correlative overturning of traditional sexual mores.
To abstain from sex in today’s world is to sacrifice true selfhood as the world around understands it. It is to pay the price of not being able to be who one really is. And that is therefore COSTLY – but only from a perspective shaped by an uncritical and unreflective acceptance of the categories of sexualized identity stemming from Freud. (392)
One can see how the Christian can lose core biblical footing when not discerning false categories. The church has lost the lead and is in the caboose watching the train wreck ahead take place.
He reflected on Hegel again, that who we are is a dialogue between our self-consciousness and the world around us. The desire human beings have to belong, to be recognized, to be authentic is informed by the moral code of the society in which we live. External environment is critical, and the desires that this environment creates can be both novel and very real. The author gives the example of the iPhone. He noted the extreme frustration and deprivation that one may have waiting in line to have one or to lose connection or to lose or break the phone altogether. Society dictates what we must have. Just because Shakespeare didn’t have an iPhone to “belong” doesn’t make the desperation for an iPhone any less imaginary. It is symptomatic of the wider dilemma of identity. (Some would simply call this covetousness and idolatry and find relief in abiding in Christ and not in materialism).
When we apply the above longings to a sexual revolution, it should be clear that in the age in which we live, we are taught to be authentic in such a way that identity, recognition, and belonging are now deeply connected to the sexual desires we have and the manner in which we express them. It is not a surprise that the number of children and adolescents reporting gender dysphoria has grown rapidly in the last few years. (I must say that it would never cross the mind of a child that they were not born in the correct sexed body. This is the parent/s entrapment to be accepted in their community and the child is but a pawn at the hand of one desperate for authenticity in their circle. It is the death of the child in so many ways.)
The author believes the church ought to address the matters of the sexual revolution and expressive individualism in deep fashion.
Possible Futures
The author believes that this culture of expressive individualism is here to stay.
The factors of:
*Consumer-based economy,
*Internet porn,
*Promises of technology, and the
*Collapse of the authority of traditional institutions, most notably the church and above all, the FAMILY.
The return to a broad religious, or even a mere metaphysical, consensus is extremely unlikely, and we are more likely to continue to press our society in the basic direction (not foreseeing a catastrophic fall of the nation to another). It has been moving in this direction for several centuries.
The retention of sacred or metaphysical order is necessary for cultures to remain stable and coherent. We currently face an indefinite future of flux, instability, and incoherence. Predictions about possible futures are iffy, but the author offers FOUR areas that are possible:
1. Sexual Morality
During the sexual revolution and promiscuity, free sex as recreation, only needing consent, is in trouble.
a. The initial entrance of the sexual revolution favored men, not to the liking of feminists. The pill and abortion freed women from the consequences of promiscuity, but things were far more complicated. With the sexual revolution and promiscuity, rape increased. Sexual assault is still regarded as heinous. It is the violation of a person in the deepest way. Women became things.
b. The #MeToo tried to define consent when disparity of power existed between the parties. This highlighted that sex is more than recreation. The #MeToo displayed great ironies. The most vocal for the movement were Hollywood actresses who were the most promiscuous on the screen. Soap operas and movies that portray women hopping from one partner to another and then recovering from infidelity in a moment began to catch up to the reality in the movement. The movement tried to confine sexual activity to a moral context. Without personal virtue, heteronomous cultural dictates, or a divine framework, all they had was the virtue of “CONSENT”. Consent became the moral and legal principle. The problem with this as being the only ground, as the author mentioned earlier, it provides a pathway to pedophilia and incest. Bestiality may not be an open door yet, since it is difficult to ascertain consent from an animal.
There is little hope that the few problems reflected upon above and the many more not noted, will be resolved with a return and resolve to traditional moral codes.
When sex is identity, then sexual morality is a function of expressive individualism, not some greater theological or metaphysical reality.
2. Gay Marriage
Gay marriage as an institution is here to stay. Whether there is a collapse of a two-person marriage remains yet to be seen. There is nothing to stop such an eventuality. The basic redefinition of marriage took place with Ronald Reagan in 1970 when he signed the No-Fault Divorce into law.
The driving and churning of a culture of psychological man and expressive individualism places great emphasis on AESTHETICS in determining what is right and wrong.
This phenomenon is observed in the turn away from abortion. There is no radical, abstract, philosophical pro-abortion policies or arguments that have swayed people away from abortion; nor was it the pro-life reasoning that won the day. It was the sonogram. AESTHEITICS. When people could see a baby in the womb that looked like a small person, it pulled on the heart strings and elicited an intuitive emotional reaction. Note the “Heart-beat Bill” that passed in Texas.
AESTHETICS worked in favor of the Christian view on abortion, but it will not win with gay marriage. It has the opposite effect on society. Gay marriage has all the potent therapeutic rhetoric and images on its side. It is about love. It is about happiness. It is about allowing two people to commit to each other. It is about acceptance. It is about inclusivity. And to oppose it is to be against all those things.
Given the premises of expressive individualism, to be an opponent of gay marriage is to be more than just a sour-faced killjoy; it is to act of irrational bigotry akin to that which motivates racists. We go back to the Jeffersonian principle of toleration, that it “neither pics my pocket nor breaks my leg” and therefore I have no interest in opposing it, carries huge weight in a society that prizes individual freedom. It is the rhetoric and the aesthetic impact of the rhetoric that makes the argument a powerful one. They are not really presenting persuasive arguments, but pure emotivism.
Wait until the Jeffersonian Principle of Toleration reveals something far more hideous that has happened to families than just a picked pocket or a broken leg. One day the mother and the father will awaken to the very fact that their own child was sexually molested, raped or murdered by these poor gay victims of society. It has happened in large numbers, yet the media that holds the key to transparency and outrage will not sound the bell. Nearly as awful as the catastrophic tragedy of losing a child to homosexual desecration, would be the parent finding out that it was their adult child that committed the heinous act of criminal homosexual aggression against another innocent child. Further, there are the throngs of broken hearts of parents in the drought of hope and despair that have had their children won over to the abysmal life of homosexuality. Far too many parents who have not suffered the shame and horror of their children enslaved in homosexuality are those parents who become deceived into accepting that their child’s wellbeing and expressive self is better as a homosexual than embracing the heterosexual boundaries designed by their Creator.
It is the most elemental thought that every homosexual child was born of a parent. Can we not put two-and-two together to see that the God-fearing family unit is the greatest deterrent to any and all sexual deviance of their children?
Therefore, the family unit must be destroyed, if not destroyed, then defamed and defeated as the first-line defense against the world. Children at their earliest stage must be educated and coopted into this world of sexual insanity and identity.
3. Transgenderism
This is different from the gay marriage with basic philosophical differences from other groups. The LGBTQ+ alliance is inherently unstable. The unifying enemy is heteronormativity and once it is defeated the coalition is unlikely to exist. The shape that it will take in the alliance is unknown.
T is tearing feminism apart and there is an undercurrent to resist any long-term normalization of T. In fact, there is a strange alliance now budding between feminists and conservative Christians opposed to T rights legislation.
T also strikes at the matter of personal privacy. School, workplace, athletics, and public restroom policies will affect everyone, whereas the L and G do not. More acutely, the issue of parental rights relative to a child claiming to be transgender is likely to prove very serious bringing into focus the relative status of family and state. The physical body relative to individual identity is a highly contested political area – and highly subjective.
No one knows the long-term impact of hormone treatment and surgery for people to realize their identities. These medical adjustments to the body have already proved to be no cure for underlying problems. Many who have gone this route in search for identity wish they had not. As time progresses – 30-40 years – it is easy to imagine that these now adults were used as experimental subjects for their parents’ trendy gender ideology and subsequently had their minds, bodies, and lives traumatized by medical treatment, will sue their parents, the doctors, and the insurance companies who financed the whole mess. To some metaphorical effect, the parents physically and metaphysically murdered their children. It is possible that due to the huge cost of liability and destructive nature of the T, it will become a minority interest again.
4. Religious Freedom (399)
Superficially, the world may seem to be marked for religious freedom with all a world view of expressive individualism. Afterall, religious freedom is historically foundational to the American experience. However, Western thought is vastly anti-historical and anti-cultural. Religious freedom is under hostile pressure, and it no longer is seen as good in the broader social imaginary. We have seen where religious freedom meets the LGBTQ+ in the courts, public square, and corporations, woke capitalism, it loses. When it goes up against Obama Care, or cakes, flowers, and venues for gay weddings, it loses. Religious freedom and expressive individualism are increasing and antithetical to each other, it will lose.
Why?
1. General decline in religious commitment in the West. It is a striking feature in America. As Americans care less and less about their own religious commitments, they will care less and less about religious freedom in society as a whole. “So, what”. (400)
2. The state of morality has come to see sexual identity as the key to the expression of personal identity. Therefore, any religion that maintains a traditional view of sexual activity and refuses to recognize identities built on desires and activities that they regard as wrong is by definition engaged in oppressing those who claim such identities. As per the Supreme Court ruling US v. Windsor, traditionalists only maintain their beliefs about sex and sexual mores on the grounds of irrational bigotry. Religious people are either stupid or immoral or both. Religious freedom as a social good is implausible, distasteful, disturbing, and undesirable. Religious freedom is no longer part of the social imaginary of the founding fathers for social cohesion, but it is a lethal threat to cohesion.
The perception is that a weak and powerless minority is being mistreated by a larger, more powerful group. Since Christianity is overwhelming white, they have enjoyed huge cultural and political power and has been regarded as having misused that power…historical pointer – note the crusades, and current child abuse scandals (Catholic priests). The truthfulness of these points is irrelevant, these are the things that inform social imaginary.
The author believes that the prospects for religious freedom in the broadest terms of free exercise seem bleak. The question of what exactly freedom of religion means will be defined by what the nature and legitimacy of sexual identity is.
Apparently, as long as religious freedom does not oppress or obstruct one’s sexual identity and expressive self, then religion can remain free. This is a clash. It is a clash of traditional religion and modern sexual identities. It is a clash between the second-world culture and the anticulture of the third – completely opposed to one another at the very core level. There is no common ground, no compromise, no assimilation of one into the other. They operate on completely different premises with antithetical outcomes. One cannot imagine where both can be accommodated. Why can’t they come together? These are matters of basic identity, and therefore of what constitutes dignity and appropriate recognition, at stake is that it makes a negotiated settlement impossible. To allow religious conservatives to be religious conservatives is to deny that people are defined by their sexual orientation. It is to assert that religious conservatism is irrational bigotry and dangerous to the unity of the commonwealth. The right for the individual to exercise his religious beliefs outside the Sunday worship service can no longer be assumed. The possible future for religious freedom is one that looks far less robust than its past. Just look at Canada.
Whither The Church? (402)
Given the bleak analysis of the above assessment on religious freedom, what should the church do?
1. The church should reflect long and hard on its connection to AESTHETICS and her core beliefs and practices. It must avoid the absolutizing of aesthetics by an appropriate commitment to Christianity as first and foremost doctrinal.
The author mentioned the dependence we have placed on personal narratives. Personal testimonies have become the highest form of authority in an age of expressive individualism. It is more important than doctrinal alertness.
(Back to the mention of the book Mere Sexuality, the author plasters personal testimonies from various figures who present their personal stories of how they suffer oppression and loneliness as a celibate gay Christian throughout each chapter and even gives a chapter to be written by a “gay Christian”. The entirety of the author’s polemic for accepting gay Christians is built upon their victimhood).
This aesthetic concern reflects the perennial power of sympathy and empathy in shaping morality. Aesthetics is mischievous when detached from a broader frame of reference.
In the contemporary culture, images have primacy over ideas. Cinema, television, and the Internet creates morality and books are gone. The role of Aesthetic images is powerful.
Just to prove the author’s case is to observe the means of grace publicly exercised in the worship gathering of Christians. Done right and doctrinally, is the biblical display of “Aesthetics” in the communion and baptisms. This is the “acting out” of a purely doctrinal truth.
The church needs to respond to - no – the church needs to get ahead of – aesthetic based logic, but first she needs to be consciously aware of it. And that means she must stop doing it herself. The church has been indulging in it and giving it legitimacy. The debate on LGBTQ+ in the church must be based on moral principles, not on the attractiveness and the appeal of the narratives of the people involved. If sex-as-identity is itself a category mistake, then the narratives of suffering, exclusion, and refusals of recognition based on that category mistake are really of no significance in determining what the church’s position on homosexuality should be. That is not to say that pastoral strategies aimed at individuals should not be compassionate, but what is and is not compassionate must always rest on deeper, transcendent commitments. Christianity is dogmatic, doctrinal, and assertive. The biblical narrative rests on the being of God and His act of creation.
2. The church must be a community.
If Christianity is in the struggle for the nature of human selfhood, then we are the sum total of the network of relationships we have with others. We possess a common human nature, but that nature has expressed – and does express – itself differently in different eras and cultures.
These different eras and cultures make the message of Christianity highly improbable at the current time.
If the message of about self is that of expressive individualism or psychological man, and if that message is being preached from every commercial, every website, every newscast, podcast, and every billboard or advertisement to which people are exposed daily, the task of the church in cultivating a different understanding of the self is, humanly speaking, likely to provoke despair. The HOPE is this: the world in which we live is now witness to communities in flux. Many cities are anonymous places, and suburbs function as giant commuter motels. The loss of the commercial town center and the rise of internet have detached people from real communities. There is now the bizarre phrase “online communities” and “he pledged allegiance to ISIS online” makes sense because we know how the very idea of community has been evacuated of the notion of bodily proximity and presence.
There is reason to despair were it not for the point that human beings still need to belong, to be recognized, and to have community.
Perhaps, if there is anything that the church can learn from the LGBTQ+ community, for, whatever moral disapproval we must have toward it, it was – is – a real community where real people look after each other in terms of meeting very real needs. And communities shape consciousness. There is a reason why Paul comment in 1 Cor 15.33 that bad company corrupts morals. Our moral consciousness is very much shaped by our community. And for this reason, the church needs to be a strong community. And even though there is so much choice in church options, seemingly a form of consumer choice – orthopraxy, music, size, style, etc., etc. We may be stuck in this church type context and have no power to change the general context, but we cannot allow it to excuse us from behaving as a community. (405)
3. Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body.
Natural law:
Of course, natural law will not persuade the wider world to change its opinions about anything. But the issue is not primarily the outside world but the church herself.
She needs to be able to teach herself about moral principles. It is not likely that a single pastor will change the course of the Supreme Court ruling on abortion (though he should try), but he is very likely to be confronted by the congregants asking questions about matters from surrogacy to transgenderism. And he must have a firm grasp of the biblical position on natural law and the order of the created world. It will prove invaluable.
The body:
A recovery of a biblical understanding of the body is vital. And the church must maintain its commitment to biblical sexual morality, whatever the social cost might be. If true what Rieff says – “Sexual codes are definitive of cultures”, then an abandonment of Christian sexual morality by the church can be done only based on a rejection of the sacred framework of Christianity and at the cost of the loss of Christianity as a meaningful phenomenon.
4. Historical Precedent. (406)
Since the church is both rooted in historical events and transmitted through history, it must be acceptable for the church to state that they have a message and precedent in the age in which we live. If there is precedence, then it goes back to the second century, first.
In the second century, the church was a marginal sect within a dominant, pluralistic society. She was under suspicion not because her central dogmas were supernatural but rather because she appeared subversive in claiming Jesus as King and was viewed as immoral in her talk of eating and drinking flesh and blood and expressing incestuous-sounding love between brothers and sisters.
This is where we are today. A church that appears immoral in a pluralistic society has slowly adopted beliefs, particularly about sexuality and identity, that renders Christianity wicked and inimical (hostile) to the civic stability of society as now understood. The second-century world is, in a sense, our world, where Christianity is a choice – and a choice likely at some point to run afoul of the authorities.
It was the second-century world that laid the foundations for the following centuries, of course. And how was it done? By existing as a close-knit, doctrinally bounded community that required her members to act consistently with their faith and to be good citizens of the earthly city as far as good citizenship was compatible with faithfulness with Christ.
How do we do that today? The author believes that narratives he has set forth in his work might form a helpful beginning for church to begin living out that answer.
So, having read the book, I perceive that the quest for identity and well-being without any transcendent purpose is the concentric focus of Western Society, the place to start evangelical discipleship is to grasp a strong doctrinal position and biblical world view about the union that mankind can have in Christ which will be the salve that heals the identity crisis of an unredeemed world. We should start big – with a “Meta-narrative” – The Big Story. Reconciliation with God through Christ is the bond that man seeks to fill the void of lost identity.
Develop a Meta-narrative or Grand Story that is common universal absolute truth (The Big Story) that reconnects this Third World Culture – the poiesis society - to a transcendent purpose. Develop an account of history that has eternal significance.
Probably one of the better meta-narrative statements that is short, concise, and easy to memorize is a solid quote from the biblical scholar F. F. Bruce:
“… the Christian gospel . . . tells how for the world’s redemption God entered into history, the eternal came into time, the kingdom of heaven invaded the realm of earth, in the great events of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.”
This statement is a good starting point with an individual that has no connection with a purpose beyond themselves. We as Christians believe this grand story is derived from the Bible and is the record of the self-revelation of God to the world, we would expect there to be a plot and direction to the Grand Story. Christianity teaches that the self-revelation of God to the world reached a culmination in the Incarnation when the Word became flesh.
From that statement we can develop solid biblical answers to the questions that all people ask:
Who am I, where did I come from, where am I and where am I going? What is wrong and what is the solution? What is true and what is false? How should I conduct my life, or act? Does God exist and if so, what is my response to Him?
These are questions that Christians must be able to answer in brevity and later in detail.
In Brevity, know the meta-narrative as quoted from F.F. Bruce
.
In Detail be able to explain:
Redemption – why did/do we need redemption (Adam and Eve: The Fall)
History – when in history did this take place? How did redemption unfold over the centuries?
Crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the Christ – know the reason for these two events and what outcome these two great historical events brought to mankind and what it means to the individual. Know a few Bible verses to give foundation to your narrative.
The metanarrative of the Bible is an account about God. The Bible contains many accounts, all woven together by the one grand theme of God's self-revelation to the world.
This Story of God comes to us in the stories of a chosen people who experienced God. So, if someone were to ask you, "What is the Bible all about?" you could answer,
"The Bible is the account of God's self-revelation to the world through a chosen people, Israel, in the OT and through the Church in the NT."
This is a starting point – it’s time to get to work!
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