The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self Quotes

“Every age has had its darkness and its dangers. The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.”
― Carl R Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“While earlier generations might have seen damage to body or property as the most serious categories of crime, a highly psychologized era will accord increasing importance to words as means of oppression. And this represents a serious challenge to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: freedom of speech. Once harm and oppression are regarded as being primarily psychological categories, freedom of speech then becomes part of the problem, not the solution, because words become potential weapons.”
― Carl R Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“A second useful element in Taylor’s work that connects to the social imaginary and to which we will have recourse is the relationship between mimesis and poiesis. Put simply, these terms refer to two different ways of thinking about the world. A 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, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.”
― Carl R Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence. All these things play into legitimizing and strengthening those groups that can define themselves in such terms. They capture, one might say, the spirit of the age.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“[I]n the work of the New Left one finds philosophical justification for what are now intuitive commonplaces of our culture: to be free is to be sexually liberated; to be happy is to be affirmed in that liberation.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“The expressive individual is now the sexually expressive individual. And education and socialization are to be marked not by the cultivation of traditional sexual interdicts and taboos but rather by the abolition of such and the enabling of pansexual expression even among children. One might regard this change as obnoxious, but it reflects the logic of expressive individualism in the sexualized world that is the progeny of the consummation of the Marx-Freud nuptials. . . .

At the same time, the psychologizing of oppression by the New Left massively expanded the potential number of victims. One did not need to be in a concentration camp or a gulag or to be subject to segregation or even to have experience of serious poverty to claim such status. Now one could point to other forms of nonrecognition as constituting victimization - not having one's sexual preferences positively affirmed by wider society, for example, or not being allowed to marry a same-sex partner. And merely tolerating certain sexual proclivities and activities would not be enough, for tolerance is not the same as recognition. Indeed, it actually implies a degree of disapproval, or nonrecognition by society. Only full equality before the law and in the culture at large can provide that. When the political struggle became a psychological struggle, it also became a therapeutic struggle.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“In his 1983 Templeton Prize address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered this summary explanation for why all the horrors of Soviet communism came to pass: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”1”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“Philip Rieff. Indeed, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is an indispensable guide to how and why men have forgotten God.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“In sum, the social imaginary 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.3 It is the totality of the way we look at our world, to make sense of it and to make sense of our behavior within it.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“The truth is, we now live in a world in which everything is politicized,”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“provide no stable framework for ethics. Contraception minimizes the risk of unwanted pregnancy, thus facilitating sex as recreation without the need for the context of a long-term stable relationship. Condoms curtail the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and therefore enable “safe sex” in the gay community. Mutual consent moves to the center of discussions about what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior. And this, in its turn, places huge pressure on even the most deeply rooted of sexual taboos. Why should incest be prohibited if it is between consenting adults and there is no risk of conception?”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“It is also important to note that Freud’s emphasis on sexual fulfillment as the essence of human happiness also leads to a reconfiguration of human destiny. The end of human life is no longer something set in the future; rather, it is enclosed within the present. To be satisfied is to be sexually fulfilled here and now. The happiest person is the sempiternal orgiast, the one who is constantly indulging his or her sexual desires.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“the world is to be divided up between those who have power and those who do not; the dominant Western narrative of truth is really an ideological construct designed to preserve the power structure of the status quo; and the goal of critical theory is therefore to destabilize this power structure by destabilizing the dominant narratives that are used to justify—to “naturalize”—it.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution