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This book is about how the following statement came to make sense to the hoi polloi
I am a woman trapped in a man's body
A revolution in the sense of "self" occurred starting in the Enlightenment, culminating in the sexual revolution. Charles Taylor identified a turning inward so as to find the source of morality and meaning that occurred in the transition. Before the turn, the purpose of life was largely social, after it became expressive individualism.
Basic Concepts:
Pivotal thinkers:
Purpose of the book is to help modern church understand its environment.
The self has become centered as never before on its sexual aspect.
"I think, therefore I am." has evolved into "I think I am a woman,
therefore I am a woman".
"social imaginary": Corresponds to a social theory, but not come to by
reason. "The water we swim in."
The promiscuous have always been present, but with the introduction of
effective technology to support them, they have become politically
assertive and more dominant in the culture.
Two different ways of seeing the world
The locus of control passes from the world to the individual, the shift largely due to changes in technology. "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" goes from being hopeless, to reasonbly fixable.
Philip Rieff's "The Triumph of the Theraputic (1966)" starts with Freud's theory the culture arises from sublimated lust, aka taboo. Traditional culture is formed by institutions that shape the individual. Ancient man was formed largely by his participation in politics. Medieval man by his participation in the religion of his day, e.g. Canterbury Tales. Economic man, whose value arose from making money followed, supplanted now by psychological man whose worth comes out of his pursuit of inward happiness. Economic man's job satisfaction stemmed primarily from being able to support his role as father whereas psychological man's satisfaction is more pegged to the psychic rewards of the job itself. Medieval man took his satisfaction from integration into his community, his priest served as his therapist whose aim was to teach him the rituals and roles of his integration. Starting with Rousseau the community came to be seen as a source of oppression rather than satisfaction. Later thinkers, Marx and Freud, considered society the major source of unhappiness and sought to revolutionize it, in particular with regard to sexual codes. All prior types had man fitting to his institutions. Psychological man ushered in an era in which the institutions were forced to fit their individual members. In former times, the telos of schools was to inform and educate its members. Now they are places for self actualization.
Decarte died in 1650, Rousseau in 1778. In a sense, Rousseau represents a culmination of Decarte's "I doubt, therefore I exist since doubt presupposes a doubter." basis for his philosophy.
Why is the new "expressive individualism" intolerant of Judeo-Christian sexual morality? Because sexual freedom is integral to political freedom. Faith based taboos inhibit the culture and must be erased. Manifesting outwardly my inward desire is the definition of expressing my authentic self which is now the summum bonum. Yet pedophilia is, for now, still forbidden. So, for now,
some identities are legitimate and their expression is a high good, and some are forbidden as evil.
Identity is a social phenomenon. Our relations with others defines us.
Rieff posits three bases of morality in culture
2nd world morality posits a fertilized human egg as a sacred life. 3rd world views it as up for grabs as the natural world is amoral. 3rd world sexual morality bases itself on happiness of the participant. Legitimacy becomes a calculation problem. 3rd world culture becomes rooted in psychological well being, i.e., therapeutics. A 2nd world Southern Baptist and a 3rd world secular humanist will have no common ground to reach an ethical consensus.
Alasdair MacIntyre identified a shift in ethical thinking in the West mirroring the move from a normative cultural tradition to an emotional based culture. After the shift, moral language came to be viewed as a vieled tool that in truth signifies nothing more that taste or preference. Even the Supreme Court came to the conclusion that the opposition to gay marraige by those with traditional marraige views was rooted in animus.
Truman redefines "3rd world" much as the woke redefine "racism" in such a way as to retain its negative connotations while standing immune from rebuke motivated by the intuition those connotations evoke. "Its not personal, its business." With that psychological slight of hand, his rebuke of the post moderns lands solidly. The 3rd world elite are hell bent on destroying the culture of the past, but have nothing, but nihilism to replace it with.
The turn of civilization at the Enlightenment was driven by a 3rd world approach. Appeal to God and the sacred was abandoned in favor of appeal to reason and the self. The Enlightenment thinkers weren't typically antagonistic to God, but rather left Him out of their reasoning altogether. Instead of a sacred order independent of self, the self became the source of value and in the transition the sacred was lost.
Decarte turned the attention inward. Rousseau and the romantics continued the turn in pursuit of self liberation. Marx described history as one long story of the evolution of oppression, not as a repository for wisdom.
Subversion of culture by art.
Obvious example: "Piss Christ"
Pervasive example: Pornography
In short, the major problem with pornography is not what many religious conservatives might understand it to be - its promotion of lust and its objectifying of the participants. It certainly does both of those things, but the problem is also much deeper: it repudiates any notion that sex has significnace beyond the act itself, and therefore it rejects any notion that it is emblematic of a sacred order.
Final example: Abortion
Abortion advocates view fetuses as having the same personhood status as excrament. Abortion "erases" the misbegotten history of sex between a man and a woman to make it as if it had never happened. Kind of an anti-christ version of baptism.
The modern conception of self can be traced back to Paul and his successor Augustine. They are among the earliest exponents of man's essence as primarily psychological. A good avatar for the phenomenon of modern psychological man is Jean-Jaques Rousseau. He is the intellectual precursor of the French Revolution and was one of Freud's heros. Rousseau's project in life was to reveal his authentic self, to be true to himself which he accomplished in his "Confessions". In that book he sets forth is response to Augustine's conception of man.
As an aside: I read a few pages of Rousseau's Confessions. They describe the author's sexual lusts in a pornographic fashion, by which I mean he presents himself as innocent in that he is just reporting his own states of mind in the presence of the various women in his early life. He invites the reader to read prurience between the lines that all on the surface can be interpreted as innocent. He presents his inner desires as by nature. By his account his corruption and degeneracy are the result of impinging societal pressures. For Augustine, the fall is due to his nature. For Rousseau the blame is outside of himself.
amour de soi-meme - self love, the good kind that actualized is the drive for self preservation and yields utopia
amour propre - love of honor in competition, generated by society rendering corruption
The romantic poets: encountering nature, the poet as Savior of man's soul.
I found this chapter tedious.
Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin as fountainheads for modern notions of self.
Nietzsche illuminates the implications of the Enlightenment's casting off of Christianity. His protagonist, the madman, prophesies the unmooring of morality as God is deconstructed out of our minds. All that is left is the struggle for power. With God gone, the madman points out we have only the self to base our morals on. Might truly does make right without God. Nietzsche discarded the idea there could be an absolute morality, desired to discover the hidden motivations behind any such claim. His enemy, Christiantiy, is motivated by the base vices of subservient people seeking to subvert their betters. He rejects it as disgusting. In its place he proposes a sophisticated version of "Be whoever you want to be, and do whatever works for you."
Marx posited human nature as a function of his economic environment. In his day laizez faire capitolism was shredding feudal patterns of human life and was promising to continue doing so. He was a hard material determinist who oddly theorized that the determinism had a telos.
Like Marx, Darwin theorized as a material determinist. Unlike him, he posited evolution as a process without a telos. Darwin's theory explained the varieties of life forms not as designed, but as produced by the play of impersonal forces on material bodies through time.
These three are not direct influencers of the wider population, but their philosophies have helped form the popular culture that is. The blitzkreig of music extolling maximum fornication aimed at youth for example. All three affirm the world has no intrinsic meaning. Meaning must be created by the self.