The Rise and Triumph Of The Modern Self by Carl Trueman 

The book is The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman. It was originally published in 2020 by Crossway books. I read it in January of 2023.  

The title comes from how Trueman lays out the history of why people are the way we are today, and why we psychologize everything.  

I read this book because Ben Shapiro and Douglas Wilson both said it was probably the most important book in the last ten years.  

Trueman gives an in-depth history of the psychology and philosophy of the self-centered mindset. He is steel-manning the woke leftist mindset.  

Trueman has done his homework. He’s done the required reading to understand where the woke mindset came from.  

A major source of conflict comes from the fact that many conservative people have done the reading and many wokesters haven’t. The woke person thinks they’re just promoting common sense compassionate ideologies like Black Lives Matter and “give to the poor.” But they haven’t done the reading on the history of what is actually lying underneath these tropes and slogans. Trueman could teach a class on the nefarious sources of wokism.  

The book is clear and accessible. Trueman is a good writer. It wasn’t hard to follow even though I have not read all the references.  

I’d recommend this book to every Christian who wants to understand the strange times we live in today.  

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Notable Quotables 

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. (p39) 

If the inner psychological life of the individual is sovereign, then identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination. (p50) 

Hegel is useful because he is the key philosopher who wrestled with the quintessential problem of identity in the modern era: how to connect the aspiration 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. (p59) 

the language of morality as now used is really nothing more than the language of personal preference based on nothing more rational or objective than sentiments or feelings. This is MacIntyre’s key observation: emotivism is a theory not of meaning but of use; it is about how we use moral concepts and moral language. (p85) 

Perhaps the quintessential deathwork of our time, and one that has really become far more widespread since Riff’s death in 2006, is pornography. (p98) 

the abortion debate is really about human identity, about who and what human beings are. (p101) 

for Rousseau, the social order is a source of falsehood or, to use the modern term, inauthenticity. Men and women are born good and corrupted by the society that surrounds them. As Charles Taylor expresses Rousseau’s thinking, “The original impulse of nature is right, but the effect of a depraved culture is that we lose contact with it.”” (p111) 

Shelley was politically radical until the day he died. Art for Shelley thus serves an overtly political cause; or, perhaps better, art for Shelley is a political cause precisely because it is that which makes people truly human. It allows them to see beyond the way the world around them is to the way that it really should be. It is future oriented. Poetry is the means to transform the individual member of the audience, and so it also brings about a new consciousness with clear political implications. Poetically radicalized sentiments drive radical politics. (p145) 

In killing God, you take on the responsibility the terrifying responsibility of being god yourself, of becoming the author of your own knowledge and your own ethics. You make yourself the creator of your world…To hope that, say, evolution will make us moral would be to assume a meaning and order to nature that can only really be justified on a prior metaphysical basis that itself transcends nature, or simply to declare by fiat and with no objective justification that certain things we like or of which we approve are intrinsically good.’ (p170) 

For Marx, the basic pattern of Hegelian dialectic is sound, but it is not ideas that drive the historical process; rather, it is material conditions and relations. Hegel must be turned on his head: it is not ideas and the self-consciousness that grasps them that shape the material conditions of the world but the material conditions that shape the ideas and the self-consciousness. (p178) 

By Marx’s account, the family and the church exist to cultivate, reinforce, and perpetuate bourgeois values…Darwin strips the world of intrinsic meaning through natural selection; Nietzsche, through his polemic against metaphysics; Marx, through his rejection of Hegel’s idealism in favor of a radical and consistent materialism. But the net result is the same: the world in itself has no meaning; (p191) 

so through the scientific idiom of psychoanalysis, an idiom that makes his theories, like those of Darwin, inherently plausible in a modern social imaginary in which science has intuitive authority. And the result is that, before Freud, sex was an activity, for procreation or for recreation; after Freud, sex is definitive of who we are, as individuals, as societies, and as a species. (p221) 

Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), connected the rise of the monogamous and the to changing economic conditions. The emergence of the family, he argued, created “the cellular form patriarchal family in microcosm of the civilized society, which anticipated larger conflicts that would develop in society at large. His focus, however, was on not the status of children so much as that of women: the family turned women into chattels, virtual pieces of property, and their emancipation would come about only when they were allowed to take their place as workers in the public means of production.” (p235) 

This connection between the family and political oppression is of lasting significance for left-wing politics: the dismantling and abolition of the nuclear family are essential if political liberation is to be achieved. (p235) 

Marxism’s notion of false consciousness is in essence a sophisticated rationale for justifying not simply a type of intellectual snobbery but also a form of gnostic knowledge, such that all and any criticism of Marcuse and company is merely sure evidence of the false consciousness of the critic. (p253) 

At the heart of de Beauvoir’s feminism-indeed, at the heart of any system that makes a hard distinction between biology and gender is a metaphysical (or, perhaps better, antimetaphysical) commitment to denying the authority of the physical body and its significance for personal identity. (p260) 

Where a sense of psychological well-being is the purpose of life, therapy supplants morality—or, perhaps better, therapy is morality—and anything that achieves that sense of well-being is good, as long as it meets the rather weak condition that it does not inhibit the happiness of others, or that of a greater number of others. (p360) 

Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognize as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not 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. (Germaine Greer. The Female Eunich) (p361) 

The church needs to respond to this aesthetic-based logic, but first of all she needs to be consciously aware of it. And that means that she herself must forgo indulging in, and thereby legitimating, the kind of aesthetic strategy of the wider culture. The debate on LGBTQ+ issues within the church must be decided on the basis of moral principles, not on the attractiveness and appeal of the narratives of the people involved. (p403)