Why Identity-Politics Pushers Are Winning the Culture Wars
There is a question that bothers many political conservatives today. It bothers us so much that the progressives and reactionaries take great delight in making us wince by asking it again and again, in their gloating and glowering essays. I can attest that they send it to us in emails and direct messages and even texts, too: “Why have you failed?” Or, “Why do conservatives fail to conserve?”
What is the point of you? is less a question than an accusation or a verdict.
But it’s just as poignant to ask the question the other way around: Why have reactionaries failed? Reactionaries have been blaming conservatives for two centuries, usually for standing in the way, like a donkey clogging up the road. But shouldn’t their politics take account of this and figure out how to whip that donkey into running, or at least push him off the road? Or perhaps, more to the point, why are progressives winning? Many of the answers are pure mythologizing about the “arc of history.” That’s not a reason, it’s just self-flattery gussied up as metaphysics.
Carl Trueman’s recent book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is an attempt to help us understand why and how historical novelties such as same-sex marriage and transgenderism went from being curiosities to widely accepted and — for most of our peers — intuitive features of society, with imagined origins in our very human nature. Or, more acutely, why have questions of “identity” moved into the forefront of politics? Instead of imagining that these are simply discrete failures of courage among conservatives, or triumphs of liberal imagination, Trueman tries to trace how our culture war is informed by a centuries-long transformation in the notion of what a human being is, and what a good life is. He writes:
There is a tendency among social conservatives to blame expressive individualism for the problems that they regard as currently putting strain on the liberal Western order, particularly as it manifests itself in the chaos of identity politics. The difficulty with this claim is that expressive individualism is something that affects us all. It is the very essence of the culture of which we are all a part. To put it bluntly: we are all expressive individuals now. Just as some choose to identify themselves by their sexual orientation, so the religious person chooses to be a Christian or a Muslim. And this raises the question of why society finds some choices to be legitimate and others to be irrelevant or even unacceptable.
And so Trueman begins his presentation of this thesis modestly, exploring why is it that many of our grandfathers, if they took pleasure from work, found it mostly in the fact that it provided for their families, served a purpose for others, or demonstrated good craftsmanship. Why is it that so many of us want work that provides inner satisfaction, where the indifference of others is a trifle compared with an abounding sense of our own authenticity? Or, why do so many of us wish to express our good and unique taste through our labors? Why is it that the idea of demonstrating the soundness of our craft can seem dull or uninspiring to so many?
Building off the work of Phillip Rieff and Charles Taylor, Trueman explores the making of modern “self,” and he’s particularly interested in how we came to view our inner being as a bundle of psychological expressions and needs.
Like many ambitious conservative books, it is a genealogy of how we got here. We run through the Enlightenment from Rousseau to David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. In the wrong hands, this kind of genealogy turns into a simple catalog of errors, where an errant snowball of an idea — say the nominalist heresy — rolls downhill through history, collecting yet more errors until the resulting avalanche crushes us. It might go like this: The denial of true metaphysical universals in the late Middle Ages led to a denial of a given human nature, which led to a romantic movement that unbridles passions from reason — and a few centuries later we’re sitting in the nuked ruins of Nagasaki because nobody believes in anything!
But Trueman’s are steady hands. He also has a more supple sense of how a transformation in a civilization’s thinking is accomplished, and the answer isn’t just through graduate seminars. Nor are the errors of an age confined merely to one set of villains:
The triumph of the therapeutic that psychological man represents depends for much of its success on its cultivation and dissemination through art, whether the elite products of the surrealists or the mass-produced demotic offerings of pop culture. Most people have not read Freud, but many find appealing the message preached in myriad movies and soap operas that life is about finding individual sexual satisfaction and that one’s sexual appetites lie at the very center of who one actually is.
And so even many who would resist the implications of this transformation are often swept up in the riptide of it. Suddenly it becomes clear that from Hume we inherit a suspicion of all demanding truth claims, and from Nietzsche we inherit a disgust and contempt for religion in particular. And Trueman’s work, as he himself acknowledges, could apply to many subjects other than the hot-button ones.
If some progressive ideas seem to triumph immediately, it is because they are built to swim in the riptide of the age, with all its prejudices and predispositions. But the extremely quick success of some of these fashionable ideas is also a testament to the weakening of the society in which they reign.
The modern psychological self acts in the world as a kind of solvent, dissolving all the bonds of unchosen obligation that in fact constitute a working civilization. The strangely sovereign, strangely captive “self” demands a form of justification for society that society cannot provide on terms that such an individual accepts.
The long-term implications of this revolution are significant, for 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 degeneration of the culture, because, of course, there really is nothing worth communicating from one generation to the next. And with serious challenges to the idea that Western society is the intended goal of history — from Russia, from China, from Islam, and from the myriad political ideologies that have taken root on the internet — the anticultural nature of the contemporary West looks unstable and unconvincing.
If this is what “winning” looks like for progressives, it is a vindication of the critique conservatives have offered them from the beginning, that they have treated their civilization too lightly.
If I had a note to add to Trueman’s work, it would be that it naturally cries out for an understanding of what remains of our culture, and what good can be done in it. Nietzsche predicted that, like Buddha, the Christian God, after being slain by the Enlightenment, might hang on for centuries as a shadow.
But our ability to recognize the riptide culture in which we live suggests that there is some stabilizing force or some action resisting the view that we are all self-created. I would add that the culture of the “psychological self” produces not just an unstable society, but a kind of unstable individual who is always directed back into a “selfhood” that is fundamentally an unknowable abyss. The only thing he can know is himself, but even that disclosure turns out to be empty, a subject understood only subjectively.
An antidote to this condition would need to be “objective” and “other.” That is, an antidote might be something like the traditional understanding of Christian liturgy, in which an other — God — is the primary actor, and his objective action is one of self-disclosure to his subject creatures. This action gives to them precisely the dignity they are seeking in the psychological self, it allows them to be known and recognized. But it improves on this desire, because this action of liturgy is not just to recognize the elect, but to love them.
