Podcast #1,064: From Public Citizens to Therapeutic Selves — The Hidden History of Modern Identity

When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about “living your truth” and “being authentic.” These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean.

The concept of identity — how we understand ourselves — has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences.

Today on the show, Carl Trueman unpacks this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian, and the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers — Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre — who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discuss how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we’ve lost something essential in moving from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about living your truth and being authentic. These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean. The concept of identity, how we understand ourselves, has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community, has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences. Today in the show, Carl Trueman impacts this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian and the author of the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers, Charles Taylor, Philip Brief, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discussed how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we lost something essential and moved you from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at a aom.is/modernself. Alright, Carl Trueman, welcome to the show.

Carl Trueman: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on Brett.

Brett McKay: So you wrote a book called The Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self, and you explore how our concept of the self has changed in modernity and how that change has influenced everything from religious life to political life. And you look at three thinkers in particular who have grappled with this change. First one was Charles Taylor. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before with his book, A Secular Age, Philip Rieff, sociologist, we’ll discuss him. And then Alasdair MacIntyre, he’s popped up in our podcast a few times. And what I love about your book is I’ve read these three guys and I’ve always wondered like, why hasn’t anyone written a book where they’ve synthesized these three thinkers? ‘Cause they’re all hitting on the same idea, and they’re trying to figure out like, what does it mean to be a self in the 20th, 21st century? Why does being a person sometimes feel weird, confusing, weightless? And you do that in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. But before we get to these thinkers, we’ll start with basic definition. What do you mean when you talk about the self?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, good question. I think what I’m trying to get at there is, is how we imagine ourselves as sentient individual beings to be in the world in which we find ourselves. What is it that makes us us? So for example, if we would go back to the middle ages and we were to randomly pick on a peasant from my home village in Gloucestershire and say, who are you or what are you, you’re likely to get an answer to the effect of, well, I’m the son of so and so, or I’m the local blacksmith. I live in this particular village or my family are associated with this particular area. You’ll get a definition of yourself in terms of external and pretty unchanging fixed realities. The self today, when you ask somebody who they are today, you’re unlikely to get quite that sort of answer.

You’re probably going to get an answer that touches on things that relate to inner feelings. I’m a spiritual person, for example, or to go down the direction of sexual identity, which I deal with a bit in the book. You might get somebody saying, well, I’m a gay person, or something like that. And the shift there has been towards this inner space, we’re not so much marked. We don’t so much understand ourselves as the product, the givenness of our surroundings as we understand ourselves as a collection of feelings, desires, et cetera, et cetera. So when I use the term self, I’m really trying to get at how do we intuitively think about who we are and what we are relative to the world around us?

Brett McKay: And you talk about in the book Charles Taylor, he discusses that shift from the outer way of defining ourself to the inner, he calls it expressive individualism. Can you flesh that out a little bit more for us?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. The idea of expressive individualism is that what makes me really me will be the set of desires, feelings, et cetera I have inside. And this is where we get the introduction of an interesting term with which we’re all familiar, but which would’ve been meaningless back in the iddyl ages. What makes me authentic is my ability to express outwardly that which I feel I am inwardly. So expressive individualism is this idea that fundamentally I’m an individual. I define myself, I’m defined by my individual desires, passions, feelings. And I find my authenticity, my place in this world by being able to express those outwardly.

Brett McKay: Okay. And we’ll hopefully go back to this idea of authenticity ’cause yeah, it’s something I think we take for granted ’cause you hear it so much these days. But something you do in the book is you do a genealogical exploration of how do we get to this point of expressive individual and where we define ourselves by our inner feelings? And a lot of people might think, well, this is a 20th century, maybe late 19th century phenomenon, but you are, this goes back hundreds of years. I mean, you’d go into detail, but brief thumbnail sketch how do we go from a point where we define ourselves by who our parents are, where we live, maybe our profession, to whatever we feel inside of ourselves?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s difficult to answer in a sort of short way without indulging in a bit of simplification. But I would say on one level the last 400 or 500 years have witnessed, at least in the West, an increasing liquifaction of the world in which we live. What do I mean by that? We’re typically no longer bound to space in the way we once were. We travel a lot more. I live in the United States now. I was born in the United Kingdom. So our ability to define ourselves specifically relative to a particular place is no longer what it was. And that’s a sort of a symbol of the crumbling of these external authorities in general. The givenness of the world has become highly negotiable. The one side of the story is the old traditional markers of identity have become very volatile, very insubstantial.

On the other hand what moves in to replace them is a kind of move inward. You see this philosophically with somebody like Descartes. Descartes is wrestling with a difficult question in the 17th century when everything around seems to be changing, when everything is becoming fluid, what can I be certain of? Is there somewhere? Is there a an archimedean point where I can sort of place myself and stand and work out from that? Because that is the one place that is certain. And he finds the certainty, of course, in his own mind. I think therefore I am and Descartes is, I think, representative of a great shift that’s taking place in the 17th century where that inner space, the one constant we all feel in our lives these days is our self-consciousness. Our psychological lives seem to be the one thing that gives some sort of continuity to our lives, some sort of continuity to our existence. So it’s that crumbling of traditional external authorities combined with a reactive move inwards I think that really sets the stage for the extremes of expressive individualism that we see manifested in the world today.

Brett McKay: And part of that reaction or that turn inward you talk about in the book was Jean Jacques Rousseau in the development of Romanticism. For those who aren’t familiar with the idea of romanticism, what is that?

Carl Trueman: Romanticism is really an artistic cultural movement that flourishes in the late 18th and then on into the first half of the 19th century, associated with poets such as Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats, an artist such as JMW Turner, Casper David Friedrich, music, I think some of the later Beethoven has romantic touches to it, but Choppa would be a romantic composer. When you compare, say the music of a Choppa to the music of a Bark, you don’t have to know anything about music to know that something significant has gone on there. In Bark you have a lot of structure and order. If you move to, I know Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or to Chopin’s Nocturnes that music is not structured and ordered in quite the same way. It’s not chaos, but it’s really pulling on the heartstrings. It’s attempting to cultivate an emotional reaction in a way that Bark is not. And that’s reflective of romanticism as a term to cover a cultural artistic movement that is really wanting to explore, stimulate and shape those inner emotional feelings and responses.

Brett McKay: And then later on the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that continued this liquification of the self. And you go into detail about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to our changing ideas of the self. And I thought it was interesting ’cause I think a lot of times people in the modern world, they say things, they may say something about what it means to be a self. I’m gonna create, I’m the creator of myself. I’m the artist of my life. And I’m thinking, you don’t realize this, but like that’s Frederick Nietzsche. You don’t know it. So tell us about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to this inward turn of the self.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, Nietzsche is a remarkable 19th century philosopher. Has almost no influence in his own lifetime. I think there’s one lecture given on Nietzsche’s philosophy before he collapses in madness in 1889. Nietzsche is the man who caused the bluff on the enlightenment. If we would take Jean Jacques Rousseau as a typical philosopher, think about Rousseau is wanting to explore the inner space. And he wants to ground morality very much in sort of spontaneous sympathetic reactions. Rousseau essentially says, as soon as you’ve got laws, you know something’s gone wrong. If you see an injustice taking place, you should naturally respond to that injustice. There’s a human instinct for justice. Rousseau in other words, he’s rightly pointing to the role I think of feelings in ethical reasoning. If you see somebody being beaten up and you feel nothing emotional, you’re a psychopath.

We understand the need for feelings in our ethical decisions, but Rousseau grounds that really in an understanding of human beings as having a human nature. And what Nietzsche does in the 19th century is he effectively says to enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau and particularly to the thought of somebody like Immanuel Kant, he says, hang on a minute, you guys have marginalized or even dispatched God into the wilderness. So he doesn’t play any positive constructive role in your thinking, but you’ve smuggled something in that plays the role of God. You’ve got rid of God as the sort of the grounds of morality, but you’ve substituted him with human nature. You still think there’s such a thing as human nature. And human nature has an authoritative moral structure to which all human beings are answerable. In other words, to be a human being is to have a moral structure. And Nietzsche says, you can’t do that. If you’ve killed God, if you’ve got rid of God, if you’ve killed God, you’ve really got rid of human nature as well. And that morality has no objective reality. Morality is at best a con trick pulled by the weak to subvert the strength of the strong. And where the features in the sort of the psychological story is, Nietzsche is fascinated by how our psychological response to the world around us shapes our moral thinking. But he’s detaching that from any objective moral structure now.

Brett McKay: And this will have consequences later on. We’ll see that. And Alasdair MacIntyre, we’ll get to him, he grapples with the consequences of Nietzsche’s ideas ’cause they’re significant, even though we might not think about them. You mentioned authenticity in Charles Taylor’s thinking on that. By authenticity you meant that you had to live your life according to whatever you feel on the inside. And that’s kind of a sort of a given. That’s how you wanna live your life today. And if you don’t do that, then you have some sort of false consciousness. At what point does Taylor think authenticity became a moral ideal?

Carl Trueman: I think it’s really in the 18th and early 19th century, the romantics are really the ones who start to articulate this in a powerful way. William Wordsworth writes this poem, it’s not one of his greatest poems, this poem, the Idiot Boy, which is this, a poem about a child. We would say today a child with serious learning difficulties. And he gets heavily criticized for this. Why are you writing a poem that appears to be mocking a child with such difficulties? And he responds in a letter to one of his students and friends, he says, basically, I’m not mocking him. I’m using him as an example. We would now say I’m using the Idiot Boy as an example of somebody with no filters. And what you have when you go to somebody like that, so we would say no filters, an inability to pick up on social cues, et cetera.

What you’ve got there is human nature in a more pristine state. It’s not being corrupted by the conventions of society. With the idiot boy what you see is what you get. And Wordsworth would say, and that takes you to the core of what it means to be a human being that binds us all together. Urbanized society has trained us to behave in different ways. It’s alienated us from that universal humanity. And so with somebody like Wordsworth, that’s where you get the emerging notion of authenticity. This idea that if we can get back beyond social conventions to those untamed, untrammeled truly human feelings inside and live according to them, then that’s what it means to be truly human or that’s what it means to be an authentic human.

Brett McKay: And they believe that if you did that, everything would just be honky dory.

Carl Trueman: That’s the idea. The romantic idea is a sort of a return to a rural idyll, if you like, where you don’t have the kind of petty rivalries, ambitions, nastiness, anonymity that is associated with the city. I grew up in a village, I can guarantee you that the rural Italy is not as idyllic as the Romantics thought it was.

Brett McKay: And Nietzsche called them on their blood and was like, yeah, you think that’s what it’s gonna happen. But actually probably not what’s gonna happen if everyone’s living by their inner desires.

Carl Trueman: Nietzsche has a much darker view of what it means to be human in many ways. The romantics have a very naive view. We could somewhat simplify, we could say, for somebody like Rousseau, bottom line is it’s society that corrupts us. With Nietzsche you know you’ve got the idea that actually what makes us great of the dark and violent desires that we have. Nietzsche is a sort of philosophical precursor of Freud in a lot of ways.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I think what we can talk about here, what we have here is what Charles Taylor sets up for us, is that there’s this shift from a sense of self that is ordered by the outside, by the external, where you live, who your parents are, the church, monarchy, as we progressed through the enlightenment and things like technology allowed you to travel. You’re no longer tied to the family farm. Monarchies started going away. We had revolutions and political life. The church started losing authority on people. You have this shift towards figuring out who you are by your inner feelings and your emotions. And the romantics kind of provided some fodder for that. And then you had philosophers like Nietzsche just adding fuel to the fire. So there’s an inward turn. Another thinker that you talk about that helps us understand this inward turn in our sense of self is a sociologist named Philip Rieff. And he wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. This was written back in the 1960s. And in this book, Rieff lays out sort of a thumbnail sketch of the history of humanity and their conception of the self. And he says there’s four ages. What are those four ages of the self?

Carl Trueman: Well, Societies are sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of four models. Now, it’s say in advance, I think the models are somewhat simplistic in that no age exclusively embodies one of these models. But in any given age I think one of the models is dominant. The first type of man that he thinks of is what he calls political man. And this is where human beings found their fulfillment in their activities, their participation in the public square. So the great example of this might be fourth century BC Athens where being involved in the assembly, that was the apex of what it meant to be a human being, to be informed about public affairs, to go to the assembly, to cast your vote, to make your speech, that kind of thing, the polis, it’s the polis in participating in the polis that makes you truly human. It’s the idea that…

Brett McKay: I was gonna say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in public life, you’re an idiot. Like you’re a private person, you’re looked down upon, you weren’t even a person basically.

Carl Trueman: No, no. I mean, the Greek, when Aristotle talks about political, man is a political animal. He’s meaning man is a man of the polis. He’s a man of public life. And as you rightly point out the opposite of politicos is idioticos, the private man. So that’s the first arrangement. And Rieff sees over time that being supplanted by what he calls religious man. And religious man is, that’s an age where human beings find their fulfillment by being involved in public religious rituals. We might think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a great example of the kind of literature that a society where religious man was the ideal. That’s kind of literally, which would be produced in that sort of culture. Where you have the shtick in Canterbury Tales is you have this rag bagg bunch of pilgrims from all levels of society united in going on this pilgrimage to Canterbury to pay homage to at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Today, we might think, if you may have Muslim friends, and they go on the Hoge to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, the idea is that their fulfillment is found in going on this pilgrimage, public pilgrimage to a religious or holy shrine.

So religious man is the age where public religious rituals are really the apex of what it means to be human. This is replaced for Rieff what he calls economic man. An economic man is the man who finds his meaning, the purpose of life in his participation in the economic activity of society. So, Charles Dickens’s books are full of economic man. He’s writing about industrial revolution, England. So you have figures like Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Grad Grind. These are figures who find their fulfillment being involved in economic activities in society. And Rieff sees all three of these as having something in common.

They may sound very different, but what they have in common is this, it is the role of society in shaping you to be a political, religious or economic man to direct you outwards. So education is about forming you in order to fulfill your political, your religious, or your economic role. Rieff sees the present age, and he’s writing in 1966. This is nearly 60 years ago. It’s one of those books, triumphal Therapeutic, which is more true today than it was when he wrote it. He says that what we have at the end of this is what he call psychological man. And Psychological man is the man whose sense of self, whose sense of fulfillment is entirely wrapped up with kind of psychological feeling of happiness. Is he happy and content with life? And psychological man represents a break with the first three.

And the break is this, that in the first three, the individual was to be directed outwards to fit into society. The therapy, if you like, of education was helping you, forming you to be a member of society. And a psychological manner reverse takes place. Now it becomes increasingly society’s role to accommodate itself to your feelings and to your happiness. So one could draw a contrast in forms of learning. I went to a very traditional boys school in England. Team sports was central to the curriculum. Why? Because education for me as a grammar school boy was about having my individuality crushed and being made into part of the team. That’s not child-centered learning that sort of dominates the airwaves today where the idea is to allow the individual child to flourish. So psychological man, it’s a very, very different culture to the first three.

Brett McKay: And it seems like it’s similar to Taylor’s idea of expressive individualism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s Taylor’s expressive individualism writ large for the whole of society. The romantics are writing, composing, painting away in the late 18th, early 19th century. It takes time for that vision of what it means to be human to permeate the whole of society and indeed to begin to transform the institutions of society.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for you word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And something Rieff talks about, one of the defining characteristics of psychological man is that they have an analytical attitude. What does he mean by the analytical attitude?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a lit has with a lot of things in Rieff, it’s a bit opaque.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He’s a hard read. He’s a very hard read.

Carl Trueman: And I think actually that’s part of the game. He’s trying to disorient the reader sometimes. But I’ll give you his definition and then I’ll try to sort of unpack it a bit. The definition that he gives in Triumph Of The Therapeutic is the analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertaining tentative opinions about the inner dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law insofar as it originates outside the individual in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse. Now, he’s talking there about Freud, and I think what he’s trying to get at is this, that for Freud society makes demands upon us. And it does that, it curbs our inner desires in order to allow us to live together. To put it in its most crude terms for Freud, males want to rape and pillage.

Our sexual desires are very, very powerful. We are savages, but we can’t live together if we’re savages. So there’s a trade off between the desire of the individual and the needs of society for perpetuating society. That creates though, those restrictions that society places upon us create all kinds of dysfunctions and malfunctions. We are never happy. We struggle because we’re not allowed to be who we really are because we need to be civilized. And I think what Rieff is getting at with the analytic attitude is the analytic attitude is really that study, that reflection upon that learning about the inner desires that allows us then to sort of negotiate between those desires and the demands of society. It’s not that we can ever come to a fully adequate compromise between the two, a peace treaty between the two, but the goal of therapy, for example, is to allow you to understand why you feel the way you do, why you struggle the way you do, to come to terms with the way you are. Key, I think to the analytic attitude is there is no objective moral order there, there is no divinely sanctioned moral order.

There are really just social conventions. They have a pragmatic usefulness, but they’re ultimately, you’re not grounded in anything beyond themselves. So the real thing you’re wrestling with are your inner desires. Those are the things you’ve gotta analyze in order to try to engage in in the kind of therapy that Freud is proposing.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s the big idea from Freud. Like Freud was trying to figure out, he’s there at the late 19th century, early 20th century. This is after Nietzsche, you had Darwin’s theory of evolution. So basically yeah, Freud was like, yeah, God’s dead. There’s no objective moral order, so what do we do? And his conclusion was, well, the best we can do is just you lay on a couch and you talk to a shrink to sort out your inner emotions. That’s about as good as you can do.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s a sort of, it’s a therapy, to use Rieff’s term. It’s therapy. It’s helping you to come to terms with reality and learning where the limits are and learning where you can perhaps break those limits at points. So yeah, it’s a negotiating strategy.

Brett McKay: And one thing too, Rieff talks about, even though Freud’s ideas have been discredited in the 20th and 21st century, like we’re still living under Freud’s shadow. We all are psychological men. I mean, I’m sure all of us have picked up a book on cognitive behavioral therapy or how to manage my anger. And it’s never like, well, don’t be angry because God said not to be angry. It’s like, well, if I wanna have a good flourishing life, I need to just get a hold of my anger. And so, yeah, Rieff says what ends up happening is what the analytical attitude can do is we end up instrumentalizing things that were once ideals like love, faith, hope, courage, et cetera.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. I mean, it’s very much the case. I think there’s a sense in which a traditional religious man was born to be saved. Therapeutic man, psychological man is born to be soothed, if you like. And when you think of love, classical understandings of love, love has profound sacrificial connotations to it. To love somebody is not to engage in a relationship with them that just makes me feel good. To love somebody traditionally will involve at times a deep sacrifice of the self. As a pastor at times I’ve married numerous young couples, and I always make the point in the wedding homily that it’s easy to love your wife on the wedding day. She’s beautiful, the sexual desire is bubbling away, you love each other’s company, you’re embarking on this lifelong adventure together.

But what about when one of you has dementia and the other one is getting nothing from that person, but is having to help them even with their most basic bodily needs? And I raised the question, where is love most dramatically demonstrated? Is it on the wedding day or is it when one of the partners can no longer provide happiness for the other, can no longer be an instrument? And I think that gets to the notion of the instrumentalizing of love and think about our divorce laws now. No-fault divorce has a very instrumentalized view of love and loved ones in it. Hey, if my wife is no longer meeting my needs to feel happy, well, the contract no longer applies. I can just dissolve the contract and take my love to another. So, yeah. But you see that, the therapeutic ideal of love transforms the notion of love. And I would say a very impoverishing way.

Brett McKay: So again, Philip reached describing inner turn towards defining ourself. It’s all about just what makes me happy, what soothes me. And I think what I love about the book, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, and I encourage people to read it, even though it is opaque hard to get through, it really does capture, it helps you understand like this rise of wellness culture in the West of everyone that’s worried about their mental health, even if they don’t have like a severe mental illness. But like, everyone’s just concerned about, okay, my anxiety, or I’m feeling nervous, or I don’t have full-blown depression but I’m feeling kind of sad. What can I do to not do that? Like Philip Rieff describes, well, here’s why you have that idea.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. Because I would say anxiety, not feeling happy all the time, these are not unnatural things. We can’t be happy all the time. There is a level of discomfort that comes with life when you are engaged in relationship with other people. To have children is to make yourself vulnerable to distress, frustration at times. It is part of the human condition that we experience frustration, depression, et cetera, et cetera. These are not necessarily the signs of neuroses or illnesses or abnormality. They’re part of being a human being, rubbing shoulders into connecting with other human beings.

Brett McKay: One argument that Rieff makes in the triumphant therapeutic is that the psychological man has taken over Western society so much, or western culture, that you even see the therapeutic ideal in things you think it wouldn’t be aligned with like religious life. Did you see that when you were a pastor? Did you see the therapeutic or the psychological man creep into religious life?

Carl Trueman: Well, certainly. I mean, in most extreme form, when you think about, who is the most successful pastor in the United States? It’s Joel Osteen down in Houston. I think he has 80,000 in his congregation. Think of the books that Joel Osteen writes, Your Best Life Now, every day of Friday, it’s always confused me that one ’cause I tend to think Saturday’s the best day of the week. But every day of Friday. You think about, why is he the most successful pastor? Because he uses the Christian religious idiom precisely to soothe the therapeutic needs of society but even in more Orthodox Christian circles. Think about how a lot of people choose their church. If you’re Catholic listeners, it doesn’t apply to them. But if you’re a Protestant, a lot of people choose their church on the basis of, does the music make me feel good? Does the pastor sermon scratch where I feel I’m itching? Think of how people think about worship. Is worship as it traditionally was a matter of, sort of liturgical forms that form you by sort of squeezing you into their mold or is it a way of expressing yourself before the Lord? So there are all kinds of ways in which that reverse in the culture that the rise of the therapeutic represents have grabbed hold of tradition, even traditional religious ideas and institutions and flipped them, turned them 180 degrees.

Brett McKay: What are your thoughts Re? Is there a place for the therapeutic and religious life, or are you kinda like, ah, just get it all out of there?

Carl Trueman: Oh, absolutely. I think one can be very cynical about expressive individualism, but one of the things that, I didn’t do this in the book. I didn’t have space, but I wouldn’t wanna say there are certain things that the psychological turn has made us more aware of and has made us more sensitive to. Having said, feeling miserable in life is not necessarily an illness. Sometimes it can be. I think we are more aware now of mental illness than we were before. We are more aware of the importance of that inner life. It’s not the psychological struggles aren’t important. They are. And I think, look back to my education that I mentioned. I’m not sure that having my individuality crushed to be part of the team. It was necessarily the best model of education. It’s very different one to the one that applies today. And I would say there are dimensions of child-centered learning, for example, that are an improvement on the model that I experienced. So yeah, the rise of the therapeutic, it’s not an entirely bad thing. I think it has brought to light and has shone a light upon certain things that have improved, for example, the healthcare that we can get.

Brett McKay: You didn’t talk about this guy in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but I’d love to get your thoughts on him, Jung. ‘Cause Rieff talks about Jung a lot in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic. And I’d love to get your thoughts on this because you see him more and more in the popular discourse, I think, thanks to Jordan Peterson who’s talking about archetypes all the time. And you even see religious leaders talking about Jung and archetypes. One thing that Rieff argues is that Yung tried to take the analytical attitude of Freud where all you do is you just try to figure out what’s going on yourself. And he turned it into almost like a quasi-religious therapy. What’s your take on Yung?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it seems to me that in some ways he’s a kind of psychoanalytical Rousseau or romantic. I don’t want to make a naive historical connection there, but it seems to me from what I’ve read of Jung, that he’s wanting to harp back to some sort of transcendent universal human nature, some sort of structure that binds us all together. I think Rieff in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic, he refers to Jung as having a sort of a weak God. And there’s that sort of return to something, some level of objectivity that allows you a sort of a framework for understanding these inner desires. And bringing up Jordan Peterson in that context, it resonates with that it seems to me, because Peterson, on the one hand seems to want to ground human nature in something. He wants to be able to talk in universal terms about what is good for human beings.

But I’ve never heard him make that final leap to full-blown theistic commitment. So he has interesting things to say about the Bible, but he always seems to be somewhat equivocal to me on whether the Bible is actually true in the way that Orthodox Christianity would consider it to be true. So from what I know about Jung, and I’ve not read very much of him, it seems that Jung represents a return to wanting to have his cake and eat it. And I think Rieff makes some comment somewhere that it’s almost preferable to have Freud’s non-existent, but powerful God than to have Jung’s existent but very weak God. And there’s a sense in which I would look at somebody like Jordan Peterson and say, I’d almost rather be dealing with Nietzsche than somebody who wants to have his cake and eat it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So I’ve read a lot of Jung, and we’ve had guests on the podcast who are big in the Jung and talk about archetypes. And I’ve read all the, especially since I’m in like in the manosphere, there’s a lot of mytho poletic stuff where people go to Jung and talk about the king archetype and the warrior. And I read these books and like I always think they’re interesting, but it’s like, what much to do with this? ‘Cause they tell you like, well, you need to harness the king architect. I’m like, what does that mean? And they tell you just, well, you gotta think about Pharaohs and you’ll somehow become, like you’ll harness it. I’m like, I don’t know. And to me it just makes more sense. Okay. I’d rather just like, okay, what’s the specific deity that I need to organize my life around instead of this sort of this vague, weird general archetype?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And I think that sort of thinking is very vulnerable to the sort of critical theoretical question which Nietzsche would raise as well, of, are you not simply trying to grant your own personal preferences a sort of transcendent authority here, your own version of masculinity or whatever it is, you’re sort of trying to find some way of claiming that it has a transcendent truth beyond that which is typically justifiable. It’s interesting you raise it in the manosphere that, it’s fascinating to me that this is the manosphere, because it’s precisely in the manosphere that I think we are seeing people trying to baptize with transcendent objectivity some things that are really socially constructed.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I think Jung is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s actually useful in organizing your life just based on my experience. We talked about Taylor, we talked about Rieff, they’ve all described this inward turn, we shape our sense of self by what’s inside of ourself. And it’s no longer external things that it’s helping us define ourself. And this brings us to Alasdair MacIntyre. What does Alasdair MacIntyre say are the consequences of this inward turn to defining ourself?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, for McIntyre in his book After Virtues where he sort of lays this out, the results are really pretty bleak at a social level in that when you enter this realm of we might say radical subjectivity, you end up losing he would say the great narratives or the great stories that bind cultures together. And so you end up really unable to engage in significant moral discussion or ethical discussion about things. One could take an example, when you lose a common understanding of what it means to be a human being, it becomes impossible to discuss and adjudicate debates about abortion, for example. Is the baby in the womb a baby in the womb, or just part of the woman’s body? Behind your convictions on those things like two entirely incommensurable stories about what it means to be a human being. And it’s virtually impossible to get the proponents of each view to sit down and come to any kind of common understanding relative to the other group. So for McIntyre, society’s ability to have important discussions starts to break down. And that has all kinds of political and social consequences.

Brett McKay: He says that since there’s no longer a common moral language, common objective, moral background, where we’re having these debates, what we had to resort to, he calls emotivism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. And essentially that is that, your moral views are basically expressions of your own emotional preferences dressed up in the language of moral objectivity. So, debates become, you think you’re talking about principles, but you’re actually talking about one emotional preference versus another.

Brett McKay: And I think what McIntyre’s idea of emotivism can help explain is why political debates, particularly today, just feel shrill and they’d never go anywhere. ‘Cause we’re just yelling past each other, basically.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And it also explains why so many of the important questions in our culture now get to go by default to the courts, because in the courts you can have a straightforward legal fight. You don’t have to persuade the populist to vote for you in some way. And so a lot of attention in the last few decades, particularly in the United States, has been focused on Supreme Court decisions. The big questions about what it means to be a human being are being decided judicially rather than on the debating floor of the Senate.

Brett McKay: What did MacIntyre think was the solution to this? Did he think there was a solution?

Carl Trueman: Building strong communities, it really points, I think, in a local direction. And in a sense, Rod Dreher as Benedicts option, I think he published the book within 2015, 2016. Rieff’s on McIntyre to a certain extent that ultimately to have a coherent narrative, you’re gonna have to return to a kind of local level.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think at the end of the book, McIntyre says it’s Nietzsche or Aristotle. That’s her choice.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Philosophically. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I would say, Nietzsche or Orthodox Christianity. But yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So it’s hard. And going back to local, that’s gonna be hard. And I think even McIntyre says he’s not very optimistic about reviving maybe local communities, because I think he argued that people today they’ve forgotten like even how to do that. And so it’s gonna be hard, maybe even impossible.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that was 45 years ago before a lot of our interaction became technologically mediated in the way it is today. I mean, you and I, we’re not sitting in the same room. I’m not even seeing your face. We’re just talking through a computer. So much of our social life now is detached from any kind of notion of real physical, geographical place where you could actually build a local community.

Brett McKay: And I think the conversation so far, what we’ve hopefully painted for our audience is that okay, reason why things can feel confusing, why you just feel weightless or just discombobulated is your sense of self it’s, we no longer have that external order to base our lives around. So we’re all kind of winging it in a way. And that’s why you have existential crises ’cause you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. And then, because we’re deciding how we look at our life, or what a good life looks like based on our own inner life, well, that causes all this debate that’s intractable and goes nowhere because we all have different subjective ideas of what is the good life.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, very much so. And I think we should not discount the importance of the loss of bodily presence in this. I mean, when you think about rising levels of anxiety among young people, I think some of that’s connected to the disembodied nature of social media. When I was growing up I had a group of friends, they were real presences in my life. Falling out was costly. I never reduced them merely to the beliefs or viewpoints they happened to express. There was real rich, strong interaction because we were actually real presences in each other’s lives. Social media insults are cheap, falling out is cheap. The tendency to reduce the people with whom we’re engaging simply to the views they express is very strong. And I think that makes us all feel less secure about who we are than would’ve been the case 30, 40 years ago. So there’s a strong, it’s not just philosophical stuff that’s going on there’s also technological stuff that is reinforcing and exacerbating this modern sense of the self.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you’re online, you’re a psychological man.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Yeah. You are disembodied.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As I was reading your section about Taylor Rieff and McIntyre, I couldn’t help but think about CS Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. What insights do you think Lewis can add to the frameworks we’ve been discussing today?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, I think in some ways Lewis could be seen, he sort of anticipates the emotivism idea in some ways in The Abolition of Man. I also think that he puts his finger, there are a number of thinkers in the 1940s who do this, Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet is doing a similar thing at the same time as Lewis, putting his finger on the fact that it is anthropology, what it means to be human that is becoming the big question of the age. And I think that remains the same today. I think The Abolition of Man, a bit like the Triumph of The Therapeutic is one of those books that the author could not have known how truly he was putting his finger on things at the time as he actually was.

It’s more true today in some ways than other times. So I think first of all, Lewis is useful because yep, anthropology is the problem. Secondly, I think he offers a note of hope because his notion of the Tao, this idea that there is some sort of moral structure to the universe and I would talk about natural law, for example. I think that’s something worth exploring. I think we’re at a point where we’re beginning to see that yes, we could try to make human beings limitless through the technology we have, but in doing so, we’re actually destroying and not enhancing or improving our humanity because there is some natural moral structure to what it means to be a human being. So I think on that point too, Lewis, he’s not offering all the answers, but he’s certainly pointing us in the direction of the right questions.

Brett McKay: And I think another thing that Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, is he helps you figure out what to do with your feelings or sentiments. Because we’ve been talking about the romantics, and with the romantics, it was just important to feel, and whatever you felt, that was considered good. But Lewis, he believed in an objective moral order and that some things should make you feel certain feelings. He thought feelings were important, but you had to train your emotions so that you felt the right emotions for the right things at the right time, for the right reasons.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that’s where I think returning to reading somebody like Aquinas on virtue. The old idea of virtues is important here, that yes, we have feelings, but we need to have those feelings shaped by our rational side, by our reason, by our knowledge.

Brett McKay: I think yeah. Role not only for Aquinas, but the great books like reading that can go a long way to training your emotions, training your feelings, training the sentiments, looking at good art. The religious life can play a role in that, helping you order your desires.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, I mean, this is the Enlightenment thinker, Friedrich Schiller has this idea that human beings, we have two drives. You have the rational drive, and we have the Sensuous Drive. And those two, if you allow the one to run amuck, it’s a disaster. If it’s the rational drive, you end up with a French revolution. If it’s a sensuous drive, you end up with a sort of moral chaos going the other way. You need to have each informing the other. And for Shiller art was the answer, as you just said, contemplating great art. That’s what brought the two together. And that’s, I think, not a bad way of thinking about things. It does matter what you read. It does matter what music you listen to. It does matter what art you contemplate.

Brett McKay: Well, Carl, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation.

Carl Trueman: That was fun. Time seems to have flown by for me.

Brett McKay: It did. Well, Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Carl Trueman: I write a, I would say a fortnightly, but for American listeners that’s every two weeks, column at firstthings.com. It actually has a print version, but it’s also an online magazine dealing with religion and public life and culture. And I write a couple of columns a month for World Magazine online as well, which is, that’s a more distinctively protestant thing. Other than that, I’ve done a lot of podcasts. I pop up all over the place, I guess, but firstthings.com Would be the primary place to go and read me.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Carl Trueman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Carl Trueman: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks For having me on.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Carl Trueman. He’s the author of the book, the Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/modernself where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and sign up for a new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind time listening when podcast would put what you’ve heard into action.