From Public Citizens to Therapeutic Selves — The Hidden History of Modern Identity
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That's shopify.com slash manliness to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash manliness. Under Biden, Americans' cost of living skyrocketed. Food, housing, auto insurance. Lawsuit abuse is a big reason everything's more expensive today. Frivolous lawsuits cost working Americans over $4,000 a year in hidden taxes.

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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 Truman 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 Reif, and Alistair 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 and moving from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash modern self. All right, Carl Truman, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on, Brett. 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 is Charles Taylor. We've talked about him on the podcast before with his book, A Secular Age. Philip Reif, sociologist, we'll discuss him.

And then Alistair McIntyre, 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...

I've always wondered, why hasn't anyone written a book where they've synthesized these three thinkers? Because they're all hitting on the same idea and they're trying to figure out 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, let's start with basic definition. What do you mean when you talk about the self?

Yeah, good question. I think what I'm trying to get at there 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 go back to the Middle Ages and we were to randomly pick on a peasant from my home village in Gloucestershire and say, you know,

know, 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 anymore.

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, what we are relative to the world around us? 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?

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 what makes me, you know, and this is where we get the introduction of an interesting term with which we're all familiar, but which would have been meaningless back in the Middle 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. Okay. And we'll hopefully go back to this idea of authenticity because, yeah, it's something I think we take for granted because 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 individualism where we define ourselves by our inner feelings and

And a lot of people might think, well, this is a 20th century, maybe late 19th century phenomenon. But you are, you know, this goes back hundreds of years. So, I mean, you 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? Yeah.

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 four or five hundred years have witnessed, at least in the West...

an increasing liquefaction 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. So that's 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. You have Descartes 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 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, you know, 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 that

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. And part of that reaction or that turn inward you talk about in the book was Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the development of romanticism. For those who aren't familiar with the idea of romanticism, what is that? Romanticism is really an artistic cultural movement that flourishes in the late 1800s

18th and then on into the first half of the 19th century, associated with poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich. Music, I think some of the later Beethoven has romantic touches to it, but Chopin would be a romantic composer. When you compare, say, the music of a Chopin to the music of a Bach,

You don't have to know anything about music to know that something significant has gone on there. In Bach, you have a lot of structure and order. If you move to 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 Bach 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.

And then later on the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that continue this liquefaction of the self. And you go into detail about Friedrich Nietzsche and his contribution to our

are changing ideas of the self. And I thought it was interesting because 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 going to create, I'm the creator of myself. I'm the, I'm the artist of my life. And I'm thinking, you don't realize this, but like that's Friedrich Nietzsche. You don't know it. So tell us about Friedrich Nietzsche and his contribution to this inward turn of the self.

Well, Nietzsche's 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's the man who caused the bluff on the Enlightenment. If we would take Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a typical philosopher, think about Nietzsche.

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, 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

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 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 know, 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 contract pulled by the weak to subvert the strength of the strong. And where that features in the sort of the psychological story is, you know, Nietzsche is fascinated by how our psychological response to the world around us shapes our moral thinking. A

But he's detaching that from any objective moral structure now.

And this will have consequences later on. We'll see that in Alistair McIntyre. We'll get to him. He grapples with the consequences of Nietzsche's ideas because they're significant, even though we might not think about them. You mentioned authenticity and Charles Taylor's thinking on that. By authenticity, he meant that you had to live your life according to whatever you feel on the inside. And that's kind of a given. That's how you want to 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? It's really in the 18th and early 19th century. You know, 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 poem about a child, we would say today, a child with serious learning difficulties.

And he gets heavily criticized for this. You know, 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, you know, 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, we would say no filters, an inability to pick up on social cues, etc.,

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, you know, 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, you know, 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. And they believe that if you did that, everything would just be honky-dory. That's the idea. The romantic ideal 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. And Nietzsche called them on their blood. He's like, yeah, you think that's what's going to happen, but actually probably not what's going to happen if everyone's living by their inner desires. Yeah.

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 are the dark and violent desires that we have. Nietzsche is a sort of philosophical precursor of Freud in a lot of ways.

Okay, so I think what we can talk about here, what we have here, 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 progress 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 in 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 Reif. And he wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. This was written back in the 1960s. And in this book, Reif 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?

Well, he sees what societies are sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of four models. Now, I would 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 you know 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

It's the polis in participating in the polis that makes you truly human. I was going to say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in public life, you're an idiot. You're a private person. You're looked down upon. You weren't even a person, basically. No, no. I mean, the Greek, when Aristotle talks about political, you know,

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 politikos is idiotikos, the private man. So that's the first arrangement. And Reif 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 literature which would be produced in that sort of culture where you have, you know, the shtick in Canterbury Tales is you have this ragbag 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 Beckett.

it. Today, we might think, you know, if you may have Muslim friends and they go on the Hajj 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 Reif by 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, you know, Charles Dickens' books are full of economic man. He's writing about Industrial Revolution England. So you have figures like Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Gradgrind. These are figures who find their fulfillment being involved in economic activities in society.

Reith 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.

Reeves sees the present age, and he's writing in 1966. This is nearly 60 years ago. It's one of those books, Triumph of the 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 calls 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 were 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.

And it seems like it's similar to Taylor's idea of expressive individualism. Yeah, it's Taylor's expressive individualism writ large for the whole of society. You know, 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.

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And something Reef 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? Yeah, it has with a lot of things in Reef. It's a bit opaque. Yeah, he's a hard read. He's a very hard read.

And I think actually that's part of the game. He's trying to disorient the reader sometimes. 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're 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 Reef 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 the

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 not grounded in anything beyond themselves.

So the real thing you're wrestling with are your inner desires. Those are the things you've got to analyze in order to try to engage in the kind of therapy that Freud is proposing.

Yeah, that's the big idea from Freud. 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. Yeah. Yeah. It's a sort of, it's a therapy, you know, to use Reef'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, right?

So yeah, it's a negotiating strategy. And one thing too, Reef 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 want to have a good flourishing life, I need to just get a hold of my anger. And so Reef 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, etc.,

Yeah, and it's very much the case. I mean, I think there's a sense in which, you know, a traditional religious man was born to be saved. A therapeutic man, psychological man is born to be soothed, if you like. And when you think of love, you know, classical understandings of love, love is...

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.

You know, 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 raise 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 anymore?

And I think that gets to the notion of the instrumentalizing of love. And think about our divorce laws now, no-fault divorce now.

has a very instrumentalized view of love and loved ones in it. You know, 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, you see that, you know, the therapeutic ideal of love transforms the notion of love in, I would say, a very impoverishing way.

So again, Philip Reese describing an 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 and hard to get through, it really does capture and helps you understand 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 Reif describes, well, here's why you have that idea. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, I would say anxiety, not feeling happy all the time. These are not understated.

unnatural things. You know, we can't be happy all the time. There is a level of discomfort that comes with life when you're 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.

One argument that Reif makes in the Triumph of the 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? Well,

Well, certainly. I mean, in most extreme form, when you think about, you know, who is the most successful pastor in the United States? It's Joel Osteen, you know, down in Houston. I think he's 80,000 in his congregation or something. Think of the books that Joel Osteen writes, you know, Your Best Life Now, Every Day of Friday. It's always confused me, that one, because I tend to think Saturday's the best day of the week, but, you know, Every Day of Friday. You

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, you know,

Does the music make me feel good? Does the pastor's sermon scratch where I feel I'm itching? Think of how people think about worship. Is worship, as it traditionally was, a matter of liturgical forms that form you by 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 is

have grabbed hold of even traditional religious ideas and institutions and flipped them, turned them 180 degrees. What are your thoughts, Ray? Is there a place for the therapeutic and religious life? Or are you kind of like, ah, just get it all out of there? Oh, absolutely. I think one can be very cynical about expressive individualism. But one of the things that, you know, I didn't do this in the book, I didn't have space, but I want to say there are certain things that the psychological turn has made us more aware of and has made us more sensitive to.

you know, having said, you know, feeling miserable in life is not necessarily an illness.

Sometimes it can be. I think we're more aware now of mental illness than we were before. We're more aware of the importance of that in our life. It's not that psychological struggles aren't important, they are. And I think, you know, look back to my education that I mentioned. I'm not sure that having my individuality crushed to be part of the team was necessarily the best model of education.

It's a 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 model

it's not an entirely bad thing. I think it has brought to light and shone a light upon certain things that have improved, for example, the healthcare that we can get. 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, because Reef talks about Jung.

a lot in the Triumph of the Therapeutic. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this because Jung has, 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 Reif argues is that Jung 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 approach

What's your take on Jung?

that binds us all together. I think Reif 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

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 equivalent 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's

Jung represents a return to wanting to have his cake and eat it. And I think Reif 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, you know, 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.

Yeah. So I've read a lot of Jung and we've had guests on the podcast who are big into 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 mythopoetic stuff where people, you know, go to Jung and talk about the king archetype and the warrior.

And, you know, I read these books and like, I always think they're, they're interesting, but it's like, what am I supposed to do with this? Cause they tell you like, well, you need to harness the King architect. Well, what does that mean? Yeah. And they tell you just, well, you just got to think about Pharaohs and you'll somehow become like, you'll harness it. And 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 vague, weird, general thing.

archetype. 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 to

beyond that which is typically justifiable. It's interesting you raise it in the manner, it's fascinating me that this is in the manosphere, because it's precisely in the manosphere that I think we're seeing people trying to baptize with transcendent objectivity some things that are really socially constructed.

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 Reef. 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 are helping us define ourself. And this brings us to Alistair McIntyre. What does Alistair McIntyre say are the consequences of this inward turn

to defining herself. 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 the great, 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 work

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 lie two entirely incommensurable stories about what it means to be a human being. And it's virtually impossible to...

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. He says that since there's no longer a common moral language, common objective moral background where we're having these debates, what we have to resort to he calls emotivism. 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 know, you think you're talking about principles, but you're actually talking about one emotional preference versus another.

And I think what McIntyre's idea of emotivism can help explain is why political debates, particularly today, just feel shrill and they never go anywhere. Because we're just yelling past each other, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And it also explains why so many of the important questions in our culture now go by default to the courts. Yeah.

Because in the courts, you can have a straightforward legal fight. You don't have to persuade the populace 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. You know, the big questions about what it means to be a human being are being decided judicially rather than on the floor of the, you know, the debating floor of the Senate. What did McIntyre think was the solution to this? Did he think there was a solution? Yeah.

Building strong communities, it really points, I think, in a local direction. And in a sense, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, I think he published the book with it in 2015, 2016, riffs on McIntyre to a certain extent that ultimately to have a coherent narrative, you're going to have to return to a kind of local level.

Yeah, I think at the end of the book, McIntyre says it's Nietzsche or Aristotle. That's her choice. Yeah, philosophically. And I think there's a lot to be said for that. I would say Nietzsche or Orthodox Christianity, but yeah. Yeah, so it's hard. And going back to local, that's going to 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 Christianity.

Like even how to do that. And so it's, it's going to be hard, maybe even impossible. 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. You know, so much of our social life now is detached from any kind of notion of, of real physical geographical place where you could actually build a local community. Yeah.

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. 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 can feel...

you know, have existential crises. You don't really know what to do, 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.

Yeah, very much so. And I think we should not discount the importance of the loss of bodily presence in this. And 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. You know, 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

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 have been the case 30, 40 years ago. So there's a strong, you know, 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.

Yeah, when you're online, you're a psychological man. Yeah, yeah, you're disembodied. Yeah. As I was reading your section about Taylor, Reef, and McIntyre, I couldn't help but think about C.S. Lewis's book, The Abolition of Man. What insights do you think Lewis can add to the frameworks we've been discussing today?

Yeah, well, I think in some ways, Lewis could be seen, you know, he sort of anticipates the emotivism idea in some ways, in the abolition of man. I also think that he's, you know, he puts his finger, there are a number of thinkers in the 1940s who do this. Czeslaw Milosz, 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

you know 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 than other times so i think first of all lewis is useful because yep anthropology is 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. I would talk about natural law, for example. I think that's something worth exploring. I think we...

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. And I think another thing that Lewis does in The Abolition Man is he helps you figure out what to do with your feelings or sentiments. Yeah. 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 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. Yeah. And that's where I think, you know, returning to reading somebody like Aquinas on virtue, you know, 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.

And 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. 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 amok, it's a disaster. If it's the rational drive, you end up with the French Revolution. If it's 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 Schiller, art was the answer. You know, 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.

Well, Carl, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation. That was fun. Time seems to have flown by for me. It did. Well, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? I write, I would say, a fortnightly, but for American listeners, that's every two weeks, a 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. Fantastic. Well, Carl Truman, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

My guest today is Carl Truman. 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 slash modern self. You can find links to resources where you can 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 can 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, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

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