Trueman's Pensées

Notes about how history and technology made us into disconnected, sovereign individuals

Yesterday, Mike Solana tweeted the following.

It occurred to me that something Left and Right might, to a significant degree, share in the US now is the sense that you don’t really owe your fellow citizens anything (and, correspondingly, your nation doesn’t owe you anything either). We’re all just individuals living in nearby geography. Their problem is their problem.

On very much a related note…

Carl Trueman spoke at our church last weekend

Below, notes from our daughter yesterday (notice the top right!).

So yes, last weekend Carl Trueman gave a series of lectures at our church. He will be most known to you perhaps for his books The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, or Strange New World, and indeed his lectures were centered on those topics. He is also a host on the Mortification of Spin podcast, to which I sometimes listen.

There are many things I appreciate about Trueman. I think we’ve sort of wandered the same mental path in understanding these issues (though he is a better writer and thinker than me, to be sure!) And to say something strange but complimentary to those of you in other Christian traditions perhaps, I think we have both benefited quite a bit from discussions with serious Roman Catholics and others. We are also willing to say some things those good Roman Catholics are not, like “you know, Roman Catholicism has also been improved by its interaction with Protestantism” (congregational singing and an attention to personal reading of scripture being two big examples of that).

But, I read a lot of Roman Catholic writing still, and I appreciate it for its philosophical seriousness. Something Trueman himself brought up, actually, was that Protestants need to get better at ethical reasoning, perhaps natural law reasoning. He teaches at a Protestant college, maybe some student comes up to him, “I don’t like the school’s teaching on sexuality, why do we believe that?” And maybe Trueman could show him a couple of scripture passages and, because they’re all good evangelicals or whatever, they will accept that… but they might not find that satisfying. They don’t just want to know what the Bible says, they also want to know why what the Bible says makes sense. We’re good at the first part and that’s great, we shouldn’t give that up, but we need to get better at the second part.

So below, with just a little bit of commentary from me, are my notes from the lectures, as I think some of you might find them helpful. Scroll down and find a heading that interests you if you’d like! They are from quickly written notes so, per usual, blame any errors on me, not him.

Many Short Notes and Reflections

Historical changes and the loss of external authorities

How (Trueman asked) is it that the sentence 'I'm a man trapped in a woman's body' came to make sense to so many ordinary people so quickly? Or even if it doesn't make sense, they have no idea how to push back against it? Well, it didn't happen overnight.

The real problem is not the LGBT movement. The real problem the way we are taught to think about what it means to be a human person. And that is rooted in transformations that have taken place over the last 500 years.

Imagine growing up in England in AD 1200. If I'd asked you, 'who are you?', your answer would have been simple. 'I'm the son or daughter of X. X is the blacksmith. I live in that house over there. And I married this girl, I met her when I was four years old.' Etc.

If I asked this person about his career plan, he would be confused. "Well my dad was a peasant farmer, and his father, and his father. So I'm going to be a peasant farmer." In the 12th century, pretty much everything about you that makes you significant is stuff about which you have no control.

It's easy in a fixed world to believe in external authorities, and easy to know who you are.

Trueman talked about how college students get frustrated when he pretends he's going to take their cell phone away from them for six months. Many needs you have, and anxieties you feel, are specifically related to the cultural circumstances in which you live. For example, if you didn't have the possibility or concept of going to college, you wouldn’t not feel frustrated by the fact that you cannot get there.

The 12th century was limited, but solid and secure. You personally might not count for much, but that's OK because you're part of a community.

Today, kids have none of those anchors. Many of his (Christian) students came from solid homes, so they have that anchor. But other than that, they live in a world of choice and change.

When everything around you is constantly dissolving it is much harder to know who you are.

Decayed anchors of identity

Three of the big solid authoritative anchors of identity have been thrown into chaos.

1. The family. Never has there been a time in Western history when there has been such little consensus over what the family even is, or when the core and immediate family has been so destabilized. When Trueman was growing up, it didn't really matter what happened at school, because he could always go home. And that was an important component of knowing who he was.

2. The Church. The Church has been battered by corruption of course, but religion itself is no longer a strong anchor.

Religious liberty is a good thing. It mesmerized Tocqueville when he saw it. But, it does make religious institutions less authoritative. You get to decide if they have authority.

No medieval Catholic ever picked his church. That's the church where I was baptized, married, and will be buried. The Reformers did not have the conceptual apparatus to understand what they were doing. Luther would not have even understood what a split in the Church would mean.

Religious liberty is a good thing, but it is not a cost-free thing. It makes it harder to answer that question, "who am I?" It becomes more grounded in personal choice. Quoting someone else (didn’t record who, sorry), "You can believe the same things a Christian believed in 1300, but you cannot believe them in the same way, because you choose to believe."

Even Catholics are Protestants now. Because they choose to be Catholic. No Catholic ever did that prior to the Reformation.

3. The nation. For the last couple hundred years, it has provided strong identity. Trueman talked about men in WWII getting married but then immediately going off to war, didn't see the new wife for six years. That was how people thought. Personal things had to be sacrificed for the common good. Because the common identity that the nation generated was so strong.

1776 or 1619? When a nation starts to debate its own origins, something pretty serious is going on.

Expressive individualism

From the 16th century onward, the economy changes. Farming becomes less important. People move to the cities. And the first person singular starts to emerge in literature.

As the external stuff becomes more and more unstable, people start to look inward to find that core of identity. This gives birth to expressive individualism. The most important things about you are not the externals, but the inner feelings. Authority is granted to the inner feelings.

John Owen had 11 children. He buried all 11 of them. He never once mentions any of that in his writings. That would be inconceivable today. People did not ascribe the same public importance to those private inner feelings that we now do.

In expressive individualism, the thing that makes us really human is the ability to express these feelings outwardly. "Authenticness".

Feelings and sexuality

Trueman was taught as a kid that self-control is the key to virtue. Not expressing himself, not authenticness. "I went to school to have the individuality in me crushed."

As the externals are thrown into flux, the internals become more important. And understandably so. We still want to know who we are.

And we come to see, especially because of pop culture, that sexual desire is the most important feeling of all. And that isn't surprising. It is a perennial of human existence. It is why the Illiad still makes sense. As we prize feelings, sexual desire becomes a more important component of who we think we are than ever before.

We come to think of human beings as constituted by their inner feelings, and characterized by their autonomy. Not social relations, not given community relations. My identity flows from my desires and choices. I am autonomous.

Redefining marriage and no obligations

Gay marriage isn't the redefinition of marriage in America. No-fault divorce is the redefinition of marriage in America. A contract now that can be broken at any time for any reason.

In abortion, it was the weakest argument, philosophically, that won the public debate. That the baby in the womb was just part of the woman's body. It doesn't make sense, but that is the argument everybody believed. Because that's how people want to think about themselves. What is the baby in the womb? A threat to the woman's happiness.

And that's what makes transgenderism so hard to resist. Where this tilts is any external authority that stands in the way of my psychological desires is invalid. Even my own body.

The LGBT movement is a function of a deeper problem. And the deeper problem is the emergence of the idea that we are sovereign individuals, connected to nobody else except those with whom we choose to enter contractual obligations.

Technology

Quoting Goethe's Faust, "my dear sir, you're looking at things in a conventional way. We must do better than that, or the joys of life will escape us... If I can afford a coach and six, isn't their energy mine? I can ride around proudly, as if I had 24 legs."

The temptation here is one the modern world has seized with both hands. To allow technology to fundamentally change what it means to be a human being.

Music

Perhaps the most significant technological innovation you never think about is music. Music is key to how the modern self has been transformed. Every culture seems to have music. The two things that the Reformation brought back to Christian worship was the spoken word and corporate singing.

Two things humans do that no other creature does: we have linguistic capacities; and we make music. And we can hear music as no other creature can. Perhaps these things are connected to the image of God.

And music has always had a communal significance. Key events in communal life are marked by music. It was also historically, of necessity, live. A major cultural moment happens when, instead, music can be stored. Prior to the phonograph, the experience of music had to be live. The very nature of music was live and communal.

Today music will still play a big part in your daily life, but you will experience it privately. Music has moved from being a matter of communal production to something that is primarily a matter of individual consumption.

300 years ago music reinforced the fact that you were a member of the community. Now it does the opposite. Now it allows you to think you are an isolated individual, sovereign in your domain.

Fireplaces

A room with a fireplace is a room with a community. A room with a television is a room of individuals.

Medicine

Medicine has moved from being primarily restorative to being primarily transformative. Plastic surgery is the most obvious example. It really took off in Britain after WWI because men came back from the trenches damaged. But back then it was restorative. Surgeons operated with a normative idea of what it was to be a human being. They were restoring something to what it was once.

How does plastic surgery operate now? Transformative. The trans issue is predicated on the idea that the body is playdough, and the feelings are everything. The realities of nature are much easier to subjugate to the ambitions of desire now. Because of the advances of technology.

Sex

Sexual activity was historically seen as, in some sense, sacred, by many cultures. It is associated with that most mysterious of things, the creation of a new human life. It was also regarded as important because it marked a move from childhood to adulthood. Marriage was important. Sex had communal significance.

Even in Christian circles, technology has transformed the notion of the purpose of sex. We think about sex first and foremost now as recreation. To think of sex as recreation you have to live in a certain kind of world. You need to live in a world of antibiotics for diseases, and ways to deal with any children that might be conceived. You need technology.

And the shift to sex as recreation makes that thing brought two people together into something that increasingly focuses on what you can get out of it. It tilts you toward seeing the other person as an object. The recently-popular sign at pro-abortion rallies, "consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy", only makes sense because our understanding of sex has been transformed by technology.

Bodies

Human beings are bodies. One of the weaknesses of the Protestant world is that we have lost sight of some of that. Trueman was struck by how casually many of us closed our churches during COVID, we didn't think we'd lost anything.

We are our bodies. When Adam sees Eve and says "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh", he's talking about Eve. Not some soul inhabiting a body like a spacesuit.

In marriage, Roger Scruton said you're interested in a face, not a body. Pornography, quite popular today, teaches us that any body will do.

Transhumanism

Transgenderism is different than LGB stuff in the sense that the first three are movements of sexual desire, and the T is not. The T is a transhuman issue. Transhumanism is the idea that we can transcend our humanity through the application of technology. We start to think of the human body as a problem to be overcome.

The strange new world is not just strange because things that were regarded as immoral are now regarded as normal. It's strange because technology has facilitated the collapse of any consensus about what it means to be a human being.

Presentism / Transcendence

Even Christians, he said, have lost a sense of the transcendent. Ancient cathedrals could take centuries to build. Nobody who started work on the building ever thought they would worship in it, but they still thought it was worth doing. They thought of time differently than we do.

But they also had such a high view of God, that they wanted to do something so great for him, that no single generation could achieve it. We need to recapture such a view of transcendence. And that primarily happens through worship. Worship is what gives us a sense of transcendence.

This also takes a weight off our shoulders, when we think about time with a sense of transcendence. Because we don't have to accomplish it all by next Wednesday.

Modesty

We also, he said, need to recover the virtue of self-restraint. Churches don’t generally debate modesty anymore, for example. Laugh at them, perhaps, but in the 1980s debates about which clothes (especially Christian women) could wear were common. The debates are gone now because modesty as a concept has virtually vanished from our culture.

Friendship

He made a point I’ve heard him make many times, but it’s a good one - one of the reasons so many girls identify as lesbians now is because they have no idea what friendship is supposed to look like. They have affection for another girl, and the only language the world has given them to understand such feelings is the language of sexual identity.

(When he has made this point in the past, to teachers, he has tied it to the importance of not giving children too much homework, or scheduling every second of their time with some formal activity. Give them time for friendship.)

Arguments and Imagination

It’s not arguments that make the world go ‘round. It’s intuitions and imagination. It’s the stuff we don’t notice that shapes how we think about ourselves most profoundly.

One of the things bodies do is remind us that persons are not abstractions. Arguments are rooted in abstractions. Imaginations are gripped by concrete realities.

(And I'll just add... this is true, and it causes pain for people like me who are used to teaching to the consciously analytical mind. Politicians know this too, of course. The data says this, the statistics say this, but here, let me trot out this one individual sob story that gives the opposite impression. Which does its work on people? Probably the sob story, because it is a concrete reality. It's hard to overcome an emotionally affecting anecdote with data, no matter how good that data is.)

Human dependence

"Man is born free but is everywhere in chains" is particularly untrue for humans, actually. Humans are particularly dependent creatures when they are born. And they are marked at every stage of their life by dependency and obligation.

Expressive individualism works great in your 20s and 30s perhaps. It's a disaster when you're older. Dying old and alone if you follow the philosophy consistently.

Mortality

Churches no longer have graveyards next to them. We no longer worship with the visible reminder of the dead. How would it affect you if you walked past a reminder of your dead loved ones every time you went to worship on Sunday? We need to bring mortality and suffering back into regular Christian teaching.

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