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The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable. Showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it.
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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. Untertitelung des ZDF für funk, 2017 ... ... ... ... ... ... Karl 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 McIntyre, 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 lost something essential in 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 awim.is slash modernself. All right, Karl 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. 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, a 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'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,
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. 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, etc., etc. 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.
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, 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 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, 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 symbol of the crumbling of these external authorities in general. The givenness of the world has become highly negotiable. So 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 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... I think, therefore I am. 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... Und 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? 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, Shelley, Keats, and artists such as JMW Turner, Caspar David Friedrich.
Musik, 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. 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 then later on in the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that continued this liquification of the self. And you go into detail about Friedrich Nietzsche and his contribution to... I'm the artist of my life. And I'm thinking, you don't realize. this, but 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.
Ja, well, Nietzsche's 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. 1889. Nietzsche ist der Mann, der die Bluff auf den Enlightenment ist. Wenn wir take Jean-Jacques Rousseau als 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, 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.
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 marginalised 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 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. 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 really got rid of human nature as well. And that morality has no objective reality. Morality is at best a contrick pulled by the weak. to subvert the strength of the strong. And where it features in 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. And this will have consequences.
Later on, we'll see that. And 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 have 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 criticised 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, 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, and that takes you to the core of what it means to be a human being that binds us all together. Urbanized society has...
It's 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 believed that if you did that, everything would just be honky dory. Das ist die Idee. Die Romantik-Ideal ist ein sort of ein Return-to-A-Rural-Idle, wenn du dich, wo du nicht hast die kind of petty rivalries, ambitions, nastiness, anonymität.
mit der Stadt. Ich habe in einer Stadt, ich kann garantieren Sie, dass die Rural Idel ist nicht als idyllisch als die Romantik thought es war. Und Nietzsche called sie auf der Blut. Er ist ja, du denkst, dass es going to happen ist, aber... Actually, probably not is what's going to happen if everyone's living by their inner desires.
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, but we could say, for somebody like Rousseau, bottom line is, it's society that corrupts us. Mit 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 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 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.
In this book, Reef lays out a thumbnail sketch of the history of humanity and their conception of the self. He says there's four ages. What are those four ages of the self? Well, he sees societies as sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of four models. Now, I would say in advance, I think the models are somewhat...
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 4th 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. I was going to say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in...
You were an idiot. You were a private person. You were looked down upon. You weren't even a person, basically. No, no. 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 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, 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 a Becket. 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 Reef 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 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. Und Reif 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 fulfil your political, your religious or your economic role.
Reif sees the present age, and he's writing in 1966. This is, you know, 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...
A 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 we might, you know, 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 is 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.
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Pretty Litter can't detect every issue. Always check with your vet. Terms apply. See site for details. And now back to the show. 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 been a lot of things in Reef. It's a bit opaque. Yeah, he's a hard read. He's a very hard read.
Und ich denke, eigentlich, das ist ein Teil der Game. Er ist versucht, den Reader zu verändern. Ich gebe Ihnen seine Definition, und dann werde ich ihn umpacken. Der Definition er gibt in ... Triumph 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...
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. We 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. 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. Like Freud was trying to figure out... Er ist da in der late 19th-century, early 20th-century. Das ist nach Nietzsche. Du hast Darwin's Theory of Evolution. So basically, ja, Gott ist dead. Da ist kein objektiv 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.
So, yeah, it's a negotiating strategy. And one thing, too, Reif 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. 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. Yeah. 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 for salvation, was born to be saved.
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. You know, 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. And I think that gets to the... The notion of the instrumentalizing of love. And think about our divorce laws now. No-fault divorce.
It 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, you see that 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 a severe mental illness, but 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...
Unnatural things. 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 We experience frustration, depression, etc. 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 Reef makes in the Triumph of the Therapeutic is that the psychological man has taken over Western. so much, or Western culture, that you even see the therapeutic ideal in things you think 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?
Ich denke, in den letzten Jahren, wenn man denkt, wer ist der größte Pastor in den USA? Joel Osteen, in Houston. Er hat 80,000 in his congregation. Think of the books that Joel Osteen... Your best life now. Every day of Friday. It's always confused me, that one, because I tend to think Saturday is the best day of the week, but every day of Friday. You think about it, 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. 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 mould, 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 even traditional religious ideas and institutions and flipped them, turned them 180 degrees.
What are your thoughts about that? 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... über Expressive Individualism. Aber eine der Dinge, ich weiß nicht, ich habe das in der Buch, ich habe die Zeit, aber ich möchte sagen, dass es bestimmte Dinge, die Psychologische Turnen hat uns mehr aware und hat uns mehr sensitiv zu haben.
Having said, 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 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 make me 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. Yeah, the rise of the therapeutic is 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 health care 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 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 Reef argues is that Jung... Try 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 Jung?
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 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. these inner desires. Bringing up Jordan Peterson in that context, it resonates with that, it seems to me, because Peterson, on the one hand, seems to want 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 equivalent to me on whether the Bible is actually true in the way that Orthodox Christianity. 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 Reef makes some comment. 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. 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 something like in the Manosphere, there's a lot of mythopoetic stuff where people...
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 interesting, but it's like, what am I supposed to do with this? Because they tell you, like, well, you need to harness the king archetype. Well, what does that mean? Yeah. And they tell you just, well, you got to think about pharaohs and you'll somehow...
You'll harness it. I'm like, I don't know. To me, it just makes more sense. I'd rather just like, okay, what's the specific deity that I need to organize my life around instead of this vague, weird, general... Yeah, I think that sort of thinking is very vulnerable to the sort of critical theoretical question, which Nietzsche would raise as well. Are you not simply trying to grant your own personal preferences a sort of transcendent authority?
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. Es ist interessant, dass es in die Manosphere ist, dass es in die Manosphere ist, weil es genau in die Manosphere ist, dass wir Menschen versuchen, mit Transcendent Objectivität, die Dinge, die wirklich soziale constructed sind. 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 is 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 ourself?
Yeah, well, for MacIntyre, 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... 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 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. 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 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, 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...
Schrill, and they'd never go anywhere. Because we're just yelling past each other, basically. Yeah, and it also explains why so many of the important questions in our culture now go by default to the courts. 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. The big questions about what it means to be a human being are being decided. rather than on the debating floor of the Senate. What did McIntyre think was the solution to this? Did he think there was a solution? 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 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 even how to do that.
And so 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.
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. 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 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 can feel, you know, have existential crises. 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. Das ist intractable und geht nicht mehr, denn wir haben alle verschiedene Ideen, was die Good Life ist.
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. 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 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. Yeah, when you're online, you're 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. Chetislav Milos, 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 at 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... 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 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. 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, not only for Aquinas, but the great books, 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, you know, we have two drives. You have the rational drive and we have the sensuous drive.
And those two, you know, 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, Karl, 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 everything. two weeks. Carlum 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. 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 modernself. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Vielen Dank.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanlies.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, it's Brett McKay. Remind you to our listening podcast would put what you've heard into action.
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