From Public Citizens to Therapeutic Selves — The Hidden History of Modern Identity
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Summary
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, when you ask somebody who they are today, you are unlikely to get quite that sort of answer.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When you scroll through social media feeds today, you'll find countless posts about living
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your truth and being authentic. These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop
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to ask where they came from or what they really mean. The concept of identity, how we understand
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ourselves, has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined
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primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community, has shifted dramatically
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toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences. Today on the show, Carl Truman
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impacts this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves
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today. Carl is a professor, theologian, and the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern
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Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers, Charles
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Taylor, Philip Reif, and Alistair McIntyre, who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts
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that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discuss how this transformation has reshaped
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politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we lost something essential and moving
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from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception
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of self. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash modern self.
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It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on, Brett.
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So you wrote a book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and you explore how our concept
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of the self has changed in modernity and how that change has influenced everything from religious
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life to political life. And you look at three thinkers in particular who have grappled with
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this change. First one is Charles Taylor. We've talked about him on the podcast before with his
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book, A Secular Age. Philip Reif, a sociologist, we'll discuss him. And then Alistair McIntyre,
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he's popped up in our podcast a few times. And what I love about your book is I've read these three
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guys. And I've always wondered, like, why hasn't anyone written a book where they've synthesized
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these three thinkers? Because they're all hitting on the same idea and they're trying to figure out
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what does it mean to be a self in the 20th, 21st century? Why does being a person sometimes feel
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weird, confusing, weightless? And you do that in your book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
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But before we get to these thinkers, we'll start with basic definition. What do you mean
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when you talk about the self? Yeah, good question. I think what I'm trying to get at there is how we
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imagine ourselves as, you know, sentient individual beings to be in the world in which we find
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ourselves. You know, what is it that makes us us? So, for example, if we go back to the Middle Ages
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and we were to randomly pick on a peasant from my home village in Gloucestershire and say, you know,
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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
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and so, or I'm the local blacksmith. I live in this particular village or my family are associated
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with this particular area. You'll get a definition of yourself in terms of external and pretty
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unchanging fixed realities. The self today, when you ask somebody who they are today, you're unlikely
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to get quite that sort of answer. You're probably going to get an answer that touches on things that
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relate to inner feelings. You know, I'm a spiritual person, for example, or, you know, to go to the,
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you know, down the direction of sexual identity, which I deal with a bit in the book, you might get
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somebody saying, well, I'm a, I'm a gay person or something like that. And the shift there has been
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towards this, you know, this inner space. We're not so much marked. We don't so much understand
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ourselves as the product, the givenness of our surroundings, as we understand ourselves as a
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collection of feelings, desires, et cetera, et cetera. So when I use the term self, I'm really
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trying to get at how do we intuitively think about who we are, what we are relative to the world around
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us. And you talk about in the book, Charles Taylor, he discusses that shift from the outer way of
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defining ourself to the inner. He calls it expressive individualism. Can you flesh that out a little bit
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more for us? Yeah. The idea of expressive individualism is that, that what makes me really
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me will be the set of desires, feelings, et cetera, I have inside. And, and what makes me, you know,
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and this is where we get the, the introduction of an interesting term with which we're all familiar,
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but which would have been meaningless back in the middle ages. What makes me authentic is my ability
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to express outwardly that which I feel I am inwardly. So expressive individualism is this idea that
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fundamentally, I'm an individual. I define myself. I'm defined by my individual desires, passions,
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feelings, and I find my authenticity, my place in this world by being able to express those outwardly.
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Okay. And we'll hopefully go back to this idea of authenticity because yeah, it's something I think
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we take for granted because you hear it so much these days, but something you do in the book is you do
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a genealogical exploration of how do we get to this point of expressive individual and where we define
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ourselves by our inner feelings. And a lot of people might think, well, this is a 20th century,
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maybe late 19th century phenomenon, but you are, you know, this goes back hundreds of years. So,
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I mean, you'd go into detail, but brief thumbnail sketch. How do we go from a point where we define
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ourselves by who our parents are, where we live, maybe our profession to whatever we feel inside of
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ourselves? Yeah, it's a good question. It's difficult to answer in a sort of short way without
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indulging in a bit of simplification. But I would say on one level, the last four or 500 years have
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witnessed, at least in the West, an increasing liquefaction of the world in which we live.
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What do I mean by that? We're typically no longer bound to space in the way we once were. We travel a
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lot more. You know, I live in the United States now. I was born in the United Kingdom. So our ability
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to define ourselves specifically relative to a particular place is no longer what it was.
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And that's a sort of a symbol of the crumbling of these external authorities in general. The givenness
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of the world has become highly negotiable. So that's the one side of the story is the old traditional
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markers of identity have become very volatile, very insubstantial. On the other hand, what moves in
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to replace them is a kind of move inward. You see this philosophically with somebody like Descartes.
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Descartes wrestling with a difficult question. In the 17th century, when everything around seems to be
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changing, when everything is becoming fluid, what can I be certain of? Is there somewhere,
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is there an Archimedean point where I can sort of place myself and stand and work out from that
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because that is the one place that is certain? And he finds a certainty, of course, in his own mind.
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I think, therefore I am. And Descartes is, I think, representative of a great shift that's taking
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place in the 17th century where that inner space, you know, the one constant we all feel in our lives
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these days is our self-consciousness, our psychological lives seem to be the one thing
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that gives some sort of continuity to our lives, some sort of continuity to our existence. So it's
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that crumbling of traditional external authorities combined with a reactive move inwards, I think,
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that really sets the stage for the extremes of expressive individualism that we see manifested
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in the world today. And part of that reaction or that turn inward you talk about in the book was
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the development of Romanticism. For those who aren't familiar with
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the idea of Romanticism, what is that? Romanticism is really an artistic cultural movement that flourishes
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in the late 18th and then on into the first half of the 19th century, associated with poets such as
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Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, an artist such as J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich. Music,
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I think some of the later Beethoven has romantic touches to it, but Chopin would be a romantic
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composer. When you compare, say, the music of a Chopin to the music of a Bach, you don't have to
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know anything about music to know that something significant has gone on there. In Bach, you have
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a lot of structure and order. If you move to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or to Chopin's Nocturnes,
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that music is not structured and ordered in quite the same way. It's not chaos, but it's really pulling
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on the heartstrings. It's attempting to cultivate an emotional reaction in a way that Bach is not.
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And that's reflective of Romanticism as a term to cover a cultural artistic movement that is
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really wanting to explore, stimulate, and shape those inner emotional feelings and responses.
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And then later on in the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that
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continue this liquefaction of the self. And you go into detail about Friedrich Nietzsche and his
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contribution to our changing ideas of the self. And I thought it was interesting because I think a lot
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of times people in the modern world, they say things, they may say something about what it means
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to be a self. I'm going to create, I'm the creator of myself. I'm the artist of my life. And I'm
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thinking, you don't realize this, but like, that's Friedrich Nietzsche. You don't know it. So tell us
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about Friedrich Nietzsche and his contribution to this inward turn of the self. Yeah. Well, Nietzsche's
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a remarkable 19th century philosopher, has almost no influence in his own lifetime. I think there's one
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lecture given on Nietzsche's philosophy before he collapses in madness in 1889. Nietzsche's the man
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who caused the bluff on the Enlightenment. If we would take Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a typical
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philosopher, think about Rousseau is wanting to explore the inner space and he wants to ground
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morality very much in sort of spontaneous, sympathetic reactions. You know, Rousseau essentially says,
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you know, as soon as you've got laws, you know, something's gone wrong. If you see an injustice
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taking place, you should naturally respond to that injustice. There should be, there's a, there's a
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human instinct for justice. Rousseau, in other words, he's, he's rightly pointing to the role, I think,
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of feelings in ethical reasoning. If, you know, if you see somebody being beaten up and you feel
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nothing emotional, you're a psychopath. We, we, we understand the need for feelings in our ethical
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decisions. But Rousseau grounds that really in, in an understanding of human beings as having a human
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nature. And what Nietzsche does in the 19th century is he effectively says to Enlightenment philosophers
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like Rousseau, and particularly to the thought of somebody like Immanuel Kant, he says, hang on a minute,
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you guys have marginalized or even dispatched God into the wilderness. So he doesn't play any positive,
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constructive role in your thinking, but you've smuggled something in that plays the role of God.
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You've got rid of God as the sort of the grounds of morality, but you've substituted him with human
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nature. You still think there's such a thing as human nature and human nature has an authoritative
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moral structure to which all human beings are answerable. In other words, to be a human being
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is to have a moral structure. And Nietzsche says, you know, you can't do that. If you've killed God,
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if you've got rid of God, if you've killed God, you've really got rid of human nature as well.
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And that morality has no objective reality. Morality is at best a contrick pulled by the weak
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to subvert the strength of the strong. And where that features in the sort of the psychological
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story is, you know, Nietzsche is fascinated by how our psychological response to the world around us
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shapes our moral thinking. But he's detaching that from any objective moral structure now.
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And this will have consequences later on. We'll see that. And Alistair McIntyre,
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we'll get to him. He grapples with the consequences of Nietzsche's ideas because they're significant,
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even though we might not think about them. You mentioned authenticity and Charles Taylor's
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thinking on that. By authenticity, he meant that you have to live your life according to whatever you
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feel on the inside. And that's kind of a sort of a given. That's how you want to live your life today.
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And if you don't do that, then you have some sort of false consciousness. At what point does Taylor
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think authenticity became a moral ideal? It's really in the 18th and early 19th century,
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you know, the romantics are really the ones who start to articulate this in a powerful way.
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William Wordsworth writes this poem, it's not one of his greatest poems, this poem, The Idiot Boy,
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which is this poem about a child, we would say today, a child with serious learning
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difficulties. And he gets heavily criticized for this, you know, why are you writing a poem that
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appears to be mocking a child with such difficulties? And he responds in a letter to one of his
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students and friends. He says, you know, basically, I'm not mocking him. I'm using him as an example.
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We would now say, I'm using The Idiot Boy as an example of somebody with no filters. And what you
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have when you go to somebody like that, we would say no filters, an inability to pick up on social
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cues, etc. What you've got there is human nature in a more pristine state. It's not being corrupted by
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the conventions of society. With The Idiot Boy, what you see is what you get. And Wordsworth would
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say, you know, and that takes you to the core of what it means to be a human being that binds us
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all together. Urbanized society has trained us to behave in different ways. It's alienated us from
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that universal humanity. And so with somebody like Wordsworth, that's where you get the, you know,
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the emerging notion of authenticity, this idea that if we can get back beyond social conventions
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to those untamed, untrammeled, truly human feelings inside and live according to them,
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then that's what it means to be truly human. Or that's what it means to be an authentic human.
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And they believe that if you did that, everything would just be honky dory.
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That's the idea. If you could, the romantic ideal is a sort of a return to a rural idyll,
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if you like, where you don't have the kind of petty rivalries, ambitions, nastiness,
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anonymity that is associated with the city. I grew up in a village. I can guarantee you that
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the rural idyll is not as idyllic as the romantics thought it was.
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And Nietzsche called them on their blood. He's like, yeah, you think that's what's going to happen,
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but actually probably not. So what's going to happen if everyone's living by their inner,
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Nietzsche has a much darker view of what it means to be human in many ways. The romantics have a very
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naive view. You know, we could somewhat simplify, but we could say, you know, for somebody like
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Rousseau, bottom line is it's society that corrupts us. With Nietzsche, you know, you've got the idea that
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actually what makes us great are the dark and violent desires that we have. Nietzsche is a sort
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of philosophical precursor of Freud in a lot of ways.
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Okay. So I think what we can talk about here, what we have here, what Charles Taylor sets up for us
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is that there's this shift from a sense of self that is ordered by the outside, by the external,
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where you live, who your parents are, the church, monarchy. As we progress through the enlightenment
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and things like technology allowed you to travel, you're no longer tied to the family farm.
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Monarchies started going away. We had revolutions in political life. The church started losing
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authority on people. You have this shift towards figuring out who you are by your inner feelings
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and your emotions. And the romantics kind of provided some fodder for that. And then you had
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philosophers like Nietzsche, just adding fuel to the fire. So there's an inward turn.
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Another thinker that you talk about that helps us understand this inward turn in our sense of self
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is a sociologist named Philip Reif. And he wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. This was
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written back in the 1960s. And in this book, Reif lays out sort of a thumbnail sketch of the history of
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humanity and their conception of the self. And he says there's four ages.
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Well, he sees, he sees what societies are sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of
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four models. Now, I would say in advance, I think the models are somewhat simplistic in that no age
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exclusively embodies one of these models. But in any given age, I think one of the models is dominant.
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The first type of man that he thinks of is what he calls political man. And this is where
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human beings found their fulfillment in their activities, their participation in the public
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square. So the great example of this might be, you know, fourth century BC Athens, where being
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involved in the assembly, that was the apex of what it meant to be a human being, to be informed about
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public affairs, to go to the assembly, to cast your vote, to make your speech, that kind of thing.
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The polis. It's the polis in participating in the polis that makes you truly human.
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I was going to say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in public life, you're an idiot.
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Like you're a private person. You're looked down upon. You weren't even, you weren't even a person,
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No, no. I mean, the Greek, when Aristotle talks about political, you know, man is a political
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animal. He's meaning man is a man of the polis. He's a man of public life. And as you rightly point
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out, the opposite of politikos is idiotikos, the private man. So that's the first arrangement.
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And Reif sees over time that being supplanted by what he calls religious man. And religious man is,
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that's an age where human beings find their fulfillment by being involved in public religious
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rituals. We might think of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a great example of the kind of literature
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that a society where religious man was the ideal. That's kind of literature, which would be produced
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in that sort of culture where you have, you know, the shtick in Canterbury Tales is you have this
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ragbag bunch of pilgrims from all levels of society united in going on this pilgrimage to Canterbury
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to pay homage to at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Today, we might think, you know, if you may have
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Muslim friends and they go on the Hajj to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, the idea is that their
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fulfillment is found in going on this pilgrimage, public pilgrimage to a religious or holy shrine.
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So religious man is the age where public religious rituals are really the apex of what it means to be
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human. This is replaced for Reif what he calls economic man. An economic man is the man who finds his
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meaning, the purpose of life in his participation in the economic activity of society. So, you know,
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Charles Dickens' books are full of economic man. He's writing about Industrial Revolution, England. So
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you have figures like Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Gradgrind. These are figures who find their fulfillment
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being involved in economic activities in society. And Reif sees all three of these as having something
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in common. They may sound very different, but what they have in common is this. It is the role of
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society in shaping you to be a political, religious, or economic man to direct you outwards. So education
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is about forming you in order to fulfill your political, your religious, or your economic role.
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Reif sees the present age, and he's writing in 1966. This is, you know, nearly 60 years ago. It's one of
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those books, Triumph of the Therapeutic, which is more true today than it was when he wrote it. He says
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that what we have at the end of this is what he calls psychological man. And psychological man is the
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man whose sense of self, whose sense of fulfillment is entirely wrapped up with kind of psychological
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feeling of happiness. Is he happy and content with life? And psychological man represents a break with the
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first three. And the break is this, that in the first three, the individual was to be directed outwards
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to fit into society. The therapy, if you like, of education was helping you, forming you to be a
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member of society. And a psychological man, a reverse takes place. Now it becomes increasingly society's
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role to accommodate itself to your feelings and to your happiness. So we might, you know, one could draw a
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contrast in forms of learning. I went to a very traditional boy's school in England. Team sports were
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central to the curriculum. Why? Because education for me as a grammar school boy was about having my
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individuality crushed and being made into part of the team. That's not child-centered learning that sort of
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dominates the airwaves today, where the idea is to allow the individual child to flourish. So psychological man,
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it's a very, very different culture to the first three.
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And it seems like it's similar to Taylor's idea of expressive individualism.
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Yeah, it's Taylor's expressive individualism writ large for the whole of society. You know,
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the romantics are writing, composing, painting away in the late 18th, early 19th century.
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It takes time for that vision of what it means to be human, to permeate the whole of society,
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and indeed to begin to transform the institutions of society.
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. And something Reef talks about, one of the defining characteristics
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of psychological man is that they have an analytical attitude. What does he mean by the
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Yeah, it has been a lot of things in Reef. It's a bit opaque.
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And I think actually that's part of the game. He's trying to disorient the reader sometimes.
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I'll give you his definition, and then I'll try to sort of unpack it a bit.
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The definition that he gives in Triumph of the Therapeutic is,
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the analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertaining tentative opinions about the inner
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dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law,
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insofar as it originates outside the individual, in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse.
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Now, he's talking there about Freud, and I think what he's trying to get at is this,
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that for Freud, society makes demands upon us. And it does that. It curbs our inner desires
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in order to allow us to live together. To put it in its most crude terms, for Freud,
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males want to rape and pillage. Our sexual desires are very, very powerful. We are savages,
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but we can't live together if we're savages. So there's a trade-off between the desire of the
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individual and the needs of society for perpetuating society. That creates, though,
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those restrictions that society places upon us create all kinds of dysfunctions and malfunctions.
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We're never happy. We struggle because we're not allowed to be who we really are because we need
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to be civilized. And I think what Reef is getting at with the analytic attitude is the analytic attitude
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is really that study, that reflection upon that learning about the inner desires that allows us then
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to sort of negotiate between those desires and the demands of society. It's not that we can ever come
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to a fully adequate compromise between the two, a peace treaty between the two. But the goal of
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therapy, for example, is to allow you to understand why you feel the way you do, why you struggle the way
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you do, to come to terms with the way you are. Key, I think, to the analytic attitude is there is no
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objective moral order there. There is no divinely sanctioned moral order. There are really just
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social conventions. They have a pragmatic usefulness, but they're ultimately not grounded
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in anything beyond themselves. So the real thing you're wrestling with are your inner desires. Those are
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the things you've got to analyze in order to try to engage in the kind of therapy that Freud is
00:25:04.440
proposing. Yeah, that's the big idea from Freud. Like Freud was trying to figure out, you know, he's
00:25:09.680
there at the late 19th century, early 20th century. This is after, you know, Nietzsche, you had Darwin's
00:25:15.640
theory of evolution. So basically, yeah, Freud was like, yeah, God's dead. There's no objective moral
00:25:20.080
order. So what do we do? And his conclusion was, well, the best we can do is just you lay on a couch
00:25:25.960
and you talk to a shrink to sort out your inner emotions. That's about as good as you can do.
00:25:32.260
Yeah, yeah. It's a sort of, it's a therapy, you know, to use Reef's term. It's therapy. It's
00:25:37.660
helping you to come to terms with reality and learning where the limits are and learning where
00:25:42.840
you can perhaps break those limits at points. So yeah, it's a negotiating strategy.
00:25:49.780
And one thing too, Reef talks about, even though Freud's ideas have been discredited
00:25:54.120
in the 20th and 21st century, like we're still living under Freud's shadow. We all are psychological
00:26:00.500
in that. I mean, I'm sure all of us have picked up a book on, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy
00:26:05.580
or how to, you know, manage my anger. And it's never like, well, don't be angry because God said
00:26:11.440
not to be angry. It's like, well, if I want to have a good flourishing life, I need to just get a
00:26:16.480
hold of my anger. And so yeah, Reef says what ends up happening is what the analytical attitude can do
00:26:22.800
is we end up instrumentalizing things that were once ideals like love, faith, hope, courage, et cetera.
00:26:30.360
Yeah. And it's very much the case. I mean, I think there's a sense in which, you know,
00:26:35.540
a traditional religious man was born for salvation, was born to be saved. Therapeutic man,
00:26:42.900
psychological man is born to be soothed, if you like. And when you think of love, you know,
00:26:49.720
classical understandings of love, love has profound sacrificial connotations to it. To love somebody
00:26:57.800
is not to engage in a relationship with them that just makes me feel good. To love somebody
00:27:04.360
traditionally will involve at times a deep sacrifice of the self. You know, as a pastor at times,
00:27:11.080
I've married numerous young couples, and I always make the point in the wedding homily that,
00:27:17.300
you know, it's easy to love your wife on the wedding day. You know, she's beautiful. The sexual
00:27:22.680
desire is bubbling away. You love each other's company. You're embarking on this lifelong adventure
00:27:28.140
together. But what about when one of you has dementia and the other one is getting nothing from
00:27:35.440
that person, but is having to help them even with their most basic bodily needs? And I raise the
00:27:40.360
question, you know, where is love most dramatically demonstrated? Is it on the wedding day? Or is it
00:27:46.340
when one of the partners can no longer provide happiness for the other, can no longer be an
00:27:53.540
instrument? And I think that gets to the, you know, the notion of the instrumentalizing of love. And
00:27:59.000
think about our divorce laws now. You know, no-fault divorce has a very instrumentalized view of love and
00:28:06.900
loved ones in it. You know, hey, if my wife is no longer meeting my needs to feel happy,
00:28:13.420
well, the contract no longer applies. I can just dissolve the contract and take my love to another.
00:28:19.640
So, yeah, you see that, you know, the therapeutic ideal of love transforms the notion of love in,
00:28:30.240
So, again, Philip Reese describing an inner turn towards defining ourself. It's all about just
00:28:36.000
what makes me happy, what soothes me. And I think what I love about the book,
00:28:39.940
The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and I encourage people to read it, even though it is opaque and
00:28:42.980
hard to get through, it really does capture and helps you understand like this rise of wellness
00:28:47.480
culture in the West of everyone that's worried about their mental health, even if they don't have
00:28:52.660
like a severe mental illness, but like everyone's just concerned about, okay, my anxiety,
00:28:56.300
or I'm feeling nervous, or I don't have full blown depression, but I'm feeling kind of sad.
00:29:01.880
What can I do to not do that? Like Philip Reese describes, well, here's why you have that idea.
00:29:07.160
Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, I would say anxiety, not feeling happy all the time. These are not
00:29:14.360
unnatural things. You know, we can't be happy all the time. There is a level of discomfort that comes
00:29:22.360
with life when you're engaged in relationship with other people. To have children is to make
00:29:28.080
yourself vulnerable to distress, frustration at times. It is part of the human condition
00:29:34.160
that we experience. Frustration, depression, et cetera, et cetera. These are not necessarily the
00:29:40.220
signs of neuroses or illnesses or abnormality. They're part of being a human being, rubbing shoulders
00:29:48.000
into connecting with other human beings. One argument that Reef makes in the Triumph of
00:29:52.460
Therapeutic is that the psychological man has taken over Western society so much or Western culture
00:29:58.680
that you even see the therapeutic ideal in things you think wouldn't, it wouldn't be aligned with,
00:30:05.340
like religious life. Did you see that when you were a pastor? Did you see the therapeutic or the
00:30:10.020
psychological man creep into religious life? Well, certainly. I mean, in most extreme form,
00:30:15.200
when you think about, you know, who is the most successful pastor in the United States? It's
00:30:18.720
Joel Osteen, you know, down in Houston. I think he's 80,000 in his congregation or something. Think
00:30:24.480
of the books that Joel Osteen writes, you know, Your Best Life Now, Every Day of Friday. It's always
00:30:29.560
confused me, that one, because I tend to think Saturday's the best day of the week, but, you know,
00:30:33.080
every day of Friday. You think about it, why is he the most successful pastor? Because he uses the
00:30:38.680
Christian religious idiom precisely to soothe the therapeutic needs of society. But even in more
00:30:46.960
orthodox Christian circles, think about how a lot of people choose their church. If you're
00:30:51.960
Catholic listeners, it doesn't apply to them. But if you're a Protestant, a lot of people
00:30:56.300
choose their church on the basis of, you know, does the music make me feel good? Does the pastor's
00:31:03.360
sermon scratch where I feel I'm itching? Think of how people think about worship. Is worship as it
00:31:09.780
traditionally was a matter of sort of liturgical forms that form you by sort of squeezing you into
00:31:16.160
their mold? Or is it a way of expressing yourself before the Lord? So there are all kinds of ways in
00:31:22.160
which that reverse in the culture that the rise of the therapeutic represents have grabbed hold of
00:31:28.320
tradition, even traditional religious ideas and institutions and flipped them, turned them 180
00:31:33.320
degrees. What are your thoughts, right? Is there a place for the therapeutic and religious life? Or
00:31:37.780
are you kind of like, ah, just get it all out of there? Oh, absolutely. I think one can be very
00:31:42.740
cynical about expressive individualism. But one of the things that, you know, I didn't do this in the
00:31:46.460
book, I didn't have space, but I want to say there are certain things that the psychological turn
00:31:51.600
has made us more aware of and has made us more sensitive to. You know, having said, you know,
00:31:57.440
feeling miserable in life is not necessarily an illness. Sometimes it can be. I think we're more
00:32:04.180
aware now of mental illness than we were before. We're more aware of the importance of that inner
00:32:11.660
life. It's not the psychological struggles aren't important, they are. And I think, you know, look back
00:32:17.460
to my education that I mentioned. I'm not sure that having my individuality crushed to make me part of
00:32:22.240
the team was necessarily the best model of education. It's a very different one to the one that applies
00:32:27.180
today. And I would say there are dimensions of child-centered learning, for example, that are
00:32:32.220
an improvement on the model that I experienced. So, yeah, the rise of the therapeutic is not an
00:32:39.780
entirely bad thing. I think it has brought to light and shone a light upon certain things that have
00:32:47.340
improved, for example, the healthcare that we can get.
00:32:50.740
You didn't talk about this guy in your book, the rise and triumph of the modern self, but I'd love
00:32:56.340
to get your thoughts on him, Jung, because Reef talks about Jung a lot in the triumph of the
00:33:01.480
therapeutic. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this because Jung has, you see him more and more in
00:33:06.160
the popular discourse, I think, thanks to Jordan Peterson, who's talking about archetypes all the
00:33:10.260
time. And you even see religious leaders talking about Jung and archetypes. One thing that Reef argues is
00:33:16.520
that Jung tried to take the analytical attitude of Freud, where all you do is you just try to
00:33:22.740
figure out what's going on yourself. And he turned it into almost like a quasi-religious therapy.
00:33:30.480
Yeah, it seems to me that in some ways he's a kind of psychoanalytical Rousseau or romantic. I don't want
00:33:36.760
to make a naive historical connection there. But it seems to me, from what I've read of Jung, that he's
00:33:42.520
wanting to harp back to some sort of transcendent universal human nature, some sort of structure
00:33:49.020
that binds us all together. I think Reef, in the triumph of the therapeutic, he refers to Jung as
00:33:56.960
having a sort of a weak God. And there's that sort of return to something, some level of objectivity
00:34:05.820
that allows you a sort of a framework for understanding these inner desires. And bringing
00:34:12.740
up Jordan Peterson in that context, it resonates with that, it seems to me, because Peterson,
00:34:18.580
on the one hand, seems to want to ground human nature in something. He wants to be able to talk
00:34:24.960
in universal terms about what is good for human beings. But I've never heard him make that final
00:34:32.380
leap to full-blown theistic commitment. So he has interesting things to say about the Bible,
00:34:38.460
but he always seems to be somewhat equivalent to me on whether the Bible is actually true in the way
00:34:43.860
that Orthodox Christianity would consider it to be true. So from what I know about Jung, and I've not
00:34:49.380
read very much of him, it seems that Jung represents a return to wanting to have his cake and eat it. And I
00:34:56.800
think Reef makes some comment somewhere that it's almost preferable to have Freud's non-existent
00:35:03.580
but powerful God than to have Jung's existent but very weak God. And there's a sense in which,
00:35:12.760
you know, I would look at somebody like Jordan Peterson and say, I'd almost rather be dealing
00:35:17.140
with Nietzsche than somebody who wants to have his cake and eat it.
00:35:21.400
Yeah. So I've read a lot of Jung, and we've had guests on the podcast who are big into Jung and talk
00:35:25.580
about archetypes. And I've read all the, especially something like in the Manosphere, there's a lot
00:35:28.860
of mythopoetic stuff where people, you know, go to Jung and talk about the king archetype and the
00:35:35.140
warrior. And, you know, I read these books and like, I always think they're interesting, but it's
00:35:39.700
like, what am I just to do with this? Because they tell you like, well, you need to harness the king
00:35:43.020
archetype. Well, what does that mean? Yeah. And they tell you just, well, you got to think about
00:35:47.080
pharaohs and you'll somehow become like, you'll harness it. And I'm like, I don't know. And to me,
00:35:52.920
it just makes more sense. Okay. I'd rather just like, okay, what's the specific deity
00:35:56.020
that I need to organize my life around instead of this sort of vague, weird, general archetype?
00:36:02.960
Yeah. And I think that sort of thinking is very vulnerable to the sort of critical theoretical
00:36:06.760
question of which Nietzsche would raise as well. Are you not simply trying to grant your own personal
00:36:13.060
preferences, a sort of transcendent authority here, your own version of masculinity or whatever it is,
00:36:19.840
you're sort of trying to find some way of claiming that it has a transcendent truth beyond that which
00:36:26.560
is typically justifiable. It's interesting you raise it in the manner that it's fascinating me
00:36:31.660
that this is in the manosphere because it's precisely in the manosphere that I think we're
00:36:36.120
seeing people trying to baptize with transcendent objectivity some things that are really socially
00:36:42.200
constructed. Yeah. I mean, I think Jung is interesting, but I'm not sure if it's actually
00:36:46.980
useful in organizing your life, just based on my experience. We talked about Taylor. We talked
00:36:53.160
about Reef. They've all described this inward turn. We shape our sense of self by what's inside of
00:36:58.860
ourself and it's no longer external things that are helping us define ourself. And this brings us
00:37:04.400
to Alistair McIntyre. What does Alistair McIntyre say are the consequences of this inward turn
00:37:10.160
to defining ourself? Yeah. Well, for McIntyre in his book, After Virtues, where he sort of lays this
00:37:16.720
out, it's the results are really pretty bleak at a social level in that when you, you enter this realm
00:37:23.560
of, we might say, radical subjectivity, you end up losing the, the great, he would say, the great
00:37:30.220
narratives of the great stories that bind cultures together. And so you end up really unable to engage in
00:37:37.740
significant moral discussion or ethical discussion about things. You know, one could take an example,
00:37:45.540
when you lose a common understanding of what it means to be a human being, it becomes impossible to
00:37:51.420
discuss and adjudicate debates about abortion, for example. Is the baby in the womb a baby in the womb
00:37:58.020
or just part of the woman's body? Behind your convictions on those things lie two entirely
00:38:03.960
incommensurable stories about what it means to be a human being. And it's virtually impossible
00:38:11.300
to get the proponents of each view to sit down and come to any kind of common understanding relative
00:38:19.040
to the other group. So for McIntyre, society's ability to have important discussions starts to
00:38:26.280
break down. And that has all kinds of political and social consequences. He says that since there's no
00:38:32.140
longer a common moral language, common objective moral background where we're having these debates,
00:38:37.720
what we have to resort to, he calls emotivism. Yeah. Yeah. And essentially that is that your moral
00:38:44.160
views are basically expressions of your own emotional preferences dressed up in the language of moral
00:38:52.320
objectivity. So debates become, you know, you think you're talking about principles, but you're actually
00:38:59.420
talking about one emotional preference versus another. And I think what McIntyre's idea of emotivism
00:39:05.840
can help explain is why political debates, particularly today, just feel shrill and they never go anywhere
00:39:13.600
because we're just yelling past each other basically. Yeah. Yeah. And it also explains why so many of the
00:39:18.600
important questions in our culture now get, uh, go by default to the courts because in the courts you can have
00:39:25.440
a straightforward legal fight. You don't have to persuade the populace to vote for you in some way.
00:39:30.860
And so a lot of attention in the last few decades, particularly in the United States has been focused
00:39:34.500
on Supreme court decisions. You know, the big questions about what it means to be a human being
00:39:39.840
are being decided judicially rather than on the, the floor of the, you know, the debating floor of the
00:39:45.260
Senate. What did McIntyre think was the solution to this? Did he think there was a solution?
00:39:51.240
Uh, it building strong communities. It really points, I think in a local direction. And in a
00:39:59.860
sense, uh, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, I think he published the book with 2015, 2016
00:40:04.680
riffs on McIntyre to a certain extent that ultimately to have a coherent narrative, you're going to have
00:40:12.820
to return to a kind of local level. Hmm. Yeah. I think at the end of the book, McIntyre says it's
00:40:19.420
Nietzsche or Aristotle. That's her choice. Yeah. Yeah. Philosophically. And I think there's a lot
00:40:24.880
to be said, said for that. I would say, you know, Nietzsche or Orthodox Christianity, but, uh, yeah.
00:40:30.960
Yeah. So it's, it's hard. And going back to local, that's going to be hard. And I think even
00:40:34.820
McIntyre says he's not very optimistic about reviving maybe local communities, because I think
00:40:40.100
he argued that people today, they've forgotten like even how to do that. And so it's, it's going to be
00:40:46.480
hard, maybe even impossible. Yeah. And that was 45 years ago before a lot of our interaction became
00:40:53.060
technologically mediated in the way it is today. I mean, you and I, we're not sitting in the same
00:40:57.720
room. I'm not even seeing your face. We're just talking through a computer. You know, so much of
00:41:02.360
our social life now is detached from any kind of notion of, of real physical geographical place
00:41:08.780
where you could actually build a local community.
00:41:11.740
And I think the conversation so far, what we've hopefully painted for our audience is that, okay,
00:41:18.200
reason why things can feel confusing, why you just feel weightless or just discombobulated is your
00:41:26.220
sense of self. It's, it's, we no longer have that external order to base our lives around. So we're
00:41:31.280
all kind of winging it in a way. And that's why you can feel, you know, have existential crisis. You
00:41:36.560
don't really know what to do, what you're supposed to do. And then because we're deciding how we look at
00:41:41.580
our life or what a good life looks like based on our own inner life, well, that causes all this
00:41:46.920
debate that's intractable and goes nowhere because we all have different subjective ideas of what is
00:41:54.140
Yeah, very much so. And I think we should not discount the importance of the loss of bodily
00:41:59.340
presence in this. And when you think about rising levels of anxiety among young people, I think some
00:42:04.760
of that's connected to the disembodied nature of social media. You know, when I was growing up,
00:42:09.340
I had a group of friends. They were real presences in my life. Falling out was costly. I never reduced
00:42:15.480
them merely to the beliefs or viewpoints they happened to express. There was real, rich, strong
00:42:23.500
interaction because we were actually real presences in each other's lives. Social media, insults are cheap.
00:42:30.640
Falling out is cheap. The tendency to reduce the people with whom we're engaging simply to the views
00:42:36.400
they express is very strong. And I think that makes us all feel less secure about who we are
00:42:43.380
than would have been the case 30, 40 years ago. So there's a strong, you know, it's not just
00:42:48.000
philosophical stuff that's going on. There's also technological stuff that is reinforcing and
00:42:56.180
Yeah. When you're online, you're psychological, man.
00:43:01.160
Yeah. As I was reading your section about Taylor Reef and McIntyre, I couldn't help but think about
00:43:06.440
C.S. Lewis's book, The Abolition of Man. What insights do you think Lewis can add to the frameworks
00:43:13.380
Yeah. Well, I think in some ways Lewis could be seen, you know, he sort of anticipates the emotivism idea
00:43:19.260
in some ways in The Abolition of Man. I also think that he's, you know, he puts his finger,
00:43:24.800
there are a number of thinkers in the 1940s who do this. Czeslaw Milos, the Polish poet,
00:43:29.900
is doing a similar thing at the same time as Lewis, putting his finger on the fact that it is
00:43:34.520
anthropology, what it means to be human, that is becoming the big question of the age.
00:43:39.880
And I think that remains the same today. I think The Abolition of Man, a bit like The Triumph of the
00:43:45.000
Therapeutic, is one of those books that, you know, the author could not have known how truly he was
00:43:50.820
putting his finger on things at the time as he actually was. It's more true today in some ways
00:43:56.840
than at other times. So I think, first of all, Lewis is useful because, yep, anthropology is the
00:44:03.320
problem. Secondly, I think he offers a note of hope because his notion of the Tao, this idea that there
00:44:10.920
is some sort of moral structure to the universe, and, you know, I would talk about natural law,
00:44:16.300
for example. I think that's something worth exploring. I think we're at a point where we're
00:44:22.300
beginning to see that, yes, we could try to make human beings limitless through the technology we
00:44:29.720
have. But in doing so, we're actually destroying and not enhancing or improving our humanity because
00:44:36.140
there is some natural moral structure to what it means to be a human being. So I think on that point
00:44:43.460
to Lewis, he's not offering all the answers, but he's certainly pointing us in the direction of
00:44:48.780
the right questions. And I think another thing that Lewis does in The Abolition Man is he helps
00:44:55.400
you figure out what to do with your feelings or sentiments. Yeah. Because we've been talking
00:45:00.560
about the romantics, and with the romantics, it was just important to feel. And whatever you felt,
00:45:06.680
that was considered good. But Lewis, he believed in an objective moral order, and that some things
00:45:14.900
should make you feel certain feelings. He thought feelings were important, but you had to train your
00:45:20.580
emotions so that you felt the right emotions for the right things at the right time for the right
00:45:27.260
reasons. Yeah. And that's where I think, you know, returning to reading somebody like Aquinas on
00:45:33.600
virtue. You know, the old idea of virtues is important here, that yes, we have feelings,
00:45:41.840
but we need to have those feelings shaped by our rational side, by our reason, by our knowledge.
00:45:49.040
And I think, yeah, the role not only for Aquinas, but, you know, the great books,
00:45:52.200
like reading that can go a long way to training your emotions, training your feelings, training the
00:45:56.940
sentiments, looking at good art. Yeah. The religious life can play a role in that,
00:46:01.100
helping you order your desires. Yeah. I mean, this is the, the, the enlightenment thinker,
00:46:05.840
Friedrich Schiller has this, this idea that human beings, you know, we have two drives. You have the
00:46:11.020
rational drive and we have the sensuous drive. And those two, you know, if, if you allow the one
00:46:17.580
to run amok, it's a disaster. If it's the rational drive, you end up with the French revolution.
00:46:22.820
If it's sensuous drive, you end up with a sort of moral chaos going the other way. You need to have
00:46:29.120
each informing the other. And for, for Schiller, art was the answer. You know, as you just said,
00:46:34.300
contemplating great art, that's what brought the two together. And that's, I think, not a bad way of,
00:46:41.180
of thinking about things. It does matter what you read. It does matter what music you listen to. It
00:46:46.240
does matter what art you, you contemplate. Well, Carl, I think we covered, we covered a lot of ground in
00:46:52.640
this conversation. That was fun. It's, it's, time seems to have flown by for me.
00:46:57.060
It did. Well, where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?
00:47:00.780
I write a, I would say a fortnightly, but for American listeners, that's every two weeks,
00:47:05.840
a column at first things.com. It actually has a print version, but it's also an online magazine
00:47:11.000
dealing with religion and public life and culture. And I write a couple of columns a month for, for
00:47:16.980
world magazine online as well, which is, that's a more distinctively Protestant thing. Other than
00:47:22.640
that, I've done a lot of podcasts. I pop up all over the place, I guess. So, but first things.com
00:47:29.900
would be the primary place to, to go and read me. Fantastic. Well, Carl Truman, thanks for time.
00:47:34.440
It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. My guest is Carl Truman. He's the
00:47:39.340
author of the book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:47:43.240
everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is slash modern self. We find links to
00:47:47.180
resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM
00:47:58.520
podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. We find our podcast archives
00:48:02.500
and sign up for a new newsletter. It's called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net.
00:48:06.920
It's a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:48:10.640
Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you how to listen to the AOM podcast would put