The Art of Manliness - From Public Citizens to Therapeutic Selves — The Hidden History of Modern Identity

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.500 When you scroll through social media feeds today, you'll find countless posts about living

00:00:15.260 your truth and being authentic. These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop

00:00:20.000 to ask where they came from or what they really mean. The concept of identity, how we understand

00:00:24.920 ourselves, has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined

00:00:29.540 primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community, has shifted dramatically

00:00:34.020 toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences. Today on the show, Carl Truman

00:00:39.460 impacts this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves

00:00:42.860 today. Carl is a professor, theologian, and the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern

00:00:48.260 Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers, Charles

00:00:53.060 Taylor, Philip Reif, and Alistair McIntyre, who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts

00:00:57.940 that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discuss how this transformation has reshaped

00:01:02.340 politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we lost something essential and moving

00:01:07.040 from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception

00:01:10.860 of self. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash modern self.

00:01:27.380 All right, Carl Truman, welcome to the show.

00:01:29.800 It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on, Brett.

00:01:31.960 So you wrote a book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and you explore how our concept

00:01:38.540 of the self has changed in modernity and how that change has influenced everything from religious

00:01:44.020 life to political life. And you look at three thinkers in particular who have grappled with

00:01:49.720 this change. First one is Charles Taylor. We've talked about him on the podcast before with his

00:01:53.520 book, A Secular Age. Philip Reif, a sociologist, we'll discuss him. And then Alistair McIntyre,

00:01:58.780 he's popped up in our podcast a few times. And what I love about your book is I've read these three

00:02:03.940 guys. And I've always wondered, like, why hasn't anyone written a book where they've synthesized

00:02:09.760 these three thinkers? Because they're all hitting on the same idea and they're trying to figure out

00:02:14.540 what does it mean to be a self in the 20th, 21st century? Why does being a person sometimes feel

00:02:20.660 weird, confusing, weightless? And you do that in your book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

00:02:26.460 But before we get to these thinkers, we'll start with basic definition. What do you mean

00:02:31.020 when you talk about the self? Yeah, good question. I think what I'm trying to get at there is how we

00:02:37.460 imagine ourselves as, you know, sentient individual beings to be in the world in which we find

00:02:43.300 ourselves. You know, what is it that makes us us? So, for example, if we go back to the Middle Ages

00:02:49.740 and we were to randomly pick on a peasant from my home village in Gloucestershire and say, you know,

00:02:55.200 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

00:03:00.680 and so, or I'm the local blacksmith. I live in this particular village or my family are associated

00:03:06.540 with this particular area. You'll get a definition of yourself in terms of external and pretty

00:03:14.000 unchanging fixed realities. The self today, when you ask somebody who they are today, you're unlikely

00:03:19.760 to get quite that sort of answer. You're probably going to get an answer that touches on things that

00:03:26.240 relate to inner feelings. You know, I'm a spiritual person, for example, or, you know, to go to the,

00:03:32.200 you know, down the direction of sexual identity, which I deal with a bit in the book, you might get

00:03:36.680 somebody saying, well, I'm a, I'm a gay person or something like that. And the shift there has been

00:03:41.820 towards this, you know, this inner space. We're not so much marked. We don't so much understand

00:03:47.200 ourselves as the product, the givenness of our surroundings, as we understand ourselves as a

00:03:53.820 collection of feelings, desires, et cetera, et cetera. So when I use the term self, I'm really

00:03:59.020 trying to get at how do we intuitively think about who we are, what we are relative to the world around

00:04:05.560 us. And you talk about in the book, Charles Taylor, he discusses that shift from the outer way of

00:04:11.820 defining ourself to the inner. He calls it expressive individualism. Can you flesh that out a little bit

00:04:16.640 more for us? Yeah. The idea of expressive individualism is that, that what makes me really

00:04:22.560 me will be the set of desires, feelings, et cetera, I have inside. And, and what makes me, you know,

00:04:29.840 and this is where we get the, the introduction of an interesting term with which we're all familiar,

00:04:33.800 but which would have been meaningless back in the middle ages. What makes me authentic is my ability

00:04:39.320 to express outwardly that which I feel I am inwardly. So expressive individualism is this idea that

00:04:45.520 fundamentally, I'm an individual. I define myself. I'm defined by my individual desires, passions,

00:04:52.900 feelings, and I find my authenticity, my place in this world by being able to express those outwardly.

00:05:01.760 Okay. And we'll hopefully go back to this idea of authenticity because yeah, it's something I think

00:05:05.280 we take for granted because you hear it so much these days, but something you do in the book is you do

00:05:09.700 a genealogical exploration of how do we get to this point of expressive individual and where we define

00:05:15.960 ourselves by our inner feelings. And a lot of people might think, well, this is a 20th century,

00:05:21.160 maybe late 19th century phenomenon, but you are, you know, this goes back hundreds of years. So,

00:05:26.080 I mean, you'd go into detail, but brief thumbnail sketch. How do we go from a point where we define

00:05:31.320 ourselves by who our parents are, where we live, maybe our profession to whatever we feel inside of

00:05:38.120 ourselves? Yeah, it's a good question. It's difficult to answer in a sort of short way without

00:05:43.500 indulging in a bit of simplification. But I would say on one level, the last four or 500 years have

00:05:49.840 witnessed, at least in the West, an increasing liquefaction of the world in which we live.

00:05:55.580 What do I mean by that? We're typically no longer bound to space in the way we once were. We travel a

00:06:01.780 lot more. You know, I live in the United States now. I was born in the United Kingdom. So our ability

00:06:07.600 to define ourselves specifically relative to a particular place is no longer what it was.

00:06:15.720 And that's a sort of a symbol of the crumbling of these external authorities in general. The givenness

00:06:23.440 of the world has become highly negotiable. So that's the one side of the story is the old traditional

00:06:30.820 markers of identity have become very volatile, very insubstantial. On the other hand, what moves in

00:06:38.600 to replace them is a kind of move inward. You see this philosophically with somebody like Descartes.

00:06:44.600 Descartes wrestling with a difficult question. In the 17th century, when everything around seems to be

00:06:51.020 changing, when everything is becoming fluid, what can I be certain of? Is there somewhere,

00:06:56.340 is there an Archimedean point where I can sort of place myself and stand and work out from that

00:07:03.080 because that is the one place that is certain? And he finds a certainty, of course, in his own mind.

00:07:08.660 I think, therefore I am. And Descartes is, I think, representative of a great shift that's taking

00:07:15.740 place in the 17th century where that inner space, you know, the one constant we all feel in our lives

00:07:22.540 these days is our self-consciousness, our psychological lives seem to be the one thing

00:07:28.220 that gives some sort of continuity to our lives, some sort of continuity to our existence. So it's

00:07:35.420 that crumbling of traditional external authorities combined with a reactive move inwards, I think,

00:07:42.180 that really sets the stage for the extremes of expressive individualism that we see manifested

00:07:48.980 in the world today. And part of that reaction or that turn inward you talk about in the book was

00:07:55.740 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the development of Romanticism. For those who aren't familiar with

00:07:59.820 the idea of Romanticism, what is that? Romanticism is really an artistic cultural movement that flourishes

00:08:05.980 in the late 18th and then on into the first half of the 19th century, associated with poets such as

00:08:13.460 Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, an artist such as J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich. Music,

00:08:20.820 I think some of the later Beethoven has romantic touches to it, but Chopin would be a romantic

00:08:26.240 composer. When you compare, say, the music of a Chopin to the music of a Bach, you don't have to

00:08:33.160 know anything about music to know that something significant has gone on there. In Bach, you have

00:08:38.100 a lot of structure and order. If you move to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or to Chopin's Nocturnes,

00:08:47.180 that music is not structured and ordered in quite the same way. It's not chaos, but it's really pulling

00:08:53.020 on the heartstrings. It's attempting to cultivate an emotional reaction in a way that Bach is not.

00:09:00.460 And that's reflective of Romanticism as a term to cover a cultural artistic movement that is

00:09:06.860 really wanting to explore, stimulate, and shape those inner emotional feelings and responses.

00:09:14.740 And then later on in the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that

00:09:18.600 continue this liquefaction of the self. And you go into detail about Friedrich Nietzsche and his

00:09:23.940 contribution to our changing ideas of the self. And I thought it was interesting because I think a lot

00:09:28.320 of times people in the modern world, they say things, they may say something about what it means

00:09:33.060 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

00:09:38.900 thinking, you don't realize this, but like, that's Friedrich Nietzsche. You don't know it. So tell us

00:09:43.820 about Friedrich Nietzsche and his contribution to this inward turn of the self. Yeah. Well, Nietzsche's

00:09:48.840 a remarkable 19th century philosopher, has almost no influence in his own lifetime. I think there's one

00:09:54.400 lecture given on Nietzsche's philosophy before he collapses in madness in 1889. Nietzsche's the man

00:10:02.620 who caused the bluff on the Enlightenment. If we would take Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a typical

00:10:07.520 philosopher, think about Rousseau is wanting to explore the inner space and he wants to ground

00:10:13.300 morality very much in sort of spontaneous, sympathetic reactions. You know, Rousseau essentially says,

00:10:20.160 you know, as soon as you've got laws, you know, something's gone wrong. If you see an injustice

00:10:24.100 taking place, you should naturally respond to that injustice. There should be, there's a, there's a

00:10:30.740 human instinct for justice. Rousseau, in other words, he's, he's rightly pointing to the role, I think,

00:10:36.860 of feelings in ethical reasoning. If, you know, if you see somebody being beaten up and you feel

00:10:40.920 nothing emotional, you're a psychopath. We, we, we understand the need for feelings in our ethical

00:10:46.700 decisions. But Rousseau grounds that really in, in an understanding of human beings as having a human

00:10:54.540 nature. And what Nietzsche does in the 19th century is he effectively says to Enlightenment philosophers

00:11:00.100 like Rousseau, and particularly to the thought of somebody like Immanuel Kant, he says, hang on a minute,

00:11:05.120 you guys have marginalized or even dispatched God into the wilderness. So he doesn't play any positive,

00:11:10.860 constructive role in your thinking, but you've smuggled something in that plays the role of God.

00:11:17.320 You've got rid of God as the sort of the grounds of morality, but you've substituted him with human

00:11:23.660 nature. You still think there's such a thing as human nature and human nature has an authoritative

00:11:30.020 moral structure to which all human beings are answerable. In other words, to be a human being

00:11:36.580 is to have a moral structure. And Nietzsche says, you know, you can't do that. If you've killed God,

00:11:42.120 if you've got rid of God, if you've killed God, you've really got rid of human nature as well.

00:11:46.800 And that morality has no objective reality. Morality is at best a contrick pulled by the weak

00:11:56.740 to subvert the strength of the strong. And where that features in the sort of the psychological

00:12:02.840 story is, you know, Nietzsche is fascinated by how our psychological response to the world around us

00:12:10.500 shapes our moral thinking. But he's detaching that from any objective moral structure now.

00:12:17.300 And this will have consequences later on. We'll see that. And Alistair McIntyre,

00:12:22.800 we'll get to him. He grapples with the consequences of Nietzsche's ideas because they're significant,

00:12:28.120 even though we might not think about them. You mentioned authenticity and Charles Taylor's

00:12:32.320 thinking on that. By authenticity, he meant that you have to live your life according to whatever you

00:12:37.300 feel on the inside. And that's kind of a sort of a given. That's how you want to live your life today.

00:12:41.840 And if you don't do that, then you have some sort of false consciousness. At what point does Taylor

00:12:47.300 think authenticity became a moral ideal? It's really in the 18th and early 19th century,

00:12:54.420 you know, the romantics are really the ones who start to articulate this in a powerful way. 0.69

00:13:00.960 William Wordsworth writes this poem, it's not one of his greatest poems, this poem, The Idiot Boy, 0.94

00:13:05.720 which is this poem about a child, we would say today, a child with serious learning 0.98

00:13:11.480 difficulties. And he gets heavily criticized for this, you know, why are you writing a poem that

00:13:16.620 appears to be mocking a child with such difficulties? And he responds in a letter to one of his

00:13:21.680 students and friends. He says, you know, basically, I'm not mocking him. I'm using him as an example.

00:13:27.640 We would now say, I'm using The Idiot Boy as an example of somebody with no filters. And what you 0.99

00:13:33.100 have when you go to somebody like that, we would say no filters, an inability to pick up on social

00:13:38.980 cues, etc. What you've got there is human nature in a more pristine state. It's not being corrupted by

00:13:47.080 the conventions of society. With The Idiot Boy, what you see is what you get. And Wordsworth would 1.00

00:13:53.260 say, you know, and that takes you to the core of what it means to be a human being that binds us

00:13:59.100 all together. Urbanized society has trained us to behave in different ways. It's alienated us from

00:14:05.540 that universal humanity. And so with somebody like Wordsworth, that's where you get the, you know,

00:14:11.440 the emerging notion of authenticity, this idea that if we can get back beyond social conventions

00:14:17.320 to those untamed, untrammeled, truly human feelings inside and live according to them,

00:14:26.720 then that's what it means to be truly human. Or that's what it means to be an authentic human.

00:14:31.780 And they believe that if you did that, everything would just be honky dory.

00:14:34.160 That's the idea. If you could, the romantic ideal is a sort of a return to a rural idyll,

00:14:40.360 if you like, where you don't have the kind of petty rivalries, ambitions, nastiness,

00:14:47.300 anonymity that is associated with the city. I grew up in a village. I can guarantee you that

00:14:52.820 the rural idyll is not as idyllic as the romantics thought it was.

00:14:57.880 And Nietzsche called them on their blood. He's like, yeah, you think that's what's going to happen,

00:15:01.340 but actually probably not. So what's going to happen if everyone's living by their inner,

00:15:05.240 their inner desires.

00:15:07.240 Nietzsche has a much darker view of what it means to be human in many ways. The romantics have a very

00:15:12.400 naive view. You know, we could somewhat simplify, but we could say, you know, for somebody like

00:15:17.240 Rousseau, bottom line is it's society that corrupts us. With Nietzsche, you know, you've got the idea that

00:15:23.900 actually what makes us great are the dark and violent desires that we have. Nietzsche is a sort

00:15:31.420 of philosophical precursor of Freud in a lot of ways.

00:15:36.660 Okay. So I think what we can talk about here, what we have here, what Charles Taylor sets up for us

00:15:41.420 is that there's this shift from a sense of self that is ordered by the outside, by the external,

00:15:47.140 where you live, who your parents are, the church, monarchy. As we progress through the enlightenment

00:15:53.060 and things like technology allowed you to travel, you're no longer tied to the family farm.

00:15:59.300 Monarchies started going away. We had revolutions in political life. The church started losing

00:16:04.480 authority on people. You have this shift towards figuring out who you are by your inner feelings

00:16:10.500 and your emotions. And the romantics kind of provided some fodder for that. And then you had

00:16:14.660 philosophers like Nietzsche, just adding fuel to the fire. So there's an inward turn.

00:16:19.520 Another thinker that you talk about that helps us understand this inward turn in our sense of self

00:16:25.320 is a sociologist named Philip Reif. And he wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. This was

00:16:31.280 written back in the 1960s. And in this book, Reif lays out sort of a thumbnail sketch of the history of

00:16:38.920 humanity and their conception of the self. And he says there's four ages.

00:16:43.780 What are those four ages of the self?

00:16:46.960 Well, he sees, he sees what societies are sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of

00:16:52.360 four models. Now, I would say in advance, I think the models are somewhat simplistic in that no age

00:16:58.180 exclusively embodies one of these models. But in any given age, I think one of the models is dominant.

00:17:04.780 The first type of man that he thinks of is what he calls political man. And this is where

00:17:10.140 human beings found their fulfillment in their activities, their participation in the public

00:17:17.800 square. So the great example of this might be, you know, fourth century BC Athens, where being

00:17:25.160 involved in the assembly, that was the apex of what it meant to be a human being, to be informed about

00:17:30.260 public affairs, to go to the assembly, to cast your vote, to make your speech, that kind of thing.

00:17:35.520 The polis. It's the polis in participating in the polis that makes you truly human.

00:17:42.100 I was going to say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in public life, you're an idiot. 1.00

00:17:48.740 Like you're a private person. You're looked down upon. You weren't even, you weren't even a person, 1.00

00:17:52.340 basically.

00:17:52.980 No, no. I mean, the Greek, when Aristotle talks about political, you know, man is a political

00:17:58.720 animal. He's meaning man is a man of the polis. He's a man of public life. And as you rightly point

00:18:03.780 out, the opposite of politikos is idiotikos, the private man. So that's the first arrangement. 0.98

00:18:10.200 And Reif sees over time that being supplanted by what he calls religious man. And religious man is,

00:18:16.340 that's an age where human beings find their fulfillment by being involved in public religious

00:18:22.060 rituals. We might think of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a great example of the kind of literature

00:18:27.780 that a society where religious man was the ideal. That's kind of literature, which would be produced

00:18:33.980 in that sort of culture where you have, you know, the shtick in Canterbury Tales is you have this

00:18:39.920 ragbag bunch of pilgrims from all levels of society united in going on this pilgrimage to Canterbury

00:18:46.420 to pay homage to at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Today, we might think, you know, if you may have

00:18:53.120 Muslim friends and they go on the Hajj to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, the idea is that their

00:18:59.360 fulfillment is found in going on this pilgrimage, public pilgrimage to a religious or holy shrine.

00:19:06.960 So religious man is the age where public religious rituals are really the apex of what it means to be 0.97

00:19:13.460 human. This is replaced for Reif what he calls economic man. An economic man is the man who finds his

00:19:19.580 meaning, the purpose of life in his participation in the economic activity of society. So, you know,

00:19:27.640 Charles Dickens' books are full of economic man. He's writing about Industrial Revolution, England. So

00:19:33.980 you have figures like Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Gradgrind. These are figures who find their fulfillment

00:19:40.960 being involved in economic activities in society. And Reif sees all three of these as having something

00:19:49.480 in common. They may sound very different, but what they have in common is this. It is the role of

00:19:54.480 society in shaping you to be a political, religious, or economic man to direct you outwards. So education

00:20:02.600 is about forming you in order to fulfill your political, your religious, or your economic role.

00:20:09.840 Reif sees the present age, and he's writing in 1966. This is, you know, nearly 60 years ago. It's one of

00:20:16.380 those books, Triumph of the Therapeutic, which is more true today than it was when he wrote it. He says

00:20:23.820 that what we have at the end of this is what he calls psychological man. And psychological man is the

00:20:30.240 man whose sense of self, whose sense of fulfillment is entirely wrapped up with kind of psychological

00:20:37.260 feeling of happiness. Is he happy and content with life? And psychological man represents a break with the

00:20:45.280 first three. And the break is this, that in the first three, the individual was to be directed outwards

00:20:52.200 to fit into society. The therapy, if you like, of education was helping you, forming you to be a

00:20:59.340 member of society. And a psychological man, a reverse takes place. Now it becomes increasingly society's

00:21:06.720 role to accommodate itself to your feelings and to your happiness. So we might, you know, one could draw a

00:21:14.560 contrast in forms of learning. I went to a very traditional boy's school in England. Team sports were

00:21:19.720 central to the curriculum. Why? Because education for me as a grammar school boy was about having my

00:21:25.000 individuality crushed and being made into part of the team. That's not child-centered learning that sort of

00:21:32.520 dominates the airwaves today, where the idea is to allow the individual child to flourish. So psychological man,

00:21:40.540 it's a very, very different culture to the first three.

00:21:45.280 And it seems like it's similar to Taylor's idea of expressive individualism.

00:21:49.540 Yeah, it's Taylor's expressive individualism writ large for the whole of society. You know,

00:21:55.200 the romantics are writing, composing, painting away in the late 18th, early 19th century.

00:22:01.760 It takes time for that vision of what it means to be human, to permeate the whole of society,

00:22:08.320 and indeed to begin to transform the institutions of society.

00:22:12.780 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:22:17.480 And now back to the show. And something Reef talks about, one of the defining characteristics

00:22:21.980 of psychological man is that they have an analytical attitude. What does he mean by the

00:22:27.320 analytical attitude?

00:22:28.600 Yeah, it has been a lot of things in Reef. It's a bit opaque.

00:22:32.980 Yeah, he's a hard read. He's a very hard read.

00:22:35.200 And I think actually that's part of the game. He's trying to disorient the reader sometimes.

00:22:40.620 I'll give you his definition, and then I'll try to sort of unpack it a bit.

00:22:44.560 The definition that he gives in Triumph of the Therapeutic is,

00:22:47.580 the analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertaining tentative opinions about the inner

00:22:54.400 dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law,

00:22:59.620 insofar as it originates outside the individual, in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse.

00:23:07.260 Now, he's talking there about Freud, and I think what he's trying to get at is this,

00:23:11.320 that for Freud, society makes demands upon us. And it does that. It curbs our inner desires

00:23:19.960 in order to allow us to live together. To put it in its most crude terms, for Freud,

00:23:26.740 males want to rape and pillage. Our sexual desires are very, very powerful. We are savages, 1.00

00:23:34.380 but we can't live together if we're savages. So there's a trade-off between the desire of the

00:23:40.200 individual and the needs of society for perpetuating society. That creates, though,

00:23:46.200 those restrictions that society places upon us create all kinds of dysfunctions and malfunctions.

00:23:52.300 We're never happy. We struggle because we're not allowed to be who we really are because we need

00:23:59.440 to be civilized. And I think what Reef is getting at with the analytic attitude is the analytic attitude

00:24:04.580 is really that study, that reflection upon that learning about the inner desires that allows us then

00:24:11.120 to sort of negotiate between those desires and the demands of society. It's not that we can ever come

00:24:18.300 to a fully adequate compromise between the two, a peace treaty between the two. But the goal of

00:24:26.980 therapy, for example, is to allow you to understand why you feel the way you do, why you struggle the way

00:24:34.020 you do, to come to terms with the way you are. Key, I think, to the analytic attitude is there is no

00:24:40.860 objective moral order there. There is no divinely sanctioned moral order. There are really just

00:24:45.740 social conventions. They have a pragmatic usefulness, but they're ultimately not grounded

00:24:51.540 in anything beyond themselves. So the real thing you're wrestling with are your inner desires. Those are

00:24:58.140 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 0.97

00:28:06.900 loved ones in it. You know, hey, if my wife is no longer meeting my needs to feel happy, 0.98

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,

00:28:26.620 I would say, a very impoverishing way.

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.

00:33:28.560 What's your take on Jung?

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. 0.90

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

00:41:52.660 the good life.

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

00:42:53.320 exacerbating this modern sense of the self.

00:42:56.180 Yeah. When you're online, you're psychological, man.

00:42:58.980 Yeah. Yeah. You're disembodied.

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

00:43:11.740 we've been discussing today?

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

00:48:14.060 what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - April 08, 2025

From Public Citizens to Therapeutic Selves — The Hidden History of Modern Identity

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