Truth Really Matters

http://punchdrunksoul.com/tag/life-coach/ The ideas, intuitions, and philosophies that dominate the attention of today’s culture did not spring forth suddenly, nor did they arise by chance.  In particular, the identity and gender claims that were once so counterintuitive – “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” – seem reasonable to so many because of the penetration of critical theory and poststructuralism in the schools and other institutions.  History matters and has led inexorably to where we are today.

This is the theme of Carl Trueman’s excellent 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self:  Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.  While Trueman’s treatment is sweeping and insightful, he neglects the invisible roots of all societal degradations – the spiritual war in which Satan schemes to destroy families, corrupt children, and damn souls.  What Trueman does masterfully is to analyze the human and historical instruments Satan uses to infest culture, education, media, and politics.

The cultural changes in the West have moved with startling rapidity.  Twenty years ago a majority was basically opposed to gay marriage, and most of the laws were consistent with that opposition.  Today gay marriage is uncontroversial and trans ideology is dogmatically embraced by all the institutions.

Key historical figures played pivotal roles in what has become a tsunami of moral change.  Trueman notes that Sigmund Freud was key to the sexual revolution by shifting the understanding of self:  “The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized.”  Sex used to be for procreation and recreation.  Freud reinterpreted sex to define “who we are, as individuals, as societies, and as a species.”  To Freud we are fundamentally sexual beings from infancy on.  Our sexual desires define who we are.  (What a pitiful contrast to the biblical view of individuals created in God’s image!)

Karl Marx laid the foundation to make sex political.  In Marx’s day oppression was about economics or legal / class distinctions.  Now oppression has been psychologized.  Freud’s ideas were combined with Marx’s by leftists like Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse.  Politics is now internal and subjective.  Nobody is allowed to tell you that you’re wrong.  Evidence is irrelevant.  And so is reality.  You define reality.  You are the god of your identity.

Trueman observes that (what I recall growing up in the 1960s as) the sexual revolution has gone far beyond a relaxing of boundaries or a higher incidence of moral transgressions.  Rather, the intent and the practice has been to abolish moral codes entirely.  Furthermore, anyone that clings to traditional or, worse, biblical morals is evil and should be punished.  We live in the culture described by the prophet Isaiah, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil . . .” (Isaiah 5:20-23).  Anyone that isn’t happy in the new Wild West of sexual immorality becomes a political enemy.

May we debate these issues, perhaps on the campuses of our institutions of higher learning?  Karl Marx offered advice on how to use criticism to defeat the enemies of the revolution:  “Its essential sentiment is indignation; its essential activity is denunciation.”  And so we see no dialogoues, no debates.  What matters is power and the squashing of opposition, with as much prejudice as possible.

Accordingly, the language has been transformed to deligitimize dissent.  Say anything negative about homosexual behavior and you are guilty of homophobia.  The term phobia puts you into the realm of the irrational and stigmatizes you as bigoted.

Ultimately, of course, this is a worldview battle at the intellectual level and a spiritual battle at its foundation.  Trueman observes that Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin destroyed teleology (meaning, purpose) for generations to follow.  No God, no meaning – therefore, no morality.  What you can do and what you can get others to do is up to you and whether you have the power to make it happen.  Morals are just a matter of taste.  All this groundwork, Trueman asserts, is laid by the end of the 19^th century.

Trueman describes the worldview battle in terms highlighted by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, mimesis and poiesis.  A mimetic view sees the world as ordered and external; it’s up to us to discover how it works.  A poietic view sees the world as raw material that can be fashioned by the individual; it’s up to us to create meaning and purpose as we like.

It is no surprise that from ancient times most people take the mimetic view.  Trueman considers medieval Europe, a mostly agrarian society.  Farming was dependent on geography, seasons, and weather, and the farmer had to cope with what was available in soils and seeds.  He was at the mercy of an external environment.  “The world was what it was, and the individual needed to conform to it.”

Technology shifted the perspective.  Irrigation allowed water to move or to be stored, fertilizers and pesticides increased yield, genetic engineering allowed more variety (or less) and more immunity to pests.  Such innovations shift the way we think about the world.  Childbirth is not so risky.  Transportation and communication developments allow us to live and work in ways never dreamed of centuries ago.  With online games and with virtual reality you can pretend to be somebody else!

In short, reality seems to be manipulatable.  So, back to “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” . . . why can’t I use technology to do something about that!  Well, for one thing, the nanotechnology of life is far beyond human science.  Surgeries and chemicals do not actually transform a man into a woman, not at the genetic level, nor at the physiological level, and not even at the functional level.

Nevertheless, the medical establishment is eager to make huge profits by doing something to pretend that the impossible was achieved.

We hate limits, don’t we?  We enjoy our creativity, we have a free will that yearns for more than life typically allows . . . hey, can’t we be like gods?  These desires aren’t new.  See Genesis chapter 3 for how that worked the first time people tried it.

Trueman’s grandfather left school at fifteen and worked for decades as a sheet metal worker in a Birmingham factory.  If you had asked him about job satisfaction he might not have understood the question – he did not belong to “psychological man’s” world.  But he certainly embraced the need for the job to put food on his family’s table and shoes on the kids’ feet.  So yeah, the job was satisfying.  In the ‘old days’ the key to self-esteem was about production and taking care of others around you.  The key to self is outward directed.

In contrast, for Trueman, a university professor, and for his students, fulfillment comes from the pleasure of teaching, learning new concepts, growing intellectually.  Feelings are central; the focus is inward.  Modern life has many options.

Counseling and therapy have changed in modern times.  Historically, it was about helping someone to understand their community and environment so they could adapt, fit in, even conform to the “canons and protocols of society.”  Now it’s about you, about your feelings.

Trueman summarizes history in an interesting way.  “The ancient Athenian was committed to the assembly, the medieval Christian to his church, and the 20^th century factory worker to his trade union and working-man’s club.”  A man’s purpose necessitated commitment to something outside himself.  Today’s psychological man, though, is committed first and foremost to self.

Thus we see schools and churches as places “to perform, not to be formed.”  Churches strive to be seeker-sensitive.  If we ‘don’t like it,’ we try another.  Schools work to assure and reassure; they don’t examine, challenge, and confront a spectrum of beliefs.  The phenomenon of ‘snowflakes’ is the result of the psychologizing of self and the inward-directed focus of therapy.  It’s all about me and if I run into anything that challenges my comfort, I’m proudly and loudly triggered.

I have a right to psychological happiness.  If anyone says something I can perceive as racially or sexually offensive, I’m thrilled; oops, I mean outraged because I’ve been oppressed.  I’m a glorious victim.  Words are now more important than violence; rather, words are violence.

Freedom of speech is dead.

Yet it is not enough to avoid offense.  Everyone must affirm and celebrate what they used to call sin.  If you object to homosexual behavior or trans ideology you are attacking – violently – the identity of people.

Alasdair MacIntyre defines emotivism as the doctrine that all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, attitude, or feeling.  Thus, saying Homosexual behavior is wrong means I personally disapprove of it and you should do likewise.  Trouble comes when the emotivists in favor of homosexual behavior, sodomy, or trans surgeries for children achieve political power.  At that point, their personal preference becomes dogmatic truth enforced by law.  All of the new moralities, which were evil immoralities for thousands of years, become universal moral imperatives and you must conform instantly and enthusiastically.  If you weren’t aware that everything had changed, that’s tough.  You can’t ask questions.

Conservative Christians, who believe in a transcendent God who defines reality and has declared moral laws that are wired into the reality of human persons, have no common ground on which to debate such matters, since the cultural consensus equates each psychologized man as his own god with no higher authority.

But is that true?  Is there no common ground?  The Bible teaches us that God has wired into each of us a conscience that discerns right and wrong.  The biblical pattern is to declare truth boldly and compassionately, because God has written His law into our hearts.  Since Trueman is a professing Christian I think he shouldn’t miss this point.  The spiritual war must be fought with spiritual weapons.  Share the Gospel, hand out Gospel tracts, speak truth even and especially when it is counter-cultural.  Trust the Holy Spirit to bring fruit where the seed finds good soil, even if we see no evidence of results.  God gave us our job to do.  He’ll do His job.

The Gospel was born into a wicked, pagan culture.  Living the open and honest Christian life was not easy then.  Why should it be easy now?  Apart from the West, the Christian life in this world entails suffering and, often, death.  Above all, the Christian life, as Jesus summarized as the two greatest commandments, is to love God and to love others.

Today’s non-Christian world owes its philosophy, in part, to 18^th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who professed his perspective in his autobiography:  “It is the history of my soul that I promised . . . all I need do, as I have done up until now, is to look inside myself.”

To Rousseau and to the modern anti-Christian culture, the essence of a person is the inner psychological life.  Thus, the young Rousseau explains away his crime of petty theft as the result of social pressure.  Additional vices afflicted him because others treated him badly, and so he became lazy and started lying.  When his father punished him that made him manipulative and covetous.  All Rousseau’s problems were the fault of others.  He was a victim!  But this is just childishness!  Do we not live in a culture in which all the kids have never grown up?

20^th century sociology was fascinated by primitive cultures.  Many concluded that the only way to be authentic was to become a hypothetical savage, unencumbered by society’s expectations.  To fit into modern culture requires suppression of natural instincts.  Far better to be “true to one’s inner (real) self.”  Accordingly, let’s deconstruct Christian morality and let everyone’s inner self out for fully authentic expression.

Tragically, as the 21^st century dawned and Western culture had disemboweled Christianity, it was replaced by woke culture, which demands absolute conformity and whose principles are viciously dogmatic and inauthentic with regard to reality.  I’ve noticed lately some debate in the media about how to define wokism.  That’s easy if you’re willing to be blunt.  Wokism stands for everything the Christian faith stands against, and stands against everything virtuous the Bible teaches.  Just go through the list regarding woke dogma on marriage, sexuality, abortion, transgenderism, freedom of thought and speech, mercy and forgiveness, civility, honesty in debate and dialogue, racism, free markets, responsibility, hard work, rewards based on merit, law and order, crime and punishment . . . the list is actually much longer.

Rousseau’s inner construction of the authentic self, unconstrained by others, “is the necessary philosophical precondition for modern identity politics,” including sexual politics, Trueman concludes.  With trans ideology the inner voice is freed “even from chromosomes and the primary sexual characteristics of the physical body.”

Moderns have imagined they have become little gods, fulfilling the promise of Satan to Eve in the garden.  Even the secular conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has pointed out that there is no compromise with Christianity in this.  The Christian faith and trans ideology are antagonists and in collision.

Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was representative of radical thought at the beginning of the 19^th century.  Shelley advocated sexual freedom.  Christian morality hindered such freedom, especially regarding marriage.  Shelley also despised the commercial marketplace, seeing it somehow as preventing people from being truly free, since everything must have its price and prices are governed by the forces of the market.  His sentiments here anticipated Karl Marx later in the century.

Modern consumerism promises that you can be transformed, or at least feel better, with the swipe of a card.  Now you have that car or fridge or purse or suit that will fulfill you.  But just wait a little while and you must have the newest model or upgrade.  Trueman:  “The  underlying dynamic of the consumer marketplace is that desires can never be fully satisfied.”

Reality – individual limitations – intervene when trying to reinvent ourselves.  I might desire to be the #1 tennis player in the world, but at age 71 it would be foolish to try.  I might yearn to explore, in person, Jupiter’s moons or the Andromeda galaxy, but the technology and resources simply don’t exist . . . yet.  (I’m hoping that during the Millennium, or beyond, what is impossible now . . .)

I don’t want to become a woman, but if I did, the medical science and technology do not come close.  I could just ‘say’ I’m a woman, but what would that even mean?  Our newest Supreme Court Justice, apparently a woman because the President insisted on appointing a woman, could not explain in open hearings just what a woman is.

Reality matters.  Trueman reprints Nietzsche’s “God is dead” passage from The Gay Science to point out that once they have killed God, there is no foundation upon which the townspeople can build their stable, comfortable lives.  The nonexistence of God is not like that of unicorns or centaurs.  Nothing is built on that mythology.  But, Trueman writes, “To dispense with God, however, is to destroy the very foundations on which a whole world of metaphysics and morality has been constructed and depends.”

Of course, Nietzsche was content with the supposed death of God; what he wanted was to reexamine and reinvent science, logic, and morality in light of a naturalistic worldview.   Well, how’s it going?  The Christian faith has been deconstructed in the West.  What is taking its place?  Chaos, confusion, and misery.  Just one data point:  In the last generation, for the first time in history, most Americans don’t want to have children.  In the U.S. the replacement birth rate is 1.6.  You need 2.1 to break even.  Most of the rest of the West is even worse than America.  This reflects self-absorption and hopelessness.

What Darwin accomplished was to provide a pseudo-scientific foundation for atheism, an intellectual excuse to banish God despite the utter lack of evidence to support evolution.  (See my free ebook on the subject.)  With the Christian worldview gone, we are no longer image-bearers, we are not accountable to anyone higher than ourselves, and we can make any rules we like, including rules defining identity.

Back to Nietzsche . . . no God means no ultimate future.  Only the present matters and what pleasure and personal satisfaction you can find.  This certainly reflects our present age.

With man focused on himself and how he can make others conform, Marx provides strategies for power.  History is about oppression and in politics, economics, and cultural ideas, you can imagine powerful groups marginalizing others.  All social organizations become political until all of life is about political power.  Trueman:  “Everything – from the Boy Scouts to Hollywood movies to cake baking – has become politicized.”  Play the game well enough and your group can be on top, oppressing others.

You can see this in modern politics and culture.  Oppression of others is supposedly evil, but when leftists use tactics to accuse and denigrate their opponents, and then cancel or oppress or even prosecute them, it’s apparently a righteous act.

Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin, along with their philosophical heirs, hate Christianity above all.  That’s strange, isn’t it?  Shouldn’t they despise Islam above all, considering its history, present collection of Islamic tyrannies, and its treatment of women, even in the West?

The superficial complaint has always been that Christianity hinders people from freedom and happiness, although history dramatically shows the reverse to be true.  Anti-Christian tyrannies have always been and are still today, along with Islamic states, destroyers of personal freedom and well-being, except for their privileged elites.

The facts of history are embarrassing, though, and so history must be erased, textbooks rewritten, statues smashed.  Trueman extends the thought to transgenderism,  which must erase the individual’s history, and rewrite not only science, but simple common sense.

Freud was so focused on sex that he redefined true happiness as sexual satisfaction.  Trueman:  “The way to be happy is to engage in behavior that leads one to be sexually satisfied.”  This necessarily starts, according to Freud, in childhood, even in infancy.  You can see the genesis of today’s dystopian efforts to sexualize children, even if that seems best served by confusing them and coercing them into mutilating surgeries.

Contemporary education follows Freud, especially in government-controlled schools, in their efforts to liberate the sexual instincts of children and separating them from any Christian influence.

Freud’s committed focus led him to despise Christianity, of course.  He concluded that “scientifically,” religious belief correlated with mental deficiency or emotional immaturity.  This attitude has taken hold of our culture and legal system.  Yet Freud was concerned about loosing the boundaries that Christianity provided to restrain the dark and violent tendencies in man.  His alternative?  Psychoanalysis!  A professional class of psychologists will surely guide mankind toward a golden age.

Wilhelm Reich’s writings in the 1930s combined ideas from Marx and Freud to argue for abolishing the nuclear family to enable political liberation.  Reich argued that the family is the totalitarian state in miniature, producing compliant youth.  Reich was trying to explain the rise of Fascism and Nazism.  At the core of Reich’s strategy was sex education and sexual freedom for children.  Parents were enemies and obstacles to overcome.  The state should be used to punish parents who resist.

In the 1960s Herbert Marcuse encouraged ‘free love’ and ‘untrammeled sexual experimentation’ as vital factors in the revolutionary liberation of society.  Marcuse equated sexual freedom with political freedom and sought to shatter the heterosexual norms.  Marcuse saw the need for speech to be regulated to foster the right political consciousness across society and to insure proper outcomes.  Bad words and bad ideas inflict psychological damage and oppression, so the language must be deconstructed.  Only the elites on the Left are qualified to make such changes.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s companion, Simone de Beauvoir, published her text on feminist theory, The Second Sex, in 1949.  She laid the foundation for the trans movement when she wrote, “The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such.”  The body itself is less important.  Now, the medical establishment pretends they can use technology to transform the body from male to female or vice versa.  It’s a crude con.

Trueman cites Joanne Herman who asks why so many who claim to be trans seek surgery and hormone treatments.  If gender is merely a social construct, then the body is not important for gender identity.  I would extend the thought:  Why not insist the medical establishment guarantee full functionality and performance in the new physical gender?  Let an impartial panel judge whether they can measure any differences between your new body and one born in that physical gender.  Let the guarantee be indemnified by a ten million dollar bond, because if the transition fails, a life is wrecked . . . as many indeed do testify.

The famous feminist Germaine Greer, in The Female Eunuch (1971) wrote, “No so-called sex change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight.”  And then, Trueman observes, there is menstruation and pregnancy.  Trueman reports that Greer believes that men who claim they have transitioned to women are simply trying to conform themselves to what they, as males, think women should be.  Is not this the ultimate in mansplaining?

From the Christian / biblical / reality point of view, cleaving gender from sex or expanding the definition of marriage is to deny and destroy what God wired into the world.  Beneath the political and cultural battles is a spiritual war waged by a relentless enemy – Satan.  Christians should grieve for those duped by the culture into gender dysphoria.  It’s become a ‘fad’ amplified by social media and a complicit educational establishment, although the word ‘fad’ seems too trivial for the human tragedies sweeping the West.

The only answer for individuals who have been caught up in these social movements and Satanic ideologies is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Repentance and trust in the Savior generates the new birth, a truly transformed spiritual creature, who can tap God’s strength and power to live a constructive and fruitful life.  If you’re a Christian who has been obedient to share the Gospel regularly, consistently, then keep at it, graciously and boldly.  You may just save a soul and a life.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com