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Intellectual Historian Dr Carl Trueman on Politics, Psychology and the Modern Self.

In this special episode of the Sceptic, host Laurie Wastell is joined by intellectual historian Dr Carl Trueman, to discuss his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

Many of the ideas that drive our politics today are strange by historical standards. Why is such great importance placed on sex, sexuality and identity politics? Why have questions about the family become so ardently politicised? When did our therapeutic society stop believing that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”? And why are we so often told that morality and truth are wholly subjective – whatever ‘feels right’?
Across so many domains, the personal has become political. In this conversation with Sceptic host Laurie Wastell, intellectual historian Dr Carl Trueman explains how today’s ‘me, me, me’ social imaginary stems from what he calls The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, in his book of that title. In an argument encompassing Rousseau, Nietzsche, the Romantic poets and the Sexual Revolution, Dr Trueman sets out how our dominant social ethos of “expressive individualism” arose – and shows what its consequences have been.

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Produced by Richard Eldred.
Filmed at the Westminster Podcast Studio.

00:00 Intro
01:59 Understanding modern politics
03:26 What the “modern self” is and how personhood changed
05:55 Why identity turned inward over time
08:49 Key thinkers behind expressive individualism
09:40 How culture and technology shape belief
12:53 Sexuality shifting from behaviour to identity
15:29 Therapeutic politics and identity validation
16:27 Why free speech is redefined as harm
17:47 Social media and the loss of privacy
20:05 Emotion replacing restraint as a norm
22:52 From imitation to self-creation
23:21 Rejecting limits: body, nature and technology
26:26 Lasch and the failure of elite progress
28:30 Identity politics in multicultural societies
29:07 Shared iconoclasm of Left and Islamism
31:52 Why shared morality breaks down
34:46 Elites abandoning cultural continuity
36:48 Desecration as a cultural instinct
37:51 Community and faith as responses