Guests: Tim Matthews and Jonathan Teague

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution

By Carl R. Trueman

Strange New World is an abbreviated edition of Dr. Trueman’s longer book titled The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

In this book, Dr. Trueman is going to examine how a person became a self, the self became sexualized, and sex became politicized.

Chapter 3 Prometheus Unbound

Dan’s comment: where/how did we get rid of objective truth (God as the standard for truth)?

Jonathan’s comment: these ideas are not thousands of years in the past - many of the ideas still popular today are heavily influenced by Marx and Nietzsche

Tim’s comment: these ideologies are not helpful, they are harmful!

Karl Marx

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.

Religion is a sign of intellectual weakness in its adherents and a means of social oppression for its proponents. Further, freedom can be achieved only by the abolition of religion.

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whither is God?” he cried: “I will tell you. We have killed him–you and I.”

God is dead.

Dan’s comment: If God is dead, then we are free from all moral constraints.

We might express Nietzsche’s thought this way: freed from the burden of being creatures of God, human beings must rise to the challenge of self-creation, of being whoever they choose to be. Put perhaps even more bluntly: be whoever or whatever works for you. You should feel no obligation to conform to the standards or criteria of anybody else.

Chapter 4 Sexualizing Psychology, Politicizing Sex

Tim’s comment: your sexuality, while important, is such a shallow measure of your total human existence and being.

…sexual desire has emerged in the last one hundred years as a primary category for understanding our identity. In biblical times or in ancient Greece, sex was regarded as something that human beings did; today it is considered to be something vital to who human beings are.

Sigmund Freud

First, the notion that sex is foundational to human happiness is central to Freud’s thinking.

So, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are key to the definition of happiness. And where is the greatest pleasure to be found? Freud is in no doubt:

Man’s discovery that sexual (genital) love afforded him the strongest experiences of satisfaction and in fact provided him with the prototype of all happiness, must have suggested to him that he should continue to seek the satisfaction of happiness in his life along the path of sexual relations and that he should make genital erotism the central point of his life.

When we add to this that Freud also saw sexual desire as existing from infancy, the point is further reinforced: our identities as human beings are in a very important sense fundamentally defined by our sexual desires.

The fulfilled life is a sexually fulfilled life.

Wilhelm Reich

In plain English, the sexual morality of Reich’s day is designed to reinforce the structure and authority of the traditional family. The social function of the traditional family is to raise children who are instinctively obedient to a strong authoritarian (father) figure–in Reich’s eyes, a figure such as Hitler.

The point is clear: sexual codes must be shattered if human beings are to be truly free. Those things that inhibit the free sexual expression, even of young children, are oppressive and prevent individuals from truly being themselves.