American Culture Individualism - Absolutely with
It was my privilege to write the foreword for the book. Those are a dime a dozen. Nor is it a pietistic exhortation to prayer, study, and sober living, of which we have countless examples. Rather, it is a sophisticated survey and analysis of cultural history by a brilliant teacher who is not only an orthodox Christian but also a pastor who understands the actual needs of the flock — and who, unlike so many intellectuals, can write like a dream. I suspect Carl asked me to write the foreword because I played a small role in bringing the book to fruition. This book is the result, but Carl ranges far beyond Rieff in its pages. I have been telling everybody I know that they need to get this book — and not just Christians. American Culture IndividualismCarl R. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books; his most recent is the just published volume titled The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolutionfrom Crossway. Deeply researched and impressively American Culture Individualism, it has been described by Archbishop Charles J. Francis J. Trueman recently corresponded with Carl E.
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Olson, editor of Catholic World Reportabout the book. CWR: Your book, as the American Culture Individualism aptly indicates, takes on a rather daunting array of related issues. How and why did you come to write the book? As a result, I started reading Rieff in depth and connecting his analysis of modern culture with that of other writers, particularly Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre.
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As I did so, it became clear to me that an introduction to Rieff Indivkdualism not be as useful a project as a more thoroughgoing analysis of our current cultural climate using the analytical concepts which these three had developed. At the time the big issues in American Culture Individualism public square were gay marriage and, post-Obergefell, transgenderism, on which issues I was regularly writing at First Things.
And so I decided to write a book applying Rieff, Taylor, and MacIntyre to the current pathologies of sexual identity https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/blog/story-in-italian/the-problem-of-evil-an-argument-against.php. A year on the James Madison Program at Princeton University then gave me the opportunity to do the necessary research.
And what are some key aspects of the transformation that has led to the normalization of transgenderism? In twenty-first century America all of these things are very different to, say, thirteenth-century England. In earlier times, my identity was something I understood to American Culture Individualism shaped by external factors — my family line, my geographical location, my status within the fixed social hierarchy.
Today, American Culture Individualism think of our identity as something we ourselves decide and as something that rests not so much upon external factors as upon internal psychology. The most extreme example is the transgender person who is convinced that the external authority of the sexed body must bow to the internal psychological conviction of the mind. CWR: As you note, people have always struggled with sexual sins and related ills.
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What is new or unique about the sexual revolution in modern times? Trueman: The American Culture Individualism revolution is not about expanding the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior. It is about abolishing sexual taboos in their entirety. Developing upon a American Culture Individualism fusion of Marx and Freud in the s, theorists such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse saw restrictive sexual codes Culturs a means of bourgeois control of the culture, specifically through the presentation and protection of the patriarchal nuclear family the means, they argued, for producing suppliant and obedient members of bourgeois American Culture Individualism. So the road to revolution required the shattering of such taboos. Of course, few IIndividualism have read Reich or Marcuse, but the idea that sexual codes are hindering human happiness is both appealing most humans have sexual desires, the fulfillment of which they consider highly pleasurable and has been popularized through magazines, movies, and the mainstreaming of pornography.
So the situation we now have is one where the idea of any but the most minimal restraint on sexual activity of which the need for consent is the most obvious is intuitively regarded as oppressive and hindering our authenticity. The fate of modesty is a great example of this: in the past, debates about modesty were debates about limits — e.
Are bikinis acceptable? Today the mainstream culture read more not debate modesty because Americsn has come to see the very concept as oppressive — I can wear what I like. Trueman: Expressive individualism is the idea that we are most authentically ourselves when we perform outwardly that which we feel inwardly. Dancing then was about learning the steps and finding your place in the established dance.]
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