The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self Book Review

Lately, I have sat puzzled over “how in the world have we gotten to where the world now promotes that declaring whatever we want to say about ourselves is truth”.  Trueman explains this conundrum in eloquent vernacular.  While reading I had to sit with my iPhone looking up the many multisyllabic words he uses but it was well worth the effort.  The book is fascinating as it lays the road map of philosophies through time, over the last 300 years, yielding the final triumph of the self in modern times being at last free of the constraints of religion.  Just to give a bit of a flavor, “Today’s education as therapy exhibits these pathologies: a liberation from traditional sexual codes and liberation from religion.” page 223 … “If I am whoever I think I am and if any inward sense of psychological well-being is my only moral imperative, then the imposition of external, prior, or static categories is nothing other than an act of imperialism, an attempt to restrict my freedom or to make me unauthentic.” Page 363.  I cannot summarize more than this … it is complicated.  Trueman traces the linkages of the connecting thoughts of major philosophers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud and then moves onto leading feminists and the LGBTQ+ movement.  Carl R. Truman is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Read it.  I recommend the book highly, but it is not a light read.