Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is an impressive book from which I have learned much. His use of the theoretical tools of Philip Rieff, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor is laudatory. His genealogical narration, starting with Rousseau and the English Romantics and continuing with Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and the “New Left” thinkers of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse is quite illuminating.
I have serious reservations about the book, which I will spell out soon.
For now, though, I just want to offer some thoughts on Trueman’s work, near the end of the book, on the “L” of lesbianism, the “G” of gay advocacy, and, most importantly, their marriage as the first two letters/causes in the political coalition of (as Trueman has it) LGBTQ+.
In Chapter 10, “The Triumph of the ‘T,'” itself nestled within Part 4, “The Triumphs of the Revolution,” Trueman offers some valuable insights into the history of political activism on the part of lesbian and gay people in the second half of the twentieth century. His thoughts on Adrienne Rich (and her 1980 article “Cumpulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”) and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective of the early 1970’s are quite valuable.
Trueman succeeds, in other words, in showing the initial tensions between the L and the G.
But where he fails—his effort to demonstrate how and why the L and the G eventually locked arms in common cause—is equally as noteworthy. He repeatedly affirms that the core of their solidarity is a sense of shared victimhood. He narrates the history of the Stonewall Inn riots and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s.
He succeeds, in my opinion, in showing that these events were exploited by gay men to appeal to a sense of victimhood. But he does not really provide any evidence for his claim that somehow these crises paved a way for lesbians to enter into the political rhetoric of victimhood, thereby uniting with gay men in common cause over and against the forces of oppression.
His thesis makes sense, but his marshaling of evidence in support of it is lacking.
Given that, quite soon, I’ll be relocating from one city (Tyler, TX) to another (Austin, TX), I’ve been thinking, pondering quite a bit about the difference between the two cities.
For example, you’d love Tyler if you like gated communities, country clubs, racial segregation, monster pick up trucks, Walmart, high school football games, guns, and hunting. Oh, and Trump.
… You’d love Tyler if you like gated communities, country clubs, racial segregation, monster pick up trucks, Walmart, high school football games, guns, and hunting. Oh, and Trump.
In Austin it could not be more different. Very few of my friends in Austin are members of country clubs, for example (even the ones who are worth many millions of dollars, or more). One friend of mine literally took a vow to avoid Walmart for the rest of his life. Have I ever heard of anyone attending a high school football game in Austin? Despite the fact that Friday Night Lights was filmed a couple of blocks away from our house in Austin, and admitting that my “station in life” might have something to do with this … no, no I have not.
All that to say, the ethos, the quality, the character, of the two cities are as different as can be. Which leads me to this quotation by John Henry Newman, suggesting that one explanation for such differences might be something in the spiritual realm:
... besides the host of evil spirits, I considered that there was a middle race, daimonia, neither in heaven, nor it hell; partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. These beings gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to the races, nations, and classes of men. Hence the action of bodies politic and associations, which is often so different from that of individuals who compose them. hence the character and instincts of states and governments, of religions communities and communions. I thought these assemblages had their life in certain unseen Powers. My preference of the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead my to this view. I thought it countenanced by the mention of "the Prince of Persia" in the Prophet Daniel; and I think I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that the Apocalypse spoke, in its notice of "The Angels of the Seven Churches."
John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York: Norton, 1968), 35–6.
