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

Of course, that a sentence is utterly fallacious has never prevented it from being believed by large numbers of people and, on occasion, used as a foundational principle for a comprehensive philosophy of life.

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.

Nietzsche’s notion that morality is really about taste is very helpful in thinking about our current moral climate. So often the language we use confirms that Nietzsche’s perspective is now a cultural intuition. So often we will speak of morality in terms of taste or aesthetics: “That remark was hurtful;” “That idea is offensive;” “That viewpoint makes me feel unsafe.” Notice that such expressions do not make a statement about whether the matters in hand are right or wrong. In fact, the underlying assumption is that the offensiveness or hurtfulness of them is identical with the moral content. The subjective response has become the ethical criterion for judgment.

Had it been uttered by a patient to a doctor in the mid-twentieth century, the doctor would almost certainly have responded that the patient had a psychiatric problem and that his mind needed to be treated so as to bring its feelings into line with his physical body. Today, the doctor is more likely to respond that the problem is such that the patient’s body needs to be brought into alignment with those inner feelings. Indeed, were a doctor to respond in the earlier fashion today, he might well find himself subject to legal action. What has changed in our society and in the social imaginary to bring this new situation about?

To respond to our times we must first understand our times.

Given all this, we can see why the foul-mouthed politician has supplanted the polite and reserved one, because in a world where the inner voice is key to the real person, the former is authentic while the latter presents a public image likely at odds with his private behavior.

If the expressive individual sees personal satisfaction or happiness as central to the fulfilled human life, then pornography allows for the realization of that in sexual terms. It presents the sexual act as something whose significance is found simply in the pleasure of the observer or consumer.

The idea that the will should master nature—creation—is, after all, plausible only under certain conditions.

To use a distinction deployed by philosopher Roger Scruton, pornography is about bodies, not faces. If sex is just about my pleasure, any body will do as a partner. But in a marriage, the specific identity of the sexual partners is critical. The purpose of sex is not to have sex but to make love, to reinforce a relationship with a particular person—or, to use Scruton’s terminology, with a face, not just with a body.

The prepolitical is no more. There is nothing in this world where human beings can relate to each other that is not a potential arena of political conflict, because all areas of life connect to the overall economic structure of society and thus to society’s inequalities and injustices; and Marx should be given much of the credit for laying the theoretical foundations of that.

Does human nature carry with it a moral structure and a specific end or purpose that remain constant over time and to which we must conform ourselves in order to flourish? Or are we simply the stuff of which we are made and beyond that free to be or do whatever we so choose? Pieces of living playdough attached to a will?

The modern self assumes the authority of inner feelings and sees authenticity as defined by the ability to give social expression to the same.

If society is the problem because it perverts and corrupts the individual, then society’s institutions are the tool by which this is accomplished. If we believe this, then that means that we need to revise our understanding of the function of institutions in such a way that they serve the natural individual. In short, they become places of performance, of learning to follow and then to give expression to that inner voice of nature, not places where that inner nature is to be tamed and formed into something else.

Doctors today, however, grant normative authority in such cases to inner feelings or psychological convictions.

Fish swim in water; they do not give it a second thought; but the scientist who analyzes water is far more informed about the aquatic environment

In the past, music was always a live, and often a communal, activity. Somebody had to be playing music for it to be heard; and somebody had to be present in order to appreciate it. Now we can listen to whatever music we choose, whenever we want, and, perhaps most significant of all, we can do so in privacy. Music has been transformed from something with a primarily live and communal focus (live concerts notwithstanding) and has become most commonly an item of consumption for the individual. If expressive individualism has come to focus on personal satisfaction as the meaning of life, technology has served that cause well.

In fact, Rousseau’s focus in Confessions on his inner psychology and the idea of the true self that he articulates in the Discourses together represent what we noted in chapter 1 is now known as expressive individualism, the notion that I am most truly myself when I am able to express outwardly what that voice of nature says to me inwardly. Doing that, to use modern parlance, is what makes me authentic.