The American Culture Flip
Strange New World by Carl R. Trueman. A book report.
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It has become fashionable to blame “Boomers” for everything wrong with the world today. If Gen X can’t afford a house, it’s because Boomers were selfish. If Gen Y thinks Socialism will fix everything, it’s because they are reacting to overly religious Boomers. Boomers are perplexed. They worked hard, played by the rules, raised their families, doted on their grandchildren, and hate Social Security just as much as everyone else. Many spent their lives voting for smaller government and got rug-pulled every 4 years. In that regard, nothing has changed.
Boomers were raised to be patriotic, defend their country and their family, and love and fear their God. It is a culture they shared with at least three generations before them.
In less than two generations, the American culture has flipped. It is causing families to fracture, unable to find common ground. Mr. Trueman describes the dichotomy in his book “Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Re-defined Identity and Started the Sexual Revolution.” All quotations are from the book.
The old culture is outward focused, with emphasis placed upon individual responsibility, being useful, serving others and serving God.
The new culture is inward focused, defined as expressive individualism. Psychological selfhood based upon identity. God is not a factor.
The thinkers and activists Mr. Trueman refers to are Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Freud—All pleasure is related to sexual tension and its discharge.
Nietzsche— “God is Dead.” Individualism supersedes traditional morality. Individuals must create their own morality in an otherwise meaningless world.
Marx— “Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
From the book:
According to Karl Marx:
Religion is a sign of intellectual weakness and a means of social oppression. Freedom can be achieved only by abolition of religion. Theological claims, such as that men and women are made in the image of God are to be repudiated. Society regards religion as childish and oppressive. In Marx’s world, all human social relations are political.
Combining Marx with Nietzsche, we get something known as Moral Relativism.
If men and women are not made in God’s image, to what absolute moral standard must they submit themselves? An absolute moral standard is meaningless in a world that is intrinsically of no significance beyond the matter from which it is made.
If there is no morality, if there is no God, we are our own masters. Whatever makes us feel good about ourselves, that is what we should do.
Morality, if it features at all, is something that is contextually determined. For example, did the person consent to the sexual act? The act itself has no moral significance beyond that.
Nietzsche’s philosophy has become our culture. We speak of morality in terms of taste or aesthetics; “that remark was hurtful,” or “that viewpoint makes me feel unsafe.”
Marx’s contribution is the politicization of selfhood based upon psychological identity.
In a world where inner psychology dominates how we think of ourselves, our feelings become very important in how we conceptualize harm. Once identity is psychologized, anything that is seen to have a negative impact on one’s psychological identity can potentially be seen as harmful, even a weapon, that does serious damage.
In the modern psychological construction of ideology, you ARE your chosen identity.
If we are, above all, what we think, what we feel, what we desire, then anything that interferes with or obstructs those thoughts, feelings or desires, interferes with us AS PEOPLE, and prevents us from being the self that we are convinced we are.
The clash of the cultures results in the polarized society we find ourselves in today, where everything feels political.
As soon as one side in a cultural battle politicizes an institution, the other side has no choice but to engage on those terms. Everything from Boy Scouts to baking cakes becomes political.
The claims that certain narratives are psychologically oppressive are plausible to many because our modern intuitions are to see ourselves as psychological beings. Anything that obstructs our psychological happiness, our sense of self, is inevitably bad, oppressive, and something to be opposed.
Victimhood has an intrinsic value to it, and anything that can lay claim to the vocabulary of the victim has unlocked a major, even irresistible, source of cultural power.
Freedom of speech and academic freedom are simply licenses to oppress and marginalize the weak. True freedom is found in closing down such traditional virtues and replacing them with a victim-centered authoritarianism.
Remember the Boomer culture: faith, family, country, liberty, independence.
There is NO line where that culture intersects with the culture of psychological identity, moral relativism and victim-based authoritarianism.
Public (and many private) schools have institutionalized the new cultural phenomenon. Our current generation of young people will witness NO remnants of the culture of their grandparents. Their parents are not alarmed, because the culture flip started with Millennials in college, with Gen Y in middle school.
Using “trauma-informed education” and “Social Emotional Learning,” schools are inculcating this new culture into the second or third generation of students. Thus, our schools are the main reason for the culture flip. Even if we could stop it now, our generations are unlikely to reconcile.
Boomers, being the last remnant of the culture of our ancestors, will continue to be the scapegoat.
by Sue Greenwald, M.D. Special thanks to Chris, who lent his book with the good parts already highlighted.