Strange New World - A Review
Sometimes when you wake from an incredibly heavy sleep with extremely vivid dreams it can be disorienting. You look around at your room and wonder how you got there, as if you have just arrived on an alien planet.
Western culture feels like that in recent years. The loudest voices of our world expect us to affirm statements that would have been viewed as non-sensical a few years ago. Someone, “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body,” has gone from a psychosis to a source of pride.
Ideas do have consequences, but what are some of the ideas and who are some of the thinkers that helped pave the way for us to get to this point.
Carl Trueman’s earlier book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, is an excellent example of thorough research and clear presentation. (I had a review written of it, but my computer ate it and I couldn’t bring myself to rewrite it yet.) The primary weakness of that volume was that it showed the jumps in concepts of the self that paved the way for the sexual revolution, but it failed to show how the ideas of Marx, Reich, and Freud were genetically connected to those cultural shifts. There seemed to be a trajectory, but Trueman didn’t connect all the dots. The second weakness of that volume was that it was so dense and academic that its audience was limited to those who had done a great deal of background reading already. Honestly, that limitation isn’t as much a weakness as simply a description of the type of work Trueman produced on that occasion. There is a place for that sort of book, but it left many of its readers (including me) wishing I could really share that with my friends and fellow church members.
Trueman’s more recent book, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, fills the gap for a more popular level work that expresses many of the same ideas. Strange New World also takes on the feedback of some of the reviews of Rise and Triumph and makes a bit tighter argument. In this case, Trueman makes it clear that he isn’t arguing there is a clear connection between the different thinkers or that the average ideological activist has actually read enough of Marx or whomever to actually be an expert. However, Trueman shows how each of these progressive thinkers broke new ground and prepare the way for the corrosive effects of the sexual revolution.
There is explanatory power in this book. It has a similar flavor to it as C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man or Richard Weaver’s Ideas have Consequences. Both of those men wrote those books eight decades ago. Trueman has much more information that points to the fact that they largely got things right, and it is destroying Western culture and the humans that reside within it.
Trueman notes, “To put it bluntly, the modern cultural imagination sees the world as raw material to be shaped by the human will.” (95) And, prior to that, he observes, “We might say that the death of God is also the death of human nature, or at least the end of any cogent argument that there is such a thing as human nature. If there is no God, then men and women cannot be made in his image and are not therefore required to act in accordance with that image.” (62)
This is modernity. It is the sort of liquid modernity that Zygmunt Bauman discusses. It is the sort of caustic thought-world that Alan Noble writes about in Disruptive Witness and to which he provides a helpful solution for in You are Not Your Own. Trueman shows how the changes in sexual norms in culture have come about through the trajectory of modern, Western thought. Strange New World is one of a chorus of helpful voices that help to explain what’s wrong with the world we inhabit.
This is a book that could be used for an upper-level student in High School, especially as a source for an advanced book review or paper. It has a place in a study of worldview or sexual ethics in an undergraduate or graduate course. This is also a book that thoughtful pastors and laypeople who are reasonably well read can work through and benefit from tremendously. Strange New World should be read widely and often as we try to navigate an increasingly anti-human and disorienting world.
Readers may also benefit from watching a series of lectures Trueman put together for Grove City College, which summarize some of the main points of his book.