Philosophical and Social Origins of Identity Politics and the LGBTQ Sexual Revolution. Part 3.
A. The Autonomous Self and Expressive Individualism
Recent Gallup surveys show that the number of people in the West who identify as LGBTQ and reject the heterosexual family in preference for “non-binary” sexual relationships is increasing. This extraordinary development is the culmination of a sequence of historical developments in the West beginning from the 17th century. This includes the decline of Judeo-Christian religion, the influence of the Enlightenment-Romantic philosophy of the autonomous self, the erosion of community relationships in secular society, and “expressive individualism”, the modern notion that one must be true to oneself to be authentic.1“Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized…In the twentieth century, it shows affinities with the culture of psychotherapy.”Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen et. al, Habits of the Heart (Uni. California, 1985, 1996), pp. 333-334.
Historically, the individual in the West based his identity on his relationship with God and the community he belonged to. The role of religion and pastoral care was to help individuals to be integrated with their community. The good life required the individual to order his life in conformity to God’s created order, in accordance the mimetic view of life. But skeptical Enlightenment philosophy dispensed with the idea of God. Consequently, nature and social order became desacralized and may be manipulated and exploited to serve the welfare of individuals and society, in accordance with the poietic view of life. If there is no created order, then society and culture are merely social constructs, and if nature possesses no intrinsic meaning or purpose, then human beings must create meaning and moral values for themselves. This led in the emergence of the autonomous individual who defines for himself his moral values, and sets the goal of self-fulfillment on his own terms.
But how do we reconcile the autonomous individual seeking self-fulfillment on his own terms to the reality of evil in wider society? The categorical answer given by Jean Jacques Rousseau is that the individual is naturally good. But he is corrupted by society. In the famous opening sentence of his book The Social Contract, “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” For Rousseau, the natural man was free and living happily before the emergence of society. But when he is incorporated into society and his state of autonomy is subsumed under civilization, his life becomes an unhappy lot as it is dominated by inequality and political injustice. Society corrupts his natural innocence and tempts him to commit evil. Man is truly free when he listens to his inner voice. In short, we must regain personal authenticity by acting according to the inclinations of our hearts. We must create our own self-identity and define our purpose of life.
Charles Taylor in his work, Sources of the Self unveils the sources of the modern autonomous self which enhance three facets of modern self-identity: “first, modern inwardness, the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, and the connected notion that we are ‘selves’; second, the affirmation of ordinary life which develops from the early modern period; third, the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source.”2Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard Uni. Press), x.
By “expressive individualism,” Taylor explains that each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires. Only then do we attain an authentic self. Taylor describes this culture of:
The understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late eighteenth century, that each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.3Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2017), p. 475.
This requires prioritization be given to understanding and conforming to one’s sense of inner psychology, that is, one’s feelings and intuition in order to grasp truly who one is and what purpose of life one should choose for oneself. Carl Trueman adds, “we might even say “feelings” or “intuitions” – for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is.”4Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020), p.39
But the inner self is beset with ambiguities and tensions. Sigmund Freud suggests the inner self or ego (consciously formed personality) is primarily driven by the drive for sexual fulfilment. Nevertheless, fulfilment is frustrated as the sexual drive is repressed by internalized sanctions imposed on the child by the authority relationship between parent and child. The repression of sexual and moral development of the child is further magnified in social relationships where morals sanctions are authoritatively imposed by education and by legal sanctions to ensure effective social compliance. The goal of Freud’s analytic therapy is to free the individual’s ego and its repressed drives from the tyranny of the super-ego or internalized social sanctions. The confluence of expressive individualism and analytic therapy enhances the popularity of the contemporary quest for inward psychological happiness or personal sexual fulfilment by setting the ego free from authoritarian forces which have repressed one’s desires and drives.
Traditional counselling strengthens the superego (conscience as the authoritative guide to the good life) in order to tame the ego. In contrast, the analytic therapy pioneered by Freud suggests that the person troubled by questions on the meaning of life is sick since in reality there is no objective hierarchy of goals and drives contributing to meaningful choices in life. The therapeutic idea of well-being is predicated on understanding one’s repressed desires and working towards harmonizing one’s inner drives since therapy does not privilege one drive over another. Since there is no value judgment of our competing instincts or ways of expressing desires, one may give expression to all desires.
B. Fashioning Fluid Gender
The focus of therapy is on the inner life of the individual so that through therapeutic intervention, one may attain a balanced mindset with its ongoing negotiation between all the competing drives. This involves a never-ending process of self-analysis and ever-changing experimentation and reconstruction of one’s identity. Trueman writes,
Psychological man is also plastic person, a figure whose very psychological essence means that he can (or at least thinks he can) make and remake personal identity at will…the emergence of the types of self that now characterize our world, namely, the elimination of the notion that human nature is something that has authority over us as individuals…Underwritten by easy credit, consumerist self-creation is the order of the day.5Trueman, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p.164.
Trueman’s insight into how analytic therapy eventually destabilizes biological categories of sexual identity is pertinent.
From the perspective of the narrative of the rise of psychological man, I would argue that the subjectivity inherent in the psychological construction of the self serves to render any biologically grounded categories – indeed, any fixed categories, whether economic, racial, or whatever – to be highly unstable. If I am whoever I think I am and if my 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 inauthentic.”6Trueman, ibid., p. 363.
Freudian analytic therapy is inherently anti-authoritarian and anti-religion. For modern therapeutic man, clarity about one’s inner self supersedes the traditional goal of conforming to the right model of moral conduct. The final goal of therapy is to ‘improve’ one’s inner self. Philip Rieff’s observation is incisive, “Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased…Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms…a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.”7The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 25, 27. Rieff notes that “The analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertaining tentative opinions about the inner dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law insofar as it originates outside the individual, in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse.”8Philip Rieff, ibid., p. 32.
Therapy can only be counter-cultural since the perspective influenced by Rousseau and Freud links the source of individual pathologies to the oppressive influence of society. The logical conclusion of the new therapy is that the fabric of culture and society and its repressive forces must be deconstructed and reconstituted so that the individual is freed to become what he or she truly is. This mission of therapeutic liberation was initiated by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse who sought not only to liberate the individual from personal repression and from social oppression by combining Freudian analytic therapy with Marxian socio-political liberation. Trueman summarizes, “If Freud identified happiness with sexual gratification, then the way to create a happy society, one untainted by selfishness and craven pursuit of power, was to allow for a maximum amount of sexual gratification. That was Reich’s basic idea. The political question of freedom could therefore only be answered through sexual liberation…Where once oppression was seen in terms of economic realities (e.g., poverty, lack of property) or legal categories (e.g., slavery, lack of freedom), now the matter is more subtle because it relates to issues of psychology and self-consciousness. The political sphere is internalized and subjectivized.”9Trueman, ibid., pp. 240, 250.
The new therapy thematizes how the family is the primary institution of psychological oppression that obstructs individual self-expression and fulfilment. The family is the training ground of morality for children in the first few years of life which is by nature authoritarian as it relies on coercion and aims at producing compliant subjects to be socialized into the authoritarian social order. Reich describes the family as “the factory of reactionary ideology and structure.” As any revolution must necessarily depose the ruler of the state, so the therapeutic revolution must depose the family of its ruler and its authoritative father figure. The mystique of the heterosexual family based on union between two heterosexual individuals must be dismantled. Since the heterosexual family imposes hegemonic norms that perpetuate the sexual binary, the family must be dismantled in the name of sexual freedom and social justice. This is the logic of the LGBTQ movement and its trans activists.
Simone de Beauvoir launched a salvo against traditional sexual and gender categories in the dramatic opening sentence in the chapter on “Childhood” in her book, The Second Sex. “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between the male and eunuch that it describes feminine.”10Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Everyman Library, 1993), p. 281.
If there is nothing substantial or immutable within oneself, then all that one has is one’s external appearances which may be redesigned by adopting unconventional and ostentatious lifestyles, listening to esoteric forms of music, modifying one’s appearance with personalized tattoos, etc. But surface appearances are by nature too superficial and transient to provide a stable sense of identity. Hence the irresistible appeal of the LGBTQ ideology which seeks to anchor one’s identity on one of the most powerful psychological drives experienced by humans, that is, one’s sexual drive. But the new sexual identity is grounded not on biological sex but on gender which the LGBTQ activists claim to be a social construct. If sexual identity is socially constructed, it may also be deconstructed and reconstructed as one desires. Hence more and more Western youths are seeking to ‘change’ their gender.
How then should the categories of male and female gender which were traditionally linked to biological sex be regarded? Judith Butler rejects the traditional categories when she asserts that “gender is not identical to biological sex…Rather, “acts and gestures which are learned [and] repeated over time create the illusion of an innate and stable (gender) core.” In other words, gender does not cause you to act in a certain way; instead, gender is produced by your actions. Each of us creates and re-creates categories like male and female as we enact culturally permissible masculine and feminine roles.”11Cited in Neil Shenvi, Critical Dilemma: The Rise of Critical Theories and Social Justice (Harvest House, 2023), p. 84. Hence the call for public display of sexual parodies by drag queens is to call attention to the alleged illusion of the traditional gender categories. Such parodies are deployed regularly in LGBTQ campaigns to erase heterosexuality and to normalize homosexuality and transgenderism. Specifically, sexual binary categories should be erased so that transsexuality may be self-defined, with no need to justify itself in contrast to traditional heterosexuality. In effect, there is no longer the presence of an “other” to engage dialogically and relationally in defining one’s self and gender identity. Trueman draws out the implications,
There is no clearly defined “other” in relation to which she can define herself. If gender is completely psychologized and severed from biological sex, then categories built on the old male-female binary cease to be relevant, and attempts to maintain them only create problems of the kind described in this testimony. If gender is a construct, then so are all those categories based on it – heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. The world of psychological man is a world in which, to borrow Marx’s phrase, all that is solid is constantly in danger of melting into air – including our selves.12Trueman, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 365.
C. LGBTQ Incoherence and Antipathy Toward Community
The LGBTQ movement may be gaining strength and popularity among younger people in the Western world. But the incoherence and tensions within the subjective transgender worldview cannot be ignored. On the one hand it asserts that gender is purely a social construct which explains why a person imbibed with the ideology of heterosexuality can feel “trapped” in a wrong body. The trans activists assert that in actuality, there should be no meaningful differences between man and woman. But if the assertion is true, transgenderism cannot deploy the rigid sex category of male and female to assert that a certain “woman” is trapped in a “man’s” body. That is to say, having asserted that sexual identity is an artificial construct, they then claim that there is a real and innate gender identity trapped in that person’s body. This being the case, one should allow gender transition so that this person can realize what is really inside. But one cannot miss the irony that the trans activists’ argument is presupposing that gender is both innate and fluid, depending what is expedient.
LGBTQ activists are misguided when they assume that priority should be given to the feelings (“lived experience”) of the individual when defining reality. However, reality must be defined by verifiable facts and not subjective feelings. For example, everyone agrees that a woman who is suffering from anorexia nervosa may think that she is grossly overweight when in reality she is a malnourished bag of bones and skeleton, is suffering from a mental disorder and should be given appropriate medical treatment. The LGBTQ privileging of feelings over facts confirms that its agenda is an ideology that is without cogent and credible scientific foundations. This is evident when LGBTQ activists applied aggressive political pressure rather than scientific evidence-based persuasion to force institutions like the American Psychological Association to redefine the meaning of homosexuality in 1973, and required John Hopkins Hospital to restart sex reassignment surgery for people who identified themselves as transexuals in 2016.13For accounts of these LGBTQ campaigns to force public institutions to comply with the its ideological demands see, Jeffrey Satinover, Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (Baker, 1996) and Ryan Anderson, When Harry Became Sally (Encounter Books, 2018).
Finally, the new therapeutic culture represented by the LGBTQ’s focus on self-fulfillment is a manifestation of the spirit of narcissism. Hence, the urge to ‘change’ one’s sexual identity inherently pits the individual against tradition and authority. It destroys religious and communal ties especially when it is antipathetic towards the traditional, heterosexual family institution. The preoccupation with satisfying the individual’s aspiration in the name of attaining self-authenticity overshadows the traditional values which binds communal relationships and mutual responsibility.
Philip Rieff’s conclusion of the triumph of the therapeutic is striking: “By this conviction a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world.” The therapeutic of the unencumbered self represents “a calm and profoundly reasonable revolt of the private man against all doctrinal traditions urging the salvation of self through identification with the purposes of community.”14Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 10.
This raises the troubling existential question whether a society which dichotomizes genetically determined sex expressed bodily from gender, rejects the self-evident truth that human nature is biologically designed as sexually dimorphic for the purpose of sexual reproduction, and abandons the heterosexual family, can reproduce itself and preserve its existence.
Related Posts
The Vanished Soul and Quest for the Authentic Self in Modern Western Thought. PSOIP LGBTQ Sexual Revolution part 1
All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Recentred but Empty Self. PSOIP LGBTQ Sexual Revolution part 2
Identity Politics. PSOIP LGBTQ Part 4 is put on hold.