A Significant Shift in the Social Imaginary
The Parricidal Nature of Therapeutic Secularism - Pt. 3
Ultimately, there is but one end, the self; all other ends are means. - John Dewey1
In Previous Episodes
It’s been a while since my last post in this series, so please bear with my “In previous episodes…” introduction. If you want to get right to the meat of the post, scroll down to History of the Modern Self.
I’m writing this series in an attempt to offer an explanation for the trending and ubiquitous phenomenon of entitled activism amongst the younger generations that is unnecessarily breaking up families (symbolic parricide).
In short, my argument is therapeutic secularism is responsible for this parricidal phenomenon. This not to argue that individuals are not responsible for their own actions; this is to argue that what they believe are moral actions are being informed by unrealized presuppositions rooted in therapeutic secularism.
Understanding this phenomenon is not only important for its own sake, but the fact that young adults (i.e., Millennials and Gen Zs) are, collectively, much more likely than previous generations to to “divorce,” “unfollow,” and “block” their parents because of offenses is rooted in the same sense of entitlement being witnessed on college campuses in the form of “safe spaces;” and, it is the same thing we are seeing in the culture at large where “canceling” someone is the default response when one disagrees with another whose beliefs are considered offensive.
In the first post of this series, I shared a lengthy excerpt by Gen Z blogger, Nia Cherie, as a representative example of the kind of activism I am addressing. There I argued that this issue is not a matter of some novel moral ascent on the part of the aforementioned younger generations, but largely the result of the development of the modern therapeutic self.
In the second post of this series, I attempted to establish the predominance of the modern therapeutic self by mapping out the most prominent tributary in its complex development, the larger cultural shift from a sacred to a secular social imaginary.
Feeding the more observable is the more obscure tributary of self-understanding. Specifically, I’m talking about the subtle historical shift from what Charles Taylor calls the mimetic to the poietic understanding of the self, burgeoning around the Age of Enlightenment.
The shift in the more obscure tributary that feeds the river of therapeutic secularism is the subject of this post.
The third tributary feeds the river downstream from this tributary, and it will be the subject of a subsequent post. That tributary we’ll call psychiatrization and its resultant concept creep.
Eventually, I also intend to explore the influence of therapeutic secularism on parenting methods, some of which are now pervasive even among Christians.
Finally, I hope to treat the increased access to social communication that has enhanced what Sociologist Emile Durkheim has described as “the collective punishment of deviance,” a kind of tribal ritual that enhances cohesion and solidarity within peer groups. This ritual is why the phenomenon has become a kind of movement, and not merely isolated to a few particular circumstances.
History of the Modern Self
The history of the development of the modern therapeutic self is a long and complicated one. Rows of dusty books about the self now occupy incalculable shelf space, so I don’t expect to make any additional contributions to the public body of knowledge in this post.
I do hope, however, that in the following paragraphs, I can identify a few significant stepping stones that will help us navigate the turbulent waters of this primary tributary, the one that fed the shift from sacred to secular, and the one that has most significantly contributed to the modern obsession with ourselves (i.e., safe spaces, my truth, trigger warnings, #nocontact, etc.).
The idea of the self is most puzzling, and at the same time, paradoxically familiar.
It can be explained as that part of ourselves we call I, as in “I think; therefore, I am.” I think; I doubt; I experience; I know; I hope; I work; I play; I love; I am [insert your name here].
The self is what is thinking, doubting, experiencing, knowing, hoping, working, playing, and loving. But it is not the name that I call myself that is my self. It is the I to which my name refers. If I were to change my name, it would be I who was changing it and the new name would still refer to the self who gave my self a new name. Or, if I were to lose my memory, contract amnesia, say, it would be I who could not remember the experiences my self once recollected.
Mimetic Social Imaginary
Prior to the period we previously identified as the immanent frame or the third world, people occasionally elevated their inner lives to a place of public discussion, but not often, and seldom to a place of preeminence.
For example, there were the occasional treatments of the inner lives of men in literature—St. Augustine’s Confessions is perhaps the most notable—but it was the exception, and always understood within the context of the larger order of the cosmos or the particular order of the polis. This is because as human beings, we tend to unconsciously absorb the culture around us and intuitively pick up our beliefs, practices, and mores from the society we live in.
Moreover, we further gain our sense of self and our understanding of the meaning of life from society because we possess our selves in constant dialogical relationships with other selves in that society.
Charles Taylor refers to this understanding as the social imaginary and explains that, historically, our social imaginary (i.e., our sense of self and our understanding of the meaning of life), was primarily mimetic. Essentially, this means we unconsciously picked up cues from society about how to think and behave so we would fit in, be accepted, and flourish. We, therefore, gained our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of the meaning of our life from the ordered world we were born into.
In his work, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman draws extensively from Charles Taylor’s work on Modern Social Imaginaries, and offers a helpful explanation of this concept. He writes,
The social imaginary is a somewhat amorphous concept precisely because it refers to the myriad beliefs, practices, normative expectations, and even implicit assumptions that members of a society share and that shape their daily lives. It is not so much a conscious philosophy of life as a set of intuitions and practices. In sum, the social imaginary is the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it—though that is emphatically not to make the social imaginary simply into a set of identifiable ideas.2
In sum, we can say the social imaginary of Western civilization prior to the Post-Christian, modern age (i.e., during first and second world periods) was mimetic—a matter of individuals intuiting meaning. But the social imaginary itself went through a shift, especially around the Age of Enlightenment, and morphed from a mimetic to a poietic understanding of the self.
Poietic Social Imaginary
From the Greek word, poieses, the poietic social imaginary is one in which meaning is created, not intuited. Somewhere along the way, we began to see the world, not as having order and meaning intrinsically—order and meaning that compels individuals to discover it and conform to it—but as a world of mere material out of which we are privileged to make our own meaning. The shift from mimetic (meaning derived from imitation) to poietic (meaning derived only from creating) is a long and complicated one, so I am forced to leave out a number of important philosophies and pathologies that contributed.
Notwithstanding, there are a few essential ones worth mentioning that will hopefully provide us with significant stepping stones to help us navigate the turbulent waters of this cunning tributary.
Stone #1 - Technology and Human Vainglory
In the first place, there is much to be said about the influence that the development of technology has had on the social imaginary. Discussing technology’s influence is not an assessment of its morality—either good or bad. There is, of course, the morality of asking, “should we?” immediately after asking, “can we?”
For instance, the question, “Is it possible for us to inconspicuously turn an ordinary water shower into a gas-emitting death chamber?” should immediately be followed by, “If we are technologically able, could such an invention help humans universally flourish?” Another example might be the tension between, “Is it possible to create a pocket-sized computer that can do a million tasks and be connected to a million other users?” And, “should we allow every teen-aged child to have one of his or her own?”
But this kind of evaluation, while immensely important in its own right, is not what I’m referencing here. I’m talking about the seemingly more benign manifestations of technology that have radically altered the social imaginary before anyone noticed.
Take, for instance, the clock.
Without retracing the development of “time-keeping” by the monks in the Medieval fourteenth century that eventually led to the establishment of mechanical clocks in bell towers of cathedrals (as well as the division of the hours into minutes and seconds), we can briefly evaluate some of the consequences, intended or unintended, of mechanizing time.
In his book, Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford explains,
The clock is a piece of power-machinery whose “product” is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. There is relatively little foundation for this belief in common human experience: throughout the year the days are of uneven duration, and not merely does the relation between day and night steadily change, but a slight journey from East to West alters astronomical time by a certain number of minutes.3
Said another way, the clock is nothing more than a machine, the “combination of resistant bodies so arranged by their means the mechanical forces of nature are compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinant motions to produce mathematical measurable sequences.”4
This kind of “product” is unnatural to the human experience in a mimetic social imaginary. Mumford goes on to explain how “mechanized time” actually detaches humanity from the cosmically-ordered rhythms of life by comparing it to the fluctuation of rhythms in the human body (e.g., pulse), the adherence to seasons by farmers, to gestation cycles by shepherds, and the developmental stages of various other kinds of life in their seasons—“in short, history.”
It is most likely the case fourteenth-century monks never anticipated that all of humanity might one day attach “mini-clocks” to their wrists so they could organize their lives by the mathematical sequences produced by their machines (e.g., work, leisure, education, worship, etc,). And, they most certainly never anticipated humans possessing them as a standard feature on that pocket-sized computer connected to everyone else in the world.
There are countless other—and probably more profound—examples of how significant the birth of the machines changed the social imaginary, but the invention of a machine so ubiquitous as the clock should be compelling enough to show how easy it is for a society to accept as a fact of nature something so artificial as “mechanized time,” that there should be no need to explore the ramifications of modern medical technology, electric lights, microwave ovens, or Artificial Intelligence.
The point here is that these seemingly benign technological developments have changed the way our society perceives reality. The reality of the world is simply raw material that we can manipulate with human ingenuity for our own desires. And such developments, whether used for good or bad, are in and of themselves, are unacknowledged teachers that diminish the authority of the natural world and persuade us of our power to shape reality.
One final thought on the influence technology has had on the social imaginary before moving to treat two other influences on the shift from mimetic to poietic.
I’m not suggesting here that creativity, ingenuity, etc. are bad things. I’m no luddite. I agree with the Apostle Paul and J. R. R. Tolkien that we are created in God’s image and therefore sub-creators in God’s world. That is part of our makeup; it’s our vocation. I’m specifically commenting on how technological developments, uncritically observed, can imply that man is all-powerful, the measure of all things; it can subtly teach us to be vainglorious as we seek to conquer all of nature in the service of our impulses.
Stone #2 - I Think; Therefore, I Am
Second, we can thank (or blame, if you prefer) René Descartes for psychologizing the self and bringing the contemplation of the same into a new centralized dimension. Instead of reasoning from first principles to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos, Descartes reasoned from his doubts. He postulated that because he doubted, it was proof that he existed (cogito ergo sum).
His famous maxim would become the new basis for understanding and conceptualizing reality in the modern world: I exist and everything else follows from that. This gave birth to the modern subject of epistemology: How do we know things? How can we be certain about what we think we know? How can we know that we know?
This mantra and the epistemology conversation led Immanuel Kant, in his notorious essay, What is Enlightenment?, to write:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!” — that is the motto of enlightenment.
No longer would man intuit his understanding of self and meaning of his place in the world; he would create it from the raw materials of his own thinking in the same way he could create machines!
As this post has already well-exceeded the desired word count, I won’t expound any further on the development of thought stemming from the Enlightenment except to encourage those interested in seeing where this line of thinking led to study, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. And, to see how this line of thinking emerged into modern psychology, one should undoubtedly add Sigmund Freud to his reading list as well. But, I digress.
Stone #3 - Man is Born Free But Everywhere in Chains
The third, and final, stepping stone that I will treat here is a French fellow by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Trueman calls Rousseau “one of the strangest geniuses in the history of Western philosophy.”
Rousseau is significant in our discussion of the shift of in the social imaginary about the self from mimetic to poietic because of his literary influence, and most dramatically through his autobiography. Like St. Augustine, Rousseau titled his autobiography, Confessions, and psychologized his self, once again making a treatment of the inner life of utmost importance.
I won’t recount all the ways in which Rousseau’s Confessions mirrors St. Augustine’s, but it’s as obvious to any reader of both as it is to the consensus of scholars who’ve written about it, that we need not prove Rousseau was intentionally playing off Augustine.
The similarities are obvious but the difference is what is most striking. Where, for Augustine, his moral flaws were intrinsic in his nature and he saw himself as accountable to God and his fellow man, Rousseau believed he was basically born good and his moral flaws were a result of society’s influence. In his own estimation, Rousseau was noble by nature but perverted by external forces.
Thus, we eventually get his famous maxim in the opening of The Social Contract that man is born free but everywhere in chains. For Rousseau, the only man who was truly free was the man who was free to be himself, the man who used his own reason and conscience toward his own desired moral ends. In his work on education titled, Emile, Rousseau writes,
The eternal laws of nature and order do exist. For the wise man, the take the place of positive law. They are written in the depth of his heart by conscience and reason. It is to these that he ought to enslave himself in order to be free. The only slave is the man who does evil, for he always does it in spite of himself. Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man. He takes it with him everywhere. The vile man takes his servitude everywhere.5
In sum, Rousseau believed we could only be an authentic self if we were true to our own inner voice, not the outer order contracted by society. In other words, authentic self must be poietic, never mimetic.
The Harvard professor and leader of the New Humanists, Irving Babbit, asserted that history overwhelmingly contradicted Rousseau as far back as human history had been recorded. He referred to Rousseau’s philosophy as sentimentalism—morality and meaning derived from the individual’s subjective feelings, which are largely detached from objectivity and reason. Babbitt further asserted that such sentimentalism that emphasizes emotion and natural goodness intentionally ignores the darker aspects of human nature and the need for self-discipline because it sees depravity as associated with society, not the natural state of man.
As Christians, second world thinkers, we see clearly that Scripture supports Babbit’s view of Rousseau and his subsequent sentimentalized humanitarianism.
From this, I would argue that while most of modernity fails to recognize the influence of Rousseau’s philosophy on what has become Critical Theory today, it also fails to make the connections between the potential vainglory of human ingenuity, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the self as the true source of knowledge, and Rousseau’s sentimentalism on the emergence of the therapeutic self—the shift from a mimetic to a poietic social imaginary.
In turn, this shift opened the flood gates for a larger cultural shift from a sacred to a secular sensus communis, and what with the ubiquitous nature of social media, its no wonder younger generations understand their own identity in terms of therapeutic secularism without having any concept there is another way of seeing reality, and likely having no sense of how it is they came to understand the world this way.
Carl Trueman summarizes modernity’s new condition of therapeutic secularism most clearly when he writes,
The psychologized, expressive individual that is the social norm today is unique, unprecedented, and singularly significant. The emergence of such selves is a matter of central importance in the history of the West as it is both a symptom and a cause of the many social, ethical, and political questions we now face…this new view of the self also reflects and facilitates a distinct move away from a mimetic view of the world as possessing intrinsic meaning to a poietic one, where the onus for meaning lies within the human self as constructive agent.6
John Dewey, Psychology, Third Revised Edition. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893), 372.
Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 37.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 9.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 9.
Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,70-71.