Review: Carl Trueman’s “Strange New World”

“It bears repeating that this is a very good book. Trueman performs a thorough but concise excavation of the intellectual, philosophical, and metaphysical currents that he sees as moving below the crashing waves of our present cultural storm.”

Introduction

How have we come to a world where basic biology and sexual realities are so disputed that a cranky conservative pundit can make mileage out of a documentary called What is a Woman? An answer is given by Carl Trueman in his 2022 book Strange New World, a slimmed-down version of his 2020 opus The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which is nearly 500 pages long. I read The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self when it came out, but the length did not aid retention. This much shorter edition with the key facts and core arguments is very welcome, and it succinctly lays out Trueman’s thesis: that the sexual revolution is the source of our present discontents, but which itself is rooted in ideas that go back to the Romantic period in the eighteenth century.

As with the longer edition, this is a well-written and well-argued book, but it still displays the tendency, particularly acute in American conservatism, to fall into idealistic framing at the expense of deeper analysis of material and sociological factors. Trueman gives answers to the questions of “what” these ideas were, and “when” and “who” they originated from, but there is less focus on the “how” and “why” these ideas became hegemonic. Trueman very much adopts the “ideas have consequences” approach and could have considered in more detail the material and structural forces, the what that makes these ideas so consequential.

The Argument: Identity as Inner Reality

At the core of Trueman’s thesis is the idea that the identity wars that gained traction and momentum in the public consciousness since 2015 are rooted in a fundamental metaphysical change in how we conceive of the self. Ryan T. Anderson summarizes the book’s argument in the foreword like this: “how the person became the self, the self became sexualized, and sex became politicized.” We have witnessed and been party to a soul-deep transformation of the way we view ourselves and our place in the world. As Trueman writes, “It is my conviction that the dramatic changes and flux we witness and experience in society today are related to the rise to cultural normativity of the expressive individual self, particularly as expressed through the idioms of the sexual revolution. And the fact that the reasons for this are so deeply embedded in all aspects of our culture means that we all are, to some extent, complicit in what we see happening around us.”