Following his excellent analysis of the cultural and social imaginary that have opened the world of pornography to widespread acceptance ("The Triumph of the Erotic"), Carl Trueman turns in Chapter 9 to "The Triumph of the Therapeutic." This chapter has little to do with the mid-twentieth century explosion of the field of mental health. Rather, Trueman demonstrates now-dominant notions of selfhood and personal fulfillment have come to expression in U.S. Constitutional law, bioethics, and contemporary university education. I will address only the first one in this post and that only briefly. I hope to spend more on the third aspect--the "anticulture" of much of higher education--in more detail along with a few comments about the American Bar Association's recently revised accreditation Standard 303.
The first subpart of Chapter 9, The Supreme Court and Gay Marriage, presents an excellent introduction for a non-lawyer reader (in fact, for most lawyers as well) to the series of Supreme Court cases beginning in1992 with Planned Parenthood v. Casey (best known for Justice Kennedy's rhapsodic "mystery of life" passage) and ending with the Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 in which a majority found that State recognition of same-sex marriage is Constitutionally required. I won't summarize the summary--buy the book and read it for yourself--except to concur that the majority's rationale seems plausible only in a world of expressive individualism. Quoting the Court, "The first premise of the Court's relevant precedents is that the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy." More succinctly, persons are constitutionally entitled to participate in gay marriage in order "to define and express their identity." Neither "individual autonomy" nor "identity" are found in the Constitution. They are glosses drawn most directly from Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Casey, of course, had its own precedent but ultimately finds its textual bedrock in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
It hardly needs to be said that same-sex marriage was not understood to be among the protected rights, liberties, privileges, or immunities that the drafters and ratifiers of that amendment had in view in the 1860s. To which the Court responded by asserting that "the generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment ... entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning." Even is such a claim were true, and even granting that the Court (whose average age is 80)--rather than legislatures--embodies the wisdom of future generations, it still does not follow that gay marriage is an aspect of liberty.
It is at this point that a couple of Trueman's observations are helpful. First, "[g]ay marriage did not make gay marriage plausible; the Supreme Court did not make gay marriage plausible. Gay marriage is plausible becomes of the wider transformation of the social imaginary." (303) In other words, a majority of the Supreme Court could not have imagined a "liberty" to participate in same-sex marriage unless American society at large had already come to believe that marriage exists as an instrument by which free individuals express their their mutual desires. Gay marriage is simply one aspect of the sexual revolution that in turn is "a manifestation of a much deeper revolution in what it means to be a self." (312) Obergefell was at most a few years ahead of the time when a majority of Americans would have reached the same conclusion without judicial intervention. (This is not to say that laws recognizing marriage as only between members of opposite sexes would have changed as quickly; that process would have been far more gradual.) Trueman is correct that for decades the reality of no-fault divorce had undercut the traditional understanding of marriage. Entry into and exit from marriage depends on no more than the continuing will of each party. And the individual will is (or should be) limited by nothing but mutual consent to self-expressive desire.
The specifics of Truemans's argument he follows well-developed understanding of his erstwhile colleague at The Witherspoon Institute, Robert George. Nonetheless, this first part of "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" reveals that the trajectory of Trueman's full argument, that "expressive individualism and the therapeutic concerns of psychological man have come to shape modern society" (336), helps make sense of this significant aspect of an important contemporary phenomenon.
An aside: on page 315 Trueman remarks that "the sexual revolution is ... simply one manifestation of the wider revolution in selfhood that has taken place over the last four hundred years. (Emphasis added.) Trueman's argument in his book begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who lived 250 years ago. Might this casual reference to "four hundred years" be something more than a typo? Might Trueman agree with me that the conceptual origins of the inward, immanent turn began with the trio of early seventeenth century thinkers Francis Bacon, Hugo Grotius, and Rene Descartes?
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