The untethered self

. . . and the stubborn immutability of the universe's givens

Thanks for upgrading to a paid subscription. Writing is my job. Your support of that means everything to me.

This is one of those posts that was catalyzed by a particular essay, which led down a trail along which I renewed acquaintance with several books and writers (Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, originally written by a team of sociologists in 1988, and updated three times since, one of my main men, Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar Carl Trueman, whose 2020 book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution spurred much of my thinking about the transformation of society over the course of my lifetime and how far back it really goes, and Diana West, author of the 2004 work The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization).

But back to the above-mentioned essay. It’s by England-based writer Freya India, who is quickly becoming another one of my faves. It’s called “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore,” and it’s at her Substack, Girls.

I’ll start by excerpting generously from that, but you should read it in its entirety. Every paragraph is a gem of keen insight.

Here are the first six:

Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent. Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realise they are autistic; our stoic grandfathers are emotionally stunted. We even helpfully diagnose the dead. And I think this is why people get so defensive of these diagnoses, so insistent that they explain everything. They are trying to hold onto themselves; every piece of their personality is contained within them.

And it’s not only personality traits we have lost. There are no experiences anymore, no phases or seasons of life, no wonders or mysteries, only clues about what could be wrong with us. Everything that happens can be explained away; nothing is exempt. We can’t accept that we love someone, madly and illogically; no, the enlightened way to think is to see through that, get down to what is really going on, find the hidden motives. Who we fall for is nothing but a trauma response. “You don’t have a crush; you have attachment issues”. Maybe he reminds you of an early caregiver who wounded you. In fact there are no feelings at all anymore; only dysregulated nervous systems. Every human experience we have is evidence, and the purpose of our lives is to piece it all perfectly together. This is the healthy way to think, that previous generations were so cruelly deprived of.

Sometimes I think about my own experience with therapy and anti-anxiety meds in these terms. I started going to a therapist and a psychologist because people in my life - such as my wife - made it clear to me that, like my father before me (although my therapist doesn’t like to spend much time on formative stuff, preferring to focus on the road ahead), I tend to come unglued when the universe doesn’t conform to the way I think it should operate.

But, having been on the therapy-and-meds program for a couple of years now, I began to entertain certain questions. What is a baseline for healthy engagement with reality? Who gets to establish that baseline? Does it change as society becomes more complex?

At this juncture I must once again refer to a June 2022 Precipice post titled “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift.” It was a reflection on turning 13 during the year 1968. My parents were the quintessential Greatest Generation couple. They attended the Presbyterian Church (but quit in the late 60s, after the secular and leftward drift became too much to stay silent about). My dad was an entrepreneur, with a small manufacturing company that made widgets for large OEM corporations, civically involved (Exchange Club Boy of the Month Program, certified Boy Scout merit badge counselor in several areas, sailing instructor, participation on several boards and committees) and possessed of a wide-ranging intellect. (He turned me on to Mises and Hayek.) They voted Republican. They liked cocktail hour before dinner. They smoked cigarettes. They subscribed to Newsweek.

They tried to compete with the British Invasion, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Allen Ginsburg and Ram Dass, but by the aforementioned 1968, all bets were off. For the rest of the years I was still at home, there was tension.

I’d been caught up in expressive individualism, which, I think is effectively summed up in this 2018 Gospel Coalition article:

When defining expressive individualism, it might be best to start with the slogans behind the movement:

• You be you.

• Be true to yourself.

• Follow your heart.

• Find yourself.

Slogans orient us to the philosophy in popular culture. History points us back to where it comes from. Robert Bellah and the sociologists who wrote Habits of the Heart trace the origins of expressive individualism back into the 1800s. The authors point to the writer and poet Walt Whitman as one of the best representatives of the philosophy.

“Individualism” goes back further. Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who traveled extensively in the United States and then wrote the classic Democracy in America noted certain traits of American individualism, in which the expressivist part grew later. Here’s what he said about individualism and its isolationist tendencies:

“Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of this fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.”

That’s an older description of individualism and the isolation that Tocqueville feared. But what about expressive individualism? What does that refer to? Yuval Levin in The Fractured Republic describes it well:

That term suggests not only a desire to pursue one’s own path but also a yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity. It is a drive both to be more like whatever you already are and also to live in society by fully asserting who you are. The capacity of individuals to define the terms of their own existence by defining their personal identities is increasingly equated with liberty and with the meaning of some of our basic rights, and it is given pride of place in our self-understanding.

Age of Authenticity

There’s a similar definition given by the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who uses “the age of authenticity” as a descriptor. We could define “authenticity” in different ways. When we’re talking about “authenticity” as the opposite of “hypocrisy,” then striving for authenticity becomes a good thing. (Jesus had a lot to say about hypocrites and the deceit that masks inauthenticity.)

But Taylor does not use “authenticity” as a synonym for integrity or honesty. He uses the term in a way that pits authenticity against conformity. Here’s Taylor’s definition:

I mean the understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century, that each one 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.

The key here is that the purpose of life is to find one’s deepest self and then express that to the world, forging that identity in ways that counter whatever family, friends, political affiliations, previous generations, or religious authorities might say. (Many a Disney movie has followed a narrative plot line of someone finding and forging one’s self-identity in opposition to the naysayers.)

This piece gives me some insight into the crossfire in which I found myself in 1968:

Australian church leader Mark Sayers helpfully sums up several beliefs that swirl around in an expressive individualist society. These seven summary statements come from Sayers’s book Disappearing Church.

1. The highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.

2. Traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.

3. The world will inevitably improve as the scope of individual freedom grows. Technology —in particular the internet—will motor this progression toward utopia.

4. The primary social ethic is tolerance of everyone’s self-defined quest for individual freedom and self-expression. Any deviation from this ethic of tolerance is dangerous and must not be tolerated. Therefore social justice is less about economic or class inequality, and more about issues of equality relating to individual identity, self-expression, and personal autonomy.

5. Humans are inherently good.

6. Large-scale structures and institutions are suspicious at best and evil at worst.

7. Forms of external authority are rejected and personal authenticity is lauded.

I absolutely wallowed in rebellion for years. Which makes for no small amount of sheepishness as I take in the words of Carl Trueman, in a recent essay titled “Pride Month and the Infantilization of Society”:

There is something infantile about rebellion and transgression. The need to perform and draw attention to oneself by constantly overthrowing and despising anything considered valuable or sacred by a previous generation has a rather Oedipal ring to it. Growing up used to be about learning and internalizing the values of the past in order to take one’s place in society. But a society built around transgression is really a society committed to a permanent state of immaturity. Whether it’s activists or social media users upping the rhetorical ante by insulting anyone they disagree with and demanding public affirmation of what is obviously false—that men can be women and vice versa—or whether it’s the ever-more outlandish sexualities on display in pop culture, the dynamic is the same: public discourse degenerating into infantile tantrums.

The Gospel Coalition article above mentions Habits of the Heart, and how Bellah et al trace the trends being discussed here back to the 1800s. Trueman, in his body of work, traces it back to Rousseau.

West, in Death of the Grownup, focuses mostly on what’s happened since the 1950s, which is surely a major reason it resonated so much with me.

She devotes a couple of pages to the mythologizing of James Dean:

. . . [We must consider the impact of] the screen persona that typifies adolescent angst - the brooding, surly, feckless animus toward powers that be . . .

The legend was born the day Dean died in 1955, age twenty-four, in a car wreck. It took place a few days before the opening of Rebel Without a Cause . . . [which] gave American psychiatry a poster boy for “troubled youth.” (As Dwight MacDonald would put it in 1958, troubled youth “is never to blame; he just has Problems.”)

. . . Having brought Dean to stardom in East of Eden, legendary director Elia Kazan found himself uneasy about his unexpected role in creating the Dean legend. “It was a legend I didn’t approve of,” the late Kazan revealed in his 1988 memoir . . . “Its essence was that all parents were insensitive idiots who didn’t understand or appreciate their kids and weren’t able to help them.”

The rebels have tried to present themselves as the agents of mystery, of the untamed places in the human heart. I think we can see that, the way it’s evolved since 1968, or, if you like, 1955, or the 1800s, or the time of Rousseau, this rebellion has been actually subsumed by a therapeutic impulse that has demystified it. Completely cutting the tether of the self that ties it to a transcendence that has given the universe its fixed architecture has made people desperate, in need of validation for the free-floating way in which they’ve come to live. That impulse doesn’t provide ultimate answers, and nothing else is going to keep us from being permanently adrift.