Review of Strange New World
And other things I am up to
Welcome to another edition of The Mueller Report!
Update
I wrote most of this newsletter from the front range. Our oldest two kids are part of a once a week STEM program for homeschoolers called Falcon AeroLab. Though the academic rigor for the intro class (9-11 year olds) is not high, it provides a lot of great experiences and conceptual knowledge around physics, chemistry, flight, engineering, etc. Their program did an outdoor ropes course, indoor skydiving, and a day at the Denver Nature and Science Museum.
It’s a good chance for our kids to rub shoulders with their peers and to explore a wide variety of extracurricular activities. I’m optimistic that later classes, especially around building and flying drones, learning more physics and engineering, and eventually actually piloting aircraft, will build valuable skills for the kids as they enter high school.
We are just ending about a week of having two ten-year olds as Teddy turns eleven – one of the fun dynamics of having Irish twins.
It’s been a wild month in the stock market, especially if you hold a large position around Nvidia like me. Let’s just say it’s been a roller coaster! I’ve concluded that I have far too much going on in my life to be tracking daily stock market movements. Watching your position move up and down thousands of dollars nearly every day also taxes one’s emotional and mental state. It’s why good investment advisers recommend a “set it and forget it” approach to retirement saving and investing. I may share more details if I close out my position over the next month or two.
This week the newsletter primary focuses on reviewing Carl Trueman’s book Strange New World.
Reflection
I finished preaching from Habakkuk just over a week ago. I find it good for my soul to spend time preparing a message to deliver. It forces me to reflect more deeply than I often do about a text and about what God’s Word means for my life as I think about how I should exhort others. Here are the links to the sermons:
Writing
I haven’t had any new publications in a week and a half. I’ve drafted several different short pieces but none have gone out the door yet. One piece reflects on transaction costs as I’ve been in the process of selling my NJ house. Another reflects on some of the nitty gritty challenges of local politics and governance that don’t fit neatly into broader theories about what local governments ought to do.
Then I have a piece criticizing the idea of creating a state-owned “Sunshine Freedom Bank” in Florida. I also have a piece criticizing the “pay-to-play” model of the major shareholder proxy recommendation firms. There will be a piece coming out Friday about the Fed’s balance sheet and a piece coming out 9/12 on my experience of transaction costs selling our NJ house. Finally, I’m working on a longer piece about the Federal Reserve.
Bookshelf
I finished Strange New World (SNW) by Carl Trueman a couple weeks ago. I strongly commend it to you. The book is a shorter more accessible version of his longer book: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (which I haven’t read). SNW gives an account of how most people in the modern world have come to believe that their personal, subjective, internal, psychological sense of self or identity is the most fundamental and important thing about who they are. Trueman’s story is primarily one of an “inward turn.”
Many people describe the outward manifestation of this inward turn as “expressive individualism.” The poster child of this phenomenon is the LGBTQ+ movement (especially the transgender element). The psychological subjective account of identity justifies the claim that one’s body should be changed to match one’s internal sense of identity rather than vice versa. Ideas of moral relativism and post-modern abandonment of philosophical truth are related outcomes of this shift in how one thinks about identity and existence.
Trueman gives a nice tour of how a variety of philosophers added key ideas that built this modern conception of the self and of one’s identity. Rousseau emphasized the corruption of one’s true self through the external expectations and structures of society – famously leading to amour propre, a kind of “false” self-love. His description of ideal education in Emile contrasts being true to one’s self with conformity to the external standards and expectations of society. Rousseau also championed a kind of natural or inherent goodness within the individual which becomes corrupted by external forces: “man was born free and is everywhere in chains.”
The next thinker on Trueman’s intellectual tour is Karl Marx. While Marxism has developed in many directions, Trueman highlights his ideas of materialism and economic determinism. On the materialism front, there is no supernatural metaphysics, no final or spiritual purpose to human existence to which we can turn. Eliminating the transcendent removes a critical anchor of reality and ethics. In its place, Marx offers the idea of economic structure as responsible for the good or ill in society. All one has to do to create heaven on earth is remake one’s economic and social institutions by abolishing existing ones: property, family, church. “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.
Then Trueman moves on to discuss the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. He is rightly seen as a key precursor to post-modernism. Nietzsche takes the ideas of Rousseau, Marx, and other materialists to their logical conclusion: nihilism. Where can meaning, morality, purpose, or identity exist in a world without God? Nowhere.
So, Nietzsche concludes, meaningful human existence consists of creating one’s identity and moral code. The famous “uber menschen” is not necessarily the Nazi or the white supremacist. Instead, Nietzsche thought these “great” men were the ones willing to face the abyss and choose, through creativity and sincerity, to build their own meaning and to define their own purpose. Most of Nietzsche’s work develops ideas of ethics without God: “God is dead, and we have killed him.”
Trueman spends a chapter on Freud to explain in part why modern men (and women) have become hyper-sexualized. Freud famously talked about ideas of repression, especially sexual repression, as forms of psychological trauma or disorder. Addressing these and other problems requires, not virtue and habit formation, but psychoanalysis – exploring one’s inner feelings, thoughts, and repressed emotions or memories.
In a word, people no longer need punishment and correction so much as they need therapy. And so our society becomes increasingly therapeutic with each passing year. A further point made by Freud is that sexuality is both one of the most important experiences in life – contra Christian teaching – and deeply psychological in nature as well as physical.
Freud argues, simplistically, that mankind desires happiness and that such happiness consists in avoiding physical pain and gaining physical pleasure. As such, he argues that sexual intercourse provides the “strongest experiences of satisfaction,” which means that make sexual relations and physical “eroticism the central point of his life.”
As Trueman notes, “Sex is no longer a matter of behavior, of what we do; it is a matter of who we are….It is not the act but the desire, or the orientation of that desire, that defines a person.” Hence sexuality becomes central to happiness and to one’s identity and psychology.
As I hope you can tell, there is a lot of great analysis and explanation in this book. It’s also quite accessible to folks who have never read Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud. That said, Trueman makes one serious blunder that mars an otherwise excellent book. That blunder is confusing emotivism with aesthetic moral judgment.
As obvious problem with the “internal turn” is the reliance on one’s feelings and emotions as the primary arbiter of truth, ethics, and right and wrong. Hence the use of “I feel” or “that may be true for you but not for me,” or “that’s insensitive.” It’s also obvious in how words and actions become wrong because of how they make one feel, not because they violate any principles of justice or virtue. So far, so good.
Trueman errs, though, when he claims that this kind of behavior, historically described as “emotivism,” is about the use of aesthetics in morality. This error stems from a superficial view of aesthetics and taste as merely being about subjective internal preferences – emotions – that cannot be reasoned about or criticized without criticizing someone’s identity.
Trueman claims that: “Nietzsche’s notion that morality is really about taste is very helpful in thinking about our current moral climate.”
Here he comments at length about the issue:
[A] case can be made for saying that the idea of morality as taste is now intuitive to Western society. Think of the language we routinely use in everyday conversation to express moral judgment: “I don’t like that.” “That behavior disgusts me.” “That was a tasteless joke.” “I find your argument offensive.” “That was a hurtful comment.” “I felt unsafe in that classroom discussion.” These statements are aesthetic in the sense that they are rooted in feeling or sentiment. We may well think we are talking about right and wrong, truth and falsehood, but the change in vocabulary is significant. Afterall, a statement can be hurtful or offensive but still be true. “Trueman, you are bald and have crooked teeth.” Would be one that comes immediately to my own mind. Offensive. Hurtful even. But sadly, very true. Yet increasingly we conflate the hurtful with the wrong and the affirming with the truth. Our very language witnesses here to the collapsing of morality into questions of taste as shaped by the culture that surrounds us.
As well as here:
This leads to the third aspect of Wilde that is Nietzschean: ethics is really aesthetics, or a matter of taste. This is Nietzsche’s conclusion, given the death of God and the absence of any external authority on which an ethical code can be built. What is good and what is evil is simply a matter of the tastes or preferences of those with power and, indeed, the means by which they maintain their power. In Wilde this switch form the language of ethics the language of taste is explicit and self-conscious. And the key to this is human freedom: the actions of the individual are governed by the idea of personal creative freedom.
But that is not an accurate representation of aesthetics, or even of taste. While it is true that the “ideal” taste or preference may not exist in an abstract or syllogistic form, we can still have meaningful conversations about what counts as good taste or as right conduct.
Scottish theologian Hugh Blair argued that while truth involved a binary (i. e. something was true or it wasn’t), beauty was multi-faceted, like a jewel. There are different types and degrees of beauty. Something can be beautiful to varying degrees or in various ways – in a way that truth is not. As a result, genuine disagreement or even “right” positions, can be held as to whether something is beautiful. But that doesn’t mean nothing is ugly. Or that all things are equally beautiful, or that all types of beauty are equally important, or that everyone’s personal taste is equally refined. Judgment, persuasion, reason, and example all play important roles in aesthetic issues. And morality, contra Trueman, involves a large dose of aesthetics.
For example, while everyone agrees that respect or generosity are good qualities, what does it mean to be respectful or generous? Well, it varies greatly based on culture, context, and framing. Acting respectfully involves aesthetic judgments of how to show it, when, and in what degree. As Aristotle noted, you don’t want a deficiency or an excess. But how do you know what constitutes a deficiency or an excess? It’s a matter of aesthetic reasoning.
Viewing ethics as the practice and cultivation of virtue, rather than the keeping of long lists of precepts or rules, requires personal engagement and a sense of the aesthetic. Moral exemplars can often be more important than sets of moral rules. This is not to say that rules don’t or shouldn’t exist, but rather than growth in maturity and morals involves emulating those who are good more than getting better at keeping rules. This, I believe, strongly comports with Jesus’ emphasis on living by the Spirit and not simply by the letter of the law.
Ultimately virtue, or for the Christian sanctification, comes from a closer walk, identification with, and imitation of Jesus. The law matters but is insufficient. We need to learn to love the things God loves and hate the things he hates – which involves aesthetic judgment as much as it does moral argument or reasoning.
Game Corner
We recently received a new game, Racoon Tycoon. I played it once with my boys earlier this week and they have since played it several times with some of their siblings. I’m not sure I understand all the ins and outs of the game, but the play is pretty straightforward. You try to gain the most points by the end of the game. You gain points by buying railroads, building towns, and purchasing buildings. Each of those items has its specific point value, but then you get bonus points for railroad-town combinations. Many of the buildings also provide special bonuses.
One of the interesting elements of the game is that there are six or seven different commodities you can collect based on three “market” cards each player has at the beginning of their turn (you replace every market card you play). These market cards give you options of which commodities to collect that turn and they also increase the price of different commodities. As you collect commodities, you also want to keep an eye on the price of the commodities to decide when and what to sell. When commodities are sold, the price of the commodity drops based on the quantity of commodities sold.
Some buildings let you sell multiple commodities at once or increase the number of commodities you can hold. Others give you a bonus for selling certain commodities or let you take extra commodities when you produce.
Railroads are purchased via auction. There are several railroad lines and the more cards you have in each line, the more points they are worth. The bidding during the game I played felt odd – I imagine that element of the game will change the most as we play it more often.
Have a good rest of your week!