Abigail Ray’s Reviews > The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution > Status Update

"But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. Like priests of old who were trusted by the community at large and therefore had significant social authority, so scientists today often carry similar weight."

"In a world of empathy-based aesthetics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth."

"Bad ages produce bad poets, and have their decadence and moral decline, reinforced thereby. Virtuous ages, produce virtuous, poets, and have their greatness and moral superiority strengthened thereby, and this intern means that the poet is someone of great political significance, both assign of the moral strength of the times and a means for maintaining the same."

"The prioritizing of the message over the aesthetic is a sign of decadence. Such productions become either cheap pastiches, or simply the hectoring, moralizing voice of the vested interests of the powerful, as were exemplified, he claims, in the dramas that marked the court of Charles II."

"If the state of nature is the ideal and if society corrupts, then the history of society becomes the history of the corruption and oppression of human nature." Which therefore only leads this present generation to be cataclysmic to historical definitions and requires the overthrow of historicity and tradition.

"Rousseau's basic point about nature, society and the authenticity of youthful innocence has become one of the unacknowledged assumptions of this present age. It is part of the social imaginary."

"The idea of the innate innocence of the hypothetical state of nature presses toward a cult of childhood and youth. Whereas in a society based on, say, Confucian, ideals, age is to be respected because age brings with it wisdom the western world of today, generally credits, youth, with wisdom, and sees old age as corrupt myopic or behind the times."

Important question: how can one arrange society in such a way that it sets those terms(individual identity established and recognized) in a manner consonant with self-love or in a way that does not lead to an alienated and authentic self-hood?

"I would show that justice and goodness are not merely abstract words that by reason alone independent of conscious, no natural law can be established and that the entire right of nature is only a chimera if it is not founded on a natural need in the human heart."

"This inward turn, the turn to the individual, gave the individual a value – a dignity – that eventually came to stand as independent of any sacred order or set of divine commands"