OLD-SCHOOL LIBERALS AND ‘EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM:’ If that term, Expressive Individualism (EI), doesn’t sound familiar, it’s from back in the day of the 1950s and 1960s when folks we know today as classical liberals held sway.

Robert P. George makes an important point in an AEI essay that, while such folks were clearly right on issues like civil rights and freedom of expression, they made what he calls “a grave error” in adapting the analysis of sociologist Robert Bellah’s EI.

“Thus was ushered in what I have termed the ‘Age of Feeling.’ Faith and reason as the objective arbiters of truth and goodness were essentially abandoned by liberals in the 1960s,” George explains.

“While lip service continued to be paid to ‘reason’ and, in mainline churches, even to some loose conception of ‘faith,’ for many people feeling became the standard of judgment — the ultimate measure of right and wrong, and of whether to perform (or approve of) an action or not,” George continues.

What Bellah called EI was not a new thing, of course, just a modern term for a very old problem among we humans — the desire to be subject to no rules, no limits and no laws, otherwise known as the idolatry of self.