The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

Bill Kraus, a San Francisco politician who was himself to die of AIDS, tried unsuccessfully to promote safe-sex practices by recommending the closure of the city’s bathhouses, focal points for uninhibited gay sexual activity. This idea was compared by one gay opponent of the plan as giving “the Moral Majority and the right wing the gasoline they have been waiting for to fuel the flames that will annihilate us!”15 The rhetoric is interesting: any inhibiting of sexual freedom—even that designed to prevent the transmission of a deadly disease—is considered unacceptable because of its perceived obnoxious moralizing or potential for promoting such. That sentiment is entirely consonant with a therapeutic culture of expressive individualism, in which it is the present moment and individuals’ ability to perform their own selves in whatever way they should choose in that moment that are the only significant ethical concerns.