Philosopher Robert Bellah once posited that modern Western human beings identify themselves in a peculiar way: as emotional cores, surrounded by baser material. According to Bellah, we are expressive individualists — meaning that “each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.” This mode of self-definition wars with older, more traditional modes, which suggest that our identities lie in how we interact with the world and society around us.