In case I don't manage anything else today, let me at least manage a link to this piece by Anthony Daniels about what a bad idea self expression is.

I first encountered the idea that self expression might be a bad rather than good thing when reading one of Karl Popper's works, about thirty years ago or more, and the thought has stuck with me ever since. I have always thought the "self" to be a somewhat vacuous notion, meaning only, roughly, the personal experience we all have at the heart of … ourselves, but not itself any different from the identical experience of selfhood that everyone else has. It is the things that assemble around the self, like memories, experienecs, and so on, which are the stuff of artistic communication, rather than the self itself, if you'll pardon the expression.

Daniels is right. If "self expression", in fact, on close examination, turns out to mean very little indeed, which is exactly what it does mean, then the expression becomes a license to express any damned old rubbish you care to settle on. It becomes an excuse for nonsense and tastelessness (and evil) of every imaginable kind.

Popper's point, if I recall it correctly, is that it is precisely the self that is not expressed in artistic, but more especially scientific activity. There is you, and there is your theory, and they are not the same thing. That being so, it is possible for someone to take a felling axe to your theory without you taking it personally. Such conjecture and refutation is the essence of science, and of scientific progress.

Self-expression is to art what modern individualism is to individuality: a pale and much distorted simulacrum, based upon a romantic rumour. According to this rumour, each person carries within him, by mere virtue of drawing breath as a human being, something not only unique, but of imperishable value, of which the world stands urgently in need. It must be expressed in public, or it is lost forever.

Daniels then goes on to defend convention against the menace of self-expression.

In practice, the need to express oneself, irrespective of whether one has anything worthwhile to express, leads to a rejection of convention and mass antinomianism. Of course, the rejection of convention is itself a convention, but this is not a thought that frequently crosses the mind of those desperate to express themselves. Nor is the fact that conventions may often be, without being always, of social and ethical value. When a writer in the Times Literary Supplement listed the late A J Ayer's virtues, he included among them that he was unconventional. This might indeed have been a virtue, but it might also have been a vice, indeed it might have included the very worst vices possible. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, after all, were unconventional.

Quite so.