Theodore Dalrymple Quote
Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.
Theodore Dalrymple
Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.
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About Theodore Dalrymple
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in: The British Medical Journal, The Times, New Statesman, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, New English Review, The Wall Street Journal and Axess magasin. He is the author of a number of books, including: Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001), Our Culture, What's Left of It (2005) and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (2010).
In his writing, Daniels frequently argues that the leftist views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimise the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within prosperous countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexually transmitted diseases, welfare dependency, and drug abuse. Much of Dalrymple's writing is based on his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill.
In 2011, Dalrymple was awarded the Prize for Liberty by the Flemish classical-liberal think-tank Libera!.