“The authentic man, in the romantic conception, is he who has cut himself free of all convention, who acknowledges no restriction on the free exercise of his will. This applies as much to morals as to aesthetics: and artistic genius becomes synonymous with waywardness. But a being as dependent on his cultural inheritance as man cannot escape convention so easily: and the desire to do so has itself become a cliché. Thus, for all its crudity and coarseness, ‘Sensation’ is deeply conventional, but it obeys a wicked and socially destructive convention” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 151).
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