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"Luckily, research (pdf) by Guido Heineck tackles just this question. Unluckily, his findings are depressing.
He looked at the correlations between UK individuals’ earnings and “big five” personality traits, controlling for other things such as age, education, marital status and region."
The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so.
Lists some of the virtues of music/art: innovation, craftsmanship, emotional truth, sensuousness, clarity, simplicity, intellectualism, memorability, physicality, theoretical rigor...
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So all these bloggers who reel on endlessly about the pop/classical problem, and how we have to protect classical music in a pop-oriented world: I simply will not partake. I believe in genres defined by specific, pin-pointable qualities, from reggae to heavy metal to totalism to postminimalism to impressionism to spectralism to to space-age bachelor pad music to bluegrass, but "classical" and "pop" are industry-created categories, economic categories, and they leave no traces for me in the music. Whether I'm listening to a song by Loudon Wainwright III or Brian Eno or Charles Ives or Sir William Walton, I want the relation of melody and accompaniment to words elegantly and creatively handled.
Empathy isn’t a fuzzy virtue. It isn’t even a virtue at all, it is an ability. It can be used for good, or for evil. Once you understand someone you can use that understanding to help them, to heal them, to hurt them or to destroy them. Reject empathy and you reject understanding your fellow humans as well as you otherwise could. In war, that can lead to defeat; in justice that can lead to injustice; and in relationships that kills love.
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We see hints of this type of reaction to our current recession, which has such clearly moral causes -- the burst of a bubble inflated by irresponsible debt, consumerism and unaccountable risk-taking. During an economic crisis, Americans return to a language of morality. Perhaps excess and recklessness are vices that deserve social stigma. Perhaps frugality and prudence are personal virtues as well as practices that prevent economic collapse. Perhaps there is a distinction between securing our needs and being dominated by our wants.
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