At his Hilarious Pessimist blog, Dalrymple takes on artist Anish Kapoor for his recent statement, “In Britain, traditionally – at least since the Enlightenment – we’ve been afraid of anything intellectual, aesthetic, visual.”

Let us pass over in charitable silence this thumbnail sketch of our national mental existence since the beginning of the 18th Century. Let us instead remark on the artist’s locus standi to pronounce on such questions: for he is one of those many modern artists who would add considerably to the beauty of the world by desisting from their activities.

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Yes, probably, says Dalrymple. But as always with medical questions, “further research is required”.

Dalrymple at Manchester Airport…

I went through security with about forty young men on their way to a stag party in Hamburg. On the back of their specially printed T-shirts (as one of the young men proudly showed me) was the following slogan:

If the woman says no –
MOLEST HER.

I am no advocate of political correctness, but a culture which produces scores of young men who think it not only amusing to wear such a slogan, but right to travel to a foreign country wearing it, is surely a vile, crude and stupid one. Worse still, this vileness, crudity and stupidity is not unselfconscious: it is deliberately aimed at, it is the considered rejection of what is better in favour of what is worse.

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As some readers may have noticed, the British Medical Journal ended Dalrymple’s “Between the Lines” column this past December. It’s a shame, because these were very enjoyable little columns that combined both of Dalrymple’s parallel careers. We remarked more than once how impressive was his intellect that he was able to write, once per week for at least (by our count) five years and on top of all of his other responsibilities as a doctor and a writer, a column on the subject of medicine in literature.

Fortunately for us, he not only wrote so many of these columns, but he wrote them well in advance. When the column ended, he had a large backlog of unpublished pieces, and he has asked us to publish them on Skeptical Doctor. We will run one per week, on Wednesdays, just as they were published at the BMJ. This gives us over a year’s worth of such pieces. Enjoy.

Active Listening
by Theodore Dalrymple

Somerset Maugham, the great doctor-author, once said that he would rather read a railway timetable than nothing at all, and I am of that ilk. One of the few lessons that life has taught me is never to go anywhere without a book, for then delay cannot irritate, and indeed (if it is a good book) can delight. A life of frustration is thereby transformed into a life of pleasure.

But no one ever keeps entirely to his principles, and recently I found myself walking in a provincial city without a book. Worse still, I had no notebook with me when suddenly I was struck by an idea for an article. My memory not being what it once was (or what I think it once was), I felt the need to write down my idea at once. I went into a stationer’s and bought an exercise book.

In my childhood such books had on their covers information about how many drachmas made a grain and how many rods and poles made a perch (or was it the other way round?). But now that we have the metric system – so dull by comparison – to blunt our brains, we need different information, a different stimulus, from the covers of our exercise books. The one I bought taught ‘Active reading and listening skills for your studies, work and life.’ There was enough in it to read and keep me occupied if the bus came late; by thus purchasing it, I had killed two birds with one stone. Not bad for £2.99!

One learns a lot from casually-encountered sources, I find. For example, ‘Active reading’ involves, among other things, understanding what is written; one’s notes should always be appropriate. But now that so much of doctors’ time is taken up by meetings, it was the section on ‘Active listening’ that I found most illuminating.

When you are at a committee meeting and some boring fool is droning on, proposing something absurd because some bigger boring fool higher up the ladder has told him to propose it, ‘smile and use other facial expressions’ (not grimaces, of course), and ‘nod occasionally’ (but not from sleep). You ‘should encourage the speaker to continue with small verbal comments such as “Yes” and “uh-uh,”’ and you should ‘Note your posture and make sure it’s open and inviting.’

In the world of active listening skills, there is no one who is ill-intentioned or needs no encouragement to continue speaking. That is why you must remember that ‘Active listening is a model for respect and understanding.’ At no time must you ever be distracted by the thought that the speaker is a time-serving apparatchik who would sell his mother for a team-building away-day (with or without a vegetarian option for lunch), let alone promotion to the post of Director of Co-ordination. ‘Responding appropriately’ is one of the five keys to ‘Active listening’ and never includes anything as vigorous as disagreement, let alone scorn: for appropriate is now as weaselly a word as ‘valid,’ as (for example) in ‘My opinion is as valid as yours.’

Am I imagining it, or are we living in a world of increasingly inescapable exhortatory platitude, from which an awareness of the tragic dimension of life has been expunged by ‘active reading and listening skills’? If you doubt it, I can only advise the following, with regard to this article:

Once you have read appropriate sections, run through the key information in your mind several times. Isolate the core facts or essential processes…

And then scream.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

A short ride on a British train becomes an ordeal thanks to a blaring and inescapable television:

There is nowhere to go to escape it, at least in second class. I asked whether there was a quiet carriage to be told that there was not, though an announcement on the television at the end of the journey informed me that somewhere on the train was a carriage with reduced volume television. This only irritated me further: why not absence of television altogether and complete silence? Is mankind now so thoroughly lacking in what used to be called inner resources that it must be kept entertained even on a half hour journey?

According to Dalrymple at Pajamas Media, there might business or public health reasons for doctors to choose not to treat certain types of patients, but those reasons might also just be a cover for simple discrimination. Or does the doctor’s motivations even matter?

Read it here

Whatever the stated reasons, it’s clear that the real motivation for the establishment of the European Union is the desire of European bureaucrats for power. They claim to be motivated by a desire to avoid further conflict on the continent, but as Dalrymple says in a new piece for the Australian (available for free at Real Clear World), the union, if anything, promotes and encourages conflict:

Actually, a forced European unity, conjured from no popular sentiment by a strange combination of bureaucratic mediocrity and gaseous utopianism, is more likely to lead to conflict than to prevent it; and the increasingly wide divergence of the interests of France and Germany is fast recalling the ghosts of the past. The French fear to be dominated; the Germans don’t want to be condescended to.

In the Telegraph, Dalrymple takes the news of Sir Alex Ferguson’s announcement of retirement as an opportunity to muse on retirement generally, including his own:

There are few sensations more delightful than waking up in the morning in the knowledge that one does not have to get up if one doesn’t want to. No doubt it is a sign of mankind’s bad character that the sensation is all the more delicious because one knows that not everyone can share it. And one comes to realise that the old maiden aunt who took an entire morning to post a letter, whom Northcote Parkinson described to illustrate his famous law that work expands to meet the time available for its completion, was not so much a figure of fun or even obloquy as a wise old bird. The fact is that pottering is fun and soothes the soul.

Read it here

This essay, consisting of fairly random musings about owls and inspired by his recent purchase of a book about the creatures, is a departure from Dalrymple’s usual oeuvre. Part 2 will apparently be about Richard III, the subject of the other book he purchased on the same visit to a charity shop.

For me, Dalrymple is no less exciting when he writes about the seemingly mundane than when he takes on the weightiest matters. The insights are just as interesting and profound, and the writing is, if anything, even more beautiful. As he says in this piece, he is interested in everything, and it seems to me that those who are the most interested are typically the most interesting.

Owls, I confess, play a only very small part in my life. In the little town in which I live when I am in England there is a woman who is always accompanied on her shopping expeditions by a pet owl. No one finds this astonishing or, if they do, lets their astonishment be known; this is either from a laudable desire not to intrude upon the owner or not to gratify her desire for notice. And in France a pair of tawny owls to-whit to-whoo every summer night in a tree a hundred yards or so (to judge by the sound of it) from the house. I never tire of listening them; I also never see them, and so their lives are a closed book to me. They therefore reassure me that there is mystery still in the world; for a world without mystery, in which everything were revealed and known, would be a terrible place. Knowledge is wonderful, the more of it the better, but omniscience would be a nightmare.

In his medical column for Pajamas Media, Dalrymple muses on the results of a recent study that shows that older doctors produce fewer complications for their patients:

Suppose it proved to be a general rule that every doctor is at his peak performance in his sixth decade? Will not every patient then want his or her doctor to be of that decade? It is obvious that such a desire could not possibly be complied with; and even if it could be, how would younger doctors get the experience to reach their peak in their sixth decade?

Of course, difference in age and experience is not the only cause of variation in doctors’ performance. Some are brilliant by natural ability, others less so. But the public does not necessarily react rationally when it learns of a statistical association.

Read it here