Monthly Archives: November 2008

When Good is Bad

Dalrymple has a short essay on modern conceptions of morality in the new issue of Standpoint magazine.


There is an asymmetry in our moral assessment of ourselves: goodness comes from within, badness from without. People, as a general rule, don’t ask for an explanation of their good behaviour: only their bad is mysterious to them. In many years of medical practice, no one has ever asked  me, “Do you think it could be my childhood that makes me so nice, doctor?”

Read the article here

Destructive Delusions

Dalrymple discusses Try to Remember by Paul R. McHugh, M.D. in today’s Wall Street Journal.


Our lives are more deeply affected by science and technology than ever before, but that does not mean that we are more rational than our forefathers in our everyday conduct. Superstition springs eternal in the human mind, or gut, and the fact that Charles Mackay’s great book, “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” published in 1843, should be so pertinent to our current economic situation proves it.

One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of “recovered memory” of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims. The whole episode would have been funny had it not been so tragic.

Read the full essay

Pot, Meet Kettle

Who is Tobias Wolff? I don’t know, but apparently he’s no selfless humanitarian, as Dalrymple displays in a brief City Journal piece that also serves as a nice summary of some of the major philosophical differences between liberals and conservatives.


Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.

Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.

Read the full article

Global Warning

An update to the Global Warning column at the Spectator…


The other day, the 9.56 bus to the nearest train station was late and the people at the stop — of whom I was by far the youngest — began to grumble a little. Then, looming out of the mist, appeared the driver.

‘I’m sorry, the brakes have failed,’ he said. ‘I’m not prepared to risk your lives and they won’t be repaired until the next bus.’

The next bus — they are all decrepit round here, resuscitated from scrap heaps — was in an hour’s time. Words such as ‘typical’, ‘Third World’, ‘incompetence’ and ‘economic crisis’ ran angrily through my mind.

Read the full column here

New Theodore Dalrymple publications coming to the UK

The publishing house Monday Books announced in this blog post on Friday that they have agreed to publish new collections of Dalrymple essays in the UK next year. We will let you know when more information is available.

Monday Books describes themselves as “an independent publisher specialising in strongly-written non fiction across a wide range of subject areas”, so Dalrymple certainly seems to fit right in. I took a look at their current titles, and many of them look very interesting.

Slouching Toward Fanaticism

Dalrymple discusses Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, by Paul A. Offit (Columbia University Press, 328 pp., $24.95).


For some reason, the immunization of children has always aroused opposition of almost religious fervor. For example, a mass movement led resistance to smallpox vaccination in Britain for 70 years and was supported by intellectuals of the stature of George Bernard Shaw, who never believed in the germ theory of disease and thought that Pasteur and Lister were charlatans. Politicians have won or lost elections on their attitude to vaccination. And the extensive literature produced by the antivaccination movement attributed virtually every human ill, from general failure to thrive to the recrudescence of leprosy, to the practice. The movement also imputed the worst possible motives to vaccinators, including Edward Jenner himself, the developer of the smallpox vaccine.

Read the article here