Dalrymple’s weekly essay at the British Medical Journal is now available online. The essay discusses a book by a Guinean doctor, La fin de Sékou Touré by Mandiouf Mauro Sidibe. Dalrymple has written often of Ahmed Sékou Touré, one of the worst dictators in a century full of them.
Read the essay here (purchase required)
Dalrymple has a brief new essay at City Journal regarding a recent experience on a Paris commuter train in which he grew uneasy because of the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities and languages of the passengers.
Normally I take a taxi to the airport when I fly from Paris, but with the ascent of the euro and the descent (so far, I am glad to say, only anticipated) of my income, I decided this time to go by train. One gets a slightly closer view that way of the often hideous concrete jungle surrounding Paris—still the most beautiful city in the world, however, with the possible exception of Venice.
Getting on the crammed mass-transit train at rush hour at the Gare du Nord, I suddenly felt uneasy…
Given the current economic upheavals, Dalrymple looks to the works of John Kenneth Galbraith for guidance and is disappointed:
…from the fact that the managers of modern corporations are bureaucrats of some kind or another, Galbraith draws the unwarranted conclusion that there is nothing to choose, from the point of view of economic efficiency, between governmental and corporate bureaucracy, and that therefore the extension of state economic power is not to be opposed merely on the grounds that it is inherently bureaucratic. This is absurd.
Here Galbraith makes precisely the mistake that he accuses those who use the word ‘work’ to cover both unskilled heavy labor and Bill Gates’ activities of making, namely of hiding important distinctions by terminology. He ask a word to carry too much ontological baggage, and by doing so indulges in the old rhetorical trick of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi.
To understand the pace of Dalrymple’s reading, consider that he is able to stumble upon enough literary references to a doctor or a medical issue to write a weekly essay about it.
His newest offering at the British Medical Journal discusses one of Tennessee Williams’s last plays, Small Craft Warnings.
Read the essay here (purchase required)
It took me a while, but I eventually realized that Dalrymple’s new contribution to his Global Warning column at The Spectator is pure satire. Of what exactly?
Of English sensitivity to criticism by the French, I suppose. Of the refusal to face unpleasant facts, certainly. Perhaps also of his own critics?
Read the column here
This June in London, Theodore Dalrymple will participate in a debate on the motion: “Psychotherapy has done more harm than good”. Unfortunately for those interested in attending, the event is already sold out. The debate is part of the increasingly-popular Intelligence Squared series, which are sponsored in the UK by The Spectator magazine.
As you might expect of a man at odds with much of his profession (one of his professions, anyway), Dalrymple is arguing for the motion.
Details of the event are here.
Focusing on the trivial can sometimes be comforting, even for a thinking man:
My wife tells me, and so it must be right, that now that we are retired we must beware of the involution of our habits and interests. It is all too easy for old people to live the petty round, in which a visit to the grocer seems an expedition of some magnitude, and not to change their clothes for weeks on end.
And yet there is something deeply reassuring about the scale of the quotidian, that seems suddenly upon retirement to be so much more important than it seemed before: besides, one cannot always be considering the deepest questions of existence, and not being a cosmologist or an astronomer, the vastness and coldness of the universe frightens me.
Dalrymple reviews “On Kindness” by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor and finds it wanting:
There is no doubt, I think, that we have difficulty with the notion of kindness nowadays. Kindness is apt to be capricious; the deserving may be excluded from it while the undeserving may be smothered in or by it. It easily turns syrupy; or alternatively may become a weapon in the hands of the passive-aggressive, to establish their power over others. It is hard to legislate for kindness, and we live increasingly in a world where what is not required by law is not required by anything else.
There was therefore scope for a short book on kindness: it is a subject that soon leads to profound questions of moral and political philosophy. This book, alas, is not the book required.
Why do people riot? Is it that they are filled with uncontrollable rage at injustice, against which they fight using the only means available to them? If so, why do they never riot in bad weather?
Dalrymple takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the appeal of nihilists’ third favorite activity.
Read the essay at FrontPageMagazine
The late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century Austrian philosopher Theodor Gompersz viewed the rational Greek approach to medicine as necessarily better than the superstitious view that has prevailed throughout much of history, but as Dalrymple notes in his BMJ column, it was only very recently that such an approach finally began to pay dividends.
Read the column here
$4 purchase required or $82 for one-year unlimited access to the entire website. His essays older than one year are free. See his BMJ links on the left of this page.