Needless to say, Dalrymple has not fallen under the Obama spell, and the disparity between the President-elect’s political success and any observable justification for it has our favorite writer contemplating the limits of democracy.
Dalrymple in The American Interest
UPDATE: I neglected to mention the $19 subscription fee for online access to the magazine. At least it’s good for the whole year!
Dalrymple has a new essay for the New Zealand Centre for Political Research regarding the appalling cases of parental abuse and neglect that have hit the British news in the last few months. The solution to these problems is simple and obvious: we need to encourage people to take responsibility for their own actions. But such a solution is against the interests of both the state bureaucracy that is funded to tackle such problems and its liberal supporters who desire a world free of social restriction and who declare their own virtue by excusing vice.
Whenever we try to assess the meaning and significance of particularly horrible cases, such as that of Nia Glassie in New Zealand or Baby P in Britain (between which there are several parallels), it is important to bear in mind that there is nothing new under the sun, that some people have always done terrible things to others, that some humans have always behaved with the utmost cruelty, that there has never been a golden age of universal benevolence and good will to all men, and that no social system will entirely eliminate the human capacity for evil.
Nevertheless, there is something peculiarly shocking about cases such as those of Nia Glassie and Baby P…
Dalrymple has often said, “I am not religious, but I am also not anti-religious.” In the last couple of years, he has begun to take on many fellow atheists for their warnings about the dangers of religion. His Fall 2007 essay in City Journal, “What the New Atheists Don’t See” argued that “to regret religion is to regret Western civilization” and that, although not religious himself, he nevertheless found that the Christian basis of Western civilization promoted a “more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more honest, more humane” outlook than that exhibited by the new atheists.
Now he has a new essay on the subject in New Humanist magazine, and I find this one to be more personal and direct.
Judging from the response to the City Journal essay and the comments to this one, I seriously doubt the extent to which most of his critics are driven by an objective pursuit of hard truths via the light of pure reason rather than by a desire to do away with the inconvenient moral restrictions that religion supports. And it’s hard for me to look at the world today and find any serious problems that can fairly be blamed on religion generally rather than on one religion in particular or on the desire to do away with religion.
The news that a British judge has awarded (rewarded?) three prisoners 11,000 pounds each for being expected to go “cold turkey” in their withdrawal from heroin has prompted Dalrymple to write again of the folly of the British attitude toward opiates, which he says “is deeply emblematic of the moral and intellectual decadence into which we have fallen”, because it encourages unhealthy and dangerous activity and promotes crime, all in the service of growing the bureaucracy.
Read the essay at the Spectator
Dalrymple’s short new essay for the City Journal, part of the magazine’s “Eye on the News” feature, is another great example of his ability to glean meaning from seemingly banal events.
Read the essay here
Dalrymple’s column at the British Medical Journal has a great opening line:”There is no pleasure greater than to denounce the wickedness of the times, and since the times are always wicked the pleasure is inexhaustible.” The article discusses the philosophical and theological views on pain held by The Reverend Jeremy Collier MA (1650-1726).
Read the column here
Dalrymple has written an essay for FrontPageMagazine.com regarding the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution:
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, the French newspaper, Le Monde, which is vastly more informative about the world than any English-language journal (and therefore loses a lot of money), had a four-page spread.
What was surprising about the tone of three of these four pages, written by Frenchmen, was their hostility to the Revolution…
This past September, The New Criterion and The Social Affairs Unit jointly sponsored a symposium entitled “The Dictatorship of Relativism: Who Will Stand Up for Western Values Now?” in Winchester, England. The New Criterion has published many of the essays from the symposium in their January 2009 issue.
Dalrymple’s contribution is an essay entitled “Guarding the boundaries”, in which he argues that the inevitable uncertainty of philosophical judgment is not an argument for relativism, that judgmentalism is an inescapable feature of human nature and that moral standards, while always imperfect and disputable, are necessary if life is to be bearable.
What is new about the current relativism, it seems to me, is not that it contends the positioning of boundaries, for such positioning has, I think, always been contentious: It is always possible, after all, to argue that any given boundary contributes more to the misery than to the happiness of man. Rather, the current relativism contests the very need for boundaries itself, or at any rate has the effect, once it filters down from the intelligentsia into the general population, of destroying the appreciation of the need for boundaries. And if no boundaries are needed, then any attempt to impose them is without legitimacy. Only what comes from the self is legitimate.
Read the essay here
($3 purchase required or $38 for a subscription to the entire website. Better yet, purchase a print subscription to the magazine for only a little more and get the online access for free. See his New Criterion links on the left of this page.)
Dalrymple on the lack of truth and beauty in modern art via his new essay for the New English Review:
In no field is Hans Christian Andersen’s fable about the Emperor’s new clothes more salient than contemporary art; or, to put it another way, in no commercial field are there so many Bernie Madoffs.
The successful modern artist’s subject is himself, not in any genuinely self-examining way that would tell us something about the human condition, but as an ego to distinguish himself from other egos, as distinctly and noisily as he can. Like Oscar Wilde at the New York customs, he has nothing to declare but his genius: which, if he is lucky, will lead to fame and fortune. Of all the artistic disciplines nowadays, self-advertisement is by far the most important.