Monthly Archives: April 2009

Cuba Libre?

In a new article for FrontPage Magazine, Dalrymple addresses the premises behind a statement made in the Guardian by Dr. Helen Yaffe of University College, London:


“Will he” (Dr Yaffe asks the author of the article in her reply) “accept the Cuban people’s right to be different – to develop an alternative to the western model of consumerism”…?

Of course, the Cuban people, as she puts it, have not been consulted on the question of whether they want consumerism or not… What Dr Yaffe fears, I suspect, is that if the Cuban people were given the choice, they would behave like everyone else.

Read the entire article here

Between Experience and Reflection

Writing in the City Journal, Dalrymple reviews Paul Hollander’s book, The Only Superpower: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism and in the process makes many observations about Hollander that one could easily make about Dalrymple himself. If we consider him a sociologist and ignore the bit about his mother tongue, there is no praise in the following passages that does not apply equally to Dalrymple:


Paul Hollander is not one of those sociologists who disdains to make his meaning clear to the average man, or at least to the average educated man. Though English was not his mother tongue, he writes with force, clarity, and even elegance. More important still, he does not treat human beings as if they were iron filings in a magnetic field. He knows that the search for meaning is one of man’s most salient characteristics, and he is capable of taking a comparatively small phenomenon and extracting the deeper significance from it.

Hollander is preeminently what one might call a sociologist of ideology, or perhaps a psychosociologist of ideology, because the history of individual intellectuals, of which he has accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge, interests him as much as that of groups.

[snip]

It is a pleasure to read a sociologist who can distinguish so clearly and with wit the less than perfect from the evil; who understands the benefits of environmental conservation without turning such conservation into a quasi-totalitarian ideology; who can see the frivolity, vulgarity, and worthlessness of industrially produced popular culture while appreciating just how quickly dislike of such culture can mutate into contempt for the people who consume it; who, in short, keeps the limits of human possibilities constantly before him. Paul Hollander’s work is an example of the dialectic between lived experience and abstract reflection, of which all work in the humanities should—but alas, seldom does—partake.

Perhaps Dalrymple feels the same way reading Hollander’s work that many feel reading his.

Dalrymple out at The Spectator

As you may have noticed, Dalrymple is no longer writing regularly for The Spectator. His Global Warning column has been replaced by Standing Room, a column written by Sarah Standing, whose subject matter is far less profound than that of her predecessor and, so far as I have determined, is not just well-disguised satire. (See for yourself here. Try the March 11 opus.) Apparently, Editor-in-Chief Matthew D’Ancona’s project to modernize the magazine involves replacing rare and timeless wisdom with utter trivia. Just what the world needs most at times like these. Were I channeling Dalrymple, I might say that the replacement is typical of the cultural degeneration of Britain.

Dalrymple (Anthony M. Daniels) began his writing career at The Spectator 26 years ago by sending unsolicited articles to the magazine from the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific, where he was managing a psychiatric clinic.

Punishing rapists

Dalrymple observes an inconsistency in liberal attitudes to crime and punishment in his latest contribution to The Social Affairs Unit:

It is curious how, when it comes to rape, the liberal press, and
presumably liberals themselves, suddenly appreciate the value of
punishment. They do not say of rape that we must understand the causes
of rape before we punish it; that we must understand how men develop
into rapists before we lock them away, preferably for a long time; that
prison does not work. It is as if, when speaking of rape, it suddenly
becomes time to put away childish things, and (to change the metaphor
slightly) to talk the only kind of language that rapists understand.

The cup of immoderation

Dalrymple writes about the teetotaling Reverend John Davis in the British Medical Journal (purchase required). His first paragraph no doubt speaks for a lot of us:

I hardly let a day go by without a glass or two of wine, and therefore I believe strongly (because I want to) in the J shaped curve of mortality versus alcohol consumption. Teetotallers are harming their health. As for moderation, its definition is clear: it is the habitual consumption of one drink more than the number I am drinking at the time.

Dalrymple on the radio, Friday 7pm GMT

Theodore Dalrymple will be on the Little Atoms radio show on Resonance 104.4FM in London today at 7pm GMT, which is 2pm Eastern time in the U.S. You can listen online here. I recommend the “low quality stream”, because I’ve had some problems with the normal stream. This appears to be a 30-minute interview

Update: Neil Denny has made the interview available here. BTW, I highly recommend Neil’s show.

The meaning of things

The new installment of Dalrymple’s BMJ column is perhaps the most personal and powerful one I’ve read. Much of his recent work has focused on gratitude, and this short piece illustrates how an appreciation for life may flow naturally out of the experience of trauma.

($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.)

The Rosenbergs, Always

In the City Journal, Dalrymple analyzes a recent Guardian newspaper article which includes an interview with the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg:


At the end of the interview he says that his parents gave him and his brother Michael “a life in which we can stand up and be ourselves and do the things we believe in.” Earlier, he had drawn a parallel between what his parents did and other people who, even today, commit acts of civil disobedience to further a cause they believe in.

It’s Moorhead’s neglecting to ask Meeropol what he thought of his parents’ cause that makes me suspect her of secret sympathy with the Soviet Union. For suppose that the subject of the interview had been the orphan of a couple executed for spying for the Nazis: would the interviewer then have let the question of what they believed in go without comment?

Read the full essay here