The “outing” of homosexual celebrities and the worship of power are the topics of Dalrymple’s new essay in FrontPage Magazine:
It is one of the ironies of modern liberalism that diversity should so often come to mean uniformity, and tolerance so often to mean intolerance: that is to say, think and act like me, or else.
The new installment of Dalrymple’s BMJ column describes W.H. Auden’s play The Dog Beneath the Skin (purchase required).
“One a bourgeois paradise; the other, an urban fear zone.” And one seems to be creeping in on the other.
Dalrymple addressed this problem in 2002 (before he moved to France) in a much longer essay, The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, which we highly recommend.
What accounts for the lack of accomplishment among modern celebrities?
In a new essay for The New Criterion (and one perfectly in keeping with the mission of that publication), Dalrymple points to the spread of tertiary education, which opened the doors of the academy to “a multitude chafing at the bit of civilized restraint”, one that was all too eager to destroy standards of “aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual worth” by embracing cultural relativism and non-judgmentalism. At the same time, the common man today makes one very clear judgment: that he is as good as anyone else and that he therefore will not countenance greatness. “People who achieve something far beyond our reach, beyond what we can imagine ourselves being or doing and whose achievements are the result of genius brought to fruition by effort, are not celebrities because they undermine our claim to be the equal of anybody.”
Read the essay here (purchase required)
Writing in The New English Review, Dalrymple considers the philosophical implications of waste:
After a little reflection, I came to the conclusion that my dislike of waste arises from a whole approach to life that seems to me crude and wretched. For unthinking waste – and waste on our scale must be unthinking – implies a taking-for-granted, a failure to appreciate: not so much a disenchantment with the world as a failure to be enchanted by it in the first place. To consume without appreciation (which is what waste means) is analogous to the fault of which Sherlock Holmes accused Doctor Watson, in A Scandal in Bohemia: You see, but you do not observe.
From Focus on the Family’s “The Truth Project”, a short video of the writer discussing the seductive appeal of Rousseau’s ideas. Dalrymple, although not religious, is increasingly the go-to guy for Christians who agree with his cultural and philosophical views.
Dalrymple’s column for the British Medical Journal discusses “the most famous doctor in all literature” (purchase required).