…the Lawrence murder took on a wide social significance because of its racial overtones. The botched investigation became a cause célèbre—the presumption being that racism alone could explain the police’s failure to bring the perpetrators to justice—and the government launched an official inquiry to “identify the lessons to be learned for the investigation and prosecution of racially motivated crimes.” There followed a festival of political and emotional correctness the likes of which have rarely been equaled. It would be impossible, at less than book length, to plumb the depths of intellectual confusion and moral cowardice to which the inquiry plunged.

I am favorably disposed to any criticism of left-wing economist and political pundit Paul Krugman, so I am pleased to see Dalrymple dissect The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, the recently updated edition of Krugman’s 1999 book, in a new FrontPage Magazine article.

I haven’t read the book myself, but I’ve always thought Krugman a perfect example of how poor judgment can render a clever mind not just useless but even destructive. How can anyone still believe that there is no significant moral or behavioral contributor to speculative bubbles and the recessions they leave in their wake? It’s really all just a matter of government economists failing to pull a lever here or turn a knob there in their daily duty of controlling the world economy? That’s the Krugman view.

“Should a person of sound mind have the right to his own life-or-death decisions?”

That’s the question addressed by the 1958 novel The Graver Tribe by Edward Candy, which is the subject of Dalrymple’s weekly BMJ column on medicine and literature.

Yes, the Reverend George Crabbe was an opium addict, but one that “made no song or dance over his opium” and “experienced no romantic ecstasies and suffered no romantic agonies because of it. That all came later, with the next literary generation, of Coleridge and De Quincey.”

Read Dalrymple’s weekly BMJ column here (purchase required)

Dalrymple on our safety-obsessed culture in his weekly BMJ column: “…the happy medium appeals neither to the puritan nor to his blood brother, the libertine.”

You knew Theodore Dalrymple would have his say on the personal expenses scandal engulfing the British parliament. In a piece for the Social Affairs Unit, he argues that the scandal uncovers some important premises of modern morality, namely “the implicit idea that if something is legally permissible, it is morally permissible and cannot be reprehensible”.

I’ve recently realized that there are fewer phrases more frustrating to me than, “There’s no law against it”. That statement is essentially a rejection of the possibility or desirability of human freedom.

From Dalrymple’s weekly essay in the BMJ:

Books can sometimes ambush your deeply buried memories (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, as the case may be) suddenly and unexpectedly, jolting them to the forefront of your mind. This happened to me when I read An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor, edited by Graham Greene and published in 1975.

Read the essay here (purchase required)

Dalrymple seeks to identify the unique characteristcs of modern vulgarity, and explain its ubiquity, in this month’s New Criterion:

It is not so much an unselfconscious absence of refinement, as it is the positive abhorrence of refinement, as if there were not room enough in the world for both vulgarity and refinement and they were locked in a struggle to the death: One must triumph, and since vulgarity is of the people, its victory is deserved.

[snip]

It is an unfortunate effect of mankind’s propensity to make logical mistakes… that much of it supposes that if the truth shocks, then the shocking must be the truth. Before long, the vulgar become the bearers of truth, while the refined become the bearers of falsehood.

It is hardly surprising, then, that there should be a lot of vulgarity about: for who is not on the side of truth against falsehood? And every decent man these days feels the necessity to show not only his truthfulness, but also his solidarity with the poor and downtrodden (in whom the truth inheres) by expressing himself crudely and using bad language.

It’s your lucky day. The essay appears to be available free of charge on the New Criterion website. By the way, for only $48, you can get a one-year print and online subscription, which includes enough Anthony Daniels / Theodore Dalrymple essays to fill several (very good) books.