Monthly Archives: June 2009

Michael Jackson: A Tragedy of Our Times

Writing in FrontPage Magazine, Dalrymple examines both the life of Michael Jackson and the logic of the doctors who connived to help him “live out his childish and pathological fantasies”, and he finds the case emblematic of modern culture:


What we see in Jackson is a manifestation in extreme form of modern man’s increasing unwillingness to place a limit on his own appetites, the precondition that Edmund Burke laid down for the exercise of liberty. Jackson, it is often said, was a child who never grew up; ‘I want, I want!’ was the sum total of his philosophy. He was, in extreme form, a very characteristic modern human type, whose life course was that of precocity followed by permanent adolescence.

Read the essay here.

Dalrymple wrote about Jackson’s child molestation case twice for National Review. His 2003 essay Our Great Societal Neverland (actually, the essay that first opened my eyes to his writing) examined pedophilia, and 2005’s Looking for Boundaries argued that Jackson’s child molestation case was evidence of “gross sexual confusion in our society”:



Each person is left to decide whether his behavior will cause harm to himself or others, and it is a fact of human nature that we can easily persuade ourselves of the harmlessness of what we want, or are already determined, to do. And conformity has in any case a bad name: It is a form of lese majesté of the individual, and — ever since the end of the Second World War — carries the connotation of the feeble excuse offered by mass murderers, that they were only obeying orders. Not the least damage that Nazism did to the world was to destroy faith in the possibility of decent conventions that ought to be followed.

The Michael Jackson case has revealed a foul swamp of egotism, not just of Jackson alone, though he has hitherto enjoyed the means to live out his tasteless fantasies. The case is an example of what happens when individuals are left to define boundaries for themselves without the assistance of social convention.

Update: Our Great Societal Neverland is available here for free. (Hat Tip: RJK)

When Theocracy Breaks Down

One of Dalrymple’s greatest essays, “When Islam Breaks Down” (named “the best journal article of 2004” by the New York Times’ David Brooks), offers an interesting description of the motivation for the ayatollahs’ ongoing crackdown in Iran:

Devout Muslims can see (as Luther, Calvin, and others could not) the long-term consequences of the Reformation and its consequent secularism: a marginalization of the Word of God, except as an increasingly distant cultural echo—as the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the once full “Sea of faith,” in Matthew Arnold’s precisely diagnostic words.

And there is enough truth in the devout Muslim’s criticism of the less attractive aspects of Western secular culture to lend plausibility to his call for a return to purity as the answer to the Muslim world’s woes. He sees in the West’s freedom nothing but promiscuity and license, which is certainly there; but he does not see in freedom, especially freedom of inquiry, a spiritual virtue as well as an ultimate source of strength. This narrow, beleaguered consciousness no doubt accounts for the strand of reactionary revolt in contemporary Islam. The devout Muslim fears, and not without good reason, that to give an inch is sooner or later to concede the whole territory….

The older generation is only now realizing that even outward conformity to traditional codes of dress and behavior by the young is no longer a guarantee of inner acceptance (a perception that makes their vigilantism all the more pronounced and desperate). Recently I stood at the taxi stand outside my hospital, beside two young women in full black costume, with only a slit for the eyes. One said to the other, “Give us a light for a fag, love; I’m gasping.” Release the social pressure on the girls, and they would abandon their costume in an instant.

……

The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a source of strength, but also of fragility and weakness, for individuals as well as for polities. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus coexists with fear that the whole edifice—intellectual and political—will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way. Intransigence is a defense against doubt and makes living on terms of true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible.

……

But the anger of Muslims, their demand that their sensibilities should be accorded a more than normal respect, is a sign not of the strength but of the weakness—or rather, the brittleness—of Islam in the modern world, the desperation its adherents feel that it could so easily fall to pieces. The control that Islam has over its populations in an era of globalization reminds me of the hold that the Ceausescus appeared to have over the Rumanians: an absolute hold, until Ceausescu appeared one day on the balcony and was jeered by the crowd that had lost its fear. The game was over, as far as Ceausescu was concerned, even if there had been no preexisting conspiracy to oust him.

……

Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that accounts for its so frequent shrillness. The Shah will, sooner or later, triumph over the Ayatollah in Iran, because human nature decrees it, though meanwhile millions of lives will have been ruined and impoverished. The Iranian refugees who have flooded into the West are fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion, as I know from speaking to many in my city. To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be very dangerous for some time to come, and all of us, after all, live only in the short term; but ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy, withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of the Church of England) be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.

This is not to say that Iranians
are turning their backs on Islam, but many are certainly turning their
backs on (and throwing their stones at) totalitarian theocracy. Political commentator Fareed Zakaria said that recent events in Iran represent “the fall of Islamic theocracy” whether the regime falls soon or not, because in the face of popular will, Ayatollah Khamenei has had to tacitly withdraw his earlier declaration that Ahmadinejad’s
election was divinely sanctioned. Of course, no one knows whether this
crack will cause the dam to burst, but if Dalrymple is right, it’s only
a matter of time.

Dalrymple and Drugs: May 2006 Speech – Romancing Opiates

In April 2006, Roger Kimball’s Encounter Books published Theodore Dalrymple’s Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, and one month later the Manhattan Institute hosted Dalrymple at the Harvard Club to mark the release of the book. In his speech at the event, Dalrymple highlighted the book’s major arguments and described the popular view of opiate addiction as an “emblematic example of how error may become ingrained and how the most obvious facts may be ignored and their significance overlooked entirely”.

We’ve posted the speech in six parts on the SkepticalDoctor channel on YouTube. Don’t miss the last part in which Dalrymple fields a question from Ethan Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, which describes itself as “the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs.” Dalrymple had criticized Nadelmann’s views nine years earlier in his City Journal essay Don’t Legalize Drugs, and apparently Nadelmann came loaded for bear.


Dalrymple and Drugs: The Value of Broad-Mindedness

Dalrymple’s writing about drug abuse sometimes brings forth a response that is unfortunately all too common from intellectuals across a range of topics: “Typical (myopic, uncaring, intolerant, hateful, etc.) conservative!”

Interestingly, I can’t remember Dalrymple ever actually referring to himself as a conservative, and he has specifically refused that label on a few occasions, in narrowly-defined contexts. In some of his earliest travel books, he actually referred to himself as a liberal, though in very specific circumstances (such as apartheid South Africa), and he has always shown skepticism toward the left.

But all should agree that Dalrymple is anything but myopic. Unfortunately, one such critic, a heroin addict named Terry Wright, responds with just this kind of invective. Angered by Dalrymple’s argument that drug addicts are not helpless victims, but willing participants in their addiction, he responds with bald assertions and childish insults.

It is hard to think of another contemporary essayist who might so inaccurately be called myopic.

As we say here, Dalrymple “has been arrested as a spy in Gabon, been pursued by the South African police for violating apartheid, visited the site of a civilian massacre by the government of Liberia (the outlines of the 600 dead bodies still visible in dried blood on the floor), concealed his status as a writer for fear of execution in Equatorial Guinea, infiltrated an English communist group in order to attend the World Youth Festival in North Korea, performed Shakespeare in Afghanistan in the presence of its crown prince, smuggled banned books to dissidents in Ceaucescu’s Romania, been arrested and struck with truncheons for photographing an anti-government demonstration in Albania, been surveilled by the Indonesian police in East Timor and crossed both Africa and South America using only public transportation.”


As he has written elsewhere, “I spent several years touring the world, often in places where atrocity had recently been, or still was being, committed. In Central America, I witnessed civil war fought between guerrilla groups intent on imposing totalitarian tyranny on their societies, opposed by armies that didn’t scruple to resort to massacre. In Equatorial Guinea, the current dictator was the nephew and henchman of the last dictator, who had killed or driven into exile a third of the population, executing every last person who wore glasses or possessed a page of printed matter for being a disaffected or potentially disaffected intellectual…In North Korea I saw the acme of tyranny, millions of people in terrorized, abject obeisance to a personality cult whose object, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, made the Sun King look like the personification of modesty.”


He served as a doctor for several years in Africa and the Pacific islands, treating and sometimes truly befriending some of the poorest people on the planet, people “with heart failure [who] walked 50 miles in the broiling sun, with panting breath and swollen legs, to obtain treatment — and then walked home again.” He worked for 14 years as a medical doctor and psychiatrist in a slum hospital in England and in the prison next door, tending to the gunshot and stab wounds of the underclass; treating thousands of heroin addicts, some 10,000 people who had attempted suicide, some 10,000 victims or perpetrators of domestic violence; and conducting psychiatric interviews of murderers, serial killers, rapists, thieves, and would-be Islamic terrorists. He still serves as an expert witness in British murder trials.


His familial connections also give him a broad view and an intimate understanding of human suffering. His mother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who, he says, “escaped the extermination camps by quite a narrow margin”. His father was a communist Russian immigrant. And “I had an uncle,” he has written, “who was a prisoner in east Asia during the second world war and who [in post-war years] was reported to wake up screaming in the night…”


Finally, his writings discuss classic literature, philosophy, history, politics, religion, and a comparative (both historically and geographically) analysis of culture.


This is hardly a man of narrow vision who has hidden away in his own small corner of the world.


Unlike Wright’s view of heroin addiction, which is based on his own experience of drugs, Dalrymple’s views are based on both his experience treating thousands of addicts and an understanding of the scientific literature. “Romancing Opiates” (aka “Junk Medicine” in the UK) makes reference to these medical studies:



  • Encyclopedia of Drugs and Alcohol, second of four volumes

  • Jay H. Stein, Internal Medicine, 5th edition, St. Louis: C.V. Mosby, 1999, p. 2997

  • Cecil’s Textbook of Medicine, 21st edition, edited by Lee Goldman and J. Claude Bennett; W.B. Saunders: Philadelphia, 2001, p. 55

  • The Oxford Textbook of Medicine, 4th edition, edited by David A. Warrell, Timothy M. Cox and John D. Firth, 2003, Volume 3, p. 83

  • Carson R. Harris, Emergency Management of Selected Drugs of Abuse, The American College of Emergency Physicians (Dallas, TX), 2000, p. 83

  • Substance Abuse: A Comprehensive Textbook, 3rd edition, edited by Joyce H. Lowinson, Pedro Ruiz, Robert B. Millman and John G. Langrod;  Williams and Wilkins: Baltimore, 1997, p. 416

  • Drugs of Abuse and Addiction: Neurobehavioral Toxicology, R.J.M. Niesink, R.M.A. Jaspers, L.M.W. Komet and J.M. van Ree, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1999, p. 260

  • Goodman and Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 10th edition, edited by Joel G. Harman and Lee E. Limbird; New York: McGraw Hill, 2001, p. 666

  • Steven B. Karch, The Pathology of Drug Abuse, Boca Raton: CRC Pres, 2002

  • Olaf H. Drummer and Morris Odell, The Forensic Pharmacology of Drugs of Abuse, London: Edward Arnold, 2001

  • John Booth Davies, The Myth of Addiction, Overseas Publishers Association, Amsterdam B.V., Harwood Academic Publishers and The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group, 1992

  • Alfred R. Lindesmith, Addiction and Opiates, Chicago, Illinois: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968

There are other inaccuracies in this blog post. Dalrymple hasn’t written “scores” of books on drug addiction, for example; he has written one.


As on so many other topics, one may disagree with Dalrymple’s conclusions on the matter of drug addiction, but to say that they are based on myopia, lies, simple-mindedness, insanity or fringe science is extraordinarily inaccurate. Exactly who is being subjective here?

Dalrymple and Drugs: Legalization

This is the first in a series of posts regarding Theodore Dalrymple’s analysis of drug use (a series we considered titling “Dalrymple On Drugs” before prudence won out). Over the years, drug use has been a regular topic of his writing. Many of his Spectator columns and City Journal essays have drawn upon his work treating patients who have overdosed (either accidentally or intentionally), and his psychiatric counseling of these patients has been an important source of his knowledge of the modern underclass lifestyle. His 2006 book Romancing Opiates (called Junk Medicine in Britain) sought to shatter many of the myths surrounding opiate addiction and withdrawal, and argued that the treatment industry now flourishing in Britain actually encouraged and benefitted from increased opiate usage.

His most extensive writing on the issue of drug legalization is his 1997 City Journal essay “Don’t Legalize Drugs“, which rebutted the major claims made on behalf of legalization. On a blog called “Looking At the Left”, a photojournalist named El Marco has made interesting use of the essay by combining some of its passages with photos he took documenting an event, held annually at the University of Colorado and tolerated by the university and the police, called “Smoke Out”, in which well over 10,000 of our best and brightest young people put down their Shakespeare and their Heidegger and pick up their joints and water pipes in protest against what they regard as the horrible injustice of marijuana laws.

One can dispute the scale and significance of the event. Is it a further slide down the slippery slope of cultural degradation or just a harmless echo of the Sixties? Didn’t more than a few of us try marijuana during our time at university? (Yes.) But in the juxtaposition of Dalrymple’s sober and enlightening prose and El Marco’s photos of these superficial youth, with all of their fake countercultural paraphenalia and their devotion to a wayward cause, it’s hard not to see so much potential just…  well… wasted.

Pictures from an Institution

The institution being Oxford…


Though I admire decorum, I love scandal. And who does not? To assuage my slight feelings of guilt over such prurience, I persuade myself that my preferred scandals are those that raise complex moral questions, or that illustrate something important about modern society.

The scandal over the Oxford professorship of poetry exactly fills the bill. It illustrates the morass into which political correctness inevitably leads us…

Dalrymple in FrontPage magazine