Monthly Archives: November 2009

Bloodless Saga

Dalrymple has a second piece in the new National Review, this time a review of the book American Homicide by Randolph Roth. While praising the book’s “immense amount of information” and Roth’s rejection of “obfuscatory jargon”, Dalrymple cites problems with both the book’s statistics and the conclusions Roth draws from them. For example, Dalrymple disagrees with Roth’s contention that the homicide rate is necessarily “a reflection of the state of social and political solidarity of a population”, arguing that Western societies have seen increases rather than decreases in crime as they have become more just societies. Dalrymple attributes this to the fact that, all other things being equal, meritocracies like those in the West leave little excuse for one’s personal failures and thereby encourage “a prickly resentment” that can lead to violence (Major Nidal Malik Hasan being one possible example?).

Read it here (purchase required)

PC Unto Death

Writing in the new issue of National Review, our favorite psychiatrist puts Major Nidal Malik Hasan on the couch and concludes that his attack was the result of his personal problems being channeled through the ideology of militant Islam, which “transformed Major Hasan from being a man in personal difficulty into being a horrifying criminal”, something surely known to his military superiors who chose to look the other way.

Read it here (purchase required)

The Architect As Totalitarian

One species of Dalrymple essay that his fans most enjoy is the commonsensical takedown of seemingly obvious, yet inexplicably ignored targets. The new City Journal offers up a classic of the genre, in which Dalrymple calls the exalted Le Corbusier an “ahuman” architect whose “soulless” work “does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism”.

Workshops and why you must avoid them

Dalrymple has another post at The Social Affairs Unit, this one dealing with the racket that is professional “courses, conferences, away-days, workshops, team-building weekends”.

All this para-work, this ceaseless diversionary activity, is designed, or at least destined, to prevent people from carrying on their real work. By doing so, of course, it creates employment, or at least the necessity to pay people salaries: for, overall, many man-days are lost to it. And it creates pseudo-entrepreneurial opportunities for so-called consultants (often ex-employees of the organisations whose staff they now offer to train in such skills as assertiveness). It is, in effect, an exercise in Keynesian demand-management, but unlike the kind of public works that Keynes envisaged as a stimulus to a flagging economy, it leaves the country with nothing of enduring value, unless a bureaucrat with a flat-screened television and a new conservatory be called something of enduring value.

Needless to add, ceaseless “personal and professional development” is perfectly compatible with the most abysmal incompetence. Indeed, such incompetence is welcome, for it creates ever more demand for the personal and professional development that is supposedly the means to overcome it. This is what I believe is known as a positive feedback loop.
Read the whole thing here

It would be interesting to see a study comparing the prevalence of these workshops among bureaucratic government service organizations and monopolies versus private sector firms in competitive industries.

Apologies and Letters

Expressing disagreement with the public statements of the grieving families of fallen soldiers is a tricky business, but Dalrymple does so here in the Social Affairs Unit, holding his nose and defending Gordon Brown in the process:


No one, I think, would take me for an admirer of Gordon Brown, much less an apologist for him; but in the matter of the letter that he wrote to Mrs Janes, mother of the soldier killed in Afghanistan, I feel sorry for him. He has become a victim of the ideological sentimentality so assiduously promoted by his odious predecessor, and now so fully a part of our national character.

An Inside Story

This week in the British Medical Journal Dalrymple discusses a novel on a topic about which he has some expertise:

One of our purposes in reading is to extend the range of our sympathies by imaginative entry into situations of which we can have no more direct experience….Still, it is only human to want to read what authors have made of one’s métier, which is why I took up a play by John Galsworthy (1867-1933), Justice. I was a prison doctor for a number of years, and there are not many plays in which such a personage appears.

Emotional, My Dear Watson

We’ve missed some recent pieces and will be catching up throughout the weekend. We ask for your patience, as our full-time jobs and lives sometimes make it difficult to keep up with Dalrymple’s prolific output.

Last week’s BMJ column touches on those feinting spells and cases of the vapours so common in Victorian-era literature, in describing “the role of stress, or more generally of psychological factors, in the production of physical illness” in “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes”.

Appearance on BBC Radio 4

Dan Collins of Monday Books, publisher of Theodore Dalrymple’s most recent books Not With a Bang But a Whimper and Second Opinion, has a post on the Monday Books blog regarding Dalrymple’s appearance Tuesday on BBC Radio 4 to discuss British approaches to treating mentally ill criminals. He links to a podcast of the segment. Dalrymple is outspoken as always.

Read it here

Oh yes… Dan has also sent us a recording of Dalrymple’s recent interview at the Dorset Literary Festival, which we hope to have online at some point, i.e. as soon as I can edit it and put it on the Speeches & Interviews page.

Second Opinion now available

Monday Books has just released Second Opinion, a collection of Theodore Dalrymple’s various columns at the Spectator between the years 1997 and 2009. The handsome hardcover book is available here directly from Monday Books for £14.99 with free shipping to any address in the world. The price is especially generous when you consider the book measures out at 321 pages.

Monday Books has posted an excerpt at their website, and if you’ve never read these pieces, I encourage you to give them a look. They are simultaneously some of the funniest, most entertaining, most heartbreaking and most profound pieces I’ve read.

I have received my copy and look forward to diving in. Even as someone who has already read most of these columns, I laughed audibly throughout the excerpt. Who can resist the following exchange between Dalrymple and a patient attacked by his girlfriend’s mother:

“…did she attack you often?”

“Only when she was pissed off with me.”
Admirable restraint, really!