In The Social Affairs Unit, Dalrymple takes a look at the public response to a Daily Mail article by Jan Moir that was “factually wrong” and “ungenerous in sprirt”.
Readers complaining about an unfair article? Good for them. But calling the police?
Read the essay here
Writing in Standpoint magazine, Dalrymple proposes starting “a society for the restoration of Sir and Madam in everyday speech”. Count me in.
Everyone likes to question authority — especially nowadays when our inflamed egotism demands it in order to establish our individuality in a mass society. What better way to do so than to reject the vast, impersonal apparatus of modern scientific medicine, which consumes more and more of our economic product with diminishing returns, and resort to some pseudo-ancient hocus-pocus propagated by modern witches and wizards.Dalrymple in the Spectator
It is also extremely gratifying to know that one’s condition is beyond the reach of the most sophisticated treatment that science can offer, but is susceptible to something more in harmony with the spiritual vibrations of the universe. This suggests that one’s body and soul is a refined one, not like that of the common herd, whose grossness responds to such crudities as surgery and pharmacology.
Doctors are the type of people one might expect to become terrorists: not all or even many doctors, of course, but some, because they have precisely the right psychological “qualifications” to do so.
First, doctors must train themselves to be dispassionate in the face of suffering, and be prepared to do things that might cause their patients discomfort and even pain, for the higher purpose of the good of the patients. The need for doctors to be able to distance themselves in this way is recognized by the old medical-school ritual of throwing medical students into the dissecting room on their first day, so that they learn to master and overcome their natural repugnance.
Clearly, this kind of mastery can tip over quite easily into aggression and sadism, if it is not allied to a very strong moral sense. And since the medical profession is very large worldwide, counting millions, it is inevitable that there should be some among them who are lacking this moral sense.
Second, and more important, there needs to be an ideology to which aggression and sadism can attach, if doctors are to become terrorists. Furthermore, such an ideology is likely to appeal not so much to the uneducated masses, at least to the extent of acting on it, as to the educated classes.
It needs a high degree of abstraction to believe that bombing an airport terminal in Glasgow will conduce to anything but the death of people at random. In their day-to-day dealings, no doubt the plotters were perfectly decent and kindly, possibly even feeling sympathy for the sufferings of the people whom they met in their training and practice as doctors. But just as the dissecting room can overcome natural repugnance, so can an ideology overcome all the social inhibitions against killing people.
As Solzhenitsyn pointed out in a different context, it is ideology that allows people to commit the most terrible acts in the belief that they are bringing about a better world. It blinds them to the most obvious moral considerations; it renders the most absolute evil good.
Islamism is nothing if not an ideology, a poisonous mixture of medieval superstition, sociology, and modern political philosophy. People who plan to set off bombs in airports with cellphones are clearly of the modern world, yet they do so in the hope of bringing about a “return” to an imagined 7th-century paradise. It requires a great deal of education and training to believe such nonsense.
Read the whole article here
…what he knocked off in an hour can still be read with pleasure and profit 80 or 90 years later. Bennett’s qualities as an essayist, apart from ease and elegance of style, were genial common sense and a complete lack of snobbery, intellectual or social, without ever losing a sense of ethical and aesthetic values (a difficult trick to pull off).Read it here (purchase required)
Dalrymple’s recent participation in a panel discussion on poverty has him musing on socialist arguments for equality in a new essay for The New English Review. As he notes, any serious attempt at promoting egalitarianism must include a program to eliminate inheritance of any kind — financial, technical, even parental. There is no reason that the arguments made in favor of egalitarianism within a society should not also apply across different societies, so that totalitarian governments become the norm. And the abolition of such inheritance presupposes the impossible: that humans have “the capacity to feel for the whole of humanity equally”.
Read the essay here
Personally, I think there is serious reason to doubt the Left’s concern for poverty and the extent to which it engenders a desire for redistribution. Some of us might wonder if the relationship is not actually the other way around, with the liberal desire for redistribution settling on poverty as an excuse. Why else would you define poverty as a relative rather than an absolute phenomenon, as the Left does? Calling inequality “poverty” is a tacit admission of the unpopularity of their view.
The latest edition of the New Criterion is out (always a happy event around here), and Dalrymple’s contribution (freely available to non-subscribers) is an essay on the attitude of Western intellectuals toward the Soviet Union:
One of the most extraordinary episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century—if, indeed, something that lasted half a century or more can properly be called an episode—is the moral and sometimes material support given by much of the western intelligentsia to the Soviet tyranny, a tyranny that made all previous tyrannies seem relaxed, liberal, and almost amateurish by comparison. Men who found the slightest circumscription of their own freedom intolerable raised hosannas to the most systematic and concerted abrogation of personal liberty yet attempted; many were those who strained at gnats to swallow a camel.