Like all of his pieces for The Daily Express, Theodore Dalrymple’s new essay for that publication is brief and modest, but it is also important. Although concerned with Britain, it expresses a central truth about the elite of the entire Western world, a truth that for some reason is rarely stated so simply and clearly: that they hate and wish to destroy their own cultural and traditional heritage. Many people on the Left, perhaps most, do not share this hatred and a shocking number of them do not believe that it even exists, but they unwittingly accept the consequences of it, forming as it does the entire basis of the modern liberal worldview, which is embraced by the vast majority of the most influential people in the West: the political, cultural, intellectual, journalistic, academic, financial and even religious (see Archbishop Rowan Williams) elite. Perhaps because of his brevity, Dalrymple notes the advantages of their view but not its ultimate source (which I believe to be a belief in the dispensability of traditional moral standards).
I think it’s important to note that Dalrymple himself is an atheist, so he is not arguing for Christianity but against “an officially-sponsored indifference or hostility to anything which might be considered part of the European and British cultural and religious heritage”. He charts a sensible middle ground between self-hatred and xenophobia, the two extremes that elite opinion offers and which the vast majority of the public surely rejects.
Anyway, the essay is here. I wish they had not disabled comments, because I suspect a lot of readers would be cheering this piece.
The Skeptical Doctor
Dedicated to the work of Theodore Dalrymple
great article! by the way, dalrymple is spending quite some time in India lately…
Yes Ravi, he certainly seems to be. We once asked him: of all the countries he’s visited, what was his favorite? Without hesitation, he said, “India, for it’s magic and mystery.”
The most trenchant analysis of what’s going on in Europe has been offered by one whom the great James V. Schall has called “the most acute mind in public life today”: Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. I suggest reading his 1) Truth and Tolerance, 2) at least the Preface to the latest edition of his Introduction to Christianity, 3) Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, 4) Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, and 5) this: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/politics/pg0143.html
The real wonder is that any intelligent person can still believe any of the usual Christian psycho-babble.
What could it possibly mean that refers to anything real (by any measure of informed intelligence) to say that you believe in the “resurrection of Jesus” and that we are somehow “saved” by something that DID NOT happen 2000 years ago.
What if Christianity is both long past its useful use by date, and never was about Real God in the first place, or was just the self-serving tribalistic cultic deity of the West altogether.
Critical essays on Christianity
http://www.dabase.org/proofch6.htm
Plus an Illuminated radical (that is going to the root)critique of what is usually called religion altogether—the mommy-daddy religion
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-religion.aspx
On Real God at:
http://www.dabase.org/noface.htm
http://www.dabase.org/dht7.htm