Monthly Archives: February 2010

Ayn Rand: engineer of souls

By on | Filed in Essays | 9 comments so far

Dalrymple is on quite the tear these days, writing one great piece after another, and it’s been hard to keep up. The latest is a new essay on Ayn Rand for The New Criterion, and it already seems to be drawing a lot of attention around the web. Conservatives have long had an uneasy relationship with Rand, embracing many of her conclusions but disavowing much of her reasoning and expressing concern for the places to which that reasoning ultimately leads. Dalrymple makes many of those same criticisms and, interestingly enough, also places her “outlook and intellectual style” firmly within the Russian rather than the American tradition — and not Chekhov or Turgenev but “angry literary and social critics, pamphleteers and ideologues”. He notes her megalomania, fanaticism and philosophical intolerance are “almost Soviet.”

Like so many of Dalrymple’s criticisms of various intellectuals, this one is all the more devastating for its fairness. He has obviously thought deeply and objectively about her work, ideas and behavior and does not hesitate to identify her admirable qualities.

A conservative can hardly discuss Rand without mentioning Whitaker Chambers’s famous criticism of Atlas Shrugged in National Review in 1957. While perhaps not as historically significant as Chambers’ critique, Dalrymple’s essay is, to me at least, a clearer and better explanation of her intellectual shortcomings.

Read it here (free of charge)


Update: Dont’ miss the discussion raging via the comments to Dalrymple’s article and New Criterion editor Roger Kimball’s take on it all.

Please Feel My Pain

By on | Filed in Essays | No comments yet

In the New English Review Dalrymple cites Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and television talk shows, criticizing the culture of sentimentality and emotionalism, in which the professed strength of one’s convictions is sufficient proof of sincerity and good will:


The cultural development in question is the systematic over-estimation of the importance not so much of emotion, as of the expression of emotion – one’s own emotion, that is. The manner with which something is said has come to be more important than what is said. Saying nothing, but with sufficient emotional vehemence or appearance of sincerity, has become the mark of the serious man. Our politicians are, in effect, psychobabblers because we are psychobabblers; not the medium, but the emotion, is the message.

The Galbraith Revival

By on | Filed in Essays | One comment so far

After reading Dalrymple’s criticism of John Kenneth Galbraith in this new City Journal piece, I can only (once again) marvel at the ability of eminent intellectuals, such as the famed economist, to build high levels of academic and social respectability on mountains of absurdities. Dalrymple gives us…

…Galbraith on Communism:

He was always disparaging about the danger of Communism—for example, arguing that it posed no real threat to the Third World…The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. “I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish…sources in this account,” he writes. “This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people…take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.”

…Galbraith on China:

Time and again, he offers vignettes of the Cultural Revolution like this one: “The workers were rather proud of having confined their fighting to the morning…Sadly some windows did get broken.” Thus Galbraith discusses the greatest episode of deliberate cultural vandalism of modern history, accompanied as it was by human cruelty on a gargantuan scale.

…Galbraith on the free market:

“Having stopped the sale of all new tires,” he writes, “we had now to find some way of selling them again but only to the necessary and needful.”

…Galbraith on Galbraith:

Galbraith’s egotism and condescension toward most of the human race is evident in his admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt—or rather, in the grounds for that admiration…“I turn now to Franklin Roosevelt, the first and in many ways the greatest of those I encountered over a lifetime. And the one, more than incidentally, who accorded me the most responsibility.” I think you would have to have a pretty tough carapace of self-regard not to recognize the absurdity of this, or to have the gall to commit it to print.

Thoughts of Revolution

By on | Filed in Essays | No comments yet

Writing in National Review, Dalrymple draws some conclusions on a subject of eternal interest. He finds that revolutions, while difficult to evaluate objectively, are usually fueled by a quest for power rather than freedom and have “mainly brought about disaster”. He is skeptical even of the potential for an Iranian revolution to install a regime that would promote freedom. His favorite kinds of revolutions are those like Mobutu Sese Seko’s in Zaire:

His “revolution” consisted of forbidding neckties and making everyone abandon his European first name in the cause of African authenticity. It otherwise largely left people untouched: It had no choice in the matter, for it was so inefficient that the transport network virtually ceased to exist. Where it did exist, the revolution set up military checkpoints, but these were not much to be feared. I remember going through one in a truck without stopping, sending the soldiers flying in all directions. I asked the driver whether this was not dangerous; would the soldiers not fire at us?

“Oh no, monsieur, they’ve sold all their bullets long ago.”

That’s the kind of African revolution I learned to like (relatively speaking), the bogus one that sells its bullets.
Read it here (purchase required)