In the latest edition of the British Medical Journal, Theodore Dalrymple declares Anthony Berkeley Cox’s 1931 novel Malice Aforethought a masterpiece:
Malice Aforethought is as much a brilliant comedy of manners as a crime novel and as much a depiction of self deception as a comedy of manners. It therefore repays close study: for men were deceivers ever, both of themselves and others.
We’ve neglected to post Dalrymple’s last few BMJ essays. This week’s essay is a profile of Dr. William Price, the father of cremation. Last week’s essay “How Long Is A Life?” looks at Lionel Arthur Tollemache, a writer with an interest in human longevity. The previous week’s piece “Smoking Sophisticates and Slobs” gives us Peter Cheyney, author of “The Urgent Hangman”, a book full of gratuitous smoking.
This new piece by Dalrymple at Pajamas Media discusses a new book on the ongoing debate about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and, touching on a comment about Hitler in the book, considers the Nazis’ place on the political spectrum — a lot to chew on for such a brief piece. The latter subject stimulated some interesting comments, especially after the piece was posted on National Review’s The Corner by Jonah Goldberg, whose book Liberal Fascism is linked in Dalrymple’s piece — the work of some enterprising young editor, I’ll bet.
Dalrymple essentially agrees with Goldberg’s thesis, by the way:
But Nazism was not conservative; when the Nazis called their advent revolutionary, they were right. There was nothing conservative about their movement at all. But the “syllogism” above has insinuated deeply into the minds of our intelligentsia, which is why so many of them are afraid of the supposed taint of conservatism.
The piece is interesting for one other reason: it contains one of Dalrymple’s most glaringly false statements: that he (Dalrymple himself) will “never amount to anything much intellectually.” Pshaw!
It seems to me that one of the differences between classical liberals (called “conservatives” in most of the Anglosphere) and modern liberals is the definition of freedom. Classical liberals like myself still think freedom means freedom from government, while modern liberals think it means freedom from other individuals. The former view calls for a limited government, and the latter for an ever-expanding one as modern liberals discover more and more instances of private behavior that inconveniences them. As Dalrymple observes in a short piece for City Journal, they don’t even talk about the true idea of freedom in Britain any more.
Today on Pajamas Media Dalrymple reminds us that, far from being the victims of manipulation, millions of rank-and-file homeowners contributed to the American financial crisis through irresponsible behavior. But he also warns that “Economic wisdom and just deserts do not always tend in the same direction”.
Apparently we missed a Dalrymple piece on Pajamas Media a couple of weeks ago. After twenty British professors of economic history wrote a letter to the Guardian arguing that British public debt is nothing to worry about, Dalrymple replied:
It is remarkable that economic historians, of all people, should view the matter so statically, as if the present moment were eternal, not taking into account the speed of the increase in the debt, the ageing of the population, the different place the country now occupies in the world, the uses to which all the borrowing was put, or indeed the crushing and impoverishing size of the debt after the Second World War. Never, it seems, have so many professors learnt so little from so much; sophisticated incompetence is now our national characteristic.
Freedom of the press is not lost all at once, as the rise of political correctness proves. Dalrymple at Pajamas Media:
Freedom is being nibbled away in the name of justice, security, well-being, and even of freedom itself, that is to say true freedom, not the merely apparent kind — for nothing is easier for power-hungry intellectuals to justify than the coercion that they favor to bring about true freedom.
It can’t be a good thing when you write a book about Islam in American prisons, entitle it “Islam in American Prisons” and see that the last line of a review of that book is: “A good book about Islam in America’s prisons remains to be written”. Such is the case for Hamid Reza Kusha, whose book Dalrymple reviews in the Winter issue of The Claremont Review of Books. Dalrymple criticizes the book’s publishers for producing “by far the worst-edited book put out by a reputable publisher that I have ever read” and its author for writing a work he finds uninteresting, “irrelevant, murky, disorganized, meandering” and “deeply shallow”.
The review, at least, is good reading, as most negative reviews are. Read it here.
Dalrymple’s new essay for the New English Review harks back to his earlier City Journal pieces, with reports from the frontlines of Britain’s dependency culture, occasioned this time by his recent visits to two former steel mining towns, one in Wales and the other in the North of England. As in those earlier pieces, he describes the almost dehumanizing influence of the undiscriminating welfare state but also finds that it hides an underlying core of civility:
It astonishes me, however, that when I speak to the people here – posh voice, obviously an emissary from another world, if not from another universe altogether – I am responded to not with hostility, but with smiles (though I inwardly remark on the terrible dentition), kindness, cheerfulness, and helpfulness if for example I want directions. I am not sure I could live their life and talk to a stranger so politely.
This underlying decency makes me all the sadder. I think of the words of Edward, Prince of Wales, when he visited South Wales at the height of the Depression: ‘Something,’ he said, ‘must be done.’
Yes, but what? Certainly, pity, with its almost inevitable leaven of condescension, is no answer.
Read it here
Dalrymple’s purchase of a budget airline ticket occasions thoughts on how relying solely on the law can crowd-out social custom and encourage duplicity.
Sharp practice, if not outright dishonesty, is bound to grow in a society in which personal trust and honour are replaced by law and the legal adjudication of obligations. Everyone then does what he can get away with, for a reliance on the law as the sole determinant of the permissible destroys all sense of shame. It is small wonder that “Cheat, that ye be not cheated” seems increasingly to be the rule by which we live.
Read the essay in Standpoint magazine (hat tip: Michael Greenspan)