From personal diaries to medical ones: Dalrymple’s new BMJ piece discusses “a large volume published in 1920 by the American Red Cross and the Harvard University Press, entitled Typhus Fever with Particular Reference to the Serbian Epidemic, written mainly by Richard B Strong and George C Shattuck”.
In what will hopefully be a recurring feature, Dalrymple (writing as Anthony Daniels) has a new Spectator piece that marks a return to his more autobiographical writing for that publication. Like the Spectator columns he wrote for years, this one features informal musings occassioned by his recent experiences — in this case, watching the debates on a friend’s television and visiting Wales and London before returning home to Shropshire.
With the editorship of Matthew d’Ancona almost a year behind them, maybe The Spectator is returning to form. (I haven’t been reading it, so I wouldn’t know.)
(hat tip: Michael Pringle)
I would call Dalrymple’s latest essay in The New Criterion extraordinary, were its insightfulness and eloquence not in fact so usual an occurence in his contributions to that great journal. An attempt to account for Samuel Johnson’s antipathy toward Jonathan Swift, given their many similarities, the essay begins with:
Whoever makes the folly of the world his study must oscillate between attempted detachment and involuntary disgust. Neither is satisfactory; nor is either effective…
Dalrymple suggests first that Johnson saw in himself what he disliked in Swift, then extends the argument to:
But I think the source of Johnson’s antagonism to Swift goes much deeper than this. It is that Swift was Johnson’s alter ego…Johnson, however, found it necessary to keep his saeva indignatio under control, not only for practical, but for psychological reasons…He lived before the fatuous idea took general hold that to express an anxiety, a misery, or a dissatisfaction is necessarily to overcome it. He believed, on the contrary, that it was necessary for man “to regulate his thoughts,”…To give way to rage, therefore, is not to lessen or discharge anger, but to be permanently enraged and eventually driven mad by the unalterable evils of the world, to end up like Swift…
Then, at the conclusion, we read what we Dalrymple devotees suspected from the piece’s opening sentences, that this is all a matter of a personal nature for him:
The Swift-Johnson dialectic, between uncontrollable, or at any rate uncontrolled, rage on the one hand (which has its illicit pleasures) and Augustan detachment on the other (a short step from indifference), is one that I have felt myself. My entire medical career has been spent among civil wars that pitted injustice against ambition or in situations in which vice and folly had no penalty and wisdom and virtue no reward. How was I to react?
For his answer, read the whole thing.
Dalrymple at In Character: The modern desire for noise is growing, and it makes solipsists of us all.
Noting that “charities have their bureaucratic imperatives to grow, and they do so by moral imperialism”, Dalrymple finds two recent indications that Amnesty International has lost their bearings, and he attributes it to a phenomenon he cites often (but which perhaps needs a better name):
It is as if Amnesty grew bored with its original purpose and now seems to suffer from what one might call the not-a-sparrow-falls-but-it-is-our-moral-concern syndrome, itself a result of believing that virtue is proportionate to the number of good causes that one espouses. Therefore, one must spread one’s moral wings and fly off into the ethical stratosphere.
He described this idea in a speech in Australia as one in which (quoting from memory), “moral concern increases in proportion to the square of the distance of the problem from oneself.”
Dalrymple addressed Western civilization’s epidemic of obesity in the Wall Street Journal two days ago, noting the economic costs and warning of the inevitable implementation of authoritarian solutions (which – no surprise – have already been imposed in New York City):
As usual, therefore, prohibition beckons. Regulation of the sugar and fat content of ready-prepared and fast foods is likely to be proposed and perhaps eventually accepted, though not without a very fierce rear-guard action by the food industry. If John Doe will not eat his greens, Uncle Sam will make him, if necessary by restricting the availability of other foods. No one will raise moral psychology of the question of obesity, for fear of sounding uncompassionate and reactionary.
In search for an amelioration, the temptation is to an intemperate authoritarianism, forgetting that the avoidance of obesity, pace the Duchess of Windsor, is not the whole purpose of life. But teaching children to cook and eat together might help overcome the crudity of their eating habits: the price of more refined, and in this instance nonfattening, pleasures always being effort.
Dalrymple has never owned a television, and it doesn’t appear his decision to watch last night’s debate between British party leaders will cause him to change his mind.
Against my principles and practice of thirty years, I allowed myself to be persuaded by friends to watch a so-called debate between the three principal candidates in the election. Of course, a three-way debate is an inherently unsatisfactory thing, like a dog with five legs, or a war on two fronts; but I had no confidence that a debate between any two of them would have been better or more illuminating.
In the event, the ‘debate’ was more like a trialogue of the deaf..
He then goes on to lament the unwillingess of the candidates to deal honestly with the public.
I am not one of those that believes that Man naturally desires freedom, at least if by a desire for freedom is meant a desire that automatically trumps all other desires and is prepared to take the consequences. What our politicians have learnt to hold out as the prospect before us, like a mirage in the desert, is the greatest, most sought-after and least possible freedom of all, the freedom from bad consequences.