Monthly Archives: June 2010

The General Meddling Council

Dalrymple has an essay in The Salisbury Review on a new proposal by the General Medical Council to revalidate doctors, which he calls unnecessary, error-prone and indicative of unrestrained government:

No number of revelations of bureaucratic incapacity ever reins in the politico-bureaucratic ambition to bring about perfection by the administrative elimination of problems, be they real or imagined. Indeed, the worse the bureaucratic failures the better: for failure is the perfect locus standi for further bureaucratic intervention and institutional growth.

Psychobabble and the Real Perps

In the Wall Street Journal, Dalrymple finds in Hitchcock’s “Psycho” a modern, romantic notion of psychopathy:

Quite apart from the sensationalism of its plot, and the brilliance of its realization, “Psycho” had a pleasing message for people who were anxious to escape what they thought were the suffocating bourgeois constraints of the times. Bates’ mother clearly was a person who valued respectability, in a purse-lipped and narrow kind of way; and her loving son was brought up to be mannerly and soft-spoken.
A syllogism, false in logic but of powerful psychological effect, was thereby insinuated into the minds of the susceptible: If respectability results in psychopathy, then lack of respectability will result in goodness. Freeing the inner psychopath—that is to say, the natural, impulsive person without the accretions of convention to detain him—will paradoxically make for better, as well as more authentic, conduct.

Outward and Visible Signs

On the virtues of dressing well:

The fact is that, given the laws of thermodynamics, it takes no effort to look like a slob; to be smart calls for care and attention, not only to one’s clothes but to how one behaves. It also means that one must try to imagine what one appears in the eyes of others. Slobbery is the sartorial manifestation of solipsistic egotism; smartness is simultaneously self-respect and respect for others.

Read it all here at In Character magazine.

Dalrymple in the British Medical Journal

Whenever I enter a medical library and look at the ranks (that I dare not call serried) of buckram-bound journals, I think I have entered a graveyard of ambition, with all those heavy, unregarded tomes being the tombstones of the hopes and efforts that produced them.
Still, once they are old enough, they might become of antiquarian interest. It is only the recent past that we do not invest with romance because it is too close to present mundanities.
…and a review of Scarred Hearts, by Max Blecher (1909-38):
The sanatorium is what Erving Goffman would have called “a total institution”: a little world of its own, all absorbing, cut off from everything else and seemingly self sufficient.
Death is ever present in the book, accepted as a fact, but there is also a love of life. There is no hyperbole in it. Completed only one year before the author’s own death, I finished the book feeling ashamed of my own long career of carping complaint. The effect, of course, will not be lasting.
Subscription required.

It is the inescapable duty of every decent citizen to express no interest in the World Cup

I’m not sure this is going to go over real well with my brother and fellow blogger, since he has already stated his intention to spend the entire next month watching the World Cup, but I thought it would be appropriate on the opening day of the event to post an essay Dalrymple wrote for The Social Affairs Unit four years ago, just before the last tournament. He argues that the World Cup, and football generally, is so caught up in a culture of violence and incivility as to render it insupportable by all decent folk.

Clint may not be committed to Dalrymple’s standard, but I don’t think he would necessarily disagree with him. We Americans are so removed from European football and the culture that surrounds it that we can enjoy the game without being haunted by its culture, but I can certainly understand how people who have seen what Dalrymple has seen would remain firmly committed to their principles.

The essay is here.

The Guardian Extracts Its Pound of Flesh

Dalrymple takes The Guardian to task for an article criticizing the austerity plans of several European countries:

Profit is to [The Guardian] what usury was to the medieval church, especially when it is made by financiers. Not very deep in the subconscious of its writers, and probably of most of its readers, is the image of capitalists as bloated plutocrats in silk top hats, satin-lapeled frock-coats and gaiters, to be swept from the face of the globe a la Russian revolutionary posters.

Read it here

The Machine

Like it or not, we are all dependents of a complex economic system that requires most of us to pursue an ever-higher standard of living that will never quite satisfy us. It may sound depressing, but the alternative is no better.

The real alternative is not perfect equilibrium, therefore, but real, and in the end absolute, poverty. This practically none of us is willing to countenance; none of us wishes to return to a back-breaking subsistence. Our bargain is a Promethean one.

Read Dalrymple’s newest essay for The New English Review