Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dalrymple notes an unexpected advantage of all that media attention directed toward the Chilean miners:

Here, then, is an illustration of the evident but often forgotten fact that social pressure is conducive to virtue as well as to vice. We generally imagine that so-called peer pressure leads only to such activities as taking drugs and vandalism; but it also leads, or rather can lead, to emulation of virtue, self-respect and decent pride. No man but an out-and-out psychopath wants to appear worse than his fellows in the eyes of the world; and the miners’ (justified) pride in appearing brave and self-composed helped them to survive their ordeal.

Thus stoicism saves where incontinent self-expression destroys: an interesting thought, perhaps, for a psychotherapeutic age.

Read it here

Dalrymple has a new piece in a Swedish journal called Axess for which he has apparently written for some time. His page there lists about 18 different articles, but only a few of them are available online, and of those only about three are available in English (the other two are here and here). Oh well, we take what we can get.

This new piece is short and touches on the decline of Europe and the loss of the kind of freedom embedded in the founding of “liberal representative democracy”, which some of us still remember as freedom from government. He echoes the great American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in one argument: that global modernization is not necessarily global Westernization.

The journal is worth perusing beyond the Dalrymple pieces, as it boasts writers like Roger Scruton, Roger Kimball, Christopher Hitchens, Alain de Botton… I think I saw Denis Dutton (of the great ALD) in there somewhere. It is edited by a Johan Lundberg, who also seems to have many interesting articles.

All the explanations of psychoanalysis are ex post facto—they do not and cannot tell us what is the true, the beautiful, or the good, and cannot tell us how to live. There is, in fact, no plucking out the heart of life’s mystery, and Hamlet has only to utter these words for us to know it. Of course, the claim that human existence is, or is about to become, totally explicable, with no remainder of mystery, continues to be made. But even those claims that are more modest—that progress in understanding has been made—seem to me absurd.

…..

To reduce Richard II to a man who needs Prozac for a few weeks seems to me to represent not an advance, but a retrogression, in understanding.

In the British Medical Journal Dalrymple praises “The Sickness”, a 2006 novel by Venezuelan author Alberto Barrera Tyszka.

A painting by Gabriel Metsu at a Dublin exhibition reminds Dalrymple how mankind, confronted by death, refuses to face the obvious. In the New English Review.

The Monday Books folks have posted another essay on the Second Opinion blog. How did I miss this grim bit of humor when I first read the book?

In the bed next to his was a young woman with lime-green hair and a black eye. She also had a ring through her nose – I dare say that, had I asked, she would have told me she was easily led.

American slang converter:
‘humor’ – humour

Last week’s BMJ column discusses Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period, an 1881 science fiction novel that satirizes euthanasia.

Read it here (purchase required)

This new piece is my favorite of his Daily Express essays and reminds me of one of his New Criterion essays from last year: “We are always in the wrong place”.

The discovery of a planet, called Gliese 581g, that resembles Earth in many ways, and that orbits a “nearby” star, raises the question of whether, having made a mess of Earth, we could one day emigrate and begin afresh. What is more, even if we made a mess of Gliese 581g it appears that astronomers now believe that there are millions of such planets throughout the galaxy that we might be able to colonise. We would have an infinite number of chances to lead perfect lives.

One day we would get it right – or would we?

Dalrymple has an essay in today’s Telegraph about a new study in The Lancet that supposedly shows that disobedient children typically suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and thus are “primarily the victims of their genetic inheritance”, rather than just, you know, children. He predicts that the popular reaction to such a report will be to use its findings as an excuse for the poor behavior of one’s children and maybe even oneself.

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit. I recall a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles where I witnessed a child begin to cause trouble, and the father’s complaint to his wife was, “He’s getting that ADHD again!” Apparently, a child’s disobediance can be indicative not only of a biological disorder but of one that comes and goes almost at random. Otherwise, children are saints.

Read the essay here