Writing for Pajamas Media, Dalrymple says that the UN may have inadvertently introduced a very deadly strain of cholera into Haiti via the Bangladeshi troops they staged there for a peacekeeping mission. “Beware of internationalists trying to do good.”
Read it here
I once asked Dalrymple whether he considered himself an atheist or an agnostic. He shrugged his shoulders, suggesting that he didn’t find the distinction particularly important, and said, “Well…I live my life as though there were no God.” I thought this a wonderful example of a practical mindset, implying as it does that the best criterion for answering the question was his actual behavior rather than his thoughts.
As many of you know, Dalrymple nevertheless sees great cultural value in religion’s constriction of the range of acceptable behavior and the purpose and meaning it gives to many. Now, in the Salisbury Review, he defends the Pope from charges of racism, endorses his belief in the insufficiency of a materialist lifestyle, and argues against the suggestions that he be arrested for the Church’s response to the acts of child abuse by some of its priests.
At the Social Affairs Unit, Dalrymple satirizes Kenneth Clarke’s opposition to prison:
If, then, the defendant is found guilty of murder it will provide conclusive evidence in favour of Mr Clarke’s view: for it will have turned out that that he, the defendant, committed murder in the very month of his release from prison: ergo prison did him no good, ergo he should never have been imprisoned, ergo he should not go to prison for murder, for there is no reason to suppose that it will do him any more good this time, and guilty or innocent he should therefore be released at once.
….
Thank heaven we have a Justice Secretary who sees this all clearly. Really it is an honour for a population to be ruled by people such as he of so deep an insight, so sincere a compassion and so uncompromising a realism. We may be proud of our state that it has at last overcome the primitive impulse to punish, incarcerate and incapacitate young men like Rodrigues, who so badly need help. Pity about Robert Macdonald, the victim of the attack, but the question we must surely all ask ourselves is, Did he have a triple lock on his front door? And if not, why not?
Writing in the Daily Express, Dalrymple discusses why such a privileged young man like Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd star David Gilmour, would riot in protest of increases in student fees:
He would probably have told himself it could not have been for petty personal or selfish reasons that he protested against the raising of tuition fees, therefore it must have been for the good of humanity. And the good of humanity is so important, and so noble a goal, that almost anything is justified in promoting it.
Young Mr. Gilmour was seen by the world swinging from the Union Flag on the Cenotaph in London and was also in the mob that attacked Prince Charles and Camilla’s car.
Read it here
We received a message today from Monday Books publisher Dan Collins, informing us that they will re-publish If Symptoms Persist and If Symptoms Still Persist, the collections of Dalrymple’s first Spectator columns. The two will be combined into a single book. As Dan explains in this blog entry, an e-book version will go on sale early next week on Amazon.com, with a hard copy available sometime in 2011.
This is good news for Dalrymple admirers, as the books have been out of print for many years. This description from the aforementioned blog is entirely accurate: “Short, bittersweet pieces, sometimes very funny, sometimes very depressing, always beautifully written”. Trust me: you will be unable to read some of these without laughing out loud. The columns also mark the birth of “Theodore Dalrymple”, as they were the first instance of his use of that nom de plume.
Do be sure to read Dan’s blog entry, as it contains one of the included columns.
Making a no-doubt enduring contribution to both politics and psychiatry, Dalrymple proposes in New English Review a new psychiatric disorder: Politician’s Self-Sacrificial Stress Disorder (PSSD). Judging from the symptoms he lists, I’d say PSSD is, though mental in nature, highly contagious and spreading rapidly. Certainly we are seeing outbreaks here in the U.S.
He then notes what almost all commentators on the debt crises seem for some reason to ignore: the Western-specific nature of the problem:
The Irish are right to think that the crisis is more than economic, that it is existential; but they are wrong to think that it is specifically or mainly Irish. It is, in fact, a crisis of western man who cannot control his appetites, who wants today what only the labour of the future can supply, or supply honestly. Western man is, in effect, a child.
We remain impressed that Dalrymple is somehow able to review, or at least describe in detail, one new medically-related work of fiction every single week in the British Medical Journal. This, in addition to his many other ongoing essays, columns and books.
This week he introduces readers to Welsh doctor-novelist Rhys Davies (1901-78): “…for a reason that I cannot fathom — because he was a very fine writer indeed — he is now all but forgotten except by specialists and thesis mongers.”
BMJ subscription required.
Dalrymple discusses Edward Gibbons’ poor health (and the stoicism he maintained about it) in the British Medical Journal. (Subscription required)
In a short piece for City Journal, Dalrymple argues against WikiLeaks, saying that the premise underlying the leaks is that there should be no secrecy of any kind, a view he calls “fanatically puritanical” and “childish”, and that the effect of the leaks will be to make communication more guarded and less frank, precisely the opposite of the supposed intention.
Does the resort to passive language matter? Dalrymple says it does, because it reduces “the role of consciousness and decision-making in human affairs”.
Dalrymple at The Social Affairs Unit