When Orwell wrote his famous essay on the postcards of Donald McGill, he called them ‘a harmless rebellion against virtue;’ they were always funny and sometimes genuinely witty. He concluded, I think rightly: ‘The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.’ The corner has become, in Britain, nearly the whole. There is nothing in modern British vulgarity that I would miss if it were to disappear from the face of the earth.

Some assertions are just too bizarre to satirize. Dalrymple has a post on the Corner at National Review Online about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on charges of sexual assault, and among other observations, he notes the statements in Libération by a writer named Luis de Miranda, who says that DSK is a hero for committing such a crime with the supposed intention of sacrificing his own political future for the good of the country. Unless I’m mistaken, one does not earn points for originality when the contribution suggests stupidity.

Update: I forgot to add a gentlemanly tip of the hat to Shishir Y.!

Dalrymple has written a new article for the Spectator, and it has garnered a lot of attention for its criticisms of Scarborough, whose impoverishment he says is “characteristic of a high proportion of the country”. He criticizes the destruction of the Victorian architecture in the town as well as “the short-term commercialism of the kind that a truly commercial nation would not display, combined with the total indifference to aesthetic considerations that years of non-discrimination have made second nature among us.”

His article prompted lots of (mostly very negative) comments on the Spectator’s website and a couple of articles (here and here) from the local paper in defense of the town.

Hat Tip: Michael P.

It is the fate of most writers, including medical ones, to be forgotten soon after their death if not before. The laws of literary survival are no less ruthless or uncompromising than those of the survival of species. A million books must be written that a hundred may survive, at least for a short time.

Dr John Shebbeare was born in the same year, 1709, as Dr Johnson….His splenetic temper made him better suited to political pamphleteering than to the practice of his profession. He wrote a satirical novel against an act of parliament forbidding secret marriage without parental consent and which was meant to discourage fortune hunting suitors of rich brides and grooms. A Tory of Jacobite leanings, one of Shebbeare’s pamphlets got him into hot water; after trial for sedition he was put in the pillory at Charing Cross and then imprisoned for three years. His fellow medical author Tobias Smollett detested him and lampooned him in his novel, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, as the character Ferret, a political agitator and quack doctor.

In The Problem of Pain, Lewis tackles the reasons for human suffering and whether it is evidence against the goodness of God. Suffering does not seem to be allocated in proportion to desert, and when tragedy strikes even the irreligious are inclined to ask, “Why me?” They expect the universe to dish out rewards and punishments according to merit, the latter being conceived of as a moderate diet and plenty of exercise. Memoirists of illness are inclined to express surprise, tinged with fury, that their illness should have affected them, of all people, when they have assiduously followed the latest advice about healthy living.

How does Lewis then explain, or explain away, human suffering—of which illness is so large a part—and make it compatible with the goodness of God? He tells us that free beings can be free only if they are able to choose the wrong path: something that public health doctors and health educationists might be rather reluctant to accept. And, according to Lewis, suffering is necessary to make us aware of our incompleteness and lack of self sufficiency.

But the problem for most people is not suffering in general but suffering in particular, in the here and now. The idea that suffering is an inescapable part of human existence, necessary and even salutary, might help people to endure, but falls short of a full explanation of any particular instance.

There is a certain kind of mentally disturbed person who sets a fire, calls the fire brigade, and then acts as the hero of the hour. Gordon Brown, the former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister, is a little like that: though whether or not he knows it is an interesting question.

one of the longest self-exculpatory notes in history… devoid of self-examination… shot through with moral grandiosity… interesting, but only in the way that a paranoid psychotic’s ideas are interesting… demonstrates that there is an intimate connection between his moral megalomania, his imperviousness to reality, his absence of self-examination, his lack of analytical power, and his gross incompetence… high-falutin’ rubbish…

preternaturally dull… the synergy of grandiosity and incompetence… There is almost nothing in economics and social policy that Mr. Brown is incapable of failing to understand. Indeed, one might almost argue that his inability to understand constitutes an ability of a kind… [uses] statistics and figures for the purpose of self-justification, indeed self-glorification… unctuously maudlin, though with a vein of threat… a monstrous and inflated ego, that saw no limitation to his power of decision-making… an intellectual without intellect, compassionate without feeling, a moralist without scruple, ambitious without talent, and upright without probity.

a very modern man

On the one hand they seem to want to deny the deeper currents that underlie the most extraordinary behaviour such as suicide bombing; on the other, they want to deny the quite ordinary or commonplace motivation for genuinely prosaic behaviour, such as spending too much. This is odd…

The avoidance of the obvious is an occupational hazard for intellectuals, because the obvious threatens them with redundancy. One might have thought that it was perfectly obvious that there were deep psychological currents in suicide bombing, and equally obvious that there us [sic] widespread greed and incontinence during epidemics of speculative behaviour. Therefore it is only natural that intellectuals should be found who would argue precisely the opposite, that deep motives are in fact shallow and shallow ones deep.

Dalrymple has often written of his belief in, and preference for, the complexity and even inscrutability of human behavior. In New English Review he respectfully disagrees with British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen’s claim to have unlocked the mystery of human evil by defining it as lack of empathy.

In the first place, Baron-Cohen sometimes makes precisely the mistake that he accuses the users of the term ‘evil’ of making, namely of rendering the explanandum identical with the explanans….Baron-Cohen is certainly not the first to think that he has plucked out the heart of Man’s metaphysical mystery (for why should empathy be any different from any other quality?). Moleschott, for example, told us a long time ago that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. (Actually, the brain also secretes quite a lot of bile, metaphorically speaking of course.) I am afraid I think there is a lot of plucking still to be done: in fact, I think it will never be done. That is the heart of our mystery.