Monthly Archives: October 2011

The New Paganism of Biodiversity

At Pajamas Media Dalrymple makes the case against biodiversity as a good in itself:

Just as I suspect that multiculturalists have a lot of different restaurants and cuisines in mind when they praise multiculturalism, so I suspect that most of those who espouse biodiversity as a good in itself are thinking mainly of attractive or at least of harmless creatures, rather than, say, Ascaris lumbricoides, the giant (and repellent) roundworm that infects children and can cause intestinal obstruction, or Dracunculus medinensis, the Guinea-worm that, once it emerges from the skin of the foot, must be wrapped round a stick and pulled out slowly  and painfully over weeks or months. It is not difficult, in fact, to think of many species that would not much be missed.

Dalrymple on All Saints’ Day

On this Halloween weekend, these comments from pages 67-68 of Sweet Waist of America come to mind:

I like graveyards in general, and Guatemalan graveyards are particularly attractive. Every little pueblo has its cemetery, the plain block-like tombs gaily painted pink, yellow, white, purple, sky-blue or mauve. They are well cared for and not at all dismal. In the large towns, such as Chiquimula, there are also large family vaults with cherubim, seraphim and angels blowing trumpets.
On 1 November, All Saints’ Day, I had been in the little town of Salama, some sixty miles distant from the capital. All Saints’ Day is every cemetery’s day of glory, the day on which Catholic Guatemalans go with their families to the tombs of their dead relatives and spend the day there. Flowers are taken: real flowers, beautiful but ephemeral, or plastic ones, gaudy but permanent. A few days beforehand, the family refreshes the tomb with a coat of paint and renews the inscription. On the day itself, everyone picnics over grandmama, eating a dish called fiambre – rice and twenty different kinds of cold meat – which is prepared only for this day. Even in death, of course, there are class distinctions, no matter that old quarrels are forgotten. Near the entrance to Salama graveyard, where the local gentry lie buried in imposing vaults, I saw coiffured European ladies in fine silk dresses lay elaborate wreaths for their departed, many of whose names had passed from generation to generation from before independence, taking their titles such as General, Colonel, Doctor and Licenciado with them into the grave. A little further into the cemetery, where the tombs were plainer but boasted at least a brass plaque, a local schoolteacher and poet lay buried, who died prematurely and much lamented, though his flowers, planted in an empty tin of Nido, a brand of powdered milk, were but a simple bunch. Deeper still into the cemetery, and at its far edges, were the graves of the poor, mere mounds of earth planted with a wooden or iron cross without a name. But those below were not forgotten: the mounds had been’ scattered with fresh pine needles (such as Indians spread on churchfloors), and the crosses were draped with coloured paper or polythene, each widow or widower remembering which was the grave of their partner. No grave was totally neglected on All Saints’ Day, and even the graves of the dead without descendants were newly painted or strewn with a flower or two.
People from northern latitudes often find the customs of All Saints’ Day morbid. I found them not only charming, but moving and wise. It seemed to me that death as the inevitable end of life was accepted better in Guatemala than in our own culture, where everything possible is done to disguise the fact of death until the last moment, when it comes as a terrible shock. And surely it is some consolation to the dying to know that at least once a year they will be remembered.
Nothing could illustrate better the contrast in our attitudes to death than the behaviour of the North American lady with whom I visited Salama cemetery on All Saints’ Day. It happened that she was a member of the American Association of Graveyard Studies, which has a membership of 300, and as such I supposed she would be interested in the activities in the graveyard on this of all days. On the contrary, she regarded them as a hindrance to the proper study of gravestones as purely physical artifacts. I was rather embarrassed when, wishing to take a photograph of a particular tomb, she asked the family who had decorated it in remembrance to remove their flowers so that the tomb should appear in her photograph in its ‘natural’ state. She preferred her cemeteries dead in every possible sense, so that they were strange and alien places on the edge of town, with no connection to the world of the living. Thus death remained a taboo for her, despite her studies; she belonged to a culture in which death was warded off by facelifts, vitamin tablets, the magical avoidance of ubiquitous substances and even the freezing of corpses at -270°. Which was the wiser attitude?
Copyright 1990 Anthony Daniels. Reprinted with permission.

Official Complaint

In Standpoint Dalrymple comments on Britain’s infamous immigration officials.
Certainly in my experience, now considerable, of arrival in this country, I have seen much more rudeness by immigration officials than by passengers. They often speak to foreigners with insolence and treat them as if conferring upon them a privilege in their personal gift, or as if (against their better judgment) they were granting prisoners release on parole. One might have supposed that all this unpleasantness at least served the purpose of preventing illegal immigration; but as we can see from the results, this is hardly the case. The rudeness is only a crude manifestation of petty bureaucratic power. Incidentally, no one intervenes to protest, because he knows that he will only make trouble for himself. 
What this notice conveys to the alert Briton is that officialdom is now not so much an endangered and therefore specially protected species in Britain as a powerful caste that stands in almost feudal relationship to the serfs below (without, however, the corresponding noblesse oblige).
(h/t Dave L.)

Murder, mystery, and medicine

A couple of Dalrymple’s favorite subjects converge in this installment of his British Medical Journal column (subscription required):
No doubt it is unusual for the founders of great institutions of learning to be deliberately poisoned to death with strychnine, let alone at the second attempt, but such seems to have been the fate in 1905 of the immensely rich Jane Stanford, the joint founder of Stanford University. First someone put strychnine in her mineral water in San Francisco, and then in her bicarbonate of soda in Honolulu, to which she had escaped to recover from the physical and emotional shock of having been poisoned.
The president of Stanford University at the time was a medical man, a keen eugenicist and ichthyologist, called David Starr Jordan, who was much in favour of compulsory sterilisation of so called unfit individuals. For some reason, perhaps never to be explained, he worked hard to cover up the fact that Stanford had been poisoned and was successful in his endeavours. He himself had a motive, namely that Stanford was about to dismiss him from his post; but, unlike Stanford’s personal secretary, Bertha Berner, who was the only person present at both poisonings, he lacked the opportunity. Berner, by contrast, lacked a motive.

Knowledge Without Knowledge

Dalrymple’s new piece on the communist writer Isaac Deutscher, in New English Review, is in keeping with his recent, excellent work for that site. We see therein a recurring, unspoken theme of his work: that in trying to make sense of our world, neither intelligence nor education nor talent, nor even the combination of all these things, is nearly enough. One also needs practicality, open-minded self-criticism, a sense of proportion and probably a lot more besides.
Deutscher was an infant prodigy, brought up as a religious Jew but losing his faith at an early age. He transferred his religious longings at about the age of twenty to the secular faith of Marxism, and never lost that faith to the day he died. Happy the man who lives in his faith, but unhappy the man who lives in a country in which his faith has become an unassailable orthodoxy.
When one reads Deutscher aware of the fact that English was his sixth or seventh language, one is truly astonished, for his prose in his sixth or seventh language is lucid and even elegant, with absolutely no hint that he is not a native-speaker, and a highly-educated one at that. As a sheer linguistic feat this is, if not completely unexampled, very remarkable indeed. Although a Marxist, he modelled himself as a stylist on Gibbon and Macaulay, and if he does not quite reach their level – well, who does nowadays?
His language was clear, but his thought was not. He was what might be called a dialectical equivocator, made dishonest by his early religious vows to Marxism. This made him unable to see or judge things in a common-sense way. His unwavering attachment to his primordial philosophical standpoint, his irrational rationalism, turned him into that most curious (and sometimes dangerous, because intellectually charismatic) figure, the brilliant fool. He was the opposite of Dr Watson who saw but did not observe: he observed, but did not see. He was the archetype of the man, so common among intellectuals, who knows much but understands little.
A good example of this capacity to misunderstand despite a great deal of knowledge occurs in his posthumous short book, Lenin’s Childhood. When he died, Deutscher was working on a projected biography of Lenin, but only the chapter devoted to Lenin’s childhood existed in anything like publishable form; it was edited by his wife and collaborator, Tamara.
From the purely literary point of view, the fragment is characteristically excellent, the very model of its type, written in beautifully balanced prose and with a judicious amount of detail. Of course, an account of so factual a matter as Lenin’s childhood must be influenced deeply by the biographer’s overall assessment of Lenin’s character and achievements, for the child is father to the man and it is the final character and achievements of that man that the childhood in part is to explain or at least prefigure. In Lenin’s case, we are interested in the childhood because of what he became, not for its own sake; and it is inevitable that we shall look for different germs of the future in it if we consider Lenin the nearest man to the devil incarnate who has ever existed from those that we shall seek if we regard him (as Deutscher did, according to his wife) as ‘the most earthly of all who have lived on this earth of man’ – clearly a religious way of putting it, incidentally. What is to be explained differs completely in the two cases: the person who thinks of Lenin as the frozen-blooded murderer who could order executions by the thousand without so much as the flicker of an eyelid will look for different things in his childhood from the person who thinks that he was the brilliant saviour of the world.
….
For Deutscher, by contrast, the ideal of a society in which people were completely undifferentiated by class, in which a spontaneous abundance arose in which people produced for use and not for profit, in which no one exercised more power than any other person, remained not what it always was, an adolescent and not terribly intelligent dream, but real, something directly to be aimed at; and never mind if people initially possessed of this vision (the product, usually, of profound and often unbalanced resentment) had so far killed millions of people. They had merely gone about it the wrong way. Deutscher, the most egocentric of men despite a pretended humility, would show them the right way:

He [the ex-communist renegade] no longer throws out the the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby; he discovers that the baby is a monster than must be strangled.

The death of tens of millions becomes mere dirty bath-water; the baby – presumably the core of the Soviet Union, its ideal, not its practice – is still beautiful.
You will most definitely want to read the whole thing.

Mortality and immortality

In the BMJ Dalrymple profiles a French doctor with a varied career similar to his own:
The Prix Goncourt, whose British equivalent is the Booker prize, was won in 2001 by a doctor, Jean-Christophe Rufin, for his historical novel Rouge Brésil. The author has had a remarkable career; he is what the French call a surdoué—a prodigy.
An early member of Médecins Sans Frontières, Rufin has worked in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. A consultant in neurology in Paris, he has also been French cultural attaché in Brazil and French ambassador to Senegal. He has fulfilled many administrative and academic duties, learnt several languages, and written 15 books, translated into many tongues, that have sold millions of copies worldwide. He became an immortel, one of the 40 members of the Académie Française, in 2008.
This year he published a book of short stories: Sept Histoires Qui Reviennent de Loin (Seven Stories from Afar). One of them is called “Night on Duty,” which I suspect is autobiographical, although Rufin in an interview once put the role of memory in the work of imaginative writing rather beautifully: it is not the writing of memories, but of echoes of memories.

Successful failures

In the October 5th BMJ (subscription required) Dalrymple addresses author T. C. Boyle’s novel Killing Babies, in which a recovering addict is given a job working in his brother’s Detroit abortion clinic:
Failure is the dark underbelly of success; for every outstanding case of the latter, there are many cases of the former. Perhaps that is why the US author and philosophical anarchist Henry David Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation (and go to the grave with the song, if any, still in them). The necessity of failure for there ever to be success also explains why, in so optimistic a land as the United States, so much of the literature is tragic; the land of opportunity is also the land of missed opportunity. The study of failure is in any case a more fertile subject for literature than success; failure is both more various and attractive than success.
…..
Life in a quiet Detroit suburb (this was before the city imploded) is not for the protagonist. He searches for, and soon finds, drugs: “I can see now that the Desoxyn [methamphetamine] was a mistake. It was exactly the kind of thing that they’d warned us about. But it wasn’t coke and I just needed a lift, a buzz to work behind, and if he [the brother] did not want me to be tempted, then why had he left the key to the drug cabinet right there in the conch-shell ashtray on the corner of his desk?”
This is a shrewd illustration of the tendency of addicts to blame others, or circumstances, for their conduct. He has a gun and, irritated by the aggressive and even violent self-righteousness of the anti-abortion protesters, he starts shooting them: “It was easy. It was nothing. Just like killing babies. It is a regrettable fact that we often behave like, or worse than, those whom we most despise.”

Rules and fallacies

Once again we need to catch up on the good doctor’s work in the British Medical Journal. His September 28th column profiles Samuel Dickson (subscription required), who scathingly criticized the medical treatment (bloodletting) given to Edward Drummond, who was shot by Daniel M’Naghten (giving rise to the M’Naghten Rules for defining legal insanity).
Dickson believed that without this treatment Drummond would have survived. Dickson was a violent critic of the medical orthodoxy of his day, having been an army surgeon in India where he noticed that bloodletting, which he then applied uncritically to patients with dysentery, malaria, and cholera, usually ended in death. In his Report on the Endemic Cholera of 1829, The Fallacy of the Art of Physic of 1836, and Fallacies of the Faculty of 1839, he accused his fellow practitioners of ignorance, illogicality, and a desire to prolong illnesses in their avidity for the fees with which bloodletting provided them. Among other things he suggested a controlled trial for the efficacy of bleeding in pneumonia.
His own method of treating fever—an emetic, quinine, and cold water splashed on the body—with which he wanted to compare bloodletting was probably less dangerous. But as bloodletting declined as a practice, Dickson received no thanks and even less praise for having pointed out its dangers. He became ever more bitter, criticising in print all the leaders of the profession. His obituary in the Medical Times and Gazette said that he was a man of moderate ability with “a talent for abuse which he exercised to an unlimited extent.” But his worst offence by far was that of having been right.

The meaninglessness of political apologies

We missed this piece in the Social Affairs Unit last month, in which Dalrymple criticizes the issuance of governmental apologies for the past actions of others:

Guilt, it used to be said, was an expression of conscience, but we moderns have found a way of divorcing the one from the other. The avowal of guilt now has nothing to do with conscience, and floats free of anything the person claiming guilt may himself have done or omitted to do.

He gives the example of a letter from Belgian minister Louis Michel, ostensibly apologizing for Belgium’s refusal to come to the aid of Rwandans during the 1994 genocide there:
The author begins in an unctuously self-congratulatory way:

On the occasion of the official visit of the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, to France, which seals the normalisation of relations between two friends of Belgium, in which I cannot but rejoice, let me be allowed to testify to the manner in which my country has turned the page in our past relations with Rwanda, in order to look to the future.

In all that follows, there is not a single identifiable individual who is alleged to have done anything wrong, certainly not the author himself.
The nearest he comes to blaming anyone is the following:

We are convinced that at the time of the genocide the Belgian authorities could, and should, have acted differently in order to have prevented it.

What the Belgians could and should have done is not specified for the readers of the newspaper, who can hardly be expected to know, nor is the identity of the people who should have done it specified.

Of Love, etc.

Arranged marriages were once common in the West. Today things are very different, of course; most of us would say for the better. But do personal ads represent a desperate search for perfection? Dalrymple reviews Paul Hollander’s new book, Extravagant Expectations, in New English Review and wonders, “Is the individual search for happiness enough of a philosophical foundation for the good life?”
At the root of the problem is our belief in the perfectibility of life, that it is possible in principle for all desiderata to be satisfied without remainder, and that anything less than perfection, including in relationships, not only is, but ought to be, rejected by us. We cannot accept that we might at some point have to forego the delirium of passion for the consolation of companionship, that Romeo and Juliet is fine as catharsis but not very realistic as a guide to married life at the age of 56. We cannot have it all.
We are in revolt against what Hollander calls ‘the limitations imposed by our mortality, genes, social and physical environment, and chance,’ as Satan was in revolt against God. Extravagant Expectations is an excellent illustration of how the examination of a seemingly minor social phenomenon can soon lead to the deepest questions of human existence.