The word “unhappy” has been virtually abolished from the English language. For every person who says “I’m unhappy” there must now be a thousand who say “I’m depressed.” The change in semantics is important: the person who says he is unhappy knows that there is something wrong with his life that he should try to alter if he can; whereas the person who says “I’m depressed” is ill, and it is therefore the responsibility of someone else — the doctor — to make him better.

An editorial in the May 17 New England Journal of Medicine by a psychiatrist at Cornell points out that the new Diagnostic and Statistician Manual of the American Psychiatric Association proposes that people who are grieving after the death of a loved one should quickly be diagnosed as suffering from depression.

….

Has no one in the APA read Hamlet? Can no one there recall his first soliloquy?

… and yet with a month –

Let me not think on’t — Frailty, thy name is woman! –

A little month; or ere those shoes were cold

With which she followed my poor father’s body

Like Niobe, all tears; why she, even she –

O God! A beast that wants discourse of reason

Would have mourned longer …

Frailty, thy name is doctor!

….

Psychiatrists, after all, spend their lives observing people: it obviously takes years of study, training, thought, discussion, reading, and reflection to know so little about them. 

But, says Singer repeatedly, ethical thinking (and conduct) requires that we now include all sentient beings in our concern, and that the interests of no one, including ourselves, should count for more than the interests of any other sentient being merely by virtue of proximity to us. It is our duty to maximise the fulfilment of as many interests as possible; thus if I have the choice between contributing to famine relief or buying an antiquarian book, I should do the former, for the interests of the starving count more than my interest in possession of said book.

To some people, this view might seem humane and generous of spirit, but actually it would sanction (if, impossibly, it were put into practice) the greatest cruelty, and destroy civilisation and all hope of progress into the bargain. A surgeon who saved someone’s life with a technically complex and costly technique would not be a hero but a villain (and let us remember that routine medical care in a country such as Britain is costly by comparison with what is available in much of the world). The surgeon could not defend himself by saying that he relieved suffering where he found it, namely in the vicinity of his hospital; he should have been using his skill, and the resources, to relieve a much greater amount of suffering elsewhere. Far from being a saviour, he is in fact a murderer.

Virginibus Puerisque, written in a discursive style not much in fashion nowadays, might be called, among other things, an antiepidemiological text. Its whole spirit is antithetical to that of our times, with our narrow, double entry bookkeeping attitude to life. For example, Stevenson recommends that no woman should marry a teetotaller or a non-smoker, because drinking and smoking imply an ability to enjoy effortless pleasure, a precondition of married contentment. (I do not say that Stevenson is right, I report only what he says.)

He writes an apology for idlers, claiming that “extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality,” whereas “a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.” The most important things in life are not taught formally: something that I should suggest medical educators remember, were they not likely to turn the necessity for informal learning into a course with multiple choice questions at the end of it.

But it is in the essay “Aes Triplex” (“triple brass”; that is to say, a strong defence) that he poses his challenge most strongly to the epidemiological philosophy. “It is better,” he says, “to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room.” This is not a man speaking who is and has always been at the peak of health and cannot imagine what it is to be ill; it is a man speaking who for years has hardly known a day’s respite from his symptoms.

Stevenson’s view of life is romantic, not precautionary: “For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.”

One of his most famous poems (lines from which are inscribed on his tomb in Samoa) starts: “Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie. / Glad did I live and gladly die . . .”

The satire in this piece at Pajamas Media is a little too subtle for the commenters, many of whom think Dalrymple is serious in his call for banning girls soccer. I thought the fact that the sport is a symbol of female empowerment by the American left was a dead giveaway, but of course not everyone is familiar with Dalrymple works like The Examined Life. (H/t Jonathan L.)

Dalrymple in the Express:

ED Miliband’s recent speech in which he tried to rehabilitate Englishness in the minds of his supporters illustrates the Left’s perennial difficulties with patriotism and national identity, particularly when they are English.

The Left doesn’t like them because they weaken the class antagonism upon which their own potential power depends.

But there is no doubt that there is a problem with Englishness in a way that there is none with Welshness or Scottishness.

We missed this piece from last week, which ran behind a pay wall in The Australian but runs for free at RealClearWorld. Dalrymple says that, given the decline of Britain during the Queen’s reign, her Jubilee is nothing to celebrate. She can’t be blamed, he notes. “She deserved a better country; but orgies of celebration are certainly not in order.”

Read it here.

The list of people who have thought that the examination of the conduct of animals sheds profound light on the human world is a long one. I remember that, in my days as a student, the studies of Konrad Lorenz were all the rage, at least until it was discovered, or at least publicised, that he had been a Nazi. This led to a different, and less favourable or credulous reading of his book on aggression, though of course whether what he said in that book was true or not had nothing to do with his political past.

For quite a long time, when I was a more frequent reviewer of books than I am now, I used to be sent books on ethology and evolutionary psychology for review, and many of them were indeed fascinating. But it seems to me that they shed no light on human life, just as a rigid Laplacean determinism does not help us to live. When I come to a T-junction, it may well be that whether I turn left or right has been already determined by the whole of the previous history of the universe (although it sounds a bit grandiose to put it like this), but the fact is that, when I come to the T-junction, I still have to think about whether I am going to turn left or right. Consultation about the whole of the previous history of the universe will not help me very much, and indeed would turn me into a kind of Buridan’s ass.

Those who know Dalrymple’s inclinations might wonder why he would write a second piece in a few months on accusations of racism on the soccer field (er, that is, the football pitch). The intro to the essay, in City Journal, explains what’s at stake:

Whether racism or radical egalitarianism was responsible for more deaths in the twentieth century probably permits of no definitive answer. What is certain is that both acted as ideological justifications for mass murder carried out with unprecedented ruthlessness, efficiency, deliberation, and intellectual self-consciousness. As ideologies, however, racism and radical egalitarianism have had very different fates. Egalitarianism remains intellectually respectable, untainted by its bloody past and espoused by many decent people; racism is not tolerated even in its tiniest manifestations, and the term “decent racist” seems a contradiction in terms. It is perfectly acceptable today to utter slurs on the character of those born rich merely because they were born rich, but racial slurs are consigned to an infinitely worse moral category.

Unfortunately, sensitivity to slurs can become hypersensitivity to them, which in its own way can be as pathological as the insensitivity of those who utter them. A man who disregards others’ feelings becomes brutish by habit; a man who focuses too closely on his own feelings falls in love with grievance and constantly seeks a cause for it, becoming fragile in a way that lacks good faith. This insincere, self-aggravating fragility tends to confer great power on authority—which gladly assumes the duty to protect the feelings of the fragile, for then it will have the locus standi for almost infinite meddling. Two recent incidents in English professional soccer, a sport not known for the delicacy of its players’ feelings, illustrate this point perfectly.