Monthly Archives: January 2013

Conservative Classic: Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer

Thanks to reader Neunder for calling our attention to a piece that we missed from the Winter Issue of the Salisbury Review. That strange Anthony Daniels byline often trips us up. “Conservative Classic” is a regular feature of the magazine wherein a writer reviews a classic work of conservative thought, in Daniels’ case Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer:

Hoffer is not so foolish or simplistic as to suppose that no indignation, anger or dissatisfaction with the nature of political arrangements as they presently are can never be reasonable or justified. He makes a distinction between those movements that have a specific and limited end and those that have a quasi-religious goal whose real end is the eternal and unlimited power of the charismatic leader and his henchmen. He is not a quietist or immobilist who suggests an inner emigration to the world or garden of the pure self, or that nothing can ever be better than it is. There is a difference between wishing to rid oneself of a specific evil or obstacle, and straining after a kind of total liberation from all of life’s little difficulties.

You can access the piece by purchasing the Winter issue online.

It’s not poverty that’s fattening – it’s the bad eating habits

Dalrymple had this piece on obesity in the Daily Telegraph a few days ago wherein he attributes the problem not to the lack of healthy dietary options available to the poor but to “the culinary ignorance, incompetence and indifference of a substantial minority” of the population and “a sense in these circumstances of meaninglessness, that nothing much matters”.

And am I the only reader to find hilarity in lines like this one, which he could probably insert into many of his articles?

Things are worse in Britain than anywhere else in Europe, but my patriotism forces me to concede, not without a certain relief, that matters are deteriorating abroad, too.

The Hippocrates Prize

From the British Medical Journal (subscription required)….

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual prize for poetry, awarded since 2010 and open to anyone who works, or has worked, in the NHS. There is also a category for poetry about a medical subject, open to anyone in the world writing in English. Altogether there are thousands of entries and the winning poems, the two runners up, and all the commended poems, are published in a slim but elegant volume. It is rather difficult to imagine a poetry prize open to people who have worked in accountancy, or to anyone who has filled out an income tax form, attracting quite so many entries as this one.

….

The power of poetry to concentrate and compress emotion is illustrated in a poem by Frances-Anne King about the wig of a child treated for leukaemia with chemotherapy. The wig is discarded as the child lies dying:

 Her scalp shone smooth then,

 translucent as the linings of an oyster shell,

 her freckles, pale tracings on a fading sea of face.

Depardieu, Heal Thyself

“The case of Gérard Depardieu continues to agitate France”, Dalrymple says here. He argues against a recent opinion piece in Libération that says… well, you know what it says.

[I]t would require immense, indeed totalitarian, political power to decide what are both ‘the most basic needs of existence’ and an acceptable level of capital accumulation (I leave aside entirely the practical probability that setting such parameters would inhibit prosperity). To be just in the sense that the author means, the most basic human needs and acceptable levels of capital accumulation would have to be identical throughout the world, for if they were different in different societies they would merely set up new injustices, between rather than within societies. Without realising it, then, she is arguing not so much for world government as for world dictatorship.

In Good Form?

If there is one thing certain about the outcome of the James Savile affair, it is that there will be more forms to fill in afterwards. This is because it is an article of modern faith – the only faith, after all, that we have – that if we fill in enough forms we shall all behave well and there will be no more scandals. It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by bureaucrats, that all social problems have equal and opposite forms, and melt away in their presence like ice in the sunshine…

The Hilarious Pessimist blog at the Salisbury Review

Of Beggars and Men

Dalrymple’s attitude to begging, expressed in this new piece for the Library of Law and Liberty, would probably surprise many:

Perhaps it is mistaken to give to beggars, especially in a rich country, as it is to encourage beggary; but unfortunately this is abstract reasoning and beggars are people, not abstractions. A donation gives relief or pleasure (perhaps a malicious pleasure if the beggar is a fraud), but to pass a beggar by without giving when one is perfectly able to do so is to harden one’s heart by means of a chain or reasoning that justifies meanness. I am reminded that Doctor Johnson, who was neither rich nor unaware of the perils both economic and psychological of dependent idleness, and who was a true liberal in economic matters, never passed a beggar without giving him something.

The Sock Fairy

What seems at first an uncharacteristically trivial piece by Dalrymple, about the frequent loss of his socks, has its deeper conclusions:
…I cannot entirely rid myself of the suspicion that there is an animate force somewhere nearby that has worked against me when socks appear to have gone missing or become dis-paired. Naturally, the suspicion is not sufficiently strong for me to do anything about it, by (for example) trying to propitiate the Sock Fairy with some kind of sacrifice. What, apart from socks, would the Sock Fairy want or be satisfied with? It is probable that socks are not an end in themselves for this nasty being: as flies to wanton boys are we to the Sock Fairy.
Our propensity to see malign forces at work against us is quite strong… We are never very far from paranoia.