Monthly Archives: February 2013

Put away the pills and listen to Tennessee Williams

To those who consider happiness their birthright and unhappiness (called depression, of course) unfair, Dalrymple presents Tennessee Williams, “travelling salesman of unhappiness”:
Clearly, he was temperamentally incapable of facile optimism; his early life experiences were not such as to encourage a rosy view of human existence…Williams’s upbringing marked him for life, and no amount of success and recognition could heal the early wounds.
….
In the modern world, Blanche Dubois, Big Daddy and Doc would all have been “diagnosed” according to the criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, and given antidepressants. Their serotonin levels would have been considered low and in need of a boost. The antidepressants wouldn’t have worked, of course, but at least they would have prevented them from the need to look inwards, to examine themselves.

Zadie Smith’s London

In City Journal (h/t Jim S.) Dalrymple reviews the novel NW by Zadie Smith. A depiction of London’s multiculturalism and ubiquitous welfare state and their very different effects on two sisters, it seems tailor-made for much of this blog’s readership (which is both British-heavy and animated by these topics, judging by our comments section).
Dalrymple says the novel “offers much of psychological and social interest”, and he has this to say about a very engaging and provocative passage he quotes from the book:

No doubt there is a certain exhilaration in a cityscape of this nature, with its constant stimulation, its kaleidoscopic or hallucinatory variety, its energy, its ceaseless pullulation, its never-sleeping quality. But the exhilaration is superficial, like the buzz of a drug; it soon gives way to a kind of anxiety or agitation. In such a city, the present moment is all, and contact among people is inevitably superficial, because they cannot fully understand one another. A lifetime would hardly be enough to understand the cultures of both the woman in the black tent and the believer in Falun Gong. Who can read Polish, Turkish, and Arabic and thus understand the concerns of the Poles, Turks, and Arabs? No one is rooted anywhere, impermanence is universal, communication with many is by pidgin, if that, and the best that can be hoped for, but not necessarily expected, is mutual tolerance. Mutual incomprehension encloses people in mental and social ghettos because the effort of understanding so many different cultures is simply too great, especially as the amount of time and energy that anyone can devote to the task is so limited. Smith’s mention of the referee is telling because it implies the constant need for adjudication among people who don’t understand one another and whose interests and assumptions are not the same—and may even conflict.

Will shale gas save the British economy?

This recent Dalrymple piece in Standpoint expresses skepticism about any benefits that might accrue to Britain from the use of “fracking” technology to extract the large deposits of shale gas that have been discovered, arguing in part that they would only be used to expand the public sector:

For Britain to hope that the exploitation of a natural resource would rescue its ailing economy seems to me like a man who purchases lottery tickets in the hope that they will secure his old age…What would we do with our large revenues? It is not necessary to be Nostradamus to imagine. At least one government would use this free gift of Nature (give or take the costs of extraction) to increase the size and emoluments of the so-called public service, and also the generosity of welfare payments..

The piece includes some economic arguments with which I for one do not agree (when I can find time, I will try to address them in more detail in the comments):
As for industry, something rather similar would probably happen. Cheap energy would obviate, at least to a degree, the need to become more efficient; it could (and I think would) be used to maintain wages that would otherwise not be justified and to avoid the necessity for innovation and adjustment. It would allow cheap imports and thereby raise not just the standard of living without concomitant effort, but permanently raise expectations. If the cheap energy were exhausted, the supposedly “healthy” economy would very soon stand revealed as a painted corpse.
This skepticism about the potential benefits stems from his view of British culture:
Pasteur famously said that chance favours only the mind prepared, that is to say a mind that is alert, knowledgeable and flexible enough to realise the importance of phenomena that it happens upon by chance. In the same way, one might say that gifts of Nature, in the form of resources, favour only an economy prepared. The United States still has an economy so prepared; the United Kingdom has not.
….
Naïve people often allude to the supposed paradox of African countries richly endowed with natural resources that nevertheless remain deeply impoverished. This is not a paradox at all: with the wrong institutions, the wrong ideas and the wrong culture, such resources can be a curse rather than a blessing, increasing in stability as the political fight over those resources becomes more desperate or acute, and undermining other productive activities. In the same way, incidentally, an educated population, if it is educated in the wrong things, imbued with the wrong expectations, is a curse rather than a blessing…[E]xperience has taught us to have no real faith in the future of our country. We are no longer a nation of shopkeepers, but a nation of political manipulators, whose main hope of betterment is a larger slice of whatever cake exists in the present moment. 

The French connection

The Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris recently held an exhibition entitled “Intelligentsia”, presenting original documents of correspondence demonstrating the relationship between French intellectuals and the Soviet Union. Dalrymple’s review in the New Criterion (subscription required) quotes one exhibited item that relates what many leftist intellectuals today no doubt believe but refuse to say openly:
There were two very important omissions, it seemed to me, in the exhibition. The first was the profound effect of the First World War. Surely membership of a decimated generation must have had something to do with the extremity of [Paul] Eluard’s and [Louis] Aragon’s hatred of western civilization as expressed in their Surrealist manifesto of 1925, Revolution First and Always:

We want to proclaim our absolute separation, and in a sense our purification from, the ideas that are the basis of European civilization . . . and even of all civilization based upon the intolerable principles of necessity and duty. . . . Everywhere Western civilization reigns all human relations cease except those founded on interest, payment on account. . . . We are the revolt of the mind; we consider bloody Revolution as the ineluctable revenge of the mind humiliated by you [the educated classes who remain patriotic].

They subsequently realized that the Soviet Union offered the best hope for the destruction of the civilization that they so hated (although they were honored by and comfortable in it). This perhaps explains Raymond Aron’s observation that faith in the Soviet Union was at its most religiously fervent when the country was at its worst, at its most prolifically murderous; faith began to waver when mass murder declined into everyday pervasive oppression.

A Healthcare System Suffocated by Bureaucrats

Being American, I had heard nothing of the scandal at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, but a quick search reveals the shocking and disgusting details of as many as 1,200 patients dying unnecessarily in a single hospital due to being left unattended, unfed and ignored. We missed this Dalrymple piece on the scandal in Standpoint, written before the publication of the official report into the matter, and reading it now, two weeks after the report’s publication, it seems he was not pessimistic enough about its conclusions:

What the Francis Enquiry will almost certainly reveal is a combination of the ravening ambition of bureaucratic mediocrities, institutionally perverted incentives that reward those who do worst, the creation of a nomenklatura class at the head of an apparat staffed by bullied, intimidated, fearful but also unscrupulous apparatchiks, intellectual dishonesty with compulsory lying on a vast scale, the proliferation of procedural objectives and bureaucratic tasks completely unrelated either to reality or to the welfare of patients, all combined with a revolting tendency to Pecksniffian self-congratulation and righteousness and an inability or unwillingness to speak or write in plain English.

In fact, the inquiry may or may not have revealed these things – no one can know – but regardless, they were not included in the report, which apparently names no names. In fact, the head of that particular region of the NHS at the time, David Nicholson, CBE (!), is now chief executive of the entire NHS. Perhaps the management style of this former Communist Party member, criticized as “centralised” and “top-down” by even the Guardian (!), though probably inevitable in a government-run health system, explains this Dalrymple anecdote from the piece:

Not long ago I was asked [to] conduct an inquiry into a spate of fatal events among the patients of an NHS Trust, and to determine whether there was a single factor that explained them. There was not; but when I reported to the Medical Director of the trust that while there was no such factor, it was clear to me that his staff were incompetent, unmotivated and completely unaware of what the purpose of their work was other than the filling in of forms (thousands of them, often with contradictory answers to the same questions in them), he replied with an almost Buddhist calm, ‘But that is the standard expected these days.’ He reminded me of a collaborator in an occupied country explaining that there was nothing he could do in the face of overwhelming military force.

A call for convalescence

In the British Medical Journal (subscription required) Dalrymple reviews a book called How to Be Idle, agreeing with the concept…

In theory I am in favour of idleness, for without it there can be no contemplation, and without contemplation there can be no wisdom.

…while disagreeing with one of the author’s prescriptions:
“We need more idler-friendly doctors,” the author says. “Instead of prescribing drugs and trying to blitz illness in the shortest possible period of time, they would order their patients to take long periods off work. Three days would be the minimum; but they could prescribe a rest cure of up to two months.”
Here, I am afraid, the author, whose book was published in 2004, displays an unawareness that doctors were already prescribing very long periods off work, or at least setting their seal of approval upon such periods. In that year, 2.7 million people were claiming incapacity benefit, half a million more than were injured in the first world war, and four times as many as were claiming its equivalent in the mid-1970s. Surely the health of the population had not declined so drastically in the meantime?

A Program of Integrated Frivolity

This piece at the Library of Law and Liberty reminds us of those classic City Journal pieces out of Birmingham and deserves a lengthy quote. But do read the whole piece.

It is absolutely no mitigation of the man’s behavior that the woman in the case was foolish; but to disguise this foolishness on the grounds that it might be considered ‘blaming the victim’ has two harmful aspects.

First it confuses the spheres of the legal and the moral. Foolishness is not a crime and is not punishable by law, but it is still foolishness. To suppose that the foolishness of the victim might be a mitigation of the crimes against her makes the overlap of the legal and the moral so great that it is an invitation to totalitarianism. The wisdom or foolishness of the victim had nothing to do with the man’s legal guilt.

Second, to obscure from the woman her own foolishness, on the grounds (for example) that she is suffering from some kind of syndrome and is therefore not responsible for her own actions, is to dehumanize her and to deny her the agency to behave any differently in the future. My experience of such women is that they are perfectly capable of acknowledging their own foolishness, and indeed do so with relief, after having been persuaded for so long that they are passive victims and nothing but passive victims. There are, of course, such victims in the world: but this woman was not one of them. Moreover it is a very short step from considering the woman in the case to be nothing but a victim to considering the man in the case also to be nothing but a victim…

 

Human Feces As Medicine?

It can be, according to one study:

Here is a case in which rationality must overcome revulsion. My admiration is great for the person who first thought of such a therapy: imagination leapt over prejudice. If it had been up to me, I should have waited passively until the pharmaceutical industry developed a more effective antibiotic than vancomycin. With this method, however, the raw material is abundant and cheap and not, I presume, under patent.

Dalrymple at Pajamas Media

North Sea Bubble

At Salisbury Review’s Hilarious Pessimist blog, Dalrymple puts Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy’s alleged slush fund into perspective:

Every person employed in Britain at public expense who is paid more than the smallest amount that he would consent to work for, every person likewise employed in a post whose activity is unnecessary or worse, that is to say positively harmful to the economy (and there are many, in practically all fields), is in effect the beneficiary of a monumental slush fund, albeit a legalised one. This kind of slush fund is, in fact, far worse than that of Sr Rajoy’s, because his at least has the merit of being against the law and therefore vulnerable to detection and suppression. It is when corruption is legalised that the real problems begin.