Modern man’s outlook is essentially Promethean: filled with utopian expectations and oblivious to the world’s limits. One comedic play exposes the folly:

Le Roi se meurt is an antidote to any kind of political utopianism, and is both poetic and satirical. It satirises man’s preposterous, and often dangerous, attempts to escape the existential limitations of his life. It punctures his attempts to ignore death, his pretence that by busying himself with his little projects it will go away…

Oddly enough, Ionesco’s meditation on the importance of death is not depressing, but on the contrary uplifting. It liberates us to take pleasure in what we are fortunate enough to have, namely existence, rather than to bear the crushing, all-pervasive and life-destroying responsibility to bring about perfection.

To read the rest, purchase the Summer 2013 edition of the Salisbury Review.

Not being pagan, Dalrymple doesn’t really think so. Nevertheless:

…victory over bacterial infection is only temporary, not final and probably never to be final, given the genetic flexibility of bacteria; medicine is thus an aspect of Man’s Promethean bargain. But temporary victory is to be preferred to perpetual defeat.

Read the piece at Pajamas Media

The promise of the information age is that the ability to capture and communicate more information will allow us to make better decisions, but judging from Dalrymple’s experience sorting through medical records, it may sometimes replace common sense:

What was quite clear from these notes was that the form-filling had become, for those who did it, the essential work to be done, completely unconnected from the diagnosis or treatment of the patient about whom the forms were supposedly filled in…

The mountain of miscellaneous, irrelevant, trivial or actively misleading information and pseudo-information did not prevent, perhaps even caused, the most obvious feature of the case to be persistently overlooked, and for the appropriate simple test not to be performed.

To read the rest, purchase the Summer 2013 edition of the Salisbury Review.

Dalrymple keeps the Cato Institute honest.

When Dr Watson first describes the character of Sherlock Holmes, he presents the man who is soon to become his friend as a complete philistine where literature and philosophy are concerned. The detective is not an ignoramus, exactly, for he has at his disposal a wide range of arcana: but his islands of knowledge form an archipelago, not a continent.

The creator of the greatest detective who never lived, Arthur Conan Doyle, was about as far removed from being a bohemian intellectual as can be imagined. He was a keen sportsman and practical joker; he was an admirer of prize fighting and its practitioners; in his early days he was an adventurer. He is often presented as a bluff and hearty man of no great intellectual attainments. But a man does not become a great prose stylist (as Conan Doyle was) by chance; the doctor-author was a very well-read man.

In 1907, he published a book, Through the Magic Door: the magic door is that to his book-lined study, of which the frontispiece is a photograph. The text is a paean to reading, and a brief account of the books that had meant most to him.

He describes how, in his medical student days in Edinburgh, he had exactly thruppence (1.25 new pence) for his lunch, but that his way to his afternoon classes was past a bookshop which kept a tub of books for thruppence outside, and ‘a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger of a youthful body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind.’ At least once a week the life of the mind prevailed over the life of the body, and he bought old leather-covered volumes of classics such as Clarendon, Addison and Swift.

By today’s standards, Conan Doyle was prodigiously well-read, both in English and French. He makes remarks that, more than a hundred years later, retain their accuracy. Lamenting the decline of music in England since the time of Pepys, Conan Doyle says, ‘In England, alas, the sound of a poor man’s voice raised in song means only too surely that he is drunk.’ On reading this, I could not but think of my embarrassment when, abroad, I have been asked to sing an English song or, worse still, perform an English dance.

In another aside, Conan Doyle laments the passing of stoicism and the stiff upper lip:

The Gentleman should always be the Stoic, with his soul too great to be affected by the small troubles of life. “You look cold, sir,” said an English sympathizer to a French emigré. The fallen noble drew himself up in his threadbare coat. “Sir,” said he, “a gentleman is never cold.”

Conan Doyle would not approve, to put it no stronger, of our propensity to complain:

One’s consideration for others as well as one’s own self-respect should check the grumble… The man who must hop because his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his knuckles are bruised should be made to feel that he is an object not of pity but of contempt.

Instead, we now have websites telling us how to complain and informing us that to complain is our right (though not, of course, that it is also big business, carried on at our expense). It is all enough to make a stoic… well, complain.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

In a piece for the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple identifies a similarity between the popular support fueling Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s increasingly imposing islamism and the growth of state power in the West:

Considerations not only of the wishes but of the welfare of the majority have increasingly trumped considerations of freedom in all western democracies. Almost everywhere (the notable exception being Switzerland) politicians have become drunk not so much with power as with responsibility. Power, however, tends to follow responsibility, which after all is its justification; and where populations look to governors for protection and prosperity, governors are only too willing to oblige. Few people, certainly not members of a modern political class, are able or willing to resist the lure of increased power.

It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that a sense of limitlessness has emerged in our political classes that is not so very different from that of Mr Erdogan…

Read the rest here

Believe it or not, there is such a day: Monday. Dalrymple writes at Pajamas Media about a new study that shows that death rates are higher for surgeries performed later in the week. In fact, the results of the study show that “the death rate increased steadily as the week progressed”.

The reason? “Perhaps hospital staff, especially surgeons and nurses, grow steadily more tired or careless as the week progresses.”

Returning to his home in France after some time away, Dalrymple is reminded that
the French bureaucratic state is more efficient than the British one:

The main explanation of all this is cultural. The French have had far less
state-sponsored and funded stupidity than the British. It is difficult as a
result to find in France such concentrations of people whose labour no one would
want even if it were free of charge. The state, overweening as it is in France,
has not acted as consistently in the direction of promoting vulgarity and low
standards of public conduct as in Britain, where an ideological attachment to
the lowest common denominator has become a badge of political virtue and
democratic sentiment.

Read it here

Not long ago, a distinguished man of letters of my acquaintance, who lived in a far distant country, sent me an e-mail. It started with an enquiry after my general welfare, and continued:

All is well here – except that I am dying.

The lightness, almost gaiety, of his tone only added to the shock. He was a comparatively young man (that is, he was only a few years older than I), and at a time when the life expectancy is 80 years one does not expect, irrationally no doubt, one’s acquaintances to die many years before that age.

It was cancer, of course, and a little later he told me that he had read of a new experimental drug on the internet of which he was now trying to get hold. It was not effective, alas, but the search for new experimental drugs, in which a desperate hope is reposed, either by the sufferer or relatives of the sufferer, now seems almost a definite stage of dying of cancer, as denial, numbness, anger, etc, are stages of grief.

The distinguished writer of science fiction, Brian Aldiss (born 1925), wrote a memoir of his wife’s fatal cancer of the pancreas, When the Feast Is Finished, in which he described precisely this desperate hope. His wife died in 1997, the cancer having advanced very quickly after diagnosis, and the book was published in 1999; at one point in the memoir American friends told him by telephone of a new drug that they believed was being tested in Chicago, which raised his hopes. He imagined taking his wife, already much debilitated, to Chicago, there to be restored to him. Alas, it turned out that the drug was being tested even further away, in San Francisco, and only on young and hitherto fit sufferers. His hopes were dashed.

Is it better to have hoped and been deceived than never to have hoped at all? Probably the drug would not have worked, or at best extended life by a week or two at fantastic expense both of money and extra symptomatology. Of all the people I have known who have tried such desperate remedies – only too understandably – not a single one has benefited much. But I suppose the price of progress is a certain amount of heartbreak and disillusion.

Aldiss must have written the book as a salve to his grief. One or two of his observations will remain with me. Although he is very complimentary about the hospice in which his wife stayed until the day before her death, he suspected it (fleetingly) of gentrifying death, surely a suspicion that must have occurred to others. And he says something that I have often noticed in some of the old, that the details of daily existence are all that is left to them. This cannot be true in his case, however, since he has remained as productive as ever.

Although Aldiss and his wife were not believers, her funeral was held in an old parish church. Even the least religious of us feels that a funeral without a service is like a wedding without a bride, that is to say somewhat awkward and even embarrassing: a proof, I suppose, of the depth of the religious roots of our culture and consciousness.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels