At Taki’s Magazine, a piece ostensibly on Dalrymple’s bibliomania becomes a paean to reading old and seemingly useless medical books:
…it will teach us that history should not be read as the backward projection of our current discontents, or of our grievances, that we are not just the victims of history but its principal beneficiaries so far.
In The New Criterion, Dalrymple compares two art exhibits in Madrid: one on the seventeenth-century still lifes of Juan Fernández, also known as El Labrador, and one on the twentieth-century hyperrealism movement. Both are realists, he says…
…but the realism of the former is contemplative and elevating while that of the latter is brash, jarring, superficial, and painful to the eye. The former is refined and exquisite, the latter low, vulgar, and no better than kitsch.
Dalrymple shares some good health news at Pajamas Media:
A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine points out that something unexpected has happened to confound the gloomy prognostications of epidemiologists and demographers. As the percentage of people surviving into old age increases, so the proportion of them who suffer from dementia decreases. People are not only living longer, but living better. This is a phenomenon that has happened across the western world.
….
The explanation favored by the authors is first that the general level of education of the population has increased and second that the prevalence of risk factors for the development of small blood vessel disease, which causes dementia, has declined. Old people have healthier lifestyles and do more exercise than they used to. The decline in smoking (oddly enough once thought to be protective against dementia, but now thought to promote it) may have had a marked effect.
Dalrymple finds much to object to in the Pope’s recent economic pronouncements:
Most egregiously, the Pope quotes from St John Chrysostom:
Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and
take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods that we hold,
but theirs.
This could only be true if an economy were a zero-sum game, if my wealth were your poverty and vice versa. But if the world has learnt anything since the death of St John Chrysostom one thousand six hundred years ago, it is that an economy such as ours is and ought to be dynamic rather than static. I am not poor because Bill Gates is rich; as it happens in enriching himself he enriched me, though the ratio of his wealth to mine is probably greater than the ratio of my wealth to the poorest person in my society. I do not care; it does no harm to me unless I let it do me harm by dwelling upon it. In the meantime, I have enough to eat and much else besides.
And the opening description of Dalrymple’s visit to an outlet mall is not to be missed.
Dalrymple did not enjoy a recent exhibition of the work of 17th-Century painter Jacob Jordaens:
Jordaens is best known for his acres of canvas covered with depictions of unattractive fat flesh and bacchanalian drinking scenes. These usually include someone vomiting quietly in the corner while an obese, grog-blossomed king wassails away in the middle of the picture. Frankly I think they are all in the most appalling taste, badly drawn and vilely over-coloured; but in a way it is reassuring that bad taste is not a phenomenon of our own times alone.
In the event, I preferred the book of comments on the exhibition to the exhibition itself. Such books are always a clear window on the banality of the public mind, or at least the mind of some of the public: to what kind of mind, for example, would it occur to write ‘Howdy Folks’ in such a book of comments? But it did occur to one or both of Stan and Phyllis. Howdy, Stan and Phyllis!
A recent study suggested that nuts have extraordinary health benefits, but Dalrymple takes these nuts with a grain of salt:
This is far from the first study that indicates the healthfulness of nuts. Indeed, so persuasive have these studies been that the Food and Drug Administration says a daily consumption of one and a half ounces of nuts might reduce the risk of heart disease. Nuts are said to reduce inflammation, fat deposition round the viscera, the level of sugar in the blood, blood pressure and damage to the lining of the blood vessels, among other desiderata. Increased nut consumption is “associated with” (weasel words) a reduction in the rate of colon cancer, gallstones, diverticulitis and type II diabetes.
While Steve and I were visiting Dalrymple and his wife this summer, the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (aka, DSM-5) arrived in their mail, and we had a fun hour or two sitting around with it open, calling out the supposed psychiatric disorders, listed therein, from which we apparently suffered. (I was obviously afflicted with tobacco use disorder years ago, until it suddenly disappeared – coincidentally, at the exact moment I decided smoking was stupid.)
In City Journal Dalrymple addresses this diagnostic inflation, and I don’t have nearly enough space to list all the absurd examples he gives, such as “intermittent explosive disorder”:
To call the habit of losing one’s temper and destroying things or hurting people a medical condition (from which, according to the DSM-5, 2.5 percent or so of the adult population suffers in a given year) empties it both of meaning and moral content, all in the service of a spurious objectivity. The notion of an outburst of temper grossly out of proportion to whatever provoked it implies moral judgment as to what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate displays of anger. Appropriateness is an irreducibly moral concept, requiring conscious judgment; no number of functional MRI scans, of the amygdala or of any other part of the brain, will assist in that judgment.
…
The DSM-5 then informs us that more than one in seven people have such a lifelong disorder—adding up to 45 million Americans and even more Europeans. These astonishing numbers give the authors not a moment’s pause (any more than does the fact that their own prevalence rates suggest that the average American suffers from more than two psychiatric disorders in any one year). Several undesirable characteristics must be present in an individual for a diagnosis of personality disorder to apply. Considering those characteristics, and that such a significant portion of the Western population supposedly exhibits many of them, either a mass outbreak of human nastiness and inability to deal with everyday life must have occurred, or the whole business of diagnosis must be dubious or even ridiculous.
News of a Communist couple who kept household staff imprisoned in their London flat reminds Dalrymple of his past Communist roommates:
I was taken back to my days as a student, when in my lodgings there lived a man called George who was a fervent communist, though the son of refugees from the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He was a theoretician rather than an activist, among other reasons because he found it so difficult to get up in the mornings, but one day he introduced Sean into the household…
This piece from Taki’s Magazine is pure, unadulterated, classic Dalrymple — providing sublime truth about wretched humanity. As Dalrymple once said in an interview, when one hears or sees these things, “One doesn’t know whether to throw oneself off the roof, or fall on the floor with laughter, which is a most peculiar feeling.”
Writing at Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple highlights two of the newer politically-correct terms: sex worker and sex work. He has written before that such terms are designed by the Left to force people “to assent to obvious lies” and to soften them up for control by our supposed betters. His point here is different and no less convincing:
The new locutions, obligatory in the polite company of the politically correct, are not only prudish but are instances of magical thinking. Those who insist upon their use think that by changing the word they will change the thing. For them, the problem with prostitution is not the phenomenon in itself and all that hitherto has inevitably surrounded it, but the stigma that attaches to it. And this, they think, can be eliminated, or at least reduced, by a change in nomenclature. For them a rose would not smell as sweet by any other name…