Tony Barber of the Financial Times had harsh words in the Charlie Hebdo affair….harsh words against Charlie Hebdo. “Disgraceful,” says Dalrymple, and a lot more….
The bifurcation of intellectual opinion in France, encouraged and enforced by a climate of political correctness, has pushed the public debate into such polar extremes that reasonable commentary is hardly possible. Not that this is new. The Countess R G Waldeck discovered it in 1939, as her writing from that time illustrates:
In this article, she sketches with some bitterness the reception that she received in American liberal intellectual circles when she described the situation in Germany as she had seen and experienced it. No one could have suspected her of being well-disposed to the Nazis, who had deprived her of her family fortune, cut her off from her friends and forced her to live and work elsewhere, in a language not her own; she was herself a liberal; but she found that liberal circles were so wedded to their own idea that someone like Hitler was so reprehensible that he could not have any support among the people and would therefore soon be overthrown that her attempts to make them see otherwise were fruitless. They were deaf to the inside knowledge and the lived experience of someone as obviously well-informed and convincing as she.
Time recently spent with a relative of naturally happy disposition makes Dalrymple wonder about the origins of goodness:
[P]eople vary naturally in their powers of self-control. Does this mean that there is more virtue in people who are naturally impulsive but do manage to control themselves than in those who are more phlegmatic and behave similarly? The most tempted are the most virtuous, if and when they actually do overcome the temptation. I know an eminent man, by nature of bad character, arrogant, intolerant, and full of hatred, who nevertheless makes intermittent efforts to be good, and sometimes even succeeds for a few moments in being affable and kindly. One knows that it won’t last, that he’ll soon turn nasty again; but his struggle against his own God-given temperament has something of the heroic about it.
By comparison with him, I have it easy; by no means saintly, I have much less of a struggle than he to be amiable. Is my general amiability (which, I confess, sometimes partakes of a good dose of pusillanimity) less meritorious than his occasional flashes of the same quality?
The premature death of an acquaintance causes Dalrymple to ponder human equality:
There is an existential equality to or inherent in Man – between men – that transcends their individual characteristics. This is recognised in medical ethics, according to which a doctor makes no enquiry into the moral worth of his patient, but treats him as best he can whatever he is like. When people discovered that I worked as a doctor in a prison, they asked me whether I did not find it difficult sometimes to treat people who had done the most terrible things. Oddly enough, I did not find it at all difficult; a doctor is like a lawyer at a trial who presents the best case he can on behalf of his client, even if he knows him to be a perfect swine. He puts such considerations out of his mind: it is not his place to decide whether a man merits his suffering, as in many cases he does; and what at first is a conscious decision soon becomes second nature. I once had a patient who, acting as a baby-sitter for a neighbour, impaled three children on railings, and who now had a cough. I treated the cough as I would have treated anyone else’s cough. We are lucky to live in a society in which we do not treat people after their desert, for huge numbers of us are treated much better than we deserve.
Writing that he “came recently into possession of letters of two of the most eminent British psychiatrists of the twentieth century, Sir Aubrey Lewis and Eliot Slater”, Dalrymple goes on to share some of their contents in this piece in New English Review:
…by the standards of their pygmy discipline, they were giants indeed.
It is delightful, then, to read the letters that Slater and Lewis wrote to each other, that prove (once again) that giants are not immune from pettiness, intrigue and wounded amour propre.
There follows a selection of wonderfully subtle slights and petty accusations that makes for amusing reading.
The New Criterion has produced a symposium on the topic “Free Speech Under Threat”, and Dalrymple’s contribution describes some of the tactics used by the NHS to undermine it:
Doctors in the United Kingdom now have to go through a procedure called “annual appraisal,” in which a series of pro forma questions are asked of a doctor by another doctor, who may have become a specialist in such appraisals, easily capable of earning £2,000 a day by performing them (every regulation is a certain kind of entrepreneurial opportunity). One of the questions that the appraiser has to ask is “Do you have any concerns about your probity?”
When I was first asked this question, I told the appraiser that I would answer it on the condition that he answered two questions. He agreed, and I asked the two questions.
“The first,” I said, “is ‘What kind of person would answer such a question?’ and the second is ‘What kind of person would ask it?’ ”
“Oh, I know,” he replied, “but just answer ‘No’ so that we can get this over with.”
….
Mistrust, fear, emasculation, compliance with untruth: these are not propitious for free speech and, perhaps worst of all, require no official censor to restrict it. The population will restrict it all by itself.
Multimillionaire financier John Paul Burrows dodged $70,000 worth of train fare and was forever barred from the City of London. Analyzing objections to his punishment, Dalrymple asks: Is the purpose of punishment to redeem the punished?
Far from being generous, this kind of reasoning seems to me callous—lacking in imagination about just how terrible crimes can be, an almost wilful disregard of the history of the 20th century. And if a Christian were to object that no crime is beyond the Savior’s forgiveness, it should be recalled that His kingdom was not of this world. As for us, we are men, not saviors.
A study suggests antibiotics might play a role in obesity, but Dalrymple is not convinced.
On a visit to a secondhand bookshop in Paris, Dalrymple judges a book by its cover:
It consisted of a black-and-white drawing with despairing peasants in the foreground, dying, praying, breaking the ground with picks, all among scattered sacks of grain with smoking factory chimneys far in the background, and looming over all, emerging from the sky just above the horizon, a clawlike hand with nails like talons, obviously connected to an unseen monster of immense power, indeed omnipotence, responsible for all the ills of the world.
This was typical of the anti-Semitic iconography of the time, but not just of anti-Semitic iconography. The year in which the book was published, 1905, was the year in which France became a fully secular state, and the ferocious anti-clerical propaganda that led to the final divorce between France and the Church was iconographically indistinguishable from anti-Semitic propaganda, being complete with giant Vatican hands looming over the world, Vatican spiders whose thin legs encompassed the globe, and hook-nosed Vatican priests luring innocent children into their dark, smothering cloaks, from which they would never again emerge.