The fact that Dalrymple’s bank “has repeatedly been forced to admit that it has engaged on huge-scale dishonesty that has cost it billions in fines and reparations” did not stop it from sending him this:

Can you please confirm the source of funds… which have been deposited in your account? If these funds are work-related can you please confirm the nature of the work, who your employers are and if you anticipate this to continue? Can you please advise why the funds are paid to your international account, rather than being paid direct to your UK account.

Analyses of national indebtedness invariably leave out an important set of factors, says Dalrymple: national culture and history:

Greek ‘prosperity’ had been based almost exclusively on borrowing, and by the government at that. It was for current consumption alone. Moreover, to compare the dysfunction of the Irish government with that of Greece would be absurd; it would be like comparing a bee to a crocodile.

I have no idea what weight exactly should be given to political, cultural and historical differences, but I think it is mad to ignore them.

In which Dalrymple offers, “Full marks (for persistence and determination) for anyone who can read right through to the end” of this excerpt from a recent edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry:

‘Photovoice’, a community-based participatory research methodology, uses images as a tool to deconstruct problems by posing meaningful questions in a community to find actionable solutions. This community-enhancing technique was used to elicit experiences of climate change among women in rural Nepal. The current analysis employs mixed methods to explore The subjective mental health experience of participating in a 4-to 5-day photovoice process focused on climate change. A secondary objective of this work was to explore whether or not photovoice training, as a one-time 4- to 5-day intensive intervention, can mobilise people to be more aware of environmental changes related to climate change and to be more resilient to these changes, while providing positive mental health outcomes.

Dalrymple explains at the Library of Law and Liberty why the run-up to the recent elections in Britain filled him with ennui:

…[O]ur national Tweedledum had promised the populace that, if elected, he would spend $12 billion more per year on our National Health Service. Our national Tweedledee, on the other hand, offered the populace the provision of a personal midwife for every new mother (whether or not she needed or wanted one), someone to tell her how to bring up her child and ensure that she never felt alone in the task.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee each spoke as if he were proposing to confer inestimable benefits upon Britons from the goodness of his heart and from his own pocketbook rather than from the pocketbooks of the electors…

Note: When Dalrymple’s long-running BMJ column ended in 2012, he had a backlog of around 50 or 60 unpublished pieces, and he kindly gave them to us to post here at Skeptical Doctor. We are posting one each Wednesday to coincide with the schedule of his old BMJ column. We hope you enjoy them.

Bernard de Mandeville (1670 – 1733) was a Dutch doctor who studied at Leiden but practised in England, whither he emigrated when some of his poems incited a riot in Rotterdam. He became a master of English prose and one of the most important political philosophers of his age.

Among his lesser works were a defence of brothels – A Modest Defence of the Public Stews: or, an Essay Upon Whoring, as it Is now practis’d in these Kingdoms – and a proposal for making public executions more efficacious in the deterrence of crime, An Enquiry Into the Causes of the Frequent Public Executions at Tyburn. He is most famous, however, for his Fable of the Bees, in which he presents arguments that private vices become public virtues, and that no country can thrive on the basis of behaviour deemed moral.

One is never quite sure how literally to take what Mandeville writes, but there is little doubt about the contempt in which he hold his medical colleagues in his A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions. This is written in the form of a dialogue, mainly between Philopirio (lover of experience) and Misomedon (hater of physic), the former a doctor who is to be taken as Mandeville himself, the latter a depressed patient. Much of the bile poured on the medical profession is from Mesomedon, but since Philopirio does not contradict him, and when he speaks holds to essentially the same view, it can be assumed that it represents Mandeville’s opinion.

Philopirio describes how to be a successful physician:

If you can Chat, or be a Good Companion, you may drink your self into Practice; but if you are too dull for what I have hitherto named, you must say little and be Civil to all the World, observe your certain Hours, and take care you are often sent for were you are, and as’d for where you are not; but tho’ in Coffee-houses you are forc’d to sit idle and loiter away your Time all day long, yet when our of ’em always Counterfeit a Man that is in haste, and wanted in a great many Places… contradict no body, never open your Lips without a Smile, and give no Peace to your Hat.

In other words, it is all a question of acting and not of curing, even if the latter were possible. But, even more scandalously, Mesomedon says that doctors do not want to save their patients:

But among the Crafty and Polite [physicians], that in reality mind nothing but themselves and getting Money, there is no Appearance of [wanting to cure their patients]… Shall I Hazard my Reputation, say they, on the possibility of saving a Patient, when I may be sure of preserving it as well when he dies as when he lives? Nay it is certain, that should a Patient miscarry after a daring Medicine, a great Clamour would be rais’d against the Physician by his Enemies. No wise Man ought knowingly to lay himself open to the Censures of a malicious World, and therefore to prescribe otherwise, than in the safe common Road, is what a Man cannot answer to his family.

It has been suggested that Mandeville was motivated by envy and his own lack of financial success as a physician. But he was an early believer in the work-life balance. Philopirio dislikes working too hard, seeing too many patients, or hurrying.

Not that I love to be idle; but I want to be employed to my own liking.

On the modern tattooing phenomenon:

…a tattoo differentiates and individuates, while at the same time allowing identification with masses of others. A tattoo allows you to rebel and conform at the same time, eat your cake and have it too. The names of tattoo parlours – Evil in the Needle, for example, or Revolution Ink – often reveal a kind of antinomianism which does not quite have the courage of its lack of convictions.

Dalrymple’s writing often relies on both objective data and his own personal experience. At Psychology Today, he notes the frequent gap between the two:

…it seems to me that the distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance, or by direct experience, is a valid one. The reading of literature is probably the best way of trying to close the gap, Shakespeare being the greatest closer of the gap than any other writer (or at least any other writer known to me). He seems not only to have described but experienced his myriad characters from the inside, as it were; and because of his incomparable literary gifts, he helps us to do so as well. When we read Macbeth, we seem to understand not only Macbeth’s actions but to know what it is actually to be Macbeth, though we have no intention of becoming him ourselves.

Read the rest here

At City Journal, Dalrymple says that, though emboldened by the recent elections, David Cameron has his work cut out for him:

He has promised a referendum on membership of the European Union, a promise that would be difficult even for Houdini to escape; and if it goes against membership, the Scots, who are Europhile but anti-English, might declare their independence and try to remain in the European Union (though it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the Union would have them). Nor would independence be without potential for creating deep divisions, bitterness, and conflict within Scotland itself, though the leadership of the SNP speaks the language of unanimity. The potential for chaos both north and south of the border is enormous.

Dalrymple has been appearing more in the media lately to promote his new book Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality. He sat down with the Chicago Tribune for this interview, which outlines the main arguments of the book:

Q: You lead with Shakespeare’s King Lear saying mental illness is “the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune…we (blame) the sun, the moon and the stars.”

A: Four hundred years later, it’s still true, but we blame psychology instead of astrology. We call it progress. Literature is far more illuminating into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.

And in this interview with Ginni Thomas for the Daily Caller, he talks about the dishonesty inherent in modern political correctness, which encourages people to say what they know isn’t true:

The question is: why has our society become so weak-willed in many respects? It accepts all kinds of obvious untruths and acts as if they were true, and that is a much worse threat than anything from outside. So that for example, just the way we think about social problems is often completely wrong. We treat people as if they were objects rather than subjects, as if they’re not reacting to their own circumstances, in fact. And we give them bad incentives and so on and so forth. So I think the intellectual dishonesty of the West is the greatest threat to our societies. We can’t say what we really think. We can only say what we don’t think (many of us), and that is really the greatest threat. And the only solution to that is for people to speak up and to write, which is what I’ve done — not with any great effect, I must say. But that’s all I can do anyway.