It seems we’ve missed Dalrymple’s last few articles at the Spectator. (The mere fact that he still writes occasionally for the Spectator, where he began his career as a writer and where he made a name for himself, in the most literal sense of that phrase, is cheering news to some of us.) His most recent piece is from May and bemoans the professionalization of the management of British public services:

So long as we have a public service — and I leave aside the contentious question of how far health care and other services should be publicly or privately funded — what we need is amateur, not professional, management. The highest echelons of any public institution must be composed of volunteers. At most they should be rewarded by the refund of their bus fares to and from meetings, and perhaps a CBE or two; under no circumstances should they be rewarded financially.

TD’s page at the Spectator is here

Well, this is interesting. Productivity has been relatively high in France for quite some time, and I have long heard this fact attributed to the stifling wage laws that make it so difficult to fire employees in France that French business owners are discouraged from hiring in the first place and resort to squeezing more work from a relative few. At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple notes that productivity is higher in France than in Great Britain and finds an example in a comparison of French and British burglars:

…the gendarmes (400 of them) had dismantled a network of burglars who had specialised in the burglary of wine-producing chateaus, their booty being not the videos and other electronic apparatuses that are the cynosure of dim British burglars, but fine wines and works of art, as well as cash and cars.

…what is interesting about this story is the way in which refinement has rubbed off even on the gens du voyage [the French gypsies responsible for the burglary]. They know a good vintage when they see it, and can distinguish a work of art from an i-Pad. In Britain they steal for quantity; in France for quality. Just like hours worked.

Read the whole piece at The Salisbury Review

While admitting that it is not the world’s worst problem, Dalrymple addresses the kitchiness of modern day palaces:

But the problem is not confined to tyrants—if only it were. Tyrants are a species in decline, though it is too early to predict their total extinction. Not only are they less numerous, but they are less bizarre. If we must have tyrants, give me a colorful one at least who will inspire a magic-realist novel or two. If tyranny were the problem, our architecture would be the most beautiful the world has seen. But we must acknowledge that we have moved decisively from the age of grand tyranny to that of petty tyranny, and the problem does not lie with tyrants in the old sense of the word.

Our problem lies elsewhere: Our architects have no ability and our patrons have no taste. The disappearance of taste from the population is an interesting phenomenon, and one that has been little studied (partly because the loss of taste means that it is not even seen as a problem by those who might study it).

This City Journal piece is one of the most powerful I have recently read from the good doctor, a review of the book Out of the Darkness, the first-hand account by a woman named Tina Nash of her boyfriend’s gouging out of her eyes, a case Dalrymple calls “a crime that eclipsed all others in Britain that year (2011) in sheer malignity.”

He issues all the usual caveats:

It is impossible not to sympathize with someone who suffered as Nash did…Her conduct might have been foolish and irresponsible, but nothing she did could possibly have deserved a minimal fraction of so awful a consequence. As for the perpetrator, no punishment could have been too condign to be just; and the severity of his punishment was limited only by our need to remain civilized ourselves.

There follows an explication of her boyfriend’s repeatedly vicious behavior, always followed by Nash’s almost incomprehensibly stupid response: returning to this “great big teddy bear” with “puppy-dog eyes.”

Suffer as a child growing up fatherless and unhappy? Have children out of wedlock yourself.

A man just spent four years in prison for violence? Go out with him.

He tries to rape you on your first date? Go out with him again.

He’s covered in tattoos depicting violence? She “chuckled at the thought that Shane fancied himself as a bit of an outlaw.”

He assaults you? Stay with him. (And repeat this cycle four or five more times.)

He eventually tries to gouge out your eyes (unsuccessfully)? Perjure yourself in court by saying it was you who assaulted him.

Etc.

Dalrymple has written before of this behavior on the part of some underclass women, but never with such power and precision. This is a must-read.

Dalrymple has often expressed his appreciation for the world’s complexity, and an aversion to the notion that important questions are generally answerable by fact and logic, with no need for judgment. At Pajamas Media, he applies this principle to the notion of parental rights and childhood immunization:

The question was this: if it is permissible for parents to refuse to have their children immunized against preventable childhood diseases, does the state have the right, through one or other of its agencies, to exclude those children temporarily from school or other social institutions if there is an epidemic developing?

This question can be answered neither by a single abstract principle alone nor by appeal to scientific fact…

This is precisely what Burke would have predicted: what we decide cannot be determined by appealing to conflicting rights alone, the more fundamental of them prevailing. Sometimes one will prevail, sometimes another; there is no way of making politics a matter of such accurate calculation that no faculty of judgment, with its permanent possibility of error, will ever have to be exercised.

A recent clearing out of some of the contents of Dalrymple’s library leads to a joyful act, the tossing out of copies of The Lancet:

Week after week, when I subscribed to the print edition of The Lancet, I used to read on the cover messages such as the following:

The right to the highest attainable standard of health is an asset and an ally, which is at the disposal of all health workers.

Or:

Despite formidable challenges ahead, a shift towards an equitable distribution of energy based increasingly on renewable resources has the potential for major health dividends.

They used to make me feel slightly sick, as if I had eaten too many rich chocolates, as I pondered the question as to the quality of a mind for which such sentences, with so many flatulent connotations without denotation, are deemed worthy of emphasis.

Dalrymple finds great wisdom in the book Portraits by the 18th Century painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, in its honest descriptions of the subjects of his famous portraits:

Reynolds shows that it was no accident that his portraits penetrated the character as well as they represented the physical appearance of his sitters. The book contains three character sketches in words of three of the great men of his time, Oliver Goldsmith, Doctor Johnson and David Garrick. These character sketches were not intended for publication, that of Doctor Johnson having been for the private use of James Boswell in writing his great Life; but though never revised, they are still worth reading because Reynolds had caught the habit of writing and thinking well from Johnson himself, at whose feet he had sat…

To express disbelief in the concept of animal rights nowadays provokes shock, but such a response is intellectually significant:

The notion of rights seems often to crowd out all other moral considerations. It as if [sic] those who believed in animal rights could conceive of no other reason why animals should be treated decently or humanely than that they were endowed with rights. Without such rights, supposedly, any treatment of them would be permitted. In other words, the concept of rights in this case, as in many others, is a defense against an inner moral vacuum.

Dalrymple at the Library of Law and Liberty

The recent revelation of Harper Lee’s previously unpublished book Go Set a Watchman, and the news of its impending publication, cause Dalrymple to revisit To Kill a Mockingbird, the only book she was previously thought to have written. Writing for The New Criterion, he notes many admirable qualities in the work but ultimately can’t get past its lack of realism, exhibited mostly in its portrayal of both Atticus Finch and the black population of Maycomb as essentially morally perfect. One example:

…as portrayed in the book, blacks are all wise, friendly, God-fearing, generous, honest, uxorious, faithful folks. They live their Christianity, whereas the whites use it only as a stick to beat others with. They seem to be happy rather than unhappy: certainly not as unhappy as the poor whites… If the purpose of social and political arrangements is to bring about a happy contented existence for people of good character, any disturbance of those arrangements in Maycomb at least would seem more to the benefit of the whites, who live in a permanent state of petty irritation and conflict with one another, than to that of the blacks. On this view of the life of blacks in southern Alabama, it should have been the whites singing “Let My People Go.”

Now of course Harper Lee was writing in 1960, when racial equality had by no means been conceded, and when it was still perfectly acceptable in certain quarters to pronounce that blacks were all but a different species, at best hewers of wood and drawers of water, and inclined or condemned by their nature to depravity in need, therefore, of permanent repression. She must have wanted to counteract and shame the still widely held prejudice of the time, and this was a highly honorable thing to do.

But a novel is not a political speech or pamphlet, and so such sentimentality deforms the book and casts doubt on its reliability. For those alert to the implausibility of the portrayal of the black population, the suspicion of emotional manipulation arises. We are being told directly what to feel.

Although many pieces in The New Criterion require a subscription, this one appears not to. You can read it here.

At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple says he couldn’t care less about FIFA, its recent corruption, the investigation into the corruption, the English national team, English football fans, football generally…