This piece at Taki’s Magazine is among the most thorough and concise that Dalrymple has written on art and architecture and the modern embrace of ugliness. He argues that it flows from a concern about inequality:

So long as there is squalor in the world, those obsessed with social justice feel obliged not only to live in it themselves, at least for a time—an elementary matter of solidarity with those less fortunate than themselves—but also to spread it evenly. Beauty has ever been associated with inequality, much of that inequality illegitimate even from the point of view of the most reactionary of inegalitarians, indeed the product of the most blatant or brutal exploitation or despoliation.

…that the desire for ugliness is not really sincere:

This world [of universal ugliness] will never come about, however, for the desire for it is neither universal nor lasting nor wholly sincere. It is curious how many pop stars, for example, having made their fortunes, retire in their private lives to the physical surroundings of country gentlemen.

…and that it paradoxically serves to increase inequality.

For as it destroys beauty and elegance, so beauty and elegance become ever more rarefied and available to a smaller and smaller elite…

Note: When Dalrymple’s long-running BMJ column ended in 2012, he had a backlog of around 50 or 60 unpublished pieces, and he kindly gave them to us to post here at Skeptical Doctor.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.

The forward to Denton Welch’s last, unfinished, posthumously published novel, A Voice Through a Cloud, is very moving:

The manuscript of this nearly completed novel by Denton Welch was at his bedside when he died at the age of thirty-one. He had suffered thirteen years of chronic and painful illness caused by a road accident in which he sustained a serious fracture of the spine… Towards the end he could work for only three or four minutes at a time… Even then, he made colossal and nearly successful attempts to finish the book. He died on the afternoon of December 30th, 1948, still upheld in his last hours by the high courage which seemed somehow the fruit of his rare intelligence.

Actually, Welch (1915 – 1948), who was also an accomplished painter, was thirty-three when he died. He suffered from Potts disease of the spine as well as the injury; his heroic efforts to remain productive make one ashamed (at least temporarily, while one recalls them) to carp about trivial inconveniences.

The novel is autobiographical, or semi-autobiographical, and the first half at least ought to be given to every medical student to read. There is a graphic account of what it is like to come round after an accident:

Everything about me seemed to be reeling and breaking up. Bright little points glittered all down the front of the liquid man kneeling beside me. I knew at once that he was a policeman, and I thought that in his official capacity, he was performing some ritual operation on me.

Welch observed his own injuries with a detachment that allowed him later to describe them so accurately:

When the nurse touched the flesh of the bruised leg, it yielded in just the way that a wine jelly yields to the pressure of the spoon.

But above all, and most valuably, he describes the petty cruelties and humiliations visited upon him by the nurses, who tell him to try to sleep when he is in severe pain, and to keep quiet when he cries out with pain.

Suddenly, without warning, the nurse gave my body a sharp little jerk which sent such agony though me that I screamed out… The woman, after the first shock of my scream, said: “Oh, I never pinched you! Fancy making all that fuss! I never pinched you!”

This, of course, suggests that the nurse was in the habit of pinching patients.

Later he is moved to a ward in the National Hospital, Queen Square (or so I infer from the description).

One day a specialist was in the ward, examining a patient, when the patient fell down in front of him in a fit. The patient was a fat middle-aged man; he shrieked and trembled and rolled on the floor… It was a terrifying and grotesque sight, but the specialist watched it with a smile on his face. He neither raised the patient up nor prevented him from cutting his head on the corner of the bedside locker.

When the patient recovered consciousness, but was still confused, the specialist said, for all to hear:

Well, I must say there’s one improvement this week – you’re falling so much more gracefully!

And then “he gave a light little well-bred laugh.”

Students should read the book because a bad example is a very good example.

Dalrymple has some criticisms of this study, namely, that it mistakes correlation for causation. But if it is to be believed, it would seem to argue for global warming, would it not?

The Guardian obviously thinks so:

If one used only the Guardian as a guide to reality, one would imagine that, where property rental was concerned, only landlords were dishonest and exploitative, never tenants. There are a score articles easily available on its website about the evils of landlords, but not one about the evils of tenants. Indeed, in a certain worldview, the very word landlord is synonymous with evil. As capitalist means a corpulent man in a top hat smoking a fat cigar and clutching a bag marked dollars, so landlord means someone who charges exorbitantly for a family to inhabit a poky, mouldy, rat-infested cubby-hole…

Read the rest at Salisbury Review

Dalrymple, writing from first hand experience, describes government work:

The first thing to note is that in many instances, activity is mistaken for work. Activity, in this context, may be defined as doing things for pay that one would not do unless paid to do them but which conduce to no useful end except filling time and giving the appearance of busyness to superiors. That is why bureaucrats don’t saunter down corridors, they scurry. And there is no doubt, I think, that an awful lot of what goes on in offices (and not just in the public sector) is activity in this technical sense rather than work. It is designed to give a false impression and to fill an existential void.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine

A recent Guardian article was headlined “How the ‘Pompey Lads’ fell into the hands of Isis.” As you can imagine, Dalrymple takes aim and fires:

According to the headline, the young men “fell” into the hands of Isis as an apple falls passively to the ground by gravitational force. The word suggests that it could have happened to anybody, this going to Syria via Turkey to join a movement that delights in decapitation and other such activities in the name of a religion—their religion. Joining Isis is like multiple sclerosis; it’s something that just happens to people.

The fourth and final piece of Dalrymple’s series arguing against drug legalization is here. In this one, he argues (among other things) against the idea of a regulated market for drugs:

Supervision would entail, among other absurdities, a bureaucratic nightmare, an apparatus that would, inter alia, have to determine prices, not so low as to encourage consumption but not so high as to encourage the development of a black market, whose elimination was one of the main purposes of erecting the scheme of control in the first place. The authorities would also have to set up an inspectorate to determine the quality and purity of each drug, putting upon each drug the state’s implied seal of approval, so that consumers would know what they were getting. Moreover, consumption of at least some of these drugs would bring serious medical consequences, and alleviating these would also be the responsibility of the state (which is to say the taxpayers).

Who reads the Economist and why? At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple describes it as “intellectual seriousness for middle management and MBAs”, its writers and editors arrogant and its style dull. Its one saving grace? It is comprehensible, a quality not to be taken for granted. Just take those academic journals for whom “prestige is conferred by impenetrability, where truth and knowledge are kept as secret gardens that would be defiled by the presence of the uninitiated”.

For example…

“It is worth reading old books,” says Dalrymple in a new piece on his Psychiatric Disorder blog for Psychology Today. Especially when they contain such revealing nonsense as in a 1969 psychiatry text from which Dalrymple quotes:

The very word justice irritates scientists… Behavioural scientists regard it as… absurd to invoke the question of justice in deciding what to do with a woman who cannot resist her propensity to shoplift… This sort of behavior has to be controlled; it has to be discouraged; it has to be stopped.

Is it possible in this day and age to have a playground without health and safety warnings? Apparently not in Ireland, in any case.

The framers of the wretched notice at the children’s playground (actually a bureaucrat’s playground) were presumably trying to prevent harm to the children by excluding all that might result in an injury to them, as well as imposing a certain orderliness on them. Ireland having secularised late by comparison with other western societies, it has taken with a vengeance to the new trinity of values: not faith, hope and charity, but wealth, health and safety. No doubt secularisation has brought many benefits to the country, but not a better sense of humour.

Read the rest here