Dalrymple sees price markdowns in his supermarket on excellent imported Tunisian products, and blames the Islamic terrorist attacks there, concluding “This is a case of a hurricane causing the flap of a butterfly’s wing”.

Dalrymple is non-religious but avoids purely scientific, mechanistic explanations because he doesn’t want to, or believe that anyone even could, strip the world of the mystery that ultimately stems from its complexity and ambiguity. I suppose this is what Matthew Arnold meant in Dover Beach when he referred to the melancholy caused by the “naked shingles of the world” having been exposed by the receding of the “Sea of Faith” (generally thought to be a reference to the recently-announced theory of evolution).

Dalrymple writes on the above themes in this new piece in New English Review, the result of having read Cukoos by Cambridge ecology professor Nick Davies.

If Professor Davies has no religious belief, he is certainly a nature mystic—as indeed was Darwin—believing that the world we have inherited is full of beauty and fascination, if we would but look at it with attention.

We infuse the world with meaning because it is impossible for us as humans not to do so. A purely mechanical view of the world is thus impossible for us. We may be
evolved creatures, the product of natural selection, descended from the virus or the bacterium, but we have reached a stage at which moral and aesthetic judgment
cannot be eliminated from our thought or consciousness: and, since goodness and beauty are not qualities that can be found measured in Angstrom units or light years,
the attempt to reduce Man to a mere physical being is destined to fail, at least in the sense that no one could live as if it were true.

….

It is curious that even the most convinced evolutionists find it difficult to eviscerate their language of intention, design and moral assessment. They claim that this
language is a kind of shorthand, and that it would be tedious to translate such language into a purely naturalistic one: but I suspect that this is not really quite
honest, and that in fact they not only speak, but think in this shorthand. At any rate, they conceive of Evolution as if it had designs as an entity rather than an
abstraction—Evolution does this, Evolution does that—when, of course, the whole point of the concept is to explain how we became what we are without resort to design,
Evolution’s or anything or anybody else’s. And I say this as one who does not believe in any overall purpose immanent in the universe, though I concede that I cannot
prove it one way or the other.

As noted in the Salisbury Review, time spent perusing the website of the Ministry of Justice strengthens Dalrymple’s conviction that Britain’s official criminal justice statistics are wholly fraudulent.

In New English Review Dalrymple recounts a dream that caused him to wonder: Is honor a virtue? That depends, he says. How can we know when it becomes a vice? That also depends.

The fact that there is no precise point or moment at which virtue turns into vice suggests that there will never be any categorical imperatives, at least not of any use to the person who is trying to behave well…The ethical life is a course steered eternally between Scylla and Charybdis, between the rock and the whirlpool of different manifestations of intransigence.

That there is no rule for discerning when virtue turns to vice does not mean that there is no real distinction between them, any more than the fact that there is no precise point at which a man becomes tall means there is no distinction between a tall man and a short one.

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.

Xavier de Maistre (1763 – 1852) was the younger brother of the brilliant reactionary philosopher, Joseph de Maistre (1753 – 1821). Both wrote in French, but were actually Piedmontese: Joseph was Sardinian ambassador to St Petersburg while Xavier served the Tsar and died there.

Xavier is now mainly remembered for his amusing Voyage autour de ma chambre (Voyage Round My Bedroom) in which he describes with wit and irony a circumnavigation of his room in forty-two days, stopping off at various points to reflect philosophically on the condition of mankind. For example, he calls his looking-glass the greatest masterpiece of human art because it reflects, and can reflect, nothing but the truth; the only problem is that the prism of amour-propre is the most powerful distorting prism known, far more distorting than that used by Sir Isaac Newton. In other words, we are ready to receive anything except the truth about ourselves.

Xavier wrote little; one of his works was The Leper of the City of Aosta. The protagonist of the story – the leper – is made to live in an abandoned castle in a depopulated area south of the city, where he is provided for by the municipality but is cut off from all human contact for fear of contagion. His sister lived with him for a time, also a leper, but she dies of the disease, leaving him entirely alone – apart, that is, from a dog.

The dog is not a handsome one, but he is affectionate and the leper loves him. From time to time, however, the dog roams and is thought by the nearest inhabitants to be a potential spreader of his master’s disease, so that one day they come to the castle and demand that he deliver the dog up to them so that they can kill him. Initially they want to drown him but finally decide on lapidation. The leper hears the pathetic cries of the dog as he is done to death, and despises himself for not having protected him better as it was his impossible duty to do.

De Maistre here demonstrates his sympathetic understanding of the intense and loving relationship that the lonely and disabled develop with their dogs; his story is strongly reminiscent of Turgenev’s short masterpiece, Mumu, in which a deaf and dumb serf called Gerasim is forced to drown the little dog upon which he pours all the love of his heart for lack of any other object upon which to pour it because his mistress, a capricious and thoroughly spoilt woman, says that the dog’s barking (not very much) has given her a headache. Carlyle wrote that Mumu was the most powerful denunciation of arbitrary power that he had ever read; and if there is a more powerful one, I certainly do not know it.

After the dog dies, the leper thinks of suicide, but even the thought seems to him a terrible crime.

In de Maistre’s story, a sympathetic soldier visits the leper and extends his hand to him, which the leper refuses to take. He does not even agree to epistolary contact between them, for fear of infecting the soldier. Instead he says to him as he takes his leave that he needs no other friend than God, in whom they will eventually be united. ‘Stranger,’ he says, ‘when sorrow or discouragement attack you, think of the hermit of Aosta. You will not then have visited in vain.’

Ah, if only the thought of those who are worse off than ourselves could truly console us as it should!