There exists in Western society an unmoved constituency who will apparently always believe, despite evidence to the contrary,  that lack of government spending is the cause of all social problems:

The canvasser was a pleasant lady, and I stopped to discuss educational policy with her. Both main political parties think that more money should be allocated to schools. I said that I did not believe that the abysmally low level of education and culture in much of the country was caused by a lack of money. We spend, on average, $100,000 on a child’s education and yet an uncomfortably large proportion of our children leave school with reading and math skills below those stipulated for 11-year-olds. Moreover, the proportion of such people has remained more or less constant for the last 40 years, despite vastly increased expenditure. The problem, therefore, is not lack of funds, as the canvasser’s party pretended that it was, but something much deeper and harder to solve.

Read it here

Rachel Dolezal, the white American woman and “social justice” complainer who was discovered a few years ago to have been passing herself off as black, has written a new memoir to explain herself, and Dalrymple reviews it in this month’s New Criterion. Though her life choices are of course unusual, Dalrymple says the assumptions that underlie them reflect the absurdity of much modern thought:

Oddly enough, but most significantly, she looks at the world through an entirely racialized lens, though at the same time claiming that she is deeply opposed to racism. Black for her (she capitalizes the word, but not the word white) is completely distinct from, or the polar opposite of, white. No theorist or proponent of apartheid could have thought in more binary terms than she; black people are for her the carriers of blackness and very little else. The oppression they suffered, and the insults they endure, are for her the justification of her own invincible self-righteousness (if there were a Nobel Prize for Self-Righteousness, I would nominate her). As a disadvantaged group, blacks are ex officio moral aristocrats; and in claiming a black identity, the author is thereby claiming moral superiority, at least in her own estimation.

Read it here (subscription or purchase required)

At City Journal, Dalrymple says the recent cyberattacks remind him of the short story “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster:

One normally associates Forster with the trembling of genteel emotions rather than with apocalyptic visions. But in this story, set at some unspecified time in the distant future, Forster brilliantly intuited certain modern developments in the life of our species…

Read it here

Dalrymple’s reflections on his own emotions, in this piece at Taki’s Magazine, serve as a good summary of the social justice warrior phenomenon:

The desire not to have one’s feelings hurt has been erected into a right, a right increasingly enforceable at law. Of course, not everyone’s feelings are treated with the solicitude that we show to a nice fluffy colorful species of animal that is, regrettably, on the verge of extinction. But there is no doubt that treating people’s feelings with this solicitude tends not only to preserve them but to cause them to flourish and multiply. The more you are preserved from hurt feelings, the more of them you have.

But as I have already observed, hurt feelings are not as unpleasurable as the psychologically naive might suppose. All is not pain that shouts its name… The inflammation of feeling, in fact, is sometimes an end in itself, indulged in for the sheer pleasure of it, which is not, of course, to say that no outrage is ever genuine.

Read the rest here

The removal of judgment and nuance is not just a feature of the modern public sector bureaucracy but also of the private. Look at those phone calls with customer support representatives, for example:

‘We need to ask you some security questions,’ said a young woman on the other end of the line.

‘Are you sure it’s not the other way around?’ I asked.

‘We need to ask you some security questions,’ repeated the young woman.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘We need to ask you some security questions.’

Dalrymple at Salisbury Review

The government is not a good patron of the arts, says Dalrymple at Taki’s Magazine. For one thing, it doesn’t have the taste to pick good from bad. But that’s not to say it should never have a role — as a censor, for example:

[C]ensorship is a precondition of the greatest art, at least if history is anything to go by. I mean a negative censorship, in which there are things that you can’t say, rather than a positive censorship, in which there are things that you must say: The latter is deadly. Preferably also the censorship should be light-handed, capricious, and unpredictable: The perfect recipe for the production of art (though, as every cook knows, some recipes go wrong even when you stick to them) is absolute monarchy with incompetent censorship and religious belief.

He’s quick to say he wouldn’t actually advocate censorship today. Read it here.

France has its fair share of problems, certainly: ghettoes filled with unassimilated immigrants, a declining educational system, hideous modern architecture and more. But Dalrymple says that, all in all, its advantages over Britain are decisive. One example:

The attention to detail in shops is another painful contrast with Britain (for a Briton, that is). A florist in France gives the impression of being a specialist in flowers, not of someone who sells flowers faute de mieux or merely as a sideline. He or she wraps the blooms with an aesthetic consideration for the flowers themselves, with matching coloured tissue, for example. This raises the price, no doubt, but also the quality; and this constant concentration on detail raises the level of the florist’s, or his employee’s, practical intelligence. This is also true of the sale of fruit, fish, meat, cheese, bread, pâtisserie, etc. And all this adds to the enjoyment of life, though like any virtue it can go too far and become mere pettiness.

Dalrymple at The Spectator

The Guardian recently complained that refugees into Britain are disproportionately placed in the poorest areas. Perish the thought! (says Dalrymple):

…it is true that there are fewer jobs in poorer areas than in rich, but refugees are not allowed to take jobs in any case. And it seems to have escaped the Guardian’s notice that rent tends to be cheaper in poorer areas than in rich. Under the present rules, therefore, it would be outrageous for them to be located anywhere else but the poorest areas.

But Dalrymple can imagine another reason that so many are placed in Rotherham: the architecture is so hideous that perhaps it will encourage them to return home.

The slobbish attire of Mark Zuckerberg is a great annoyance, says Dalrymple, and indicates a worldview that easily extends to other aspects of life:

As there is slobbery in clothes, so there is slobbery in manners, which often masquerades as informality. My slight acquaintance, Alexander McCall Smith, created the delightful character of Mma Ramotswe, the only lady detective in Botswana, whose attractiveness for audiences of many millions around the world is surely connected to the ceremoniousness of the African life portrayed in the books in which she appears, a ceremoniousness that has been lost almost everywhere.

That ceremoniousness is sometimes thought to be not only a waste of time (and time is money) but, far worse from the intellectuals’ point of view, to be inauthentic as well, insofar as it involves forms of words that do not express real individual thoughts or feelings. And the authentic person is under the obligation to be always sincere. If I don’t actually care a jot how you are, I shouldn’t ask you; and if I do ask you, it should be because I really want to know how your varicose veins are getting on.

Dalrymple at Taki’s Magazine