Category Archives: Speeches

Catching up

By on | Filed in Essays, Speeches | 5 comments so far

We apologize for our recent long absence, as we were attending our parents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration in our country’s spectacular Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. Besides offering a wonderful time, it was an occasion to catch up with our family, and is now causing me to reflect on the truth of one of Dalrymple’s most important arguments.

Steve and my family life has been as easy and happy as Dalrymple’s was (according to him) difficult and resentment-producing. We have never seen or heard our parents even argue. That humans can be happy, civilized, and morally upright without questioning existing mores, or even being much inclined to reflection at all, as long as the proper prejudices (properly understood) are inculcated in them, is a truth on constant display by our parents. For which we are extremely grateful.

In the meantime we have fallen far behind in posting Dalrymple’s work, and this is made more difficult by the man’s unrelenting productivity (a good problem, of course). So rather than follow our usual format we are going to dump his latest pieces here:

5/?
Selling Ourselves: The body as a commodity

A series of video debates by the Institute of Art and Ideas in which Dalrymple argues that “commodification of the body leads to a vulgar and violent society”.

5/16
Life at the Top: The Worldview That Makes the Elites

On May 16th Dalrymple spoke at the Heritage Foundation, perhaps America’s most influential conservative/free market think tank, adapting the theme of what is probably his best-known book. I hope this doesn’t come off as boastful, but in creating this website Steve and I hoped to promote Dalrymple’s life and ideas and, judging by the introduction given to him before his speech, we are very pleased that someone at the Heritage Foundation has obviously read our site!

5/20
Speech: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass

A few days later Dalrymple spoke at Hillsdale College, a liberal arts university in Michigan that National Review calls “a citadel of American conservatism”, condensing the arguments in Life at the Bottom and Romancing Opiates into a powerful explication of the dangers of the welfare state. Hillsdale’s impressive publication Imprimis has re-printed the speech.

6/1
Euthanasia

Theodore Dalrymple wonders why the US authorities do not ship their condemned criminals to Belgium where that country’s doctors, skilled at euthansia, won’t make a botch of the executions.

When Eggheads Go Sour

The egghead in question being the president of Niger, who claimed that “poverty is the principal ally of terrorism”…

Ford and Against

Until quite recently I had never read John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore though I had always meant to do so, partly (I suspect) on account of its title. But while it is Man that proposes, it is Time that disposes; and it is one of the one of the glories, or at least the consolations, as well as the frustrations, of our human existence that we never have time enough to achieve all our projects and purposes. Imagine what life would be after such complete achievement, how time would stretch before us featureless as oblivion but with the torment of awareness and the awareness of awareness, without any subject except itself to be aware of! No wonder people without projects or purposes go off the rails! At least self-inflicted crises give the illusion of meaning.

What a Falling Prof. Was There

A sleepless night leads Dalrymple to Internet searches of his former professors, fellow students and colleagues.

Beauty out of madness

A review of the drawing “The Electric Pencil” by James Edward Deeds, inmate of a Missouri state psychiatric hospital.

6/2
Mobiles

Theodore Dalrymple on a generation who expect genius to descend on them without any effort on their part.

Is This the End of Mammograms to Screen for Breast Cancer?

6/4
Ode on a Grecian Crisis

When the French leftist newspaper Liberation attempts to blame Greece’s economic crisis on austerity, clearly a review of the country’s recent history is in order.

6/8
Vicodin Ingestion Syndrome

A major epidemic in America, which seems to me to have received rather less publicity than its scale would warrant, is the dramatic increase in the number of deaths in the country from overdose of prescription opioids.

6/9
Do Medical Experiments on Animals Really Yield Meaningful Results?

6/14
Will Legal Marijuana Be a Bonanza For Trial Lawyers?

6/15
Slobbery as Snobbery

For some, dressing poorly is a matter of ideology.

6/19
The French (Jihad) Connection

How a routine search for drugs turned up a terrorist.

6/21
Loan sharks

Theodore Dalrymple wonders at a public sector company making loans to the poor at 44% p.a.

6/22
Liberty, Equality, Regrettably

Reading the journal of an 18th Century doctor-turned-bestselling-author in France after the Revolution…

Vulgarity

British values? Vulgarity: militant, uncompromising, aggressive and ideological

Dalrymple at Lewes Speaker Festival July 14

By on | Filed in Speeches | 5 comments so far
Oh, to be in Lewes. Now that July’s (almost) there.
Dalrymple will participate in the Lewes Speaker Festival on July 14. That’s Bastille Day of course, and he will discuss “The future of French society after the May elections” with Jonathan Meades and Jonathan Fenby. The fireworks start a few hours later when he debates the resolution “The welfare state and liberal attitudes to morality are the principal causes of the breakdown of British society” with… oh my… Polly Toynbee of the Guardian.
Of course, you can have a welfare state without liberal attitudes to morality, and Dalrymple has always maintained that Britain’s social problems were caused by one and not the other:
Welfare states have existed for substantial periods of time without the development of a modern underclass: an added ingredient is obviously necessary. This ingredient is to be found in the realm of ideas.
–Introduction to Life at the Bottom
But I for one find it heartening that the “the breakdown of British society” seems to be taken as a given. Will Ms. Toynbee cite a different cause for this breakdown or deny that it exists at all? I’m not familiar enough with her position. Were last summer’s riots enough to wake up even liberal Guardian columnists — to the problem if not to the cause?
The website for the event has more details as well as a link for purchasing tickets. I don’t see anything about an internet broadcast or other kind of recording, so perhaps one of our readers can do us a favor and make one themselves.
So that we might recapture the first fine careless rapture!

Dalrymple Speaks on the Euro Crisis

By on | Filed in Speeches | 8 comments so far
We’ve been waiting until the audio from Dalrymple’s speech in New York last week was made available before posting about the event, and the good folks at the New Criterion have graciously come through (see below). Dalrymple stood on a balcony overlooking a large and slightly gothic living room in a private residence in Manhattan and spoke for about 15 minutes on the problems of Europe and then took a few questions from the audience. Among other observations, he questioned the ostensible purpose of the European Union and criticized its anti-democratic nature.

We were told there were at least two (and possibly more) Skeptical Doctor readers who joined the Friends of the New Criterion specifically for this event, and Clint and I enjoyed speaking with at least one of them: a smart, polite and good-natured Manhattanite named Adam.

Left to Right: Clinton, Dr. Anthony Daniels aka Theodore Dalrymple, Skeptical Doctor reader Adam, Steve’s wife, Steve. (Let the record show that Steve is standing on a lower step.)

Dalrymple to speak in New York on Wednesday Nov 30

By on | Filed in Speeches | One comment so far
This Wednesday, The New Criterion is hosting “An Evening with Anthony Daniels” at a private residence in Manhattan. Attendance is possible with the purchase of a membership in the Friends of the New Criterion, or for those in their twenties or thirties, in the Young Friends of the New Criterion. You can obtain membership details by contacting Emily Esfahani Smith at smith@newcriterion.com.
Whether you can attend or not, I encourage you to consider a membership, especially if you live in the New York area. The New Criterion hosts several Friends events throughout the year, and they provide a great chance to meet an impressive array of thinkers, writers and artists, not to mention the friendly folks at TNC itself. They occasionally host events in other cities as well.
For anyone weary of our depressing, modern popular culture (probably anyone reading this blog), these events are restorative.
We will summarize Dalrymple’s remarks in the days following the event.

Peter Bauer and the Third World

By on | Filed in Speeches | 4 comments so far
On May 7, 2004, Theodore Dalrymple gave a speech at Princeton University as part of a three-day conference entitled, “How Does Development Happen? A Conference in Tribute to Peter Bauer”. The event was hosted by the James Madison Program at Princeton University and honored the work of the great development economist that Dalrymple was honored to call a friend and about whom he had written before.
His speech cites his experiences in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania in support of Bauer’s work. Nyerere’s ideas and policies were precisely those against which Bauer fought: the hatred and demonization of profit, the control of products and prices, and the almost unending flow of state aid from Western to Third World nations. The results were exactly those that Bauer predicted: impoverishment, oppression and “the complete politicization of life”.
You can watch the speech here (see Part 6) and read the text here.
I would like to thank Betsy Schneck and the other fine folks at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University for making all of the conference speeches available online.

The Mirage of Equal Opportunity

By on | Filed in Speeches | 2 comments so far

Back in May Dalrymple addressed the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey. It was his third address to the group in as many years, and his speech described “The Mirage of Equal Opportunity”:

If one were serious about equality of opportunity, one would be a totalitarian so thoroughgoing as to make North Korea seem like a libertarian paradise. Only clones could be born and no parent could have any influence on the upbringing of his or her child, for fear of introducing inequality. Every child would receive exactly the same treatment, preferably from machines. A society of equality of opportunity would be one in which no parent could express in words or in action a preference for his own child, or to procure advantages for him or her, in case it should prejudice the chances of another child. I leave it to you to decide whether a society in which parents held no particular brief for their own children as against all the others in the world would be an attractive one. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World would be but a beginning, not an end.

A video of the address can be found here, and a transcript here.

The Gustave de Molinari Lecture

By on | Filed in Speeches | 4 comments so far

We mentioned in an earlier post that the Belgian think tank Libera! awarded Dalrymple its Laudatio Prize of Liberty, which they award for “special merit in the fight for freedom”. The group has just posted the speeches from that event online.

There is a speech in Dutch by Kristof Van der Cruysse, the President of Libera!, here. Perhaps a Dutch-speaking reader could summarize it for us?

Dalrymple was introduced by Bart De Wever, the president of the largest political party in Belgium and the man who by rights should perhaps be Prime Minister of the country. De Wever considers Dalrymple his intellectual mentor, and several statements from his speech are worthy of note.

On the main lesson of Dalrymple’s work: “Social policies need to focus on the empowerment of people, if you really want to help them.”

On the essay (“Fans behaving badly are at the heart of selfish England”) that first got De Wever’s attention: “It cut straight to the heart of the social premises that founded the Purple government and therefore demonstrated to me that it was possible to translate a traditional liberal and moderate conservative discourse in a modern and socially relevant way. The publication of Life at the Bottom a year later strengthened that conviction and probably laid the foundation for my own modest attempts of being a columnist.”

On Dalrymple’s efforts fighting moral relativism: “I believe the significance of Theodore Dalrymple’s writings lie exactly in the exposure of this ideological masquerade. With every essay, another sham of political correctness is debunked. At the turn of the century, this was unheard of, maybe even unthinkable. Dr. Dalrymple was one of the first to voice an opposing opinion in a compulsive intellectual climate. He had obstacles to overcome and still is as much praised as lauded.”

De Wever’s speech is here.

Dalrymple’s Gustave de Molinari Lecture in acceptance of the award summarizes his criticisms of modern Western political thought, mostly by reference to Great Britain. I found these passages most interesting:



I have conducted little research that could be called scientific, and I am certainly not an academic. And I haven’t really even formulated a consistent philosophy or even tried to do so. And lack of theoretical rigour is an accusation often brought, perhaps justly, against British intellectual life and tradition, which is marked by an unformed empiricism. However, there are also certain advantages to such a tradition (which incidentally is now dying out, much to my own country’s detriment), one of the advantages being a refusal to view reality through the lens of an arcane and elaborate and much cherished theory…


Well, let me tell you what I regard as my most fundamental discovery (I mean it was a discovery for me, and not for anyone else in the rest of the world) that nevertheless quite a lot of people still find deeply shocking: that poor people, whether they be poor in the absolute or relative sense, are fully conscious human beings who are endowed with the capacity to think, to calculate, desire, make decisions and so forth, in the same way that more fortunately placed people do… [We] ought never to forget that those consequences [of being poor] are greatly affected and modified by the mentality of the poor, and that this mentality is itself affected not merely by material but more importantly by cultural circumstances, and above all by ideas.


Dalrymple’s speech is here.