On Wednesday, June 8th Dalrymple will participate in the ongoing Intelligence Squared debate series at Cadogan Hall in London, siding with Amy Chua in support of the resolution “Western parents don’t know how to bring up their children”.

Chua became virtually a household name in America overnight with this controversial January piece in the Wall Street Journal, excerpting her since-published blockbuster Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother criticizing Western childrearing. It is difficult to overstate the article’s ubiquity as a topic of conversation in the US in the days following its publication. She will undoubtedly make an appropriate and formidable partner for the author of Spoilt Rotten. The debate will be viewable live online for free. Viewers can even submit questions and vote to determine the winners.

Dalrymple has participated in two previous Intelligence Squared debates in support of the resolutions “Psychotherapy has done more harm than good“ and “Prison works“. From the organization’s website:

Now operating in London, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Kiev and Abuja, Intelligence Squared provides a unique platform for the world’s leading figures in politics, journalism, and the media to contest the most important political, social, historical and scientific issues of the day….Employing the classic “Oxford Union” style of debating, the world’s leading speakers are pitched against each other with a clearly defined motion, to try and win over the votes of the audience through a mixture of impassioned rhetoric, persuasion and charm. Buy your tickets online.

Intelligence Squared debates are unique. Whereas most broadcasters create debates specifically for television, we film our live debates as they happen and then screen them internationally on television. Since January 2009, Intelligence Squared debates have been shown globally on BBC World News to an estimated audience of over 70 million people.

H/t Michael P.

Dalrymple recently spoke at The Iona Institute in Ireland on the subject of the economic crisis there (and throughout the Western world). In keeping with views he has expressed elsewhere, he blames the crisis on a modern outlook that has rendered the cardinal virtues increasingly unpopular:

Thus we see governments viewing or at any rate subconsciously recognising easy credit and asset inflation as a way of courting popularity, a popularity necessary in order that they should retain the power that, as individuals, they craved and which they made the main aim of their lives. If in the process it meant the large scale corruption of the population, so be it. And, for reasons only too obvious to mention, bankers were happy to go along with it.

An avidity for power, then, combined with a deeply materialistic outlook on life, which regarded an increased level of consumption as the summum bonum of human existence, lay behind the crisis, and certainly not only in Ireland. Greed, either for power or easy gain, acted everywhere in our societies.

You can read the text of the speech here (hat tip: Ravi).

Apparently Dalrymple spoke to the Gladstone Club, at the National Liberal Club, in London a week ago. Author and Liberal Democrat politician Jonathan Fryer had kind words for him and his presentation on his blog (the first link above). It’s good to see our man receiving praise from people one wouldn’t generally expect to offer it, and it’s always nice to see this kind of comity between the various sides of the public debate.

There seems to have been no recording of the event.

UPDATE: Peter Fennell, the Secretary of the Gladstone Club, has helpfully provided a summary of Dalrymple’s remarks. His speech compares the state of civilization in Britain and France and concludes that France is doing better. You may view it here.

One interesting quote:

Daniels offers no statistics on ugliness but muses that its prevalence here is less innate than cultivated. Young men go to considerable lengths to achieve a look of brutality with shaven heads, piercings and tattoos. To which might be added the fashion for sub-hipster, drop crotch jeans which literally is ‘prison chic’ from the American gaols where dangerous criminals are denied belts. Some adopt the look perhaps because they are dangerous criminals. Some who are not say they do so to deter attack by those who are.

Last month Dalrymple spoke at the Property and Freedom Society’s fifth annual meeting in Bodrum, Turkey on the subject “‘Public Health’ as a Lever for Tyranny”. You may watch the speech here. The good doctor also addressed the society’s two previous annual meetings. We never posted these earlier speeches, as the audio is poor, but now seems an appropriate time to do so for anyone interested in delving into them:

Dalrymple has participated in two of the Intelligence Squared debates that have recently become popular in London and New York. In 2007, he debated on behalf of the “For” side of the topic “Prison Works”, and earlier this year debated the topic “Psychotherapy has done more harm than good”, also on the “For” side (and in contrast to the position of his wife and fellow psychiatrist, who believes in the benefits of psychotherapy).

These debates are quite entertaining, and Dalrymple’s humor comes through in at least the first one (I haven’t yet watched the second one). His side won the day in the prison debate but wasn’t as fortunate in the one on psychotherapy.

Watch them here

By the way, the page includes a brief bio of Dalrymple — brief, that is, compared to this!

Update: The link above is not working, but this one seems to be.

Dalrymple will be interviewed by journalist Rene Wyndham at 11:00 am, October 22nd as part of the Dorset Literary Festival in Dorset, Dorchester, UK. Details here (toward the bottom of the page).

In April 2006, Roger Kimball’s Encounter Books published Theodore Dalrymple’s Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, and one month later the Manhattan Institute hosted Dalrymple at the Harvard Club to mark the release of the book. In his speech at the event, Dalrymple highlighted the book’s major arguments and described the popular view of opiate addiction as an “emblematic example of how error may become ingrained and how the most obvious facts may be ignored and their significance overlooked entirely”.

We’ve posted the speech in six parts on the SkepticalDoctor channel on YouTube. Don’t miss the last part in which Dalrymple fields a question from Ethan Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, which describes itself as “the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs.” Dalrymple had criticized Nadelmann’s views nine years earlier in his City Journal essay Don’t Legalize Drugs, and apparently Nadelmann came loaded for bear.

This June in London, Theodore Dalrymple will participate in a debate on the motion: “Psychotherapy has done more harm than good”. Unfortunately for those interested in attending, the event is already sold out. The debate is part of the increasingly-popular Intelligence Squared series, which are sponsored in the UK by The Spectator magazine.

As you might expect of a man at odds with much of his profession (one of his professions, anyway), Dalrymple is arguing for the motion.

Details of the event are here.

On June 2, 2005, Theodore Dalrymple spoke at the Harvard Club in New York to celebrate the release of Our Culture, What’s Left Of It, published by Ivan R. Dee. The book is a collection of essays Dalrymple wrote for City Journal magazine, which sponsored the event. He was introduced by City Journal editor-in-chief Myron Magnet. The speech is in five parts, all of which are available via the SkepticalDoctor channel on YouTube. Part 1 is below.

In the speech, Dalrymple discusses the tendency of intellectuals to “ignore the obvious”, because they are enthralled by a theory and don’t feel the need to observe and contemplate the real world.

Education of a certain kind can actually impede, rather than enhance, understanding of the world. It is not to be thought that all education is good and leads either to enlightenment or realism.

 

We have posted on YouTube a speech that Theodore Dalrymple delivered at the Harvard Club in New York on November 14, 2001 to mark the release of Life at the Bottom. The speech is in five parts. Part 1 is below. Look for the others here. We have also created a SkepticalDoctor channel at YouTube to collect videos related to the good doctor.

The event at the Harvard Club was hosted by the Manhattan Institute, publisher of City Journal, the magazine that published the essays that were collected in the book. City Journal editor Myron Magnet provided the introduction, the first few seconds of which are unfortunately cutoff in the video (and I can’t seem to fix it). Missing from his introduction is the following:

Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to see you all here. Welcome.

Gathering blurbs for Life at the Bottom was an extraordinarily pleasant experience. People couldn’t say yes enthusiastically or quickly enough. It was as if they had been waiting by the phone just to be asked. And because we approached some of the nation’s foremost thinkers, the blurbs that came back with such lightning speed were marvels of intelligence, each one a pithy epigram going straight to the heart of the book’s accomplishment.