Writing in The American Conservative, Dalrymple begins with a sleepless night and a maddening itch on his back and arrives, by characteristic indirection, at a meditation on complaint, gratitude, and human nature. Along the way he offers an appreciative tribute to the unsung ingenuity behind that humblest of instruments, the backscratcher.
We should bear gratitude in mind more often. We won’t, though: that is my complaint against human nature.
Writing in The Telegraph, Dalrymple argues that Britain’s so-called pandemic of anxiety is less a medical crisis than a political convenience, allowing the government to disguise rising youth unemployment by transferring the ranks of the jobless to those of the officially ill. He warns that a welfare state which rewards people for feeling unwell will inevitably produce a fragile, dependent population—and, eventually, serious social unrest.
The British welfare state is well on the way to creating more invalids than did the First World War. An entire generation, it seems, is suffering from shellshock: without, of course, ever having heard so much as a single shell whistle overhead.
Writing in The American Conservative, Dalrymple contemplates the paradox of Keir Starmer’s premiership: a leader of no discernible talent whose most compelling argument for remaining in office is that his likely replacements would be worse still. He reflects on the crisis of political legitimacy in Britain, the collapse of the two-party system, and the dangerous illusion that change from a bad situation can only be for the better.
In politics, the usual choice is between the bad and the worse, not between the bad and the good—and history shows that those who elect a politician because he is good, and not because he is merely better than the alternative, usually end up disappointed, disillusioned, and even embittered. Politics, at least in the modern age, is not a metier for good people.
In this interview with Laurie Wastell on The Sceptic, Dalrymple marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Life at the Bottom by revisiting the violence and nihilism he observed as a prison doctor, arguing that liberal ideology rather than poverty is the true engine of crime and social breakdown. He also discusses the hypocrisies of the caring classes, the unforeseen consequences of the therapeutic mindset, and modern anarcho-tyranny.
Writing in The Oldie, Dalrymple considers whether crosswords, artistic pursuits, and other forms of mental activity can stave off dementia. He examines a French study of over three thousand elderly people suggesting that those who engaged in moderate or high levels of intellectual activity had half the rate of dementia, but cautions against confusing correlation with causation.
I should not like anyone to take from what I have written the idea that mental activity is pointless or worthless. Far from it: but it should be undertaken for its own sake, for the satisfaction and pleasure that it brings, and not as a kind of preventive medicine.
In The Lamp, Dalrymple reviews Keith Michael Baker’s “magisterial” new biography of Jean-Paul Marat, the revolutionary driven by resentment, paranoia, and an insatiable thirst for glory who styled himself “the friend of the people” while advocating their enemies’ slaughter on an ever-expanding scale.
He may have been the friend of “the people,” but not of people. He conceived of the people not as they were but as he felt they ought to have been. Time and again he expressed his disdain for them because they failed to act as he thought they ought to have acted.
Writing at The Epoch Times, Dalrymple examines the intractable dilemma of illegal immigration and labour, arguing that regularisation of illegal workers tends only to price them out of the market and create a vacuum that draws in the next wave, while the conceptually simple reforms that might break the cycle remain politically impossible.
The illegal immigrants do jobs that the local people do not want to do and do not have to do because they can choose to be unemployed instead, at no great loss of standard of living. If the currently illegal immigrants are regularized, then a vacuum will be created into which a further wave of illegal immigrants will be sucked in, and the cycle will begin again.
In The Critic, Dalrymple examines the case of a frenzied knife attack in Marseille and the language used to describe its aftermath, arguing that the French press’s use of the euphemism “neutralised” to describe the police killing of the attacker is a small but telling instance of the semantic dehumanisation favoured by totalitarian regimes.
Much as he was to be reprehended, this man was still a man. He was killed, not neutralised. We ought not to indulge in semantic dehumanisation of the kind that totalitarian regimes indulge in.
Writing in The Telegraph, Dalrymple reflects on whether we can—or should—judge the mental fitness of our political leaders from a distance, noting that while psychiatric diagnosis at a remove is unreliable, common sense demands that citizens not remain indifferent to signs of incapacity in those who wield great power.
Power corrupts, said Lord Acton, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it also isolates. The powerful begin to live in an echo chamber, never hearing anything but what they say themselves, or what sycophants tell them. Such a chamber has an inevitable effect on the mental equilibrium of anyone who lives in it.