In The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes issue with a letter to the British Medical Journal objecting to the word “regain” in the context of weight loss, on the grounds that it shifts responsibility from biology to personal inadequacy. He argues that the medicalization of weakness of will, however well-intentioned, divides humanity into agents and automata.

No one says of a very good or kind person that his goodness or kindness is merely biological, and that it is wrong to shift the praise from biology to personal adequacy.

Read the full essay here.

In The Epoch Times, Dalrymple recounts the case of Sean Egan, a supermarket manager of 29 years dismissed for physically confronting a prolific shoplifter. He traces a line from Nietzsche and Matthew Arnold through G.K. Chesterton to argue that what we are witnessing is not exactly a change in values but a perversion of older ones.

Procedure is good as a guideline, and in some instances, though not very many in everyday life, is essential—for example, in the flying of an aircraft. But where it is bowed down to and worshipped as if it were a jealous god, it leads to a brainless formalism, gross injustice, and an absurd situation in which a man who attempts to prevent shoplifting is punished much more severely than is the shoplifter.

Read the full essay here.

In New English Review, Dalrymple reviews Frank Furedi’s book on populism, drawing on his acquaintance with three brilliant sociologists—Christie Davies, Kenneth Minogue, and Furedi himself—to explore why the word “populist” has become a term of denunciation rather than description, and why the technocratic alternative is no less dangerous than the populism it claims to oppose.

The demand that we should eschew all nostalgia as a harmful emotion is a demand that we should never compare the past—which is, after all, one of the great teachers of humanity—with the present, except in the triumphalist spirit that we know best and that therefore we have nothing to learn from the past.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The Oldie, Dalrymple considers the new psychiatric category of Prolonged Grief Disorder, using Miss Havisham as its archetype. He notes that a review of 169 controlled trials found little evidence that any treatment does much good.

Grief, like any emotion, can turn morbid. Whatever is morbid is soon hypostasised these days to a disease, and every disease calls forth its acronym.

Read the full essay here.

In Quadrant, Dalrymple examines the logic of assisted suicide legislation, arguing that once the avoidance of suffering is accepted as the criterion, there is no principled reason to confine assisted suicide to the terminally ill and that measuring suffering objectively is not possible.

The fundamental problem with any law that tries to make suffering the criterion of eligibility for assistance with suicide is that it has in effect to measure suffering in the same way as the level of haemoglobin in the blood is measured, as if it were purely objective: that is to say, as if such and such a condition resulted in such and such an amount of suffering, and as if there were a cutoff point at which it became intolerable. All this is necessarily false.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple draws on Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft to argue that the mechanisms of the witch-craze—forced confessions, denunciations, the punishment of skeptics—are far from extinct.

Reading this, who will not think that this is the explanation of the vast increase in gender dysphoria and transsexualism in the last few years, and indeed of the spread of psychopathology in general?

Read the full essay here.

At Law & Liberty, Dalrymple reviews Walter A. McDougall’s The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe, a sweeping conspectus that he finds masterful in its fairness and clarity. While noting several small errors of fact and occasional lapses of judgment, he praises the book’s account of the First World War’s causes and its distinction between technical progress and moral progress.

The decline of Europe is obvious. It is relative and may yet become absolute. The author makes much of the failure of the Europeans to bear sufficient children to maintain, let alone to increase, their numbers but, except in sub-Saharan Africa, this is a worldwide problem. He attributes the decline of Europe to a toxic mixture of hubris and loss of self-belief, as well as a loss of faith in God.

Read the full essay here.