Dalrymple notices something telling in the response of many to the Paris attacks. One example:

The mother of two of the Paris terrorists, one of whom was a suicide bomber, demonstrated how far she had assimilated to contemporary Western culture from her native Algerian, and how well she understood it, when she said that she was sure that the son who blew himself up with explosives in his vest did not intend to kill anyone and acted in the way he did only because of stress. This combines two important modern tropes: that stress excuses all, and that irrespective of someone’s actual conduct, however terrible it may be, there subsists within him a core of goodness that is more real than the superficial badness, such as taking part in mass murder.

A bit of moral exhibitionism causes Dalrymple to conclude, on the Salisbury Review blog, that “The covers of the Lancet are like a hybrid of Pravda and Elmer Gantry.”

Thankfully, even the most morbid aspects of human behavior (like abuse of the elderly) are studied by specialists intently, so that you and I don’t have to:

A recent review article in the New England Journal of Medicine draws the attention of doctors to the phenomenon that they would probably rather not have to think about. Surveys suggest that about 10 per cent of the elderly (rather alarmingly, from my current personal perspective, defined as those over 60 years of age) are abused…

This piece on the Library of Law and Liberty blog is an excellent look at Molenbeek, Belgium (the center of Islamic terrorism in Europe) and the prevailing ideology there and throughout Europe that has made the continent so vulnerable to Islamism:

A striking thing about the immigration debate before the massacres of November 13 was the almost complete absence of references, at least by the “respectable” politicians, to the national interest of the various countries. The debate was couched in Kantian moral terms….Europe has nothing equivalent to national interest, and if it did, it would have no way of acting on it. A kind of bloodless universalism has rushed in to fill the vacuum, whose consequences are now visible to all. The first thing President Hollande tried to do after the attacks was close the borders; he now talks (understandably, of course) of national security. He talks also of defeating ISIS militarily, but France, along with all of the other European countries, has run down its armed forces in the name of the social security that paid for at least some of the terrorists.

In the Salisbury Review:

‘British Muslims report big rise in Islamophobia’ said the headlines of an article in the Guardian for 12 November. From the headline, I thought I would read that there had been an increase in the number of vicious attacks on Muslims qua Muslims, or at least of acts of physical desecration.

Not a bit of it. What I read instead were things like the following, taken from a survey of Muslim opinion:

More than two-thirds of Muslims told the survey that they
had heard anti-Islamic comments by politicians, and half
thought that politicians condoned Islamophobic acts.

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple says the modern epidemic of offense-taking is in large part attributable to monomania:

…the real threat to freedom of expression comes nowadays not so much from governments but from those groups of monomaniac citizens who are prepared to devote themselves to ruining the reputation of or making life miserable for those who dare to contradict them. The struggle is an asymmetric one: For by definition the monomaniacs have their one subject, while their opponents have many subjects. The former care desperately and continually about their subject, the latter only moderately and intermittently.

All of our modern gadgets — laptops, smartphones and tablets — distract us from the real world and discourage social interaction. You know the argument, short attention spans and all that. But is this really a new phenomenon? Would it be any better if we all went back to reading good old-fashioned books? Dalrymple says no.

It should not be taken for granted that reading is necessarily a good thing in itself, the sign of a developed mind or a healthy spirit. Like Somerset Maugham I would rather read a railway timetable than nothing at all, and this cannot be a manifestation of complete psychic health. (On occasion I have even resorted to telephone directories, in the days when they still existed, and found them to be not without interest.) He, Somerset Maugham, found all human company tiresome after an hour or two and longed for the comfort of the printed page; this can hardly be taken as a model for what everyone should be like.

Read the whole piece here

Dalrymple responds briefly in City Journal (h/t Yakimi) to several statements made about the Paris attacks – by politicians, but also by Bono and the Guardian:

One has to pity—a little—politicians obliged to react publicly to events such as those on November 13 in Paris. They can’t pass over them in silence: but what can they say that does not sound banal, hollow, and obvious? They can only get it wrong, not right.

Note: When Dalrymple’s long-running BMJ column ended in 2012, he had a backlog of about 60 unpublished pieces, and he kindly gave them to us to post here at Skeptical Doctor. We are posting them on Wednesdays to coincide with the schedule of his old BMJ column. We hope you enjoy them.

Not so very long ago facial transplants would have been the stuff of science fiction, but now they are the stuff of reality. At the moment they are performed on people whose faces have been horribly injured, but in L P Hartley’s dystopian novel, Facial Justice, published in 1960, they were performed for political rather than for medical or aesthetic reasons.

Hartley (1895 – 1972) is now mainly remembered for one novel, The Go-Between, a fine evocation of traumatic sexual awakening in the upper reaches of the Edwardian society to which Hartley remained forever attached. In all, he wrote sixteen novels whose quality, says the Dictionary of National Biography, declined as their frequency of publication increased. Hartley, who was invalided out of the army by Sir Frederick Treves in 1916 without ever having seen action, died of the complications of alcoholism: by no means the first or the last author to let himself be mown down by the bottle.

Facial Justice takes place after the Third World War, when the surface of the earth has been more or less completely laid waste. Some of humanity survives, but underground; in England half the population, dissatisfied with its subterranean lot, makes the daring move to go above ground.

There the New Society is created, ruled by an otherwise nameless Dictator. It must be admitted that Hartley’s imagination was not strong enough to make his dystopia come alive, as do, say, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-four, for neither the details nor the history of the New Society are consistent or plausible. I suppose that is why the books remains relatively unknown and unread.

Another reason, perhaps, is that it is a satire on the notion of equality that is now so dear to us. In the New Society there is a Ministry of Facial Justice which works towards the equalisation of women’s faces by means of surgery. Divided on grounds of natural beauty into three categories, alpha, beta and gamma, plastic surgeons operate to give alphas and gammas entirely new beta faces according to a pre-ordained pattern, so that there should be no envy because of the possession of unfair natural advantages or disadvantages: for in the New Society envy is seen as the root of human evil, especially violence. Mediocrity in all things is the goal of the society, and a series of slogans – beta is best and alpha is anti-social – are inculcated into the population to drive the message home.

After an accident, the main character in the book, an alpha woman called Jael, undergoes involuntary betafication (the local equivalent of beatification) carried out by the plastic surgeon Dr Wainewright. She revolts against this and indulges in a conspiracy to bring about the downfall of the Dictator, whose identity no one knows. The result is chaos and violence, in which Dr Wainewright is killed: the message or warning of the book, in so far as any story so unconvincing and ill-constructed may be said to have a message or carry a warning, is that once democratic mediocrity is thoroughly installed in a society, there is no going back and the alternatives are worse.

Harley obviously intended the book to be a satire on what he saw as the mediocrity of the England of his time: and whether this has any meaning today for you depends crucially, I suppose, on whether you think that NICE should really be renamed NICM, the National Institute of Clinical Mediocrity.