In Quadrant, Dalrymple revisits the work of the late Oxford professor John Carey, whose trajectory from justified attacks on literary snobbery to a wholesale denial of aesthetic distinction strikes him as a philosophical error.

Art does not make us better, but it makes the world better for us. Try to imagine a world completely without it! It is true that a great deal of art that is now produced is valueless, or indeed worse than valueless, insofar as it detracts from the world as a home for humanity, but that is because artists, critics and some section of the public have gone over to the idea that anything can be art because there is no dividing line on the continuum.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The Critic, Dalrymple dissects the almost meaningless verbiage of corporate and political language, prompted by a vacuous motivational poster outside his hotel room in France.

Does such verbiage matter? It adds to the impression that we are surrounded by lies, euphemisms and deceit. It emasculates us because we are powerless to reply or even to demand an explanation. Intelligent people have spent hours devising such cunning bilge.

Read the full essay here.

Dalrymple writes in The American Conservative about rescuing a small bird from a parasitic tick in his garden, and from this episode draws a broader meditation on natural and man-made ugliness. He argues that while nature produces both beauty and repulsiveness indifferently, modern Western culture has developed a peculiar attraction to deliberate ugliness, from rap music to the architecture of Frank Gehry.

For some reason, our art finds it difficult to express tenderness towards the world, despite the fact that we are in many respects the most fortunate people who have ever lived. It is as if our world contained only ticks and no birds.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes aim at the sloganeering spirit of our age, from a French town council’s call to “globalize solidarity” to the unctuous piety of an Oxfam shop window.

What of globalized solidarity? I can’t think of anything more depressing; thank goodness that it’s impossible. You might as well ask the lion to show solidarity with the gazelle or the crocodile with the gnu—simply because they share the same continent, Africa.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Dalrymple reviews Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian novel about a vast armada of destitute migrants heading for France while the West, paralyzed by guilt and propaganda, proves unable to resist. He argues that the novel’s portrait of spiritual exhaustion has proved uncomfortably prescient.

Dystopian novels are not predictions but projections: they imagine what the world will become if a current trend continues uninterrupted. The difference between prediction and projection is vital but often overlooked. The former is a call to fatalism, the latter a call to action.

Read the full essay here.

In New English Review, Dalrymple takes up the case of Nigel Biggar, the Oxford theologian whose measured defence of the British Empire brought down upon him a campaign of denunciation and professional sabotage.

A relatively small number of ideological fanatics or monomaniacs has managed to institute something approaching a reign of terror in universities, and since people do not like to consider themselves to be terrified, because then they feel that they are cowards, they persuade themselves that what terrifies them is actually true or the truth.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple observes the lizards on his terrace in France, puzzling over a recent shift toward melanotic coloration and the rituals of their mysterious behavior. The small mysteries of the natural world lead him to reflect on the value of patient scientific observation, the limits of authority, and our own resemblance to creatures unaware of forces looming over them.

I found myself anthropomorphizing, investing the lizards with conscious purposes, as if they were enjoying themselves, or were angry, frightened, outraged, or determined. This, despite the manifest tininess of their brains.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple considers the career and legacy of the recently deceased Paul Ehrlich, the entomologist-turned-doomsayer whose Population Bomb predicted mass famine in the 1970s. He reflects on the enduring appeal of Malthusianism and the curious human pleasure of contemplating catastrophe.

Two things are certain, however. The first is that mankind cannot get anything just right. The second is that man is the only species that derives pleasure from contemplating its own extinction.

Read the full essay here.