Dalrymple sees price markdowns in his supermarket on excellent imported Tunisian products, and blames the Islamic terrorist attacks there, concluding “This is a case of a hurricane causing the flap of a butterfly’s wing”.
Dalrymple is non-religious but avoids purely scientific, mechanistic explanations because he doesn’t want to, or believe that anyone even could, strip the world of the mystery that ultimately stems from its complexity and ambiguity. I suppose this is what Matthew Arnold meant in Dover Beach when he referred to the melancholy caused by the “naked shingles of the world” having been exposed by the receding of the “Sea of Faith” (generally thought to be a reference to the recently-announced theory of evolution).
Dalrymple writes on the above themes in this new piece in New English Review, the result of having read Cukoos by Cambridge ecology professor Nick Davies.
If Professor Davies has no religious belief, he is certainly a nature mystic—as indeed was Darwin—believing that the world we have inherited is full of beauty and fascination, if we would but look at it with attention.
We infuse the world with meaning because it is impossible for us as humans not to do so. A purely mechanical view of the world is thus impossible for us. We may be
evolved creatures, the product of natural selection, descended from the virus or the bacterium, but we have reached a stage at which moral and aesthetic judgment
cannot be eliminated from our thought or consciousness: and, since goodness and beauty are not qualities that can be found measured in Angstrom units or light years,
the attempt to reduce Man to a mere physical being is destined to fail, at least in the sense that no one could live as if it were true.….
It is curious that even the most convinced evolutionists find it difficult to eviscerate their language of intention, design and moral assessment. They claim that this
language is a kind of shorthand, and that it would be tedious to translate such language into a purely naturalistic one: but I suspect that this is not really quite
honest, and that in fact they not only speak, but think in this shorthand. At any rate, they conceive of Evolution as if it had designs as an entity rather than an
abstraction—Evolution does this, Evolution does that—when, of course, the whole point of the concept is to explain how we became what we are without resort to design,
Evolution’s or anything or anybody else’s. And I say this as one who does not believe in any overall purpose immanent in the universe, though I concede that I cannot
prove it one way or the other.
As noted in the Salisbury Review, time spent perusing the website of the Ministry of Justice strengthens Dalrymple’s conviction that Britain’s official criminal justice statistics are wholly fraudulent.
In New English Review Dalrymple recounts a dream that caused him to wonder: Is honor a virtue? That depends, he says. How can we know when it becomes a vice? That also depends.
The fact that there is no precise point or moment at which virtue turns into vice suggests that there will never be any categorical imperatives, at least not of any use to the person who is trying to behave well…The ethical life is a course steered eternally between Scylla and Charybdis, between the rock and the whirlpool of different manifestations of intransigence.
That there is no rule for discerning when virtue turns to vice does not mean that there is no real distinction between them, any more than the fact that there is no precise point at which a man becomes tall means there is no distinction between a tall man and a short one.
Dictator Robert Mugabe replaced Zimbawe’s colonial rulers supposedly in the name of justice. So why did he adopt their attire?
Be that as it may, Mr. Mugabe’s attitude to the settler regime was not one of total rejection. There were many things about it that he admired. And in truth it was a remarkable regime, one with a very small elite who produced and ran a functioning, though not of course a just, state. It was not only the efficiency but the style that Mr. Mugabe admired, and since outward show is easier to imitate than inner substance, Mr. Mugabe adopted that style as his own, and the dress of what he thought was the British gentleman. The uniformed men around him still wear the uniforms of the British hierarchy.
In introducing his latest Pajamas Media column, tackling the above question, Dalrymple shares this bit from one of his many adventurous stays abroad (covered in more detail in his colorful and entertaining second book, which we’ve already attempted on several occasions to cajole our visitors into reading):
When I was in my early thirties, I several times visited an island in the Pacific called Nauru. From the medical point of view, it was of the utmost interest because fifty per cent of the population has Type II Diabetes and it therefore represented the epidemiological shape of things to come.
The Nauruans had become diabetic only recently, when they suddenly (and briefly, as it turned out) became the richest people per capita in the world, thanks to the phosphate rock in which their tiny island was covered. From a life of subsistence on fish and coconuts they went straight to being millionaires. They abandoned their traditional diet and started to eat, on average, 7000 calories per day. Not surprisingly they were enormously fat. They liked sweet drinks and consumed Fanta by the case-load. For those who liked alcohol as well there was Château Yquem. They were unique in the world in being both rich and having a short life expectancy.
The book includes an anecdote about the Nauruan who bought an expensive sports car, drove it until it ran out of gas, then set it on fire – and bought another one.
New English Review has published a new collection of Dalrymple’s columns, Out Into The Beautiful World. The Amazon page here includes glowing praise from some prominent figures. Myron Magnet compares Dalrymple to Montaigne, Conrad Black calls him “one of the most elegant and erudite contemporary writers in the English language”, and John O’Sullivan says, “Theodore Dalrymple has done something that all the severe literary critics had decreed impossible. He has revived the essay.”
Dalrymple’s own introductory words from the Amazon page are:
When I was a young man I thought that metaphysics was the most exciting (and important) thing in the world. I wish now that I had not wasted so much time on the imponderable questions of metaphysics but had used it to more worthwhile effect. Rather than study philosophy, I should have studied insects.
In the little essays that follow, I have no grand theory to prove, no single message to convey. Small things and slight occurrences have caught my attention and caused me to reflect a little. I hope only to please the reader.
Last year we posted this piece from Taki’s Magazine, wherein Dalrymple described his visit to a shop selling The Tyrant Collection of banknotes. New English Review has now posted a kind of sequel to it, in which he describes his own banknotes, which he has divided into a tyrant collection and a hyperinflation collection (between which there is some overlap, as you might guess):
But the star of the hyperinflation collection, if I may so put it, is undoubtedly the Zimbabwean note for fifty trillion Zimbabwean dollars. I could have had the hundred trillion note, but I preferred the fifty for its cerulean colour—appropriate, considering that inflation in Zimbabwe had long since gone through the roof.
There was a reason why I preferred the blue note: I also possess a Zimbabwean $2 note dated 1986, when two such dollars would actually have bought you something. What is interesting (to me, at any rate) is that the design is almost exactly the same, $2 and $50,000,000,000,000.
The third installment in Dalrymple’s series of anti-drug legalization columns at the Library of Law and Liberty has been posted here. He will write one final installment on this topic.
There is no pharmacological reason why people who take heroin should commit crimes; the case is rather the reverse. Heroin has both euphoriant and tranquillizing properties, neither of which one would expect to lead to the commission of crime. And yet many heroin addicts do commit crimes, often repeatedly and in large number. Why? The standard answer: to “feed their habit,” to use an expression I have heard hundreds of times. According to this view, taking the drug renders them incapable of normal, legitimate work; but such is their overwhelming and irresistible compulsion, their need, to take the drug once they have become addicted to it that they must obtain it somehow. Crime is their way of squaring this circle.
Among the flaws in this view is its implicit explanation of how and why people become addicts in the first place. In fact, most heroin addicts choose to become addicted and indeed have to work at it. Not only do heroin addicts on average take the drug intermittently for 18 months before becoming physically dependent on it, but they have a lot to learn—for example where and how to obtain supplies, how to prepare the drug, and (if they inject) how to inject it. Most people have a slight natural revulsion against injecting something into their veins, a revulsion that has to be overcome. This speaks, then, of determination, not of a condition fallen into by accident.