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?
Rob Henderson contributes the foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Life at the Bottom, drawing on his own experience of foster care and the military to explain why Dalrymple’s account of the underclass remains so urgent. He argues that the “luxury belief class” — affluent people who promote permissiveness while living with strict discipline — has dismantled the norms that once helped the poor build decent lives.
Dalrymple is indispensable because he refuses to romanticize the poor or celebrate intellectual rebellion. He writes about people who trade stability for fleeting pleasures and a culture that cheers them on. Without pity or platitude, he cuts through the fog of jargon, reminding us that stability is fragile, that tradition is wisdom distilled through trial, and that humans are capable of virtue only when we believe we should be.
As Life at the Bottom turns 25, its warnings feel more urgent than ever.
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.
Writing in The New Criterion, Dalrymple offers an extended essay on Agatha Christie’s social, psychological, and philosophical acuity, adapted from his forthcoming book of the same title. Taking They Do It With Mirrors as his text, he makes a case for Christie as a shrewd observer of human nature whose comedies of manners contain depths that her detractors, notably Edmund Wilson, were too snobbish to notice.
This piece is adapted from Dalrymple’s forthcoming book of the same name.
“It is odd, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not want to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.”
This is a sharp psychological observation whose truth we recognize at once. In a sense, we have always known that it was true, but it is not until it is so clearly enunciated that we let it into the forefront of our minds.
In The American Conservative, Dalrymple reflects on inflation, currency debasement, and their corrosive effects on character and prudence.
Where money is no store of value, there can be no concept of enough. Just as, for Milton, the mind was its own place that could make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, so the inflation consequent upon the unsolidity of money can turn prudence into imprudence, and imprudence into prudence.
In City Journal, Dalrymple recounts the Kafkaesque ordeal of Benjamin Brière, a young Frenchman imprisoned for three years in Iran on espionage charges, who returned home only to find himself erased from the French social security system and treated by the tax authorities as a delinquent.
Situations such as Brière’s now have a proposed remedy: a special tax regime for people kept hostage in foreign countries. Every bureaucratic problem has, naturally, a bureaucratic solution—requiring a special department to decide when it should be applied. Another problem solved!
In The Epoch Times, Dalrymple reflects on the recent Hungarian election and Viktor Orbán’s removal from power after sixteen years. He argues that the European Union’s attitude to mass immigration is profoundly contradictory—treating immigrants as mere economic inputs while simultaneously acknowledging the burdens they may bring—and that Hungary’s resistance to this was prudent rather than xenophobic.
To speak of immigrants as immigrants, and as nothing else but immigrants, as if the fact of their immigration is the only significant thing about them, reveals such a lack of interest in immigrants as people that it is almost chilling in its inhumanity. It is also condescending.
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.
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.