In this essay at TakiMag, Dalrymple reflects on the paradox of modern travel—how the freedom of flight is matched by enforced waiting—and uses a chance encounter in an airport to probe deeper questions about compassion and the value of life:

How easy it is to conclude that the lives of others are not worth living—intrinsically not worth living!

In his monthly essay at New English Review, Dalrymple examines the modern surge in tattooing among young people and interprets it as a symptom of a deeper search for identity, recognition and freedom, ironically revealing a loss of individuality rather than its affirmation:

I find this, at heart, all very sad. It is a desperate search both for public recognition and individuality. Public notice is hardly something that ought to be desired for its own sake, while individuality is conferred existentially, as an essential condition, whether desired or not, of being human.

In this essay at Law and Liberty, Dalrymple argues that the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in Britain will create a vast new bureaucracy rather than meaningfully relieve suffering, and that the rituals of paperwork may outlast the very persons the Bill claims to help:

This bill is perfectly drafted to create more employment than it will relieve suffering. Although the ostensible purpose of the bill is to assist terminally ill people who wish to end their own lives, it will, in reality, be either dangerous, because its provisions and safeguards are so cumbersome that they will be ignored, or ineffectual, because the same measures are so lengthy to comply with that few people will benefit from the passage of the law. Most people will die before the forms can be properly filled in.

The case of Claire Mackie-Brown in Scotland, who is being investigated for making a statement that is supposedly a hate crime, reveals a cultural shift:

The fact that someone should think that the innocuous locution, “born and bred here”, should be a manifestation of hatred is revelatory of the debased and pathological universalism of much of what counts for thought in the modern Western world.

Read the piece at Quadrant

In this piece, Dalrymple reflects on how human beings, including himself, are prone to envy, especially when confronted with the wealth of the chief executives of large corporations:

All judgment, said Doctor Johnson, is comparative, which is no doubt true; but the natural habit of comparing one’s situation with that of other people is also to a degree controllable by taking thought. If I grow envious over the superior wealth of others, which I think unmerited by comparison with my own merits, can I not stop to think in absolute rather than in comparative terms?

At TakiMag, Dalrymple examines the absurdity of modern politics, in France specifically but elsewhere too, and he argues the culprit is us:

We are sheep who complain of their shepherd: We don’t like his guidance or his bullying, we abominate his sheepdog, but we want him to take better care of us. The shepherd says that he will do so, provided only that we accept that he decides everything for us. We want him not only to protect us from the wolves, but to provide the grass as well.

In this piece at City Journal, Dalrymple critiques the Church of England’s decision to host a graffiti-style installation inside Canterbury Cathedral, arguing that it embodies an institutional self-undermining: rather than preserving its sacred heritage, the Church is actively eroding it.

If any institution in the world provides evidence of Freud’s concept of the death instinct, it is the Church of England. With unfailing aim, it does whatever will hasten its demise, already quite advanced…

In this essay at Law and Liberty, Dalrymple takes aim at the ease with which associations are conflated with causation, especially when non-experts (politicians, celebrities) pronounce on medical matters they scarcely understand, arguing that such reckless commentary amplifies suffering and undermines genuine expertise.

It is, perhaps, wasted breath to protest against people’s propensity to invest the wrong people—presidents, duchesses, or film stars—with authority to pronounce on matters of health, because it seems ineradicable. In these circumstances, however, those with what might be called charismatic authority, rather than with the authority of true expertise, have an inescapable duty to remain silent on subjects that they have not studied but on which their advice might be heeded by many people if given.

Writing at Quadrant, Dalrymple argues that neither France nor Britain today can claim a legitimately functioning government, making any serious reform or renewal almost impossible under current social and moral conditions.

In both countries, the political systems, despite their differences, are suited to a two-party system; but the population of both is now so balkanised, ideologically and even ethnically, that a mere two parties are no longer capable of expressing the outlooks of most of the population. The intellectual class, at least, gives the impression of being a concatenation of monomaniacs, that at most can form subversive alliances of convenience.

Read the rest here