In this essay, Dalrymple examines how modern reporting and legal reasoning often draw a false line between madness and ideological hatred. Using recent cases from Australia and Europe, he argues that mental illness does not arise in a vacuum:

Although delusions or hallucinations indicate madness, their content derives from the ideas and circumstances that are known to the mad person. This was recognized a long time ago. Thomas De Quincey, in his “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” wrote of dreams induced by the consumption of opium, “If a man whose talk is of oxen should become an opium-eater, the probability is that … he will dream about oxen.”

At the Telegraph, TD argues that Labour’s definition of poverty—household income below 60 percent of the median—confuses inequality with genuine deprivation. By this relative metric, even a millionaire among billionaires would be deemed “poor,” while a society where everyone is equally cold and starving would count as poverty-free. He says that such thinking leads to bad policy, fosters resentment, and even encourages a perverse preference for general decline, since recessions reduce inequality.

The difference between relative and absolute measurements is important in medicine as well as economics. Let me give a purely hypothetical example. Suppose the infant mortality rate in the richest tenth of the population were 3 per thousand, and in the poorest tenth 6. Let us then suppose that both could be lowered respectively to 2 and 5 thousand. Everyone would be better off, but inequality would have increased: the difference in mortality rates between the two deciles would have increased from 200 to 250 per cent. The benefit, though the same per thousand for both deciles, would have lowered the infant mortality rate by 33 per cent in the richest tenth, but by only 20 per cent in the poorest.

Would anyone reject such a lowering of mortality rates on the grounds that it increased inequality? (I rather fear that some might, because envy and hatred are by far the strongest political emotions.)

Read it here (subscription required)

At Taki’s Mag, Dalrymple reflects wryly on why pedants take such delight in spotting tiny errors and why the rest of us are sometimes tempted to do the same. What begins as fault-finding, he suggests, often masks a deeper desire for order in a world that resists it.

I think that pedantry is often, if not always, an effort to keep at bay the fear of disorder in the world, and of the meaninglessness and fleetingness of human existence. A man who scours a text after its publication for error (I am not speaking here of copy editors, who scour it beforehand) thinks that he is engaged in important work, saving the world from misconception; but in reality, he is defending himself against insignificance.

Read it here

At Quadrant, Dalrymple traces what he sees as the long decline of the BBC: from a trusted global authority to an institution widely met with skepticism, a collapse of prestige driven in large part by dumbing itself down to what it perceives as the level of its audience.

Not very deeply concealed in the story is the implicit view of the BBC that most of the population was crude, and that crudity was therefore necessary to capture its attention. It also had played a part, again dialectical, in the reduction of the attention span of the population, rather condescendingly assuming that it could no longer attend to serious discussions about serious subjects, without sensational visual effects, that lasted more than a minute or two.

For a piece in the Telegraph, Dalrymple argues that the Princess of Wales’s recent claim that addiction is “not a choice or a personal failing” is both empirically false and morally damaging. By denying agency her view reduces addicts to passive objects rather than responsible subjects, stripping them of dignity and the possibility of genuine change:

At the root of the Princess’s misapprehension is the post-religious or secular view that if a person is the author of his own downfall, he is due no sympathy or compassion. It is a highly puritanical view, and since we do not want to be puritans, we make the problem a medical one instead. But since we are all sinners and the authors of our own downfall, at least in some respect or other, this also has the corollary that sympathy or compassion is due to no one when he needs it.

Dalrymple has some thoughts on British children after witnessing some typically bad behavior from a British teenager:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that children in Britain have more miserable or wretched childhoods than any others in Europe. This is in large part because of the population’s growing incompetence in the art of living, but it is also almost traditional that the British do not like their children very much. By the time they have finished bringing them up so badly, they are proved retrospectively right not to have liked them very much, because they grow into pretty awful young adults…

Read it here

At The Critic, Dalrymple writes on the minor controversy over a review of a book of poetry and finds mistakes all around:

This suggestion of plagiarism upset the publisher, Canongate, which said, “Canongate refutes completely this baseless allegation.”

It did nothing of the kind. Only in a world of “my truth” are denial and refutation synonymous. One would have hoped for better from a respectable publisher.

At Taki Mag, Dalrymple reflects on the cultural obsession with youth and the way modern society equates staying “young forever” with adolescent behavior.

There has been a vogue for running after a youthful clientele ever since the Second Vatican Council, when the Catholic Church more or less abandoned the Latin Mass, among other things. The leaders of the church had the rather dim idea of trying to attract young people to the religion by “modernizing” its liturgy, which was far more beautiful in Latin than in any modern language