In the July edition of New English Review, the good doctor has composed another gently meandering essay covering environmentalism, nature, photography, and even the Guinea worm.

I mistrust environmentalists, who seem so often to hate humans more than they love nature. Hatred is, of course, always the most powerful political emotion; but in addition to hating humans, they seem not to care very much about the visual or aesthetic qualities of the environment.

In the spring issue of City Journal, our critical doctor describes the tragic, soulless modernist creation of an English city in the 1960s, which, however, does have one redeeming feature.

But the city itself is, to me, infinitely depressing, not least because it offers such a window into the minds of our post-1945 politicians, bureaucrats, and architects—rationalist social planners to a man (rarely a woman). Milton Keynes is a kind of laboratory for raising humans in social petri dishes.

Our intrepid doctor compares rural life to city life in the Fall 2024 issue of The European Conservative.

Especially in modern times, those who extol the country life over the city life seem to me often guilty of a certain dishonesty, at least if they are not simply talking of their personal taste rather than of a recommendation for the whole of humanity.

Back at Takimag, the concerned doctor runs into a Moldovan gypsy woman begging in his English town, which gets him thinking.

Realism and hard-heartedness—which often go together—are not quite the same thing.

In his latest Takimag, our judicious doctor weighs in on the topic of immigration based on his own wide-ranging personal experiences.

One thing is almost certain: The combination of mass immigration and a right to welfare and other services is a recipe for an explosion.

In the June issue of The Critic, the doubtful doctor is perplexed by yet another bizarrely worded BBC headline.

“Indigenous” is clearly a term of art: it does not mean merely native to a place, born and brought up there, but — nowadays at any rate — a higher state of being, almost an escape from original, or any other kind of, sin. Indigenes are inherently victims rather than perpetrators.

Over at Takimag, our world-weary doctor laments the social, cultural, and economic decline of Britain and France, although not to the extent as one famous French historian.

Whatever you think, Britain in this respect is very much in the same boat as France. The country has come to resemble more and more a large hotel rather than a homeland of anyone in particular, luxurious for some but cheap and run-down for many.

In the June edition of New English Review, the skeptical doctor pens a wide-ranging essay on invasive insects from China, lizard courting rituals, the theory of evolution, and medical advances.

To jump from watching lizards, or any of the other animals that used to be called lower, to explanations or judgments (or lack of them) about human behaviour is an attempt to disburden ourselves from the inescapable choices that we must make every day of our lives, and therefore of our moral responsibility that weighs on our shoulders like an immoveable backpack.

In his last Takimag piece, our helpful doctor describes his sociological adventure volunteering for a few hours as a shop assistant at the Chinese antiques store of some friends.

I suppose the reason for this is our increasingly democratic sentiment, or at least protestations of democratic sentiment. After all, everyone can be a victim, but few can be a hero. Besides, we like to elevate ordinary people who are just like us, as we like to pull down those who are clearly our betters.