Writing in The Telegraph, Dalrymple argues that the real obstacle to immigrant assimilation is not hostility from the host country but the collision between clan-based social obligations and the impersonal trust on which modern welfare states depend.
Where diversity increases the basic loyalty to a system that makes it workable can no longer be assumed: the system becomes a resource to be looted, all the easier to do when control is weak, which it usually is.
In The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan profiles Dalrymple at length on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Life at the Bottom, covering his encounters with ill-mannered Britons, his observations on the welfare state, and his insistence that the problems of the underclass are cultural rather than material.
It is dehumanizing to think of social problems, or social pathology, as if human beings were mere inanimate objects, reacting like billiard balls to other billiard balls, without ideas or agency of their own.
Read the interview here. If nothing else, click just to see the caricature of TD.
Writing at New English Review, Dalrymple examines the vexed question of capital punishment, arguing that while some crimes are so heinous that no other penalty seems adequate, the death penalty remains so brutal and error-prone that it resists easy justification.
On the matter of capital punishment, as on many other questions, I face in two directions at once. On the one hand, I think that there are some crimes so heinous that no other punishment is appropriate; on the other, that it is so brutal and dehumanising that it should never be employed.
In this City Journal podcast, Dalrymple joins Rob Henderson and Rafael Mangual for a wide-ranging discussion on the real drivers of antisocial behavior and crime, the growing disconnect between policymakers and the communities most affected by violence, and how elite “luxury beliefs” shape public narratives around criminality.
What I found was that most criminals were actually certainly at one level resistant to the idea of themselves as feathers on the wind of circumstance or as just vectors of forces. So one day a repeat burglar came to me… He said, “Do you think, doctor, I burgled because of my childhood?” And I said, “No, I’ve got absolutely nothing to do with that.”… And he said, “Well, why do I do it?” And I said, “Well, you’re lazy and you want things that you’re not prepared to work for.”
Writing at The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes the bankruptcy of a neighbour as the occasion for a characteristically wry meditation on schadenfreude, the parasitic industry of consultancy, and the universal human pleasure of investing malice with a semblance of moral outrage.
Only in a world of assumed incompetence can so much consultancy be thought necessary. No doubt it is sometimes true that a third party can see things that the people more directly involved cannot see. But there are now giant companies of consultants, which must surely have a vested interest in the inefficiency and incompetence of others, because inefficiency and incompetence are what makes consultancy necessary in the first place.
In The Spectator, Dalrymple speaks with Rob Henderson about the cultural forces that have created a Western underclass and why poverty of the spirit, rather than of the pocket, is the real affliction of modern life. Their conversation marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom.
I had spent a lot of time in Africa and traveling the world, where material goods were infinitely worse than anything in Britain. Yet in certain respects poverty in Britain was spiritually and psychologically worse than what I had seen in Africa, where people actually went hungry! So I came to the conclusion that there was something other than mere absence of economic wellbeing that explained what I was seeing.
In The New Criterion, Dalrymple reviews the new book The Eyes of Gaza and offers a severe critique, arguing that the book substitutes therapeutic self-expression and moral posturing for analysis, proportion, and historical understanding.
Unfortunately, self-pity is inimical not only to self-knowledge but also to a proper understanding of the world, or even to an awareness that we should strive for such an understanding. It brings in its train other undesirable traits, such as self-satisfaction, moral complacency, and a blindness to the need for perspective. It elevates emotion over rationality, precisely when the latter is most needed.
Read it here
Writing at The American Conservative, TD has much to say about what he recently saw online:
Yesterday, I found what was advertised as a masterclass in the recitation of a soliloquy, posted by the National Theatre in London. It seems to me increasingly that English stage actors have two modes of recitation: mumbling or gross overemphasis—hamming it up in fact—with resultant harshness of diction.
So it was in this case, in one of Ophelia’s laments on Hamlet’s condition. But there was something more than mere harsh diction: Ophelia was played by an actress with achondroplasia—that is to say she was a dwarf.
Read the rest here
Writing at TakiMag, Dalrymple argues that the proposal to give puberty blockers to prepubertal children as part of a long-term clinical trial represents a profound ethical failure rather than a triumph of scientific caution:
The ethical objections to the experiment are so obvious that what is most significant is that there is any need for them to be pointed out… If it is argued that, without such an experiment, we will never know whether the drugs do any good or not, the reply must be: So be it. There are some things that we cannot, for ethical reasons, find out, not without losing our humanity.
Read it here