Free Republic

In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, in which he argued that ideology—understood in the sense of a coherent, single-minded philosophical outlook or system of abstractions intended as much as a lever to change society as a description to explain it—was dead, at least in the West, and in the United States in particular. A combination of democracy and mass prosperity had “solved” the political question that had agitated humanity since the time of Plato. There were to be no more grand and transformative, if woefully erroneous, ideas; all that remained was public administration, with, at...

Since I’ve received no education in philosophy whatever, it is no doubt very rash of me to make a broad generalization concerning the subject, but I shall risk it nonetheless: that in the whole history of philosophy not a single important philosophical problem has ever been solved beyond all possible dispute. I know that the late Sir Karl Popper claimed to have solved the problem of induction not merely to his own satisfaction, but also to the satisfaction of all rational men; alas, I do not think that all rational men have reciprocated by agreeing with him. Pace Popper, the...

Is our society losing its way? An interview with psychiatrist and thinker Dr. Theodore Dalrymple. Bernard Chapin: In your essay, “The Roads to Serfdom,” you refer to a famous quote by George Bernard Shaw, who said, “We are all socialists now.” Are we all on the brink of becoming socialists once again? Why do you think, given the oppressive and pernicious nature of this method of governance, it remains politically viable? Dr. Dalrymple: I think it more likely that there will be an increase in corporatism than in socialism. America will not be socialist, but it might be corporatist (there...

When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless. They did not seem to her, moreover, to have any virtues to compensate for their unpleasant qualities. I occasionally asked her to think of some, but she couldn’t; and neither, frankly, could I. snip What, exactly, were the qualities that my mother had so admired? Above all, there...

It is one of the evils of evil tyrannies that they seek to implicate everyone in their system, by means of spying, the granting of privileges, etc. But it is not only tyrannies that do this: modern bureaucracies, even in liberal democratic states, do this also. For example, in the British state hospital system (and no modern state does entirely without public hospitals), doctors undergo a compulsory annual appraisal by a colleague, decreed and designed by the administration, without any evidence that it improves performance in any way whatever. Its purpose is not to improve performance; it purpose is to...

Theodore DalrympleChildhood’s End Britain, land of bleak houses and low expectations Growing up in today’s England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. NB: This is a fairly long article. I have taken the liberty of skipping the first half --except the two opening lines-- as it deals chiefly with horrific examples of modern day British "childhood". I urge the reader not to skip it.--YD] Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child, according to a recent UNICEF report. Ordinarily, I would not set much store by such a report;...

Oh, to be in England. Theodore Dalrymple: Childhood’s End - Britain, land of bleak houses and low expectations Growing up in today's England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. kate greenaway/Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY Growing up in today’s England is far from the idyll depicted in this nineteenth-century lithograph. Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child, according to a recent UNICEF report. Ordinarily, I would not set much store by such a report; but in this case, I think it must be right—not because I...

A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences, makes childhood in Britain a torment both for many of those who live it and those who observe it. Yet the British government will do anything but address the problem, or that part of the problem that is its duty to address: the state-encouraged breakdown of the family. If one were a Marxist, one might see in this refusal the self-interest of the state-employee class: social problems, after all, are their raison d’être.

<p>Acting recently as an expert witness in a murder trial, I became aware of a small legal problem caused by the increasingly multicultural nature of our society. According to English law, a man is guilty of murder if he kills someone with the intention either to kill or to injure seriously. But he is guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter if he has been sufficiently provoked or if his state of mind at the time was abnormal enough to reduce his responsibility. The legal test here is a comparison with the supposedly ordinary man—the man on the Clapham omnibus, as the legal cliché has it. Would that ordinary person feel provoked under similar circumstances? Was the accused’s state of mind at the time of the killing very different from that of an average man?</p>

In his essay, The Empire of the Ugly, the great Belgian Sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys recounts the story of how, writing one day in a café, a small incident gave him an insight into the real nature of philistinism. A radio was playing in the background, a mixture of banal and miscellaneous chatter and equally banal popular music. No one in the café paid any attention to this stream of tepid drivel until suddenly, unexpectedly and inexplicably, the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet were played. “Mozart,� Leys says, “took possession of our little space with a serene...

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) is a retired English psychiatrist who spent most of his career working on the grounds of an urban prison, an experience that he chronicled in a regular, haunting column for the London Spectator. He recently retired to France but continues to write voluminously for outlets such as the Daily Telegraph, the New Criterion, and the City Journal. He is the Dietrich Weismann fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author, most recently, of the slender, devastatingly argued volume In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas (Encounter Books). BC: Dr. Dalrymple, would you say...

Separation Anxiety Divorcees are bad for the environment. Do environmentalists care?27 December 2007A small item in the British Medical Journal recently caught my eye. It was a brief digest of a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the environmental impact of divorce. Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale.One of the interesting questions that this little piece...

When President Bush described the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as cowardly, he chose precisely the wrong word. (He was not the only person to do so, but he was the most important one to do so.) In fact, it was a very courageous act: for it requires great courage to assassinate someone in the middle of a large and volatile crowd favourable to that person, and above all then to blow yourself up just to make sure that you have succeeded. Not many people have that degree of courage: I certainly don’t. The two Islamic militants whose telephone call was...

Theodore Dalrymple: No Security - Britain is failing in its most basic duty to its citizens. 20 November 2007 For millions of its inhabitants, Britain is a failing state. It assumes responsibility for education and health care without regard for results; and it fails in its most basic duty, to ensure that its inhabitants can go about their business with reasonable security. A recent incident—the assault of a 96-year-old man—has brought home to the British public just how little it can rely on the state for protection. The assailant, 44, was frustrated that the elderly man was in his way...

For self is a sea boundless and measureless. We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words. —Kahlil Gibran Among my mother’s books was a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I remember still the cream color of the cover, adorned with a soft-focus drawing of a young man with a thin moustache staring, Svengali-like, into some kind of philosophical infinity. Although—or was it because?—The Prophet was so popular at the time, selling by the million worldwide, I resisted reading it. I suspected that its profundity, or rather its straining after profundity, was bogus,...

It used to be said that one should not talk of sex, religion or politics in polite company. So much the worse for polite company, I thought in my days of adolescent enjoyment of disputes for their own sake; and certainly there are subjects that a journalist should avoid if he wishes to avoid an angry response whatever he says about them. In my experience, which admittedly is limited, those subjects are modern art, chronic fatigue syndrome and religion: but of these, religion is the greatest. I haven’t written much about religion, but I have been surprised by the vehemence,...

Theodore Dalrymple: Cameras, Crooks, and Deterrence - Constant surveillance seems to have had little effect on Britain’s sky-high crime. 16 October 2007 After the North Koreans, the British are probably the most highly surveyed people in the world. Around 10,000 publicly funded closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras—to say nothing of the private ones—watch London every day. The average Briton, you often hear, winds up photographed 300 times a day as he goes about his business, even if his business is crime. Whenever a brutal murder is committed in a public place, the police announce that they are examining the video evidence:...

The first writer whose prose style I ever admired was Bernard Shaw. I was between eleven and twelve years old at the time, and did not arrive at my judgment independently. I was under the influence of my English teacher, the first intellectual I had ever met (other than a second cousin who had published a few verses in the small and evanescent English-language literary journals of Paris in the 1950s), and I and my friends admired him to the point of hero-worship. If he had told us that the greatest novelists who ever lived were Marie Corelli and E....

By nature and inclination I am an aesthete: I can hardly think of Venice or Siena, for example, without an excess of emotion. And yet I have spent a great deal of my life among the utmost ugliness, both physical and moral. Moreover, I must confess that the problem of evil has preoccupied me. One of the reasons for this, perhaps, has been literary ambition. It is far easier to make evil interesting than good. Depictions of good people are inclined very soon to decline into mawkishness, and make their objects as dull as they are unbelievable. Too much good...

Drug-addiction services have also grown massively. In our society, every problem calls forth its equal and supposedly opposite bureaucracy, the ostensible purpose of which is to solve the problem. But the bureaucracy quickly develops a survival instinct, and so no more wishes the problem to disappear altogether than the lion wishes to kill all the gazelle in the bush and leave itself without food. In short, the bureaucracy of drug addiction needs drug addicts far more than drug addicts need the bureaucracy of drug addiction. The propaganda, assiduously spread for many years now, is that heroin addiction is an "illness"....

Theodore Dalrymple: How Societies Commit Suicide - Scots and Italians surrender to Islam. 17 August 2007 In an effort to ensure that no Muslim doctors ever again try to bomb Glasgow Airport, bureaucrats at Glasgow’s public hospitals have decreed that henceforth no staff may eat lunch at their desks or in their offices during the holy month of Ramadan, so that fasting Muslims shall not be offended by the sight or smell of their food. Vending machines will also disappear from the premises during that period. Apparently the bureaucrats believe that the would-be bombers were demanding sandwich-free offices in Glasgow...

It is the best of faiths, it is the worst of faiths. It is the faith of tolerance, it is the faith of hate. Opinions of Islam in the world could hardly be more diverse or more opposed. However many times one hears it said that Islam is not a unitary phenomenon - that the Sufis are as different from the Salafists as chalk is from cheese - almost everyone, after pronouncing this caveat, proceeds to speak or to write as if Islam were a unitary phenomenon. This is the great achievement of the Islamists: they have turned the nastiest...

The question of whether doctors are more or less likely than others to involve themselves in violence is similar to the question of whether they are more or less likely than others to be great writers. Certainly they are more likely than dentists; but the question is a difficult one to answer definitively. However, speaking personally, I was not at all surprised by the involvement of doctors in Islamist attempted violence in Britain. Osama bin Laden’s deputy, after all, is a surgeon. George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and a man of unstintingly...

Theodore Dalrymple: Avanti, Dr. Kevorkian! There may be an overseas market for the doctor’s services. 12 June 2007 It’s strange how even closely allied nations do not take advantage of one another’s complementary strengths and resources. For example, I noticed this month a possible synergy between the United States and Italy: neither, as far as I am aware, has tried in any way to take advantage of it. Jack Kevorkian was released on June 1 from prison, after serving eight years of a sentence for second-degree murder. Kevorkian, popularly known as Dr. Death, is an enthusiast of euthanasia and assisted...

The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, by Ed Husain (Penguin Books, 304 pp., £8.99) The author of this memoir is a young man of Bangladeshi descent, born and brought up in London’s East End. He went to elementary school with a mixed population and got on very well there, his teacher making unobtrusive efforts to introduce him to English culture. Unfortunately, when he left for high school, his father insisted that he go to a boys-only school, and the only one within range was among the worst in England....

Theodore Dalrymple: Global Warming - I was sitting in a train recently, wondering why everyone’s mobile telephone conversations, except my own, were so utterly banal, when a young black man sitting two rows behind me answered the irritating wail of his instrument of the devil. He began to speak, and I wished that I had learnt shorthand. ‘Hancock’s definitely put in a plea,’ he said. ‘Moran’s in the early stages. I’ve got to go back next week, but for the moment I’m on bail.’ As is often the case, his telephone rang non-stop. ‘There was a lot of negotiation going...

Doctors have been trying to diagnose King Lear for more than two centuries. They haven’t succeeded, of course, for a couple of reasons that are not mutually exclusive: first, King Lear does not exist, and second he is not available for tests or examination. The latest technology, no matter how sophisticated, will never settle the matter. No imaging studies for King Lear: he was born much too soon for them, and now will never be diagnosed properly. Not, of course, that that puts doctors off, far from it. Nineteenth-century mad doctors in Britain and America said Lear’s case was...

Those who admire and wish to propagate the bourgeois virtues—prudence, thrift, industry, honesty, moderation, politeness, self-restraint, and so forth—are sometimes haunted by an uncomfortable question: how would the world be if, as is not very likely, everyone were to adopt these virtues as his own? Would not the world be a duller (though of course a much better ordered) place—a kind of giant Lucerne or Vevey? It is surely not a coincidence that the iconography of hell is so much more vivid and interesting than that of heaven, a location that induces a deadly boredom even as one strains to...

In my youth (in which I include my early adulthood), I read a lot of philosophy. In those days, I picked up books of metaphysics with an excitement that I cannot now recapture, and that completely mystifies me, indeed seems to me faintly ridiculous. I still cannot quite make up my mind, however, whether or not I wasted my time. After all, I was a medical student, not someone training to be an intellectual. I doubt that philosophy made me a better person, let alone a better doctor, but I suppose it is possible that it made me a better...

Britain is experiencing a spate of murders that suggests a population increasingly unable, or unwilling, to control itself. A recent survey suggested that the British are now more prone to knife-fights than any other people in Europe. Guns have also become fashionable, despite—or is it because of?—stringent laws against them. An emblematic recent murder was that of Krystal Hart, a pregnant 22 year-old, shot with two bullets in the head and then found in her apartment in an up-and-coming part of London, which she shared with her mother. As with any widely publicized murder in Britain these days, an outpouring...

How do bad ideas spread and enter the general stock of received wisdom? One culprit is sloppy or uncritical newspaper reporting. For example, a recent small item on the front page of the Sunday Times, the largest-selling serious Sunday newspaper in Britain, insinuated something both false and dangerous to believe. The headline ran: WANT A FIGHT? SCIENTISTS SAY IT’S ALL IN YOUR GENES. The story begins: “Scientists have discovered an answer to one of the most intractable squabbles in family life—argumentative children are born and not made.” According to the article, new research has found antisocial traits to be inherited...

Dr. Daniels begins predictably witht this: ...Why should Orwell be so desired and desirable, in short so unanswerable, an ally? He is a secular saint, over whose relics everyone squabbles. There are good reasons for this, no doubt. In his essay, Why I Write, published in 1946, Orwell disarmingly tells us that all writers are to some extent egotistical: they desire to seem clever, to be talked about and admired, and to be remembered after their death.... But finally Dr. Daniels points this out: ...But by far the worst aspect of Homage to Catalonia is its strong advocacy of totalitarianism....

When, as a medical student, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film of A Clockwork Orange, I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story’s adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called “ultra-violence.” The film had been controversial in Britain; its detractors, who wanted it banned, charged that it glamorized and thereby promoted violence. The young men dressed as droogs seemed to confirm the charge, though of course it is one thing to imitate a form of dress and quite another to imitate behavior. Still,...

As alternatives to the NHS are considered, which model of healthcare will Britain adopt? The French, the Swiss, the German or the American? Theodore Dalrymple thinks it might well be the Zairean - Theodore Dalrymple May 3, 2006 The Zairean model of healthcare as pioneered by Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko is gradually being adopted in Britain - or so argues Theodore Dalrymple. This model is a simple one - the rulers receive the best healthcare money can buy, the mass of the populace get an aspirin if they are lucky. In Britain, the mass of the populace will do rather...

Not long ago in the hospital in which I once worked, a young male nurse was asked by the administration to remove the ironmongery with which he had recently adorned his face and ears. He was outraged by this assault on his inalienable right to mutilate himself in any way that he chose, which he believed to be narrow-minded. He was, after all, the owner of his face and ears in fee simple; they were his to dispose of as he saw fit. As it happens, he was a decent and dedicated young man, albeit one with the bad taste...

"Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, f--k the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull,...

Published on The Brussels Journal (http://www.brusselsjournal.com) Dalrymple on Decadence, Europe, America and Islam By Paul Belien Created 2006-09-16 23:50 An interview with Theodore DalrympleAnthony Daniels is a 57-year old recently retired psychiatrist. He began his career in Africa and worked for many years as a hospital and prison doctor in Birmingham before he moved to the South of France in 2005. Using the pen name Theodore Dalrymple he writes about the collapse of Western civilization in Europe, analyzing the social pathologies of our time. When he chose his pen name, he says, he opted for a name that would evoke...

Theodore Dalrymple - Subsidized Stupidity Rather than elevate the culture, the BBC degrades it—at public expense. 21 July 2006 For a license to receive television broadcasts in their homes, British households must pay an annual fee of about $200 (soon to rise), which subsidizes the once famous but now increasingly infamous BBC. This broadcasting system exemplifies two of the guiding principles of contemporary British public life: the active promotion of vulgarity and the shameless looting of the public purse. Conservative Party head David Cameron recently sat down for an interview on the BBC with Jonathan Ross, whom the organization values...

Theodore Dalrymple: From stiff upper lip to clenched jaws - Youthful embrace of human rights is destroying British dignity and decorum May 06, 2006 WHAT a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the fabric of our lives but it has a profoundly corrupting effect on youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom. Worse still, it persuades each young person that they are uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone...

Theodore Dalrymple: Growing Up British - The sordid is all too typical. 28 April 2006 Not long ago, a defense lawyer asked me to prepare a medical report on a young woman, aged 18, who had nastily assaulted an elderly relative, with whom she was living. She had been drunk at the time, and in fact was already an alcoholic of some six years’ standing. She told me that when she and her friends were 12, they would ask adults to buy alcohol for them, since they could not legally buy it themselves. Apparently, many of the adults they asked...

It’s This Bad - Theodore Dalrymple Returning briefly to England from France for a speaking engagement, I bought three of the major dailies to catch up on the latest developments in my native land. The impression they gave was of a country in the grip of a thoroughgoing moral frivolity. In a strange inversion of proper priorities, important matters are taken lightly and trivial ones taken seriously. This is not the charming or uplifting frivolity of Feydeau’s farces or Oscar Wilde’s comedies; it is the frivolity of real decadence, bespeaking a profound failure of nerve bound to have disastrous consequences...

It’s This Bad: Theodore Dalrymple Returning briefly to England from France for a speaking engagement, I bought three of the major dailies to catch up on the latest developments in my native land. The impression they gave was of a country in the grip of a thoroughgoing moral frivolity. In a strange inversion of proper priorities, important matters are taken lightly and trivial ones taken seriously. This is not the charming or uplifting frivolity of Feydeau’s farces or Oscar Wilde’s comedies; it is the frivolity of real decadence, bespeaking a profound failure of nerve bound to have disastrous consequences for...

My parents had conflicting views about the nature and origin of good manners. My father took the Romantic view that they were the expression of man’s natural goodness of heart and that they therefore emerged spontaneously—that is, if they emerged at all. If they didn’t, it was because of the social injustice that inhibited or destroyed natural goodness. My mother took the classical view that good manners were a matter of discipline, training, and habit and that goodness of heart would, at least to an extent, follow in their wake. The older I grow, the more decisively I take my...

France’s New Serfdom - Après statism, le déluge? 30 January 2006 (After statism, the flood) Whenever the French government tries, however tentatively, reluctantly, or feebly, to reform the vast state sector that is fast bankrupting the country, it immediately meets with strikes and demonstrations that cause it to retreat in disarray. The strikers and demonstrators are defending their often grotesque privileges, such as heavily subsidized vacations, restaurants, electricity, and train rides; short working hours (the employees of the suburban trains of Paris work 28 hours per week, for example); early retirement at 85 percent of final salary; and the right...

WHEN one has prepared a number of reports on murderers, both for the prosecution and for the defence, one begins to discern certain patterns. Of course, it is possible that these patterns are not real, or rather are the consequence of the selection of cases that are sent for report. For example, there is one rather startling group of murderers who kill with a single, fatal stab to a vital organ of their beloved, from which one might be inclined to conclude that this group is anatomically and physiologically well informed: until, that is, one realises that reports are seldom...

The death of a dissolute soccer star sends England into a frenzy of ersatz grief. The death from alcoholism at 59 of a famous soccer player has proved that the mass hysteria that followed Princess Diana’s demise was by no means an aberration in British life but rather a permanent feature of it. Born into a working-class Northern Irish Protestant family, George Best was possibly one of the most talented soccer players ever. Slight in build, he was extremely handsome and once had considerable charm. He played for Manchester United and sometimes was called the fifth Beatle. Unfortunately, his abilities...

Theodore Dalrymple: Second Opinion - One of the great advantages of a multicultural society is that it gives you a clear view of the varieties of human evil. If it were not for a multicultural society, indeed, you might be inclined to suppose that all evil was committed by people very like yourself. And how narrow-minded and deeply parochial that would be! For, of course, believing yourself to be the only source of evil in the world is but another form of self-congratulation and aggrandisement. Evil, like misery, is protean, and never greater than when it is committed in the...

Bonfire of the Vanities - By THEODORE DALRYMPLE - November 7, 2005 When it comes to rioting, there's no 35-hour week in France. It may be difficult nowadays to get people in what the French call the Hexagon to work on Friday afternoons, but not to riot, at least not in the "sensitive" quartiers that surround most towns and cities. The productivity of the rioters has been increasing rapidly of late, and France looks like it will be breaking its record for burnt-out cars: 1,295 on Saturday night alone and 750 on Friday night, 500 the night before, and 300...

Everyone knows la douce France: the France of wonderful food and wine, beautiful landscapes, splendid châteaux and cathedrals. More tourists (60 million a year) visit France than any country in the world by far. Indeed, the Germans have a saying, not altogether reassuring for the French: “to live as God in France.” Half a million Britons have bought second homes there; many of them bore their friends back home with how they order these things better in France. But there is another growing, and much less reassuring, side to France. I go to Paris about four times a year and...

An artist asks: Should Europe want Turkey; should Turkey want Europe?The power of art to shock, not in the trivial sense of drawing attention to an artist’s craving for notoriety, but of making us acutely and uncomfortably aware of the ambiguities and contradictions of the human condition, remains undiminished. All that is required for an artist to exert that power is imagination, talent, intelligence, and seriousness of purpose.A photograph exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial by the Turkish artist, Burak Delier, captures the existential dilemma confronting both his own country and Europe with brilliant precision. It shows a Muslim woman, heavily...