Free Republic

In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog. 'snip' Of course, from the point of view of social justice as equality, it wouldn’t really matter whether the treatment meted out to dogs was good or bad, so long as it was equal. And, oddly enough, one of the things about the British National Health Service for human beings that has persuaded the British over its 60 years of existence that it is socially just is the...

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...

Staying recently in a South Yorkshire town called Rotherham—described in one guidebook as “murky,” an inadequate word for the place—I was interested to read in the local newspaper how the proprietors of some stores are preventing hooligans from gathering outside to intimidate and rob customers. They play Bach over loudspeakers, and this disperses the youths in short order; they flee the way Count Dracula fled before holy water, garlic flowers, and crucifixes. The proprietors had previously tried a high-pitched noise generator whose mosquito-like whine only those younger than 20 could detect. This method, too, proved effective, but the owners abandoned...

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...

Global euphoria is better than the disrepute of the Bush years, but so far our new president’s appeal is entirely symbolic.By Theodore Dalrymple Like it or not, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States has done an immense amount to restore American prestige in the world. Not since the destruction of the Twin Towers has there been dancing in the streets anywhere on the planet to celebrate events in America. It is to be hoped, of course, that it is not the same people doing the dancing.In Delhi, Indians kissed Obama’s photo. Parties spilled into...

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>

Theodore Dalrymple: Delusions of Virtue - We should hope Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia tale was a lie—and not a fantasy. 3 April 2008 Nietzsche, in one of his disconcertingly piercing aperçus, wrote: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. At last—my memory yields.” Hillary Clinton seemed to reverse the Nietzschean order of things when she “misspoke”: “I cannot have done that,” said her memory. “I must have done that,” said her pride, and remained adamant. At last—her memory yielded. Was she lying? A journalist called and asked my opinion as...

Elizabeth Pisani, an epidemiologist and blogger (at The Wisdom of Whores), has just published an article in the Guardian entitled “Spitzer’s true folly: A governor who pays for sex should know to mould social policies on reality, not morality.” Noting that the departing New York governor had championed a tough anti-prostitution law, Pisani writes that “the collective gloating [over his embarrassment] obscures an important truth: policies based on morality, not reality, don’t work.” Further on, she claims: “Morality, which is hard to define let alone to measure, is not a good basis for public policy. Science is a good basis...

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...

once had a conversation with an eminent professor, of great and even intimidating erudition (though, of course, erudition is not quite the same thing as talent), about the degree of man’s self-understanding. I maintained that it had not increased in any fundamental way, notwithstanding our startling technological progress, and that, in this respect, the neurosciences were greatly oversold, as in the past physiognomy, phrenology, social Darwinism and other doctrines had been oversold. This was not to deny, of course, the very real achievements of science, but for the great majority of the time, and for the great majority of people,...

It goes without saying, I hope, that I am utterly opposed to murder. If it were possible to eliminate this, the oldest and most terrible of crimes, from the face of the earth, I should most certainly rejoice at it. So why is it that, when asked to prepare a medico-legal report in a case of murder, whether for the defence or the prosecution, I am extremely pleased and look forward immensely to receiving and reading all the documentation? Why is this, when I know full well that a world without murder would be much better than the one in...

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,...

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable....

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....

From an Islamist point of view, the news from Europe looks good. The Times of London, relying on a police report, recently observed that the Deobandis, a fundamentalist sect, now run nearly half of the 1,350 mosques in Britain and train the vast majority of the Muslim clerics who get their training in the country. The man who might become the sect’s spiritual leader in Britain, Riyadh ul Haq, believes that friendship with a Christian or a Jew makes “a mockery of Allah’s religion.” At least no one could accuse him of a shallow multiculturalism. According to Le Figaro, 70...

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...

A Culture of Lies By Fjordman Created 2007-07-26 19:09 The always excellent writer Theodore Dalrymple, one of the most astute observers of Britain and indeed of the Western world today, has assessed the ten years under the leadership of former PM Tony Blair. According to Dalrymple, “Many in Britain believe that he has been the worst prime minister in recent British history, morally and possibly financially corrupt, shallow and egotistical.” One of the reasons for this negative view is the rapid growth of insecurity, ironically combined with the even more rapid growth of surveillance: “The typical Briton finds himself recorded...

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...

ARRIVING IN BRITAIN by air the day after two men crashed a gasoline-laden Jeep Cherokee into the main terminal at Glasgow's international airport, and a couple of days after two car bombs were discovered in the heart of London, I was surprised by how calm everybody was. Apart from the prohibition of passenger drop-off and pickup next to the terminal building at Birmingham Airport, everything was as usual. Men and women in Muslim garb mingled in the crowd with perfect tranquillity, expecting neither violence nor even verbal reproach. Was this a sign of the admirable tolerance of British society, or...

Flying to Rotterdam recently, the largest and busiest port in the world, I was forcibly struck by the aerial view. I doubt there is a sight anywhere that is more eloquent testimony to the power of human intelligence and organization. Indeed, this applies to the whole of the Netherlands: a physically unpromising fragment of land, much of it reclaimed from the sea, has been diligently transformed into one of the globe’s most flourishing regions, whose economic product exceeds that of the whole of Africa. The text accompanying a book of photographs of the Dutch landscape that I was given as...

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...

As entertainment becomes omnipresent, more people look to celebrities for moral and political guidance. THE CULT OF CELEBRITY is not new, but it is increasing in its scope and effect. At one time, people wanted simply to gawp at the famous, and possibly dress like them. Now, many take their moral and political opinions from them. For example, most young people's view of Africa, insofar as they have one at all, probably derives more from the pronouncements of Bono, U2's lead singer, than from any other source of knowledge about the Dark Continent. As it happens, Bono has boned up...

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,...

I have long been preoccupied by the problem of evil. Not being a philosopher, I have no satisfactory explanation of evil to offer, nor even, indeed, a satisfactory definition of it. For me, evil is rather like poetry was for Doctor Johnson: easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. All I know for certain is that there’s a lot of it about - evil, I mean, not poetry. Why? Is the heart of man irredeemably evil, or at any rate inclined to evil? What are the conditions in which evil may flourish? My medical practice, admittedly of...

The Gift of Language - Theodore Dalrymple No, Dr. Pinker, it’s not just from nature.Now that I’ve retired early from medical practice in a slum hospital and the prison next door, my former colleagues sometimes ask me, not without a trace of anxiety, whether I think that I made the right choice or whether I miss my previous life. They are good friends and fine men, but it is only human nature not to wish unalloyed happiness to one who has chosen a path that diverges, even slightly, from one’s own. Fortunately, I do miss some aspects of my work:...

On a recent visit to New Zealand, I happened across a book that I had long intended to read, In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott. (Before the advent of the Internet, which equalised world prices, New Zealand used to be the best place in the English-speaking world for second-hand books.) The name probably faintly rings a bell. He was a career criminal, and had spent the vast majority of his life in penal institutions of one kind or another. At the time he first wrote to Norman Mailer, he was serving a sentence of up to...

Theodore Dalrymple: The Frivolity of Evil - When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off. It would be just as absurd for me to...