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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...

My first contact with Islam was in Afghanistan. I had been through Iran overland to get there, but it was in the days of the Shah’s White Revolution, which had given rights to women and had secularized society (with the aid of a little detention, without trial, and torture). In my naive, historicist way, I assumed that secularization was an irreversible process, like the breaking of eggs: that once people had seen the glory of life without compulsory obeisance to the men of God, they would never turn back to them as the sole guides to their lives and politics....

Viva VoltaireIn the cartoon controversy, it’s the French who’ve been courageous, the Americans and British spineless. 10 February 2006 This time, the French have put the British and Americans to shame. From the outset of the crisis over the Danish caricatures, they have vigorously defended the right of free expression, unlike the British and Americans, whose pretence that they “understand” Muslim outrage has fooled no one and given the fanatics the (correct) impression of weakness and lack of conviction—and thus encouraged them. Two French satirical weeklies with Voltairean aplomb, Le Canard Enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo, have published a series of...

When the Taleban blew up the ancient statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, there were no spontaneous or state-sponsored demonstrations in the Islamic world demanding that the feelings of Buddhists should be spared. Furthermore, the cartoonists and commentators of the Middle East have never been sparing with their insults of other people or of other people’s beliefs. In Egypt, one of the more tolerant of Middle Eastern countries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is available everywhere on the streets, often with accompanying caricatures straight out of Der Sturmer. My copy of The Protocols was printed and published in Kuwait,...

"No Beheadings, Please, We’re British." Appeasing Muslim extremists means surrendering Western liberties. 6 February 2006 The weekend edition of Le Monde carried on its front page a startling photograph of a masked protester in London, holding up a placard demanding the death of those who insult Islam. Policemen flanked him on either side, as if protecting him from the vicious assaults of cartoonists. Nothing could have captured better the cowardly and pusillanimous response of the British government to the crisis deliberately stirred up in many Muslim countries four months after the publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 cartoons depicting...

City JournalNo Beheadings, Please, We’re British.Appeasing Muslim extremists means surrendering Western liberties.Theodore Dalrymple 6 February 2006 The weekend edition of Le Monde carried on its front page a startling photograph of a masked protester in London, holding up a placard demanding the death of those who insult Islam. Policemen flanked him on either side, as if protecting him from the vicious assaults of cartoonists. Nothing could have captured better the cowardly and pusillanimous response of the British government to the crisis deliberately stirred up in many Muslim countries four months after the publication in a Danish newspaper of 12...

The late Professor Joad, a popularizer of philosophy rather than a philosopher in the true sense, used to preface his answer to any question by saying, "It depends on what you mean by…"—in this case, "doomed." The word "doomed" implies an ineluctable destiny, against which, presumably, it is vain for men to struggle. And this in turn implies a whole, contestable philosophy of history. Historical determinism has two sources: first the apparent ability of historians, who of course have the benefit of hindsight, to explain any and all historical events with a fair degree of plausibility, even if their explanations...

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...

Oh, to be in England - The Frivolity of Evil - Theodore Dalrymple 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...

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...

All terrorists, presumably, know the dangers that they run, accepting them as an occupational hazard; given Man’s psychological makeup—or at least the psychological makeup of certain young men—these dangers may act as an attraction, not a deterrent. But only a few terrorists use their own deaths as an integral means of terrorizing others. They seem to be a breed apart, with whom the rest of humanity can have little or nothing in common. Certainly they sow panic more effectively than other terrorists. Those who leave bombs in public places and then depart, despicable as they are, presumably still have attachments...

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...

Thursday 03 November 2005 How the French riot Theodore Dalrymple Les Vans, Ardèche For a patriot like me, it is a great consolation to know that other societies are undergoing precisely the kind of decomposition, if a little more slowly and with slightly more resistance to it, in which we so clearly lead the world. This reassures me that, eventually, nowhere will be better than Britain, and then I will be able once again, like George III, to rejoice in the name of Briton. In France, for example, it was not many years ago that people with tattoos were infrequently...

We can usually sympathize with one or another party to a dispute: one is usually more in the right—or less in the wrong—than the other. But with the breakdown of accepted conventions, it increasingly happens that neither side arouses our sympathies. Take a recent case in Sweden, where a lesbian couple wished to have children. An understanding and liberal-minded male friend agreed to donate his sperm, and three children were born to one of the two women between 1992 and 1996. But then relations between the two women deteriorated, and they split up. The mother of the children found herself...

All too sad to explain In the days when murderers in Britain could still be executed by hanging, the Home Office used to receive five unsolicited applications a week for the position of hangman (not even the most rigidly doctrinal feminist has ever demanded that we use the word hangperson). The desire to kill one’s fellow beings in the pursuit of a good cause, in this case the preservation of law and order and the prevention of murder, is therefore quite widespread, even under the most civilized conditions. There is no doubt that a good execution has its attractions. Once...

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...