Steady As She Goes
There are two kinds of censorship, the negative and positive. The negative proscribes, the positive prescribes...
The positive kind of censorship is much worse than the negative and, if it goes very far, is almost incompatible with either deep thought or good art. It co-exists with the negative form of censorship, but in addition to making some things unsayable it prescribes what must be said, in the way that any thesis on any subject whatever in the old Soviet Union was obliged to carry quotations from Lenin, showing that Lenin had come to the right conclusions years before. Of course, intelligent people quoted Lenin with satire in their hearts; but forcing men publicly to mouth sentiments as a precondition of furthering their careers is a sovereign way to destroy their probity and induce a state of self-contempt. And men who are contemptuous of themselves are more likely to take to the bottle than to constructive activity.
His bizarre and childish whims
I find this piece to be respectful of, and generous to, Michael Jackson while also appropriately criticizing the man, his work, his doctors and the society that surrounds them all. Surely Dalrymple withholds discussion of Jackson's troubling relationship with children purely out of respect for the recently departed.
In Praise of Prejudice
Unhappy with the NHS?
In yet another governmental attempt to pretend that British public services are responsive to the opinions of the people they serve, GPs will have the incomes of their practices reduced if a sufficient number of patients answer a questionnaire, sent to them six months after their contact with the practice, unfavourably.
Michael Jackson: A Tragedy of Our Times
What we see in Jackson is a manifestation in extreme form of modern man’s increasing unwillingness to place a limit on his own appetites, the precondition that Edmund Burke laid down for the exercise of liberty. Jackson, it is often said, was a child who never grew up; ‘I want, I want!’ was the sum total of his philosophy. He was, in extreme form, a very characteristic modern human type, whose life course was that of precocity followed by permanent adolescence.
Dalrymple wrote about Jackson's child molestation case twice for National Review. His 2003 essay Our Great Societal Neverland (actually, the essay that first opened my eyes to his writing) examined pedophilia, and 2005's Looking for Boundaries argued that Jackson's child molestation case was evidence of "gross sexual confusion in our society":
Update: Our Great Societal Neverland is available here for free. (Hat Tip: RJK)Each person is left to decide whether his behavior will cause harm to himself or others, and it is a fact of human nature that we can easily persuade ourselves of the harmlessness of what we want, or are already determined, to do. And conformity has in any case a bad name: It is a form of lese majesté of the individual, and — ever since the end of the Second World War — carries the connotation of the feeble excuse offered by mass murderers, that they were only obeying orders. Not the least damage that Nazism did to the world was to destroy faith in the possibility of decent conventions that ought to be followed.
The Michael Jackson case has revealed a foul swamp of egotism, not just of Jackson alone, though he has hitherto enjoyed the means to live out his tasteless fantasies. The case is an example of what happens when individuals are left to define boundaries for themselves without the assistance of social convention.
Blow your own trumpet
When Theocracy Breaks Down
Devout Muslims can see (as Luther, Calvin, and others could not) the long-term consequences of the Reformation and its consequent secularism: a marginalization of the Word of God, except as an increasingly distant cultural echo—as the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the once full “Sea of faith,” in Matthew Arnold’s precisely diagnostic words.This is not to say that Iranians are turning their backs on Islam, but many are certainly turning their backs on (and throwing their stones at) totalitarian theocracy. Political commentator Fareed Zakaria said that recent events in Iran represent "the fall of Islamic theocracy" whether the regime falls soon or not, because in the face of popular will, Ayatollah Khamenei has had to tacitly withdraw his earlier declaration that Ahmadinejad's election was divinely sanctioned. Of course, no one knows whether this crack will cause the dam to burst, but if Dalrymple is right, it's only a matter of time.
And there is enough truth in the devout Muslim’s criticism of the less attractive aspects of Western secular culture to lend plausibility to his call for a return to purity as the answer to the Muslim world’s woes. He sees in the West’s freedom nothing but promiscuity and license, which is certainly there; but he does not see in freedom, especially freedom of inquiry, a spiritual virtue as well as an ultimate source of strength. This narrow, beleaguered consciousness no doubt accounts for the strand of reactionary revolt in contemporary Islam. The devout Muslim fears, and not without good reason, that to give an inch is sooner or later to concede the whole territory....
The older generation is only now realizing that even outward conformity to traditional codes of dress and behavior by the young is no longer a guarantee of inner acceptance (a perception that makes their vigilantism all the more pronounced and desperate). Recently I stood at the taxi stand outside my hospital, beside two young women in full black costume, with only a slit for the eyes. One said to the other, “Give us a light for a fag, love; I’m gasping.” Release the social pressure on the girls, and they would abandon their costume in an instant.
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The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a source of strength, but also of fragility and weakness, for individuals as well as for polities. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus coexists with fear that the whole edifice—intellectual and political—will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way. Intransigence is a defense against doubt and makes living on terms of true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible.
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But the anger of Muslims, their demand that their sensibilities should be accorded a more than normal respect, is a sign not of the strength but of the weakness—or rather, the brittleness—of Islam in the modern world, the desperation its adherents feel that it could so easily fall to pieces. The control that Islam has over its populations in an era of globalization reminds me of the hold that the Ceausescus appeared to have over the Rumanians: an absolute hold, until Ceausescu appeared one day on the balcony and was jeered by the crowd that had lost its fear. The game was over, as far as Ceausescu was concerned, even if there had been no preexisting conspiracy to oust him.
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Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that accounts for its so frequent shrillness. The Shah will, sooner or later, triumph over the Ayatollah in Iran, because human nature decrees it, though meanwhile millions of lives will have been ruined and impoverished. The Iranian refugees who have flooded into the West are fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion, as I know from speaking to many in my city. To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be very dangerous for some time to come, and all of us, after all, live only in the short term; but ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy, withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of the Church of England) be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.
Dalrymple and Drugs: May 2006 Speech - Romancing Opiates
In April 2006, Roger Kimball's Encounter Books published Theodore Dalrymple's Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, and one month later the Manhattan Institute hosted Dalrymple at the Harvard Club to mark the release of the book. In his speech at the event, Dalrymple highlighted the book's major arguments and described the popular view of opiate addiction as an "emblematic example of how error may become ingrained and how the most obvious facts may be ignored and their significance overlooked entirely".
We've posted the speech in six parts on the SkepticalDoctor channel on YouTube. Don't miss the last part in which Dalrymple fields a question from Ethan Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, which describes itself as "the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs." Dalrymple had criticized Nadelmann's views nine years earlier in his City Journal essay Don't Legalize Drugs, and apparently Nadelmann came loaded for bear.
Dalrymple and Drugs: The Value of Broad-Mindedness
Interestingly, I can't remember Dalrymple ever actually referring to himself as a conservative, and he has specifically refused that label on a few occasions, in narrowly-defined contexts. In some of his earliest travel books, he actually referred to himself as a liberal, though in very specific circumstances (such as apartheid South Africa), and he has always shown skepticism toward the left.
But all should agree that Dalrymple is anything but myopic. Unfortunately, ...<< MORE >>
Double trouble
Dalrymple and Drugs: Legalization
This is the first in a series of posts regarding Theodore Dalrymple's analysis of drug use (a series we considered titling "Dalrymple On Drugs" before prudence won out). Over the years, drug use has been a regular topic of his writing. Many of his Spectator columns and City Journal essays have drawn upon his work treating patients who have overdosed (either accidentally or intentionally), and his psychiatric counseling of these patients has been an important source of his knowledge of the modern underclass lifestyle. His 2006 book Romancing Opiates (called Junk Medicine in Britain) sought to shatter many of the myths surrounding opiate addiction and withdrawal, and argued that the treatment industry now flourishing in Britain actually encouraged and benefitted from increased opiate usage.
His most extensive writing on the issue of drug legalization is his 1997 City Journal essay "Don't Legalize Drugs", which rebutted the major claims made on behalf of legalization. On a blog called "Looking At the Left", a photojournalist named El Marco has made interesting use of the essay by combining some of its passages with photos he took documenting an event, held annually at the University of Colorado and tolerated by the university and the police, called "Smoke Out", in which well over 10,000 of our best and brightest young people put down their Shakespeare and their Heidegger and pick up their joints and water pipes in protest against what they regard as the horrible injustice of marijuana laws.
One can dispute the scale and significance of the event. Is it a further slide down the slippery slope of cultural degradation or just a harmless echo of the Sixties? Didn't more than a few of us try marijuana during our time at university? (Yes.) But in the juxtaposition of Dalrymple's sober and enlightening prose and El Marco's photos of these superficial youth, with all of their fake countercultural paraphenalia and their devotion to a wayward cause, it's hard not to see so much potential just... well... wasted.
Pictures from an Institution
Though I admire decorum, I love scandal. And who does not? To assuage my slight feelings of guilt over such prurience, I persuade myself that my preferred scandals are those that raise complex moral questions, or that illustrate something important about modern society.
The scandal over the Oxford professorship of poetry exactly fills the bill. It illustrates the morass into which political correctness inevitably leads us...
Dalrymple in FrontPage magazine
Curing crime
Always in the wrong place
I read Theodore Dalrymple's new piece in the New Criterion just a few hours after I watched a video on North Korea shot clandestinely by some foolishly brave Americans, and I found it impossible not to think about the Dear Leader as I read it.
Reviewing Kombinat: Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era, a book of photographs documenting the decaying industrial infrastructure of Ceaucescu's Romania, Dalrymple praises the work for raising several profound philosophical issues: to paraphrase, the permissibility of aestheticizing evil and disaster, Communist construction viewed as destruction of the past, and the extent to which human societies rebounding from horror can begin anew, "as if nothing had happened".
Read the essay here