Author: Theodore Dalrymple

Not many people, I imagine, still read Dr. Johnson for pleasure or instruction, though he was once the favorite reading of the educated in the English-speaking world and his complete works found in practically all private libraries. He contrived to be a moralist without moralizing; he was an incomparably greater psychologist than Freud, having no ax to grind and no sect to found; and he was humane and charitable without sentimentality. No wonder that he is not in fashion. We prefer mental contortions, self-justifications, evasions, rationalizations, and all the other methods of avoiding the truth about ourselves, to his discomfiting … Continue reading →

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A young man of my acquaintance recently ended his intimate relationship with a girl that had lasted some years, and announced the fact to the world on Facebook, together with some rather disobliging commentary on his former lover’s character. This mania for making public what ought to remain private is, if not entirely new (for, as the Bible tells us, there is no new thing under the sun), at least of such greatly increased intensity that it might as well be regarded as new. The possibility of publicity brings forth the desire for publicity. Most men, observed Thoreau, live lives … Continue reading →

The post What the Snowflakes Want appeared first on LewRockwell.

In my salad days as vulgarity correspondent—that is to say, a reporter on the disgusting ways in which young British people so often chose to behave—I was sent one year to the Glastonbury Festival. This is a large gathering of the British lumpenintelligentsia come to celebrate its own appalling taste in music, in a place vaguely associated with druidism, the healing chakras of the earth, Hopi ear candles, and that kind of thing: ideal, in other words, for people who claim to be spiritual but not religious. The weather that year was terrible, with torrential rain that turned the fields … Continue reading →

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There is no better or more salutary way of reminding yourself of your own profound and irreparable ignorance than to browse in a well-stocked secondhand bookshop. It is also a way to overcome misanthropy if to such you are inclined, for you cannot help but admire your fellow beings who have, over the centuries, accumulated so much knowledge about so many things. In our day-to-day avocations, we tend to forget (if ever we knew) just how much we are the beneficiaries of our predecessors, how much we stand not only on the shoulders of giants but on the shoulders of … Continue reading →

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Ariana Grande, of whom I had not heard until Salman Abedi killed 22 people at her “concert” in Manchester, has had herself tattooed with a picture of a bee, a symbol of Manchester’s industrious industrial past, as a “permanent tribute” to the city. Apparently, the other performers in her vulgar act have done likewise. Could courage, compassion, sympathy, self-sacrifice, indeed virtue itself, go further? This could be the start of something big: a movement called Tattoos Against Terrorism or TAT for short. If anything could convince the Islamic suicide bombers of the superiority of the Western way of life, with … Continue reading →

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Like most governments these days, the Irish government is a patron of the arts. The problem is that most governments know as much about the arts as I know about how to select camels for a camel race. Naturally, therefore, governments rely on advisers to advise them on artistic matters, in effect delegating to them the disbursement of funds. Here the problem is that the art world is now so corrupt morally, intellectually, and aesthetically that the advice it gives is more likely to resemble Mr. Madoff’s advice to investors than Lord Duveen’s to Henry Clay Frick. There has always … Continue reading →

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One of Britain’s royal princes has revealed to tens of millions of his closest and dearest friends and acquaintances, via an interview in a newspaper, that he found the period after the death of his mother difficult. He was widely praised for his openness when, of course, he should have been firmly reprehended for his emotional incontinence and exhibitionism. Alas, this kind of psychological kitsch is fashionable, with all kinds of princely personages—footballers, rock stars, actors, actresses, and the like—displaying their inner turmoil, much of which, unlike the actual prince’s, is self-inflicted. They parade that turmoil as beggars in some … Continue reading →

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The real winners of the recent Dutch elections were the animals—or at least the Party for the Animals, which might not benefit animals any more than workers’ parties benefit workers. We shall have to see. The animals, or their representatives, won five seats in the Dutch parliament. But what I want to know is, will the Party for the Animals speak up for the worms and the flies as well as for nice fluffy mammals such as skunks, jackals, and hyenas? And what of the rats? Perhaps you may think they already have enough representation in parliament. And what of … Continue reading →

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Self-love used to be a vice, but nowadays it is the nearest thing to a virtue, as a supposed precondition of our own mental health (whatever that might be). An Irish friend kindly forwarded me an article from The Irish Times reporting on a school in County Dublin that, on St. Valentine’s Day, encouraged children to write Valentine cards to themselves. They were supposed to inscribe in them what they loved about themselves, on the theory that self-love is a precondition to success, happiness, and resilience, and should therefore be taught early and probably incessantly. My view is that the … Continue reading →

The post Feeding Your Inner Caligula appeared first on LewRockwell.

We should all like to know why some people become terrorists, other than for the most obvious reason: that to kill, maim, and destroy, supposedly for a good cause or some allegedly higher purpose, is a delight to a certain kind of person, worth even dying for. In addition, I doubt that there are much more self-important people than terrorists. You might think that psychiatry and psychiatrists would be able to shed some light on the matter, but this is itself a manifestation of a modern superstition, namely that human self-understanding has made great strides pari passu with technical advances … Continue reading →

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You can get angry with machines, especially when you haven’t the faintest idea how they work. They seem to break down out of spite, just at the wrong moment; it is as if they are not completely inanimate but possessed of souls with ill will. I once had a very unreliable car—coincidentally of British manufacture—that knew exactly when I had an appointment that I particularly did not want to miss and chose that moment not to start. My preferred way to repair it, and to teach it a lesson that it would not forget, was to kick it in the … Continue reading →

The post The Creepy Replacement for Religion appeared first on LewRockwell.

I think I too could be a Nobel Prize winner in economics—at least if an interview with Joseph Stiglitz in a recent edition of Le Figaro, the French newspaper, on the occasion of the publication of one of his books published in French, is anything to go by. It is not that Mr. Stiglitz said nothing that was true: Rather it was that what he said that was not actually untrue could have been said by anyone of moderate intelligence and average powers of reflection. Perhaps the Nobel Prize for Economics ought henceforth to be replaced by one for Common … Continue reading →

The post Our Opponents Are Mediocrities appeared first on LewRockwell.

I am never sure whether I should lament the state of the world or be complacent about it. For, on the one hand, everything is going to the dogs and on the other, I am a happy man. Part of my happiness derives, of course, from intimations of approaching apocalypse: There is nothing quite like them for cheering oneself up. That is why I bought a book the other day by Chantal Delsol, the distinguished French philosopher, called La haine du monde (Hatred of the World), in which she maintains that there is in modern, post-religious Prometheanism more in common … Continue reading →

The post Frightening Totalitarianism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Once again the only country of any size that, as far as I can see, emerges from the Olympic Games with any credit is India. Accounting for something like a sixth of the world’s population, it had not—the last time I looked at the table—won a single medal in any event. This proves that, at least in this regard, it has its priorities right. It has steadfastly refused to measure itself by the number of medals it wins at the Olympics and does nothing whatever to encourage its citizens to devote their lives to trying to jump a quarter of … Continue reading →

The post A Deeply Vicious Festival appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is hardly surprising that newspapers nowadays more and more resemble magazines that are produced weekly or monthly instead of daily. With modern technology they can hardly any longer be the first to break news; as their circulations fall and journalists are “let go”—to use a delightful euphemism for dismissal so dear to more refined or sensitive bosses—they cannot do much investigative journalism, either. What is left is gossip about celebrities, explanations of the obvious, speculation about the future based on what has happened in the recent past, drivel about the sport, and articles catering to modern man’s fathomless narcissism. Nevertheless, … Continue reading →

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