Author: Theodore Dalrymple

I care nothing for football (soccer to Americans), but I was pleased when Portugal won the European Cup last Sunday. I would have preferred it to be Liechtenstein or San Marino, or best of all Vatican City—that is to say, the smallest country possible. But at least Portugal is not a large country, however, important it may once have been in world history. Naturally, as a patriotic Englishman, I was thoroughly delighted when Iceland defeated England. Everyone likes an underdog in any case, and anything that humiliates crushes mentally and causes misery to the beer-bellied, shaven-headed, and tattooed English football … Continue reading →

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Though derided and despised, there is much to be said in favor of mediocrity. It is comfortable and unthreatening, unlike excellence; it makes no demands on us. Who can stand the strain of having to be brilliant all the time, or of having to be careful never to say a banal or obvious thing? Who, when he is tired from a hard day’s work, or even from the mere passage of a large number of hours since he rose in the morning, wants to flog his brain into the maximum activity of which it is capable? One longs, then, for … Continue reading →

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Driving through France recently, we stopped for the night in the small town of Loudun. It had that complete, and to me pleasing or even consolatory, deadness common to many small French towns, where there seems to be no activity at all, nothing ever happens except on the tiniest scale, and all dramas are strictly private. There were a few desultory drinkers in the bar in Loudun, but that was all. Otherwise, the shutters were closed and nobody was about. The quietness of a town at night has a special quality, which is more than the mere absence of sound, … Continue reading →

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Every year Joseph Haydn comes for a few days to the town in which I live when I’m in England. For about five days there are two concerts daily, and for me, it is a great luxury to have a string quartet playing almost on my doorstep. I am fond of Haydn’s chamber music. But there is no disguising the fact that the little festival to celebrate the life and works of Papa Haydn has a definite atmosphere of its own, not so much fin de siècle as fin de-civilisation. Although I am myself a pensioner, I am usually by … Continue reading →

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said of William Shakespeare, the 400th anniversary of whose death has just passed, that he was capable of writing tragedies only about individuals, or small groups of individuals because he lived at a time without ideology. The latter was necessary for killing on a mass scale, Solzhenitsyn said. Two years after Shakespeare died, the Thirty Years’ War broke out, which reduced the population of Germany by about a third. The war was ideological. Solzhenitsyn also said that the dividing line between good and evil ran through every heart. This is not a contradiction: Ideology encourages or makes easier … Continue reading →

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Thirty years ago, a taxi driver in Mexico City taught me, though I cannot remember the exact context in which he did so, some lines from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the learned Mexican nun of the 17th century, a sage, and poetess famous not only in Mexico but in Europe. I have never forgotten them because they sum up succinctly many a moral dilemma (trying to decide whom to blame is a moral dilemma): Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón, sin ver que sois la ocasión de lo mismo que culpáis…. ¿O cuál es más … Continue reading →

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Shortly after my arrival for a short visit to New York City, I had the happy idea of going to the criminal courts on Centre Street. They are the Metropolitan Opera of the criminal-justice system, and as an occasional expert witness in British courts, I wanted to see how these things were done in America. Quite by chance, I arrived at a dramatic moment in a dramatic trial of a dramatic crime. A man called Elliot Morales, charged with murder in the second degree, who was representing himself, was about to make his final address to the jury. Even the … Continue reading →

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I have reached the age of making lists of things to do. This is partly an implicit recognition of declining powers, but also the result of a long-standing desire, so far never fulfilled, of making myself efficient in the way that managers are supposed to make employees efficient. I want to turn myself into a production-line worker, so that I no longer go up and down the stairs wondering when I arrive at the top or the bottom why I am there and what I have come for. Lists, I had hoped, would keep my nose productively to the grindstone. … Continue reading →

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Of all the subjects of academic study, psychology is probably the most useless, or at least the most useless by comparison with its pretensions to use. In a century and a half, it has not told us anything of undisputed value. It is subject to absurd fashions, and its published experiments, even when they are interesting, are often either not reproducible or their relevance to life is unclear. The overall cultural effect of psychology is negative, insofar as it tends to alienate people from their own direct experience and causes them to speak of themselves as if they were mere … Continue reading →

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It is strange what moves people to action, if signing a petition counts as action—which, given the sedentary nature of so much of the population, I suppose it might do. According to a newspaper article I have just read, 140,000 people in Britain signed a petition to have a man with the improbable name of Tyson Fury removed from the list of candidates for the BBC’s completely vacuous and unimportant title of Sports Personality of the Year. Fury is a boxer who is 6 feet 9 inches tall and comes from a family of Irish Travellers (once known as tinkers), … Continue reading →

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One should not speak ill of the dead, of course, especially of the recently dead, but it does not follow that one should speak well of them, or speak of them at all. Personally I was astonished at the amount of coverage given to the death of David Bowie. One might have thought he was really a figure of world-historical importance such as David Beckham or Leonard DiCaprio. On the day after his death, the supposedly serious newspaper that I take most often when I am in Britain, The Guardian, ran a special 12-page supplement on his life and activity, … Continue reading →

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In Pyongyang I once nearly marched past the Great Leader himself (Kim Il Sung), but the British delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students, into which I had managed to insinuate myself, decided at the last moment that I was not quite martial enough in my bearing for the immense honor of doing so. Besides, at age 40, I could hardly claim still to be either a youth or a student. The march-past took place in the largest stadium in the world, which holds 150,000 people. The North Korean regime is one not so much of bread and … Continue reading →

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On 30 December, 2015, the French newspaper Libération had a huge word dominating its front page: Fuck! The expletive was used to commemorate, lament, or celebrate the death at the age of 70 of a rock star called Lemmy Kilmister. The accompanying picture shows a middle-aged rebellious adolescent; inside there is a picture of him in old age, a kind of senile rebel who could never bear to leave his adolescence behind, proud of his degeneracy unto death. In this, he was an authentic representative of modern psychological development: a short period of precocity followed by a long one of … Continue reading →

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Credit where credit is due: President Hollande—who until then had never seemed à la hauteur, as the French say, of his exalted position, appearing more like the deputy head of a lycée in Limoges than a head of state—made an excellent speech before both houses of the French parliament after the terrorist attacks of Nov. 13. It added, temporarily, cubits to his stature. But one speech doesn’t make a policy; and one knew, of course, that the unanimity expressed by the standing ovation with which his speech was received could not last. Luckily, indeed, our countries are not given to … Continue reading →

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There is no racist like an antiracist: That is because he is obsessed by race, whose actual existence as often as not he denies. He looks at the world through race-tinted spectacles, interprets every event or social phenomenon as a manifestation of racism either implicit or explicit, and in general has the soul of a born inquisitor. That is why a recent cartoon in the Australian newspaper aroused the ire—I suspect the simulated ire, the kind of pleasantly self-righteous ire that we can all so easily work ourselves into if and when we want—of the guardians of racism purity. The … Continue reading →

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