#theodore dalrymple
I remember my first mobile telephone, which was more like an offensive weapon than a transitional object, an effective brick to break a skull with. It was prestigious to own one, however, for in those far-off days that now seem to us to be of a totally different historical epoch, they were comparatively uncommon, and anyone who had one could consider himself to be at the very cutting edge in the use of technology.
I despise myself for having become so quickly dependent on my phone. The reason for this is snobbery. When I see how dependent others are on their phones, how for example they look at them even during supposedly convivial meals (in the days when there were convivial meals still), I think how foolish and degraded they are, and how little I want to be like them.
A sensible person does not have to be permanently contactable, and indeed, when I look back, some of my happiest times have been the months in which I was totally incommunicado. My recent dependence on my phone, however, has revealed to me that I am exactly like others in my folly, no worse but no better. I am humbled, if not humiliated, by my phone.
Reading a report on the Guardian website of the death of the Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, I was much struck by two phrases: “addiction to cocaine took hold” and “his private life spiralled out of control”.
This way of putting it suggested that both his addiction and his private life had an existence independent of anything that he himself did: that addiction, for example, was like Parkinson’s Disease, an illness that could reasonably be said to “take hold” of someone. This is the official, but nonetheless false and simplified, view of addiction, as something that just happens to a person.
Why this strange way of putting things? I suspect it is because of the great fear that haunts all modern intellectuals, that of being considered censorious, at least about individuals who bring unhappiness on themselves (and often to others). There is, of course, a certain class of person about whom it is de rigueur to be censorious, even ultra-censorious, but Maradona, being an idol of the populace, and of humble origin, was not a member of that class.
He was a tragic figure, a man who did not put the fruits of his natural talent to a use that brought him much happiness. The tragedy was in the choices he made and in their consequences, by comparison with the choices that he might have made. The fact that they were his choices is what made his life tragic. If he had contributed nothing to his addiction or to his private life, he would no more be a tragic figure than is a broken vase or a punctured tire.
But we have no sense of the tragic, only of victimhood.
- Theodore Dalrymple
Some algorithm somewhere has decided that I’m undereducated, for regularly I receive via my internet server invitations to join masters’ courses at universities—at considerable expense to me, be it added. The algorithm appears not to have noticed that I’m past the age at which a further qualification, or pseudo-qualification, will do much for my career (as promised by the invitation) because my career is over.
The latest such offer I have received (for only $15,000) is an on-line master’s course in “Media, Ethics and Social Change,” in which I will “learn the skills to use the power of digital media to bring about social change.” In other words, it’s a course in such arts as agitprop, surreptitious censorship of opposing views, and false insinuation. I don’t think it takes much imagination to guess what kind of ethics or social change will be promoted by the course, and I doubt that much attention will be given on it to the possibility that things can get worse as well as better.
The courses on offer seem to me to be exercises in the purest careerism, both of those who take them and those who offer and run them. They are harbingers of a brave new world in which political correctness comes to rule through the creation of a self-righteous and ruthless bureaucracy that has been trained to believe that it’s working for humanity’s benefit rather than for its own.
It’s for this reason that I do not entirely disregard offers such as the one I received to “learn the skills to use the power of digital media to bring about social change.” The language used in the profile of the teacher may be horribly ugly, it may indicate an inability to think clearly or express ideas well, but neither beauty nor clarity are its aim. , .
- Theodore Dalrymple
Once the Russians have flattened and occupied Kiev, Lviv, Kharkiv, etc., as surely they will (for anything less would be a defeat), the question will be asked in the West, “Who lost Ukraine?”—as once the question, “Who lost China?” was asked. My preferred answer would be Greta Thunberg—or perhaps I should say, to be a little fairer, Greta Thunberg and people like her.
The Thunberg episode must have been of great aid and comfort to the man in the Kremlin, for it must have convinced him, as it convinced his apologists in the West, of the almost total decadence and fundamental unseriousness of the West. Here was a spoiled upper-middle class Swedish girl claiming that her childhood had been stolen—by whom and by what, exactly?—and no one in any position of power or responsibility had the guts to tell her to shut up and to stop broadcasting her disgusting self-satisfied and highly privileged self-pity. Instead, she was the object of deference and almost of adulation, as if she were being brave in the way that anti-war demonstrators in Russia have been brave.
Why did no one in any position of power or responsibility take on little Greta and tell her to go away? The answer, probably, is sentimentality: She was young, and everyone knows that adolescence is the springtime of idealism. To destroy the fatuous illusions of the ignorant and inexperienced is cruel; therefore, we must submit meekly to be lectured, or hectored, by them, and to do as they say. The fact that the person in question may have been as manipulated as a cruise missile was not allowed to enter anyone’s mind.
- Theodore Dalrymple
“The persons who pride themselves on their own frankness, and who say the first thing that comes into their head, are in my experience rather inclined to be over-sensitive when other people do the same. They like frankness only so far as it is their own.”— Theodore Dalrymple
Worthy repost.
Nearly a century ago, in 1925 to be precise, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote an article for a Berlin newspaper titled “Making the World Uniform.” It began:
, : . , .
I know what Zweig meant. In the days when I traveled a great deal, often to supposedly remote places, my ambition was not to reach somewhere no human foot had trodden, but where Coca-Cola or Nescafé was not on sale. This was no easy matter, and I hear from time to time that even the peak of Mount Everest is now littered.
Zweig attributed the extinction of national and cultural differences in Europe to the rapid Americanization of the continent after the First World War: Perhaps Midwesternization, at least as far as aesthetics were concerned, would have been a better term for it. The domination of American fashions, in clothes, music, literature, architecture, was complete, according to Zweig. Europe has become a cultural colony of the United States, and it welcomed its own subjugation, insofar as such colonization brought material comfort and required meager intellectual effort of citizens.
“It is tempting to suppose that there is increasing uniformity in the world. But it depends on which end of the telescope you look down.”
American or not, mass amusements now prevailed over more refined aristocratic or upper-middle-class ones so dear to Zweig. Football (soccer, not the American variety) became the measure of all things. Zweig’s theory was that the American civilization that conduced to material comfort and prosperity was so boring that it provoked, by reaction, sensation-seeking:
It is tempting, then, to suppose that there is increasing uniformity in the world. But as with so many things, it depends on which end of the telescope you look down.
When I see young people en masse, I think that they are all the same: They dress the same, their tastes are the same, their interests are the same, etc. And yet, when I speak to them individually, I find that there is the same irreducible individuality to each person. Human beings by their very nature are privileged, or condemned, to be unique.
We see the end-of-the-telescope phenomenon in Shakespeare. When he depicts the lower orders of society as a collective, he depicts them most unflatteringly; they are stupid, unthinking, brutish, and fickle. But when he depicts them as individuals, he has the utmost sympathy for them…
At the end of his article, Zweig tells all his readers who feel as he does that they cannot defeat modern trends, and therefore the best thing for them to do is to retire into a kind of inner immigration, cultivating their own interests quietly without stridently or uselessly condemning what in fact cannot be changed.
- Theodore Dalrymple
Apparently in Saudi Arabia, the epidemic has had a profound social effect. Many of the migrant workers who supplied the country with its cheap labor have returned to their homelands, and thus created an opportunity, or the necessity, for Saudi women to join the workforce, as they have now done in unprecedented numbers.
A third of Saudi women are now either working or seeking work, an increase of 60 percent in only a year or two, a veritable silent revolution.
It is not surprising in the circumstances that they are paid far less than men—their jobs are mostly in the poorly paid sectors—but they earn far more than the migrant workers whom they have replaced. Whether the migrant workers will return when the epidemic is over is an open question: Will the women simply accept to return to their sequestered lives as before, and will the Saudi government wish to continue to economize on its balance of payments consequent upon the replacement of foreigners by Saudis? As for the effect on the countries that export their cheap labor in return for remittances, what will it be?
On a visit to the Gulf a few years ago, I bought a tanzanite ring for my wife. The server in the shop did not own it; he was a migrant laborer, allowed home two weeks every two years. For the rest of the time, he worked 72 hours a week, and lived and slept in a dormitory. He could not have been from the very poorest section of Indian society because he spoke quite good English. His salary was meager, and what he earned in a month I was prepared to spend in a minute without a moment’s reflection. Nevertheless, he was saving money so that he could marry back home, and in another few years would be able to do so.
In the most obvious sense, he was exploited. His employer took advantage of his poverty to extract a large amount of labor from him for little return. And yet he did not strike me as miserable (of course, he could have been acting) or self-pitying. As he himself said, he had made a choice, he had not been press-ganged, and he had come to the conclusion that he was better off accepting the offered conditions than anything else that was available to him. Would Covid-19 and its economic consequences have forced him home?
I would prefer a world in which a man such as he did not have to make the choice that he had had to make, to sacrifice himself for years in order to achieve what comes so easily to many others. But such as he play their part—a tiny part, but a part nonetheless—in improving the world. I found him heroic. Like all true heroes, he was unaware of his heroism.
- Theodore Dalrymple
There was a time—I’m talking of the 1990s, so almost of prehistory—when every bad decision that people made was attributed to lack of self-esteem, rather than to such human phenomena as, say, weakness, folly, cowardice, laziness, or even fear or duress, the first four of which were dismissed as being incurably judgmental and therefore useless as scientific explanation.
The problem with self-esteem is that it is entirely egotistical and self-regarding, unlike self-respect, which is a social virtue and imposes discipline and obligations upon the person who has, or wishes to have, it.
By contrast, self-esteem is like a medal that one pins to one’s own chest merely by virtue of existing. I am, therefore I esteem myself, and I demand that you esteem me too.
Curiously enough, at the height of self-esteem’s popularity most people knew, or at least had some inkling, that the whole idea was completely bogus. Sometimes when patients would say to me, “I have low self-esteem, doctor,” I would reply (admittedly not in every last case), “Well, at least you’ve got one thing right, then.”
Far from becoming angry, they started to laugh, as if they had been caught out in a naughty game that they had been playing. It came to them almost as a relief: they didn’t have to pretend to believe an evident absurdity any more, and then they could begin to examine the real causes of the devastation of their lives, some internal and some external
- Theodore Dalrymple
❝[The Biden administration] has an elective affinity with the architectural elite which despises the opinion of the majority as ignorant, ill-informed and uncomprehending, exactly the charges levelled against those who did not vote for it. The fact that this ignorant, ill-informed and uncomprehending public has no problem whatever in “comprehending” the Taj Mahal or Notre-Dame does not give them pause: …. ❞
Theodore Dalrymple, ‘Elites Choose Ugliness in Federal Architecture, No Matter What the People Prefer’, New English Review, 31 May 2021.
