In The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes aim at the sloganeering spirit of our age, from a French town council’s call to “globalize solidarity” to the unctuous piety of an Oxfam shop window.
What of globalized solidarity? I can’t think of anything more depressing; thank goodness that it’s impossible. You might as well ask the lion to show solidarity with the gazelle or the crocodile with the gnu—simply because they share the same continent, Africa.
Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Dalrymple reviews Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian novel about a vast armada of destitute migrants heading for France while the West, paralyzed by guilt and propaganda, proves unable to resist. He argues that the novel’s portrait of spiritual exhaustion has proved uncomfortably prescient.
Dystopian novels are not predictions but projections: they imagine what the world will become if a current trend continues uninterrupted. The difference between prediction and projection is vital but often overlooked. The former is a call to fatalism, the latter a call to action.
In New English Review, Dalrymple takes up the case of Nigel Biggar, the Oxford theologian whose measured defence of the British Empire brought down upon him a campaign of denunciation and professional sabotage.
A relatively small number of ideological fanatics or monomaniacs has managed to institute something approaching a reign of terror in universities, and since people do not like to consider themselves to be terrified, because then they feel that they are cowards, they persuade themselves that what terrifies them is actually true or the truth.
In The American Conservative, Dalrymple observes the lizards on his terrace in France, puzzling over a recent shift toward melanotic coloration and the rituals of their mysterious behavior. The small mysteries of the natural world lead him to reflect on the value of patient scientific observation, the limits of authority, and our own resemblance to creatures unaware of forces looming over them.
I found myself anthropomorphizing, investing the lizards with conscious purposes, as if they were enjoying themselves, or were angry, frightened, outraged, or determined. This, despite the manifest tininess of their brains.
In The American Conservative, Dalrymple considers the career and legacy of the recently deceased Paul Ehrlich, the entomologist-turned-doomsayer whose Population Bomb predicted mass famine in the 1970s. He reflects on the enduring appeal of Malthusianism and the curious human pleasure of contemplating catastrophe.
Two things are certain, however. The first is that mankind cannot get anything just right. The second is that man is the only species that derives pleasure from contemplating its own extinction.
Hard as it is to believe, it has been twenty-five years since Dalrymple’s most popular and celebrated book was published. And now, a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition, featuring a new foreword by Rob Henderson and a new postscript from the author, will be released on April 16. Dalrymple’s key insight remains as powerful as ever: that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims.
“A classic for our times. It is as fundamental for understanding the world we live in as the three R’s.” —Thomas Sowell
In The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes President Trump’s wearing of a baseball cap at a ceremony for fallen servicemen as the starting point for a broader meditation on the triumph of informality over ceremoniousness, arguing that the loss of distinctions in dress and speech has made the world sadder and more vulgar.
The romantic idea that it is only the inner being that counts is, of course, a license for degradation.
At City Journal, Dalrymple offers a rich portrait of Hay-on-Wye, the small Welsh border town that became the world’s first to make the sale of secondhand books its principal business. He weaves together the town’s many literary associations, from the Reverend Kilvert’s charming diary to Bruce Chatwin’s novel and the infamous Hay Poisoner, and celebrates the eccentric entrepreneurialism of Richard Booth, who declared himself king and built an empire of books.
I am not a bibliophile but a bibliomaniac: I have always lived partly through books, and now I live predominantly through them.
In The American Conservative, Dalrymple reflects on the omnipresence of digital surveillance, from the private detectives of his parents’ generation to the creepy precision of modern algorithms.
Surveillance is to us what electricity was to James Thurber’s aunt, that is to say leaking all over the house.