Writing in Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple takes an allergic reaction to the elastic in a pair of cheap socks as the occasion for a nocturnal meditation on the relationship between pleasure and pain and the futility of theodicy.

I think it is a fact of our nature that there could be no pleasure without pain, no goodness without evil, and no beauty without ugliness, though their precise proportions are not fixed. A perfect world would be imperfect, deprived of meaning or significance: Therefore, there is no such possibility as a perfect world. That is why depictions or descriptions of heaven are so much less vivid than those of hell, which are always very lively, if horrifying.

Read it here.

In Quadrant, Dalrymple reflects on the obituary of a colorectal surgeon who died of cancer at fifty, finding in the man’s selfless devotion to his patients a rebuke to his own less purposeful life as well as a puzzle about why a world populated by so many excellent people remains in so lamentable a state.

I find myself veering, or careening, between complacency on the one hand, and despair on the other. If I tell myself that my life is perfectly satisfactory, I accuse myself of callousness or indifference towards all the suffering millions in the world; if I tell myself that the condition of the world is catastrophic because there is so much suffering in the world, I accuse myself of humbug, since I know perfectly well that I take many pleasures, including that of my forthcoming lunch, and that, in my lifetime, I have known many more good people than bad. I feel that I ought to have an indubitably correct attitude, like a tightrope walker high above a circus ring, but I find that it is beyond my ability to find one.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple recounts clearing out the vast accumulation of papers in his house, finding among them a letter from a condemned man, a Nigerian spiritual healer’s visiting card, and an advertising circular for fuss-free cremation: each prompting reflections on suffering, magical thinking, and the modern desire for technical solutions to intractable human problems.

I suppose these papers represented a biography of a kind, since they all referred either to some event in my life, or to an intellectual interest that I must have had at some time during it. It was startling to discover how much of my own life that I did not remember. The past is not only another country where they do things differently, as L.P. Hartley put it, but we seem to have been different people in our own pasts, connected to our present selves by a mere thread of fallible memory.

Read the full essay here.

In The New Criterion, Dalrymple introduces readers to the Polish satirist Sławomir Mrożek, whose absurdist short stories and plays exposed the pretensions, paranoia, and mendacity of life under Communist totalitarianism with a wit that transcends its original context.

Anyone familiar with the Communist world will recognize the Potemkinization of the whole of life that took place under it, when the declamatory, the ersatz, the substitute became the only reality. I myself have witnessed plastic imitation fruit and vegetables put out in celebratory fashion in Pyongyang and sat in Romania watching television footage of immense potato harvests, while outside people queued for hours for a few rotten potatoes that they were by no means certain of securing.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The Telegraph, Dalrymple takes aim at Eli Lilly’s London Underground advertising campaign reassuring people that obesity is not their fault, arguing that the medicalisation of overeating, like the earlier medicalisation of addiction, is part of a broader cultural refusal to acknowledge human weakness and moral responsibility.

All three reasons lead to the elaboration of what in essence is a lie; and with the loss of awareness that Man is a flawed creature goes an inability to sympathise with any weakness. People now think that if you ascribe responsibility to people for their own situation, you are automatically withdrawing all sympathy for them. To judge is viewed as censorious, and censoriousness is horrible. The problem is that not to judge is dehumanising.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple examines the language used by police in the aftermath of the killing of eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana, finding in its bureaucratic euphemisms a symptom of the deeper moral evasion that Orwell warned of in Politics and the English Language.

A later statement by the police said that the suspect had been “neutralized.” This is appalling: it speaks of a human life as if it were an acid to which a base had been added to result in a pH of 7. It is the adoption by the police of the language of dictators.

Read the full essay here.

In The Telegraph, Dalrymple reflects on the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius, placing it in a long historical tradition of plague ships, quarantines, and the atavistic terror of unfamiliar disease.

There is something almost medieval about the situation, however. For nearly 500 years, port cities—starting in the Venetian city of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in Croatia, in the 14th century—enforced a quarantine of people arriving from outside, to ensure that they were not carrying plague with them.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The Critic, Dalrymple notices a poster at several London Underground stations that he identifies it as straightforward political propaganda paid for with public funds.

It is thus an example of the corrupted use of public funds, but we hardly notice it because such use is what we have come to expect of what used to be called public servants but ought now to be called masters of the public.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes issue with a letter to the British Medical Journal objecting to the word “regain” in the context of weight loss, on the grounds that it shifts responsibility from biology to personal inadequacy. He argues that the medicalization of weakness of will, however well-intentioned, divides humanity into agents and automata.

No one says of a very good or kind person that his goodness or kindness is merely biological, and that it is wrong to shift the praise from biology to personal adequacy.

Read the full essay here.