In last week’s Takimag, our distressed doctor contemplates the tempting emotion of hatred and why it should feel so prevalent in our modern, prosperous age.
This brought me to reflect on the nature of modern hatreds. There is no new emotion under the sun, of course, but it seems to me that hatred is now in the very air that we breathe, in a greater concentration than at any time in my life that I can remember.
In the December issue of New English Review, our nostalgic doctor heads off to a small corner of northern Wales to celebrate his 75th birthday. We wholeheartedly wish Theodore Dalrymple a very happy birthday and many more years of good health, wisdom, and joviality!
The Wales of today seems to me savourless, merely a small country in thrall to a failed materialism. For the Wales of today, it seems, material success is all, and yet it repeatedly elects politicians who do everything possible to obstruct such success. Greed and resentment tussle for hegemony, with resentment always winning.
Back at Takimag, Dr. Dalrymple takes issue with an absurd quote from a modern psychologist in a book he happened to open during a visit to a friend’s bathroom.
We would like to wish our readers a peaceful and blessed Advent.
Self-love is like self-esteem, according to this philosophy: It is something to which one has a right merely because one draws breath. But in fact, one is already lost if one even considers the question of whether one loves or esteems oneself. One is already on the royal road to egotism and self-absorption.
In the autumn issue of City Journal, the skeptical doctor opines on the anti-immigrant rioting in Britain over the summer, the surprising reaction from the left-liberal elites, the ongoing social and cultural decay, and the completely irresponsible immigration policy of the British state.
One of the riots’ ironies (if they were merely an episode and not the shape of things to come) was that liberal intellectuals rediscovered the social value of punishment, which they had previously denied, both on pragmatic and philosophical grounds. Punishment did not work, they had long argued: it neither deterred nor reformed.
Over at Takimag, our genteel doctor has an axe to grind with various members of the Western intellectual and celebrity classes when it comes to obnoxious public displays of vulgarity and coarseness.
Perhaps they believe that by public coarseness other people will fail to notice that they are, in fact, part of a rarefied elite, and therefore will feel no dangerous envy toward them. They feel that they ought, for reasons of political philosophy, to be egalitarian, but they don’t really want to be equal, either.
Dalrymple’s new book On the Ivory Stages has just been published and is available on all Amazon sites worldwide. On the Ivory Stages is in the same genre as These Spindrift Pages, in that it features Dalrymple’s thoughts on what he has been reading. As you probably know, Dalrymple can hardly read anything without having interesting thoughts about the writer, the ideas expressed, the larger historical context or something tangential. What from most writers would seem trivial or shallow often seems, in his hands, important and engrossing. There is no overall theme to the book, but it reads as a series of small and interrelated essays, and as always there is the sheer beauty of his writing.
To quote at length from one passage:
Steven Runciman’s three volume A History of the Crusades contains an implicit explanation of the attraction of books signed or dedicated by their authors, or once owned by famous or distinguished people. Runciman was a man who, without being a fully-fledged believer, was always interested in the occult and the paranormal, and he explains the development of the cult among early Christians of saintly relics:
Authorities such as Prudentius and Ennolus taught that divine succour could be found at the grave [of the early Christian saints], and that their bodies should be able to work miracles. Men and women would now travel far to see holy relics. Still more, they would try to acquire one to take it home and set it in their local sanctuary.
In the same way:
To stand where those that we reverence once stood to see the very sites where they were born and toiled and died, gives us a feeling of mystical contact with them and is a practical expression of our homage.
Surely the desire for signed or dedicated copies of books, or those that once belonged to the famous (or infamous), partakes of an attenuated form of this mysticism?
As it happens, my copy of this three-volume work is what is called an association copy, that is to say it was once in the possession of, or associated with, a person of some note. In this case, it was a man called Ian Samuel, of whom I had not heard before I bought the books (in Tunbridge Wells). The internet permitted me to trace him with ease, the inscriptions of the books being as follows: Vol. 1, Ian Samuel, Cairo, 1951; Vol. 2, Ian Samuel, Damascus; Vol. 3, Ian Samuel, Miswills House, Turner’s Hill, Surrey, Oct. 1954. I deduced from all this, correctly as it turned out, that Samuel had been a diplomat. I quote from the Daily Telegraph obituary:
Adrian Christopher Ian Samuel was born on August 20 1915 in Colchester and educated at Rugby and St John’s College, Oxford, where he read modern languages. Deciding on a career in the Foreign Service, he learnt Arabic to add to his French, German, Spanish and Turkish; his first postings were to Beirut, Tunis and Trieste.
His career was interrupted by the war, and he became a bomber pilot. He sank a German submarine.
… a U-boat was spotted three miles away. Despite heavy anti-aircraft fire from the surfaced submarine, he dived from 2,000 ft and dropped depth charges. His rear gunner saw the U-boat heel (sic) over and submerge. Then, as Samuel circled above, the submarine reappeared with the bows at an acute angle. He attacked again, and U-169, which had left Kiel to join a Seewolf group, sank vertically with all hands.
It is a tribute to the horrors of war that Samuel must have rejoiced at his success. Such is the effect of war on mentality, no doubt here with justification. Still, when one thinks of the men drowning in their steel tube…
And there follows a description of the rest of Samuel’s vivid life with other interesting tangents.
You can buy the book here in the US or here in the UK — or use your own country’s Amazon site.
In the November issue of The Critic, our relentless doctor excoriates attempts to portray Brutalist architecture as anything but monstrous, ugly, and soul-crushing designed by debased, fascistic architects with totalitarian impulses.
There seems to be a propaganda campaign afoot to try to persuade the public that the architectural style known as Brutalism has been other than an aesthetic, social and urban disaster. It is as if the National Association of Thugs were trying to persuade the public that being robbed in the street at knifepoint were a life-enhancing experience.
In the November edition of New Criterion, our bibliophile doctor evaluates another book related to incarceration—this time dealing with the letters of history´s most famous prisoners.
Please note that this essay is behind a paywall.
Conversely, I was often much surprised at how well people of intelligence or education coped with the miseries and hardships of prison—often better than those whose normal train of life much more closely resembled prison conditions.
In the October issue of New Criterion, Theodore Dalrymple reviews a book by a young academic covering the historical development of the idea of incarceration as punishment.
Please note that this essay is behind a paywall.
In fact, prisons in their present incarnation, which seem to us so indispensable a part of modern existence, are not by any means immemorial; they are less ancient than hot chocolate.