In this hilarious piece in Taki’s Magazine Dalrymple argues that self-deceptive optimism inevitably leads to bitterness, and it occurs to me that mediocrity and disillusionment are unfairly maligned.

In a pure meritocracy, everyone would find his true, utterly deserved level; but it is a mere prejudice that if there were justice in the world, everyone would be better off. In a pure meritocracy, there would be no paranoid defense against one’s own nullity—one could blame only oneself for it and no one else. That is why the concept of equality of opportunity, besides implying a kind of Brave New World world, is so deeply vicious, and why so many people who promote it are obviously hate-filled. They do not want to serve humanity but torture it.

Of course, they also know that their ideal is not reachable or even approachable. It is, short of cloning and hatcheries, barely even conceivable. Nor do they truly want their ideal to be realized, for then they would have no providential role to play and would have to sink back into the great mass of humanity, their work done. No; they criticize the world from the standpoint of an impossible ideal not to improve the world but to stir resentment, that emotional equivalent of the perpetual motion machine. The resentful are easy to manipulate and willing to confer power on those who offer to liberate them from the supposed causes of their distress. Therefore it is important to keep inequalities of opportunity firmly before men’s minds; important, and easy, too, for it is always the case that if things had been different, things would have been different. Though we are enjoined—less and less frequently, to be sure—to count our blessings, it is far easier and more gratifying to count our curses. It accords with our desire to explain, or explain away, our failure. There are whole university departments set up to train students to do nothing else.

In the Library of Law and Liberty Dalrymple reviews The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Legutko, who, as both a professor of philosophy and a member of “the European Pseudo-Parliament”, and as an observer of both the EU and the Poland of the communist era, sounds like a writer any Dalrymple reader would want to evaluate.

Legutko’s book calls out the similarities between the EU and the totalitarian Poland of his youth, and Dalrymple’s review of it includes descriptions of the current regime that will also be recognizable by any first-hand observer of the “social justice” left:

According to Professor Legutko’s analysis, the similarities that he has observed under communism and the current liberal democratic regime are not attributable to accidents of history or to the activities of a few misguided men, but are the logical consequences of their whole world outlook. And perhaps the single most important similarity is that each of the systems is forward-looking and judges the present not by what has existed in an imperfect past, or by what is possible for human beings given their essential and abiding nature, let alone by any deontological precepts, but by a future state of perfection that the systems responsible for the present will allegedly call into existence.

In arguing that the supposedly enhanced cortisol resulting from fear of discrimination leads to physiological harm, the New England Journal of Medicine uses a hoax to support an already-flawed argument:

Let us overlook the post hoc, ergo propter hoc nature of this reasoning and accept it almost at face value. Clearly, what the authors are trying to establish are the deleterious physiological effects of fear of racial attack (given that chronically raised cortisol levels are bad for you). But the accusations were entirely false, made up and self-dramatizing or self-promoting on the part of the person who made them. They were wicked inventions, excusable only if a certain class of person (black female) were exempt from normal judgment, which would be a deeply condescending attitude to take toward black females or anyone else.

A bout with gout is a reminder of the usefulness of suffering:

I know that the gratitude will not last, because gratitude can never be a chronic emotion. I will forget the pain within the week and take my painless toe for granted again. But still the episode illustrates the point that suffering is necessary for the full appreciation of life. Without some experience of it, we could hardly be aware that we were enjoying anything; and it is why it is so difficult to imagine heaven, where suffering does not and could not exist. We can all imagine, vividly, a thousand hells, but a single heaven is quite beyond our imagination to conceive. That is why the iconography of hell is varied and fascinating, that of heaven dull and boring.

For years the Spectator magazine’s pre-Internet content was not available electronically, but we recently noticed that it now is. And so we are able to provide this link to the very first published item of Dalrymple’s career, A Bit of a Myth. (Though we should really say it’s the first published item of Anthony Daniels’s career, as he had not yet begun using the Dalrymple pseudonym). It adheres to the primary theme of his early writing: opposition to colonialism.

Former Spectator editor Charles Moore once said that Daniels was the only author he has ever chosen to publish on the basis of unsolicited articles, and this piece would seem to have been the unsolicited one that launched his writing career.

Be advised that the piece is poorly formatted and punctuated, seemingly the result of an automated mass upload process.

The absurd questionnaire Dalrymple was required to complete after his submission of a recent article to an American publication causes him, in the August edition of New English Review, to consider the motivations for and effects of such forms:

During my annual appraisal, itself a procedure of doubtful value, my appraiser asked me whether I had any concerns about my own probity. The appraiser was a colleague for whom I had some regard as a man, and he asked me this question only because it was prescribed for him to do so by the form about me that he had to fill.

‘I will answer the question if you answer two questions first,’ I said, and he asked me what they were.

‘The first is, “What kind of man would answer such a question?” and the second is, “What kind of man would ask it?”’

‘Oh, I know,’ he replied, ‘but just answer it to get it over with.’

Of course it was a formality; no dishonest person would reply, ‘Now that you come to ask, I am a little worried by my own dishonesty.’ But to comply with absurd formalities only because compliance is a condition of continued employment is to lose a little of one’s probity, as is to ask so absurd a question because it is required. Hume said that it is seldom that liberty is lost all at once, and the same might be said of probity. It is eroded rather than exploded: death by a thousand procedures.

After arguing that both sides in the abortion debate offer overly simple arguments, and going through what he considers the proper ones, Dalrymple writes:

So how do you frame a law that avoids the indisputable cruelties and hardships occasioned by total prohibition, while not acceding to the uncouth and ill-founded demands of the other side, and avoiding the bogus jurisprudence of Roe v. Wade? Arguments that rely solely on competing rights can result only in shouting matches; they have the psychological effect of limiting the moral imagination. On the other hand, the law must lay down with reasonable predictability and consistency what is permissible and what is not.

There is a limit to what the law can achieve if it is not to become, in effect, the absolute arbiter or dictator of our lives. Therefore, it is up to the population to exercise virtue…

We sometimes write that if you only read one Dalrymple piece this week, let it be this one. That is true of this piece in Taki’s Magazine on social media over-sharing and the related ideas it illuminates: The desire to publicize the details of one’s life (only the positive ones, of course). The “thirst for significance in a mass society”. The wish for the fulfillment of contradictory and mutually-exclusive desires, such as the wish to be judged and not judged, noticed and not noticed, simultaneously. A good read.

The demand for recognition and nonrecognition at the same time is surely one of the reasons for the outbreak of mass self-mutilation in the Western world in an age of celebrity. A person who treats his face and body like an ironmongery store can hardly desire or expect that you fail to notice it, but at the same time demands that you make no comment about it, draw no conclusions from it, express no aversion toward it, and treat him no differently because of it. You must accept him as he is, however he is, because he has an inalienable right to such acceptance. As a professional burglar once asked me, how could I expect him to give up burgling when he was a burglar and burglary was what he did?

In his latest contribution to New English Review Dalrymple devises a test to determine which distastes reveal everyone’s – note: everyone’s – inner authoritarian.

Read the piece here, take the test yourself, and submit your answers in the comments section.

In the course of explaining the principles involved, he offers this (to my mind accurate and insightful) description of the current ideological warfare that marks the present moment:

With the cacophony of opinion that now seems to envelop us every minute of the day, thanks to the media of mass communication, virtue has become the expression of the right ideas, which is to say of ideas that coincide with one’s own. In the beginning was the Word, but the word is now the beginning, the middle and the end. In a logocracy such as ours, he is best whose words are best; and those who say things that differ from our opinion not merely think differently, but are bad people. Those who merely behave badly are not bad, provided they believe the right things; while even the best, kindest or most considerate of personal conduct will not save the reputation of someone who expresses incorrect ideas.