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.
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.
In last week´s Takimag, our favorite doctor returns to the curiously disturbing rise in ugliness—from fashion to rap to architecture and art—in our modern and economically prosperous world.
To dress well likewise takes self-discipline. It also takes effort and imagination—not imagination of a high order, perhaps, but of the minimal kind that requires a person to see himself as others see him. But that implies that others are and should be important in our eyes, which is an affront to our self-importance.