Dalrymple’s Oh, to be in England column for the Autumn 2015 edition of City Journal has just been posted at the magazine’s website, and it compares American architecture to that of Europe, with some conclusions I found slightly surprising. For while he prefers older architecture, he doesn’t actually abhor modern architectural styles in America, where he finds them at least more fitting than in Europe:

The upward thrust of American architecture has been copied throughout the world, successfully in Asia but unsuccessfully in Europe, where skyscrapers tend to be shabby, unconvincing, and out of place. The reasons for this lack of imitative success are several. First, such architecture requires either enormous capital or cheap labor, or both…

American modernist architecture is convincing compared with the European variety because America is modern, whereas Europe, ever since the end of World War I, has merely tried to be modern, limping sadly after a model. American modernity is native to its soil. European modernity is highly ideological, or at least theoretical, with either fascist or Communist roots.

Read the rest here

Life in France is understandably different after the recent terrorist attacks, as Dalrymple reports from the scene:

On Christmas Eve, a group of 12 Muslims in the northern French town of Lens gathered round to protect a church where midnight mass was about to be performed. They wanted, they said, to give a different and better impression of Islam from that which is increasingly taking hold in Europe.

No doubt this was a well-intentioned gesture on the part of the 12 individuals, decent people all. But it could hardly achieve the desired end: for from whom was the church in Lens in need of protection? There is only one possible answer, an answer not likely to alter the image of Islam…

Most of our thoughts are banal, says Dalrymple at Salisbury Review. For good evidence, look to the comments book at art exhibits. An example: “Necessary to clean the glass cases to protect the works. Too many finger-prints. Thank you.”

Dalrymple looks at a recent study reported in the British Medical Journal that attempts to examine whether successful political candidates live shorter lives as a result of wielding political power.

The authors found that, allowing for life-expectancy at election, those who were successful and therefore achieved office had a reduced life span. They lived, on average, 2.7 years fewer than their unsuccessful opponents. Of course, one should not make the elementary mistake of supposing that a statistical association implies causation; but it is nonetheless tempting to say that power not only corrupts, it kills. It is not necessary to add that absolute power kills absolutely.

Read the full piece here

At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple writes of a recent hospital visit (to aid a friend) that he found surprisingly relaxing and even comforting:

…not only were the chairs in the waiting area comfortable, but there was no electronic stimulation or compulsory entertainment whatsoever: no television, no pop music punctuated by drivelling presenters, no advertisements, no bullying propaganda. There was no assumption by the management that, rather than being left to our own devices, we needed to have the gap in our minds filled with the weather forecast, the latest stock prices or football results, sexual scandals in high places, scenes of war, episodes of soap opera, cookery programmes, or any other type of stimulation that acts on the mind as a food mixer acts on vegetables.

Read the entire piece here

Here is one thing that makes Theodore Dalrymple happy: a recent paper in the Lancet that “asked whether happiness was good for health and found that it wasn’t”. The study indicates that happiness and good health are statistically associated with one another, but the direction of causation is not quite as simple or as banal as perhaps the authors hoped.

Although I know little of his work, I was not at all surprised to learn from this recent piece at Salisbury Review that D.H. Lawrence hated the upper class, but I didn’t know he had expressed his hatred so literally, in the form of a poem called How Beastly the Bourgeois Is. According to Dalrymple, his feelings were “near-genocidal”.

Dalrymple at Salisbury Review: “It is odd that the Guardian should have published an essay by [former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams], titled A Summons to Writers” on the subject of good prose, “for Dr Williams is a writer who generally avoids cliché only by resort to vagueness or obscurity.”

Click for examples

An appeals court in South Africa recently changed the verdict in Oscar Pistorius’s case from culpable homicide to murder on the grounds that Pistorius did not have the right to kill his girlfriend even were it possible, as the court previously determined, that Pistorius mistook her for an intruder, because he did not have grounds to believe himself in danger.

While believing Pistorius guilty, Dalrymple argues that the appeals court’s reasoning is nonsense:

What could he have supposed the intruder had intruded for? It would not have been a social visit—it must have been for some criminal purpose. And a very high percentage of intruders into houses in South Africa are armed; the murder rate there is very high. Moreover, Pistorius did not have his prostheses on and would therefore have been particularly vulnerable and unable to take avoiding action.

So if it was possible that Pistorius really thought there was an intruder, it was reasonable for him to think that his life was in danger. This was not a ‘gentlemen of France, fire first’ kind of situation.

Read the whole piece at Taki’s Magazine.