It seems we’ve missed Dalrymple’s last few articles at the Spectator. (The mere fact that he still writes occasionally for the Spectator, where he began his career as a writer and where he made a name for himself, in the most literal sense of that phrase, is cheering news to some of us.) His most recent piece is from May and bemoans the professionalization of the management of British public services:

So long as we have a public service — and I leave aside the contentious question of how far health care and other services should be publicly or privately funded — what we need is amateur, not professional, management. The highest echelons of any public institution must be composed of volunteers. At most they should be rewarded by the refund of their bus fares to and from meetings, and perhaps a CBE or two; under no circumstances should they be rewarded financially.

TD’s page at the Spectator is here

Well, this is interesting. Productivity has been relatively high in France for quite some time, and I have long heard this fact attributed to the stifling wage laws that make it so difficult to fire employees in France that French business owners are discouraged from hiring in the first place and resort to squeezing more work from a relative few. At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple notes that productivity is higher in France than in Great Britain and finds an example in a comparison of French and British burglars:

…the gendarmes (400 of them) had dismantled a network of burglars who had specialised in the burglary of wine-producing chateaus, their booty being not the videos and other electronic apparatuses that are the cynosure of dim British burglars, but fine wines and works of art, as well as cash and cars.

…what is interesting about this story is the way in which refinement has rubbed off even on the gens du voyage [the French gypsies responsible for the burglary]. They know a good vintage when they see it, and can distinguish a work of art from an i-Pad. In Britain they steal for quantity; in France for quality. Just like hours worked.

Read the whole piece at The Salisbury Review

To express disbelief in the concept of animal rights nowadays provokes shock, but such a response is intellectually significant:

The notion of rights seems often to crowd out all other moral considerations. It as if [sic] those who believed in animal rights could conceive of no other reason why animals should be treated decently or humanely than that they were endowed with rights. Without such rights, supposedly, any treatment of them would be permitted. In other words, the concept of rights in this case, as in many others, is a defense against an inner moral vacuum.

Dalrymple at the Library of Law and Liberty

The recent revelation of Harper Lee’s previously unpublished book Go Set a Watchman, and the news of its impending publication, cause Dalrymple to revisit To Kill a Mockingbird, the only book she was previously thought to have written. Writing for The New Criterion, he notes many admirable qualities in the work but ultimately can’t get past its lack of realism, exhibited mostly in its portrayal of both Atticus Finch and the black population of Maycomb as essentially morally perfect. One example:

…as portrayed in the book, blacks are all wise, friendly, God-fearing, generous, honest, uxorious, faithful folks. They live their Christianity, whereas the whites use it only as a stick to beat others with. They seem to be happy rather than unhappy: certainly not as unhappy as the poor whites… If the purpose of social and political arrangements is to bring about a happy contented existence for people of good character, any disturbance of those arrangements in Maycomb at least would seem more to the benefit of the whites, who live in a permanent state of petty irritation and conflict with one another, than to that of the blacks. On this view of the life of blacks in southern Alabama, it should have been the whites singing “Let My People Go.”

Now of course Harper Lee was writing in 1960, when racial equality had by no means been conceded, and when it was still perfectly acceptable in certain quarters to pronounce that blacks were all but a different species, at best hewers of wood and drawers of water, and inclined or condemned by their nature to depravity in need, therefore, of permanent repression. She must have wanted to counteract and shame the still widely held prejudice of the time, and this was a highly honorable thing to do.

But a novel is not a political speech or pamphlet, and so such sentimentality deforms the book and casts doubt on its reliability. For those alert to the implausibility of the portrayal of the black population, the suspicion of emotional manipulation arises. We are being told directly what to feel.

Although many pieces in The New Criterion require a subscription, this one appears not to. You can read it here.

At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple says he couldn’t care less about FIFA, its recent corruption, the investigation into the corruption, the English national team, English football fans, football generally…

On the modern tattooing phenomenon:

…a tattoo differentiates and individuates, while at the same time allowing identification with masses of others. A tattoo allows you to rebel and conform at the same time, eat your cake and have it too. The names of tattoo parlours – Evil in the Needle, for example, or Revolution Ink – often reveal a kind of antinomianism which does not quite have the courage of its lack of convictions.

Dalrymple’s writing often relies on both objective data and his own personal experience. At Psychology Today, he notes the frequent gap between the two:

…it seems to me that the distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance, or by direct experience, is a valid one. The reading of literature is probably the best way of trying to close the gap, Shakespeare being the greatest closer of the gap than any other writer (or at least any other writer known to me). He seems not only to have described but experienced his myriad characters from the inside, as it were; and because of his incomparable literary gifts, he helps us to do so as well. When we read Macbeth, we seem to understand not only Macbeth’s actions but to know what it is actually to be Macbeth, though we have no intention of becoming him ourselves.

Read the rest here

At City Journal, Dalrymple says that, though emboldened by the recent elections, David Cameron has his work cut out for him:

He has promised a referendum on membership of the European Union, a promise that would be difficult even for Houdini to escape; and if it goes against membership, the Scots, who are Europhile but anti-English, might declare their independence and try to remain in the European Union (though it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the Union would have them). Nor would independence be without potential for creating deep divisions, bitterness, and conflict within Scotland itself, though the leadership of the SNP speaks the language of unanimity. The potential for chaos both north and south of the border is enormous.

Dalrymple has been appearing more in the media lately to promote his new book Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality. He sat down with the Chicago Tribune for this interview, which outlines the main arguments of the book:

Q: You lead with Shakespeare’s King Lear saying mental illness is “the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune…we (blame) the sun, the moon and the stars.”

A: Four hundred years later, it’s still true, but we blame psychology instead of astrology. We call it progress. Literature is far more illuminating into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.

And in this interview with Ginni Thomas for the Daily Caller, he talks about the dishonesty inherent in modern political correctness, which encourages people to say what they know isn’t true:

The question is: why has our society become so weak-willed in many respects? It accepts all kinds of obvious untruths and acts as if they were true, and that is a much worse threat than anything from outside. So that for example, just the way we think about social problems is often completely wrong. We treat people as if they were objects rather than subjects, as if they’re not reacting to their own circumstances, in fact. And we give them bad incentives and so on and so forth. So I think the intellectual dishonesty of the West is the greatest threat to our societies. We can’t say what we really think. We can only say what we don’t think (many of us), and that is really the greatest threat. And the only solution to that is for people to speak up and to write, which is what I’ve done — not with any great effect, I must say. But that’s all I can do anyway.