Monday Books has published a new excerpt from their wonderful Dalrymple collection “Second Opinion”. The leavening humor in this book makes it an extremely enjoyable read for Dalrymple devotees accustomed to his usual, more serious take on British slum culture:

WHY THE BRITISH want to reproduce themselves is a question which isas puzzling in its own way as that of the origin of life.

Their existence is so wretched, so utterly lacking in anythingreasonably resembling a purpose, so devoid of those things that makehuman life worthwhile (I am merely paraphrasing what thousands have toldme) that it is a marvel that they should go in for children.

I suppose the nearest I can come to an explanation is that they hope achild will supply the want that they feel: the triumph of hope overexperience, for they soon discover that a British child merely addschores to emptiness.

Dalrymple’s forthcoming “satire on the health-and-safety culture” is now available for order at Monday Books. It ships within the next couple of weeks. You can order it here.

His 1995 satire So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer is appended to the book, and with such a reasonable price, readers get quite a good deal. So Little Done is especially popular in the Netherlands, where it was made into a one-man play last year. If The Examined Life is as similar as it appears to be, it should get its point across in a very humorous way.

Monday Books had also planned an August release for Anything Goes, his first-ever collection of entirely new essays, but that has been pushed back to early next year.

Several people have asked about or mentioned Dalrymple’s new book Spoilt Rotten. I don’t have a copy yet myself, so I can’t say much about it. I have heard from its publisher, Gibson Square Books, and it appears the book is now available but only in the UK. I ordered a copy via Amazon.com (the American site) through a reseller. Commenter Rachel says here that she bought it from Amazon UK and had it shipped to Israel, so you should be able to get it that way as well.

When the book first appeared on Amazon UK a few weeks ago, its subtitle was “How Britain is Ruined by Its Children”, but it has changed to “The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality”, suggesting that the book makes a wider argument about society as a whole and not just the unique problems caused by modern child-rearing. I know that two years ago Dalrymple was working on a book on sentimentality, so it appears this is that book.

Some people hate the cover, but I find it hilarious.

The eminent David Pryce-Jones has a brief review of Dalrymple’s next book “The New Vichy Syndrome” on his blog at National Review Online, saying at one point:

As admirers of the writing and intellect of Dr. Anthony Daniels aka Theodore Dalrymple, we pride ourselves on our knowledge of the man’s work. So imagine our surprise, to say nothing of the blow to our egos, when we discovered a book, written by him over twenty years ago, that was formerly completely unknown to us. In 1989, Daniels published a satire called Filosofa’s Republic under the name Thursday Msigwa, described on the book jacket as “the pen-name of   who says in a letter to the publisher that ‘biographical details interfere with the proper estimate of an author’s work,’ and added that disclosure was in any case impolitic for him in his present country of residence.” Yes, that is a blank where the name “Anthony Daniels” should be. At the time of the book’s publication, Daniels was still covering African politics for the Spectator under another pseudonym, Edward Theberton, and all of this mystery was necessitated by Daniels’ criticisms, both in this book and in the Spectator, of African political leaders who did not receive criticism warmly.

The “filosofa” in question here is “His Excellency The Brother-President of The United Democratic Human Mutualist Republic of Ngombia Filosofa Dr. Cicero B. Nyayaya”, clearly a satire on Julius Nyerere, the President of Tanzania during much of the time that Daniels lived there and who referred to himself as mwalimu or teacher. Where Nyerere had his Arusha Declaration, Nyayaya has his Harisha Declaration. Like Nyerere, Filosofa implements a rigid political structure designed to provide control at the most granular level possible. He calls it “The Law of Eights”, and it requires that “every eighth household should be represented [meaning, monitored] by a Party member”, eight of whom report to a higher-ranking Party member, and so on. Also like Nyerere, Filosofa promotes a political theory (“Human Mutualism”) that, while claiming to be “neither communist nor anticommunist, but simply the expression in the African context of the highest ideals of Man”, nevertheless embraces all the hallmarks of communism: collectivized farming, forced equality and one-party rule.

If the internal contradictions inherent in Filosofa’s ridiculously long title haven’t already betrayed any claim of devotion to equality, then surely the nature of his political hierarchy does so. But while Filosofa’s politics might suggest menace and hardship, what actually results is irrelevance and futility. Daniels divides the book into chapters that begin with one of Filosofa’s maxims and end with a vignette from daily life in fictional Ngombia (based on Daniels’ own experiences in Tanzania) that shows that maxim to be completely ineffectual against the tide of local culture. Filosofa’s promises of justice are juxtaposed with scenes of backroom judicial corruption, and his calls for “a new kind of Man” are shown to be helpless against normal human vice. But Daniels isn’t criticising communism alone. He also demonstrates the inability of religious missionaries (both African and European) to change people’s behavior, and he therefore seems to suggest that foreign ideas of all kinds find it hard to take root in African soil.

His argument is serious, but his heart is light. Daniels clearly has great fondness for the people he met in Africa and enjoys telling these stories. Although this is officially a work of fictional storytelling (his only one), it reads much like his travel books, and to an avid reader of his work, Anthony Daniels the sincere travel writer sometimes seems to poke through the satire. This complicates the work’s already complex provenance. The story is told in the first-person by a narrator who is a white, English accountant, but Daniels chose an African pseudonym. The book jacket says “Thursday Msigwa… [writes] through the eyes of a white visitor to Ngombia”, so is Anthony Daniels writing as an African who is writing a fictional satire as a white Englishman?

It doesn’t matter. The characters are too likeable, the stories too charming and the point made too well for the reader to care.

(Note: Monday Books has just released the new book, which you can buy here.)

Theodore Dalrymple has tried for years to get his City Journal essays published in book form in his native Britain. While City Journal is an American publication, the essays, published under a column entitled “Oh, to be in England!”, deal almost exclusively with the parlous state of British society. Three separate collections have been released to wide acclaim in the US, but no publisher in the subject country has been interested until Monday Books came along. Given the undeniable quality of the material and the quantity of his other published work in Britain, it is difficult not to credit his claim to have been stymied by an intellectual climate opposed to his views. Perhaps it is not surprising that the intellectual leaders that Dalrymple claims have driven the nation into an economic, social and cultural ditch deeper than any in the Western world should be so hostile to criticism.

Although it shares a title with the most recent American collection, this is a new book, with three original essays not available elsewhere and a selection of City Journal pieces tailored to address a list of problems that has gotten longer and more obvious over the last year. The essays “Delusions of Honesty” and “What Goes On In Mr. Brown’s Mind?” consider the policies and philosophies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, whose economic mismanagement has recently become visible to all, with an enormous expansion of public debt and a devalued currency. According to Dalrymple, the economic growth under their leadership “was more apparent than real”, and their actions and rhetoric have exhibited the kind of intellectual and moral corruption seen in the recent Parliamentary expenses scandal. Under their watch, the public sector has grown while the private sector has shrunk, and as a consequence about forty percent of the British citizenry are now “direct dependents of the state”, either through government employment or welfare.

“The Roads to Serfdom” and “How Not To Do It” outline the causes and effects of such a growth in state power, showing how the embrace of collectivism promotes policies that over time erode the national character: “large numbers of people corrupted to the very fiber of their being by having been deprived of responsibility, purpose, and self-respect, void of hope and fear alike, living in as near to purgatory as anywhere in modern society can come.” The collapse of religion has left some segments of British society with few sources of meaning or morality. No wonder they end up celebrating and rewarding the debased and profane, which Dalrymple illustrates in the opening essay by recounting the on-air conduct of the BBC’s Jonathan Ross.

Dalrymple exposes the worst of this mentality by emphasizing its affect on rates of crime. In spite of the official statistics, which purport to show little increase in criminal activity, the public experience of crime in Britain continues to grow, and the statistics are less believable daily. Concerned more with proving their liberal credentials, the police are fearful of even recording crime. The cases they do record seldom result in conviction, and conviction rarely results in adequate punishment. The police are now “like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate its political masters.” The few criminals that are incarcerated are treated as if they are mentally ill, while the mentally ill are treated as if they are criminals — or else not treated at all. Of course, the citizens made most vulnerable by such policies are those few who are truly disadvantaged, who are least able to defend themselves and whose interests are supposedly served by the state.

“Opiate Lies” summarizes Dalrymple’s 2007 book Romancing Opiates (published in the UK as Junk Medicine) and demonstrates how crime has driven drug use, rather than the reverse. “Don’t Legalize Drugs”, which also appeared in the earlier compilation Our Culture, What’s Left of It, is surely one of the best and wisest short works on the subject of legalization. As with much of these essays, it is all the more powerful for its acknowledgment of opposing views. Time after time in the book, Dalrymple makes concessions that demonstrate reasonableness and intellectual honesty. Even if much of Britain’s material progress is illusory, British citizens are today undoubtedly wealthier. Many past policies were undeniably harsh, so that merely returning to the past, were it even possible, can not be a solution.

Dalrymple places most of the blame for the nation’s decline on intellectuals who advocated the sweeping away of traditional British standards and values to be replaced by a devotion to equality of outcome, moral relativism and multiculturalism. “Ibsen and His Discontents” argues that the brilliantly talented Norwegian playwright almost single-handedly invented modern theater, even while his works displayed an enthusiasm for jettisoning moral precepts necessary to any civilized society in the utopian belief that human life could be made free of dissatisfaction. With the acceptance in Britain of this kind of disdain for one’s cultural inheritance, newer generations of Britons lack even the most basic appreciation for or even knowledge of their country’s history and culture. And freed of the responsibility for teaching that history faithfully, academics can pursue their own self-interest by claiming that modern problems are so complex that only they can see their true nature. This is “How Criminologists Foster Crime”. But in this collection, Dalrymple also praises writers like Anthony Burgess, J.G. Ballard and Arthur Koestler, whose work rejects many aspects of the new consensus.

Much of Dalrymple’s evidence about the decline of British culture comes from outside the liberal intellectual establishment, from his extensive experience working with underclass patients but also from a new class of similar writers who, like Dalrymple, work inside various aspects of the British bureaucracy: David Fraser, a probation officer whose book A Land Fit for Criminals exposes the fraudulent scheme of the entire modern, British criminal justice system; Police Constable David Copperfield, writer of an increasingly popular blog and a book, Wasting Police Time, both of which explain how devotion to furthering the cause of political correctness now trumps the most basic police work; and Frank Chalk, a teacher whose book It’s Your Time You’re Wasting “tells essentially the same story, this time with regard to education”. The work of these latter two have also been published by Monday Books, which describes itself as “an independent publisher specialising in strongly-written non fiction”, suggesting that perhaps an alternative view is gaining ground.

The establishment will no doubt reject Dalrymple’s views. The Guardian has already reviewed the book, and not surprisingly they are dismissive, with the reviewer not even feeling obligated to back up his raw assertions (probably because he can’t). But it increasingly seems as though the man in the stre
et knows, contrary to what he is being told, that something is terribly wrong.