(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.

Dalrymple is well known for his eloquent and meaningful essays, but the travel journals of his early writing career are not as familiar to most readers. In these books, a man of broad education goes curious and open-minded on journeys through places where difficulty and conflict raise the fundamental questions of human existence. Below, for example, are a few lines from Sweet Waist of America: Journeys Around Guatemala. How many travel books contain lines like these?

The wrecked cathedral, once grandiose rather than grand, now deconsecrated and deserted, looks out over wasteland in which graze zebu cattle. The whole enormous edifice, with its crumbled walls of reinforced cement painted to look like marble, seems to mock the vanity of Man’s aspirations. Why rebuild when everything is destined for decay? The grass which grows in the cracks in the floor and bends before the wind that gusts through the ruined church made me think of six words: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The detritus of sanctity lies everywhere, unclaimed…

We wanted to make sure that everyone saw the comment left by Dan Collins of Monday Books regarding their plans for new Dalrymple releases over the next year or so.

We’re about to publish (in the UK) four (and possibly more) Theodore Dalrymple books.

The first, ‘Not With A Bang But A Whimper’, will be available in May (it contains some of the essays in the US edition of NWAB, some from ‘Our Culture, What’s Left Of It’, some from ‘Life At The Bottom’ and some new material.

Later in the year we will publish ‘Second Opinion’, a collection of some Spectator pieces written under that title and under ‘If Symptoms Persist’.

Next year we will publish ‘Anything Goes’ – a further collection of new material and other material previously published overseas.

Finally, we will publish two brief satires in one volume (one of these is his serial killer work, ‘So Little Done’, and the other a novella about the British health system.

best

Dan Collins

It will be interesting to see how they combine the essays from the three City Journal compilations into one book geared to the British market, and it’s great that some of that material is finally getting published in book form in the country that is its chief subject. Dalrymple is always shouting into the wind, culturally speaking, and I hope this book breaks through.

I am probably most excited about Second Opinion, as I believe his brief Spectator columns are some of his most clever and funniest work. The more I read the two If Symptoms Persist books, the more I appreciate their concise brilliance, and as those books are out-of-print, I look forward to that type of material receiving another chance.

And it goes without saying that I anxiously await the new material.

The publishing house Monday Books announced in this blog post on Friday that they have agreed to publish new collections of Dalrymple essays in the UK next year. We will let you know when more information is available.

Monday Books describes themselves as “an independent publisher specialising in strongly-written non fiction across a wide range of subject areas”, so Dalrymple certainly seems to fit right in. I took a look at their current titles, and many of them look very interesting.

Ivan R. Dee has just published the newest collection of City Journal essays by Theodore Dalrymple. The book is now available for purchase at Amazon and, I presume, your own preferred outlet.

Not with a Bang but a Whimper collects 19 essays published between 2004 and 2008 and includes many of his most discussed essays from that time, such as “What the New Atheists Don’t See” and “The Gift of Language”. We will be reviewing and summarizing the book in due time. For now, the summary from the book jacket is reproduced below. And why not take this opportunity to buy a print subscription to the publication that made this all possible: City Journal, one of the best and most beautiful magazines in America.

“No writer today is more adept and incisive than Theodore Dalrymple in exploring the state of our culture and the ideas that are changing our ways of life. His brilliant new collection of writings follows on the extraordinary success of his earlier books, Life at the Bottom and Our Culture, What’s Left of It.

In Not with a Bang But a Whimper, he takes the measure of our cultural decline, noting that our current age seems exceptional in the peculiarity of its unease: “Never in human history have people lived such long and pain-free lives; never have so many people, and so high a proportion of people, had so much freedom to choose how to live, what goals to pursue, and how to divert themselves. On the other hand, never have so many people felt anxious and depressed, and resorted to pills to ease their distress. Mankind has labored long and hard to produce a cornucopia for itself, only to discover that the cornucopia does not bring the happiness expected, but only a different kind of anxiety.”

Mr. Dalrymple’s special attention is to the British experience–its bureaucratic muddle, oppressive welfare mentality, and aimless young–all produced by people and programs in pursuit of democracy and freedom. He shows how terrorism and the growing numbers of Muslim minorities have changed public life in Britain and elsewhere. Also in the book are Mr. Dalrymple’s trenchant observations on artists and ideologues, and on the treatment of criminals and the mentally disturbed, his area of medical interest.

The collapse of confidence that many people experience is here stringently articulated by one of our keenest social observers.”