In the September edition of New Criterion, the good doctor reflects on his recent visit to Porto, Portugal, and the cultural degradation he encounters around him. Another deep, classic Dalrymple travel essay.

What was so striking about the crowd in Porto—a crowd from all over Europe with a fair sprinkling of Americans—quite apart from the prevalence of self-mutilation by tattoo and piercing, was the complete absence of any sense of personal dignity. This is not the same as absence of ego, however; indeed, it is the very reverse.

In this week’s Takimag, our bibliophile doctor shares with his readers his dream of cataloging his vast library and some of his more curious purchases.

But for me, my library is a kind of autobiography, or at least a record of serial obsessions. It is undecipherable for anyone but me, which of course is part of its charm: Everyone needs a secret garden of one kind or another.

Back at Takimag, the dubious doctor disputes the sterling reputation of Simone Weil after reading a newspaper article, which describes her time as a guest at Gustave Thibon’s farmhouse during the Second World War.

We should neither try to prick the bubble, reputation, simply because it is reputation, nor bow down before it. In short, we are perpetually called upon to use our judgment, as best we can.

The unconvinced doctor returns to the pages of The Spectator with an insightful essay on the medical community’s recent mistaken tendency to treat obesity as a disease.

NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) seems by its language in its report about the anti-obesity drug, semaglutide (Ozempic), to veer towards the red corner, for it describes the fat as people living with overweight or living with obesity, more or less as I live with my wife. Inside every fat person, then, there really is a thin person trying to get out, that is to say the real him. His obesity is adventitious, an unwelcome stranger, like a tumour.

Over at Law & Liberty, the critical doctor calls out the former woke CEO of National Westminster Bank, Alison Rose, for having her staff compile a 40-page dossier on Nigel Farage before unceremoniously tossing him out of the bank. Thankfully, she has since resigned over this incident, which incidentally caused the bank’s value to fall by over $1 billion. Hope springs eternal.

Still, the tendency to moral grandiosity combined with a lack of elementary scruples, as illustrated in this episode, is worrying. Would one trust such people if the political wind changed direction? Their views would change, but the iron moral certainty and self-belief would remain the same, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. How many meetings have I sat through in which some apparatchik has claimed to be passionately committed to a policy, only to be just as passionately committed to the precise opposite when his own masters demand a change of direction?! The Coutts story is one of how totalitarianism can flourish.

In this week’s Takimag column, the skeptical doctor speaks out against the overrated personal characteristic of ambition, tells of his reliable and wise French gardener, and admonishes Nietzsche for his enthusiastic support of the decline of the Christian faith.

I grant that ambition is sometimes, or often, necessary, but it is a virtue, like bravery, that is not self-standing. To be brave in a bad cause is worse than to be cowardly in the same cause. And it hardly takes much historical knowledge to realize that ambition can be the closest ally of monstrous evil.

In the current issue of The Critic, Dr. Dalrymple recaps the downfall of the (in)famous Dr. Raoult with his much-touted but ultimately bogus COVID treatment.

Hubris is followed by nemesis, however, and boastfulness provokes enmity, even (or perhaps especially) when its contentions are justified or partly justified. It was his claim to have found a simple, cheap and effective cure to Covid-19 that made him a media star and turned his head.

In his weekly Takimag column, the curious doctor recounts to his loyal readers the wonders of nature that he regularly observes from his library on his French estate.

The cicadas were kicking up their usual racket, and I thought of La Fontaine’s fable. In it, the cicada has spent the whole summer singing, but when the north wind begins to bite has nothing left to eat. She asks her neighbor, the ant, for food, which she, the ant, has spent the summer accumulating for wintertime. “You sang all the summer, though,” replies the ant. “Very well, now you can dance.”

 

Over at The Epoch Times, the judicious doctor calls into question the recent admonition of one of the policemen involved in the Floyd case by a Minnesota judge for not showing the necessary level of remorse.

As revenge is a dish best eaten cold, so remorse is an emotion that should bring no tangible reward—such as a reduced prison sentence. Indeed, in conditions in which expressions of remorse are rewarded, not to express remorse could be taken as a sign of truthfulness and probity.