Over at Takimag, our anthropocentric doctor considers the disturbing death wish trend on the part of many modern Westerners.

This seems to me a very dismal attitude, and underlying it is a dislike of human life as he who holds this attitude has lived it. He has been born into a civilization, he thinks, in which he sees nothing good, worth continuing, or contributing toward. For him, it would have been better if it had never existed. And this amounts to a death wish, not merely personal but civilizational.

In his weekly Takimag column, our well-traveled doctor recalls a recent informative conversation with a perceptive Nigerian taxi driver in London, which allows him to think back to his many visits to that west African country.

This is lazy, but not necessarily stupid, for taxi drivers are often well-informed, having overheard a great deal; and they are besides blessed with that knowledge of human nature that derives from experience rather than from reading or theorizing. They are often derided as being prejudiced, but there is no one more prejudiced than he who has a theory to preserve against all evidence.

The good doctor takes a firm stand against the seemingly arbitrary arrest of the former leader of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon, as another example of the deterioration of the rule of law in the West.

But to arrest someone and then release him or her almost immediately without charge seems to be the procedure of a police state. It’s no excuse that Sturgeon was herself no friend of freedom, that in fact she circumscribed freedom by promoting draconian laws against hate speech. The point about the rule of law is that it extends its protection to everyone, whether or not they personally deserve it: for it’s precisely this that makes it morally superior to arbitrary rule.

Over at Quadrant, the dubious doctor takes his faithful readers through some framed tyrants in his kitchen, considers banknotes resulting from hyperinflation, and laments the possibility of cashless society.

The idea that the abolition of cash will put an end to tax evasion and trafficking is a strange manifestation of the belief that man is perfectible. If the conditions are right, he will behave himself like a choirboy: the urge to traffic will disappear with the possibility of trafficking.

In his Takimag column, Theodore Dalrymple comments on the creeping wokeism in book publishing, which most clearly manifests itself with the absurd tendency of capitalizing the word black.

This is no doubt a fashion, but it does not seem a purely spontaneous one. If there is no central enforcement, there might as well be one. The presses have been invaded by the termites of wokeness so thoroughly that there is no need of central direction.

Over at City Journal, the skeptical doctor lambastes the self-serving British political class for its tendency to resort to democratic demagoguery in times of crisis.

The permanent possibility of demagoguery is the price that must be paid for universal suffrage. Politicians, if they desire office (and few do not desire it), must pander to electorates who may not be very logical, consistent, or well-informed. People want medicines without side effects and laws without unintended consequences, or even foreseeable ones. Demagoguery creates problems, then worsens them with the solutions it proposes to what it has caused in the first place.

In the June issue of The Critic, our curious doctor wonders about which crimes go wonderfully right after reading a report of a gang-related murder of a child in The Daily Telegraph.

When police spokesmen these days report a murder to the press and public — for example the owner of a corner shop killed by a young tyke who was trying to rob him — they often say, “This was an armed robbery that went tragically wrong.” A robbery that went happily right would have been one in which the redistribution of property had been effected and no one had been injured.

Over at Takimag, the dissenting doctor ponders the meaning behind the books of the recently deceased Martin Amis, and disputes the lefty Guardian‘s description of Amis as “an era-defining novelist.”

I suppose the problem arises when the lower depths predominate; that is to say, when much of society comes to resemble its former lower depths, whose way of life is fashionable rather than merely the object of prurient interest. When Martin Amis said that the people who wanted signed copies of his books were sleazeballs, or what might once have been called degenerates, I do not think he was being self-critical, but rather self-congratulatory.

In the June issue of New Criterion, our critical doctor considers two interesting plays from the oeuvre of John Galsworthy, who was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.

For myself, I can’t quite decide whether the internals or externals are the more important to literature. After all, in the absence of consciousness, nothing in the universe could be of the slightest importance; conversely, only a very spoiled, self-obsessed, and superficial person could deny the impact of the external on the internal.