Theodore Dalrymple opines on the well-known Second Amendment of the United States Constitution over at Law & Liberty.
I am in sympathy with Originalists who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted as literally as possible. Still, they should not abandon the position once it yields a result different from the one that they would like. This is dishonest.
Over at City Journal, our favorite doctor has penned a disparaging obituary on the prime ministership of Boris Johnson.
In retrospect, Johnson did not deserve to be prime minister. The problem for Britain is that it isn’t clear that anyone else on the current scene does, either.
In his Takimag column, our self-critical doctor does some serious soul searching after rushing to judgment on a bus trip.
Therefore, we cannot shy away from judgment any more than we can shy away from the atmosphere around us. What is not possible cannot be desirable, except in the minds of self-indulgent utopians; but though we cannot avoid judgment, we can avoid sticking to our judgments through thick and thin, irrespective of evidence against them. Therefore, we must hold them with a certain lightness, though not frivolity. We must be prepared to relinquish them.
In the July edition of New English Review, the good doctor considers the conflict between obedience to authority and freedom after reading a book with the thought-provoking title of Obedience is Freedom.
True obedience, says the author, retains some element of voluntary consent, a willingness to submit to authority when it is possible not to do so. Obedience is more than bowing to the inevitable. It often requires an informal but assumed acceptance of what is done and how it is done. That is why a shared understanding of behaviour requires a shared culture.
Over at The Epoch Times, our dubious doctor shares his concern for the latest bureaucratic diktat of the American Medical Association.
But the dangers of a society in which the commissars of the American Medical Association, or any other such body, forbid and punish what they think is heresy are far greater than one in which the Raoults of this world blaze across the historical firmament for a moment. Freedom is desirable in itself; it’s also the necessary condition of that self-correcting activity that we know as science.
Dr. Dalrymple has penned another memorable ode to the NHS over at The Critic.
Of course, a pauper may be treated well or badly, kindly or cruelly, and in the NHS both kinds of treatment are to be encountered. I have personally nothing to complain of, though I know people who do. But a pauper is a pauper still: he has no control over, or say in, what he is given.
In this week’s Takimag column, our cultured doctor attends his English town’s annual classical music festival and ponders how civilizations are allowed to die.
The old always blame the young for what they dislike in them—for example, their taste for crude and vulgar music—but they do so as if they bear no responsibility whatever for what they think undesirable in the younger generation. If the taste for the almost miraculous artistic achievements of the past has been all but extinguished, and is now but the secret garden of a tiny and insignificant number, no doubt of the highly privileged, must not this be because the older generation has signally failed to instill any love for it in their own children?
Theodore Dalrymple informs us of the troubling mustard shortage in France, which is in part due to the war in the Ukraine. Read it over at City Journal.
Perhaps the mustard is elaborated in Dijon, but the mustard seed, it turns out to everyone’s surprise, is imported from Canada and Ukraine. Apparently, Canada has seen a disastrous harvest of mustard seed, while there is no need to explain the shortage in Ukraine. Dijon mustard is about as local to Dijon as a modern soccer team is local to the city in which it has its stadium.
Our skeptical doctor highlights the disturbing intrusion of woke leftist ideology on Britain’s Open University system after the issuing of absurd trigger warnings for students reading Hamlet.
In other words, the ideologist always comes back for more self-abasement: Today it’s transgenderism, tomorrow it will be—what? The glories of incest, the social necessity and benefit of infanticide? It doesn’t matter: The aim is not improvement, it’s the exertion of power, for one of the cultural or psychological characteristics of the age, at least among the educated, is the belief that, in human relations, everything is a matter of power and therefore that only power counts or is to be trusted.