Over at City Journal, our favorite doctor has published his postmortem analysis of the most recent uninspiring French presidential election.
The far Right and far Left did well in the election, insofar as anyone can be said to have done well in a second round of voting with 54 percent abstention. In France, the extremes are separated by their attitudes on immigration and national identity, but on economic matters they are not terribly far apart. They are both extremely dirigiste.
The good doctor finally learns of the infamous Johnny Depp. We can only hope that someday soon Depp will learn of our notoriously skeptical doctor.
I came across this mentality very frequently in my former clinical practice. Women were repeatedly attracted to men who exuded abusiveness or cruelty like a cold front on a weather map. Anyone with the slightest experience of life could take one look at them and know that they should be avoided, and yet they never had any difficulty in attracting women to them.
Dr. Dalrymple wades into the abortion debate in light of the historic—and long overdue—overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court last week.
And this itself points to a wider social problem, namely the absence of intellectual probity in the supposedly thinking classes. First comes the conclusion that they desire, then come the alleged arguments, such as a shamefully bogus constitutional right to abortion, in its favor.
In his Law & Liberty column, the critical doctor makes yet another forceful argument against using punishment as personal therapy for murderers and rapists after reading about an outrageous crime—this time from France for a change.
A society that lacks either the will or the courage to imprison someone like Nicolas Alba for life (without, I hasten to add, any cruel treatment) is a society that has no confidence in its own judgment, either moral or practical.
In his weekly Takimag column, our incredulous doctor turns his attention to the modern age’s confusion over rights before taking a brief detour to explain our current economic framework.
For example, it is clearly desirable that everybody should be housed decently: No one wants to see anyone homeless who does not desire to be, or to live in horrible conditions. But that is not the same as saying that everyone has a right to a home, for such a right would impose on others the duty to provide such a home irrespective of the person’s conduct. Since no home can be provided except at the cost of human labor, a right to housing is also the imposition of forced labor.
After reading an essay by Daniel Mahoney, the dubious doctor considers the disgraceful and pathological tendency to self-hatred on the part of many Western “intellectuals.” Read it over at Law & Liberty.
To this, I should tentatively reply that it is because of the mass intellectualization of society consequent upon the spread of tertiary education. Intellectuals have an inherent tendency to be oppositional to all received opinion or feeling, for there is no point in going to the trouble of being an intellectual if one ends up thinking and feeling what the great mass of the people around one think and feel. Love of country and inherited custom is so commonplace as to appear almost normal or natural, and much of it, of course, is unreflecting.
If any of our readers thought that the absurd, insane, and completely irrational gender ideology was going to quietly fade away anytime soon, the latest Dalrymple The Epoch Times column should serve as an unpleasant wake-up call.
The bureaucrat who asks the question from obedience and fear for his position comes to believe that he’s engaged in important work of social reform. There’s no one as shameless as a bureaucrat following orders who has persuaded himself that those orders are for the good of humanity.
Theodore Dalrymple returns to the Quadrant with an interesting essay on the concept of rights, the abortion debate, and the American Constitution.
The triumph of the Soviet conception of rights—that nothing counts as a right until it is exercised in practice—is caused by the apprehension, perhaps the oversensitive apprehension, of the manifest and manifold defects of our own societies. It is only fair and just, of course, that we should face up to these defects, but it is also important to make comparisons with what is possible, not with an abstract ideal held up to us that never has existed and never will exist.
In this week’s Takimag, our favorite doctor considers the possibility that our world has in fact gone completely insane.
It’s a mad world, my masters. I wouldn’t mind it so much were it not so boring to have to argue against evident absurdity. If one does not do so, however, the absurdity becomes unchallengeable orthodoxy in no time at all.