At Quadrant, Dalrymple explores the surge of tattooing in modern society and argues that what might be hailed as “body art” is really a widespread embrace of kitsch, likening the tattooed skin to the mass-market populism of the painter Vladimir Tretchikoff.
Tattooing is often called body art, but in reality it should be called body kitsch. There is a crude aesthetic sensibility (if that is not too elevated a term for it) of which it is always a reflection.
In this short column at The Oldie, Dalrymple warns that the ubiquitous use of earphones is setting the stage for a future wave of hearing loss among the young:
Two thirds of people over the age of 70 already have significant hearing loss. That is to say, two thirds of people who reached adulthood before the modern era of solipsistic cacophony or cacophonous solipsism.
In an essay at Law and Liberty, Dalrymple argues that in both Britain and France, the need for reform is urgent yet seems simultaneously impossible: democratic legitimacy is eroded, society lacks a moral compass, and the systems designed to govern us have become incapable of authentic renewal.
The problem is not electoral fraud, or procedures that are not adhered to; the problem is that the political systems of both countries work and result in legitimacy only if there are two predominant parties, which is no longer the case. Both the president of France and the prime minister of Britain, though elected according to the rules, were unpopular even before they began to rule, being the choice of only a small minority of the population.
Read it here.
At Quadrant, Dalrymple writes on the modern tendency to take offense:
Now it seems obvious to me that the notion of tolerance (the queen of the modern virtues, indeed the sole distinctly modern virtue) implies the existence of dislike or disapproval, for surely everyone is able to tolerate what he likes, approves of or is utterly indifferent to. A person who is too inclined to disapprove is censorious, not intolerant; and many a censorious person is in practice tolerant, if only because he has no choice in the matter…
Writing at TakiMag, Dalrymple reflects on how the modern obsession with “well-being” often masks normal human dissatisfaction, arguing that wellness as a cultural ideal is detached from genuine health and grounded more in self-absorption than in real flourishing:
The search for well-being is essentially egotistical, as well as futile. It is like the search for happiness when directly aimed at. If someone says that his ambition is to be happy, you know that he is a lost soul, just as someone who claims to lack self-esteem is a lost soul. Happiness and its pale, vapid quasi-physiological imitator, well-being, are not to be achieved, or arrived at by prescription, but are the consequence or by-product of an effortful life, appreciated only in retrospect.
Read the full essay here.
A sharp reflection on how the censorious impulse has been reframed in modern times, this piece at Quadrant shows that modern censorship is no longer just about suppressing vice or obscenity but about silencing dissent and that, furthermore, such censorship has perverse effects in our “transgressive age”:
To erect taboos, then, is nowadays to invite people, or at least those people who wish to distinguish themselves from the mass, to break them. In these circumstances, a taboo will cause the very thing that the taboo is erected to prevent…
Dalrymple returns to the pages of the Spectator for the first time in three years to comment on the sight of “hundreds of books thrown out of a former library in Croydon on to the ground”. It reminds him of a similar sight in Liberia in 1991, and as a result, we get this wonderful passage that harkens back to his book Monrovia, Mon Amour and Anthony Daniels the intrepid traveler:
The capital city of Monrovia was in those days cut off from the rest of the country by the forces of Charles Taylor, and the only way to arrive was by the Steel Trader, a ship owned by a redoubtable old Africa hand, Captain Monty Jones, responsible, at his risk and profit, for revictualling the besieged city. On board was an American ex-marine, known to me only as Rambo, who sat on the stern looking for pirates to blow out of the water. (To his disappointment, they never materialised.) There was also Serge, a French mercenary who found life in France wearisome, and was engaged to train one of the Liberian parties to the civil war…
In last week’s Takimag, the astute doctor examines stupidity and evil from Mao to Nyerere all the way to Starmer in our mediocre, degraded century.
Stupidity is like the eye: It does not see itself. It is therefore one of those qualities that is easier to observe in others than in oneself. In addition, it gives us pleasure to do so, for it reassures us of our own wisdom and superiority.
Back at Takimag, our troubled doctor scrutinizes the excessive leniency, general incompetence, and politically correct turn of Western European ‘justice’ systems.
A state that is seen as bullying, intrusive, demanding, expensive, and ineffectual in its primary purpose—to secure the protection of its citizens from crime and disorder—is certain one day to produce a reaction, if not an explosion.