Over at City Journal, our concerned doctor laments the severe deterioration of Haiti’s already devastating social, cultural, and economic conditions.
The downward spiral in Haiti toward a Hobbesian war of all against all seems endless. So terrible is the situation that even the days of Papa Doc, once the byword for bizarre tropical dictatorship, now seem almost halcyon by comparison. The history of no country on earth is more tragic than that of Haiti.
In the March issue of New Criterion, the critical doctor reviews a new film depicting the fictionalized home life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, while focusing on the human tendency for the mental compartmentalization of evil.
But the argumentum ad Hitlerum, as it has been called, is, or can be, mentally lazy. It is a way of avoiding the difficult and painful demands of thought. For the fact is that compartmentalization is inevitable in a complex world such as ours. We go about our lives, with our petty concerns and projects, despite our awareness of the enormous evils prevalent in the world, even some that are close at hand.
In the March edition of New English Review, our scholarly doctor explores some of the religious themes found in Shakespeare’s oeuvre.
Shakespeare doesn’t put all his cards on the table and tell us that any particular religious doctrine is true (and therefore that others must be false). But he does make one kind of religiosity, naïve and instinctive, attractive, while another kind is somewhat repellent, which is to say instrumental, hypocritical and self-interested. He favours common humanity over ambition and the lust for power.
Our favorite doctor returns to The Spectator to expound on why he thinks that the concept of ‘mental health’ should be abolished.
Please note that this article is behind a paywall.
The concept of mental health is a hypochondriac’s, narcissist’s, shirker’s and social security fraud’s charter: for who can prove that someone does not so feel depressed, anxious, or grief-stricken that he is unable to work? Who can distinguish between can’t, won’t and would rather not?
Over at Quadrant, the dubious doctor wades into the thorny abortion issue following the overturn of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Perhaps the basic point is this: that if men will not restrain themselves, even in their desire to do good, no constitution will bind them. A sense of limitation is necessary to a free people.
But it is precisely this sense of limitation that the modern liberal rejects. Since he knows what is good, his end must justify his means. The fact that the Supreme Court has referred the abortion question back to the states appals him, since he dreams of a world without demurral from his own standpoint. His dream is the abolition of politics and the establishment of a benevolent despotism—his own, naturally.
Over at Law & Liberty, Dr. Dalrymple covers—and criticizes—the recent settlement by a French advertising company responsible for the promotion of oxycontin, which is at the heart of the ‘opioid epidemic’ in the United States.
Still, to extract money by threatening the possibility of something even worse, and then spending it on an activity of doubtful value, or an activity that could be easily funded some other way, seems to me scarcely dignified, or even compatible with the rule of law.
In his Takimag column, the skeptical doctor writes a review about a new film depicting the brutality and evil of the post-war Romanian communist regime. It is reassuring that movies dealing with the innumerable crimes perpetrated by communists over the past century are finally being made, just not by Hollywood.
The purpose of propaganda in Communist states was not to inform or persuade, but to humiliate: that is to say, to force people to pretend to believe what they could not possibly believe, and to celebrate what they most detested, including their own enslavement. Of course, the confessions also broke the spirit of those who made them, even if they survived.
The good doctor takes issue with a petition by a typical snowflake at the University of Manchester in the UK calling for the dissolution of an anti-abortion student society.
It is not the function of the law to prevent anyone from feeling stigmatized, for this would be to prohibit a vast range of opinion and leave permissible speech at the mercy of all those sensitive souls who feel stigmatized by any criticism or opinion whatever. A society in which nothing and nobody were stigmatized would be unliveable, morally completely anarchic.
Dr. Dalrymple lashes out at a prominent American medical journal for going all in on the ‘diversity’ racket at the expense of real, valuable scholarship.
The proportion of published authors of each racial or demographic group should, according to the “equity” fanatics, mirror that of their proportion in the general population, as if, in a state of fairness, all groups would be represented equally in everything.