In the winter issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple recounts his recent visit to Edinburgh and his unfortunate and jarring encounter with the horrors of modern architecture, as well as the widespread vulgarity on display all around.

Nothing could be more emblematic of the implosion of Scottish (and British) taste than the incapacity of modern architects and government officials to build even a minimally pleasant building on, and appropriate to, the site—in a city whose elegant but simple Georgian architecture is world-renowned.

Over at Australia’s Quadrant, our patriotic doctor considers the difficulties of raising a conscripted army of British or Australian citizens, many of whom are self-serving modern wokeists, rank narcissists, or ‘mental health’ sufferers.

Modern conscientious objection would be different. It would derive not from serious moral thought, but from a shallow and preening self-righteousness and narcissism—with cowardice probably thrown in.

Our pessimistic doctor advises the people of France and Britain to pay attention to what is happening in Argentina under the leadership of the eccentric Javier Milei as a portent for what’s to come in their countries.

There is a kind of dialectic at work here: First, the government makes people dependent on it; then the government becomes dependent on the people whom it has made dependent on it. From this infernal cycle, it is not easy to escape.

Over at Takimag, our critical doctor lampoons the absurd and ridiculous plans to build the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Whenever any scheme aims or claims to be “world-class,” you may be sure that it is the brainchild of megalomaniac mediocrities. Alas, our world is full of them, they dominate public affairs.

Our dubious doctor offers his take on the current strained and seemingly hopeless political climate in much of the Western world.

Deep mistrust of political elites is now widespread throughout the Western world, probably to an extent greater than at any time in recent history. Whether this is because the elites are worse than they once were or because, thanks to various media, we know more about them is a question often debated around middle-class dinner tables.

“The idea that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice is a giant ideological lie.”

There is a giant ideological lie behind the locutions used in both papers, which is that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice or of random allocation at birth, an unimportant detail medically. If people choose to believe such rubbish, it is up to them; but when the repetition of such a lie is imposed as a condition of employment or advancement, when everyone must assent in public to what he knows to be false, then has totalitarianism arrived.

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.