In the October edition of New English Review, our philosophical doctor considers the evolutionary development of a common beetle, the curse of having been informed early of his high intelligence, and the pursuit of the good life.
The question raises that of the good life. What is the proper end for a person to pursue? Does anything actually matter, given the size of the universe, the second law of thermodynamics, the transience of life, the inevitability of death and the infinitude of time?
In a September Takimag piece, our old-fashioned doctor recounts his shocking first encounter with television after being away for a quarter century.
The debate between Nixon and Kennedy was Plato by comparison with what we have now, albeit that Nixon’s five o’clock shadow played some part in the public assessment of it. We are more intelligent and better educated than ever, but somehow public discourse becomes cruder, more stupid, more ill-tempered, less concerned with truth, as our cognitive level improves.
In Australia´s Quadrant, Theodore Dalrymple reasserts his view of the detrimental cultural and moral effects that the increasing popularity of psychology in the Western world has had.
This study too has undergone a vast expansion, indeed out of all recognition. Psychology is now the third most popular subject in American colleges and universities, and no doubt elsewhere as well. I suspect that this popularity is a manifestation of mass narcissism rather than of curiosity.
Over at Takimag, our dubious doctor receives an email with unsolicited advice and bogus concern from his insurance company, which gets him thinking…
It is rather that such constant surveillance tends to undermine the distinction between what is properly public and properly private, to the detriment of the latter and the expansion of the former. Where everything is recorded (and we are increasingly complicit in this), we become performers rather than characters, and the boundary between the real and the bogus is extinguished.
In his Quadrant column, the skeptical doctor expertly sums up the woeful Parisian Olympic farce in not one but two scintillating essays.
Still, there is little doubt that Paris has not been beautified by its vainglorious and completely unnecessary decision to host the Olympics. It is true that the security situation in the world has deteriorated unpredictably since the decision to apply was taken; but the horrible physical mess that has resulted, the City of Light becoming the City of Concrete, was all too predictable, and the harm done to a unique place is much more important than the pleasure, which could have been taken anywhere in the world.
In his latest Law & Liberty essay, Prof. Dalrymple warns of the ongoing dangers of the infantilization of the British populace, which has gone hand in hand with the unhealthy growth in the popularity of psychology at universities.
But the very idea that reading about something unpleasant, even knowingly and without compulsion, can lead to such severe psychological reaction that professional assistance is necessary to overcome it is peculiarly demeaning of human beings and comparatively recent, occurring pari passu with the growth of clinical psychology as study and profession.
Readers might have noticed that we’ve made various tweaks and updates to the Skeptical Doctor website recently. We’ve implemented site caching and made numerous styling fixes (including a larger font for mobile devices). We also examined our subscription solution and contact form configuration – and found that both needed some work!
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Dalrymple’s 1989 book Filosofa’s Republic, originally published under the pseudonym Thursday Msigwa, has just been re-published in a second edition under the Dalrymple name. The book has been out of print for many years, and even used copies have been hard to locate online.
Filosofa’s Republic is a humorous satire of Tanzania under the rule of Julius Nyerere and is based on Dalrymple’s personal experiences living and working in a remote village in Tanzania for two years. The book pokes fun at a variety of vivid characters: the fictional dictator and his local party apparatchik, whose somewhat flexible left-wing political principles are really just an excuse for power and riches; a Western missionary with an ostensibly different doctrine but who may be seen in much the same light; and the local villagers who mostly ignore these doctrines and struggle to get out of their own way in their daily lives. (We wrote a longer summary of the book here many years ago.)
Although much of the story is based on real-life events that Dalrymple has described in his essays (like Not As Black As It’s Painted), I think it is still fair to call this his first fictional work, and insofar as it satirizes socialist thought and exemplifies it in one small community, you might say this is his Animal Farm. It is not the tragedy that that work is though: it’s clear that Dalrymple is charmed by these people (except for the missionary, perhaps), and the overall tone of the book is light. I had forgotten how enjoyable this book is.
It is available on all Amazon sites worldwide: here in the UK and here in the US.
In last week’s Takimag, our ornithological doctor marvels at a friend’s phone app that can assign bird sounds to the correct species of bird.
They would surely soon learn respect for knowledge and lose some of their exhibitionist disillusionment before they ever had any illusions. Pseudosophistication is a great temptation for, and enemy of, the young.