The City Journal has published one of the stories from Theodore Dalrymple’s book Grief and Other Stories.
Fantasy is all very well, it is better than nothing at all, but it is no substitute for reality. By middle age, Amos had had enough of it and its pretences. Why should he be condemned to a second-rate life just because, through no fault of his own, he had developed a unusual desire that, if fulfilled, would harm no one else? Every man has a right to fulfilment.
In his last Takimag column of the year, our favorite doctor touches on the ridiculously improbable, unethical, and farcical Qatari World Cup, and the complete equanimity with which he watched the England-France quarterfinal match in a provincial French bar.
I would like to take this moment to wish all of our readers around the world a peaceful, blessed, and merry Christmas.
The World Cup in Qatar attracted hundreds of millions of viewers, for whom entertainment was more important than the extravagant absurdity of air-conditioning the outdoors in a place as hot as Qatar so that the players should be able to play at all, the sheer waste resources on so ephemeral an event (Qatar is said to have spent $220,000,000,000 on preparing for the championship), and the lives taken during the construction of the stadium and other infrastructure.
Back at The Epoch Times, our critical doctor critiques the shallow, modern cult of the celebrity and what this phenomenon tells us about the trajectory of the overall culture.
Celebrity is a phenomenon simultaneously of great depth and great shallowness. It’s deep because it tells us something important about mass psychology; it’s shallow for the same reason it tells us how trivial or frivolous are many of our thoughts.
Our inquiring doctor wonders why the leftist Guardian refuses to get to the bottom of Britain’s largely self-induced energy crisis over at City Journal.
What is certain is that restrictive policies with regard to energy resources and exploration such as those followed by successive British governments, cowed by middle-class ecological warriors and perhaps influenced in another way by special interest groups, will lead in the near future to many preventable deaths, if they are not already doing so.
In his Takimag column, our jubilant doctor brings some Christmas cheer his loyal readers by presenting us with some recent positive experiences with the general public.
All is not lost, then, I thought, and civilization will survive us; the end is not nigh. Naturally, this mood of optimism cannot last long before it is replaced by a much darker mood more conducive to the kind of article that I and most journalists usually write. But the holiday season, as Google puts it, is upon us, and we need a break from gloom, however justified it might be.
Over at Quadrant, our altruistic doctor elaborates on the modern obsession with turning benefits into rights with the inevitable ingratitude or grievance that follows.
The provision of tangible benefits as of right not only creates a psychological dialectic between ingratitude when a right is fulfilled and grievance when it is not, but it imposes forced labour on everyone in order to pay for the fulfilment of those supposed rights, which are not free gifts of nature but have to be provided by human activity.
In his The Epoch Times column, the skeptical doctor expresses his dismay at the unhealthy obsession with race in the Western medical world after coming across a particularly outlandish opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
It’s later in the article in JAMA that the resemblance to apartheid thinking becomes more manifest. It goes on to argue that “minoritized” doctors will be preferred by “minoritized” patients, because they’ll understand such patients better and sympathize with them more. This, of course, assumes that human solidarity passes principally by race, which is precisely what the doctrinaires of apartheid always said. In any case, the assumption that patients always prefer doctors of their own background is false.
Over at Law & Liberty, our concerned doctor condemns an irresponsible and asinine British judge for failing to uphold the rule of law on account of his personal political convictions.
In other words, the judge saw his role not as enforcing the law as it (quite reasonably) stood, but as licensing certain people to be exempted from its provisions. It was his job to decide what a good or a bad cause was, and how good a cause had to be before protestors might illegally inconvenience their fellow-citizens with impunity. By claiming to be “moved” by the criminals’ evidence, he was removing the blindfold from the statue of justice and putting weights in her balance: one law for the people he liked and another for those that he didn’t.
Over at The Critic, Theodore Dalrymple recounts a disingenuous and outright misleading sentence uttered by a psychologist at a dinner party that he recently attended.
The solution to this problem, of course, is value-neutral language, for it is stigma that makes the world go haywire. Change the words and you change the thing, either for the better or the worse.