Our concerned doctor reflects on the dangers posed by a small minority of ideologically-obsessed radicals on a largely silent majority.
The absurdity of modern ideological enthusiasms is evident, but while those who promote them make them the focus of their existence and the whole meaning of their lives, better-balanced people try to get on with their lives as normal. No one wants to spend his life arguing, let alone fighting, against sheer idiocy, and thus, sheer idiocy wins the day.
Our favorite doctor and his wife encounter some obnoxious leftist protesters on their way to a dinner party in London in this week’s Takimag.
What is most alarming about all this is that a very noisy but tiny minority has been able with surprising ease to overturn, and indeed reverse, a tradition of free speech and enquiry. Our society has proved surprisingly susceptible or vulnerable to the activism of monomaniacs of many kinds. The problem is that an issue is all in all to the monomaniacs, but to the rest of us it is merely one thing among many others, not even, or far from, the most important.
In the November edition of New English Review, Dr. Dalrymple explains to his faithful readers why he prefers going to his doctor in Paris rather than the one in England.
The unpleasant aspects of health care in Britain are universally acknowledged, are well-known, and a cause of wonderment to all Western Europeans. I have come to the conclusion, however, that it is precisely these aspects that appeal so strongly to the British. How else is fairness to be guaranteed, other than by ensuring that everyone is humiliated and made to feel that he is privileged to receive anything at all?
Our scholarly doctor reviews a new book by a disgruntled liberal literature professor who has recently left Yale University and academia.
Because his life has been so wrapped up with the university and then writing for the intelligentsia as a freelance, I think he underestimates the problems of political correctness (or Wokeness) in institutions other than those of higher education. If anything, the problems are now worse, and even more sinister, in primary and secondary than in tertiary education: give me a child until he is seven, etc.
In his weekly Takimag column, our quiet doctor expresses his longing for a more muted world in which he can read a book in peace in a café or be heard by the person he is dining with at a restaurant without having to yell.
The English have always taken their pleasures sadly, but now they take them first noisily, then antisocially, then forgetfully. Several times I have heard young people claim to have had a wonderful time the night before, the evidence for which is that they can remember nothing whatever of it. On this view of things, death is the final, eternal nightclub.
In the November issue of New Criterion, Theodore Dalrymple reviews A.N. Wilson’s autobiography, which ultimately does not deliver on providing the reader with a better understanding of this prolific writer’s character.
Wilson is a skilled writer and a learned man drawn by nature to arcana; he has many gifts, and yet one feels that something is missing. If I am not mistaken, he feels this himself.
In the City Journal, our humorous doctor writes about this week’s output of his favorite political cartoonist, Matt Pritchett of The Telegraph.
I am reminded of what Horace Walpole said: “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” And to those who think and feel, it is a tragicomedy.
In this week’s Takimag, our well-traveled doctor has the (dis)pleasure of experiencing modern British customer service, this time on a British Airways flight back to London.
The cabin crew of the aircraft that brought me back to London was no doubt well-intentioned, and they were not actively rude, but they were singularly lacking in grace or charm; and in that respect, they were truly representative of the population from which they were drawn.
Over at The Epoch Times, the good doctor opines on the ridiculous reaction of certain ethnic minorities of the Labour Party to the new British Prime Minister, who is the son of Punjabi immigrants from East Africa.
The envy of wealth is thought by those who express it to be noble, as if to hate the rich were to love the poor: But envy and hatred are much stronger and more durable emotions than love, particularly in political matters. Hatred of the rich is perfectly compatible with contempt for the poor.