At TakiMag, Dalrymple examines the absurdity of modern politics, in France specifically but elsewhere too, and he argues the culprit is us:
We are sheep who complain of their shepherd: We don’t like his guidance or his bullying, we abominate his sheepdog, but we want him to take better care of us. The shepherd says that he will do so, provided only that we accept that he decides everything for us. We want him not only to protect us from the wolves, but to provide the grass as well.
In this piece at City Journal, Dalrymple critiques the Church of England’s decision to host a graffiti-style installation inside Canterbury Cathedral, arguing that it embodies an institutional self-undermining: rather than preserving its sacred heritage, the Church is actively eroding it.
If any institution in the world provides evidence of Freud’s concept of the death instinct, it is the Church of England. With unfailing aim, it does whatever will hasten its demise, already quite advanced…
In this essay at Law and Liberty, Dalrymple takes aim at the ease with which associations are conflated with causation, especially when non-experts (politicians, celebrities) pronounce on medical matters they scarcely understand, arguing that such reckless commentary amplifies suffering and undermines genuine expertise.
It is, perhaps, wasted breath to protest against people’s propensity to invest the wrong people—presidents, duchesses, or film stars—with authority to pronounce on matters of health, because it seems ineradicable. In these circumstances, however, those with what might be called charismatic authority, rather than with the authority of true expertise, have an inescapable duty to remain silent on subjects that they have not studied but on which their advice might be heeded by many people if given.
Writing at Quadrant, Dalrymple argues that neither France nor Britain today can claim a legitimately functioning government, making any serious reform or renewal almost impossible under current social and moral conditions.
In both countries, the political systems, despite their differences, are suited to a two-party system; but the population of both is now so balkanised, ideologically and even ethnically, that a mere two parties are no longer capable of expressing the outlooks of most of the population. The intellectual class, at least, gives the impression of being a concatenation of monomaniacs, that at most can form subversive alliances of convenience.
Read the rest here
At TakiMag, Dalrymple discusses how the language used to describe murder has shifted in ways that distort its moral reality, arguing that when murder is framed in euphemism or treated as social misfortune rather than moral evil, society loses a crucial sense of responsibility:
Looseness of language about murder is now so common that it is normal in Britain these days. Murders are frequently described, both by newspapers and judges, as cowardly, as if bravery in the commission of murder were an extenuation of it, or as if murderers had a moral duty to give their victims the chance to escape or fight back. The crime is murder, not cowardice, and a brave murderer—let us say one who stalks his victim in hazardous circumstances—is not better than a cowardly one.
Read the full essay here.
In this essay at The Spectator, Dalrymple argues that the rise of psychology as a popular discipline has shifted people from being active agents of their lives into passive objects of study: undermining responsibility, subjectivity, and human dignity.
A young Chinese girl approached me after I gave a talk at a conference and asked for my advice about what she should study… I was touched by her naive assumption that I would answer benevolently and in her best interests. It suggested that she had not yet encountered much of human malignity. “What are you interested in?” I asked.
“I was thinking of history and psychology,” she replied.
“Ah,” I said, “definitely not psychology…
In this piece at Law and Liberty, Dalrymple argues that while raising taxes beyond a certain point may appear economically irrational (even self-defeating), it becomes perfectly rational if the goal isn’t prosperity but something else: namely, social engineering and control.
The members of the government who believe in high taxation have the same reaction to a free society as Le Corbusier had to the street. It lacks rationality, an overall plan or goal, it is higgledy-piggledy, and above all, it is not only unjust but unfair.
In this provocative essay at The European Conservative, Dalrymple explores our cultural climate in which ugliness is embraced as a badge of authenticity and where aesthetic decay becomes intertwined with moral degeneration, arguing that uglification is less a revolt against beauty than a capitulation to despair.
When we look at something beautiful that has come down to us from the past, we are now encouraged to view it not through the lens of aesthetic appreciation, but through that of supposedly historical understanding—which in our present intellectual climate is that of the backward projection of current grievances and detection of past injustices.
In this column, Dalrymple argues that our modern medical culture’s fixation on risk-management risks turning life into a protracted medical procedure rather than something that is simply lived.
The avoidance of risk is the avoidance of life, in the sense of lived life rather than of life expectancy.