Do sties make pigs?

Why architecture really matters; or, the teleology of public housing, from Theodore Dalrymple. An excerpt you can verify in person:

What do the tenants think of their apartment blocks? They vote with their urine. The public spaces and elevators of all public housing blocks I know are so deeply impregnated with urine that the odor is ineradicable. And anything smashable has been smashed.

The people who inhabit these apartments are utterly isolated. All that connects them is the noise they make, often considerable, which permeates the flimsy walls, ceilings, and floors. They are likely to be unemployed and poorly educated, socialized neither by work nor by pastimes. Single mothers are housed here, guaranteeing the impoverishment of their children's social environment: and in Britain we are now into the second generation of children who know no other environment.

Dalrymple on thin books

From his recent book review:

I make a plea for thin rather than for fat books, at least for the general reader. (I accept the value of fat books as repositories.) There is more intellect in the distillation than in the accumulation of facts; for facts, unlike men, are not created equal. We busy human beings need guidance as to their importance and significance; and there are, after all, very few subjects of such intrinsic importance that we need to know every last detail about them.

Indeed. For example, I've gotten more lasting good out of Samuel Morison's tiny one-volume distillation of the life and voyages of Columbus than I ever would out of his 2.3-pound Columbus biography.

Dalrymple on Freud

Theodore Dalrymple reviews George Makari's Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. Incipit:

What, if anything, did Sigmund Freud actually discover? What concrete human knowledge would be lacking if he, or someone very like him, had never lived?

Global warning

New Dalrymple at the Spectator. Incipit:

The medical profession used often to be twitted with the mortality of its own members: for if doctors knew so much, how came it that they died like everyone else?

I think a more interesting question is why people who study literature for a living write so badly. After all, death is a fundamental and inescapable condition of human existence; bad writing is not. It seems, however, to be almost an advantage nowadays in academic life, at least in the humanities, to write barbarously. Advancement is secure if you can veer between incomprehensibility and banality, while passing seamlessly through obvious error.

Dalrymple alert

Two new essays. First, The Pleasures of Assassination; the incipit:

When President Bush described the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as cowardly, he chose precisely the wrong word. (He was not the only person to do so, but he was the most important one to do so.) In fact, it was a very courageous act: for it requires great courage to assassinate someone in the middle of a large and volatile crowd favourable to that person, and above all then to blow yourself up just to make sure that you have succeeded. Not many people have that degree of courage: I certainly don't.

And Reasons to Be Cheerful; the incipit:

In my line of work, it is rather hard to think of reasons to be cheerful. On the contrary, it requires quite a lot of concentrated intellectual effort: one has the sensation of scraping the bottom of one's skull for thoughts that just aren't there. Of course, since lamentation about the state of the world is one of life's unfailing pleasures, the world is a greater source of satisfaction than ever. Another consolation is that most people are not nearly as miserable as they ought to be, or would be if they saw their own lives in a clear light. I meet more than 1,000 people a year who have tried to do away with themselves, and the wonder is not that they should be so many but that they should be so few. Reasons to be cheerful? Is that reasons for me to be cheerful, or reasons for one, that is to say for humanity in general, to be cheerful?

Oil on Troubled Waters

A new article from Theodore Dalrymple in the December 2007 New English Review. Incipit:

Quite often one reads that such-and-such a country - the Congo, for example - is impoverished in spite of its abundant natural resources. The tone is usually pained and a little surprised; the writer seems to think that natural resources ought to develop themselves and benefit populations without human intervention, by jumping out of the ground and distributing themselves equitably, for example.

Diagnosing Lear

Anthony Daniels on King Lear. Incipit:

Doctors have been trying to diagnose King Lear for more than two centuries. They haven't succeeded, of course, for a couple of reasons that are not mutually exclusive: first, King Lear does not exist, and second he is not available for tests or examination. The latest technology, no matter how sophisticated, will never settle the matter. No imaging studies for King Lear: he was born much too soon for them, and now will never be diagnosed properly.

Dalrymple on Gibran

Speaking of takedowns, here's Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple) on Khalil Gibran. Incipit:

Among my mother's books was a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I remember still the cream color of the cover, adorned with a soft-focus drawing of a young man with a thin moustache staring, Svengali-like, into some kind of philosophical infinity. Although—or was it because?—The Prophet was so popular at the time, selling by the million worldwide, I resisted reading it. I suspected that its profundity, or rather its straining after profundity, was bogus, and I was right. It is precisely in its ersatz quality that its popularity resides.

Ivan Illich, 1926-2002

Here's something of an obituary of Ivan Illich from Anthony Daniels, a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple.

Ahead of Its Time

Here's an old Dalrymple article, "Ahead of Its Time", at the Dallas Morning News. Incipit:

When, as a medical student in England, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story's adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called "ultraviolence."

"No Security"

New Dalrymple is up at City Journal.

What the New Atheists Don't See

This is the first post under the tag TheodoreDalrymple - a collection of writings from one of this generation's best essayists.

What the New Atheists Don't See: City Journal, Autumn 2007

Related links:

• Wikipedia entry for Juan Sánchez Cotán
  • Fra Cotán's painting Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (see below)
• Works by and about Joseph Hall, D.D., late Lord Bishop of Exeter and of Norwich
  • Contemplations Upon the Principal Passages of the Holy Story
  • Characters of Virtues and Vices
  • Occasional Meditations
  • Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted