Another enjoyable Dalrymple jeremiad on art. Here's an excerpt:
Let me take the second point first. One often hears of 'cutting-edge' art; indeed, the much older term, avant garde, is of the same ilk. This suggests that there is progress in the arts, as there is in science, and that what comes after must, in some sense, be better than what came before. Art has some kind of destination, with later artists further along the road to it than earlier.
In science, progress is a fact (except for the most extreme of epistemological sceptics, none of whom, nevertheless, would be entirely indifferent as to whether their surgeon used the surgical techniques of, say, the 1830s, rather than those of this century). The most mediocre bacteriologist alive today knows incomparably more that did Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch, for example; the most mediocre physics graduate knows incomparably more than Sir Isaac Newton ever did. This is because scientific knowledge is cumulative. But no one would suggest that the paintings of Rothko were better than those, say, of Chardin because he lived a long time after Chardin, and that Chardin's were better than those of Velasquez for the same reason.
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See his latest article in the New English Review: Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm. Via Neoneocon, who is also one of us.
My favorite used bookstore is gone these few years now - it was on the campus of the University of Illinois in the YMCA basement, which always smelled of a little Indian restaurant down there. The white-haired proprietor of the bookstore had been a student at the U of I in the early 1960s and had picked up a large collection of original Doubleday Image paperbacks at the Newman Center back then (back when Image was a reliable Catholic publisher). Many of those good old books ended up on my bookshelves.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Here's something of an obituary of Ivan Illich from Anthony Daniels, a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple.
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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."
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And the NER has a blog, The Iconoclast.
Hat tip: Kathy Shaidle.
Some excerps...
Who knew the ancient Romans were Anglicans?
Probably, but not certainly. Gibbon tells us that in Rome, religious observance, highly syncretic in nature, was adhered to by people who did not accept the truth of the beliefs that supposedly underlay their observance. They continued with their observance because of the social value of religion: in other words, truth was less important to them than social coherence. Before we denounce those Romans as hypocrites and liars, we should remember how often, for the sake of social ease and convenience, we say and do things that are neither true nor convenient to us personally. Show me a man who is sincere all the time, and I will show you an insufferable boor.
Which reminds me of a joke a friend used to use in his email signature: "there is no one, from Franco to Chairman Mao to the Dalai Lama, who can go to bed at night sure that he is not an Anglican."
On the lack of, say, Lutheran terrorists in Minnesota:
The new atheists are quite right to see the threat of theocracy in Islamism. But in attacking all religion, they are like the French government which banned not only the wearing of the headscarf in schools, but the wearing of all religious insignia whatsoever, despite the fact that wearing a Star of David or a crucifix has and had a completely different social signification from wearing a headscarf. In the name of non-discrimination, the French government failed to discriminate properly: and proper discrimination is, or ought to be, practically the whole business of life. If there were large numbers of Christians or Jews who were in favour of establishing a theocracy in France, who had a recent record of terrorism, and who terrorised each other into the wearing of crucifixes and Stars of David, then the banning of those insignia would have been justified too. The wearing of the headscarf should be permitted again when Islam has become merely one personal confession among others, without the political significance that it has now.
On the misguided religion-hatred of Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk:
Islamism is a worthy target, of course, but by now one that has been pretty well aimed at (though I recommend very strongly the forthcoming book from Encounter Books, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest). To suggest, however, that all forms of religion are equal, that they are all murderous and dangerous, is not to serve the cause of freedom and tolerance. It is to play into the hands of the very people we should most detest; it is to hand them the rhetorical tools with which they can tell the gullible that our freedoms are not genuine and that our tolerance is a masquerade. It is to do what I should previously have thought was impossible, namely in this respect to put them in the right.
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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:
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A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey
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And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.—St John of Patmos
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