Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and
the Masses
By Theodore Dalrymple
(Ivan R. Dee, 341 pages, $27.50)
This is a superb collection of essays that you should not miss.
Published mostly in City Journal over the past five years,
they focus mainly on the decadence of today's Britain but also
range widely over topics as diverse as Shakespeare, modern art, the
state of today's Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Italy, and the crisis of
Islam.
Dalrymple, a British doctor-writer, upholds the classic
conservative insights about the need for societal constraints, but
does so from the standpoint of one who has worked extensively in
hospitals and prisons, in Britain and many other places, and has
seen up close the results of societal chaos. In Britain, he notes,
crime rates have increased twelvefold since 1941; the rise of the
welfare state and the breakdown of the family and of personal
responsibility have spawned a nightmare of violence, drug
addiction, and illegitimacy that he depicts with the grim certitude
of firsthand knowledge.
Those evils afflict particularly the lower socioeconomic
classes, but Dalrymple is never more caustic than when exposing the
crackpot notions and smug self-pity of intellectuals like Virginia
Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Havelock Ellis, and Alfred Kinsey who laid
the groundwork for the "liberation." To this day the intelligentsia
cannot face "the human consequences of the changes in manners,
morals, and social policy that it has consistently advocated,"
instead taking refuge in warmed-over Marxist shibboleths about the
masses as helpless victims of malign economic forces.
Although it is tempting to link Dalrymple with the tradition of
British satire -- indeed, one of his subjects is the 18th- and
19th-century satirical cartoonist James Gillray -- there is little
humor in Dalrymple's perspective; his horror at what he sees is too
deep. One essay takes you on a tour of "Sensation," a recent
exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art in London that featured such
attractions as a magnified portrait of the sadistic child-murderess
Myra Hindley, amid bitter protests by mothers of her victims, as
well as "flayed corpses, sliced animals in formalin, a close-up
photograph of a gunshot wound to the scalp, and...Dead
Dad," which was a "scaled-down but hypperrealistic model" of
the naked corpse of the artist's father.
"That civilized life cannot be lived without taboos," Dalrymple
remarks in one of the book's many examples of aphoristic
brilliance, "...is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of
nihilism."
Another essay, "All Sex, All the Time," considers such outcomes
of the sexual revolution in Britain as 12-year-old prostitutes on a
street corner "a hundred yards from where I write this," rampant
sexual abuse of children particularly by stepfathers and mothers'
boyfriends, and unprecedented teen pregnancy rates. In Dalrymple's
Birmingham, "the local health authorities send a van round several
times at night to distribute condoms" to the youthful and other
prostitutes, and "local residents...who object to the presence of
discarded condoms in their gardens and in the street outside their
homes have been offered a special instrument with which to pick
them up." It would have been difficult to know it had gotten this
bad in a country still associated with refinement, but Dalrymple
observes that the maladies are common to today's West in varying
degrees, and one would hardly dispute him.
The book is not, however, just a gallery of horrors. No less
than Dalrymple is appalled at these painful phenomena, he is
appreciative of insightful writers like Shakespeare, Turgenev,
Orwell, and Huxley who could have, or did, predict what would
happen to society when it contemptuously threw off the accumulated
wisdom of centuries. ("The loss of the religious understanding of
the human condition -- that man is a fallen creature for whom
virtue is necessary but never fully attainable -- is a loss, not a
gain, in true sophistication.") And Dalrymple's versatility is
striking when he turns, with no less acumen, to more mundane topics
as in "The Uses of Corruption," on the comparative workings of the
Italian and British welfare states, or "Don't Legalize Drugs,"
which argues that case with stunning force.
Dalrymple is never more astute, though, than in "When Islam
Breaks Down," a meditation on that religion's predicament in the
modern world and profound problems in reconciling with it.
Surveying the harsh practices of forced marriage and oppression of
women that continue in Muslim communities in Britain and elsewhere
in the West, Dalrymple notes "a vital difference in the historical
situations" of Islam and Christianity that "tempers my historical
optimism... Devout Muslims can see...the long-term consequences of
secularism," and hence are even more likely to wall themselves in
fundamentalism. The essay ends somewhat incongruously, however,
with a prediction that fundamentalist Islam will eventually
fade.
The book is written throughout in a prose that is easily flowing
and conversational yet marked by elegance and sparkling precision.
I cannot recommend it too highly.
topics:
Satire, Religion, Islam, Books, Law
