Theodore Dalrymple
Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a British writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in a hospital and prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
Daniels is the author of a number of books, including Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass , Our Culture, What's Left of It, and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality.
In his writing, his philosophical position is compassionate conservative,[1] and he is critical of liberal and utopian thinking. He is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow.
Life
His father was a Communist businessman of Russian ancestry, while his Jewish mother was born in Germany and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee from the Nazi regime.[2]
In 2005 he retired early as a consultant psychiatrist, writing in the Sunday Telegraph: "Retired at last! Retired at last! Thank God Almighty, retired at last! Such are the feelings of almost all hospital consultants and general practitioners who retire from the National Health Service after many years of service: years that increasingly have been ones of drudgery, servitude and subordination to politicians and their henchmen, the managers, who utter Pecksniffian pieties as they secure the advancement of their own inglorious careers." He now divides his time (with his wife, Dr A.C. Nalpas) between homes in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, and France, and continues to write.
He has worked in places including the present Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), Tanzania, South Africa, Kiribati, the east end of London and central Birmingham (UK).
Regarding his pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, Daniels says he "chose a name that sounded suitably dyspeptic, that of a gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world."[3]
He is an atheist, but has criticized anti-theism and says that "to regret religion ... is to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy".[4] Although raised as a Christian, he began doubting the existence of a God at age nine. He became an atheist at about age fourteen in response to a moment in a school assembly.[4]
Daniels has also used the pen names Edward Theberton and Thursday Msigwa[5] and possibly yet another pen name.[3]
Writing
Daniels has written extensively on culture, art, politics, education, and medicine, drawing upon his experience as a doctor and psychiatrist in Zimbabwe and Tanzania. More recently he worked at a prison and a public hospital in Birmingham; the historian Noel Malcolm has described Daniels's written accounts of his experiences there as "journalistic gold".[6]
His work frequently appears in City Journal, The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator , The Salisbury Review, and Axess (a Swedish cultural magazine).
In 2009, Dalrymple's British publisher Monday Books announced it was to publish two books. The first, Not With a Bang But A Whimper, appeared in August 2009. It is different from the US book of the same name, though some of the author's essays appear in both books. In October 2009, Monday Books was to publish Second Opinion, a further collection of Dalrymple essays, this time dealing exclusively with his work in a British hospital and prison.[7]
In his commentary, Daniels frequently argues that the so-called "progressive" views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimize the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within rich countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexually transmitted diseases, welfare dependency, and drug abuse.
He contends that the middle class's abandonment of traditional cultural and behavioural aspirations has, by example, fostered routine incivility and ignorance among the poor. Although he is occasionally accused of being a pessimist and a misanthrope, his defenders praise his persistently conservative philosophy, which they describe as being anti-ideological, sceptical, rational and empiricist.
Themes
Daniels' writing has some recurring themes.[8]
- The cause of much contemporary misery in Western countries - criminality, domestic violence, drug addiction, aggressive youths, hooliganism, broken families - is the nihilistic, decadent and/or self-destructive behaviour of people who do not know how to live. Both the smoothing over of this behaviour, and the medicalization of the problems that emerge as a corollary of this behaviour, are forms of indifference. Someone has to tell those people, patiently and with understanding for the particulars of the case, that they have to live differently.[9]
- Poverty does not explain aggressive, criminal and self-destructive behaviour. In an African slum you will find among the very poor, living in dreadful circumstances, dignity and decency in abundance, which are painfully lacking in an average English suburb, although its inhabitants are much wealthier.[10]
- An attitude characterized by 'gratefulness' and 'obligations towards others' has been replaced, with awful consequences, by an awareness of rights, a sense of entitlement. The result is resentment as, naturally, those rights are violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general.[11]
- One of the things that makes Islam attractive to young westernized Muslim men is the opportunity it gives them to dominate women.[12]
- Technocratic or bureaucratic solutions to the problems of mankind produce disasters in cases where the nature of man is the root cause of those problems.
- It is a myth, when going "cold turkey" from an opiate such as heroin, that the withdrawal symptoms are virtually unbearable; they are rarely worse than flu.[13][14]
- Criminality is much more often the cause of drug addiction than its consequence.
- Sentimentality, which is becoming entrenched in British society, is "the progenitor, the godparent, the midwife of brutality".[15]
- High culture and refined aesthetic tastes are worth defending, and despite the protestations of non-judgmentalists who say all expression is equal, they are superior to popular culture.[16][17][18]
- The ideology of the welfare state is used to diminish personal responsibility. Erosion of personal responsibility makes people dependent on institutions and favours the existence of a threatening and vulnerable underclass.
- Moral relativism can easily be a trick of an egotistical mind to silence the voice of conscience.[19]
- Multiculturalism and cultural relativism are at odds with common sense and statistical evidence.[20]
- The decline of civilised behaviour—such as: self-restraint, modesty, zeal, humility, irony, detachment—is a disaster for social and personal life.[21]
- The root cause of our contemporary cultural poverty is intellectual dishonesty. First, the intellectuals have destroyed the foundation of culture, and second, they refuse to acknowledge it by resorting to the caves of political correctness.
- Beyond and above all other nations in the world, Britain is the place where all the evils summarized above are most clearly manifest.[22]
Works
- Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America (1986)
- Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987)
- Zanzibar to Timbuktu (1988)
- Filosofa's Republic (1989) (published under the pen name Thursday Msigwa)
- Sweet Waist of America: Journeys around Guatemala (1990)
- The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (1991) (published in the U.S. as Utopias Elsewhere)
- Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia (1992)
- If Symptoms Persist: Anecdotes from a Doctor (1994)
- So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer (1996)
- If Symptoms Still Persist (1996)
- Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares (1998)
- An Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine (2001)
- Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001) ISBN 1566633826 Available at Amazon.com
- Violence, Disorder and Incivility in British Hospitals: The Case For Zero Tolerance (book published by the Social Affairs Unit, 2002) ISBN 0907631975
- Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses (2005) ISBN 1566636434 Available at Amazon.com
- Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies And The Addiction Bureaucracy (2006) ISBN 1594030871 (published in the U.K. as Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy ISBN 1905641591) Available at Amazon.com
- Making Bad Decisions. About the Way we Think of Social Problems (2006) (Dr. J. Tans Lecture 2006; published by Studium Generale Maastricht, The Netherlands. Lecture read on Wednesday 15 November 2006. ISBN 9789078769019)
- In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas (2007) ISBN 1594032025
- Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline (US edition) (2008) ISBN 1566637953
- Second Opinion. A Doctor's Notes from the Inner City (2009) ISBN 9781906308124
- Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline (UK edition; contains three essays that are not in the US edition) (2009) ISBN 978-1-906308-10-0 Available at Amazon.com
- The New Vichy Syndrome. Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism (2010) ISBN 9781594033728 Available at Amazon.com
- Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (2010) ISBN 1906142610
External links
- Manhattan Institute Scholar|Theodore Dalrymple
- Archive of City Journal Columns
- The Skeptical Doctor (detailed biography, links to current writings, book reviews, speeches and interviews)
- An interview with Theodore Dalrymple about modern society for Dutch public television (video ca. 40 minutes)
- "The Moral Roots of Economic Crisis" - 2009 Galbraith Lecture at Memorial University's Harris Centre
Bibliography
- Dalrymple, Theodore (2010). Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. Gibson Square Books Ltd. ISBN 1906142610.
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References
- ^ See: "Compassionate Conservative", profile published in the New York Sun, 2004.
- ^ Dalrymple, Theodore. Our Culture What's Left of It (2005) Ivan R. Dee. Note: Daniels writes that it was not a happy marriage; he characterised his parents as having "chose[n] to live in the most abject conflictual misery and created for themselves a kind of Hell on a small domestic scale". In his essay What we have to lose p. 158, Daniels wrote: "(...) my mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany (...) She had left Germany when she was seventeen (...)".
- ^ a b Theodore Dalrymple. Where nobody knows your name. (Globe and Mail, Feb. 16, 2008).
- ^ a b Dalrymple, Theodore. "What the New Atheists Don't See". City Journal. Retrieved January 5, 2009.
{{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ^ Website Skeptical Doctor. For an example of an article written by Edward Theberton, see: Black Marx (The Spectator, 5 juli 1986). The characteristic opening sentence of the article reads: "If the people of Mozambique could eat slogans, they would be fat."
- ^ Noel Malcolm (15 August 2010). "Spoilt Rotten! by Theodore Dalrymple: review". The Sunday Telegraph. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
- ^ The publisher made extracts from both works available free of charge at its website at the following points: Not With A Bang But A Whimper and Second Opinion
- ^ A good number of Daniels's themes are discussed in the interview by Paul Belien with Daniels: 'Dalrymple on Decadence, Europe, America and Islam', in: The Brussels Journal, the Voice of Conservatism in Europe, 17 September 2006.
- ^ Life at the bottom. The Worldview that makes the Underclass (passim).
- ^ What is Poverty, City Journal, spring 1999.
- ^ 'The Law of Conservation of Righteous Indignation, and its Connection to the Expansion of Human Rights', in: In Praise of Prejudice. The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, p. 68 (chapter 17).
- ^ In The Gelded Age. A review of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, by Mark Steyn (Website The Claremont Institute, 9 April 2007), Dalrymple wrote: "The principal immediate attraction of Islam to young Muslims brought up in the West is actually the control and oppression of women." A similar idea is expressed in The Suicide Bombers Among us (Frontpage Magazine, 3 November 2005). In that piece Dalrymple wrote: "However secular the tastes of the young Muslim men, they strongly wish to maintain the male dominance they have inherited from their parents."
- ^ Cold turkey is no worse than flu New Statesman, 09 April 1999. See also: Romancing Opiates (passim).
- ^ Addicted to lies: junking heroin is no worse than flu.
- ^ Dalrymple 2010, p. 50
- ^ [1]
- ^ [2]
- ^ [www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html]
- ^ 'The Uses of Metaphysical Skepticism', in: In Praise of Prejudice. The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, p. 6 (chapter 2).
- ^ Multiculturalism Starts Losing its Luster, City Journal, summer 2004.
- ^ All our Pomp of Yesterday, City Journal, summer 1999.
- ^ Not with a Bang but a Whimper (passim). Daniels does not baulk at the use of the concept of evil. Numerous articles of his have evil in the title.
