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| Home > Reviews > Our Culture, What's Left of It - The Mandarins and the Masses |
| Our Culture, What's Left of It - The Mandarins and the Masses | | Date Created: Oct 15, 2005, 09:52 PM |
 I just love books by british physicians nearing retirement. They know it all. They've seen it all. And they don't care much what others think about their opinions. Another brit doc favorite and essential reading for skeptics is Whiplash and Other Useful Illnesses by Andrew Malleson.
Theodore Dalrymple is one such English physician and I had high expectations for this book. Apparently Dalrymple is a nom de plume for Anthony Daniels, but the experience as a physician around the world and in British prisons is real.
I wasn't disappointed with Our Culture, What's Left of It until the very end. It's really a collection of essays on different subjects and it just ends. There are no answers. Not even a suggestion of where do we go from here. I suspect the answer isn't in his previous book, Life At The Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, either.
Dalrymple has it figured out. It's hard to imagine someone who knows more about what the problems are. He just doesn't have any answers. He knows what doesn't work. But what does? In the chapter called, "Don't Legalize Drugs", he gets it wrong. He also doesn't seem to understand the US branch of libertarianism. But what can you expect from someone who's an avowed atheist and whose father was a Marxist?
The overriding sense while reading this book is, "it couldn't possibly be that bad". "These must be anecdotes." "If this is true, when is it going to really fall apart?" "It's not that bad in the US is it?" Victimology, welfare, multiculturism, intellectual and academic elites, foreign aid, human nature -- it's all here.
How's this for the ending two paragraphs of the first chapter, "The Frivolity of Evil"?
...Ultimately the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites is responsible for the continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain, a disaster whose full social and economic consequences have yet to be seen. A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have atomized British society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so protective in times of hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened, however obvious it it, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they should feel bad about themselves -- another aspect of the frivolity of evil. Moreover, if members of the elite acknowledged the social disaster brought about by their ideological libertinism, they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior, for you cannot long demand of others what you balk at doing yourself.
There are pleasures, no doubt, to be had in crying in the wilderness, in being a man who thinks he has seen farther and more keenly than others, but they grow fewer with time. The wilderness has lost its charms for me.
I'm leaving -- I hope for good."
I couldn't have said it better. Read this and weep. But don't expect any answers. |
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