He's probably been working, as he himself admits, too hard

Arts & Letters Daily linked to this article: The Frivolity of Evil by Theodore Dalrymple. It's a critique, sorta, of British society.  Here's the beefiest passage I could find:

There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like, and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing...

Can someone interpret? What is he talking about? Does anyone of any substance -- and I don't mean the people, Left & Right, who spread rumors that Dick Cheney was involved with 9-11 --  support the specific policies to which he so vigorously yet vaguely alludes? Do any of the Brits here know anyone who believes that "How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence..." Do you know someone? Seriously? Does anyone take them seriously?

Dalrymple rants but -- as usual with the right-wing intellectuals -- in the vaguest and most non-specific way possible. A&LD may think it's noteworthy; I suspect it's angry cant.

I live in a city -- BlueSeattle -- that I suspect Dalrymple would destest, full as it is of liberal pieties. So when I read articles like this one, I look around my block and I wonder what people he is talking about. With respect to the sentence I quoted immediately above, the whole of American family law is built around the idea of the best interests of the child. Whether the Legislatures & Courts pull it off is one question; but that it is the pole star of thinking about family life is undeniable. And I would suspect that the same is in Britain.

So what are these middle-aged intellectuals -- ranting on about "the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites...responsible for the continuing social disaster?"  -- really talking about? I wish they'd get down to specifics. Do he and I live on the same planet? An characterization like this one --

"...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."

-- mystifies me because it lacks any reference to specific policies.

Oh well, politics is mostly code words.

Comments

[TM Lutas]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "the beefiest passage". Could you explain? From what I can gather, the man has had 14 years of experience treating the underbelly of UK society and gathered enough data in his practice to provide a very good picture of trends, at least in the lower classes, especially the lower criminal class. Other passages make it clear that he's taken his wide, personal experience and drawn conclusions that UK intellectual conceits as they are actually practiced have the effect described above.

Past a certain point of bad results, incompetent implementation loses its explanatory powers and you have to admit that however nice and good a theory appears to be, its appearance is false, covering a perniciousness and outright evil that must be stamped out. The most famous of these cases has been the continued thrust by certain communists that communism has never truly been tried and this next experiment will surely get things right.

Certainly UK social practices are not the equivalent of the black book of communism but it is a matter of degree of denial, not of kind. This denial leads to the same sort of broken record syndrome of repeating failure in new and improved variants of pathology.

I'm surprised you say "Dalrymple rants but -- as usual with the right-wing intellectuals -- in the vaguest and most non-specific way possible". I think you're simply not paying much attention to the statistics nuts on the right. They're certainly out there and a quick perusal of the Heritage Foundation's Backgrounder series would demonstrate that numbers and hard facts have as much a place on the right as they do on the left.

As for Dalrymple personally, his medical practice is both a powerful source of actual data and a straightjacket for how he can use such data. He is vague, in part, because specificity would be unethical. I'm sure that he could have published papers and perhaps he has under his real name (I believe Theodore Dalrymple is a pseudonym). But you don't win culture wars with dry recitations of statistics. There must be narrative, there must be fire to rouse the spirits of your supporters and shame your opponents. That's the enterprise which Dalrymple engages in.

[Chris Burd]

Theodore Dalrymple -- real name: Anthony (A.M.) Daniels -- is certainly a cut above the average right-wing (or left-wing) ranter, for precisely the reason TM Lutas mentions: as a physician working in British prisons and slums he deals personally with problems that the rest of us just talk about. A repeated theme of his is the degree to which bien-pensant positions on social policy often amount to posturings intended merely to present the speaker in a good light.

By the way, though clearly on the right, Dalrymple is anti-Thatcherite agnostic from a left-wing background (his father was a Communist activist and his mother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany). He came to his more or less traditionalist views (he says) via his professional experience.

The City Journal website has dozens of his essays on line, and they're well worth reading, some more than others, admittedly.

Cheers,

Chris Burd