Our Culture, What's Left Of It; The Mandarins and the Masses -Theodre Dalrymple

-But this book.

-About the author (wikipedia)

-The Skeptical Doctor, a blog dedicated to the work of Theodore Dalrymple

"The first requirement of civilization is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do so which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than beasts."

To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilized men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilized men have done worse than nothing - they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians. They have denied the distinction between higher and lower, to the invariable advantage of the latter. They have denied the superiority of man's greatest cultural achievements over the most ephemeral and vulgar of entertainments; they have denied that the scientific labors of brilliant men have resulted in an objective understanding of nature, and, like Pilate, they have treated the question of truth as a jest; above all, they have denied that it matters how people conduct themselves in their personal lives, provided only that they consent to their own depravity. The ultimate object of the deconstructionism that has swept the academy like an epidemic has been civilization itself, as the narcissists within the academy try to find a theoretical justification for their own revolt against civilized restraint. And thus the obvious truth - that it is necessary to repress, either by law or by custom, the permanent possibility in human nature of brutality and barbarism - never finds its way into the press or other media of communication.

For the last decade I have been observing close-up, from the vantage point of medical practice, the effects upon a large and susceptible population of the erosion of civilized standards of conduct brought about by the assault upon them by intellectuals. If Joseph Conrad were to search nowadays for the heart of darkness - the evil of human conduct untrammeled by the fear of legal sanction from without or moral censure from within - he would have to look no further than an English city such as mine." (163)

"...a rejection of everything associated with one's childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it." (25)

"To base one's rejection of what exists - and hence one's prescription for a better world - upon the petty frustrations of one's youth, as surely many middle-class radicals have done, is profoundly egotistical. Unless consciously rejected, this impulse leads to a tendency throughout life to judge the rightness or wrongness of policies by one's personal emotional response to them, as if emotions were an infallible guide." (26)

On D.H.Lawrence:

" Lawrence was was an earnest, but not a serious, writer - if by serious we mean one whose outlook on life is intellectually or morally worthy of our consideration. Lawrence put a lot of himself into Mellors (the protangonist in Lady Chatterly's Lover), who at one point in the book enunciates the essence of Lawrence's philosophy, the summary of all his reflections on human existence, his final testament to the world: "I believe in something, I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love. I believe that if men could fuck with warm hearts and women took it warm-heartedly, everything would be all right." The idea that social perfection is to be achieved through wonderfully sensual sexual relations between men and women is a fantasy unworthy of prolonged intellectual consideration. To call it adolescent tripe is to be unfair to many intelligent adolescents. The fact that so many eminent persons were willing to testify in court that Lawrence was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, worthy to be compared, say, with Conrad, is an indication of the elite's loss of taste and judgment. Their imprimatur helped transform a bad writer and a worse thinker into a major cultural influence: and his crude, egotistical literal-mindedness has been successively trumped ever since by yet cruder, more egotistical literal-mindedness.

Yet literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth - far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is to say self-conscious and human, cannot be spoken of directly: the attempt leads only to crudity, not to truth. Bawdy is the tribute that our instincts pay to secrecy. If you go beyond bawdy and tear all the veils away, you get pornography and nothing else. In essence, therefore, Lawrence was a pornographer, though a dull one even in that dull genre.

There never was much demand, except from the elite, for relaxation of the law of censorship: indeed, until the law was relaxed, the public had shown a distinctly limited appetite for the works of D.H.Lawrence. But no sooner had the relaxation been legislated, and the book published, than one in four British households had acquired it. The genie was well and truly out of the bottle, the supply had created a demand, and the appetite grew with feeding.

It is, of course, a common prejudice that censorship is bad for art and therefore always unjustified: though, if this were so, mankind would have little in the way of an artistic heritage, we should now be living in an artistic golden age. But if we cannot censor, we can censure: and we should be tireless in saying that D.H.Lawrence and his deplorable and hackneyed progeny down to Marilyn Manson and Glen Duncan, with his "dark, satanic thrills," darken the world rather than enlighten it." (60-61)

On Virginia Woolf:

"It comes as no surprise that a thinker ( or perhaps I should say feeler) such as Mrs. Woolf, with her emotional and intellectual dishonesty, should collapse all relevant moral distinctions, a technique vital to all schools of resentment. Time and again we find her misappropriating the connotation of one thing and attaching it to another, by insinuating a false analogy: that since both the British policeman and the Nazi stormtrooper wore a uniform, the British policeman was a brute. It is one of the chief characteristics of modern rhetoric, designed not so much to find the truth as ( in the words of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam) to "maintain your rage." (71)


"Her inability to distinguish metaphor from the literal truth is unremitting. Discussing the struggle for female emancipation, she says: "It is true that the combatants did not inflict flesh wounds; chivalry forbad; but you will agree that a battle that wastes time is as deadly as a battle that wastes blood."

As deadly? As deadly? It is small wonder that Mrs. Wolf finds it difficult to draw a distinction between the Church of England and the Nazi party...." (72-3)


"Once the war began and the bombs began to fall ( destroying the Woolf's London house), even Mrs. Woolf began to think that a Nazi victory might not be such a good thing. Even more astonishing, she began to see virtues in the very people whom previously she had only disdained....

Eventually Mrs. Woolf must have wondered from what deep source the virtues she noticed had arisen - or could they have been present all along and she had failed to notice them? Might the revelation by the war of the utter frivolity of her previous attitudinizing have contributed to her decision to commit suicide? If the good life is a matter of judgment, the war proved that all her adult life she had none. My mother, with her wrench by day and helmet by night, did more for civilization ( a word that Mrs. Woolf enclosed in quotation marks in The Three Guineas, as if it did not really exist) than Mrs. Woolf had ever done, with her jeweled prose disguising her narcissistic rage.

Had Mrs. Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind - shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal - had triumphed among the elites of the Western world." (76)

On Huxley, Orwell, and Shakespeare:

"...the underlying theme of the two great dystopias ( Brave New World & 1984 ) of the twentieth century is the need to preserve a sense of history and cultural tradition if life is to be bearable. This theme is all the more powerful because Huxley and Orwell were by nature radicals: Huxley was a socialist at Oxford, flirted with fascism in the 1930s, and then became a West Coat guru; Orwell was a socialist from an early age and a lifelong enemy of the status quo. Both implicitly realized as they contemplated the future that preservation was as important as change in human life: that the past was as important as the present and the future.

In both dystopias, people find themselves cut off from the past as a matter of deliberate policy. The revolution that brought about the Brave New World, says Mustapha Mond, was "accompanied by a campaign against the Past" - the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments ( as in the Taliban's Afghanistan), the banning of old books. In 1984 "the past has been abolished." " History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right."

Such dystopian engineering is at work in my own country. By the deliberate decision of pedagogues, hundreds of thousands of children now leave school without knowing a single fact about their own country. The historical principals that museums have traditionally used to display art have given way to ahistorical thematic displays - portraits of women from a jumble of eras, say. A meaningless glass box now sits on a pediment in London's Trafalger Square as a "corrective" to the famous associations of that famous urban space. A population is being deliberately created with no sense of history.

For both Huxley and Orwell, one man symbolized resistance to the dehumanizing disconnection of man from his past: Shakespeare. In both writers, he stands for the highest pinnacle of human self-understanding, without which human life loses its depth and its possibility of transcendence. In Brave New World, possessing an old volume of Shakespeare that has mysteriously survived protects a man from the enfeebling effects of a purely hedonistic life. A few lines are sufficient to make him realize the superficiality of the Brave New World:

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!

And when Winston Smith wakes in 1984 from a dream about a time before the Revolution, when people were still human, a single word rises from his lips, for reasons that he does not understand: Shakespeare.

This scene takes me back to Pyongyang. I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People's Study House - all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata - when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, "Do you speak English?"

An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, "Down with Big Brother!"

"Yes" I replied.

"I am a student at the Foreign Language Institute. reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life."

It was the most searing communication that I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.

Orwell and Huxley had the imagination to understand why - unlike me, who had to go to Pyongyang to find out." (113-15)

On Modern art and art criticism:

"...for the new art criticism, "disturbing" is an automatic term of approbation. "It has always been the job of artists to conquer territory that has been taboo," writes Norman Rosenthal......It would be difficult to formulate a less truthful, more willingly distorted summary of art history, of which a small part - and by no means the most glorious - is mistaken for the whole,.....

"Artists must continue the conquest of new territory and new taboos," Rosenthal continues, in a prescriptivist mood. He admits no other purpose for art: to break taboos is thus not a possible function of art but its only function. Small wonder, then, that if all art is the breaking of taboos, all breaking of taboos soon comes to be regarded as art.

Of course, he doesn't really mean what he says; but then, for intellectuals like him, words are not to express propositions or truth but to distinguish the writer socially from the common herd, too artistically unenlightened and unsophisticated to advocate the abandonment of all restraint and standards. It is unlikely, however, that even Rosenthal would find, say, a video of young hooligans raping his sister to be merely the conquest of new territory and taboo. Thus, while he may not actually mean what he says, his promotion of this idea in the current exhibition will return to haunt not only him but the rest of society. For why should artists alone be permitted to break taboos? Why not the rest of us? A taboo exists only if it is a taboo for everyone: and what is broken symbolically in art will soon enough be broken in reality.

That civilized life cannot be lived without taboos - that some of them may indeed be justified, and that taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished - is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism. How ironic that a high official of the Royal Academy should have espoused this destructive doctrine, when the Academy 's first president, a greater and better man by far, wrote in his Seventh Discourse on Art: "A man who thinks he is guarding himself against prejudices (by which he means inherited moral standards and taboos) by resisting the authority of others, leaves open every avenue to singularity, vanity, self-conceit, obstinacy, and many other vices, all tending to warp the judgment." As Sir Joshua also pointed out - in urbane, witty, and civilized prose, of a kind impossible to imagine Norman Rosenthal writing - the intelligent and wise man examines his prejudices, not to reject them all because they are prejudices but to see which which should be retained and which should not.

...modern sophistication demands a sensibility that nothing can offend or surprise, that is ironclad against shock or moral objection. To be a man of artistic taste now requires that you have no standards at all to be violated: which, as Ortega y Gasset said, is the beginning of barbarism." (146-8)

On Princess Diana:

"The cult of royalty, while the mystique lasted, suggested to those who followed it that there was a plane of existence that transcended the everyday world, and that there existed something greater and more important than themselves; whereas the cult of celebrity is but a disguised worship of our own, generally uncultivated, tastes and desires. Quiet reverence for the unseen has become noisy tittle-tattle about the ubiquitous, which has resulted in a vicious spiral of ever-coarsening public appetites, because tittle-tattle must be ever more salacious to satisfy us.

If  Diana's life was inaccessible to the commonalty, and therefore the stuff of dreams, it was highly accessible also. Her prince turned out to be not so charming, at least to her. His heart was set on another, even as he walked down the aisle. She had been selected for  marriage in much the same way as a horse breeder selects a horse, and for much the same reasons: the bloodline must go on. Her teeth were good, and she was fertile. Moreover, the family into which she was married, interesting only by virtue of its position, was not at all normal. Difficulties ensued.

Diana therefore had a constituency of all those who have been unhappy in their marriages, whose husbands or wives have deserted or betrayed them, who have had contretemps with their mothers-in-law, who have suffered humiliation at the hands of others: that is to say, a very high percentage of the human race. Her problems were those that might afflict any ordinary person, especially any ordinary woman, and therefore ordinary people were able to identify with her easily. She was the goddess of domestic tribulations.

When she revealed that she suffered from bulimia, she sealed her universal popularity. In an age when strength of character consists of being able to flaunt one's weaknesses to the prurient gaze of millions of idle onlookers, nothing could establish her bona fides better than her confession that she induced herself to vomit after eating too much: just like a thousand or a million salesclerks anxious about their weight. She is one of us: an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sexual pervert, a kleptomaniac, an agoraphobic, an anorexic, or one of the thousand natural diagnoses of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (Fourth Edition) that flesh is heir to.

So universally accepted has the pathologico-therapeutic approach to life become that the apostolic heir to St. Augustine - that is to say, the present Archbishop of Canterbury - offered up thanks to God at the funeral service for Princess Diana's vulnerability, as if an appointment with a psychiatrists were man's highest possible moral and cultural aspiration. Of course, prelates of the Church of England today have backbones of marshmallow; but still it seems to me absurd to offer up thanks to the Author of the Universe for a princess's shortcomings.

The other quality that made Diana the people's princess was, of course, the extreme banality of her tastes and pleasures. As she herself was the first to admit, she was not clever, at least in the intellectual sense,  though she clearly had intuition. Apart from dress sense, she had the cheapest tastes, in other words, she was not at all threatening to the man and woman in the street, who knew that she liked what they liked and that much of her life was lived as they would live, were they to win the lottery. Even her sympathy with the poor and wretched of the earth was such as the average man or woman feels from time to time. In this respect her similarity to Eva Peron, who embraced the conspicuously afflicted before the flashbulbs of photographers, is very striking, as is the similarity of the aura of sanctity that the public, quite incongruously, conferred upon "Evita" after her equally untimely death.

That her tastes were, despite her privileged upbringing, utterly banal and plebeian appeared very clearly at the funeral, were Elton John sang his bathetic dirge immediately after the prime minister read St. Paul's magnificent words in Corinthians. It was highly appropriate 9 and symbolic) that this lugubrious booby, with his implanted wig, should sing a recycled version of a song initially dedicated to the memory of Marilyn Monroe - a celebrity who at least had had to make her own way in the world, and who also made a few films worthy of commemoration. "goodbye, England's rose," he intoned in a mid-Atlantic accent that spoke volumes for the loss of Britain's cultural confidence, "from a country lost without your soul."

You can say that again, in the orgy of sentimentality into which much of the country sank after Diana's death, and which reminds me of the hot bath into which I gratefully sink after a hard day at the hospital, one thing has become evident, that the British, under the influence of the media of mass communication, which demand that everyone wear his emotion or pseudo-emotion on his sleeve, have lost their only admirable qualities - stoicism, self-depreciation, and a sense of irony - and have gained only those worthy of contempt. They have exchanged depth for shallowness, and have thought they got the better of the bargain. They are like people who think that the answer to constipation is diarrhea."    (205-7)