Isegoria

Theodore Dalrymple explores Mixed-up Malaysia:

When you arrive into Kuala Lumpur airport, you are warned in writing and by the air stewards that the mandatory death penalty is in force for drug smugglers in Malaysia. For some strange reason, this warning makes you feel guilty: could someone have secretly loaded your luggage with drugs between check-in and boarding?

Surely the policy keeps Malaysia drug-free? But I learnt, in the first newspaper that I read after arriving, that Malaysia intends to start a needle-exchange scheme and institute a methadone-substitution program for its drug addicts, all in the name of harm reduction. The death penalty for drug smugglers notwithstanding, Malaysia seems to have quite an HIV problem: officially 60,000 people are seropositive, though unofficial estimates put the real number at 300,000 — 5 times the rate of the United States.

Jamie Glazov of FrontPage magazine interviews Theodore Dalrymple on his new book, Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, which is a compilation of essays.

On depression:

I have noticed the disappearance of the word ‘unhappy’ from common usage, and its replacement by the word ‘depressed.’ While unhappiness is a state of mind that is clearly the result of the circumstances of one’s life, whether self-inflicted or inflicted by circumstances beyond one’s control, or a mixture of both, depression is an illness that is the doctor’s responsibility to cure. This is so, however one happens to be leading one’s life. And the doctor, enjoined to pass no judgement that could be interpreted as moral on his patients, has no option but to play along with this deception. The result is the gross over-prescription of medication, without any reduction in unhappiness.

On conflicting goals:

It is clear to me that people often want incompatible things. They want danger and excitement on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, and often simultaneously. Contradictory desires mean that life can never be wholly satisfying or without frustration.

I think it was Dostoyevsky who said that, even if the government were 100 per cent benevolent and arranged everything for our own good, as judged by rational criteria, we should still want to exercise our freedom by going against its dispensations.

One reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British, if not the whole of Western, society, is the avoidance of boredom. For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men — that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring.

On political correctness:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

I recently read Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali, his horror novel about an American literary magazine editor who travels to Calcutta to acquire a new manuscript from a presumed-dead poet. Now I’m seeing oblique references everywhere. From High and Low by Theodore Dalrymple:

Calcutta is the most literary city in India. The Bengalis have long prided themselves on being in the country’s artistic and intellectual vanguard — which explains, perhaps, why West Bengal has a Marxist government and why Calcutta, until recently, has lagged at the rear of the economic transformation of India’s cities. A disproportionate number of India?s well-known writers in English hail from this terrible and wonderful place, where reality itself has a hallucinatory quality.

According to Big names in the blogosphere, “well known writer and commentator Theodore Dalrymple is now a contributor to the Social Affairs Unit blog, publishing under his real name, Dr Anthony Daniels.”

Also, he has a new book coming out, Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.

In A Murderess’s Tale, Theodore Dalrymple describes the English legal system’s concept of diminished responsibility, which leads to leniency in the case of a personality disorder — “or what used to be called a bad character”:

The use of personality disorder in such cases seems to me to be little else than a thin or even frivolous pretext for leniency, for if the argument were taken seriously it would lead to more severe punishment rather than less. If a man kills as a result of a momentary but understandable lapse, in unusual circumstances, he is guilty of murder but is unlikely to kill again; if a man kills because his character is deficient, and it is therefore the kind of thing he does, he is guilty of manslaughter but, ex hypothesi, is likely to do it again.

Dalrymple has some terrible stories to tell:

Not long ago, I testified in a case in which personality disorder served as an illogical pretext for leniency. A woman in her early forties, an alcoholic, had married another alcoholic and had a child by him. The father subsequently gave up drinking, separated from his wife — who continued to drink — and came to the conclusion that she was not a suitable mother for his child. He was in the process of applying for custody.

By now, the child was two years old. One day, the mother — probably drunk — dissolved the contents of her antidepressant capsules in some cough medicine and injected the solution into the child?s mouth with a syringe. The child died as a result.

Theodore Dalrymple opens When Islam Breaks Down with a bit of a travelog:

My first contact with Islam was in Afghanistan. I had been through Iran overland to get there, but it was in the days of the Shah?s White Revolution, which had given rights to women and had secularized society (with the aid of a little detention, without trial, and torture). In my naive, historicist way, I assumed that secularization was an irreversible process, like the breaking of eggs: that once people had seen the glory of life without compulsory obeisance to the men of God, they would never turn back to them as the sole guides to their lives and politics.

Afghanistan was different, quite clearly a pre-modern society. The vast, barren landscapes in the crystalline air were impossibly romantic, and the people (that is to say the men, for women were not much in evidence) had a wild dignity and nobility. Their mien was aristocratic. Even their hospitality was fierce. They carried more weapons in daily life than the average British commando in wartime. You knew that they would defend you to the death, if necessary — or cut your throat like a chicken?s, if necessary. Honor among them was all.

He describes performing Romeo and Juliet for the crown prince of Afghanistan, not realizing the lines “would so uncannily capture the predicament of some of my Muslim patients in Britain more than a third of a century after my visit to Afghanistan, and four centuries after they were written”:

In fact the situation of Muslim girls in my city is even worse than Juliet?s. Every Muslim girl in my city has heard of the killing of such as she back in Pakistan, on refusal to marry her first cousin, betrothed to her by her father, all unknown to her, in the earliest years of her childhood. The girl is killed because she has impugned family honor by breaking her father?s word, and any halfhearted official inquiry into the death by the Pakistani authorities is easily and cheaply bought off. And even if she is not killed, she is expelled from the household — O sweet my mother, cast me not away! — and regarded by her ?community? as virtually a prostitute, fair game for any man who wants her.

A creepy anecdote:

She had two children in quick succession, both of whom were so severely handicapped that they would be bedridden for the rest of their short lives and would require nursing 24 hours a day. (For fear of giving offense, the press almost never alludes to the extremely high rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous marriages.) Her husband, deciding that the blame for the illnesses was entirely hers, and not wishing to devote himself to looking after such useless creatures, left her, divorcing her after Islamic custom. Her family ostracized her, having concluded that a woman whose husband had left her must have been to blame and was the next thing to a whore. She threw herself off a cliff, but was saved by a ledge.

Muhammad’s legacy intermingles temporal power with claims of religious purity:

Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the Prophet?s death, with some — today?s Sunnites — following his father-in-law, and some — today?s Shi?ites — his son-in-law). Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad?s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-?-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam — in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church — has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform. Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by the ways of the world.

In Killing time, Theodore Dalrymple, a prison doctor in the UK, makes the case that “caring” attitudes have increased the suicide rate in British prisons:

A former director of the prison medical service once opined (in private, not for publication) that in France no one cared if a prisoner committed suicide; indeed, such a death was regarded by the public as a net gain for society. In Britain, however, we pretend both to be shocked and to care deeply. This pretence is not entirely harmless, for it results in a lot of official activity; and, as we have come to expect, official activity has the opposite effect to that intended.

In the 1980s, two measures seemed to coincide with the rise in suicide in prison. Until about 1986, the prison record of each prisoner who had ever attempted suicide was marked with a large red “F” (I can’t find out what the F stood for) so that the prison officers automatically knew who was vulnerable and could keep a special eye on them. For some reason, this simple system was stopped and was replaced a few years later by a form of much greater complexity for those deemed to be actively suicidal. The change represented the bureaucrat’s view that elaborate formal ways of dealing with a problem are always superior to simple informal ones. In a sense, this is true: they always give bureaucrats more work to do.

Until the 1980s, when the suicide rate rose, it was an offence in prison to harm yourself or to make a suicidal gesture. Unless the doctor considered that you had a bona fide illness that led you to act in this fashion, you were charged with wasting medical time, and lost remission. The abolition of this harsh-sounding regulation was replaced by a more “caring” attitude, and conferred certain advantages in prison upon those who claimed to be suicidal, which resulted — as any sensible person would have expected — in a large increase in acts of self-harm, of which there are now at least 20,000 per year in our prisons. But the abolition of punishment for self-harm achieved its most important end: the gratification of the reformers’ narcissistic urge to feel humane.

The suicidal are now rewarded with various privileges that can include better material conditions, admission to the hospital wing (where the regime is easier), daily visits from nurses and “listeners” (prisoners deputed to allow fellow-prisoners to air their problems), increased medication irrespective of whether it is strictly indicated, and so forth. But in order to prove their bona fides as potential suicides, and to preserve their privileges, some prisoners feel obliged eventually to make a serious gesture. I have known prisoners who have been laughing and joking companionably with their fellow-prisoners attempt to hang themselves a few minutes later if told that their status as suicide risks was being removed. And such gestures sometimes go wrong.

As soon as Theodore Dalrymple qualified as a doctor, he went to Rhodesia, which was to transform itself into Zimbabwe five years or so later. There, he worked under a remarkable doctor (also from England), as he explains in After Empire:

He never panicked, even in the direst emergency; and he knew what to do when a man had been half eaten by a crocodile or mauled by a leopard, when a child had been bitten in the leg by a puff adder, or when a man appeared with a spear driven through his skull. When called in the early hours of the morning, as he frequently was, he was as even-tempered as if attending a social event.

Interestingly, Rhodesia paid doctors equally, regardless of race, but this didn’t have the effect you’d expect:

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire — and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, by Theodore Dalrymple, describes modern France’s criminal-infested housing projects (cités), and the parallels to American housing projects are uncanny:

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them — a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust — greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years — is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements.
[...]
Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti — BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.
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[Pit bulls were] the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.
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Antagonism toward the police might appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen (whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines.
[...]
The absence of a real economy and of law means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal system based on theft and drug-trafficking. In Les Tarterets, for example, I observed two dealers openly distributing drugs and collecting money while driving around in their highly conspicuous BMW convertible, clearly the monarchs of all they surveyed. Both of northwest African descent, one wore a scarlet baseball cap backward, while the other had dyed blond hair, contrasting dramatically with his complexion. Their faces were as immobile as those of potentates receiving tribute from conquered tribes. They drove everywhere at maximum speed in low gear and high noise: they could hardly have drawn more attention to themselves if they tried. They didn’t fear the law: rather, the law feared them.