Theodore Dalrymple's Blog

Personal experience is no guide to statistical reality, a lesson brought home to me recently once again by a trip to London. When I arrived back home from my trip, a copy of The Spectator was waiting for me, and its cover story was about the decline of drinking in Britain.

Suffice it to say that this did not entirely coincide with my experience on the train to and from London. Per capita sales of alcohol in Britain may have declined from their peak in 2004, but the Indian lady on the way to the city had clearly bought quite a lot of vodka for the journey. The drunk on the way back had probably shoplifted his alcohol, to judge by his unsolicited autobiographical remarks.

My guess is that the lady on the way to London was probably Sikh, or at least Punjabi, for I have noticed that among Indians who drink heavily, they are very prominent. I once had a Sikh patient dying of liver failure with a bottle of whisky on his bedside table who adamantly denied that he had ever let a drop pass his lips and that therefore his illness was unjust.

“He was a free man—far freer than most of the people who inwardly tut-tutted at his behavior.”

The drunk lady was very loud. She was in a party of four, but the other three were not drinking. Her laugh rose from a cackle to a scream that lasted until she took her next swig. I don’t think I have ever heard anything so funny that it would justify such loud laughter. To me, her laughter sounded almost hysterical: laughter in search of something to laugh about.

Her sober companions did nothing to restrain her. Perhaps they couldn’t. I thought of Mr Bumble, the beadle in Oliver Twist, when told in court that the law supposed that a man was in control of his wife. “If the law supposes that,” said Mr Bumble, “the law is a ass—a idiot.”

My wife approached her—she was not malign-looking—and said mildly that she was making an awful lot of noise. The lady replied by holding out her bottle and saying, “Would you like a drink, love?” There was clearly no point in expostulating further or trying to put an end to her one-woman party, and we even began to think that the problem was with us, that we were strait-laced puritan killjoys. It was eleven in the morning, however.

By the time we reached London, the lady was so far gone that it had to be explained to her why the train had stopped, and she had to be guided reluctantly out of the carriage like a baby out of the womb during a difficult delivery.

On the way back, there was a man sitting behind us whose condition one would not have needed a breathalyzer to diagnose. His general appearance was of a dishevelment that was not that of a moment. He was informing the carriage that he was English, and a good lad, really; when the ticket inspectress came, he informed her that he didn’t have a ticket but that he was going to Lichfield.

The train, however, did not go to Lichfield, and with admirable calm and politeness, the inspectress found the route that the passenger might take to the city of Dr Johnson’s birth. Of course, she knew that this was pointless, that he was merely making an excuse for being on the train without a ticket. Once she had gone, he announced that he was trying to get to Glasgow, another of the many cities to which the train was not going.

“I’m English,” he said, “I’m a good lad, I am.” He said this as if the quality of being good and English were synonymous—or perhaps oxymoronic.

Then he approached another passenger and asked him whether he had enjoyed himself in London. “Did you do any robberies, burglaries, or shootings?” This was obviously his idea of having a good time. Then he said, “I’m a good lad, I am, English, not a nonce.”

Nonce is English prison slang for a sexual offender, a word I have not heard used outside of prison, so that clearly this man had been in prison. Perhaps his state of drunkenness—he swayed like a leaf in the autumn wind—was in celebration of his release from what many who live in its shadow call “the big house.”

I did not reply to his repeated efforts to engage me in conversation. To him, I must have seemed censorious, priggish, or stand-offish (I have never been very good at conversing with drunks). Fortunately, we got off at the next stop, just as the police, who evidently had been called by the inspectress, were getting on.

When I saw them, I was struck by a feeling of the futility of it all. They would haul him off the train, take him down to the police station, book him, and either let him back on the streets, to continue making his mild mayhem, or put him in the cells to sleep it off. If they brought him before the magistrates, he would be fined, but would not pay his fine. A warrant for his arrest might then be issued, but it would never be executed. What was the point of all this, beyond giving several people a certain amount of form-filling to do? On the other hand, it would hardly be right for no public notice whatever to be taken of him.

This not very clever man easily ran rings round a state that collected and spent untold billions, and yet was powerless to do anything about him. Of this, I was secretly glad. It was not that he added to the gaiety of the nation, exactly, but that I had rather a state that was sometimes helpless than one that was ruthlessly omnicompetent. He was a free man—far freer than most of the people who inwardly tut-tutted at his behavior.

Two drunks don’t make a social trend. It is well to remember that when next you make a pronouncement on the state of society on the basis of your personal experience, which—if you are anything like me—you will do very soon.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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It is a trope of many intellectuals that to stack shelves in a supermarket, or to work at a supermarket checkout, is the worst fate that can befall a human being. Such a job is regarded as the very epitome of dead-endedness, though a dead end is what we are all progressing toward anyway, and many people do not particularly want excitement on the way to that inevitable dead end. They want peace and tranquility instead: As some of my patients used to ask, “Can’t you give me something to stop me thinking, doctor?” It was not any particular thoughts that they wanted to cease to think: It was thought as such.

Be that as it may, there is interest to be found in supermarkets, for example in people’s choice of comestibles. I often look at what people buy and am appalled. It is almost as if they trusted nothing that had not been processed in a hundred factories and added to by a thousand chemicals. What they eat is natural only in the sense that everything that exists is natural. The products they choose may be given names suggestive of pastures, meadows, flowers, mountain ranges, and so forth, but the list of contents in microscopic letters on the back reads like an advanced textbook of chemistry, organic and inorganic. But at least all the purchasers have to do to prepare the stuff is to heat it up, which is about as far as their culinary skills extend.

“I often look at what people buy and am appalled.”

You can tell the social class of people by simply looking at what they buy. Partly, of course, it is a question of money, but only partly. The higher the proportion of fresh food chosen, the higher the social class. As for alcoholics, they buy edibles as if eating were a regrettable necessity and rather a waste of money. They buy as little and as cheaply as possible: They do not want to eat into their drinking money. It is as if they knew dietary recommendations perfectly and had decided to do as near the opposite as they could. Dostoyevsky said that if a perfectly benevolent and well-intentioned government existed (a wildly unlikely hypothesis), people would do the opposite of its injunctions merely to exercise their freedom. Fortunately, no such government is necessary to prove the determination of people not to follow good advice—which, as La Rochefoucauld pointed out, is in any case easier to give than to take.

If I were to work at a supermarket checkout—another kind of employment that will soon disappear—I am sure that I should find it very difficult to refrain from commentary on the customers’ purchases. “How can you buy this disgusting rubbish?” I would ask. “It isn’t even cheap, contrary to what you suppose.”

Nowadays, people are prepared to eat cakes with sky-blue icing, or sky-blue ice cream. Fifty-five years ago I held a dinner party at which I dyed potatoes either red or blue, my hypothesis being that my guests would be prepared to eat the red potatoes but not the blue: red being a possible color for a natural food but blue being obviously artificial. And so it turned out: People (of my own age) would eat the red but not the blue potatoes.

It would be interesting to repeat the experiment today. It might well be that people are now so disconnected from nature, and so accustomed to the artificial, that they would be prepared to eat blue potatoes.

From time to time, I find shopping lists either dropped or thrown onto the street in my little town in England (the English have become the most slovenly people in the world, in their disposal of litter as in their dress). I pick up these lists and read them: They are interesting both as to form—bad spelling—and content, which is to remind people what they have gone out to buy. The very idea of a shopping list, incidentally, is now distinctly old-fashioned, implying as it does some kind of self-discipline rather than action on impulse, so that one might presume that the people who make—but also discard, whether deliberately or accidentally—shopping lists are of above average self-control. Most people seem to shop, at least in supermarkets, as if they were wandering about until inspiration emanating from the shelves struck them. Few are those who enter with a fixed purpose, adhere to it, and leave once they have bought what they set out to buy.

But even shopping lists catch people in flagrante delicto, as it were, just before or just after they have committed crimes against nutritional good sense. Good God, I think, they give this stuff to their children, it is almost a form of child abuse. The problem is that mothers ask their children what they would like to eat tonight, and with the bad sense that is natural to children, or to humans, the children always reply that they want whatever is bad for them. And the mothers, fearing an outburst of petulance, immediately comply. Thus, an asymmetric war is set up between mothers and children: the mothers having all the power, but the children having the whip hand.

Therefore, it was a pleasure the other day to pick up a shopping list from the ground that concerned only the person’s dog. What unconditional love it bespoke!

Dog food
Treats [the above evidently not being sufficient}
Grooming products and brushes
Dog toys
Towels and blankets
Poo bags [for when the dog is taken for a walk in the town]
Puppy pads
Bone sale

As the fertility rate declines, so the number of dogs increases; and I have to admit that, these days, I myself find relations with dogs rather easier than those with humans, of almost any age. My impression is that people have become more difficult of late years, more complex in an uninteresting way, possibly because of the habit, not of reflecting on themselves, but of thinking and talking about themselves. Possibly my difficulty is part of the aging process, which in this case is mine; but never, so it seems, have so many people been so incompetent in the art of living, notwithstanding all the advantages they have enjoyed in their lives.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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Everyone lives in his own little world and unless he makes a special effort from time to time to enlarge it, there is a tendency with age for it to collapse in on itself and become yet smaller. It is for this reason that I sometimes read the Japan Times, for otherwise that country would not be on my horizon at all, despite its undoubted importance.

My view of Japan is full of clichés, if not entirely composed of them. I think of it as a very well-ordered place where these is little crime and no litter, where everyone has a refined aesthetic sense and makes the utmost use of space, and where politeness is universal. The women dress in kimonos and spend their days on the tea ceremony. Japan is also, in my imagination, stiflingly conformist.

It was therefore with some surprise that I read the main stories of the Japan Times for 5th January. The first had the headline Body found in suitcase along Taina River in Kawasaki: Police open murder probe after 46-year-old man is discovered.

“Bodies found in suitcases are usually an indication that something is wrong, but I did not think that such suitcases were ever found in Japan.”

Bodies found in suitcases are usually an indication that something is wrong, but I did not think that such suitcases were ever found in Japan. Whoever was responsible was, at the least, not deeply conformist.

The next story was that of a man in Tokyo who pushed a woman onto a railway line.

A 39-year-old man was arrested Saturday for pushing an unacquainted woman off the platform onto the rail track at Tokyo’s JR Shinagawa Station…. The man from Osaka Prefecture has admitted to the charge of attempted murder saying that he wanted to spend the rest of his life behind bars, said the police who withheld his name citing a mental disorder.

The desire to shut myself away from the world occurs to me from time to time, though it is true that I generally think of other ways of becoming a hermit than pushing old ladies onto railway lines. I don’t think the desire to be shut away is in itself a sign of a mental disorder, rather it is a sign of world-weariness. Perhaps the man in the story wanted to have his cake and eat it: He wanted to shut himself away, but also wanted to be clothed and fed. Looking after oneself, after all, is a problem for hermits.

Having worked in a prison, I soon came to the conclusion that the only way in which imprisonment would be tolerable for me would be in solitary confinement. Not to be able to get away from other people, especially those not chosen by myself, would be for me a kind of torture. Enforced socializing is a terrible thing.

Where pushing people on Tokyo platforms is concerned, I conjure up in my mind’s eyes photographs from the 1960s, when men in uniforms with white gloves pushed crowds of commuters into the carriages of the Tokyo subway, squeezing them in until a tin of sardines would seem like a fête champêtre by comparison. I don’t know whether this is still done.

I thought that it was only in North America and western Europe that schizophrenics under treatment, in what is laughingly called “the community,” which is usually to say neglect, and under the influence of illicit drugs, push people from station platforms into the path of oncoming trains. I shall now have to revise my prejudices, which is always a painful thing to have to do.

The third story was about unmarried people in Japan aged between their 20s and 40s:

More than a third of unmarried adults in their 20s to 40s have never been in a relationship and one fourth have no intention of ever getting married…. Of respondents [to a survey of 1,200 of unmarried Japanese of that age]…19.4% of woman and 23.7% of men said having a romantic relationship is a waste of time and money.

It would be interesting to know what these people would consider not a waste of time or money. I presume that they are not all scholars whose study of, say, Pali texts cannot be interrupted by domestic chitchat or candlelight dinners.

What the article does not tell us, unfortunately, is the percentage of people in the 20s to 40s in Japan who remain unmarried, and therefore what is the social significance of the survey’s findings, which clearly would be very different if the percentage were high than if it were low. But it is interesting that the article uses the words married and unmarried, in the way that they might have been used in the West in the 1950s, when it was still possible without irony for a musical, High Society, to have a song whose lyrics included the lines:

Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.

At any rate, the article hints at (though does not prove the existence of) a society in which radical social isolation and loneliness are common and, as other statistics quoted suggest, are becoming more common. No wonder the Japanese have so few children. Not only is the population of Japan growing older on average, but it will also soon be shrinking—as will the population of many other countries. Having come to maturity when it was widely held that overpopulation made famine and starvation in the near future inevitable, I cannot help but wonder whether this is an altogether bad thing, even though I know that the doomsday predictions of the time were all proved not only wrong, but almost the opposite of the truth. The fact is that falsities absorbed in one’s youth leave a trace in one’s mind, however much one tries to clear them out.

One might gather from reading the Japan Times in desultory fashion, as I do, that the country is a sink of political crisis, corruption, murder, and growing social problems. Our conception of the rest of the world is inevitably refracted through some lens or other, and because it is the unusual and sensational that interest us rather than the banal and everyday, it is the former that is related to us by various media. One picture, said Mao Tse-Tung, is worth a thousand words; one body in a suitcase is worth more (to a newspaper) that the 70,000,000 Japanese who went to work the same day.

There might still be something to my stereotype of Japan, then. What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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The slow-motion implosion of Claudine Gay’s presidency of Harvard has been a pleasure for many to watch, in the manner in which wanton boys, to use Shakespeare’s designation of them, enjoy picking the legs and wings off flies. Her discomfiture was deserved, however; she seems to have made a career of surfing the great ocean of grievance, that great source of moral self-worth in an age otherwise given to moral relativism. Grievance is to complacency what the selfie is to vanity.

Her resignation statement eschewed self-examination altogether; it even managed to suggest that she was a victim. She said, for example, that she had received menacing or insulting messages, which, alas, is all too believable, since threat and insult these days seem to be the highest forms of argument employed by fools and ignoramuses of every extreme political stripe. Even now she did not understand that her commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (the Faith, Hope, and Charity de nos jours) and to academic excellence were incompatible. To hire people because of their race and not their accomplishments is automatically to drive down standards.

“Claudine Gay’s letter of resignation was morally incoherent.”

Of her own accomplishments, I am not qualified to speak because I have not read her work, exiguous in extent though it be. (That it is exiguous is not necessarily to condemn it, for many an author has written only one thing in his life of great value, while many authors have written millions of words without ever having expressed an interesting, let alone a new, idea.) The titles of her publications, it is true, do not excite me: I had rather read papers on the taxonomy of beetles. Indeed, the taxonomy of insects can, in certain circumstances, be a matter of the utmost importance, and I have met in my time two or three taxonomists who have managed by their enthusiasm to convince me that their work is the most important in the world, although this effect has never lasted long.

As to the former president’s habit of using other people’s form of words without proper attribution, it does not strike me, from the examples I have seen, as having been terribly wicked; more inglorious than deeply dishonest. It is possible that worse instances than I have seen may exist, but there are some questions on which it is not worth expending much energy to find the answer, and this is one of them. Suffice it to say that an air of mediocrity hangs over what I have seen.

It was widely reported, including in the Harvard Crimson, that Claudine Gay was “proactively” requesting corrections to some of her articles, that is to say to insert attributions where they were missing; but the word “proactively” seemed to me to be misleading at best, since she was requesting it only because she had been found out. As for retroactively altering her thesis, I did not know such a thing was possible or permissible in an institution of higher learning. It put me in mind of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, when the publisher sent a note to all who had bought it to tear out an old and insert a new article when the ideological wind had changed and a former prominent personage had not only ceased to exist, but had never existed.

Apparently, Claudine Gay was chosen from a list of 600 people considered for the position of president of Harvard. Surely the consideration of each person on such a list cannot have been very deep; having once been on a jury to select poems for a prize, I know how arduous and time-consuming it is to choose from a much smaller number. I cannot prove it, but I hope I shall not be accused of cynicism if I say that the choice seems to have been made on grounds other than pure, unadulterated merit.

Of course, it is possible that people of such pure, unadulterated merit would not really have wanted the job in the first place. Those who can, do; those who cannot, administer. This seems to be the rule in the modern world, and perhaps it is as well that it should be so. You don’t want your cleverest people to be constantly attending meetings, developing policies, raising funds, attending to buildings, allocating offices, and so forth. The world needs mediocrities.

What the world does not need, and what it needs not to have, is ambitious or evangelical mediocrities. What political correctness and wokeness have done is to give such types their chance to accumulate power, position, influence, and wealth. Such people are inclined not merely to obstruct people more gifted than themselves, but to fear and hate them. Thus, they are ever on the lookout for pretexts to destroy them.

The imposition of ideological purity is a perfect weapon in these circumstances. The past of almost anyone can be trawled for evidence of wrongdoing (that is to say, wrong-saying) from the point of view of the present, but constantly shifting, ideology. Are there any of us who have never said something that we would rather others did not know that we had said? This was so even before a single sentence could destroy a reputation or a career. Unless the power of the bureaucratic mediocrities of academe is broken, therefore, anyone who wants a career will be walking on eggshells forever, and totalitarianism of a new kind—that without a great leader—will have triumphed.

Claudine Gay’s letter of resignation was morally incoherent. She admitted to having done nothing wrong, not even having copied other people’s words (perhaps, let us be charitable, inadvertently). She believed herself to have worked successfully for both academic excellence and social justice, which she said, in the canting language of today, was part of “who she was.” Why, then, should she resign? If she had said merely, “It is with sorrow that I step down as president of Harvard,” she would have preserved some dignity, but to resign while claiming to have done no wrong is implicitly to claim victimhood and to demand condolence.

As for the Board’s letter of response, all that would have been required for form’s sake was an expression of thanks for past services, without elaboration. As it was, it gave the impression that clones of Uriah Heep or Mr Pecksniff had taken over the academy—as perhaps they have.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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The world, said James Boswell, is not to be made a great hospital; but to a hammer everything is a nail, and to doctors and medical journals everything is either a medical problem or a medical solution.

Looking at the website of the Journal of the American Medical Association today, I came across a paper with the title “Effect of an Intensive Food-as-Medicine Program on Health and Health Care Use.” It was published just above “A Young Pregnant Person With Old Myocardial Infarction.”

Could that pregnant person possibly be a woman? Heaven forfend that so prejudiced a thought should occur to us! If it occurred to you, dear reader, I suggest that your brain still needs washing. The word woman is here abjured by JAMA as completely as, say, it would abjure (rightly) the word bitch with reference to a woman. In other words, the word woman is now treated as if it were in itself an insult, a rather strange result of pro-feminist indoctrination.

“I must admit that if I had been one of the subjects of the experiment, I would have delighted to subvert the results by noncompliance with the protocol.”

The paper begins, “A patient in their 30s presented to the hospital…” No doubt I am deeply reactionary, almost a dinosaur in a world of mammals, but is not their the plural possessive adjective, and is not “a patient” singular? If the authors of the paper were really not sure whether the pregnant person was a man or a woman, surely they should have written “A pregnant person in his or her 30s…”? That would have been a step too absurd (so far) even for the editors of JAMA, assuming that the paper in question was published with some kind of editorial oversight. I anticipate further linguistic absurdity in JAMA with a mixture of amusement and irritation; that there will be one is a racing certainty (a Dutch friend of mine was going to write a book about Dutch social policy titled Creative Appeasement).

The paper, by the way, gives new meaning to the first two sentences of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil: “Suppose truth to be a woman—what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatic, have been very inexpert about women?”

But back to food as medicine. The idea that all flesh is grass—or these days, double cheeseburgers with fries, washed down by some disgusting soft drink looking like the effluvial by-product of a noxious industrial process—is certainly not new. The 18th-century English physician George Cheyne, who was once so fat that he had to move around with the help of pulleys, wrote more than one book extolling the virtues of moderation in alimentary consumption. But in the modern world, there is an inverse dietary anxiety rule: Those who need to worry least worry most, while those who should be careful are the most insouciant.

Anyway, what the investigators did was to give a group of type 2 diabetics supposedly healthy food—fruit and vegetables, you know the drill—free of cost to them for ten meals a week, and compare their diabetic control with a group of similar diabetics (surely they should by now be called people living with diabetes rather than diabetics?) who were not given such healthy food. The diabetics were allocated consultations with dietitians, nurse evaluations, health coaching, and education about diabetes. The same food was also given to the rest of their family.

It was with considerable, though no doubt discreditable, satisfaction amounting almost to joy that I read that, from the point of view of diabetic control, all this made no difference. The uselessness of the trial was further demonstrated by the fact that, of 1,064 people deemed eligible to participate in the study, because they were poorly controlled diabetics with “food insecurity” (as established by asking two questions), and were living within the area in which the study was conducted, only 500 agreed to take part and 465 completed the program. It has to be remembered moreover that the investigators were probably full of enthusiasm and goodwill, as the staff if the program were bureaucratized would not be!

The researchers had to be satisfied with what are known as “secondary outcomes,” that is to say results that were not the main object of the experiment, in this case a greater number of requests for prescription medicine, self-reported improvement in diet, and more visits to dietitians. But whether these things themselves did any good, in the sense of preventing illness or death, is not known, and would require further research to discover. They seem to be procedural results rather than real ones, if by real in this context we mean something that benefits patients rather than those involved in their health care, for example by giving them something to do.

Of course, it cannot be known either whether those provided with healthy food actually ate it. Perhaps they did, or perhaps they didn’t; they might have done something else with it, like sell it. Strictly speaking, the subjects of the experiment should not just have been given the food but should have been supervised eating it (perhaps this could have been done electronically).

I must admit that if I had been one of the subjects of the experiment, receiving visits from dietitians and so forth, I would have delighted to subvert the results by noncompliance with the protocol. No doubt the people conducting the experiment would have had my best interests at heart, but Dostoyevsky says somewhere that even if those who ruled us were entirely benevolent, people would still oppose them just for the sake of exercising their freedom.

Suppose what might have been the case, namely that the distribution of supposedly healthy food free to type 2 diabetics actually improved their diabetes or even reversed it: The question would still arise—though not, perhaps, in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association—of how far we should take this kind of intervention in people’s lives. After all, there is very little that humans do or consume that has no potential effect on health whatever; their entire lives could therefore be supervised, regulated, and subsidized in the name of health.

There is, I fear, no end to the appetite for benevolence.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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The desire for perfection in human relations is a powerful stimulant of conflict—and of a bureaucracy to adjudicate it. That all should be fair, open, aboveboard, that no one should ever experience discomfort because of what someone else says, that each should be shown equal signs or marks of respect, that no one should feel left out of anything, is an impossible pipe dream, as the most minimal reflection on experience should make evident.

What is possible, however, and what has eventuated, is a large and well-paid bureaucracy that has secured what it supposes to be its own eternity by the pursuit of such chimeras. Its work will never be done. The more cowed people are by regulations of their speech and conduct, the more microaggressions remain to be discovered and adjudicated. The task of securing diversity, equity, and inclusion is like the task of Sisyphus, with this difference: that in its very impossibility lies an assurance of a job, a pension, and a gratifying sense of doing the world’s work.

I suppose one should not rejoice at the discomfiture of a fellow human being, but this is a counsel of the same perfection attempt to achieve that is likely to lead to the same kind of dishonesty as that involved in the search for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Therefore, let me be frank: I have been rather enjoying the saga over the president of Harvard’s alleged plagiarism in her academic work. I doubt that I am the only one to feel this discreditable delight.

“The more cowed people are by regulations of their speech and conduct, the more microaggressions remain to be discovered and adjudicated.”

Medieval theologians are supposed to have argued over the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin, and we laugh at them for their foolishness; but now we argue about what degree of failure of a writer to attribute to their authors the words he or she uses constitutes real plagiarism. How many words or lines are necessary before oversight becomes not only implausible but culpable? How much recidivism in this respect is forgivable? Should we say, “Let him who has never copied or failed to attribute cast the first stone”?

As I write this, Dr. Claudine Gay has survived calls for her to stand down as president of Harvard, and having no crystal ball I cannot say whether she will continue so to survive, or whether further revelations of non-attribution in her academic work (the titles of her publications do not fill me with much intellectual curiosity or excitement) will eventually cause a kind of administrative gestalt switch in her superiors who have so far sided with her.

I am not a betting man, but if I were, I would not put all my money either way. In such a situation, courage, truth, conviction, or personal loyalty do not count for very much by comparison with the bubble, reputation. There is no honor among snakes.

The trouble began for Dr. Gay when she was asked by a Congresswoman whether a hypothetical call for the genocide of Jews would be in violation of Harvard’s code of conduct. I am far from sure that the legislature is the forum in which questions of academic freedom should be aired or decided, since it implies a duty and a power of the legislature to adjudicate everything. The earth is the Congress’ and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein (a slight adaptation of Psalm 24 in the King James Version, which I mention only to avoid charges of not-attribution or even of plagiarism).

But the question was asked, and Dr. Gay answered it maladroitly: “It can be,” she said, “depending on context.” A follow-up question might have been whether a hypothetical call for the re-enslavement of black people in America would be a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct; if Dr Gay’s answer had been as equivocal, she would have been accused of apologetics for slavery and if it were not, the question would then have been asked whether enslavement were morally worse than genocide. In those circumstances, I would have felt some slight sympathy for Dr. Gay, as well as schadenfreude; for she would have been in the position of a man who is asked whether he has stopped beating his wife yet, yes or no.

I think the underlying problem is the very idea of a code of conduct in a university. At the very least, its existence, and the supposed necessity for such a code, goes to show how far mistrust has eaten into our society. Without such a code of conduct, would Harvard and other universities really become a hell of rapine, insult, menace, racial violence, and so forth? This suggests a very unpleasant population, and while I am no starry-eyed admirer of humanity as a whole, yet I have gone through my life without constant fear of the worst in my fellow beings. As Dr. Johnson put it, it is better sometimes to be deceived than never to trust. In my daily dealings, at any rate, I have found more trustworthiness than its opposite, though I am not unfamiliar with the worst that people can do.

It will be pointed out, no doubt, that before codes of conduct were instituted, people sometimes did behave very badly. No doubt they did: Before there were performance indicators, for example, some professors were like drones who never did a stroke of work once they were irremovable from their position. But I do not think that most were like this: I recall them as having frequently done much more than their duty rather than less. And it is a human trait that when one is harried and harassed, one is disinclined to do more than the strict minimum. If one is treated as a potential cheat, one begins to think and even sometimes to act like a cheat. One studies loopholes, seeks small advantages, studies strict contractual conditions, as never before. Goodwill is lost, but that is precisely what the apparatchik type wants. Goodwill and informal understanding are his greatest enemy; he wants everything to be laid down in codes of conduct, with enough ambiguity in them to require endless adjudication. He wants his staff fragile, insecure, inclined to paranoia: and for diversity read division. He dreams of a world in which the whole of life is but a procedure.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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One of the great pleasures of retirement is that one can lie abed in the morning and read Agatha Christie without any feeling of guilt—guilt about being late for work, for example. It doesn’t matter in the least if one gets up at eleven: One hasn’t anything else important, or pseudo-important, to do. (Most importance is of the pseudo kind.)

Therefore, I was content one morning last week to lie in bed reading They Do It With Mirrors (my wife having brought me coffee). But human, or at any rate my, nature being what it is, prolonged unperturbed contentment is not of this world. Soon there were two flies in the ointment of my satisfaction.

Notwithstanding that I had nothing else pressing to do, I soon began to feel a slight and inchoate unease. At least seven-eighths of my life is now over: Should I not be spending the final eighth allotted to me in cultivating my soul (at long last) rather than idling my time away reading Agatha Christie? I remembered the line Richard speaks in Richard II:

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me…

But one of the things life teaches us is how to rationalize well. Just as Miss Marple said that there is a lot of wickedness in an English village, so there is a lot of spiritual sustenance in Agatha Christie. I do not mean by this the sustenance to be found in her convoluted plots, but rather in her shrewd observations of life, which might even be called philosophical.

“I am rather attached to the theory that Poirot and Miss Marple were serial killers.”

In fact, a publisher once asked me to write a book about Mrs. Christie’s philosophical, social, and psychological ideas. The prospect tempted me because I could lie abed all day reading her and imagine that I was working. I also had a grand theory to propound, namely that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were actually themselves serial killers. Wherever they went, murder was soon to follow (in fact, there are three murders in They Do It With Mirrors alone). Almost all of these murders take place in circumstances in which you would least expect them to occur, so that the most parsimonious explanation for this extraordinary epidemic of homicide is that the two detectives themselves—the only characters, after all, present at all of them—are the killers.

This raises an interesting philosophical question: Why is the most parsimonious explanation of any phenomenon the one that we prefer? Is it because it must be true? Assuredly not, for a very elegant theory may nevertheless be false. Even less is it the case that by definition the most parsimonious theory is best. There remain two possibilities: that we prefer the most parsimonious theory for aesthetic reasons. It is more elegant than its competitors, and the achievement of beauty is one of the great aims of human existence. The other possibility is that, in practice, the most parsimonious theory will be found to be the most useful.

Be that as it may, I am rather attached to the theory that Poirot and Miss Marple were serial killers. Alas, I have not the time, patience, ingenuity, or scholarship to prove it.

In They Do It With Mirrors, Mrs. Christie makes a devastating (and profound) criticism of psychoanalysis, and indeed of all unitary theories of human psychology. It is not that such theories fail to explain anything, it is that they explain too much, too easily. The figure of the psychiatrist in the book, Dr. Maverick, is lampooned for his assumption that he understands everyone’s behavior. It brings to mind the anecdote told by the philosopher Karl Popper, who, back in Vienna just after the First World War, was initially impressed by the theories of Alfred Adler, the dissident Freudian. “How can you be sure,” Popper once asked him about a patient whom he claimed to understand thanks to his own theory, “that your explanation is the true one?” “Because,” replied Adler, “of my thousand-fold experience.” Popper replied (or said he replied): “I suppose your theory is now a thousand-and-one-fold.”

Mrs. Christie illustrated the dangers of procrusteanism (to which we are all liable) in a very light and amusing way.

In fact, I think I could write a short book on They Do It With Mirrors alone, never mind on the whole of Mrs. Christie’s oeuvre. It would include, for example, the question of arsenic poisoning raised therein. I once proposed to write a history of arsenic in the 19th century, when arsenic suffused the social world as cigarette smoke did in the 1940s and ’50s, when three-quarters of men, and half of women, smoked. The world must then have smelt like a giant ashtray. In the 19th century arsenic was everywhere, in the wallpaper, in medicines, in cosmetics; in America, it was in the banknotes so that bank tellers suffered from poisoning by it; it got into beer and chocolates. It was used to kill flies, weeds, insects, and rats—and, of course, humans, especially by wives, but also by a few doctors. It was a drug of abuse. It was mined—in Cornwall there was an English Arsenic Company that refined arsenic and left so much of it in the ground that to this day nothing grows around its workings. An interesting subject, I think.

A publisher agreed, and my first step was to buy books about arsenic. I have a very large arsenical library, including a book published in America in the 1880s, consisting of arsenic wallpapers. I had assumed that arsenic wallpapers must all have been green, but there were pink and blue ones, too.

Unfortunately, I left it too long to write the book, and another author beat me too it, writing a book that was, from my point of view, lamentably good.

I must just briefly mention the second fly in the ointment of my contentment as I lay in bed reading Agatha Christie, namely a peculiarly persistent fly, the only one in the room, that kept buzzing around me and landing on my hands and face. He was too fly for me: I kept slapping myself, but he was like a thought-reader; he seemed to know my actions in advance. One he had the temerity to land on the tip of my nose. After a while, I began to feel him landing all over me, even when he hadn’t. I began to hallucinate the tickle of his tiny feet. In a way, I admired him, for his qualities of character and intelligence; but wasn’t he supposed to be hibernating?

After a time, it was no joke. O! for a fly paper of the Victorian kind that Mrs. Maybrick soaked, allegedly to poison her husband with arsenic! Arsenic isn’t everywhere anymore, except in my mind.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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Nothing could better illustrate or be emblematic of the earnest suicidal frivolity of the West than the decision of the first female chief executive of the British insurance and pension company Aviva, which has assets of more than $420 billion under management, that the appointment to all senior positions of white men must “be signed off by her”: in other words that there must be a presumption against them—unless, I suppose, they can prove themselves to her to be thoroughly emasculated and in tune with her ideology. She told a parliamentary committee that there is “no non-diverse hire at Aviva without it being signed off by me and the chief people officer.”

A photograph of her in a newspaper shows her looking very smug, as if she had found her way to Jesus, or at least to a pharaonic salary—rather as had done the first female chief executive of the giant British bank the National Westminster, who was disgraced by the blatantly political decision of her staff to deny Nigel Farage a bank account.

The chief executive’s command of English seems not to be quite consonant with her salary, for she said, in that mixture of Newspeak and langue de bois that we have now come to expect from the nomenklatura class, that she wanted to “make sure that the process followed for that recruitment has been diverse, has been properly done.” People who left school in 1925 at age 14 used to speak better English than this; what she meant is not that the process should have been diverse, but that the candidates chosen should have been diverse, in the technical sexist and racist meaning of the word.

“Unless we are careful, we become what we oppose.”

She is too cloth-eared to realize the implications of the word “non-diverse,” with its condescending assumption that to be anything other than a white male must be vulnerable and therefore in need of a bureaucratic leg up, so to speak, from the likes of her. As to the “chief people officer” of whom she spoke, only someone ignorant of Orwell, or utterly without imagination, could use it without a shudder. Human resources is bad enough, as if people were to be mined like diamonds on the Transvaal Rand, but a chief people officer (no doubt abbreviated to a CPO) is one stage worse.

One might naively have supposed, or hoped, that companies nominally answerable to their shareholders chose senior staff according to their ability to do their job, not according to some ideologically preconceived demographic pattern, supposedly reflecting the demographic pattern of the population as a whole.

Of course, the demographic features to be taken into account have to be chosen for their supposed relevance, for human populations have an almost infinite number of possible demographic features—intelligence, for example. I presume that not even the chief executive of Aviva would want 15 percent of the directors of her company to have an IQ of 80 or below (though it might make life easier for her), or that 25 percent of the directors should have a criminal record or be obese, with of course the correct proportion of obese criminals, or that 1 percent of her staff should be aged over 90. Clearly, the chief people officer would have quite a lot of extra work to do if staff were to mimic the demographic features of the population in all possible ways; and the only way to ensure it would be to employ the entire population at the same salary. No one could then sue for discrimination. Borges’ story about a map of the world so accurate that it was the same size as the world comes here to mind.

Clearly, then, characteristics have to be chosen from among innumerable others, if any demographic pattern is to be imposed at all. Presumably they are to be chosen in the same way that the World Wildlife Fund chooses which species of animal to protect, namely the animals that are supposedly in some kind of danger of extinction. (The WWF has not yet, so far as I am aware, chosen to protect the brown rat, the cockroach, or the bluebottle fly, as being already adequately present in the world.)

The characteristics of human groups to be protected as endangered species are protected must be considered relevant in some way; and if you are a racist, as the chief executive of Aviva is a racist, no doubt without realizing it or wanting to be one, then race will be considered a relevant characteristic in choosing senior staff. Thus, anti-racism turns 180 degrees and becomes mirror-image racism, and the old joke, that the cop did not care what kind of communist the anti-communist protester was, becomes expressive of an important truth. Unless we are careful, we become what we oppose.

The suicidal frivolity of the West is demonstrated by the fact that no one would apply to a professional sports team the criteria that the head of a giant company (and certainly not she alone) thinks important. The reason for this is obvious: Professional sports teams are concerned only to find the best athletes so that they can win. The spectacle of sport is thus too important in our moral economy to be harmed by the imposition of quotas, but the pensions of 15 million people—of which Aviva has at least partial care—can justifiably be harmed by such quotas. So long as there is good quality sport for people to watch, the fate of their pensions does not matter. All they need is enough for junk food and a sofa from which to watch a giant screen.

It seems that there are all too many chief executives of companies and heads of other institutions and organizations (Harvard, for example) who would like to play the role of Rosa Parks, though with the satisfaction not only of helping to oppose injustice and bring about a more just society, but also to receive vast salaries and pensions for doing so. This is a mediocrities’ charter.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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Perhaps I am more sensitive to them than I once was, but it seems to me that hectoring and badgering semi-political public messages (mostly paid for at public expense, of course) are much more prominent than they used to be. This is a West-wide phenomenon, originating from the United States—because all other Western countries are far too brain-dead to resist the ideological siren song, or songs, of the technologically most advanced country in the world, however deleterious those songs might be. We are to be hectored into virtue, virtue being principally a matter of the opinions that we hold.

One sometimes has the impression that one will not be left alone until one really does love Big Brother—though who exactly Big Brother is remains unclear. We seem to be undergoing, or at least are being subjected to, what the Chinese in the 1950s called thought reform.

If there is an ultimate purpose behind all this—how easily one becomes paranoid!—it is to render us dependent on an unseen power even for our own thoughts. First, we must be convinced that, left to ourselves, we are bad; second, that we are constantly in danger; and third, that there is a benevolent authority that will straighten out our mind and then keep us safe from all danger.

“One sometimes has the impression that one will not be left alone until one really does love Big Brother.”

Going to the cinema in Paris recently, I collected some of the public messages that were either noticed en route or were hammered home in the cinema before the film I had gone to see.

The first, and probably the most startling, was a poster in the Métro immediately visible once I had gone down the steps into the station. “87% of women,” it said, “have already been victims of sexist or sexual harassment in public transport. Let’s raise our eyes against the aggressors.” On the poster was a histogram bar, 87 percent red (representing women who had been harassed) and 13 percent black (women who had not), to illustrate the point.

Next to it was another poster, a close-up of a young black woman’s face, with the following legend: “We are at your side in public transport. Find our guide against sexist and sexual violence. Everyone is equal.”

But who is the “we” who travels at our side in public transport? In the top left-hand corner of both posters was a little French flag, the white between the blue and the red in the profile of Marianne, with the single word GOVERNMENT in capitals. Thank you, government, for being at our side and protecting us from disobliging remarks! Alas, it seems that it cannot also protect us from mad, knife-wielding criminals who have already been convicted and are known to frequent jihadist circles, it being too busy ensuring that men do not wolf-whistle at, or even compliment, women unknown to them.

No doubt it was very wrong of me, but my first question, when I saw the figure of 87 percent presented in this way, was “How and why did the other 13 percent of women on public transport escape sexual harassment or assault?” I will not destroy my reputation permanently by publishing the possible explanations that came immediately into my mind; but I presume the figure of 87 percent could have been reached only by subsuming gang rape and unwanted compliments on mode of dress under the same category; were this not so, the women who take the Métro generally behave with an astonishing degree of sangfroid or insouciance.

No sooner had I looked at these posters than some advice came over the public address system: At the first sign of nausea, vertigo, or any other symptom I should alight the train and alert staff, who would call medical assistance for me. It made it sound as if we, the passengers, were not going on the Ligne 3 to Réamur-Sébastopol or wherever, but into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. (Réamur-Sébastopol, incidentally, is a station particularly prone to be filled with the smell of the untreated schizophrenic who has taken neither his pills nor a bath for a long time.)

By the time I returned home after my visit to the cinema, I had been catechized on the environment, imminently to collapse; on the dangers of drugs (for example, that 25 percent of drivers in France responsible for deaths on the road had taken drugs, though we were not informed what percentage of drivers matched for age and other variables who had not been responsible for deaths on the road had taken such drugs, an important comparison if intellectual honesty were to be conserved; dangers to pregnant women and their babies of drinking too much; and on the wonders of mass immigration into France. I had also seen an advertisement for drink with the obligatory warning that drinking too much is bad for your health, as if many people could be found who did not know it and who, on reading this warning, would amend their ways.

After having absorbed all these messages, I got into the carriage with a message of another kind painted on its side: Fuck the police. The carriage was quite crowded, and I saw a space farther up from where I got on where there were still seats. But when I reached it, I realized why the space persisted while many people were standing. Across the seats was sprawled a smelly snoring drunk, with a half-empty can of the kind of beer that only alcoholics drink rolling around the floor beside him and making a sticky mess.

Perhaps I should have woken him and told him that drinking too much can make you drunk, and also that drinking regularly to excess was bad for his health. Perhaps he didn’t know this and behaved as he did through sheer ignorance.

We live in a world of precept rather than of example. Religious preachers have declined in number and influence, but they have been replaced by secular ones, often governmental. By badgering and hectoring us at a distance, they prove, or think that they prove, how much they care for us, who are their sheep. Once they have preached at us, they have discharged an important duty. In addition, they have established implicitly that they are in loco parentis to the population in a very dangerous world.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

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There is a little Italian restaurant that we usually go to soon after our arrival in Paris, an unpretentious place where the pasta is good. It has a friendly atmosphere, and by now we are frequent enough customers to be greeted as friends.

The patronne allows her children, aged about 7 and 9, when they have no school the next day, to act as auxiliaries in the restaurant. How proud they are to show patrons to their table, to take their orders, and to bring their dishes when ready! It is charming to watch, and it is an excellent way to teach them things informally. When customers pay in cash, it is they who calculate the change due; they are even learning how to use the credit card machine. In this safe environment, they learn not to fear strangers and how to address them politely. These things will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Imagine, however, a busybody who reported the use of child labor to the authorities. Children kept up after they should be in bed, and who might be exhausted the next day! Children exploited as ultracheap labor in place of adult labor! Children entering a busy kitchen where all sorts of dangers await them! Children carrying hot dishes that might scald or burn them if spilt! What a horrific picture could be painted! You could, if you wanted, make it all sound like the horrors of child labor of the 19th century. The children would therefore have to be protected from their cruel or irresponsible mother, who, being of Sicilian peasant origin, found this all perfectly normal. Never mind that it was obvious from a glance that she was a loving and solicitous mother, and the children were happy: The case must be investigated, and the law invoked.

“I suddenly found myself envying rather than pitying him.”

This probably will never happen, but one can easily imagine it happening, for the state is not only meddling, but more than a few of us invite it and expect it to meddle in the name of public safety. And, of course, it is easier, less bothersome or dangerous, to meddle where citizens behave well than where they flout the law and behave in a ruthless and openly criminal manner. That is why minor regulations are often enforced with almost pedantic severity by agents of the state or the public administration, while serious infractions go not so much unnoticed, as uninvestigated. Fiddling while Rome burns is an occupational disorder of bureaucrats in an over-administered society.

At the next table in the restaurant was a completely blind man, in his middle to late 30s, I suppose, having his dinner. Beside him on the floor was his large and pacific Labrador guide dog, a handsome creature whose relations with his master were evidently those of trust and love, of course reciprocated. One could easily imagine their intensity.

The man, about half my age, had arrived in the restaurant before us, and finished before us. The kindness and solicitousness with which la patronne showed him out was touching. We watched him depart. Across the road was a hotel, an undistinguished establishment, also without pretension, but by no means uncomfortable. His dog guided him to the entrance, and la patronne explained that he lived there and dined often at her restaurant.

Of what his economic resources were, of what their provenance, I was completely ignorant; but strange to relate, I suddenly found myself envying rather than pitying him. I have no idea whether he was lonely, how he spent his days, whether he lamented his condition, whether he was bored. But in certain respects, his life was one of ease, at least by comparison with mine. If he always ate food prepared for him, if he had few clothes but those few that he had were laundered for him (he was well turned-out), if he had no property that imposed its care upon him, if his bedroom and his bathroom were his entire domestic sphere, then he was freed of many of the irritating tasks and anxieties that beset someone like me, of the middling economic condition, who wishes he had not been born the moment the plumbing springs a leak, that the boiler fails to work, that there is nothing in the larder for dinner tonight and must therefore go off to the supermarket to find something to cook. The blind man had no one with whom to keep up; and though not by nature competitive, yet I feel obliged to maintain my garden to a certain standard, not let my house fall into complete disrepair, and so forth, for fear of what the neighbors would say.

As it happens, I had been reading The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s last plays, on the train to Paris that day. Much as I venerate Shakespeare, my memory for his works is patchy at best, and each time that I reread one of them (I have read The Tempest several, if not many, times), I am surprised by what I find. Here, Gonzalo, the honest servitor of the King of Naples who has saved Prospero after he was expelled from his rightful dukedom of Milan by his wicked brother, Antonio, speaks of the society on Prospero’s isle that he would create if he were sovereign of it:

I’th’commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things, for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation, all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty—

When Sebastian points out that Gonzalo is dreaming of what he would do if he were himself sovereign, Gonzalo continues:

All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine
Would I not have, but nature should bring forth
Of its own kind all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.

This is a mixture of Marx and Rousseau, avant la lettre.

How easy it is to imagine a life easier than one’s own, free of all its miseries and frustrations; how difficult or impossible to achieve it!

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