“Our Culture, what’s left of it” is a collection of recent social analysis and literary critical journalism from Theodore Dalrymple, a retired British prison doctor and writer, whom many regard as the George Orwell of our time. The essays essentially anatomise our age’s moral and cultural depredations. An earlier book of Dalrymple’s – “Life at the Bottom” – reported on the lifestyles and ways of thinking of Britain’s growing underclass, whose culture, he warned, through its disinhibition, vulgarity, aggression, self-importance and arrogance, was spreading through the whole society. The twenty-six essays in “Our Culture, what’s left of it” expand on this theme and take the focus beyond Britain’s shores. The essays range in subject from the breakdown of Islam to body-piercing and the legalisation of drugs, and from great creators (Shakespeare, Turgenev, Cassatt) to thoughtless destroyers (Marx, D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf). Dalrymple uses insights from exchanges with prison patients during his years as a practitioner. Some essays outline the critical conditions that allow the frivolity of evil to insinuate itself in human nature (his diagnoses run contrary to those of most social scientists). Other essays criticise the irresponsibility of the educated classes and their peddling of the psychotherapeutic view of life that has eroded emotional hardiness and self-reliance in favour of “a banal, self-pitying, witless and shallow emotional incontinence”. He sheds light on the mendacity employed in much of the rhetoric about poverty. He believes human understanding to have reached its height with Shakespeare and sees art as a potential redemptive force. His honesty is penetrating and unsentimental, his vocabulary eloquent: “Having spent a considerable proportion of my professional career in Third World countries in which the implementation of abstract ideas and ideals has made bad situations incomparably worse, and the rest of my career among the very extensive British underclass, whose disastrous notions about how to live derive from the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics, I have come to regard intellectual and artistic life as being of incalculable practical importance and effect.”

If you wish to sample some of Dalrymple’s writing, a Google search on his name retrieves hundreds of articles, including one from 2002 - “The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris” – in which he predicted the recent French riots. The 5-star ratings of the book at Amazon.com tell their own story. I think he’ll be read into the next century.

hmmmNov 20, 2005 @ 22:13