Pinpointing civilization’s shortcomings

In his new book of essays on political, social and artistic aspects of modern life, Theodore Dalrymple falls upon his victims with singular ferocity, raging against modern British life in general and Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular, as well as multiculturalism, the welfare state, modern art (Joan Miro and contemporary British art especially), D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.

What? Mrs. Woolf a menace to civilization? Yes indeed, Dalrymple contends in “Our Culture, What’s Left of It.”

Were Woolf around today, he writes, “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.”

Was the Bloomsbury circle really so powerful? Dalrymple, a physician who works in British prisons and inner-city hospitals, believes it was, and that the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” are novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists and even pop singers under the influence of “outdated or defunct ideas of economists and social philosophers.”

Woolf’s primal error, Dalrymple argues, was to confuse the domineering English male to whom she objected in the early 1930s with Adolf Hitler, who was even then threatening English liberty.

In one essay he improbably juxtaposes writer Ivan Turgenev and political philosopher Karl Marx. Both, he notes, were born in 1818 and died in 1883; both attended Berlin University at overlapping times and were affected by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his dialectic method of reasoning (thesis, antithesis, synthesis); both were in Brussels at the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, and both were spied upon by the secret police. Each had an illegitimate child, each lived and died in exile.

The point of his comparison? The aloof and difficult Marx claimed to know the common people, but it was the gentle Turgenev who really did, as his sympathetic writings about Russian serfs and other members of the lower classes prove.

This is not a new idea about Marx, but Dalrymple writes as if it were and hammers it relentlessly, slashing away at Marx as he does at Woolf. And poor Turgenev, who does not need Marx as a foil to be celebrated for his compassion and wisdom.

By this point in his essays, Dalrymple has revealed that his mother fled to England to escape the Nazis, a fact that may help to explain his contempt for “elitists” like Woolf, who were safe in their languid upper-class self-absorption. He also discloses that his father was “a Communist by conviction.” That may account for Dalrymple’s zeal for annihilation, which he demonstrates toward his intellectual opponents. It resembles nothing so much as one communist intellectual’s accusing another of misunderstanding the true Marxian faith. And perhaps that is behind Dalrymple’s posture as implacable reactionary.

He plays the part well. He believes that “an oppositional attitude toward traditional social rules is what wins the modern intellectual his spurs, in the eyes of other intellectuals.... What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, the unemployed, the welfare recipient -- the very people most in need of boundaries to make their lives tolerable or allow them hope of improvement.” And the result, he argues, is “moral, spiritual and emotional squalor, engendering fleeting pleasures and prolonged suffering.”

Dalrymple protests that not all criticism of social conventions is wrong, but that critics, “including writers of imaginative literature, should always be aware that civilization needs conservation at least as much as it needs change ... and that immoderate criticism ... is capable of doing much, indeed devastating, harm.”

Dalrymple’s conservative credentials are impeccable. Most of the essays in this collection are drawn from the City Journal, the publication of the Manhattan Institute of New York, for which he is a contributing editor. His previous collection of essays, “Life at the Bottom,” was widely praised. And he has written for the London Spectator for more than a dozen years. Readers who enjoy those sorts of publications will be enthralled with these essays.

But just as Marx should not be rejected altogether, neither should non-conservatives reject everything Dalrymple has to say. Having worked in the Muslim world and among Muslim immigrants in Britain, he has some provocative ideas about the conflict between Islam and the West. He passionately denounces the frequent cruel treatment of Muslim women by Muslim men and argues that modern Muslims must “either abandon their cherished religion or ... remain forever in the rear of human technical advance.”

And surely one need not be a right-wing reactionary to find objectionable the appearance of the punk rocker, in all his skin-pierced glory, who is pictured on the dust jacket of “Our Culture, What’s Left of It.”

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Anthony Day, former editorial page editor of The Times, is a regular contributor to Book Review.