Reading
Theodore Dalrymple is quite an ambiguous experience.
I
cannot help but enjoy his erudition and wry humour and the fact that he speaks
with such obvious experience about the human condition[1] gives his perspective a
psychological grounding that many, if not most of us would admit to a lack of. Although
the picture he paints can quite often be disturbing to say the least.
His
implacable atheism no doubt influences his gloomy worldview but the fact that
he is a conservative and one who both acknowledges and appreciates the
influence of the Judeo-Christian worldview on Western civilisation brings an elastic
equilibrium to this vision du monde noir.
I
am currently enjoying(?) his 2010 book; The new Vichy Syndrome: why European
intellectuals surrender to barbarism and some of the insights he offers are
really helpful to ponder on and perhaps provide an impetus to adjust one’s own
attitudes to life. They also help to explain some of the peculiar and
inexplicable things happening in our society.
For
example one of the sections in chapter 6: Why are we like this is
subtitled; Life without Transcendence; and speaks of the dilemma faced by
people who have abandoned any idea of something ‘bigger’ than them:
“…this life is all he has. He must
therefore preserve and prolong it at all costs – and he not only has to
preserve and prolong it, but live it to the full. Death for him is extinction,
the void, eternal nothingness…”
He
then goes on to explain how the things that we replace this transcendence with
tend to pall after a while. For example his take on the mindlessness of
consumerism:
“The problem with consumption is that
it soon ceases to satisfy. How else can one explain the crowds that assemble in
every city centre in Europe (and increasingly elsewhere) every weekend to buy
what they cannot possible need and perhaps do not even want?........At best
there will be a brief moment of elation, followed soon after by a prolonged
indifference to whatever it is that has been bought.” [p.67]
He
goes on further about the vacuity of the emotions being affected by appreciation
vs. scarcity but what he then has to say about experiential living reverberated
for me:
“The same might be said of the
experiences that people seek, the experiences that they feel they must seek if
they are to live life to the full. Sports become more extreme in their competitive
urgency, holiday’s ever more exotic, films more violent, broadcasting more
vulgar, the expression of emotion more crude and obvious (compare advertisements
showing people enjoying themselves sixty years ago and now). Mouths are open
and screams, either of joy or pain, emerge. Quiet satisfaction is no
satisfaction at all; what is not expressed grossly is not deemed to have been
expressed.” [p.68]
This
passage caused me to reflect on what we call a church service today; how our ‘corrupted’(?)
emotions might influence our expectations of what should, or can take place in our meetings.
Dalrymple
then riffs about what a lack of transcendence means in the political arena and
makes some salient observations:
“A transcendent meaning to life can be
sought in politics of a certain kind. Marxism might have been deficient as an explanation
of the world; its prophecies might have been refuted, as far as undated prophecies
can ever be refuted; and as a guide to the establishment of regimes in
practice, its record has been uniformly atrocious, leading to more complete
tyrannies than many previously experienced by mankind, that has hardly been
lacking in imagination in this matter. But the one thing it did do for millions
of people, at least for a time: it gave them the feeling that their lives were
a contribution to the immanent meaning of history, and that they were a
contribution to the denouement of history, when all contradictions would be
resolved, all desires fulfilled, and all human relations easy, spontaneous,
friendly and loving. It was obvious nonsense, of course, but not more obvious nonsense
than the religious ideas of those whose religious ideas we do not happen to share.”[p.69]
I
daresay this could be said about the new ‘transcendence’ today, that of the
ISIS or the emergent ‘new Caliphate’ phenomena being bandied about by the disaffected.
There
is of course a rather more invidious, already established new transcendent
belief that has captured many in the post-modern age, and in this I refer to
the Green eco-fanatics that inhabit the Western world. This is how Dalrymple
speaks of these:
“ ‘A New Pagan Transcendence’; Chief among
these was the environment. The threatened cataclysm was not to be brought about
any longer by the unbearable contradictions of capitalism, but by the
unsustainable destruction of the environment brought about by human activity. As
with the final crisis of capitalism, however, nothing but a complete
transformation would do; and the more extreme the allegedly necessary changes,
the more extremists could pass them off as prescriptions for change; extremists
could pose as the saviours of the human race. Just as Leninists knew what was
good for the proletariat, thereby conferring on themselves a gratifyingly providential
role, so the environmentalists now know what is good for humanity and likewise
confer on themselves a providential role. The beauty of preservation of the environment
as a cause is that it is so large that is would justify almost any ends used to
achieve it, for a liveable environment is the sin qua non of everything else. You can demonstrate and riot for
the good of humanity to your hearts’ content: your questions about what life is
for have been answered.”[p.69/70]
As
I have said, Dalrymple makes for reflective reading. I will regurgitate (sic)
more on these subjects in further blogs.
[1]
His decades long experiences as psychiatrist and doctor for a large mental
hospital and its attached Prison affords him a particular ‘no-frills’ insight
into the human condition.
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