Dalrymple’s despair

Is Theodore Dalrymple an important conservative writer? He certainly comes across like one, with his grim, authoritative-seeming pronouncements on the death of British culture. Yet I always find the grimness overbearing and the authoritative tone overdone, as though they were substitutes for a reasoning process and a point of view that transcends his material. As a result, Dalrymple’s articles leave me filled with a feeling of bitter depression and despair, without the compensatory sense of having learned anything or being lifted to a higher plane. Writing should always be aimed at conveying truth, and truth is always interesting and enlivening, even if the substance of it is terrible. But with Dalrymple the mood feels like despair for the sake of despair. Which is more or less the reaction I get from his interview at FrontPage Magazine this week on “Our Culture, What’s Left of It.”

However, this strikes me as a new insight:

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.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 01, 2005 06:30 AM | Send