Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 1949) is a British writer and retired physician (prison doctor and psychiatrist), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple. He has written extensively on culture, art, politics, education and medicine drawing upon his experience as a doctor and psychiatrist in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, and more recently at a prison and a public hospital in Birmingham, in central England. He has travelled in many countries in Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Daniels has revealed in his writing that his father was a Communist businessman, while his Jewish mother was born in Germany and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee from the Nazi regime.^{[citation needed]} In 2005 he retired from England to move (with his wife) to France, where he plans to continue writing. His columns frequently appear in The Spectator as well as in City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute.

In his commentary, Daniels frequently argues that the so-called "progressive" views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimize the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within rich countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexual promiscuity, welfare dependency, and drug abuse.

He contends that the middle class abandonment of traditional cultural and behavioural aspirations has, by example, fostered routine incivility and ignorance among members of the working class. Occasionally accused of being a pessimist and misanthrope, his defenders praise his persistently conservative philosophy, which they describe as being anti-ideological, sceptical, rational and empiricist.

1 Quotes
2 Works
3 External links
- 3.1 Reviews
- 3.2 Multimedia

[edit] Quotes

"Resentment is one of the few emotions that never lets you down, but it's useless. In fact, it's worse than useless, it's harmful, and we all suffer from it at some time in our lives."

"When words become the test of virtue, they also become the masks of vice. That is why sanctimony and ruthless self-interest are such powerful allies."

"Hatred of the rich is a stronger emotion than sympathy for the poor."

"Blind disobedience to authority is no more to be encouraged than blind obedience."

"The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism."

"People who deny responsibility for their own actions use a language that portrays them as passive victims of circumstance."

"If insincerity is always a vice, sincerity is not always a virtue, nor is it incompatible with other, questionable traits."

"If love of beauty is to be postponed until all is right with the world, surely we should create only hell on earth."

"To extol the hand hoe was clearly the prerogative of a man who had never had to use one."

"If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse."

"It took genius to invent and industry to spread the telegraph and telephone; it took an axe or a match to destroy them."

"In the realm of culture, construction is always temporary and in need of constant maintenance, while destruction is permanent."

"The desire to appropriate someone else’s property is certainly not confined to the poor, nor need the property be of any value to be coveted."

"Just as there is a biologically determined age at which babies acquire language, so there seems to be a biologically determined age at which the middle-aged start to lament the passing of the good old days."

"It is in the nature of the intellect that it should try to impose order on the seeming chaos of everyday experience; but in human affairs, there are far worse failings than inconsistency, and few worse than passion masquerading as disinterest."

"I sometimes astonish my patients by telling them that it is far more important that they should be able to lose themselves than that they should be able to find themselves. For it is only in losing oneself that one does find oneself."

"All the guests held an opinion in common, namely that the power for good or evil of the US was without limitation…many times I was to encounter this faith in US omnipotence: a faith that survived the repeated failure of anyone to foresee what would happen the following day or the day after that."

"If it was no longer possible to believe that everything best in the world was American, it was at least possible to believe that everything worst was; and thus the US, which first brought vulgarity into the world, retained a special mission, albeit an evil one. How pleasant to be always on the side of the angels, and yet retain one’s American passport!"

"The idea that faith and faith alone was sufficient to heal any illness was cruel, lazy and stupid; for did it not mean that those who failed to recover were deficient in belief, and therefore blameworthy?"

"After all, they are not highly educated, so they have no culture; there is no religion, there is no belief that the country is involved in a transcendental purpose, so there is very little left for them; they live in their own soap opera, actually." On people "at the lower end of the social scale" in Britain.[1]

"I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners." [2]

"Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one’s own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience. A democracy that stifles debate on such vital and difficult matters by means of speech codes, explicit or implicit, is asking for a genuinely fascist reaction."

"Primo Levi most movingly wrote that each person should be judged as an individual and that no person should be judged according to his membership of a race or nation. But that is not the same as demanding that group outcomes should be absolutely equal, for then anti-racists will become mere mirror-image racists."

"Even in a crisis, people have to live, shop, make love, drink beer. It is newspapers and television that persuade us that life can be catastrophe and nothing else."

"Commerce is despised by intellectuals, and to call something commercial is practically to condemn it as trivial and worthless. But remove commerce from the streets, and you are left with something more dead than Pompeii."

"The belief that justice as fairness is the most important desideratum, indeed the only really important one, is profoundly destructive. In a world in which not everyone shares it, it also guarantees relative decay and economic regression. And, of course, it doesn't even lead to fairness; only to the creeping tyranny of bureaucrats."

"The psychological advantage to a person of decrying authority altogether and of adopting a mental attitude of invariant opposition is that it allows him to think himself virtuous without having to engage with the necessary, messy compromises of real life."

"It was the shortages that explained the thievery. In Guatemala, if you had money you could buy things; but in Nicaragua access to scarce goods was controlled by political influence. Price is a relatively impersonal way of rationing goods, and in my view greatly to be preferred: it has a much less corrosive effect on the human personality. I say this as a matter of empirical observation around the world, after a youth in which I believed precisely the opposite."

"…a useful corrective to the false premise upon which the increasingly bureaucratic sclerosis of our societies is founded, namely that the more extraneous information we have, the better our decisions will be. We often need freedom from information rather than freedom of information. He is not always wisest who knows most."

"It is no accident (as the Marxists used to say) that political correctness should flourish most in those countries in which libertinism has become an ideology; or that in countries in which the literary use of foul language is taken as a sign of liberation from stifling convention, certain words and thoughts are simply not allowed to be expressed. For what is political correctness except an attempt to purify the human heart by making unworthy thoughts literally inexpressible?"

"I learned early in my life that if people are offered the opportunity of tranquillity, they often reject it and choose torment instead. My own parents chose to live in the most abject conflictual misery and created for themselves a kind of hell on a small domestic scale, as if acting in an unscripted play by Strindberg. . . Though they lived together, they addressed not a single word to one another in my presence during the eighteen years I spent in their house, though we ate at least one meal a day together . . . " Essay, "A Taste for Danger" (1998), in "Our Culture, What's Left of It", (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2005.)

"Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness."

"He was under the influence of the idea that some aspects of reality are more real than others: that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side—and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side. This idea could be said to be the fundamental premise of modern popular culture."

"But the leader of the FARC, Mario Marulanda Velez, known as Tirofijo, has been a guerrilla for 50 years - and no one lives such a life to earn the opportunity to lose next year's elections. Far from being the freedom fighters of the romantic imagination, the guerrillas are inveterate enemies of freedom."

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

"As Wordsworth said, poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; and the most powerful feeling that overflows spontaneously in most prison poetry is self-pity. Few indeed are those so lacking in compassion that they do not feel sorry for themselves, and in some cases self-pity becomes strident or militant."

"All the things that men desire are not compatible, and therefore discontent is the lot of Man; as Rasselas’s sister, Nekayah, puts it: “No man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.” A man who understands this will not as a result cease to experience incompatible desires—for example, those for security and excitement—but he will be less embittered that he cannot have everything he wants. An understanding of the imperfectibility of life is necessary for both happiness and virtue."

"When exactly did this downward cultural spiral begin, this loss of tact and refinement and understanding that some things should not be said or directly represented? When did we no longer appreciate that to dignify certain modes of behavior, manners, and ways of being with artistic representation was implicitly to glorify and promote them? There is, as Adam Smith said, a deal of ruin in a nation: and this truth applies as much to a nation's culture as to its economy. The work of cultural destruction, while often swifter, easier, and more self-conscious than that of construction, is not the work of a moment. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day."

"He describes one murder as "a parking lot stick-up gone bad". What is a parking lot stick-up that goes well, then? Is it a man being relieved of his property without being killed, merely frightened out of his wits? When lawyers think like gangsters, using virtually the same language (more than one murderer has told me that it wasn't murder because it was only a robbery that went wrong), the outlook for society is not encouraging."

"Even more egregious is the statement quite often heard, after an innocent victim has been killed by an armed robber, that "This was a robbery that went tragically wrong". The corollary of this would seem to be that a robbery in which the victim is unhurt and the robber escapes with the loot is a robbery with a happy ending. An odd point of view, one might have supposed, for a policeman to take. Loose language suggests loose thought; and loose thought loose responses to dangerous situations. Confucius was right: calling things by their right names is the beginning of wise government."

"This rise [in crime rate] provides no support for liberal theories of crime, no sustenance for the kind of person who proves the strength of his compassion by conceiving of those less law-abiding than himself as automata, mere executors of the dictates of circumstance."

"The combination of relativism and antipathy to traditional culture has played a large part in creating the underclass, thus turning Britain from a class into a caste society. The poorest people were deprived both of a sense of cultural hierarchy and of the moral imperative to conform their conduct to any standard whatever. Henceforth what they had and what they did was as good as anything, because all cultures and all cultural artifacts are equal. Aspiration was therefore pointless: and thus they have been as immobilized in their poverty - material, mental, and spiritual - as completely as the damned in Dante's Inferno. Essay, "Uncouth Chic", in "Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes The Underclass", (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2001.)

"It is from social prejudice that one learns social virtue. Metaphysical thought and reflection come later."

"Of course, I had traveled in many countries that were in the throes of civil wars, and knew something of the inhumanity of man to man, but nothing had quite prepared me for the level of extreme violence in personal relationships that I encountered in a country that was enjoying sustained economic growth and unprecedented prosperity...What I saw was human conduct as it becomes when the requirement to conform to inherited social restraints no longer exists, when it is left to the whim of individuals how to behave. The result is an urban hell."

"Habit is behavioral prejudice." "In Praise of Prejudice", (Encounter Books, New York City, 2007.)

"Almost nobody has a bad word to say for equality of opportunity, though as a concept it seems to me to be more confused, and certainly more dictatorial in its implications, than equality of outcome.

The arguments against equality of outcome have been more or less accepted. Not only is such equality impossible in practice – human nature will always subvert it – but it conflicts with the demand for justice, at least if justice has anything to do with the reward of individual conduct.

Equality of opportunity is a thoroughly nasty and totalitarian concept. It is the demand that no one should start (or continue) life with any advantages relative to another. But how could such a condition actually be achieved? Leaving aside genetic differences, which must persist until all hereditary endowments can be made precisely the same, and which for the time being must be accepted even though they are unfair (not unjust, although most people nowadays seem to have difficulty distinguishing between the two), the only way environmental factors affecting opportunities can be made equal is by social engineering on a scale that would make North Korea look like a paradise of laissez-faire.

Parents would have to be separated from their children at birth and re-united with them, if at all, only when the environment had had its lasting and irreversible effect; children would have all to be taught precisely the same things, in precisely the same fashion, by teachers of precisely the same level of competence (or more likely, incompetence). No parent would be permitted to leave anything to his children, and therefore one of the great motives for economic prudence would be vitiated. In short, equality of opportunity would mean, if it meant anything, equality of poverty, inhumanity and horror."

[edit] Works

Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America (1986)
Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987)
Zanzibar to Timbuktu (1988)
Sweet Waist of America: Journeys around Guatemala (1990)
The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (published in the U.S. as Utopias Elsewhere) (1991)
Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia (1992)
If Symptoms Persist: Anecdotes from a Doctor (1995)
So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer (1996)
If Symptoms Still Persist (1997)
Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares (1998)
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine (2001)
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001) ISBN 1566633826
Violence, Disorder and Incivility in British Hospitals: The Case for Zero Tolerance (2002) ISBN 0907631975
Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses (2005) ISBN 1566636434
Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies And The Addiction Bureaucracy (2006) ISBN 1594030871
Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2007)ISBN 1905641591
In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas (2007) ISBN 1594032025