Dalrymple harumphs
February 18, 2015
Review of Spoilt Rotten by Theodore Dalrymple
In Spoilt Rotten, conservative polemicist and physician Theodore Dalrymple complains in sometimes pompous prose that the modern obsession with love, and the insistence that everyone has an inalienable right to pursue his or her desires without impediment, is responsible for all of contemporary society’s ills.
His rat-a-tat argument is as follows: the indulgence of children creates generations of spoilt, lazy brats who think the world owes them a living. Unfettered promiscuity creates thousands of insecure, single-parent families, raising the risk of step-parent abuse and neglect. The expectation that one’s wife or girlfriend is entitled to leave as soon as she finds a more alluring sexual companion also raises the likelihood of violence among men. If there were taboos against extramarital affairs and divorce, men would feel more secure in their relationships and families would have a much better change of staying together.
The “cult of sentimentality” has also ruined most of our institutions and curdled our national spirit. There is something quite ridiculous about the way we are now forced to emote about distant catastrophes, how a maudlin, mawkish consensus is being imposed upon us by a global mob of sentimental bien-pensants, especially in cases like the death of Princess Diana or the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. “Emotions are now like justice: they must not only be felt, but seen to be felt,” he says, but what has it got to do with you whether someone else is moved or not by Diana’s death?
Things, Dalrymple harumphs, have gone too far in the direction of liberty, libertinism and emotional incontinence. These days, a good life is defined not as one of duty, self-sacrifice and responsibility, but of happiness and individual fulfilment, and we are going to Hell in a handcart.
A lot of this actually sounds very cogent, until you start to consider what sort of moral, political and religious regime might be required to swing society back in the direction of permanent marriages and unsplit nuclear families. At one extreme, the god-forsaken Bacchanalias of booze, blood, semen and vomit that seem to prevail in most British city centres every Friday night, with fleets of ambulances streaming to and from A&E. At the other, the stoning to death of adulteresses in Saudi Arabia or the stilted, stultified lives of countless pre-liberation women, trapped in loveless and sometimes abusive marriages for the sake of the kids.
In China, you can’t criticise the ruling Party with impunity and you can’t hold banners aloft in Tian’anmen Square, but at least you can walk the streets at night with more than a reasonable chance of not being assaulted, and at least the kids generally show respect. Liberty comes at a high price. The main purpose of politics is to determine how much of it we are willing to trade away in exchange for discipline or order.
