Not Called Limousine Liberals for Nothing

“The first duty of the modern intellectual, wrote George Orwell, is to state the obvious, to puncture ‘the smelly little orthodoxies . . . now contending for our souls..’ Orwell meant by these the totalitarian doctrines that mesmerized the intellectuals of his time and that prevented them from accepting the most obvious and evident truths about their own and other societies . . . If humankind, as T.S. Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality, it seems that it can bear any amount of unreality . . . The complacent disregard by [literary society] of the social catastrophe wrought in the [lower reaches of society] appalls me almost as much as the catastrophe itself. Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, pp. 244-245).