“Thanks to the sexual revolution, current confusions are manifold. In a society that forms sexual liaisons with scarcely a thought, a passing suggestive remark can result in a lawsuit; the use of explicit sexual language is de rigeur in literary circles, but medical journals fear to print the word ‘prostitute’ and use the delicate euphemism …
Confused Enlightenment
“If there is one thing of which modern man is utterly convinced, it is that he has reached a state of sexual enlightenment . . . Yet, as enlightened as we believe ourselves to be, a golden age of contentment has not dawned—very far from it . . . The sexual revolution has not yielded …
Refined Beastiality
“An attachment to high cultural achievement is thus a necessary but not sufficient condition of civilization . . . The first requirement of civilization is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts” (Theodore Dalrymple, …
The Clichéd Rebel
“The authentic man, in the romantic conception, is he who has cut himself free of all convention, who acknowledges no restriction on the free exercise of his will. This applies as much to morals as to aesthetics: and artistic genius becomes synonymous with waywardness. But a being as dependent on his cultural inheritance as man …
Parasitic Creativity
“The problem of upholding virtue and denouncing vice without appearing priggish, killjoy, bigoted, and narrow-minded has become so acute that intellectuals are now inclined either to deny that there is a distinction between the two or to invert their value. There is no higher word of praise in an art critic’s vocabulary, for example, than …
Inverted Sentimentality
“The idea that, after an event such as the Great War, an artistic celebration of the world is no longer possible is nonsense, compounded of strangely twisted romanticism and inverted sentimentality . . . But this is simply a pose: supposing an Adorno-like figure had said, ‘After the war, sexual pleasure is no longer possible,’ …
Legions of Untalented Hacks
“The logic of an arms race came to rule in art: and legions of untalented hacks who came after Miro devoted themselves to thinking about what had never been done before rather than about what they wanted to express” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 121).
Hypocrisy of the Heart
“Such artists strained after emotions not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel. This, of course, is one of the sources of sentimentality; it is the tribute that vanity pays to compassion” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 119).
Doublethink
“Doublethink—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas and assent to both—is with us too, and will remain so as long as we have large bureaucracies that claim to act for our own good while pursuing their own institutional interests” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 112).
Aristocracy is Not Deity
“[Virginia Woolf] protests and complains as a woman and as a writer, but above all as a human being, who has discovered with bitterness that being born privileged does not alter the conditions and limitations of human existence” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 75).