“Yet literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth—far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is …
When Vice Gets Good Press
“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?” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 55).
Can’t Have It Both Ways
“A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham’s law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 52).
Sign of Spiritual Election
“Until then I had assumed, along with most of my generation unacquainted with real hardship, that a scruffy appearance was a sign of spiritual election, representing a rejection of the superficiality and materialism of bourgeois life. Ever since then, however, I have not been able to witness the voluntary adoption of torn, worn-out, and tattered …
Unappreciated Heroism
“It was in Africa that I first discovered that bourgeois virtues are not only desirable but often heroic” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 25).
The Wrong Units of Measurement
“It is only the sentimentalist who imagines that the profundity of a person’s response to tragedy is proportional to the length, volume, or shrillness of his lamentation” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 20).
Contempt for the Poor
“But there is little doubt that an oppositional attitude toward traditional social rules is what wins the modern intellectual his spurs, in the eyes of other intellectuals. And the prestige that intellectuals confer upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to nonintellectuals. What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, …
When Conscience Cannot be Denied
“It is a little like watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre over and over again and watching the hippies drawn inexorably to their doom in the uncanny house . . . that has become not a place of refuge, but of slaughter instead. That house is our culture. We are all being led into that house …
Because God is Not Mocked
“As anyone who has seen a number of films in the horror-slasher genre could attest, there is nothing surprising about this morality at all. The message of slasher films is very simple: you screw, you die . . . the plot of every horror story is essentially the same. If you violate sexual morals, you …
And They Think That We Have a Thing About Sex
“Ripley then takes off her clothes, and as soon as she does so the Alien reappears. Here we have the truncated causality of the horror genre. As in The Bacchae, The Blob, Blood Feast, Slumber Party Massacre, and countless other examples, as soon as an attractive young woman removes any article of clothing a monster …