Dalrymple reviewed in the TLS

Theodore Dalrymple's latest book, Our Culture, What's Left of It, is reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement:

Few people have been better placed to record the catastrophic effects of the collapse of English manners and habits than "Theodore Dalrymple", the pseudonym of a physician who until recently worked in a decayed district of the Birmingham conurbation and as a prison doctor. His essays — written mainly for American magazines — collected in Our Culture, What's Left Of It set out to map "the moral swamp that is contemporary Britain" and to study the "low-level but endemic evil" that he says is an "unforced and spontaneous" effulgence in the British underclass. He admires that most aristocratic of virtues, fortitude; and he detests the way that "the hug-and-confess culture" is extirpating emotional hardiness and self-reliance from British national character "in favour of a banal, self-pitying, witless and shallow emotional incontinence". Overall, he argues strenuously — irresistibly — for the reassertion of traditional English virtues: "prudence, thrift, industry, honesty, moderation, politeness, self-restraint".

Dalrymple has, it must be stressed, written an urgent, important, almost an essential book. Our Culture, What's Left of It needs to be read and acted on by policy-makers, by opinion-formers, and anyone who wants to grasp why Britain has become so much less pleasant a country in which to live. The book is elegantly written, conscientiously argued, provocative and fiercely committed: "one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists", Robert Louis Stevenson said. Dalrymple's information is often unpalatable, but always arresting. He reports, for example, that many young Muslim women come to his practice in suicidal despair at their enforced marriages to close relations, "usually first cousins", and deplores how journalists, "for fear of giving offence", seldom allude to "the extremely high rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous marriages". His measured polemics arouse disgust, shame and despair: they will shake many readers' views of their physical surroundings and cultural assumptions, and have an enriching power to improve the way that people think and act.

I'm only a couple of chapters into the book (as a collection of essays, it improves by reading only one or two selections at a time), but I highly recommend it to anyone interested in what has happened to British civil society, and what clearly is starting to happen here in North America.

Hat tip to Publius at Gods.