Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Dalrymple Watch
In the latest issue of The New Criterion there is an essay by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) on Samuel Butler's 1903 novel The Way of All Flesh. Here is a sample:
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The book is, or at least could be, a manifesto for virtually all the social pathology that I have seen in my medical practice in a British slum at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Every intellectual presupposition that has gone to the creation of misery in the midst of plenty is not only contained, but trumpeted, in The Way of All Flesh.Some of these intellectual presuppositions are:
- Pleasure as man's highest goal
- The obsolescence of the family (and especially the father)
- The superiority of youth
- Child-centered learning
- The doctrine of the Real Me
