Posted on 01/30/2008 1:56:23 PM PST by neverdem
Dr. Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) is a retired English psychiatrist who spent most of his career working on the grounds of an urban prison, an experience that he chronicled in a regular, haunting column for the London Spectator. He recently retired to France but continues to write voluminously for outlets such as the Daily Telegraph, the New Criterion, and the City Journal. He is the Dietrich Weismann fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author, most recently, of the slender, devastatingly argued volume In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas (Encounter Books).
BC: Dr. Dalrymple, would you say that the rehabilitation and clarification of basic terms -- such as prejudice, discrimination, honor, good and evil -- has become an essential task for conservatives? Is that why you wrote In Praise of Prejudice?
Theodore Dalrymple: I suppose I am a bit of a Confucian in the matter of the rectification of language. And I am afraid that in the present climate, the connotation of words has often taken over in importance from their denotation. Thus, since irrational racial antagonism is a manifestation of prejudice, all prejudice comes to partake of the quality of irrational racial antagonism, and the right-thinking person thinks he has to overthrow prejudice as such. This is not realistic: no one has ever lived or could ever live as if this were the case. Hence we live in a state of humbug.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
he speaks bocce.
I didn’t know those balls could speak.
That’s what I thought too!
I think Professor Dalrymple is a humbug for saying and writing such junk.
He also is not a psychiatrist. I do believe he worked in a psychiatric-prison setting but was trained as a family physician. If anyone knows for sure please post.
He is an excellent writer but not an excellent commentator.
“Anthony Daniels was born in 1949. After qualifying as a doctor, he worked in what was then Rhodesia, followed by South Africa, before returning for three years training as a psychiatrist in London’s East End.” source: http://newcriterion.com/archives/author/adaniels/
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