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On a London street, “social” housing encourages antisocial egotism. An interesting experiment took place on the London street where I have an apartment. A few years ago, the borough council permitted a developer to build six apartment complexes across from my building, on the condition that he reserve three of them for “social”—what Americans would call public—housing. The architecture of the buildings, while deeply undistinguished, is far from the worst of the genre and certainly does not suffer from the gigantism that was once the vogue. The street remains leafy, and edges on a fashionable area. A two-bedroom apartment in...

July 07, 2006, 7:46 a.m. Failure of IntelligenceIf stupid hurt, we’d all be in a world of pain. Well, ow. By Denis Boyles Surely, after Christmas, the July 4th weekend must be the Internet equivalent of August in Paris. Nobody’s around but us tourists. So you may have missed the results of a poll published in the Daily Telegraph last weekend showing “Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.” Such is the fury of an ex-, I suppose, but it’s good...

Strolling with my dog down the road in the village in North Wales where I have been staying for the last month, I passed a small boy aged about six, dressed in a green school uniform, who was walking on the top of a stone wall, his hands outstretched to form airplane wings. His mother was behind him, watching. “That’s a nice little dog,” he said in a strong Welsh accent. “Yes, he is,” I replied. “My dog’s black and white and a little smaller than yours,” he said. “What’s he called?” I asked. “Jack,” he said, and laughed, returning...

THE SIGHT OF MILLIONS of Frenchmen, predominantly young, demonstrating in deep sympathy and solidarity with themselves, is one that will cause amusement and satisfaction on the English side of the Channel. Everyone enjoys the troubles of his neighbours. And at least our public service strikers just stay away from work, and spend the day peacefully performing the rites of their religion, DIY, and not making a terrible nuisance of themselves. In fact, many of them are probably less of a public nuisance if they stay at home than if they go to work. Of course, demonstrating in huge numbers is...

Unenlightened - As extremist Muslims react to the Danish cartoons, the Enlightenment doesn’t look so bad, huh? THEODORE DALRYMPLE Where do you get a Danish flag to burn when you live in Damascus or Karachi? I am not sure that I would find it easy to come by one, and I live in France, a fellow member of the European Union. In fact, I don’t think I could even find a French flag to burn in the streets of my nearest town (though I confess that I am not an experienced flag-burner). Moreover, Damascus is not the kind of place...

The late Professor Joad, a popularizer of philosophy rather than a philosopher in the true sense, used to preface his answer to any question by saying, "It depends on what you mean by…"—in this case, "doomed." The word "doomed" implies an ineluctable destiny, against which, presumably, it is vain for men to struggle. And this in turn implies a whole, contestable philosophy of history. Historical determinism has two sources: first the apparent ability of historians, who of course have the benefit of hindsight, to explain any and all historical events with a fair degree of plausibility, even if their explanations...

It's harder to ignore the elephant in the living room when the elephant is setting fire to it. The elephant in France -- whose name begins with the dreaded M-word journalists dare not mention -- hasn't been allowed in the living room. He's been locked in the shed out back. This gives liberals an excuse to blame the rioting in France -- which has finally died down after two weeks -- on the standard liberal villains, poverty and racism. But if racism is a cause of the rioting, poverty isn't. As Theodore Dalrymple noted in a prescient article in the...

Pat Robertson made headlines this week when he offered his opinion that the United States should assassinate Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. What surprised me the most is that so many FReepers took offense to this statement. While nearly all of us fully support the war against Islamofascist terrorism, many here were outraged that a religious personality would call for the death of a totalitarian dictator. From the outset, let me say that I often disagree with Robertson. I live in Virginia Beach and have been listening to his outrageous statements for a long time. I remember ten years ago when...

If freedom entails responsibility, a fair proportion of mankind would prefer servitude; for it is far, far better to receive three meals a day and be told what to do than to take the consequences of one’s own self-destructive choices. It is, moreover, a truth universally unacknowledged that freedom without understanding of what to do with it is a complete nightmare. Such freedom is a nightmare, of course, not only for those who possess it, but for everyone around them. A man who does not know what to do with his freedom is like a box of fireworks into which...

The last time I attended a hanging in the prison it was a murder, not a suicide. I arrived too late to bring the hanged man back to life: for, if there are degrees of deadness, he was by then already very dead. The cellmate of the hanged man did not so much confess as boast that he had intimidated the dead man into hanging himself. He had threatened to cut his throat in his sleep if he did not hang himself first, and the man, who was two weeks from his release, chose the rope—or rather, the bedsheet torn...

Outpourings of grief that hide an inner emptiness By Theodore Dalrymple (Filed: 20/08/2002) It goes without saying that the abduction and murder of two girls is a truly appalling crime, and that their parents must be inconsolably distraught: but we in Britain seem entirely to have forgotten that what goes without saying should also hardly be said. But there has, on the contrary, been a competition in the press and the broadcasting media, from people who are almost intruders into the private grief of those involved, as to who can express his distress most forcefully, as if depth of feeling...

Peter Saunders: You’ve been writing this column in The Spectator for 12 years, and now the book has come out. Your essays are very rich descriptively, but what is the basic message that we should take away from reading them? Theodore Dalrymple: I think it’s the idea that people are not billiard balls. They’re not impacted on by forces like cold fronts in the weather and react accordingly. They actually think about what they’re doing. For example, criminals are conscious of what they’re doing and they respond to incentives. And they have a culture—they have beliefs about what they’re doing....

In 1938, the year my mother left Germany for good and never saw her parents again, Virginia Woolf published a book entitled Three Guineas. It was about how women could prevent war. Virginia Woolf’s name is not normally associated with great affairs of state, of course. Quite the reverse. She regarded them with a fastidious disgust, as a vulgar distraction from the true business of life: attendance to the finer nuances of one’s own emotional state. Along with the other members of the Bloomsbury group—that influential and endlessly chronicled little band of British aesthetes of which she was a moving...

One of the terrible fates that can befall a human being is to be born intelligent or sensitive in an English slum. It is like a long, slow, exquisite torture devised by a sadistic deity from whose malevolent clutches escape is almost impossible. Such was not always the case. My father was born in an English slum in the years before the First World War. In the borough in which he was born, one in every eight children died in his first year. But in those benighted times, when some London children, too poor to buy shoes, went to school...

I'VE just returned to England after a brief trip to Australia. I can't say I'm pleased to be home: quite the contrary. I've lived in a country more or less continuously in decline since my birth (I don't claim a causative relationship). Although Britain's economic performance has improved in the past few years, at least by its own rather low standards, we have somehow managed the trick of growing richer while reducing the quality of our daily lives. Britain is an increasingly unpleasant little country to live in, devoid of all its former charms, while adding daily to its defects....

"Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgment is at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. ... In any case, nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that, in the words of a bitter Argentinean tango, 'todo es igual, nada es major': everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man." —Theodore Dalrymple Dr. Theodore Dalrymple has reached his conclusion not in the ivory tower, but working...

What should they know of Western civilisation who only Tipton know? Tipton is the town in which two of the young Britons of Pakistani descent, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, who are held in Guantanamo as suspected members of al-Qa’eda, grew up. By common consent, it is the grimmest municipality in the whole of the Black Country, which is itself no aesthete’s paradise, to put it very mildly. In surveys to discover the worst area in Britain to live, Tipton always comes near the top, despite much stiff competition from other places. It is the kind of place that resists ...

The thin blue line is vanishing Theodore Dalrymple National Post Britain's esteemed -- or perhaps I should say self-esteemed -- Prime Minister, Anthony Blair, wants to bring peace to India and Pakistan. He would be better employed in the far more difficult and intractable task of bringing peace to London's streets. Last year, street crime in London (already no haven of law and order) rose by 35%. It rose by a similar amount the year before. There is no reason why it should not continue to rise at this rate, for the great majority of such crime is completely uninterrupted, ...

Excerpts from the article: * * * There is no doubt, however, that for some years now the strongest evangelical current in British prisons has been that of Islam, and it is important to our future to understand why this should be. In the first place, there is a general susceptibility of a proportion of prisoners to religious conversion. Crime is definitely a young man's occupation: it is not for the elderly or even for the middle-aged. There thus comes a time when it dawns upon prisoners that a life of crime is never going to lead to riches and ...

The man who tried to blow up the aircraft from Paris to Miami by igniting Semtex hidden in his shoe was a British criminal called Richard Reid. Concealment in the soles and heels of shoes is a common way of smuggling drugs and even weapons into prison, so it is possible Reid learned part of his technique in a house of correction. Certainly he converted to Islam there. Religious conversion in prison is not at all uncommon. Many of the young men in British prisons (and crime, it should always be remembered, is a young man's game) emerge from ...