Yesterday I mentioned Victor Davis Hanson as a historian whose commentary on the collapse of the West is worth following.
Today I direct your attention to another Cassandra, Theodore Dalrymple. He is a doctor (real name Anthony Daniels) of long practice among the lowest classes in England. Unlike leftist intellectuals whose experience of the downtrodden tends to be academic and therefore comfortably remote, Dalrymple has spent his life in close contact with them. His books are filled with disturbing (if humorous) stories of his patients and the dying society in which they live and move and have their being. His books Life At The Bottom; The Worldview That Makes The Underclass and Our Culture, What’s Left Of It; The Mandarins And The Masses: are excellent (if often frustrating and infuriating and saddening) reads.
He is a regular columnist for the City Journal, a magazine worth checking online from time to time. Today’s essay is entitled “Thoughts on Woolwich” (the town where two young Muslim-convert Britons from Nigeria brutally murdered and decapitated a British soldier, then pontificated about it to the witnesses recording it all on their cellphones.
“What these cases show is that it is not Islam that makes young converts violent; it is the violence within them that causes them to convert to Islam. The religion, in its most bloodthirsty form, supplies all their psychological needs and channels their anger into a supposedly higher purpose. It gives them moral license to act upon their rage; for, like many in our society, they do not realize that anger is not self-justifying, that one is not necessarily right because one is angry, and that in any case even justified anger does not entail a license to act violently. The hacking to death of Lee Rigby on a street in Woolwich tells us as much about the society that we have created, or allowed to develop, as it does about radical Islam preached by fat, middle-aged clerics.”
