Evil, Be Thou My Good

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Tuesday, November 22, 2005

BOOK REVIEW

Our Culture, what's left of it
Theodore Dalrymple
Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2005

Having delivered psychiatry to the destitute and delinquent in urban Britain for decades, Theodore Dalrymple, in Our Culture, What's Left of it, delivers an arresting, quixotic and wonderfully severe diagnosis of Western high culture and low life. Written as individual essays under a pseudonym (his real name is Anthony Daniels), Dalrymple draws the thinnest of lines—thinning even as my fingers tap across each lettered button on the keyboard—separating civilization from brutality, love from rutting, humanity from animality.

A contrarian for our time, Doctor Dalrymple finds the source of our spiritual malaise not in a lack of public education or ducats, but rather in the evangelical nihilism of the most honored aesthetes of the twentieth century—a rogues' gallery of self-indulgence, self-pity and dissentious excess, from D. H. Lawrence to Virginia Woolf; from Marcel Duchamp to Damien Hirst. What's worse, Dalrymple has found that our raucous high culture has—as efficiently as indoor plumbing—flushed its detritus downhill where it coalesces and congeals into carnal cesspools of chronic decadence wherein these very aesthetes will too often find "romance" as they voyeuristically "suffer" the "spirit" of it all in their art.

According to the Doctor, we are all allegorically afflicted by original sin—innately inclined to embrace the black bile of our own evil. Civilized people thus have the cultural and moral charge to buck up and assume their own innate goodness, even if that goodness should be as fleeting as the life of one human being against the backdrop of all time.

To Dalrymple, the morally crippled libertine, obsessed with his fragile feelings, has deconstructed the traditional concept of the road less traveled into the resentment of the road abandoned, inspired, one would assume, by the same spirit that led Duchamp's artistic sensibility to find its full expression in the defiled l'objet d'art of the urinal. It should be noted that M. Duchamp was not the first to immortalize this device in art, the concept was rather conceived by Sir Thomas Crapper who had envisioned his art for the other more practical and common purpose that bears his name. However, by expelling the past into Duchamp's urinal, or Crapper's crapper—by virtue of no more than its being the past—the bon vivant violently egests the veils of tradition by transgressing the "boundaries that separate civilization from barbarism" and by advocating the freedom detached from conscience succinctly and melodically described in the twentieth century maxim if it feels good do it…'till you're satisfied.

Indeed. Here, modern Western culture has achieved something of an amoral triumph, celebrated by art critics, academics, plumbers, earnest libertines and those who would make sacrosanct and useless art from the otherwise fully functioning work of Sir Thomas Crapper. The work also offers an unintended antidote to the common dictum that apodictically states "you can't polish a turd".

Dalrymple, performing an autopsy on the cerebral end of civilization, finds that it is not only unarmed in its war on savagery, but its effete troops are advancing in the wrong direction, having been misled, in their ignorance and arrogance, by the fact that their predecessors had previously white-washed the whole awful fa�ade of incivility with the paint of their discredited and decrepit ideologies. Thus our would-be cultural heroes high-tailed and turned traitor, becoming unknowing collaborators with the dark forces aligned against the civilization that they would have traditionally championed. Moreover, to the good Doctor, the artiste is in fact the weakest of the weak links in the ethical body of the cataclysmic twentieth century, lost in his troubled feelings and sentiments, when thought and conscience are better suited to his celebrated work.

Dalrymple, cutting through the ideology of the self-absorbed, focuses his sharp eye and scalpel on two of the more curious sacred cows and whitewashers who are most beloved of a fawning academia: D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. To Dalrymple, the two authors embody the bait and switch now de rigueur to intellectual and artistic fashionistas. Here, according to the Doctor, artists and thinkers strain "after emotions not that they felt, but that they felt that they ought to feel. This of course is one of the sources of sentimentality: it is the tribute that vanity pays to compassion." It is also the modus operandi of our most high-fashion causes, protests, and random—though deeply felt—fads. It is said that such feelings of sentimentality "speak truth to power," but such "speech," although possessing a wonderful facility in rhyme, too often lacks the grand eloquence of reason. It has become the common currency of miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, intellectual riffraff, protest organizers, and would be tune-smiths: come one, come all, they all come looking for action and a good time on such festive and jolly occasions as they'll find.

It must be said, that amongst the literature praised by the g'literati, Lady Chatterley's Lover takes a back seat to none. And it is easy to see why. With Lady Chatterley the conventional and tired practice of making love is given a rhetorical lift into "f*cking," and in the same move, humans are celebrated as rutting barn animals. The appeal is endless. Once upon a time, say a century ago, a civil person would likely grimace at the vulgar use of such hackneyed taunts as "bloody" or "hell" (the bad form of uniting the two, in good company, would have had many uncouth souls bounced out on their behinds, on such civil occasions as life would afford them), though now we are to acquiesce when such vulgarities and puerile fantasies are the counterfeit jewels placed in the bezels of the Western Canon (worse is the indignity of being tested on our knowledge of such flotsam and jetsam!).

To the point, the aspiring aesthete can revisit the dialogue of two of D. H. Lawrence's protagonists in Chatterley. Here, a father recommends and celebrates the sexual prowess of his own daughter before the rapscallion who of late tasted her carnal delights himself, whereupon during his coital rutting, he has the temerity to impregnate his interlocutor's beloved daughter. The father—bizarrely—boasts to the rake that confessed to deflowering and engorging his daughter's nubile belly, "Well young man, and what about my daughter?'…'Well sir, and what about her?'…'You've got a baby in her all 'right'…'I have that honor'…'Honor! How was the going, eh?'…'Good!'…'I'll bet it was! Ha- ha! My daughter, a chip off the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of f*cking myself." Fatherly lust, gutter-art, transgression, all at one clip—a literary Trifecta for the amoral ages to celebrate.

Dalrymple, unlike aesthetes comfortably ensconced in hyphenated "Studies" Departments across academia, thinks Lady Chatterley's Lover deserves to be censored. Period.

But what about free speech? You may ask. Artistic expression? To Dalrymple, when we take the modern artistic step away from romantic love into brute f*cking, from loving parents finding sexual and emotional innocence as the common custom, to boasting of its derogation, there is much more to be lost than some very badly written fiction. If we take D. H Lawrence seriously, which most of the g'literati do, then his novel form of love, family and ultimately, civilization, will, like swamp water, dilute the good wine imbibed by humanity; if you call a urinal a work of art, and do so with an aesthete's diction and proper artistic disposition, the hoi polloi may rightly wonder why the act of simply relieving themselves in a public restroom would not represent an occasion of artistic obeisance and a sacrosanct moment of artistic expression. The galleries, museums and universities of the world and their contents, such as they are, will rightly become superfluous, replaced by men's restrooms and modern privies—as Virginia Woolf wished that they would be.

Woolf favored the intellectual's cultural residence to be "built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions" and felt that these institutions "should teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practiced by poor people." Essentially, Woolf would have preferred something more appropriate to a shanty town or a refugee camp in place of Oxford or Cambridge and certainly nothing like Dartmouth College, The Hopkins Center or The Metropolitan Museum of Art; let us say, at the very least, the lady would have preferred something more along the aesthetic lines of a prefab Wal-Mart hailing from Podunk Arkansas than a Sydney Opera House in…well, Sydney.

Dalrymple's critique of Woolf is so ripping, sharp and poignant that it elicits a nervous laughter from the unprepared mind. Dalrymple, in his dispassionate autopsy of the Woolfian mind determines that Virginia's famous Three Guineas would have been more aptly titled, How to be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved.

Woolf, you see, is all about change, without being the least bit worried over what a particular change might engender, or of the fact that it has long been an article of common sense and good grammar that only good change is, you know, good; but to her admirers, is is this very capricious courage that sets Woolf apart. Woolf is proud and says it loud ("the new is better than the old by virtue of its novelty") without, however, coming right out and saying it.

Change for Woolf is, to use Nietzsche's phrase, beyond good and evil and inhabits and furnishes a moral transcendence all of its own design and making. Truly, it is difficult to know how one could go about making a bad choice in Virginia's World. Common sense, however, would be offended. Simply attributing any difference among individual choices to mere subjectivity is to deny that there exists a common bond or thread that links us all together, that allows someone like Dalrymple to pity a twelve year-old prostitute while simultaneously finding what she does despicable.

When we believe that there is nothing that unites us as a species besides 46 chromosomes, we are inclined to lose our pity, compassion and affection for each other, and by the very same token, our common humanity. Choices define us; good choices make us good. If you and I are really so different that our choices bear not at all upon each other, or lack a reference to a common source, what does it matter to me if you, either through your choices or another's, are suffering?

While in the gulags, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good from evil passes not through the states, not between classes, not between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts." According to Dalrymple, too often, our "best and brightest" would believe there is no line, and worse, there is barely a heart.

Evil, Be Thou My Good

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