The barbarians within the gates

Spectator readers have known of Dr Dalrymple for many years through his regular column in this magazine. Every week we muddled our way through, unreflectively finding life all right and other people not so bad. Then, on Fridays we took Dr Dalrymple’s little magic pill and suddenly saw that we were knee-high in a rising sewer. The column was short and usually followed a pattern. There was an abbreviated story of a patient who had tried to kill himself or someone else. The Doctor’s questions revealed a little more of the patient’s disgusting life, and it ended with a comment by the patient showing his total lack of moral responsibility for his actions.

So what can the Doctor do when given more space and more words: these essays are more than ten times longer than the columns? Well, they range wider with treatments of Shakespeare, Marx, Turgenev, art, Havana, Gillray, Islam and drugs. They also articulate an argument. The column shows the degeneracy of the ‘masses’. The book extends this to an argument about the fragility of our civilisation. The degeneracy is, of course, the fault of the masses themselves: Dalrymple has total scorn for the leftish view that blames ‘structures’ and oppression for the evil committed by the lower orders. But the blame is extended to the intelligentsia, hence the mention of ‘mandarins’ in the subtitle:

It is in the arts and literary pages of our newspapers that the elite’s continuing demand for the erosion of restraint, and its unreflexive antinomianism, is most clearly on view … The revolution in British manners did not come about through any volcanic eruption from below … it was the intellectual wing of the elite that kicked against the traces.

The crudity … results from the poisonous combination of an ideologically inspired (and therefore insincere) admiration for all that is demotic, on the one hand, and intellectual snobbery on the other.