The doctor is in.(Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses)(Book Review)

Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, by Theodore Dalrymple (Ivan R.Dee, 352 pp., $27.50)

WHAT a phenomenon Theodore Dalrymple is! There is no one else writing today quite like him. Liberals have fashioned a world in the image of their ignorance and naivete, and he mocks it with unceasing brilliance and a unique gallows humor. Fighting this rearguard action, he reveals himself to be a man of immense culture and the widest experience. And like some Old Testament prophet, he cries Woe, Woe from a standpoint of absolute moral conviction. Doom may be closing in upon us all, but it will never extinguish his light.

A sense that he has perpetually been seeking evidence that things are for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds certainly infuses his work. From sparse clues he drops here and there in these essays, he seems to have been conditioned from childhood to take a low, indeed a tragic, view of human nature. His father was a lifelong Communist who nonetheless encouraged him to read widely; his mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany. These two outsiders were engaged more in a civil war--"a kind of hell"--than in a marriage. In their son's presence, they did not speak to each other. One night, he awoke when his mother was exclaiming, "You're a wicked, wicked man"--these were the only words he ever heard pass between his parents. When he was about eleven, he says, he lined up for a ticket to a soccer match. A blind beggar with an accordion passed by, whereupon some young men drowned him out by turning up their radio, laughing loudly at his bewilderment.

Someone less intelligent might have settled for victimhood. Dalrymple instead has spent most of his working life as a doctor in a hospital and a prison, in a large industrial city that he doesn't identify but in fact is Birmingham, in the British Midlands. In this capacity he has dealt with murderers, perverts, and misfits, and with every sort of violence and sexual abuse, in particular the horrors customarily inflicted on local Muslim women. At times, and in order to continue testing reality, he has practiced medicine in such Third World countries as Zimbabwe and Tanzania. He has also made a point of visiting places of persecution and fear, including Castro's Cuba and Liberia, to see for himself mass graves and the negation of civilization.

"Men commit evil within the scope available to them." That, for him, is the inescapable brute fact about the human race, and wisdom consists in facing it and drawing the proper conclusions. Until the 20th century, it was generally accepted that civilization rested on restricting the scope available for evil, and that government, law, morality, taboos, and custom were all enrolled in that purpose. Dalrymple often praises Shakespeare because he demonstrates better than anyone else how the absence of restraint destroys the individual and the society.

What's different and novel now is that for more than a century intellectuals have been promoting the view that evil is a myth, and everything laboriously set in place to restrict man's innate capacity for evil has been wrong. This is nothing more than utopian fantasy, but it has been enough to unravel the time-honored truth that self-discipline is a necessary condition of freedom; and governments everywhere have consummated the wreckage by enacting laws that promote ...