Theodore Dalrymple writes:
In Winnenden, near Stuttgart, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer went on a shooting spree at a school and then a car showroom, killing 15. He had said before the atrocity:
I’m fed up. I’ve had enough of this meaningless life, which is always the same. Everyone ignores me, no one recognises my potential.
Dalrymple comments:
This reeks of resentful, narcissistic grandiosity, the result of an imperative to be an individual at a time when individuation is more difficult than ever.
These words, writes Dalrymple, are
the chief motto of British service industries.
They are also chosen, he points out, by
a surprisingly large number of auto-tattooists for the exercise of their dermatographical art.
He recalls a patient who
had the two words tattooed in mirror writing upon his forehead, no doubt that he might read them in the bathroom mirror every morning and be reminded of the vanity of earthly concerns.
Suitable applicant for a post in the British service industries
The seemingly minor social phænomenon of tattooing affords us, says Dalrymple,
a little glimpse into the Hobbesian moral world inhabited by a section of the population with whom we normally have little contact: they actually want to be considered psychopathic.
Moreover, we must not discriminate against someone who has Fuck off tattooed on his forehead. Dalrymple notes that
prudence is a virtue and used to be considered one of the cardinal virtues. No longer.
We have become so individualistic that
we claim the right to behave any way we like without any consequences for ourselves. A man may tattoo Fuck off on his forehead and then claim to have been discriminated against when he is refused a job serving the public.
Some observers, Dalrymple notes, see Islamisation
as the most fundamental threat to the continuation of Europe as a civilisation.
These people assume that Europe
does nothing to change the Moslems themselves, and that their religious affiliation is of such overwhelming importance to them that nothing else goes into forming and maintaining their identity.
Dalrymple believes this is too crude a view. Rather, he says,
it seems to me likely that Islamism in Europe is a reaction to cultural dislocation caused by the very power of the dislocating attractions (many of which seem to me to be, in truth, sub specie æternitatis, not very attractive) that Moslem youth experience merely by living in Europe.
The factors the West faces, and which it declines to tackle in any meaningful way, are listed by Dalrymple as follows:
With its ready-made diagnosis and prescriptions, writes Dalrymple, it
opens up and fills with the pus of implacable hatred for many in search of a reason for and a solution to their discontents.
According to Islamism, Dalrymple notes, the West can never meet the demands of justice, because it is
Only
a return to the principles and practices of 7th-century Arabia will resolve all personal and political problems at the same time.
This notion, he points out, is
no more (and no less) bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century: that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men.
Dalrymple lists the factors that ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further ‘martyrs’ for years to come:
Église Saint-Étienne
And not just for France, of course. Dalrymple identifies the factors which, he writes,
ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further Mohammedan ‘martyrs’ for years to come.
These are:
The outlook in France and the rest of the West is grim, says Dalrymple. He identifies the factors which, he writes,
ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further ‘martyrs’ for years to come.
These are:
Heygate Estate, Walworth, London. Tim Tinker, 1974
Enemies of Corbusian profanation do not hesitate to act
Whole acres, writes Dalrymple, of man-made surfaces are disfigured in Europe by graffiti,
in which some people, ever on the lookout for something counter-intuitive to say, claim to have found art. This is the tribute money pays to poverty without having to part with anything.
The need to assert (rather than express) oneself in some way, no matter how pointless, becomes imperative in a society in which
Royal National Theatre, South Bank, London. Denys Lasdun, 1967–76
Taggers tend to deface
ugly surfaces, often of inhuman size, in which modern urban spaces are so richly, or impoverishingly, supplied. It is true that tagging never improves those surfaces, but they are often in themselves of degrading hideousness.
The epidemiology of graffiti
suggests a subliminal aesthetic criticism. It is a commentary on the kind of building and concrete surface that the fascist modernist architect, Le Corbusier, extolled and desired, with the enthusiasm of a revivalist evangelical, to spread throughout the whole world. In a sense, taggers in England and France are endowed with taste.
Having said that, in Italy or Portugal,
18th-century buildings are not exempted from the attentions of bruised and inflamed young egos.
The squalor, degradation and sordor that is Western popular culture
Two windows on the sordor:
Pop stars, writes Dalrymple, fall into two groups:
There is nothing like the sordid for getting ahead
Romantics view self-destructive behaviour
as the sign of a great soul.
De Quincey wrote:
Pain driven to agony, or grief driven to frenzy, is essential to the ventilation of profound natures.
But, Dalrymple points out,
it is an elementary error of logic to suppose that, because profound natures ventilate agonised frenzy, those who ventilate agonised frenzy have profound natures.
Take punk. Its ‘ethic’ consists, explains Dalrymple, of
an utterly conformist non-conformity and an insensate individualism without individuality, allied to brutal and deliberate bad taste.
Self-harm
For instance,
to inflict a serious injury on yourself (which you then require others to repair for you, at their expense) in order to prove that you are genuinely committed to bad taste, ugliness, a rejection of everything that could possibly make life worth living, and to a celebration of ‘alienation, boredom and despair’ does not seem to me to be meritorious in any way. The alienation, boredom and despair are the consequence of a combination of laziness and impatient ambition, rather than the consequence of an ‘objective’ situation, and represent an impossible demand for achievement without concomitant effort.
Rage
Dalrymple says:
I feel a certain rage at the culture that we have created, and a certain guilt that I have not fought against it with all my heart and soul, to the best of my ability. It is a culture that can produce lines — and mean them, that is what is terrible — such as the following from one of Richey Edwards‘ songs (as Mozart took dictation from God, so he took dictation from the Zeitgeist):
I hate purity. Hate goodness. I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone corrupt.
Cartoon: Paco Calderón
Photo: Thomas Sweertvaegher
Take your medicine
Cartoon: Paco Calderón
Photo: Ronnie Kaufman (cover of 2005 collection of Dalrymple essays)
St Theodorus the Misoneist
