The West is soaked in academic drivel

The fatuous ideology of diversity

People in the West live, writes Dalrymple,

in a totalitarian condition in which they are afraid to say some things and—what is worse—are required to say others. They are obliged to deny what they believe and assent to what they do not believe. There is no better way to destroy the personality. People become cynical, time-serving, increasingly self-absorbed. Their impotence breeds apathy. Once they start to utter things for the sake of their careers or their peace and quiet that they do not believe, they lose self-respect and probity and thus their standing to resist anything. People without probity are easy to control and manipulate; the purpose of political correctness is not to enunciate truth but to exercise power.

The threat comes not from government

but from the universities and the semi-intellectuals that they turn out. The governments of once-liberal democracies lamely follow the fashions and obsessions that emerge from universities, and few politicians have the courage or stamina to resist. To do so would require a willingness to present an intellectual case against them, not once but repeatedly, as well as a rhinoceros hide to be unaffected by the opprobrium and insult to which they would be subjected (insult these days being the highest form of argument). We do not live in times propitious to patient argumentation by politicians about matters of principle. What cannot be said in three words will not be heard, so that surrender is the default setting.

A dictatorship of virtue

Dalrymple notes that even applying for a job, particularly in US universities,

is a kind of Calvary for the person who does not share modern academic-bureaucratic obsession with race and sexual proclivities. The applicant must fill in forms about his attitude towards diversity—there being no permissible diversity in attitudes towards diversity.

Many universities demand a personal ‘diversity statement’ from the applicant. It requires of the successful candidate a full commitment to modern orthodoxies.

To admit that all you want to do is study the life and times of, say, William the Silent, the Khedive Ismail or José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, and convey your enthusiasm for this subject to others, would be fatal to your chances. You must want, in the cant phrase of our times, to make a difference. You must bring your straw to the fires of resentment, so that the diversity bureaucracy will never extinguish them and never be out of a job.

Welfarism and the debasement of the British

The condition of many people in relatively degenerate areas of Great Britain is, says Dalrymple,

worse than that which I have seen in Africa.

These Britons

have less pride, less self-respect. They have no self-respect, actually.

A necessary condition of such a state of the soul is

the welfare state.

But Dalrymple doubts that the welfare state is a sufficient condition for such degradation. (There are, he points out, welfare states less bad than Britain’s.) The point is that there has been

an ideological change: things that were once received as a benefit are received as a right. This is a cause of resentment: what people receive — they are being paid to exist — is never as much as what they would like to receive.

I’m fat, ugly, stupid — ‘n fuckin’ proud of it!

Many British people, Dalrymple observes, are

beached human whales.

Dalrymple encounters a male whale in the hotel lift.

His T-shirt was emblazoned with a single word, ENGLAND, a superfluous message if ever there were one.

The British, says Dalrymple, are

fried food made flesh.

Their appearance signifies one of two things, or both:

1. collapse of self-respect, at least in the aspect of physical appearance
2. total lack of imagination as to the impression they make on others

Dalrymple points out that

slum-dwellers in Kinshasa make a better effort, with more success, in turning themselves out well.