🚀 go-pugleaf

In the current issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute,
British physician Theodore Dalrymple examines "the mental mechanisms that
liberal intellectuals use to disguise the truth from themselves and others,"
beginning with "outright denial. Increasing crime [in England] was long
dismissed as a mere statistical artifact, before the sheer weight of the
evidence overwhelmed the possibility of denial," he notes. "As to
educational failure, it was long denied by the production of statistics
showing that more and more children were passing public examinations [which]
had deliberately been made so easy that it was impossible to fail them."
Another mental mechanism used for deception is the "tendentious historical
comparison or precedent. Yes, it is admitted, violence and vulgarity are a
large part of modern British life; but they always were," Dalrymple parrots.
"For some reason not fully explained, it is supposed to be a comfort . . .
that antisocial behavior has persisted unabated over hundreds of years."

Yet another deceptive mechanism, "once the facts are finally admitted under
the duress of accumulated evidence," is to deny or pervert "their moral
significance," says Dalrymple. "Do children emerge from school as ignorant
of facts as when they entered?" he asks rhetorically. "Well, of course: this
is because they are no longer taught by rote but instead are taught how to
go about finding information for themselves." Dalrymple points out that any
quantity of violence can be "explained away by reference to the 'structural
violence' of capitalist society."

Dalrymple sees a "causative relationship between the ideas that liberal
intellectuals advocated and put into practice and every disastrous social
development of the last four decades." He remembers how liberal
intellectuals "called for the destruction of the family as an institution.
The destigmatization of illegitimacy," he recalls, "went hand in hand with
easy divorce, the extension of marital rights to other forms of association
between adults, and the removal of all the fiscal advantages of marriage."
Rather than increase "the stock of innocent sexual pleasure," the
destruction of the family "resulted instead in widespread violence
consequent upon sexual insecurity and in the mass neglect of children, as
people became ever more egotistical in their search for momentary pleasure."

Dalrymple accuses liberal intellectuals of turning education into "a form of
childish entertainment," rejecting "grammar and arithmetic" as "mere
bourgeois tools," and eliminating "the very idea of failure." He charges
that they justified and encouraged crime with their absurd claim that "an
unjust society forced people into criminal activity, and therefore
punishment constituted a double injustice, victimizing the real victim. By
what right could an unjust society claim to impose its version of justice?"
he mimics. "Empathy and understanding were what was needed, provided they
absolved the criminal of his responsibility. The creation of a universal
disposition to do good, and not the creation of fear of the consequences of
doing evil, was what was needed to extirpate crime." Dalrymple reports that
"these were glad tidings to those tempted by the life of crime and
demoralizing ones to those who upheld the law.

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