Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)

Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (1949-) is an English writer and retired physician (prison doctor and psychiatrist), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple. He has written extensively on culture, art, politics, education and medicine drawing upon his experience as a doctor and psychiatrist in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, and more recently at a prison and a public hospital in Birmingham, in central England. He has travelled in many countries in Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Daniels has revealed in his writing that his father was a Communist businessman, while his mother was born in Germany and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee from the Nazi regime. In 2005 he retired from England to move (with his wife) to France, where he plans to continue writing. His columns frequently appear in The Spectator as well as in City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute.

In his commentary, Daniels frequently argues that the so-called "progressive" views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimize the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional values, contributing to the formation within rich countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexual promiscuity, welfare dependency, and drug abuse.

He contends that the middle class abandonment of traditional cultural and behavioural aspirations has, by example, fostered routine incivility and ignorance among members of the working class. Occasionally accused of being a pessimist and misanthrope, his defenders point to a persistently conservative philosophy in his work that is anti-ideological, sceptical, rational and empiricist.

Quotes

 * "After all, they are not highly educated, so they have no culture; there is no religion, there is no belief that the country is involved in a transcendental purpose, so there is very little left for them; they live in their own soap opera, actually." On people "at the lower end of the social scale" in Britain.


 * "I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners."


 * "Resentment is one of the few emotions that never lets you down, but it's useless. In fact, it's worse than useless, it's harmful, and we all suffer from it at some time in our lives." CBC Ideas podcast


 * "People who deny responsibility for their own actions use a language that portrays them as passive victims of circumstance."


 * "I learned early in my life that if people are offered the opportunity of tranquillity, they often reject it and choose torment instead. My own parents chose to live in the most abject conflictual misery and created for themselves a kind of hell on a small domestic scale, as if acting in an unscripted play by Strindberg. . . Though they lived together, they addressed not a single word to one another in my presence during the eighteen years I spent in their house, though we ate at least one meal a day together . . . " Essay, "A Taste for Danger" (1998), in "Our Culture, What's Left of It", (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2005.)


 * "Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness."


 * "This rise [in crime rate] provides no support for liberal theories of crime, no sustenance for the kind of person who proves the strength of his compassion by conceiving of those less law-abiding than himself as automata, mere executors of the dictates of circumstance."


 * "The combination of relativism and antipathy to traditional culture has played a large part in creating the underclass, thus turning Britain from a class into a caste society. The poorest people were deprived both of a sense of cultural hierarchy and of the moral imperative to conform their conduct to any standard whatever. Henceforth what they had and what they did was as good as anything, because all cultures and all cultural artifacts are equal. Aspiration was therefore pointless: and thus they have been as immobilized in their poverty - material, mental, and spiritual - as completely as the damned in Dante's Inferno. Essay, "Uncouth Chic", in "Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes The Underclass", (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2001.)


 * "It is from social prejudice that one learns social virtue. Metaphysical thought and reflection come later."


 * "Of course, I had traveled in many countries that were in the throes of civil wars, and knew something of the inhumanity of man to man, but nothing had quite prepared me for the level of extreme violence in personal relationships that I encountered in a country that was enjoying sustained economic growth and unprecedented prosperity...What I saw was human conduct as it becomes when the requirement to conform to inherited social restraints no longer exists, when it is left to the whim of individuals how to behave. The result is an urban hell."


 * "Habit is behavioral prejudice." "In Praise of Prejudice", (Encounter Books, New York City, 2007.)

Works

 * Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America (1986)
 * Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987)
 * Zanzibar to Timbuktu (1988)
 * Sweet Waist of America: Journeys around Guatemala (1990)
 * The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (published in the U.S. as Utopias Elsewhere) (1991)
 * Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia (1992)
 * If Symptoms Persist: Anecdotes from a Doctor (1995)
 * So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer (1996)
 * If Symptoms Still Persist (1997)
 * Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares (1998)
 * An Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine (2001)
 * Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001) ISBN 1566633826
 * Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses (2005) ISBN 1566636434
 * Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies And The Addiction Bureaucracy (2006) ISBN 1594030871