Terrible Ted's New Book

We earlier (link) recommended Theodore Dalrymple's new book, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, even though we hadn't read it yet. Well, our copy arrived last Saturday and we immediately plunged in.

We weren't disappointed. Ted rocks. We found choice passages immediately.

From the Preface:

Having spent a considerable proportion of my professional career in Third World countries in which the implementation of abstract ideas and ideals has made bad situations incomparably worse, and the rest of my career among the very extensive British underclass, whose disastrous notions about how to live derive ultimately from the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics, I have come to regard intellectual and artistic life as being of incalculable practical importance and effect. John Maynard Keynes wrote . . . that practical men might now have much time for theoretical considerations, but in fact the world is governed by little else than the outdated or defunct ideas of economists and social philosophers. I agree: except that I would now add novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists, and even pop singers. They are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and we ought to pay close attention to what they say and how they say it.

We plan to publish more excerpts from the book during the next couple of weeks, but that's no reason not to buy it. We'll publish less than 5% of the passages worth reading.