Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline by Theodore Dalrymple, 241 pages

Not with a Bang but a Whimper is a collection of essays by Anthony Daniels, the (now retired) London prison psychiatrist who established himself as one of the 21st century's leading social critics with his masterpiece Life at the Bottom, published under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, summarizing decades of work with the British underclass.  This book, written between 2004 and 2008, ranges more freely over subjects from Samuel Johnson to A Clockwork Orange, but his themes remain consistent - that 20th century intellectual fads have led to the decline of culture and the rise of the state, producing an increasingly infantilized populace which is less and less capable of finding true meaning or joy in life.

Dalrymple's greatest strength, as a critic and as a psychologist, is his ability to spot deception, and especially self-deception, which reaches an apogee of absurdity in his reflection on Tony Blair's time as Prime Minister, "Delusions of Honesty".  Somehow, he manages to say more about Modernism in the course of a sixteen page essay on Ibsen than Peter Gay could in 500 pages.  Dalrymple shows himself possessed of not only the moral courage to view social problems without evasion or illusion, but a humane sympathy that refuses to abandon others to life in barbaric conditions or the creeping barbarism of a nihilistic anti-culture.