Our Culture, What's Left of It: by Theodore Dalrymple...

August 14, 3006: I've only read a few essays from this book, but I can already tell that this is a must-read book for anyone interested in the cultural decline that appears to be picking up speed in some western countries, and especially in the U.K.

Dr. Dalrymple writes in 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 hoe 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 effort. John Maynard Keynes wrote, in a famous passage in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that practical men might not have much time for theoretical considerations, but in fact the world is governed by little else than the outdated or defunct ideas of economists and social philosophers.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.

Here's an interview with Dalrymple about the book.

Curtis Bowman seems to have great coverage... here.

Many Dalrymple articles... here. The first one I've read, which is fantastic, is here... The Frivolity of Evil

More to follow as I get through it...