Anthony Malcolm Daniels (born 11 October 1949), also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple (), is a conservative English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
As Dalrymple, Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in: The British Medical Journal, The Times, New Statesman, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, New English Review, The Wall Street Journal and Axess magasin. He is the author of a number of books, including: Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001), Our Culture, What's Left of It (2005) and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (2010).
In his Dalrymple pieces, Daniels frequently argues that the views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimise the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within prosperous countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexually transmitted diseases, welfare dependency, and drug abuse. Much of Daniels's writing is based on his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill.
In 2011, Daniels's Dalrymple work was awarded the Prize for Liberty by the Flemish classical-liberal think-tank Libera!.
Life Daniels was born in Kensington, London. His father was a Communist businessman of Russian Jewish descent,The Spectator in the Breast of Man. Peter Saunders talks to Theodore Dalrymple: My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1938 and my father was East London Jewish. while his Jewish mother was born in Germany. She came to England as a refugee from the Nazi regime. His grandfather had served as a major in the German Army during World War I.Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline, By Theodore Dalrymple, (Ivan R. Dee, 2 Sep 2008), page 80
He studied medicine at the University of Birmingham, graduating with an MB ChB degree in 1974. He became a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1980 and qualified as a specialist in psychiatry in 1997.
His work as a physician took him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Tanzania, South Africa and the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati).A bit of a myth, A. M. Daniels, The Spectator, 26 August 1983 He returned to the United Kingdom in 1990, where he worked in London and Birmingham.The doctor is in, The New Criterion, 17 May 2004
In 1991, he made an extended appearance on British television under the name Theodore Dalrymple. On 23 February, he took part in an After Dark discussion, called "Prisons: No Way Out", alongside the former gangster Tony Lambrianou, the Greek journalist and writer Taki Theodoracopulos, and others.
In 2005, he retired early as a consultant psychiatrist.A doctor's farewell , The Spectator, 22 January 2005 He has a house in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, and also a house in France.Minutes of the Extraordinary Meeting of Bridgnorth Town Council held in the Mayor's Parlour, College House on Monday, 28 October 2013 at 7.15pm
Regarding his pseudonym "Theodore Dalrymple", he wrote that he "chose a name that sounded suitably dyspeptic, that of a gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world".
He is an atheist, but has criticised anti-theism and says that "To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy". Raised in a non-religious Jewish home, he began doubting the existence of a God at age nine. He became an atheist in response to a moment in a school assembly.
Daniels has also used other pen names. As "Edward Theberton", he has written articles for The Spectator from countries in Africa, including Mozambique.Black Marx, Edward Theberton, The Spectator, 4 July 1986, page 13 He used the name "Thursday Msigwa" when he wrote Filosofa's Republic, a satire of Tanzania under Julius Nyerere.Political Violence, Paul Hollander, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 He may also have used another pen name, in addition to his bona fide name.
Writing Daniels began sending unsolicited articles to The Spectator in the early 1980s; his first published work, entitled "A Bit of a Myth" appeared in the magazine in August 1983 under the name A.M. Daniels. Charles Moore wrote in 2004 that "Theodore Dalrymple, then writing under a different pseudonym, is the only writer I have ever chosen to publish on the basis of unsolicited articles". Between 1984 and 1991 Daniels published articles in The Spectator under the pseudonym Edward Theberton.
Daniels has written extensively on culture, art, politics, education, and medicine – often drawing on his experiences as a doctor and psychiatrist in Africa and the United Kingdom. The historian Noel Malcolm has described Daniels's written accounts of his experiences working at a prison and a public hospital in Birmingham as "journalistic gold", and Moore observed that "it was only when he returned to Britain that he found what he considered to be true barbarism – the cheerless, self-pitying hedonism and brutality of the dependency culture. Now he is its unmatched chronicler." Daniel Hannan wrote in 2011 that Dalrymple "writes about Koestler's essays and Ethiopian religious art and Nietzschean eternal recurrence – subjects which, in Britain, are generally reserved for the reliably Left-of-Centre figures who appear on Start the Week and Newsnight Review. It is Theodore's misfortune to occupy a place beyond the mental co-ordinates of most commissioning editors."
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, a collection of essays was published in book form in 2001. The essays, which the Manhattan Institute had first begun publishing in City Journal in 1994, deal with themes such as personal responsibility, the mentality of society as a whole, and the troubles of the underclass. As part of his research for the book, Dalrymple interviewed over 10,000 people who had attempted suicide.
Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, published in 2005, is another collection of essays in which he contends that the middle class's abandonment of traditional cultural and behavioural aspirations has, by example, fostered routine incivility and militant ignorance among the poor. He examines diverse themes and figures in the book including Shakespeare, Marx, Virginia Woolf, food deserts and volitional underclass malnutrition, recreational vulgarity, and the legalisation of drugs. One of the essays in the book, "When Islam Breaks Down", was named one of the most important essays of 2004 by David Brooks in The New York Times.
In 2009, Dalrymple's British publisher Monday Books published two books of his. The first, Not With a Bang But A Whimper, appeared in August 2009. It is different from the United States book of the same name, though some of the author's essays appear in both books. In October 2009, Monday Books published Second Opinion, a further collection of Dalrymple essays, this time dealing exclusively with his work in a British hospital and prison.The publisher made extracts from both works available free of charge on its Web site Not With A Bang But A Whimper Second Opinion
With Gibson Square Dalrymple then published Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (2010), which analyses how he thinks sentimentality has become culturally entrenched in British society with what he considers harmful effects. In 2011, he published Litter: What Remains of Our Culture, followed by The Pleasure of Thinking (2012), Threats of Pain and Ruin (2014), and others.
Dalrymple was a judge for the 2013 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.
In May 2023 he spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in London on the subject of "Historiography and the State of the Western Mind".Theodore Dalrymple, nationalconservatism.org. Retrieved 8 July 2023.
He currently writes a weekly commentary column for the online Taki's Magazine.
Themes
Daniels's writing has some recurring themes. The cause of much contemporary misery in Western countries – criminality, domestic violence, drug addiction, aggressive youths, hooliganism, broken families – is the nihilistic, decadent and/or self-destructive behaviour of people who do not know how to live. Both the smoothing over of this behaviour, and the medicalisation of the problems that emerge as a corollary of this behaviour, are forms of indifference. Someone has to tell those people, patiently and with understanding for the particulars of the case, that they have to live differently.Life at the bottom. The Worldview that makes the Underclass (passim). Poverty does not explain aggressive, criminal and self-destructive behaviour. In an African slum you will find among the very poor, living in dreadful circumstances, dignity and decency in abundance, which are painfully lacking in an average English suburb, although its inhabitants are much wealthier. An attitude characterised by gratefulness and having obligations towards others has been replaced – with awful consequences – by an awareness of "rights" and a sense of entitlement, without responsibilities. This leads to resentment as the rights become violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general.'The Law of Conservation of Righteous Indignation, and its Connection to the Expansion of Human Rights', in: In Praise of Prejudice. The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, p. 68 (chapter 17). One of the things that make Islam attractive to young westernised Muslim men is the opportunity it gives them to dominate women.In The Gelded Age. A review of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, by Mark Steyn (Website The Claremont Institute, 9 April 2007), Dalrymple wrote: "The principal immediate attraction of Islam to young Muslims brought up in the West is actually the control and oppression of women". A similar idea is expressed in The Suicide Bombers Among Us (City Journal, Autumn 2005). In that piece Dalrymple wrote: "However secular the tastes of the young Muslim men, they strongly wish to maintain the male dominance they have inherited from their parents". Technocratic or bureaucratic solutions to the problems of mankind produce disasters in cases where the nature of man is the root cause of those problems. It is a myth, when going "cold turkey" from an opiate such as heroin, that the withdrawal symptoms are virtually unbearable; they are in fact hardly worse than flu. Criminality is much more often the cause of drug addiction than its consequence. Sentimentality, which is becoming entrenched in British society, is "the progenitor, the godparent, the midwife of brutality". High culture and refined aesthetic tastes are worth defending, and despite the protestations of non-judgmentalists who say all expression is equal, they are superior to popular culture. The ideology of the Welfare State is used to diminish personal responsibility. Erosion of personal responsibility makes people dependent on institutions and favours the existence of a threatening and vulnerable underclass. Moral relativism can easily be a trick of an egotistical mind to silence the voice of conscience.'The Uses of Metaphysical Skepticism', in: In Praise of Prejudice. The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, p. 6 (chapter 2). Multiculturalism and cultural relativism are at odds with common sense. The decline of civilised behaviour – self-restraint, modesty, zeal, humility, irony, detachment – ruins social and personal life.