Theodore Dalrymple is probably best known for his weekly columns in The Spectator and his essays in the American quarterly City Journal. He is a psychiatrist working in an inner city area in Britain where he is affiliated with a large hospital and a prison. His columns report on the lifestyles and ways of thinking of Britain’s growing underclass, and in his book, Life at the Bottom, he warns that this underclass culture is spreading through society.
In his latest City Journal piece, Mr. Dalrymple expresses the frustration that he feels in responding to the various pooh-bah theories that seem to abound these days:

In Australia recently, I shared a public platform with an educationist, who had won awards for social innovation in the field of education for disadvantaged minorities. I was looking forward to what she had to say.
I was soon in a towering rage, however. She uttered some of the most foolish cliches of radical education theory, now about 40 years old—theories that I had fondly thought were now behind us, . . .
Halfway through my own reply, however, I suddenly became bored. Why do I spend so much time arguing against such obvious rubbish, which should be both self-refuting and auto-satirizing the moment someone utters it? Why not just go and read a good book?
The problem is that nonsense can and does go by default. It wins the argument by sheer persistence, by inexhaustible re-iteration, by staying at the meeting when everyone else has gone home, by monomania, by boring people into submission and indifference. And the reward of monomania? Power.

Read the entire piece. Hat tip to Craig Newmark for the link to Mr. Dalrymple’s latest.