Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)

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Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (1949-) is an English writer and retired physician (prison doctor and psychiatrist), who frequently uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple. He has written extensively on culture, art, politics, education and medicine both in Britain and overseas, and is probably best-known for his opposition to progressive and liberal policies in these fields. Now retired from medicine, he worked as a doctor and psychiatrist in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, and more recently at a prison and a public hospital in Birmingham, in central England. He has travelled in many countries in Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Daniels has revealed in his writing that his father was a Communist businessman, while his mother was born in Germany and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee from the Nazi regime. In his commentary, Daniels frequently argues that the so-called "progressive" views prevalent within Western intellectual circles tend to minimize the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and to undermine traditional values, thus contributing to the formation within rich countries of a vast underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexual promiscuity, welfare dependency, and drug abuse. He contends that the middle classes' abandonment of their traditional cultural and behavioural aspirations has, by example, fostered routine incivility and irredeemable ignorance among members of the working class. Occasionally accused of being a misanthrope, Daniels denies the charge and his defenders point to a persistently conservative philosophy in his work that is anti-ideological, sceptical, rational and empiricist.

In 2005 he retired from England to move (with his wife) to France, where he plans to continue writing. His columns frequently appear in The Spectator as well as in City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute.

At a recent reunion of 1974 graduates of Birmingham Medical School, Daniels could not be located and was mistakenly declared to have died, much to the sadness of his classmates. It was with great relief that the rumour of his death, like that of an earlier writer, Mark Twain, was found to have been "greatly exaggerated".^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Quotes

"After all, they are not highly educated, so they have no culture; there is no religion, there is no belief that the country is involved in a transcendental purpose, so there is very little left for them; they live in their own soap opera, actually." On people "at the lower end of the social scale" in Britain.[1]

"I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners." [2]

"Resentment is one of the few emotions that never lets you down, but it's useless. In fact, it's worse than useless, it's harmful, and we all suffer from it at some time in our lives." CBC Ideas podcast [3]

"People who deny responsibility for their own actions use a language that portrays them as passive victims of circumstance."

"I learned early in my life that if people are offered the opportunity of tranquillity, they often reject it and choose torment instead. My own parents chose to live in the most abject conflictual misery and created for themselves a kind of hell on a small domestic scale, as if acting in an unscripted play by Strindberg. . . Though they lived together, they addressed not a single word to one another in my presence during the eighteen years I spent in their house, though we ate at least one meal a day together . . . " Essay "A Taste for Danger" (1998) in "Our Culture, What's Left of It," (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2005.)

[edit] Works

Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America (1986)
Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987)
Zanzibar to Timbuktu (1988)
Sweet Waist of America: Journeys around Guatemala (1990)
The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (published in the U.S. as Utopias Elsewhere) (1991)
Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia (1992)
If Symptoms Persist: Anecdotes from a Doctor (1995)
So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer (1996)
If Symptoms Still Persist (1997)
Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares (1998)
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine (2001)
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001)
Our Culture--What's Left of It (2005)
Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies And The Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)