Anthony Daniels

Wednesday

12 Dec 2012
Anthony Daniels

Family commitments

Twice in my career, in very remote places, I encountered lunatics who had been chained for many years to the wall or to posts in the ground. The reasons why they were so enchained had been lost in the sands of time, but their keepers were convinced that they were far too dangerous to be released. By now they were certainly mad, but whether they were mad because they had been tied up, or tied up because they had been mad, it was impossible to say. And in one of the institutions — a prison — I found prisoners who had been acquitted or whose release had been ordered by a judge ten years before, but who did not have enough money to pay their gaolers to release them. I could not help but recall these experiences as I read Sarah Wise’s excellent new book, Inconvenient People, about the supposedly therapeutic incarceration during the 19th century of people of doubtful madness in various asylums in Britain.

Saturday

30 Jun 2012
Anthony Daniels

For richer, for poorer

It is an old-established truth, a truism in fact, that money does not buy you happiness — though, as the late Professor Joad pointed out, it does allow you to be miserable in comfort. Yet the great majority of people, knowing this, nevertheless devote their energies to increasing their wealth, which suggests that happiness is not actually their ultimate goal. In fact, most people don’t have an ultimate goal. The authors of this book, father and son, seek to persuade us that we should devote more of our energies to things that are done for their own sake, that are good in themselves, rather than spend our lives on the treadmill of getting and spending, which is ultimately no more satisfying than the work of prisoners who are forced to dig holes only to fill them again.

Saturday

3 Dec 2011
Anthony Daniels

Government health warning

Few men are prepared to die for the right of others to say what they strongly disagree with; and most people’s faith in multiparty democracy is at best a lukewarm recognition that the alternative is much worse. Secretly most men would like their ideas (which they naturally believe to be correct) to rule absolutely and forever. Of this company is James Gilligan.He is a professor of psychiatry at New York University and would like to see the Republican Party in the United States disappear from the face of the earth. His argument for this consummation so devoutly to be wished is as follows: the death rate from homicide and suicide in the United States goes up when there is a Republican president and down when there is a Democratic president.

Saturday

12 Nov 2011
Anthony Daniels

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard

With all the advances of science, we may be no nearer to understanding ourselves than before, says Anthony Daniels — but we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility outrightSome years ago I had a patient who believed that his neighbours, unskilled workers like himself, had developed an electronic thought-scanner whose antennae they could, and did, direct at him in order to know his thoughts as and when he had them. He heard them laughing and jeering at the banalities with which, inevitably, his mind was filled most of the time. Needless to say, he found this intrusive and oppressive, and it made him murderously angry.As life follows art, science follows delusion. It seems to be the ambition of neuroscientists to reach a level of understanding in which such a thought-scanner might be possible, and many claim that we are on the verge of understanding ourselves so completely that we shall no longer be mysteries to ourselves.

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard

Saturday

10 Sep 2011
Anthony Daniels

Prince of war

Why shouldn’t one of Liberia’s most infamous psychopaths become its president?Human rights are universal and indivisible, existing as they do in an unexplored metaphysical sphere in which the European Court of Human Rights plays the role of Christopher Columbus. So it is a wonderful thing to see the court’s discoveries accepted, applied and even extended in a country in which its writ does not yet run, namely Liberia, in West Africa. There, a man called Prince Y Johnson is running for president in the forthcoming elections. When I met him, a little more than 20 years ago, he was Field Marshal Brigadier-General Prince Y Johnson, but just as he awarded himself these ranks, so he has now divested himself of them. In those days it was advisable, or so I was told, to visit the Field Marshal in the morning, before he had drunk too much beer and smoked too much dope: for in the event of intoxication he was inclined to take up his AK47 and go round shooting people more or less at random.

Prince of war

Saturday

28 May 2011

Saturday

13 Nov 2010
Anthony Daniels

Fear of the unseen

There was a time when detailed case histories, including direct quotations from patients’ accounts of their own experiences, formed a significant part of the medical literature.There was a time when detailed case histories, including direct quotations from patients’ accounts of their own experiences, formed a significant part of the medical literature. French doctors of the 19th century were particularly adept at writing such case histories; the lucidity of their prose, as of their thought, was exemplary. Indeed, French medical prose of the 19th century was often as good as that of Flaubert.But the extended case history has gone out of medical fashion, as being too anecdotal and therefore unscientific. Now that we have so many diagnostic blood tests and imaging techniques, as well as powerful therapeutic procedures, the mere phenomenology of illness does not interest us very much; indeed it seems almost a waste of valuable time to elicit it.

Wednesday

28 Oct 2009
Anthony Daniels

Don’t believe in miracles

Irrationality, without which life cannot be lived, is profoundly irritating, especially in others. It is at its worst when those who are guilty of it try to sue those who, like Simon Singh, try to expose it. Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association after he wrote a book debunking several alternative ‘therapies’. A few weeks ago, thankfully, he was given leave to appeal but the affair nearly spelled victory for irrationality. Irrationality is also very bad when displayed by someone close to you. My late mother suddenly suffered from a non-life-threatening but disfiguring skin condition of her scalp that naturally enough caused her great distress. Old ladies in their eighties, worried about their appearance, are not high on the National Health Service’s list of priorities; and this, combined with a severe shortage of dermatologists in this country, meant that she could not be seen on the NHS for 18 months.

Wednesday

23 Sep 2009
Anthony Daniels

Cries and whispers | 23 September 2009

The habit of dividing the past into centuries or decades might be historiographically suspect, but by now it seems unavoidable. And it is possible that, because we now expect decades to have flavours of their own, they end up actually having them. We change our behaviour when the year ends in 0. Can there be anyone who has never used ‘The Twenties,’ ‘The Thirties,’ ‘The Fifties’ or ‘The Sixties’ as historical shorthand, expecting his interlocutor to know exactly what he means by it? By comparison with the Sixties, the flavour of the Seventies is indistinct and muted. Everyone is agreed that, for better or worse, the Sixties now represent the breakdown of social restraints on personal behaviour; but what do the Seventies represent in popular imagination? This is the question that Francis Wheen sets out to answer in his breezy and readable, but superficial, account of these years.

Saturday

21 Mar 2009
Anthony Daniels

Whistling in the dark | 21 March 2009

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, by Michela WrongOnce, when I was crossing Mali by bus, it took three days to go 100 yards. This was not because of the condition of the road, but because three sets of officials — the army, the police and the douaniers — insisted upon extracting their pound of flesh from the passengers (except for me), and would not let them go until they had duly paid up.The passengers took it all with a good-humoured resignation that both surprised and moved me. Perhaps their resignation derived from an understanding that, had the boot been upon the other foot, they would have behaved in the same way. Such a degree of self-understanding is rare in the world.Perhaps this also explains why, when dictatorships and presidencies for life are overthrown in Africa, the successor regimes, nominally more democratic, seem often to be not much better, at least in point of corruption.

Whistling in the dark | 21 March 2009

Saturday

31 May 2008
Anthony Daniels

Nothing ever new out of Africa

When I was a young doctor working in what was still Rhodesia, I read a book by a nun who was also a political economist. She demonstrated that land reform was not only a requirement of social justice but would lead to greatly increased agricultural output, since African peasant farmers cultivated their land more intensively than commercial farmers. Her argument was positively Euclidean in its precision and I accepted it in its entirety. The only thing that she omitted to mention, and that did not occur to me at the time, was that the land reform would have to be carried out by men; and not just men in general, but by particular men, with all their passions, weaknesses and prejudices. Political geometry is non-Euclidean.

Wednesday

12 Mar 2008
Anthony Daniels

Running for shelter

It is questionable whether psychiatry as a whole does, or has done throughout its history, more good than harm. Certainly there are some patients who benefit from its ministrations; but there are many others who have been harmed by the wrongful administration of noxious drugs or other therapies. A less tangible, but nevertheless potentially serious, harm is that it persuades people with the difficulties in living that are inseparable from human existence that they are ill, and therefore disguises from them that the best remedy, if one there be, lies in their own hands. Indeed, psychiatry seems to have persuaded whole societies that all forms of mental distress are illnesses, for which there is a technical medical solution.

Saturday

24 Nov 2007
Anthony Daniels

No simple solutions

The epidemic of Aids among heterosexuals of which we were once warned by public health officials is now almost as forgotten as the global freezing of which the environmentalists in the 1970s also warned us. Only in Africa has Aids spread through the general population, reducing the already low life expectancies of several countries still further. The African exception has long puzzled doctors. Why should Africa be the exception? Various theories have been put forward, from general malnutrition to the prevalence of other sexually transmitted diseases that facilitate the entry of the virus into the body and the polio immunisation experiments conducted in the 1950s in the Congo. According to the author of this book, the main explanation lies elsewhere, in the pattern of African sexual relations.

Saturday

15 Sep 2007
Anthony Daniels

Taking courage from the Dutch

Globalisation is not as new as we sometimes like to think. Within a mere five years of the publication in 1798 of Jenner’s tract about vaccination, Dr Francisco Xavier de Balmis set sail to the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) with a view to introducing vaccination there. Having done so successfully, he sailed on to the Philippines, Macau and Canton with the same aim in view. Vaccination arrived about the same time in Java by way of Mauritius. No modern consumer product has spread more rapidly. Vaccination, however, was late in reaching Japan. This was not because there was no need for it: on the contrary, it has been estimated that about a fifth of Japanese children died of smallpox before the age of five.

Saturday

7 Jul 2007
Anthony Daniels

The commonsense approach

Medical advance has been startling in the past half-century. To give only one example, more or less at random: if the techniques of resuscitation and trauma surgery that were available in 1960 were still in use today, our homicide rate would be three to five times higher than it is (and it is two or three times higher than it was in 1960 nonetheless).Atul Gawande is a surgeon at one of the world’s greatest surgical centres, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. As such, he is committed to medicine’s noblest ideal, the dedication of science to the cure of disease. It seems almost unfair that he should also be a gifted writer with an ability to tell medical anecdotes whose dénouement the reader awaits with suspense.

Saturday

12 May 2007
Anthony Daniels

Kicking a man when he’s down

The desire to wage war as if it were keyhole surgery is, after a certain fashion, a laudable one. It indicates that a government can no longer afford to treat its own population, if not that of the enemy, as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier killed is ten, a hundred, votes lost. But the new-found tenderness towards the lives of soldiers has two inconveniences. The first is that keyhole-surgery war is a chimera, and what is impossible cannot be desirable. The second is that the decline of what one might call the cannon-fodder spirit makes the prosecution of long-drawn out wars and military occupations very difficult. Keyhole surgery is limited not only in space but in time.Donald Rumsfeld, the now disgraced former Secretary of Defense of the United States, was as credulous a believer in the miraculous powers of technology as any devotee of the healing cult of a saint’s relics.

Saturday

3 Feb 2007
Anthony Daniels

Virtually a kangaroo court

When Slobodan Milosevic died, more than four years into his trial for war crimes, newspapers around the world said that he had cheated justice. It would have been more accurate to say that he had cheated injustice. Had he lived, the judges would have been faced with an unpleasant dilemma: either to find him not guilty, thus casting a lurid light upon the past activities of their employers, the powers that had brought the tribunal into being in the first place, or to find him guilty and to sentence him to a long prison term on evidence that would not have justified a fine for illegal parking. As John Laughland shows in this short, lucid and well-written book, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague was little more than a kangaroo court, though without the very real advantages of that kind of legal establishment, namely speed and economy.

Saturday

4 Nov 2006
Anthony Daniels

The case for the defence | 4 November 2006

Hubris is followed by nemesis, and the idea that the English-speaking peoples (that is, those who speak English as their native language) exert an economic, political, moral and cultural hegemony in the world strikes me as distinctly hubristic. Whether it is true, or if true desirable, is another question. Andrew Roberts’ history is rather old-fashioned, and none the worse for that, in that it is mainly a narrative of political and military events: a tale of kings (or presidents and prime ministers) and wars. Social, intellectual, cultural and economic history are included only insofar as they impact upon high politics and the balance of power. It is Roberts’ thesis that the English-speaking peoples are united, despite occasional differences and betrayals, by a unique devotion to freedom and a unique scrupulosity in the exercise of power.

Thursday

31 Aug 2006
Anthony Daniels

Seeds of wisdom and dissent

George Orwell was deeply hostile to vegetarianism. Vegetarians were of ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’. And before the days of South Indian restaurants in London, one had only to go to a vegetarian eating establishment to see that he had a point. It wasn’t only the beards that wilted (to quote Orwell again): it seemed that nut rissoles had an existentially wilting effect on those who subsisted on them. Of course, one might have mistaken cause for effect. Tristram Stuart’s very, indeed excessively, long and somewhat shapeless history of vegetarian thought in Europe does not entirely dispel this impression.

Thursday

27 Jul 2006
Anthony Daniels

Sorting out the selves

There are few pleasures more reassuring than that of disagreement with some of the contents of a book that is closely argued, extremely well-written and clearly the work of a highly civilised, cultivated and decent man. Such a pleasure is reassuring because, in a hate-filled world, it reminds us that identity of opinion, which makes for dullness, is not necessary for the establishment of high regard.In this short and bracing book, Professor Sen inquires into the question of human identity, and the practical consequences of the various answers that may be given to it. The question is of the greatest possible urgency in the modern world for obvious reasons, and Professor Sen’s view is informed by, if not the outright consequence of, an unforgettable childhood experience: during the violence that preceded partition in Bengal, he witnessed a fatally injured Muslim seek refuge in his parents’ garden.

Thursday

25 May 2006
Anthony Daniels

Working into the night

Listing page content hereThe influence of an intellectual is not necessarily proportional to his merit. The late Edward Said was a prime example of this dissociation between influence and merit. His most famous book, Orientalism, has had a profound and lasting effect on writing about the Middle East, yet it is badly written, worse argued and uses evidence so selectively that it is little short of mendacious. Said, however, was a literary critic and accomplished amateur pianist as well as a political polemicist, and in this post- humous work he considers what he calls ‘Late Style’. Unfortunately, it has long been fashionable in some intellectual circles to discuss concepts to which no very clear definition can be given, the better to discourse about them with an air of profundity, and I am afraid that late style is one such concept.

Saturday

25 Feb 2006
Anthony Daniels

Reports from discomfort zones

South African doctors have a very good reputation. The excellence of their medical training is matched by the breadth of their clinical experience. For example, a young South African doctor in surgical training in Britain often has more practical experience of bullet wounds than the boss who is teaching him; or such, at any rate, would have been the case until quite recently, when inner-city surgeons started to treat the victims of drug and gang wars. Jonathan Kaplan is a South African surgeon who has eschewed the conventional career that was clearly within his reach for that of a volunteer surgeon to the war zones of the world. He puts his life in danger to save the injured and maimed, who are often very poor into the bargain (the poor are easier to hit than the rich).

Saturday

11 Feb 2006
Anthony Daniels

Murdering for diamonds

It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from the offer for sale of this ostentatiously expensive luxury (if I hadn’t already known it by other experiences) that the country was in the hands of a rapacious and vulgar elite. The civil war broke out soon afterwards. It seemed that the participants were determined to prove that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line,’ No worse, there is none’, could have no application in human affairs. The spectacle of mass amputation of legs, hands and arms, often carried out by drugged, psychotic children, briefly caught the horrified attention of the world.

Saturday

7 Jan 2006
Anthony Daniels

Jaw-jaw about civil war

Bernard-Henri Lévy is possessed of a large fortune, great intelligence and film-star good looks (if now a little ageing). He therefore had the wherewithal to go through life like a hot knife through butter, but yet has chosen many times to expose himself to great danger in the continuing wars of torrid zones. Why? In this book, he reprints his reportage from five lengthy, indeed seemingly eternal, civil conflicts — Angola, Burundi, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Sudan — and then appends philosophical reflections as footnotes to what he wrote. These footnotes form two thirds of the book. The author suffers from one of the besetting sins of French intellectuals, a tendency to torrential, undisciplined abstraction, presumably in the hope that profundity will eventually emerge of its own accord.

Saturday

31 Dec 2005
Anthony Daniels

Onward and downward

Man is a constitutionally ungrateful creature, taking all progress immediately for granted and making the most of whatever complaints still come to hand. However privileged he is, either in relation to people who have lived in previous ages, or to contemporaries living elsewhere in the world or even in his own country, a man can always find reason to believe that he is the most unfortunate of creatures, and that all is for the worst in this, the worst of all possible worlds. In this invigorating, clever and often very funny satire, Ross Clark mocks the pieties of our age that have replaced the pieties of our forefathers. Among them, of course, is that our industrialised society is uniquely horrible, polluting the earth to destruction, responsible for all the diseases that afflict us (albeit after an unprecedently long life) and depriving life itself of meaning.

Saturday

5 Nov 2005
Anthony Daniels

Colossally bad taste

Everyone loves a good dictator, at least at a distance. Dictators exert the same horror and fascination that snakes have for some people; Latin American literature, for example, would be very much the poorer without them. It seems that we cannot ever know too much about their daily lives, for their arbitrary power over life and death seems to give a wider significance to the most trivial detail of their existence. Peter York, whom the blurb describes as ‘Britain’s original style guru’, has had the clever idea of making a picture book of dictators’ homes, 16 of them in all. The premise of the book is that by their décor shall ye know them. The pictures largely speak for themselves, but are accompanied by the style guru’s commentary, written in an arch, mid-Atlantic, facetious joke-a-minute style that often passes for wit, and that implies that the author has achieved final truth where aesthetic judgment is concerned.

Saturday

14 May 2005
Anthony Daniels

One way of doing it

In his essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, De Quincey derides poisoning as an inferior method of bringing about the death of others. It seemed to him both sneaky and unmanly. However, the age that succeeded him was a golden age of poisoners, many of whose crimes are remembered to this day. De Quincey was wrong, or at least in a minority: everyone, except of course the victim, loves a good poisoning. Arsenic and antimony were the elements whose compounds were most frequently employed by Victorian murderers and murderesses, but the author also considers those of mercury, lead and thallium. Contrary to the title, he deals not only with murder but with occupational and environmental diseases caused by the ignorant or careless handling and disposal of such compounds.

Saturday

15 Jan 2005
Anthony Daniels

Outcasts of the world

The leprosarium of the Pacific islands in which I once worked was situated next to the Mental Wing, as the psychiatric hospital was known. The lepers derived considerable pleasure and hilarity from watching the antics of the lun- atics through the fence that separated them. This taught me an unedifying principle of human psychology, that the existence of people upon whom one can look down is a great solace in misfortune, no matter how grievous. Generally speaking, however, sufferers from leprosy have had no one upon whom to look down. They have been outcasts, cruelly separated from the rest of humanity and cut off even from their own families. Their disease, rarely and only slowly fatal, is horribly disfiguring when untreated; quite unreasonably, it has had derogatory moral connotations attached to it, and has been seen as a punishment for personal shortcoming rather than as a natural phenomenon.

Saturday

3 Jul 2004
Anthony Daniels

Fantasies under the river gums

Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las Vegas), so silliness can sometimes transcend itself and attain sociological significance. Germaine Greer has written a transcendently silly pamphlet about a proposed future for her homeland, Australia. She wants it to become what she calls an Aboriginal Republic, though the exact meaning of this term is unclear even to her, which is not altogether surprising, since Aborigines lived in stateless societies before the arrival of the Europeans. However, her mind is so completely stocked with clichés that she often uses words that have connotation but no denotation, as a kind of shorthand. For example, she suggests that Australia should become a hunter-gatherer society, presumably because hunter-gatherers are assumed by the modern right-thinker to be environmentally friendly and at one with the beneficent vibrations of the cosmos.

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