THE RAREST OF THINGS...A SILLY DALRYMPLE:

Escape from barbarity: Theodore Dalrymple says he is turning his back on the ugliness and emptiness of Britain and moving to France, which for all its faults he considers a more civilised country than his own (Theodore Dalrymple, 1/03/04, The Spectator)

Is France in better shape than Britain? Its countryside is emptier, which for someone like me, who has had enough of crowds in general and people in particular to last him a lifetime, is good enough. I know it is a high-tax economy — bureaucratic and sclerotic in many respects — but at least the people seem to get something in return for their taxes. France’s infrastructure, public transport and healthcare are far better than Britain’s. It would be nice if we in Britain got something — anything — tolerably decent in return for our taxes, but with the increasing moral and intellectual corruption of our public services that I have seen over the years, and the unimpeded advance of wilful administrative incompetence into every nook and cranny of public life, I do not think that there is any prospect of that.

France has social problems that are nearly as great as ours. Although one looks in vain in the centre of Paris or other cities for the brutal and brutalised faces that one sees everywhere in Britain, and that are now the defining national characteristic of the British, France has a substantial underclass too. Whether by accident or design, France has opted for the South African solution to the problem: geographical isolation. It confines its underclass in satellite cities around major conurbations that can be sealed off by a single tank and by halting a few trains. If push ever came to shove, and there was a social explosion, I have little doubt that the Declaration of the Rights of Man would have little influence on the French official response. As the South Africans used to say before they discovered morality, ‘They will only foul their own nest.’ And certainly such an explosion is not impossible: I recently visited the housing estates that ring Paris, and the alienation and hatred I found there exceeded by far anything I have ever encountered in this country. It was extremely frightening.

But, for all that, France still seems to me a more civilised country than Britain. It is less dominated by mass distraction (known here as popular culture, but in Nineteen Eighty-Four as prolefeed) than Britain is. France’s mass distraction is amateurishly produced in comparison with the cynical slickness of its Anglo–American equivalent, and this really is a case of the worse the better. There are no tabloid newspapers in France to compare with ours, and while the word ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro carries a burden of ideological disapproval and even subtle insult (it means, among other things, savage economic liberalism), there is nothing to compare with the vulgar ignorant abuse of the French to be found in our red-top newspapers, produced for the masses by people who ought to (and in fact do) know better. French newspaper readership is the lowest in the Western world, and while I suppose it is possible to discuss whether this is a good or a bad thing, I personally find it a relief.

Oh well, even Ted Williams had an o-fer every once in awhile.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 6, 2004 2:31 PM