The New Vichy Syndrome Quotes

“Life is conceived as a vast supermarket through which one moves with one’s shopping trolley, fetching down ways of life from shelves marked “Existential choices.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“A healthy modern society must know how to remain the same as well as change, to conserve as well as to reform. Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“Miserabilism leads to a mixture of indifference towards the past and hatred of it. This hatred is visible in the architecture and urban planning of Europe since the war. [...] This mania for destruction, often carried out in lesser degrees by the strategic placement of a terrible building that the eye cannot escape (the Tour Montparnasse in Paris is a particularly fine example of the genre), is a symptom of an impotent rage that Europe has been left behind, is not longer in the vanguard of anything. It is also a kind of magical thinking: that by adopting the externals of modernity somehow modernity itself will be achieved and mastered.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“Like all other virtues, patriotism when carried to excess becomes a vice; but that does not mean that patriotism is incompatible with respect for others.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“the European Union is like a giant pension fund for defunct politicians, who either cannot get elected in their own countries or are tired of the struggle to do so. It is a way for politicians to remain important and powerful, at the center of a web of patronage, after their defeat or loss of willingness to expose themselves to the rigors of the electoral process.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“The Germans had an identity and a past that they badly needed to forget. From having been the most rabid and ruthless nationalists in the history of the world, they wanted henceforth to blend into a background, into a kind of macédoine de nations, a salad of nations. Only thus could they prove that they had really changed, that they no longer believed themselves to be the only world-historical nation, that they were no longer the purveyors of the jack-boot to the face of other nations (to change the metaphor slightly).”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“It has become all too typical of western youth, to mistake their personal angst for a universal political cause.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“Just as Leninists knew what was good for the proletariat, thereby conferring on themselves a gratifyingly providential role, so the environmentalists now know what is good for humanity and likewise confer on themselves a providential role. The beauty of preservation of the environment as a cause is that it is so large that it would justify almost any ends used to achieve it, for a livable environment is the sine qua non of everything else. You can demonstrate and riot for the good of humanity to your heart’s content; your questions about what life is for are answered.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“For good or ill, God is dead in Europe and I do not see much chance of revival except in the wake of catastrophe. Not quite everything has been lost of the religious attitude, however; individuals still think of themselves as a being of unique importance, but without the countervailing humility of considering themselves to have a duty towards the author of their being, a being inconceivably larger than themselves. Far from inducing a more modest self-conception in man, the loss of religious belief has inflamed his self-importance enormously.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“No doubt the decline of religion accounts for the rise in self-obsession and self-importance that is everywhere observable. One of the great advantages of the Christian philosophy was that it managed to reconcile the unique importance of each man with humility. Every man was important in the eyes of God, and in that sense was at home in the universe because the universe was expressly created for beings such as he.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“It is obvious that for human beings to be free, they need to live in a rule-bound society. There is an analogy here with language. There are many modern educationists who believe that teaching children the standard grammar of their language, which they may not learn at home or in their social environment, is harmful, not only to their self-esteem because it suggests to them that something that they are already doing, naturally as it were, is not perfect, but to their creativity. In other words, such teaching limits their freedom by putting them in a linguistic straitjacket. It is obvious, however, that mastery of the standard language (whether or not they choose to exercise it) widens the scope of their freedom very considerably, and makes available to them far more than it precludes.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

“The French state insists that once someone becomes French by citizenship, his ancestors become, metaphorically speaking, the Gauls, and he is therefore not to be distinguished from any other Frenchman, in statistics or anywhere else. It would take considerable conceptional subtlety as well as empirical knowledge to disentangle the truth and lies of all this.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism