Cherie Blair, et. al, v. The People

Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal is one of my all-time favorite writers. For those not familiar with work, Dalrymple is an English psychiatrist who spent his entire professional career working in the National Health Service seeing to the mental mental health needs of the British underclass. He makes a compelling argument in his best known book, Life at the Bottom, that the source of squalor and misery among Britain’s poor is a deeply engrained sense of victimhood combined with a highly developed ethic of relativism. As always, while those at the top, the “mandarins” he calls them, make a good living off of the behavioral problems of poor, English society as a whole continues to coarsen and the conditions of the poor themselves spiral downward. Life at the bottom means living with the burden of bad ideas conceived at the top.

The attached article has a hall of mirrors quality to it. Cherie Blair, Esq. is representing two Muslim girls who are suing for the right to wear headcoverings and other traditional Muslim dress to school. He points that Mrs. Blair has confused her categories. Since the long robes and head coverings are traditionally Muslim, Blair assumes that British society, by denying them the opportunity to wear those clothes to school, is engaging in cultural hegemony and oppression. The reality, Dalrymple says, is the opposite: the clothes themselves are symbols and tools of misogyny and oppression which Muslim men use to try to keep Muslim women barefoot, married at 12 and pregnant. As bad as those conditions are, the offerings of British society are equally bad: non-Muslims enjoy great freedom but increasingly convert freedom to a kind of license that is making life in many British cities intolerable. The trick, he says, is to hold freedom and discipline in balance. It is a trick the Muslim world has yet to learn and that the West,including Cherie Blair, is quickly forgetting.