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Global warning

Theodore Dalrymple

Wednesday, 3rd October 2007

When we were students, a professor of public health once told us that the death rate declined whenever or wherever doctors went on strike. This was an even stronger argument, he implied, than the purely ethical one against doctors resorting to such action, or inaction. No profession should lightly expose its uselessness to the public gaze.

Crossing Belgium recently, at a time when it had had no government for several weeks, I could not help but notice that it looked very much the same as when it did have a government. Obviously the crisis would have to be resolved sooner or later because otherwise people would realise the redundancy of the political class. According to one Belgian I met, the only real function of the latter is to vote a budget so that the bureaucrats got paid. For without a budget, how could their salaries and their numbers ever increase?

Of course, politicians are not the only flies in the ointment of modern society. There is the small problem of the people, too: they are constantly doing the most terrible things to one another and nobody seems able to stop them, not that anyone tries very hard.

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