Ghost of a flea: The Ludovico Method

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March 10, 2006

The Ludovico Method

"I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting."
- William Shakespeare

Theodore Dalrymple has another go at the ideology of self-expression by way of discussing Anthony Burgess and A Clockwork Orange. Dalrymple has little enthusiasm for kids these days but then he gets twitchy around people with tattoos so grain of salt and all that. My favourite passage could just as easily describe an encounter with any university student assigned a grade lower than a "B" (or in Harvard's case, an "A").

For example, adults grow afraid of the young and defer to them, something that has certainly come to pass in Britain, where adults now routinely look away as youngsters commit antisocial acts in public, for fear of being knifed if they do otherwise, and mothers anxiously and deferentially ask their petulant five-year-old children what they would like to eat, in the hope of averting tantrums. The result is that adolescents and young men take any refusal of a request as l�se-majest�, a challenge to the integrity of their ego. When I refused to prescribe medicine that young men wanted but that I thought they did not need, they would sometimes answer in aggrieved disbelief, �No? What do you mean, no?� It was not a familiar concept.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at March 10, 2006 08:14 AM

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