differently. Poverty does not explain aggressive, criminal and self-destructive behaviour. In an African slum you will find among the very poor, living in dreadful circumstances, dignity and decency in abundance, which are painfully lacking in an average English suburb, although its inhabitants are much wealthier. An attitude characterised by gratefulness and having obligations towards others has been replaced – with awful consequences – by an awareness of "rights" and a sense of entitlement, without responsibilities. This leads to resentment as the rights become violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general. One of the things that make Islam attractive to young westernised Muslim men is the opportunity it gives them to dominate women. Technocratic or bureaucratic solutions to the problems of mankind produce disasters in cases where the nature of man is the root cause of those problems. It is a myth, when going "cold turkey" from an opiate such as heroin, that the withdrawal symptoms are virtually unbearable; they are in fact hardly worse than flu. Criminality is much more often the cause of drug addiction than its consequence. Sentimentality, which is becoming entrenched in British society, is "the progenitor, the godparent, the midwife of brutality". High culture and refined aesthetic tastes are worth defending, and despite the protestations of non-judgmentalists who say all expression is equal, they are superior to popular culture. The ideology of the Welfare State is used to diminish personal responsibility. Erosion of personal responsibility makes people dependent on institutions and favours the existence of a threatening and vulnerable underclass. Moral relativism can easily be a trick of an egotistical mind to silence the voice of conscience. Multiculturalism and cultural relativism are at odds with common sense. The decline of civilised behaviour – self-restraint, modesty, zeal, humility, irony, detachment – ruins social and personal life. The root cause of our contemporary cultural poverty is intellectual dishonesty. First, the intellectuals (more specifically, left-wing ones) have destroyed the foundation of culture, and second, they refuse to acknowledge it by resorting to the caves of political correctness. Bibliography Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America (1986) Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987) Zanzibar to Timbuktu (1988) Filosofa's Republic (1989) (published under the pen name Thursday Msigwa) Sweet Waist of America: Journeys around Guatemala (1990) The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (1991) (published in the U.S. as Utopias Elsewhere)