THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Judge not that ye be not judgmental, for in making a judgment you commit the worst, indeed the only, possible sin in an age of tolerance. This, perhaps, is the modern equivalent of the paradox of the Cretan liar: that we judge negatively only those who judge negatively.

It follows from moral relativism that we live in the best of all possible worlds, since every custom is equally good and each way of life equally 'valid'. There is no Archimeclean moral point from which to condemn anything; only celebration of difference is permissible. Self-congratulation is the greatest, the only, virtue.

Let us therefore praise the child-rearing practices of my patient last week who had half-starved her baby and beaten it severely while under the influence of crack cocaine. The baby having been, as she put it, 'took off me', she went straight to the pills and swallowed a handful.

I asked as delicately as I could, with apology in my intonation, about the father of the baby. 'No,' she said firmly.

I was a little puzzled.

'No,' I repeated. 'What do you mean, no?'

'He don't have nothing to do with it.'

What is this 'it' of which she spoke? Whatever 'it' referred to changed rapidly.

'It was a one-night stand.' She paused. 'I've known him for ten years, it just happened, until then he'd been a kind of friend. He's a registered psychopath.'

I couldn't help but recall a patient in the prison who had introduced himself to me by saying, 'I'm one of Her Majesty's psychopaths.' You might forgive a man a lot for uttering a phrase like that — if, of course, you could make a judgment about him in the first place.

I passed on to the next patient. She, too, had elected to have a child by a psychopath, but in her case it was not a one-night stand but a 2,920-night, or eightyear, stand. She was now trying to disembarrass herself of him, but he returned to her like a dog to its vomit. He had kidnapped their child the week before in order to force her to contact him, knowing that she would be too terrified to call the police. My next patient was a young man who had taken an overdose while under arrest. He hadn't fancied a night in the cells, and so took the pills he always had handy for the purpose. The police had obligingly de-arrested him — to use a technical term — once he had arrived in hospital.

'What did you take?' I asked.

`Triazepam.'

'Don't you mean diazepam?'

'I call it triazepam because I usually take two and stick one up my arse.'

I asked him why he took it in the first place.

'It gives me a mind for invention,' he said. 'I write songs.'

'You're an artist, then?'

'Yes, kind of. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of the best shoplifters in C—, but I don't go robbing old ladies or nothing.'

I noticed that he had a long scar on his neck, and asked him how he came by it.

'I got drunk one night and chopped myself.'

'What with?'

'A machete.'

'What happened?'

'I just went to sleep and woke up covered in blood.'