Theodore Dalrymple is a prolific author and world traveler. He is also a British M.D. (psychiatrist) who has practiced medicine in Rhodesia, Central America, and the Gilbert Islands and has worked at a Birmingham prison and hospital for the last 13 years. A graceful stylist who writes with exceptional clarity and verve, he explores difficult and often dispiriting subjects. Invariably insightful and instructive, his interests embrace politics, social pathologies, public health, literature, intellectuals, the arts, and mass culture. He has also written of his travels in Africa, Central America, and the last remaining communist countries (at the time of his writing: Albania, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam).

His new book “Our Culture, What’s Left of It” (Ivan R. Dee, 325 pages, $27.50) is divided into “arts and letters” and “society and politics” and contains essays about Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Turgenev and Marx, Stefan Zweig, Mary Cassatt, the British caricaturist James Gilroy (1756-1825), the Marquis de Custine, and Princess Diana, as well as some unusually vicious English serial killers. The topics include the debasement of popular culture, the pessimistic utopias of our times, the urban decay of Havana, corruption and bureaucracy (with special reference to Italy and England), the diet of criminals, the legalization of drugs, Muslim immigrants in England and France, and the colonial past in Zimbabwe.

These essays are held together by a well-founded concern with the spiritual, moral, and cultural decline of the Western world. The volume begins with the proposition that “the fragility of civilization is one of the great lessons of the 20th century” and that many of the disasters of the 20th century could be characterized as a revolt against civilization itself: the Cultural Revolution in China … the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia … in Rwanda, scores of thousands of ordinary people were transformed into pitiless murderers by demagogic appeals over the radio.

While such mass murders had a political-ideological inspiration associated with the promulgation of certain values and beliefs, Mr. Dalrymple sees the ascendancy of moral-ethical relativism as the source of the social and cultural ills in the West. Such relativism finds expression in public policy, education, politics, the arts, and, not least, popular or mass culture. Western intellectuals contribute to these trends: “to break a taboo, or to transgress are terms of the highest praise in the vocabulary of modern critics, irrespective of what has been transgressed or what taboo broken.” The commendable embrace of tolerance often ends up in a wishy-washy relativism: “where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.”

The moral and aesthetic relativism is most strikingly manifest in popular culture (Mr. Dalrymple calls it “the hug-and-confess culture”), in Britain as well as in this country. It is a culture he superbly describes as permeated by a “shallow emotional incontinence” – all too familiar to anybody exposed to American confessional television shows, with their revelatory interviews and autobiographies at once self-aggrandizing and mawkish. Clearly, a shallow individualism has been one of the prominent byproducts of modernity.

The social-critical posture has its problems too: “There is a permanent temptation, particularly for intellectuals, to suppose that one’s virtue is

proportional to one’s hatred of vice, and that one’s hatred of vice is in turn measured by one’s vehemence of denunciation.” That is to say, “demands for tolerance and understanding grow ever more shrill and imperious.” This is the essence of political correctness.

It may be asked how the vehement denunciation of vice is compatible with the moral relativism depicted. I think the answer is that even the most relativistic, postmodern intellectual entertains notions of right and wrong; his or her moral relativism is selective; it is acceptable to be judgmental about certain phenomena but not others.

Mr. Dalrymple’s uncommon grasp of social pathologies has been enriched by his daily contact with imprisoned criminals. It is of special interest for the American reader how strikingly British social pathologies resemble the American ones and how closely the British underclass (largely white) resembles its American (largely non-white) counterpart. Mr. Dalrymple holds the British welfare state responsible for many of these problems, especially the decay of the family.

The conception of human nature here entertained will not win the approval of liberal-optimists; Mr. Dalrymple does not “believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.” He suggests that “there has been an unholy alliance between those on the left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and the libertarians on the right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions.” His sensibility is inimitably conveyed in his comparison of Marx and Turgenev: “Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, moral strengths and weaknesses. Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche … as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men.”

Theodore Dalrymple has succeeded (once more) in publishing a book that is both thoughtful and absorbing. “Our Culture, What’s Left of It” memorably illuminates the darker sides of our world and human nature.

Mr. Hollander’s most recent book is “Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Orgins and Impact at Home and Abroad” (Ivan R. Dee).