Theodore Dalrymple explains how Britain went down the drain

Friday, May 13th, 2016

While working as a pyschiatrist in a prison and in a hospital serving the poor, Theodore Dalrymple “saw almost straight away that raw want was not the explanation” for the poor behavior of the poor in Britain:

Blame is reserved for the intellectual class that made all this happen. Not through the indifference of the 1930s, but overindulgence. Trendy 1960s social theories have run amok and caused endless harm to the people they are supposed to be helping, he says. Academics, writers, artists and journalists tore down old values like personal responsibility and civility, replaced by ideas that “society is to blame” and a moral relativism that says that nothing is wrong.

“It has disastrous effects on those worst off,” he says, “those least able to withstand the practical results” of that moral anarchy.

Zero self-control and zero connection between effort and reward did not make people happy, but left them trapped in “cheerless self-pitying hedonism and the brutality of the dependency culture”, he wrote in the book, Life at the Bottom.

Comments

  1. Slovenian Guest says:

    Here is the Derb’s review of it:

    There is an odd conservatism in the common perceptions of life in other lands. I grew up among English people who still thought of France — a rather stuffy and puritanical country in the 1960s — in terms of the “Gay Paree” of seventy years earlier, a place of unbridled license and monocled boulevardiers swilling champagne at the Folies Bergère. In the same way, many Americans carry in their minds an image of England as a polite and civilized land, where impeccably courteous David Niven types sit around at their clubs in antique leather armchairs sipping port, while, at the other end of society, stoic cockneys converse in rhyming slang and cheer each up other with cups of tea in the parlor. In fact today’s England is a rather coarse and violent place, whose crime statistics now surpass the U.S.A.’s in most categories (homicide being the principal exception). The nation’s everyday culture is dominated by the most brutish of proletarian values: politicians like Tony Blair from perfectly sound bourgeois families affect the dropped aitches and glottal stops of the slums, while the old codes of chivalry, patriotism and restraint have been shoved aside in a snarling, clawing assertion of “rights.” American jaws drop when I say, in response to inquiries, how much I enjoy the comparative tranquillity, security and civility of life in the U.S.A. and the exquisite manners of Americans — especially in the South, the best-mannered large region in the English-speaking world.

    The older, tranquil England of the American imagination actually existed not long ago. I am merely middle-aged, but I can recall quiet working-class streets in the midland city of Birmingham, where I spent part of my childhood, that are now bedlams of vice and crime. Birmingham is, as it happens, the city where Theodore Dalrymple works as a hospital doctor, with occasional medical duties at a nearby prison. For some years he has been chronicling English underclass life: in regular columns in the London weekly The Spectator since at least 1993 (the limit of my own personal stock of Spectator back numbers), as a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s quarterly City Journal, and with occasional pieces in other newspapers and periodicals, including this one. The main thrust of Dalrymple’s observations has always been the moral and intellectual poverty of the people he encounters while carrying out his professional rounds. He has observed these phenomena across many years and thousands of instances, and thought deeply about how they originated and what sustains them. In Life at the Bottom Dalrymple has put together 22 of his City Journal articles, written in the late Nineties and early Oughts.

    Dalrymple writes with great clarity, slicing through the common gibberish of the “official” social sciences with the sword of reductionism. The child-rearing philosophy of the underclass is, he tells us, one of “laissez-faire tempered by insensate rage.” The distress that leads to attempted suicide — an everyday occurrence in the lives of Dalrymple’s patients — is “the consequence of not knowing how to live.” (A key insight. In another place he speaks of “the chronic suffering caused by not knowing how to live.”) The poor, he writes, “live in a torment of public and private disorder, which I have trembled to behold every day of the last ten years of my professional life.” Reading, we tremble with him. The misfortunes of a patient result from “a willful chasing after misery.” Root causes? “Since the cause of crime is the decision of criminals to commit it, what goes on in their minds is not irrelevant.”

    Well, what does go on in underclass minds? Not much that is coherent, of course, since the people we are dealing with here have, either by their own will or under the example or intimidation of their peer group, rejected all attempts to educate them. The typical Dalrymple subject is “devoid of either ambition or interests,” his inner life a solipsistic jumble of “emotions … simultaneously intense and shallow.” It is clear, however, that all the cant of our age, all the doctrines of moral and cultural relativism that seized hold of the educated classes in the years after WW2, all those pop-Marxist doctrines that attribute every worldy ill to some form of material deprivation, or to oppression by malign political conspiracies, have seeped down into the dull minds at the bottom of society, turning toxic in the process. Are our personalities formed in response to our physical environment? Why, then, the inanimate world is our master, and we cannot fairly be held responsible for the things we do. “The knife went in,” three different stabbers told Dalrymple, when he pressed them, in the prison, to describe the deed that landed them there. Why should a low-IQ barely-literate youth believe in the doctrine of free will, when, for all he can see, his intellectual superiors have given up on it?

    Dalrymple is particularly good on the squeaky-wheel syndrome that is so characteristic of modern social services. Defy your circumstances; manage to get some scraps of education; win some decent, if low-level employment; stay out of trouble; stay off the dole; maintain some minimal standards of honesty and chastity; and see what happens to you! If you are lucky, the authorities will ignore you; if not, they will actually harass you. Should your less disciplined neighbors make your life a misery, you will get no help from police or social workers. If, on the other hand, you follow your peers into the world of dysfunction and dependency, all the attentions of England’s extravagant welfare state will be lavished on you. You will be given a free apartment furnished with all modern appliances, a regular supply of money, free medical attention, and the doting ministrations of “health visitors,” “case workers,” “counsellors” and so on.

    Americans may find it surprising that most of the people wallowing in this slough of ignorance, illiteracy, promiscuity, bastardy, intoxication, vice, folly, lawlessness and hopelessness are white English people. Much of what is described here is the sort of thing Americans instinctively associate with this country’s own black underclass. There is some satisfaction, I suppose, though of a very melancholy kind, to be drawn from the revelation that sufficiently wrong-headed social policies, persisted in with sufficiently dogged refusal to face simple truths, will visit moral catastrophe on people of any race.

    Not that racial foolishness is altogether absent from Life at the Bottom. Thanks to government policies of staggering idiocy pursued across several decades, England is now both multi-racial and multi-cultural, though there is no trace of evidence that any detectable number of English people ever wanted it to be either. This has, of course, made the country a much worse place to live in. Social workers, teachers, the police, and all other authority figures are thoroughly race-whipped, and know that any action they take against a person of color will bring them under the intense scrutiny of their superiors, not to mention the press and numerous busybody groups charged with maintaining the integrity of the “gorgeous mosaic.”

    Dalrymple illustrates this with the horrifying story of 8-year-old Anna Climbie, tortured to death by her mother, a West African who had come to England for the welfare benefits. The poor child had been admitted to hospital twice in the months before she died, and it was obvious to the doctors and nurses that she was a victim of gross abuse. However, they could not persuade the police or welfare services to act. The child’s condition and the abject terror she exhibited at her mother’s approach were, the authorities believed — or pretended to believe, to keep themselves out of trouble — merely facets of West African culture, on which it would be wrong to pass judgment. Bad ideas again. Since people in other lands live contentedly under social norms wildly different from those of the London suburbs, why then, surely it’s clear that one set of norms is just as good as another, and it would be wrong of us to find fault? We are living in the Age of Bad Ideas.

    I think, though Dalrymple makes less of this, that the hedonism of the postwar middle classes has also been a large factor in the collapse of morality over at the left-hand tail of the bell curve. It is a bad thing, but not an irremediable one, if the daughter of an architect has an illegitimate baby or acquires a minor drug habit. If the daughter of a janitor does these things, she has taken a headlong leap over the precipice into a lifetime of destitution. If any of the people who make social policy in England are aware of this simple fact, they probably regard it as another form of unfairness, to be resolved by lavishing money and attention on the janitor’s daughter. A better remedy would be for the middle classes to behave themselves, and to give a good example to those beneath them, and to stop feeling so all-fired guilty about everything under the sun. That, of course, would be “elitist”: but if there is a lesson to be drawn from Life at the Bottom, it is that a society’s choice is never between having an elite and not having one, it is always between having an elite with a sense of responsibility and a will to provide leadership, and having an elite with neither.

  2. Bruce Charlton says:

    The root of the cause of decline in Britain (which is by now very extreme indeed) is the loss of Christianity which has left us without will or courage, because there is neither meaning nor purpose to our public life. Despite their acutness as diagnosticians and describers, Dalrymple and Derbyshire are both complicit in this apostasy – which is why they both induce hope-less-ness and despair; their only answer is, in effect, to reach for a bottle of good wine and tranquillize ourselves while hoping for a painless death and oblivion beyond (much as do the despised underclasses). Godless right-wingery is a dead, and deadening, end.

  3. Mike says:

    Bruce Charlton said, “The root of the cause of decline in Britain (which is by now very extreme indeed) is the loss of Christianity.”

    Here are some countries around the world that are more Christian than England (with the % of the population who identify as Christian):
    El Salvador (81%)
    Congo (92%)
    Rwanda (93%)
    Haiti (96%)
    East Timor (99%)

    And now the top five least religious countries in the world are:

    1. Estonia
    2. Japan
    3. Denmark
    4. Sweden
    5. Vietnam

    Based on these charts I’d prefer to live in an irreligious country over a religious (read monotheistic) one.

  4. David Foster says:

    Is ‘identifying as Christian’, or ‘attending Church regularly’, really a reliable indicator of religiousness? There are a lot of people who affiliate with a predominant religion for reasons of social approval. My impression is that this was largely the case even more than a century ago among the British upper classes. Evidence pro or con?

  5. David Foster says:

    In his neglected 1950 novel The Age of Longing, Arthur Koestler (himself not a conventionally religious man) takes on the West’s (especially Europe’s) loss of civilizational self-confidence and assigns blame to the loss of religiousness. A senior French intelligence officer explains to the heroine his country’s supineness in the face of impending Soviet invasion:

    “You cannot cure aberrations of the political libido by arguments…Now the source of all political libido is faith, and its object is the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lost Paradise, Utopia, what have you. Therefore each time a god dies there is trouble in History. People feel that they have been cheated by his promises, left with a dud check in their pocket. The last time a god died was on July 14, 1789, the day when the Bastille was stormed. On that day the Holy Trinity was replaced by the three-word slogan which you find written over our town halls and post offices. Europe has not yet recovered from that operation, and all our troubles today are secondary complications. The People–and when I use that word, Mademoiselle, I always refer to people who have no bank accounts–the people have been deprived of their only asset: the knowledge, or the illusion, whichever you like, of having an immortal soul. Their faith is dead, their kingdom is dead, only the longing remains. And this longing, Mademoiselle, can express itself in beautiful or murderous forms, just like the frustrated sex instinct…Only the longing remains–a dumb, inarticulate longing of the instinct, without knowledge of its source and object. So the people, the masses, mill around with that irksome feeling of having an uncashed check in their pockets and whoever tells them ‘Oyez, oyez, the Kingdom is just round the corner, in the second street to the left,’ can do with them what he likes.”

    OTOH, it really isn’t true that belief and sense of meaning is always linked to religiosity in Koestler’s sense of belief in an immortal soul. Indeed, one of the most true-believing characters in Koestler’s own book is a Russian Communist atheist, who gets a deep sense of meaning from his secular belief system.

    I reviewed the book at some length here:

    http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11799.html

  6. Hoyos says:

    Slovenian Guest:

    Second on the South. I currently reside there, and I remember a man with actual skull tattoos saying “yes sir” and “no sir” to an elderly African-American gentleman he was conversing with.

    When the guy with skull tattoos is that polite that is ingrained culture.

  7. Anne says:

    To be fair, he is overextending the behaviour of a benefit-dependent underclass to the whole of the country, which isn’t completely accurate. It’s a growing problem since these people have many more children than the middle classes and the more traditional working classes who actually work, and which are then subsidised by the state.

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