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.
Here is the Derb’s review of it:
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.