“I do not believe,” Theodore Dalrymple wrote a few years ago in
an essay on manners for the liberal British journal New
Statesman, “that the human heart, undisciplined by rules and
conventions, is good: on the contrary, the default setting, to use
a computer analogy, is to savagery and selfishness.”
Dalrymple’s sense of original sin comes in part from experience
— or more exactly, from a pliant capacity to learn from
experience. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the
Underclass (Ivan R. Dee, 263 pages, $27.50; click
here to order) is a collection of 22 essays about his
experience over the past decade as a physician and psychiatrist
treating the underclass in a Birmingham slum. At the hospital and
nearby prison where he works, he estimates he has treated about ten
thousand patients, each of them with stories involving at least
five other lowlifes, so that his “sampling” of about 50,000 of the
British underclass is not, as the social scientists say, “merely
anecdotal.”
What kind of people make up this huge segment (about 30 percent,
according to Dalrymple) of the British population? They include
drug addicts, alcoholics, the chronically unemployed, the
habitually violent, the insouciantly larcenous. They sport tattoos,
shaved heads, malignant dispositions, foul manners. About 70
percent of them are illegitimate, and hardly any of them are much
into family values.
They are given to overdoses of their drugs, often as a ruse to
manipulate a welfare system that allocates its considerable
resources (more than a fifth of the national income) in larger
chunks to those more deeply degraded. They have no financial
resources, no family support, no skills or training, no serious
schooling, no mental accomplishments, no curiosity, no sense of the
past or the future. The brightest of them can scarcely think ahead
more than twenty minutes, and what little intelligence they bother
to cultivate is directed towards second-guessing the bureaucrats
who control their destinies.
They are not “poor” in the sense understood by Charles Dickens
or Henry Mayhew. Mayhew’s chronicles of the down-and-out in
Victorian London were about hungry people still connected to some
human dignity. Dalrymple’s “Grim Reality” (the title he gives to
the larger of the two sections in his collection, essays that first
appeared in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal) is
about people stripped of all dignity by a nanny state, the
brainchild of liberal intellectuals eager “to flaunt the
magnanimity of their intentions.”
Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, who took
his medical degree in 1975 and first made his reputation as a
writer in the 1980s with a series of books relating his experiences
in the backwaters of Africa, Latin America, and eastern Europe
before the collapse of communism.
His choice of a pseudonym for what appears to be a second stage
in his writing career is motivated partly by a desire to keep some
professional distance between his medical and literary careers (and
partly by his fondness for the name Dalrymple, which he tells an
interviewer “sounds grumpy”). In Life at the Bottom,
Dalrymple intermittently remarks that no deprivation encountered in
his travels abroad, working as a physician among the desperately
poor, comes close to the degradation he witnesses daily in his
treatment of the well-fed British underclass.
Following his description of “Grim Reality,” Dalrymple turns to
the “Grimmer Theory” he blames for the degradation. Roughly since
the late 1950s, bad ideas which had been percolating for decades in
the minds of liberal intellectuals (determinism, sexual license,
relativism, egalitarianism — all impervious to fact or refutation)
bubbled out of the academy into the larger culture, so that
career-promoting academic hypotheses became ideas widely
accepted.
At the center of these cheesy ideas is a rejection of the
efficacy of human consciousness. What goes on in the minds of
individual human beings is denied importance “in favor of vast
impersonal forces that statistical regularities supposedly reveal
and that supposedly determine people’s behavior.” The irony is not
lost on Dalrymple that the intellectuals attach great importance to
the screwy notions cooked up in their own minds.
A familiar consequence of such notions is the pose of
nonjudgmentalism, which Dalrymple calls “a prophylactic against
learning from experience.” A related consequence is the feel-good
fad of multiculturalism, whereby there is only difference, not bad
or good.
At variance with human experience (and with the testimony of
great literature), the ideas of liberal intellectuals have fostered
“a lie at the heart of modern society.” If we ascribe our conduct
to pressures from without (as Dalrymple’s patients invariably do),
“we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding
ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good
about behaving badly.”
For nearly a half century now, liberal “solutions” to “social
problems” have been inspired by falsehoods about the human
condition. Family life can be troubled? Destroy the family with
sexual liberation. Education can be tedious and discouraging?
Eliminate the discipline of learning and the possibility of
failure. Crime is getting out of hand? Deny all responsibility in
the criminal and any legitimacy in the justice system.
Dalrymple is at his best when he describes the psychological
denial of liberals confronted with the consequences of their ideas.
It occurs in three predictable steps. First, deny the facts (“Are
you making this up?” he was asked by an elderly journalist mildly
curious about Dalrymple’s essays). Second, deny the moral
significance of the facts (after all, violence and vulgarity have
always been a large part of British life). Third, deny that
anything can be done without returning to the bad old days of
unhappy marriages, rote learning in the schools, and unhealthy
inhibitions.
The “natural man” of the liberal imagination has emerged in the
British underclass, free of internal or external constraint, his
manners now seeping upward into the middle classes. There’s one
snag, however, over which the liberal intellectual stares vacantly:
natural man has turned out to be a charmless psychopath.
