A visit to the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently by Dr.
Anthony Daniels, who writes under the name of Theodore Dalrymple
for the (London) Spectator, the New Criterion and
City Journal, among many other publications, painted a
desperately gloomy picture of life among the British underclass —
which he had spent many years as a prison doctor observing at close
quarters. Only his wit and unfailing good humor — though it is
often of the gallows kind — kept his rapt audience from sinking
into the darkest despair. But there is or ought to be hope in the
fact that, as the doctor always stresses, the social pathologies he
observes are invariably the result of individual choices and the
resulting cultural breakdown. In theory, if he and others who can
see what he sees can also persuade enough people of what is wrong
with those choices and that culture, both can be corrected.
In theory.
Alas, the power of ideology is such that the work of persuasion
appears to make little headway. Consider the following quotation
from an article in the Times of London by Penny
Wark commenting on one of the most prominent of the cultural
failings mentioned above, the failure of schools to educate
properly.
Overwhelmingly, say Professor Robert Cassen and Dr
Geeta Kingdon in their report Tackling Low Educational
Achievement, it is white boys who fail in Britain. Remove the
middle classes from the equation, look just at children from
deprived areas, and more than three-quarters of low achievers are
white, British and male. They are visible at the age of 3, Cassen
says. “The child from a professional middle-class home hears 1,500
different words a day. A working-class child hears 500. They don’t
recover because we don’t have an equalising education
system.â€
In other words, a social problem exists because something that has
never existed still doesn’t exist — and it occurs to no one what a
lunatic thing this is to say. This is the power of utopian thinking
which, drug like, teaches us to be happy in our misery since the
only thing that could alleviate it is an impossible state of
perfection.
The tyranny of egalitarian thinking similarly holds that if
everyone cannot be well-educated, then no one should be
well-educated. It reminds me of those who think — or at least act
as if they think — that if everyone can’t be rich, then no one
should be rich. There has never been a time when the good things of
the world have been equally distributed. If such an insane ideology
had prevailed in centuries past, the good things of the world would
never have come into existence to make the utopians think they
should be equally distributed. Now, the remoteness of the
prospect of their being equally distributed serves as an excuse for
those who say that they should not exist. What kind of moral and
intellectual poverty does it take to believe this?
Another but related cultural failure is pointed up in another
quotation from Miss Wark’s report, this time from one of the
working class youths she interviewed whom she calls “Dom”:
“There’s no respect for the community, just respect
between friends….There’s no discipline from when you’re born. I
reckon it’s about the no-smacking rule. How else are you supposed
to discipline them? My mam couldn’t discipline me and there was no
one else so I thought I was top dog.”
Like Dr. Daniels’s grim narrative, this is both terribly sad and
terribly funny. The only bourgeois values which have percolated
down to the underclass are such fashionable beliefs as this: that
the physical chastisement of children amounts to child abuse. So
children are not physically chastised, so they are not disciplined
— for as Dom rightly observes, among those with a thin culture and
few disciplinary resources, “how else are you supposed to
discipline them?” — so they easily slip into a life of ignorance,
idleness and petty crime, perpetuating the squalid conditions under
which they themselves were raised.
How did this view of discipline become a bourgeois value? It
never was before the 1960s. But along with all the other evils that
decade brought us was the notion of “violence” as morally
undifferentiated. The ideology that then superseded the old honor
culture and that holds sway still told people that there was no
moral difference between the parent or teacher who strikes a child
and the child who strikes a parent or teacher — just as there is
no difference between a burglar who shoots a householder and a
householder who shoots a burglar. This is now the law of the land
in Britain. The same idea lies behind the fashionable and
progressive view of the war in Iraq, namely that the British and
American effort to remove a tyrant and a mass murderer is morally
no better than — and among the most progressive who hold up signs
depicting the President and Vice President of the United States as
“The Real Terrorists,” it is actually worse than — the tyrant’s
murders. You have to work hard to rid yourself of common sense in
order to believe such stuff.
