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Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
Here is a searing account-probably the best yet published-of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives. Drawn from the pages of the cutting-edge political and cultural quarterly City Journal, Dalrymple's book draws upon scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes that are by turns hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and all too revealing-sometimes all at once. And Dalrymple writes in prose that transcends journalism and achieves the quality of literature.
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Theodore Dalrymple
78 books569 followersAnthony Malcolm Daniels, who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
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July 11, 2021
Dalrymple worked in an inner city 'slum' hospital and prisons. His choice, so he obviously liked the patients and writes of the trials and tribulations that keep them living in such conditions, often contentedly because they know no better and don't know want to know either. He blames the socialist state and the modern no-blame, no-shame, no-judgement culture for this.
He is discussing his prison patients, on asking them what they'd done, they often reply, oh just a normal burglary, just a normal assault, and the wives refer to what their husbands' do as 'work'. He asks how has crime come to be seen in this way by its perpetrators? Is it, he suggests, a weakening of the inhibition against criminality?
There are many other 'pressure groups' each with their own politics of the individual. They want to silence people. Just as in the USSR and its allies, and in China at the present , not a word should be spoken, printed or even hinted at that they do not approve of. Their tools are not execution and prison, but deplatforming, firing, Twitter campaigns and death threats - the cancel culture that took over the Woke movement and now are identical.
A lot of the book makes sense to me. I grew up in a middle-class area but went to an IQ tested school that drew 90% of its pupils from working class areas. As a teenager, I had friends from sink estates, I saw how it was. But of course all my friends and schoolmates had escaped the fate that Dalrymple sees as the norm for this 'underclass'.
A lot of the book though, I really, really don't agree with.But, to quote Noa Baum,
He is discussing his prison patients, on asking them what they'd done, they often reply, oh just a normal burglary, just a normal assault, and the wives refer to what their husbands' do as 'work'. He asks how has crime come to be seen in this way by its perpetrators? Is it, he suggests, a weakening of the inhibition against criminality?
Academics have used two closely linked arguments to establish the statistical and moral normality of crime and the consequent illegitimacy of the criminal justice system’s sanctions.And that is what seems to be the root of the soul-destroying BLM riots as well, of course, of terrorism. The BLM protestors got taken over and used by Marxist anarchists who seek to destroy institutions, organisations, statues even, without ever wanting to sit and discuss how to replace racism and corruption, no they, in true anarchist form, just want to destroy.
First, they claim, we are all criminal anyway; and when everyone is guilty, everyone is innocent.
Their second argument, Marxist in inspiration, is that the law has no moral content, being merely the expression of the power of certain interest groups – of the rich against the poor, for example, or the capitalist against the worker. Since the law is an expression of raw power, there is no essential moral distinction between criminal and noncriminal behaviour. It is simply a question of whose foot the boot is on.
There are many other 'pressure groups' each with their own politics of the individual. They want to silence people. Just as in the USSR and its allies, and in China at the present , not a word should be spoken, printed or even hinted at that they do not approve of. Their tools are not execution and prison, but deplatforming, firing, Twitter campaigns and death threats - the cancel culture that took over the Woke movement and now are identical.
A lot of the book makes sense to me. I grew up in a middle-class area but went to an IQ tested school that drew 90% of its pupils from working class areas. As a teenager, I had friends from sink estates, I saw how it was. But of course all my friends and schoolmates had escaped the fate that Dalrymple sees as the norm for this 'underclass'.
A lot of the book though, I really, really don't agree with.But, to quote Noa Baum,
Being able to imagine and understand their point of view does not mean I have to adopt it. It does, however open the possibility that, eventually, adding another's point of view may challenge my opinions or perhaps reveal misconceptions, but I don't have to change or replace it in the moment. Listening to another's story is not a declaration of defeat.”
April 10, 2012
THE BRITISH UNDERCLASS
Dalrymple's great subject is the underclass – he's worked with them for years as a doctor in an inner city area and in prisons, he knows what he's talking about, this is a guy I respect, and he's thrusting before our horrified faces the terrible facts of the matter. He sounds like a right wing git half of the time but maybe I'm turning into a right wing git because mostly I think he's got it dead right but sometimes he's just like a slightly more intellectual Jeremy Clarkson who can write well and maybe his books are nothing more than the posh version of Is It Just Me or is Everything Shit
Which is something that makes my flesh crawl - I hate all the jeremiads which pour forth about modern life from every source these days, and all these complainers think we'll wag our bonces and ruefully say "ah how true", oh how they denigrate and carp, the economy, the ecology, the music the kids listen to, the reality shows, the celeb culture, the poxy politicians, the schools, the police, everything according to all these foisters of their own neurotic unhappiness has been on a one way downhill roll into shitness since 1956 when yes of course all was sweetness and pop songs had tunes and we were good, ah, remember when we thought we were good, and there was none of this political correctness and there were hardly any immigrants – oops, what a giveaway! Did I say that? No, you moaning modern-life-is-rubbish demiwolves, you didn't say it but you meant it.
Try being anything other than a middle class white guy in 1956, then report back.
Oh wait – the moaning demiwolves are all middle class white guys.
On the other hand there are lots of things wrong with Britain in 2012. One of them is that there's a swathe of the population who are simply redundant, not required anymore. The underclass. All they do is make their own lives a living hell and break into your house if you leave the smallest window open. And if you run into a gaggle of them on the way home from the pub they just might take it into their heads to kick you to death. In 1956 all these people worked, there was almost no unemployment, imagine that, but now Chinese and Indian people do all the backbreaking factory work in China and India making all our ipods and stuff & so the 20% of the population who can only do factory work [euphemism alert ] have nothing to do except drugs and each other. TD describes the calamitous moral decay of this class of people (you don't need me to recap, Jeremy Kyle and Jerry Springer have done this already)
He identifies the underclass as something which has been growing since the 60s, is mostly white and is aided but not caused by the Welfare State. Lack of employment is one thing but the miasma of drug usage, domestic violence, child abuse and all types of crime except those which require brains needs further interrogation. On p 12 he is saying that they are like children who have been encouraged to behave badly by misguided liberal parents. This is a big theme which runs through all of TD's thinking. Liberals took over the way society runs itself and have wrecked it with their ludicrous cuddly notions of being nice to people. They have given the feckless (the sturdy beggars of yesteryear) a loaded gun – now the feckless have realised they are themselves passive victims. TD tells us that when apprehended, all the criminals of the underclass will portray themselves as "Putty in the hands of fate" or "marionettes of happenstance". They never stab someone intentionally, no, they tell you "my head went. The knife went in."
Another burglar demanded to know from me why he repeatedly broke into houses and stole VCRs. He asked the question aggressively as if "the system" had so far let him down in not supplying him with the answer, as if it were my duty as a doctor to provide him with the buried psychological secret that, once revealed, would in and of itself lead him unfailingly on the path of virtue. Until then he would continue to break into houses and the blame would be mine.
Hark - I hear an old song from West side Story... do you hear it too?
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!
Gee, Officer Krupke, we're very upset;
We never had the love that every child oughta get.
We ain't no delinquents,
We're misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!
There is good!
There is good, there is good,
There is untapped good!
Like inside, the worst of us is good!
TD points the finger at (please, anyone in the caring professions should look away now!)
The legions of helpers and carers, social workers and therapists, whose incomes and careers depend crucially on the supposed incapacity of large numbers of people to fend for themselves and behave responsibly. …their entire therapeutic worldview of the patient as the passive, helpless victim of illness legitimises the very behavious from which they are there to redeem him from. … ...the idea has become entrenched that if one does not know or understand the unconscious motives for one's acts, one is not truly responsible for them.
Officer Krupke, you're really a square;
This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care!
It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He's psychologic'ly disturbed!
We're disturbed, we're disturbed,
We're the most disturbed,
Like we're psychologic'ly disturbed.
(Spoken) In the opinion of this court, this child is depraved on account he ain't had a normal home.
(Spoken) Hey, I'm depraved on account I'm deprived.
My father is a bastard,
My ma's an S.O.B.
My grandpa's always plastered,
My grandma pushes tea.
My sister wears a mustache,
My brother wears a dress.
Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!
Also the spectre of the swinging 60s haunts the pages :
If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass.
(note – great American book detailing all the chaos : Random Family)
However - there should be a word for someone who wrecks their own arguments by continually overstating them to the point where they sound mad, and TD does this every so often, alas. I won't embarrass him by quoting some of the dafter parts. And also, in the end, while I admit of the awfulness whereof he speaks and the eloquence which makes these essays not only bearable but compelling, he offers absolutely no answers. He's a great diagnostician (is that a word?), and I kind of suspect that if he proposed any solutions they might involve abolishing parliament, appointing a National Salvation Council and setting up Re-education Centres for every social worker. Giving teachers electric cattle prods would probably be part of it too.
I recommend TD if like me you're comfortable with despair and you're quite happy to read and weep.
Dalrymple's great subject is the underclass – he's worked with them for years as a doctor in an inner city area and in prisons, he knows what he's talking about, this is a guy I respect, and he's thrusting before our horrified faces the terrible facts of the matter. He sounds like a right wing git half of the time but maybe I'm turning into a right wing git because mostly I think he's got it dead right but sometimes he's just like a slightly more intellectual Jeremy Clarkson who can write well and maybe his books are nothing more than the posh version of Is It Just Me or is Everything Shit
Which is something that makes my flesh crawl - I hate all the jeremiads which pour forth about modern life from every source these days, and all these complainers think we'll wag our bonces and ruefully say "ah how true", oh how they denigrate and carp, the economy, the ecology, the music the kids listen to, the reality shows, the celeb culture, the poxy politicians, the schools, the police, everything according to all these foisters of their own neurotic unhappiness has been on a one way downhill roll into shitness since 1956 when yes of course all was sweetness and pop songs had tunes and we were good, ah, remember when we thought we were good, and there was none of this political correctness and there were hardly any immigrants – oops, what a giveaway! Did I say that? No, you moaning modern-life-is-rubbish demiwolves, you didn't say it but you meant it.
Try being anything other than a middle class white guy in 1956, then report back.
Oh wait – the moaning demiwolves are all middle class white guys.
On the other hand there are lots of things wrong with Britain in 2012. One of them is that there's a swathe of the population who are simply redundant, not required anymore. The underclass. All they do is make their own lives a living hell and break into your house if you leave the smallest window open. And if you run into a gaggle of them on the way home from the pub they just might take it into their heads to kick you to death. In 1956 all these people worked, there was almost no unemployment, imagine that, but now Chinese and Indian people do all the backbreaking factory work in China and India making all our ipods and stuff & so the 20% of the population who can only do factory work [euphemism alert ] have nothing to do except drugs and each other. TD describes the calamitous moral decay of this class of people (you don't need me to recap, Jeremy Kyle and Jerry Springer have done this already)
He identifies the underclass as something which has been growing since the 60s, is mostly white and is aided but not caused by the Welfare State. Lack of employment is one thing but the miasma of drug usage, domestic violence, child abuse and all types of crime except those which require brains needs further interrogation. On p 12 he is saying that they are like children who have been encouraged to behave badly by misguided liberal parents. This is a big theme which runs through all of TD's thinking. Liberals took over the way society runs itself and have wrecked it with their ludicrous cuddly notions of being nice to people. They have given the feckless (the sturdy beggars of yesteryear) a loaded gun – now the feckless have realised they are themselves passive victims. TD tells us that when apprehended, all the criminals of the underclass will portray themselves as "Putty in the hands of fate" or "marionettes of happenstance". They never stab someone intentionally, no, they tell you "my head went. The knife went in."
Another burglar demanded to know from me why he repeatedly broke into houses and stole VCRs. He asked the question aggressively as if "the system" had so far let him down in not supplying him with the answer, as if it were my duty as a doctor to provide him with the buried psychological secret that, once revealed, would in and of itself lead him unfailingly on the path of virtue. Until then he would continue to break into houses and the blame would be mine.
Hark - I hear an old song from West side Story... do you hear it too?
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!
Gee, Officer Krupke, we're very upset;
We never had the love that every child oughta get.
We ain't no delinquents,
We're misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!
There is good!
There is good, there is good,
There is untapped good!
Like inside, the worst of us is good!
TD points the finger at (please, anyone in the caring professions should look away now!)
The legions of helpers and carers, social workers and therapists, whose incomes and careers depend crucially on the supposed incapacity of large numbers of people to fend for themselves and behave responsibly. …their entire therapeutic worldview of the patient as the passive, helpless victim of illness legitimises the very behavious from which they are there to redeem him from. … ...the idea has become entrenched that if one does not know or understand the unconscious motives for one's acts, one is not truly responsible for them.
Officer Krupke, you're really a square;
This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care!
It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He's psychologic'ly disturbed!
We're disturbed, we're disturbed,
We're the most disturbed,
Like we're psychologic'ly disturbed.
(Spoken) In the opinion of this court, this child is depraved on account he ain't had a normal home.
(Spoken) Hey, I'm depraved on account I'm deprived.
My father is a bastard,
My ma's an S.O.B.
My grandpa's always plastered,
My grandma pushes tea.
My sister wears a mustache,
My brother wears a dress.
Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!
Also the spectre of the swinging 60s haunts the pages :
If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass.
(note – great American book detailing all the chaos : Random Family)
However - there should be a word for someone who wrecks their own arguments by continually overstating them to the point where they sound mad, and TD does this every so often, alas. I won't embarrass him by quoting some of the dafter parts. And also, in the end, while I admit of the awfulness whereof he speaks and the eloquence which makes these essays not only bearable but compelling, he offers absolutely no answers. He's a great diagnostician (is that a word?), and I kind of suspect that if he proposed any solutions they might involve abolishing parliament, appointing a National Salvation Council and setting up Re-education Centres for every social worker. Giving teachers electric cattle prods would probably be part of it too.
I recommend TD if like me you're comfortable with despair and you're quite happy to read and weep.
November 14, 2019
Blames the poor for their poverty.
A taste of it here: https://www.city-journal.org/html/wha...
There's a (white) underclass in England. As it was 100 years ago, described in The People of the Abyss by Jack London, the underclass is people "the work of the world does not need."
Unlike in 1905, England's underclass doesn't slowly die of malnutrition, exposure, and overwork in poor houses.
England still has welfare.
To our current author, it's /because/ of welfare that the lives of the underclass are meaningless.
Not so much.
Lives weren't better in 1905 London, slow starvation. The absence of welfare in the U.S. does not infuse with purpose the lives of homeless veterans.
Rather it's that the work of the world does not need them that makes lives futile. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, William Julius Wilson
Work has been moved to lowest-wage, lowest-environmental-protection, countries. Mom and Pop businesses can't compete with multinationals. Work no longer pays the rent. Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, James Bloodworth. The New Poverty, Stephen Armstrong.
The world is organized for the greatest good for the greatest wealth.
Ending welfare won't fix it.
(Gifts /only/ to the poor, "earn $1 more and we take back your home and medicine," keep the poor, poor.)
To undermine the working class is an old ploy by the powerful.
Remember too, the biggest beneficiaries of the welfare state are not the poor. It's the middle class and higher, who get most from the governments--in pensions, insurance, home-mortgage deductions, subsidized higher education, employment in government-subsidized industries. Corporate welfare is no aberration in the system: it /is/ the system. (Tony Judt makes some of these points in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.)
For a clearer-eyed view of the problems of urban poverty and the sorts of actions needed, see Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism, Steven M. Gillon. Different country and race only: same issues.
See Trevor's review of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution by James Ferguson for why work is no longer sufficient to base distribution of subsistence on: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .
The U.S. pattern: The Surplus American: How the 1% Is Making Us Redundant, Charles Derber
(Elites have attacked the poor before: goodreads.com/review/show/887422551)
A taste of it here: https://www.city-journal.org/html/wha...
There's a (white) underclass in England. As it was 100 years ago, described in The People of the Abyss by Jack London, the underclass is people "the work of the world does not need."
Unlike in 1905, England's underclass doesn't slowly die of malnutrition, exposure, and overwork in poor houses.
England still has welfare.
To our current author, it's /because/ of welfare that the lives of the underclass are meaningless.
Not so much.
Lives weren't better in 1905 London, slow starvation. The absence of welfare in the U.S. does not infuse with purpose the lives of homeless veterans.
Rather it's that the work of the world does not need them that makes lives futile. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, William Julius Wilson
Work has been moved to lowest-wage, lowest-environmental-protection, countries. Mom and Pop businesses can't compete with multinationals. Work no longer pays the rent. Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, James Bloodworth. The New Poverty, Stephen Armstrong.
The world is organized for the greatest good for the greatest wealth.
Ending welfare won't fix it.
(Gifts /only/ to the poor, "earn $1 more and we take back your home and medicine," keep the poor, poor.)
To undermine the working class is an old ploy by the powerful.
Roman victories were pouring slaves into Italy; this led to the loss of the dignity of labor. The small farmer was forced off the land, usurped by large slave-worked estates.
The impoverished farmers, unable to compete with slaves, flocked into Rome which developed a large unruly population of poor people on what we would call "welfare."
--Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Chronology of the World, p. 82
Remember too, the biggest beneficiaries of the welfare state are not the poor. It's the middle class and higher, who get most from the governments--in pensions, insurance, home-mortgage deductions, subsidized higher education, employment in government-subsidized industries. Corporate welfare is no aberration in the system: it /is/ the system. (Tony Judt makes some of these points in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.)
For a clearer-eyed view of the problems of urban poverty and the sorts of actions needed, see Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism, Steven M. Gillon. Different country and race only: same issues.
See Trevor's review of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution by James Ferguson for why work is no longer sufficient to base distribution of subsistence on: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .
The U.S. pattern: The Surplus American: How the 1% Is Making Us Redundant, Charles Derber
(Elites have attacked the poor before: goodreads.com/review/show/887422551)
March 10, 2018
I loved this book so much it's hard to know where to begin.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician and writer specializing social pathology in Britain (everything he writes about in Britain also applies to the U.S. in spades, BTW), brilliantly describes the rising numbers and overwhelmingly ubiquitous of nature societal ills and how and they've become so prevalent since the 1960s.
If you've ever looked around and thought, Gosh, why are so many more people on welfare, addicted to drugs, illiterate, born into families without two parents and generally resigned to a life of government dependent-misery and victimhood these days?
Dr. D has the answers in this book -- he carefully provides case after case after painstakingly descriptive case of exactly how the lower classes in crime-ridden slums think, how their worldviews developed and why they stay in nearly fatal cycles of abuse, poverty and misery, which they pass on to future generations, creating a problem no one seems to know how to address.
Darlymple places blame squarely where it belongs -- in the hallowed exalted halls of academia and government, where abstract social theories prevail but are untested, really in fact, rejected, in the lives of the liberal well-meaners who espouse them.
Despite living in the most technologically and medically advanced period in human history, the ever-growing numbers of people who continue to live in slummy government-subsidized housing, are cared for in government-run medical care and educated in government-run schools continue to grow. These problems were created to solve problems and help the lives of the destitute but somehow have instead created even more monolithic quandaries that no one knows how to unravel now.
The solutions to these problems may be obvious to some, but how bad it has to be before someone actually does something is anyone's guesss. It's worth noting that this book was published in 2001, and most essays were written in the 1990s -- as is evident in the sections that cover spousal/domestic abuse. In the pre-O.J. Simpson era, authorities in some places and times were much more lax in prosecuting domestic battery. In the U.S., the laws changed so that victims will have charges pressed on their behalf by the police -- and I hope it is that way in the U.K. at this point too.
It was also pre-9/11 and before technology changed the lives of all classes even more than what could have been foreseen at the time. However, the central issues have remained the same and grown worse in more than 20 years: liberal well-meaning social programs put in place to help people have disastrously backfired and have created a social-political Frankenstein no one could have seen coming and have no way to rein in.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician and writer specializing social pathology in Britain (everything he writes about in Britain also applies to the U.S. in spades, BTW), brilliantly describes the rising numbers and overwhelmingly ubiquitous of nature societal ills and how and they've become so prevalent since the 1960s.
If you've ever looked around and thought, Gosh, why are so many more people on welfare, addicted to drugs, illiterate, born into families without two parents and generally resigned to a life of government dependent-misery and victimhood these days?
Dr. D has the answers in this book -- he carefully provides case after case after painstakingly descriptive case of exactly how the lower classes in crime-ridden slums think, how their worldviews developed and why they stay in nearly fatal cycles of abuse, poverty and misery, which they pass on to future generations, creating a problem no one seems to know how to address.
Darlymple places blame squarely where it belongs -- in the hallowed exalted halls of academia and government, where abstract social theories prevail but are untested, really in fact, rejected, in the lives of the liberal well-meaners who espouse them.
Despite living in the most technologically and medically advanced period in human history, the ever-growing numbers of people who continue to live in slummy government-subsidized housing, are cared for in government-run medical care and educated in government-run schools continue to grow. These problems were created to solve problems and help the lives of the destitute but somehow have instead created even more monolithic quandaries that no one knows how to unravel now.
The solutions to these problems may be obvious to some, but how bad it has to be before someone actually does something is anyone's guesss. It's worth noting that this book was published in 2001, and most essays were written in the 1990s -- as is evident in the sections that cover spousal/domestic abuse. In the pre-O.J. Simpson era, authorities in some places and times were much more lax in prosecuting domestic battery. In the U.S., the laws changed so that victims will have charges pressed on their behalf by the police -- and I hope it is that way in the U.K. at this point too.
It was also pre-9/11 and before technology changed the lives of all classes even more than what could have been foreseen at the time. However, the central issues have remained the same and grown worse in more than 20 years: liberal well-meaning social programs put in place to help people have disastrously backfired and have created a social-political Frankenstein no one could have seen coming and have no way to rein in.
August 17, 2017
"If the doctor has a duty to relieve the suffering of his patients, he must have some idea where that suffering comes from, and this involves the retention of judgment, including moral judgment.And if, as far as he can tell in good faith, the misery of his patients derives from the way they live, he has a duty to tell them so—which often involves a more or less explicit condemnation of their way of life as completely incompatible with a satisfying existence. By avoiding the issue, the doctor is not being kind to his patients; he is being cowardly. Moreover, by refusing to place the onus on the patients to improve their lot, he is likely to mislead them into supposing that he has some purely technical or pharmacological answer to their problems, thus helping to perpetuate them."- Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom
Theodore Dalrymple, a retired British psychiatrist, who has spent years working with the underclass is a very keen observer of human nature, as is evidenced by this book. His dealings with thousands of these people at close quarters gave him much of the fodder for his thesis which is, I’m sure that some will disagree, that a lot of poverty is caused by dysfunctional values, values that those in power exploit and make worse by creating a culture of victims. Most of these stories and anecdotes are from Dalrymple’s time working in British slums and prisons.
This was a very heavy read and I’m still thinking about it weeks after I read it. There are things discussed that seem so foreign to me because I’ve never had to deal with them, and it’s upsetting that so many do. I learned interesting points around education, literature, the violence in the British culture, the housing, and how often people in need aren’t helped enough because they aren’t tragic enough. It was eye-opening and there is a lot of pain in this book, and so much raises questions.
Also, it’s important to know that several of the essays in this book were written in the 90s, so people’s values have changed since then. I obviously didn’t agree with everything Dalrymple stated in the book, and I haven’t lived in the UK for a long time, so there are things I can’t speak to or challenge, even though I really want to.
I was surprised when Dalrymple alluded that systemic racism isn’t a thing, but his other points about how we should treat people on a case by case situation, not by their race, was well-taken. Also interesting was how he has worked in African and Latin American countries where he talks about the poverty there but says that the Western underclass’s mental, cultural, emotional and spiritual poverty is the worst he has ever seen, something backed up by the doctors from Asia who start working at his hospital:
"By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidized apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries."
So much of this book is due to the fact that Dalrymple is tired of people blaming the system and not taking their own actions into consideration. There is a lot of controversial stuff, that’s for sure. But as far as critical thinkers goes, Dalrymple is one of the best I’ve come across recently.
I liked his thoughts on the architectural changes in England following the turn of the 20th century when Britain was entering modernity:
"The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them to be the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it. Hence, among many other crimes, they tore down the elegant Victorian wrought-iron tracery of my city’s main railway station, with its splendid arched roof over the platforms and tracks, and built instead a brutalist construction of steel and soon-discoloured concrete to a plan that proved no more practical or functional than the old."
One of the points that spoke to me the most was perhaps this:
"Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgement, that nonjudgmentalism is at its best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness? How can people learn from experience unless they are told that they can and should change?"
This book will definitely make you think.
Theodore Dalrymple, a retired British psychiatrist, who has spent years working with the underclass is a very keen observer of human nature, as is evidenced by this book. His dealings with thousands of these people at close quarters gave him much of the fodder for his thesis which is, I’m sure that some will disagree, that a lot of poverty is caused by dysfunctional values, values that those in power exploit and make worse by creating a culture of victims. Most of these stories and anecdotes are from Dalrymple’s time working in British slums and prisons.
This was a very heavy read and I’m still thinking about it weeks after I read it. There are things discussed that seem so foreign to me because I’ve never had to deal with them, and it’s upsetting that so many do. I learned interesting points around education, literature, the violence in the British culture, the housing, and how often people in need aren’t helped enough because they aren’t tragic enough. It was eye-opening and there is a lot of pain in this book, and so much raises questions.
Also, it’s important to know that several of the essays in this book were written in the 90s, so people’s values have changed since then. I obviously didn’t agree with everything Dalrymple stated in the book, and I haven’t lived in the UK for a long time, so there are things I can’t speak to or challenge, even though I really want to.
I was surprised when Dalrymple alluded that systemic racism isn’t a thing, but his other points about how we should treat people on a case by case situation, not by their race, was well-taken. Also interesting was how he has worked in African and Latin American countries where he talks about the poverty there but says that the Western underclass’s mental, cultural, emotional and spiritual poverty is the worst he has ever seen, something backed up by the doctors from Asia who start working at his hospital:
"By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidized apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries."
So much of this book is due to the fact that Dalrymple is tired of people blaming the system and not taking their own actions into consideration. There is a lot of controversial stuff, that’s for sure. But as far as critical thinkers goes, Dalrymple is one of the best I’ve come across recently.
I liked his thoughts on the architectural changes in England following the turn of the 20th century when Britain was entering modernity:
"The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them to be the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it. Hence, among many other crimes, they tore down the elegant Victorian wrought-iron tracery of my city’s main railway station, with its splendid arched roof over the platforms and tracks, and built instead a brutalist construction of steel and soon-discoloured concrete to a plan that proved no more practical or functional than the old."
One of the points that spoke to me the most was perhaps this:
"Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgement, that nonjudgmentalism is at its best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness? How can people learn from experience unless they are told that they can and should change?"
This book will definitely make you think.
December 31, 2023
Extremely readable and devastatingly sad. The consequences of modern thinking spelled out in minute detail. It reminds us that love might look quite a bit different than we assume in our therapeutic culture.
July 2, 2015
You see. I’ve had a Dalrymple experience and it was like this. My doctor has his rooms in a Dalrymple part of town. Everybody who goes in looks like they’ve either just come out of a stretch, or they’ve just been sentenced to one…or might even on the run from one. The older women clearly all have sons whom they might even be visiting that very afternoon in the slammer. I’m the only one, I deduce, who has never set foot in gaol. Oh. There is that time I was put in gaol in Slovakia, but I’m not counting that because I wuz innocent. Whereas these people are clearly all guilty. Of something.
So a few visits ago I’m sitting, waiting and Jad comes in and sits down next to me. He lopes in, bum half out of jeans and – is that a strangely placed piece of metal…
I don’t know Jad. He tells us all he’s Jad as he rather pathetically attempts to wave his hand at us. His wrist is broken. As he explains ‘This guy on the street outside, he calls Lola a slag. I had to defend her onnah.’
Proffered this information I steal a glance at Lola, sitting the other side of him.
rest here:
https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
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Dalrymple on Wikileaks. He is so cool-headed. Of course he is right.
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon1...
The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say.
It's a totalitarian paradise.
But isn't Assange right too: here he is talking about what Wikileaks is all about and interalia, forces us to remember the idealism with which we all start out and now I'm talking about Rupert Murdoch:
IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”
His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
Totalitarian or democratic imperative????? Or is it that these two monoliths, totalitarianism and democracy aren't so very different after all?
January 23, 2010
I probably wouldn’t have like this book if I had read it in California. I wasn’t exactly a bleeding-heart liberal, but I acted outraged when Bill Clinton reformed the welfare system. Only a heartless conservative would be against providing subsistence to the weak and the vulnerable. I had enough compassion in me, like any other yuppie, not to want to see those poor single moms thrown out in the cold. I couldn’t believe people had fallen for Ronald Reagan’s myth of Cadillac-driving welfare queens.
Moving to England, however, opened my eyes to the wonders of the welfare state. One of my first memories in London is from visiting my cousin in one of those ghastly council towers. I remember a pool of urine on the elevator floor. Hallways were littered with trash and beer cans. Loud music and kids screaming. The smell of piss and puke and ganja. The tower was inhabited by immigrants and the British underclass. They hated each other, but had one thing in common: milking the system. They were all on dole. This was at the height of the economic boom. There was plenty of work available. Those who worked did it for cash and hid it from the authorities. The small town in southwest London where I work is known for its population of teenage moms. While in other countries the cause of teenage pregnancy is too-stupid-not-to-get-knocked-up, England has a different breed of teenage moms: girls who get knocked up intentionally, so that they can get out of school, get free housing, and get beer money. The more babies, the more beer money. On occasions I have seen a young girl having children, each with different racial features. Multiculturalism at its best.
Dalrymple is a psychiatrist who worked for many years in prisons and inner-city hospitals. This book is a collection of essays from his experience. Most of them are just telling what he had seen. Some of the essays offer his analysis of the situation. His main point is that the well-intentioned, middle and upper class liberals have created a permanent underclass with their policies. They have the intellectuals on their side to provide lofty moral justifications for their policies. These intellectuals, who are mostly middle and upper-class and are insulated from crime and poverty and the realities of the underclass and how it lives on, are smug with their sense of goodness and moral superiority and don’t see the effect of the policies that they’re promoting. They have a distorted, often too rosy, picture of human nature and can’t see what might happen when personal responsibility is no longer required of the population. There are a lot of compelling and strong arguments in this book.
Moving to England, however, opened my eyes to the wonders of the welfare state. One of my first memories in London is from visiting my cousin in one of those ghastly council towers. I remember a pool of urine on the elevator floor. Hallways were littered with trash and beer cans. Loud music and kids screaming. The smell of piss and puke and ganja. The tower was inhabited by immigrants and the British underclass. They hated each other, but had one thing in common: milking the system. They were all on dole. This was at the height of the economic boom. There was plenty of work available. Those who worked did it for cash and hid it from the authorities. The small town in southwest London where I work is known for its population of teenage moms. While in other countries the cause of teenage pregnancy is too-stupid-not-to-get-knocked-up, England has a different breed of teenage moms: girls who get knocked up intentionally, so that they can get out of school, get free housing, and get beer money. The more babies, the more beer money. On occasions I have seen a young girl having children, each with different racial features. Multiculturalism at its best.
Dalrymple is a psychiatrist who worked for many years in prisons and inner-city hospitals. This book is a collection of essays from his experience. Most of them are just telling what he had seen. Some of the essays offer his analysis of the situation. His main point is that the well-intentioned, middle and upper class liberals have created a permanent underclass with their policies. They have the intellectuals on their side to provide lofty moral justifications for their policies. These intellectuals, who are mostly middle and upper-class and are insulated from crime and poverty and the realities of the underclass and how it lives on, are smug with their sense of goodness and moral superiority and don’t see the effect of the policies that they’re promoting. They have a distorted, often too rosy, picture of human nature and can’t see what might happen when personal responsibility is no longer required of the population. There are a lot of compelling and strong arguments in this book.
March 10, 2015
I find this really hard to give a star rating to because I completely disagree with his politics, yet I devoured the book and really enjoyed it - "hate reading" as @gbaker called it. Kind of a guilty pleasure like watching Jeremy Kyle (this book has a lot in common with that show).
Anyway, I thought I'd list things that the author doesn't like:
Intellectuals
Modernism
The sexual revolution
Government
Bureaucrats
Police (well, not the concept, but how they are so politically correct these days)
Political correctness
Liberals (though I think he gets them confused with anarchists and libertarians sometimes)
Multiculturalism
Welfare
Tattoos (they are the cause of crime, don't you know!)
Nightclubs
The Guardian newspaper
The BBC
Non-judgementalism
Stephen Pinker
Anyway, tonnes of stuff. And you know what, some of the stuff he hates, I hate too! Like betting shops and aggressive public drunkenness. But he comes across like a mad, snobbish toff. In fact it's kind of hard to believe he works as a psychologist in very poor area of London because he has zero empathy. O wait, that's another thing he hates! Those damn bleeding heart liberals. He seems to really miss the good old days of Victorian England when it was much easier to ignore those dirty poor people. Now there are so many of them, how annoying!
All his chapters (essays written throughout the 1990s) are just masses of anecdotes about his patients which were actually super interesting in themselves. And he does talk about how he just uses anecdotes instead of actual evidence of the causes of poverty and crime etc (like he's preparing his defences against obvious criticisms), but I'm going to point out the obvious criticism that there is no evidence that, for example, tattoos cause crime.
I would *love* to hear what he has to say in a post-GFC world where the crimes of bankers and the finance world have been exposed. Although I already kind of know - "not the kind of thing to make you fear walking the street at night".
The best thing about this book and the reason I would recommend it to anyone is that, for liberals, it is a fantastic insight into how Conservatives think. And I guess for Conservatives it just enforces their opinions. So everyone wins!
Anyway, I thought I'd list things that the author doesn't like:
Intellectuals
Modernism
The sexual revolution
Government
Bureaucrats
Police (well, not the concept, but how they are so politically correct these days)
Political correctness
Liberals (though I think he gets them confused with anarchists and libertarians sometimes)
Multiculturalism
Welfare
Tattoos (they are the cause of crime, don't you know!)
Nightclubs
The Guardian newspaper
The BBC
Non-judgementalism
Stephen Pinker
Anyway, tonnes of stuff. And you know what, some of the stuff he hates, I hate too! Like betting shops and aggressive public drunkenness. But he comes across like a mad, snobbish toff. In fact it's kind of hard to believe he works as a psychologist in very poor area of London because he has zero empathy. O wait, that's another thing he hates! Those damn bleeding heart liberals. He seems to really miss the good old days of Victorian England when it was much easier to ignore those dirty poor people. Now there are so many of them, how annoying!
All his chapters (essays written throughout the 1990s) are just masses of anecdotes about his patients which were actually super interesting in themselves. And he does talk about how he just uses anecdotes instead of actual evidence of the causes of poverty and crime etc (like he's preparing his defences against obvious criticisms), but I'm going to point out the obvious criticism that there is no evidence that, for example, tattoos cause crime.
I would *love* to hear what he has to say in a post-GFC world where the crimes of bankers and the finance world have been exposed. Although I already kind of know - "not the kind of thing to make you fear walking the street at night".
The best thing about this book and the reason I would recommend it to anyone is that, for liberals, it is a fantastic insight into how Conservatives think. And I guess for Conservatives it just enforces their opinions. So everyone wins!
May 31, 2012
Dalrymple makes his points early on in the book, then spends the rest spewing countless anecdotes which supposedly prove them. Interesting stuff such as the passive phrases violent people use ("the knife went in...") can't make up for the fact that the author is clearly out to put all the blame on 'progressives' and 'liberals'. He makes it seem like a kind of conspiracy: liberals were and are out to destroy society.
A very tiresome read.
A very tiresome read.
May 6, 2016
Electrifying essays by a conservative thinker who has seen the urban poor up close in the UK's worst slums -- and is terrified by what the future holds!
I'm giving this book five stars, not because I agree with all of it, but because Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant writer and a master of persuasive logic. He's a distinctive voice among the daredevil conservative thinkers who rule the sky in that flamboyant Flying Circus of political commentary known as NATIONAL REVIEW magazine.
Please understand that I've been a liberal all my life, like my parents before me, but I read this magazine from cover to cover every two weeks because these guys are smarter, funnier, sexier, and better educated than any other magazine staff around. The only left-wing equivalent might be THE NATION, but putting Katrina Vandenheuvel up against Rob Long, Mark Steyn, or even Jonah Goldberg is like asking Margaret Dumont to go one on one with Groucho Marx!
What makes Dalrymple unique among this company of heroes is that he is actually a working English physician who served for many years in hospitals located in or near England's worst urban slums. He's seen the needle and the damage done. He's seen gang violence, street violence, ethnic violence, domestic violence . . . and it's all here. All of it.
The only question is, can you really blame all this stuff on the Welfare State? And on pop music? And on pretty female celebrities who always seem to turn up wearing sexy new clothes at movie premieres? And on members of the royal family wanting to pierce their navels?
Theodore Dalrymple is a well-meaning man of tremendous courage. But he's also a hopeless fuddy-duddy. More than half a century after the birth of rock music, he's still sighing and moaning because someone, somewhere, may enjoy the Beatles more than Bach. (Guilty as charged, m'lud!) But is it really such a slippery slope from enjoying a fun, vibrant, irreverent celebrity culture and just randomly stomping on your girl friends, one after the other?
Most of Dalrymple's insights are not new. Everything he has to say about the modern educational system was said much better in an essay called "Screwtape Proposes A Toast" by the late, great, C.S. Lewis. The vanished joys of working class life in England were poignantly expressed years ago in the classic rock songs -- yes, Teddy, there is such a thing as classic rock -- of the Kinks! Want to get sentimental about Blackpool holidays? Ray Davies has been there, done that, and is going back for more. ("I go to Blackpool, for my holidays/Sit in the open sunlight." AUTUMN ALMANAC, 1967.)
There are so many problems with Dalrymple's treatment of sexual violence, and violence against women. He keeps insisting that the whole cause is a modern culture that encourages the poor to believe they can have all the sex they want, whenever they want, with no consequences. Damn those celebrities and their endless celebration of pleasure! (Blame the Beatles part 567.) Problem is, there are millions of well-educated, well-mannered, decent people who love the culture this man loathes, who don't go out on the beer and bash people. Dalrymple has no explanation for that. He's worked with hundreds of battered women, which is to his credit. But what really comes across is not that he wants them to be "free" but that he sort of wishes they could all go back to wearing the veil, or living secluded in a harem.
Except that would mean they'd be just like the Pakistani women he writes about. And he never gets tired of pointing out how unhappy their lives are!
At the end of this book I had the impression that this is a man who is tormented by a whole variety of sexual and emotional hang-ups he cannot identify and will not acknowledge . . . but he sure can hate the welfare state.
Physician, heal thyself!
I'm giving this book five stars, not because I agree with all of it, but because Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant writer and a master of persuasive logic. He's a distinctive voice among the daredevil conservative thinkers who rule the sky in that flamboyant Flying Circus of political commentary known as NATIONAL REVIEW magazine.
Please understand that I've been a liberal all my life, like my parents before me, but I read this magazine from cover to cover every two weeks because these guys are smarter, funnier, sexier, and better educated than any other magazine staff around. The only left-wing equivalent might be THE NATION, but putting Katrina Vandenheuvel up against Rob Long, Mark Steyn, or even Jonah Goldberg is like asking Margaret Dumont to go one on one with Groucho Marx!
What makes Dalrymple unique among this company of heroes is that he is actually a working English physician who served for many years in hospitals located in or near England's worst urban slums. He's seen the needle and the damage done. He's seen gang violence, street violence, ethnic violence, domestic violence . . . and it's all here. All of it.
The only question is, can you really blame all this stuff on the Welfare State? And on pop music? And on pretty female celebrities who always seem to turn up wearing sexy new clothes at movie premieres? And on members of the royal family wanting to pierce their navels?
Theodore Dalrymple is a well-meaning man of tremendous courage. But he's also a hopeless fuddy-duddy. More than half a century after the birth of rock music, he's still sighing and moaning because someone, somewhere, may enjoy the Beatles more than Bach. (Guilty as charged, m'lud!) But is it really such a slippery slope from enjoying a fun, vibrant, irreverent celebrity culture and just randomly stomping on your girl friends, one after the other?
Most of Dalrymple's insights are not new. Everything he has to say about the modern educational system was said much better in an essay called "Screwtape Proposes A Toast" by the late, great, C.S. Lewis. The vanished joys of working class life in England were poignantly expressed years ago in the classic rock songs -- yes, Teddy, there is such a thing as classic rock -- of the Kinks! Want to get sentimental about Blackpool holidays? Ray Davies has been there, done that, and is going back for more. ("I go to Blackpool, for my holidays/Sit in the open sunlight." AUTUMN ALMANAC, 1967.)
There are so many problems with Dalrymple's treatment of sexual violence, and violence against women. He keeps insisting that the whole cause is a modern culture that encourages the poor to believe they can have all the sex they want, whenever they want, with no consequences. Damn those celebrities and their endless celebration of pleasure! (Blame the Beatles part 567.) Problem is, there are millions of well-educated, well-mannered, decent people who love the culture this man loathes, who don't go out on the beer and bash people. Dalrymple has no explanation for that. He's worked with hundreds of battered women, which is to his credit. But what really comes across is not that he wants them to be "free" but that he sort of wishes they could all go back to wearing the veil, or living secluded in a harem.
Except that would mean they'd be just like the Pakistani women he writes about. And he never gets tired of pointing out how unhappy their lives are!
At the end of this book I had the impression that this is a man who is tormented by a whole variety of sexual and emotional hang-ups he cannot identify and will not acknowledge . . . but he sure can hate the welfare state.
Physician, heal thyself!
September 29, 2018
When I am dictator, which hopefully will be any day now, I am going to bring back what was once a crucial distinction. Namely, the sharp separation between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Theodore Dalrymple’s book shows both why that distinction is necessary, indeed absolutely essential, and why it has fallen from favor among those who decide society’s rules. Moreover, "Life at the Bottom" offers a wide range of food for related thoughts, so many that I am afraid, beginning this review, that it is likely to go on for a very long time. But at the end, I will solve all the problems for you. Strap in.
This book is a compilation of short articles written by Dalrymple for the London "City Journal" between 1994 and 2001. All of them take as their theme the condition of the British underclass, something to which the author was (he recently retired) exposed directly to for decades, working as a physician in a slum hospital and in a nearby prison. From his tens of thousands of patients, the life of each of whom he explored (he was a psychiatrist, not that the vast majority of his patients had any mental illness), he extracted a clear view of their lives, and the lives of all those around them. As a result, this book is not so much a compilation of anecdotes, but the grasping of a pattern, offering heft equal to books that rely more on statistical social science, such as Charles Murray’s "Coming Apart," and more heft than books relying on news stories and abstract moralizing.
In fact, Dalrymple offers almost no moralizing at all. An atheist, he sometimes shifts uneasily in his seat when talking about morality, since he has nothing except utilitarian impact and unmoored societal consensus on which to base claims of morality. On balance, though, that perhaps makes his book more accessible, in these post-Christian days, though it is surely true only with a recovery of morality, and enforced moral judgment, will any of the problems he bemoans actually be addressed. His lack of a moral frame is, perhaps, also why Dalrymple too often offers preemptive apologies, such as approving the laughable idea that today’s forced nonjudgmentalism is largely a reaction to “the cruel or unthinking application of moral codes in the past,” or sagely chanting the required overt falsehood that recent European immigration from inferior cultures is generally a good thing. The reader is best off just ignoring such apologies, which, as always, merely weaken strong arguments and serve no purpose other than corrupting the truth and surrendering to one’s enemies.
While the book’s stories blur into an endless round of squalor, violence, and every type of vice, several major themes run through the whole book, which collectively characterize the “worldview” of the underclass. The chief one is that all of British society, and the underclass most of all, has wholly absorbed to its detriment the philosophy of nonjudgmentalism. Everyone, except benighted reactionary outcasts, recoils from the idea of that one thing or action is or can be better, more worthwhile, or more moral than another. From that flow, directly or indirectly, most of the underclass’s problems—while the classes above them have retained, to some degree, the structures that permit them to avoid the price of nonjudgmentalism (this is, of course, Charles Murray’s point about America). Another is that the underclass has been taught to ignore reality—when Dalrymple points out to a young girl that, being weaker than them, she can always be physically battered by her boyfriends, and she should avoid situations that lead to her being beaten, she denies that she is physically weaker, chanting “That’s sexist!”, and goes back to get beaten some more. And along the same lines, healthy and reality-based views of masculinity and femininity have disappeared entirely.
A third is that the underclass denies any and all personal responsibility. When a man stabs someone, he says “The knife went in.” Jordan Peterson would be appalled (actually, he is appalled—I noticed after reading this book that it is on his list of recommended reading). A fourth is that they give no thought for the future, living in the eternal present; concomitantly, they have no aspirations to do or be something better. A fifth is that the underclass expects government handouts, that is, theft from the productive members of the society for their benefit, as an absolute, irrevocable, and non-discussable birthright. A sixth is their total ignorance—of all the thousands of Dalrymple’s patients, he says, only a few had more than the vaguest idea of when the Second World War took place. This is because teachers have abdicated their responsibility, plus any student who shows drive is torn down by his peers. A seventh is the fear that all the underclass lives in, a fear of crime committed by the most criminal among them, about which the police will do little or nothing. An eighth is that they have wholly absorbed the religion of emancipation, that they have no personal limits, but they instead have unfettered freedom to do exactly as they please, to be funded by others if that freedom needs money, of course. A corollary to this is that no hierarchy of persons or values can be permitted, since everybody is aggressively and always equal (which reinforces lack of aspiration).
I use the term “underclass,” rather than “the poor,” deliberately, and for two reasons. One is that some people with limited income and assets are not part of the underclass, though they usually suffer as a result of their physical proximity to the underclass. The second is that no member of the underclass is actually poor at all. They may be “below the poverty line,” but since that line is set as a percentage of all incomes, we will always have the poor with us in that sense (which is not the sense in which Jesus used it). By any rational standard, every member of the underclass is wealthy, having, even without any source of earned income, free food, healthcare, cash, housing, transportation, and appliances. True, the incentives created by the programs that provide these handouts to the underclass are often perverse, such as encouraging the underclass to stay jobless (not that most of them need any encouragement) or encouraging them to stay unmarried and to have multiple children out of wedlock. But that does not change that, viewed objectively and historically, the British underclass is actually prosperous.
And where does the underclass get these habits of thought? Why, from their rulers, naturally, who have been feeding Leftist claptrap to them through news and entertainment, and through the minions of government, for decades. Most of these habits are the liquid in the poisoned chalice of the modern Left, the nasty fruit of the Frankfurt School. Whether it is their teachers, the hundreds of thousands of social workers who live equally parasitically off government handouts, television, newspapers, or slippery politicians like Tony Blair, none of these habits of thought are called out as bad and requiring immediate correction by harsh means. The other classes don’t pay the penalty for these ideologically driven ideas, but they do get to feel smugly superior and righteous, though they keep well away from where the underclass lives. To be sure, there’s just as much, if not more, rot throughout the rest of British society, also requiring immediate correction through harsh measures. It’s just a different type of rot. But when an entire society requires a hugely unpleasant reset, it’s no surprise that Lotos-eating gets the nod as a preferred alternative.
Americans like me can’t really believe it’s this bad in England. Certainly, what the author describes is similar to some areas of America (just read J. D. Vance’s "Hillbilly Elegy," though the underclass there is not quite as degraded as the one Dalrymple portrays). The reader wonders if the author is exaggerating. Not to mention that, if it was this bad in England twenty years ago, how long could this go on? What’s it like today? Dalrymple, though now retired, is still prolifically writing for the "City Journal.". Few recent writings of his touch directly on the British underclass, though those that do, don’t suggest things have changed for the better. Have things gotten worse? Have things settled down to a permanent state of having X% of English citizens live in crime-ridden blob-like squalor? Is it just that polite society ignores and stays out of the areas where the poor live, such that areas of Britain are like certain suburbs of Paris, out of sight and out of mind except when the rioting begins? It’s essentially impossible to get straight answers to questions like this, unfortunately, at least as an American.
Because this book focuses purely on Britain, and never mentions the United States, it offers other interesting comparisons to matters here. Most of all it shows that, whatever our local racists may say, who is in the underclass has nothing at all to do with race. The majority of the British underclass is white, and its pathologies are a purely cultural phenomenon, since none of these people, or their ancestors, suffered any type of persecution they could claim explains their lot—in fact, they were offered all the benefits of the greatest civilization the world has ever seen, the pre-late modern West. Further proving that culture is all, Dalyrmple points out that some Indian subcontinent groups (notably Sikhs) largely avoid falling into the underclass; others plummet rapidly into it. Immigrants from Jamaica dwell (metaphysically) largely in the cellar; those from Barbados do not. The author narrates with grim amusement how doctors come from Mumbai and Manila, brimming with great sympathy for the poor and hugely impressed with how well the British government provides for the poor, and are quickly disillusioned by the underclass’s total ingratitude and failure to take advantage of what they are offered, ultimately concluding that those living in the slums of the Third World are better off, overall, than the English underclass.
Another point of comparison is crime. It is very hard for a casual observer to get coherent data on crime in the UK. Not only does the government not present it longitudinally in any form easily available to the public, there are different sets (is Scotland included, for example?), and widespread consensus that a great many crimes are simply not reported because the police don’t care and can’t be bothered (a theme that recurs repeatedly in this book). However, the left-wing "Guardian" newspaper noted in 2017 that “Police-recorded crime has risen by 10% across England and Wales—the largest annual rise for a decade—according to the Office for National Statistics. The latest crime figures for [March 2016 to March 2017] also show an 18% rise in violent crime, including a 20% surge in gun and knife crime. The official figures also show a 26% rise in the homicide rate. More alarmingly, the statisticians say the rise in crime is accelerating, with a 3% increase recorded in the year to March 2015, followed by an 8% rise in the following year, and now a 10% increase in the 12 months to this March. . . . [T]he country is becoming increasingly violent in nature, with gun crime rising 23% to 6,375 offences, largely driven by an increase in the use of handguns.” From other data, it’s quite clear that all violent and property crimes are much higher in England than America, except for homicide (which is especially relatively under-reported in England for multiple reasons), and that the UK has not experienced the massive drop in crime that America has in the past three decades, at least not to nearly the same degree.
But these statistics don’t capture a related qualitative difference between crime in England and America. It’s hard for people like me to grasp the oppression of the British underclass by crime, something Dalrymple emphasizes. They can do nothing to defend themselves or to preserve their dignity; they must just sit there and take it. If they defend themselves in any way, they go to jail, as numerous recent cases have shown. When, having disarmed the law-abiding populace, the British elite now shriek that knives are evil and that kitchen knives should only be sold with blunted points, it’s hard to imagine the oppressive feeling of powerlessness and fear that must confine the British underclass. In most of free America, where I live, if I am afraid I may be exposed to crime, to prevent it, I simply carry a Glock. I carry it concealed for discretion, or on my side, visible to all, if I think that trouble may be walking the street, and, as a result, there is no trouble. Many others do as well, and as a result street crime and home invasions in free America are practically nonexistent. Aside from its practical benefit, that I and my family are safer, I can tell you from personal experience that the ability to be armed empowers us and adds dignity to our lives, real dignity, not the fake kind of dignity that Anthony Kennedy parades through Supreme Court opinions. That’s something the English underclass is denied.
There are other cultural lessons in this book for those of us outside the underclass, which is probably one hundred percent of the people reading this. Dalrymple often notes the unpleasant habit today of lower-class culture percolating upwards to infect other classes, a reversal of every society prior to the Western late modern. Tattoos are one example of this, but more generally, when rappers and seedy entertainers are taken as fashion and role models by the middle and upper classes, the culture is degraded, not enriched. All the habits of the underclass reinforce this rot, such as the canard that everyone is equal and thus we must believe that doggerel is poetry. But it’s not just body modification and ugly music that’s caught on among the upper classes—it’s loutish, drunken behavior in public, the casual use of obscene language, wife beating, and generally what used to be correctly called “lower class behavior.” (Contrary to feminist myth, wife beating, or to call it by its sanitized term, “domestic violence,” was not at all common outside the lower classes, until quite recently, because of social disapproval. Although, it is true that there are now precious few wives among the lower classes, so maybe the old term is now inaccurate.) Needless to say, voluntary degradation is not the way to build a society that is going anyplace good, though almost nobody dares to say so.
Another cultural lesson, with historical aspects, applicable to the United States, is that the destruction of communities by forcing the poor into planned, Le Corbusier-type Brutalist concrete hellholes was driven exclusively by left-wing ideology. Nobody disputes this in Britain, which is why Dalyrmple just states the fact as obvious and undisputed. The same ideology drove similar destruction and construction in America, which is no surprise. But in recent decades, because of the total failure of such housing in America and the harm it caused the underclass, the Left has taken to lying and saying that it was racist conservatives who pushed building Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor homes, and other fantastically pernicious housing projects. No doubt racists (many, or mostly, left-wing) have negatively affected housing patterns for African Americans, but high-rise public housing is not an example of that; in both Britain and America, it was and is solely the responsibility of the reality-unmoored, utopian Left. This book performs the service of exposing the lies of the American Left on this topic, since there was indisputably no racial element in this forced migration in the United Kingdom.
I also found it interesting that the term “Asians” as a general term for those from the Indian subcontinent does not appear once in this book. That suggests the usage is of quite recent vintage. My 1989 copy of the Second Edition of the "Oxford English Dictionary" does not list that use of the term; nor do the printed Additions through 1997. Like all politically chosen terms, it is also subject to ongoing forced change. In recent years, Sikhs and Hindus, annoyed that Muslim crimes such as terror and rape are characterized as being committed by “Asians,” have petitioned that the term not be used, although it is not clear what they want to substitute. (It’s not like the press is going to start calling Muslim crimes, “Muslim crimes.”) I’m not sure why the new term “Asians” was forced into common use, or what came before. I am told, by the shocked look on my English cousin’s face when I use it, that “Paki” is regarded now as a slur, so presumably “Asian” was brought in as a euphemism, which, like most euphemisms, clouded communication. So maybe the Sikhs now prefer to be called “Pakis” again, a slightly more accurate term, certainly, than “Asian,” and one which does not get them lumped in with child rapists.
Muslims don’t show up much in this book causing the problems they cause in Britain in the twenty-first century. Dalrymple wrote before a toxic brew of Muslim aggression and triumphalism, government fecklessness, and Left ideology, really started to poison Britain. Rumors and echoes of this show up occasionally, though, especially when the author notes that the police deliberately ignore crimes so as to avoid any possible claim of racism, demanding “Zero Intolerance.” (I wonder what Dalrymple thinks of the Yorkshire police’s current campaign to encourage reporting to the police of any non-criminal behavior that constitutes “hate,” while they ignore their actual job of fighting crime.) Part of the poison is terrorism, supported by a significant percentage of British Muslims. In 2017, a large survey showed that 25% of British Muslims were willing to openly support wholly replacing all British law with sharia law, and 33% supported killing anyone who insulted Muhammad. But far worse is the cultural poison of the Muslim underclass not related to terrorism, with the tip of the iceberg revealed by the Rotherham crimes (in Yorkshire), where Muslim men groomed more than a thousand non-Muslim girls for mass rape over many years, ignored by the police who were terrified of being called “racist.” (Such treatment of infidel women is both permitted and celebrated by mainstream, though not by any means exclusive, interpretations of Muslim law.) I suspect that even now Dalrymple doesn’t touch too much on these matters, since it is forbidden in Britain and you will be arrested if you say these things (I would be if I said the preceding paragraph on the street near a policeman). A recent column of Dalrymple’s noted that he keeps his mouth shut on certain topics, not because of fear of arrest (though maybe that too), but because if he talked about them “everyone I know would cut me dead.” The Muslim underclass is, though, at root just a specialized underclass problem, and ultimately all of these problems need a common solution; they cannot be addressed piecemeal.
[Review completes as first comment.]
This book is a compilation of short articles written by Dalrymple for the London "City Journal" between 1994 and 2001. All of them take as their theme the condition of the British underclass, something to which the author was (he recently retired) exposed directly to for decades, working as a physician in a slum hospital and in a nearby prison. From his tens of thousands of patients, the life of each of whom he explored (he was a psychiatrist, not that the vast majority of his patients had any mental illness), he extracted a clear view of their lives, and the lives of all those around them. As a result, this book is not so much a compilation of anecdotes, but the grasping of a pattern, offering heft equal to books that rely more on statistical social science, such as Charles Murray’s "Coming Apart," and more heft than books relying on news stories and abstract moralizing.
In fact, Dalrymple offers almost no moralizing at all. An atheist, he sometimes shifts uneasily in his seat when talking about morality, since he has nothing except utilitarian impact and unmoored societal consensus on which to base claims of morality. On balance, though, that perhaps makes his book more accessible, in these post-Christian days, though it is surely true only with a recovery of morality, and enforced moral judgment, will any of the problems he bemoans actually be addressed. His lack of a moral frame is, perhaps, also why Dalrymple too often offers preemptive apologies, such as approving the laughable idea that today’s forced nonjudgmentalism is largely a reaction to “the cruel or unthinking application of moral codes in the past,” or sagely chanting the required overt falsehood that recent European immigration from inferior cultures is generally a good thing. The reader is best off just ignoring such apologies, which, as always, merely weaken strong arguments and serve no purpose other than corrupting the truth and surrendering to one’s enemies.
While the book’s stories blur into an endless round of squalor, violence, and every type of vice, several major themes run through the whole book, which collectively characterize the “worldview” of the underclass. The chief one is that all of British society, and the underclass most of all, has wholly absorbed to its detriment the philosophy of nonjudgmentalism. Everyone, except benighted reactionary outcasts, recoils from the idea of that one thing or action is or can be better, more worthwhile, or more moral than another. From that flow, directly or indirectly, most of the underclass’s problems—while the classes above them have retained, to some degree, the structures that permit them to avoid the price of nonjudgmentalism (this is, of course, Charles Murray’s point about America). Another is that the underclass has been taught to ignore reality—when Dalrymple points out to a young girl that, being weaker than them, she can always be physically battered by her boyfriends, and she should avoid situations that lead to her being beaten, she denies that she is physically weaker, chanting “That’s sexist!”, and goes back to get beaten some more. And along the same lines, healthy and reality-based views of masculinity and femininity have disappeared entirely.
A third is that the underclass denies any and all personal responsibility. When a man stabs someone, he says “The knife went in.” Jordan Peterson would be appalled (actually, he is appalled—I noticed after reading this book that it is on his list of recommended reading). A fourth is that they give no thought for the future, living in the eternal present; concomitantly, they have no aspirations to do or be something better. A fifth is that the underclass expects government handouts, that is, theft from the productive members of the society for their benefit, as an absolute, irrevocable, and non-discussable birthright. A sixth is their total ignorance—of all the thousands of Dalrymple’s patients, he says, only a few had more than the vaguest idea of when the Second World War took place. This is because teachers have abdicated their responsibility, plus any student who shows drive is torn down by his peers. A seventh is the fear that all the underclass lives in, a fear of crime committed by the most criminal among them, about which the police will do little or nothing. An eighth is that they have wholly absorbed the religion of emancipation, that they have no personal limits, but they instead have unfettered freedom to do exactly as they please, to be funded by others if that freedom needs money, of course. A corollary to this is that no hierarchy of persons or values can be permitted, since everybody is aggressively and always equal (which reinforces lack of aspiration).
I use the term “underclass,” rather than “the poor,” deliberately, and for two reasons. One is that some people with limited income and assets are not part of the underclass, though they usually suffer as a result of their physical proximity to the underclass. The second is that no member of the underclass is actually poor at all. They may be “below the poverty line,” but since that line is set as a percentage of all incomes, we will always have the poor with us in that sense (which is not the sense in which Jesus used it). By any rational standard, every member of the underclass is wealthy, having, even without any source of earned income, free food, healthcare, cash, housing, transportation, and appliances. True, the incentives created by the programs that provide these handouts to the underclass are often perverse, such as encouraging the underclass to stay jobless (not that most of them need any encouragement) or encouraging them to stay unmarried and to have multiple children out of wedlock. But that does not change that, viewed objectively and historically, the British underclass is actually prosperous.
And where does the underclass get these habits of thought? Why, from their rulers, naturally, who have been feeding Leftist claptrap to them through news and entertainment, and through the minions of government, for decades. Most of these habits are the liquid in the poisoned chalice of the modern Left, the nasty fruit of the Frankfurt School. Whether it is their teachers, the hundreds of thousands of social workers who live equally parasitically off government handouts, television, newspapers, or slippery politicians like Tony Blair, none of these habits of thought are called out as bad and requiring immediate correction by harsh means. The other classes don’t pay the penalty for these ideologically driven ideas, but they do get to feel smugly superior and righteous, though they keep well away from where the underclass lives. To be sure, there’s just as much, if not more, rot throughout the rest of British society, also requiring immediate correction through harsh measures. It’s just a different type of rot. But when an entire society requires a hugely unpleasant reset, it’s no surprise that Lotos-eating gets the nod as a preferred alternative.
Americans like me can’t really believe it’s this bad in England. Certainly, what the author describes is similar to some areas of America (just read J. D. Vance’s "Hillbilly Elegy," though the underclass there is not quite as degraded as the one Dalrymple portrays). The reader wonders if the author is exaggerating. Not to mention that, if it was this bad in England twenty years ago, how long could this go on? What’s it like today? Dalrymple, though now retired, is still prolifically writing for the "City Journal.". Few recent writings of his touch directly on the British underclass, though those that do, don’t suggest things have changed for the better. Have things gotten worse? Have things settled down to a permanent state of having X% of English citizens live in crime-ridden blob-like squalor? Is it just that polite society ignores and stays out of the areas where the poor live, such that areas of Britain are like certain suburbs of Paris, out of sight and out of mind except when the rioting begins? It’s essentially impossible to get straight answers to questions like this, unfortunately, at least as an American.
Because this book focuses purely on Britain, and never mentions the United States, it offers other interesting comparisons to matters here. Most of all it shows that, whatever our local racists may say, who is in the underclass has nothing at all to do with race. The majority of the British underclass is white, and its pathologies are a purely cultural phenomenon, since none of these people, or their ancestors, suffered any type of persecution they could claim explains their lot—in fact, they were offered all the benefits of the greatest civilization the world has ever seen, the pre-late modern West. Further proving that culture is all, Dalyrmple points out that some Indian subcontinent groups (notably Sikhs) largely avoid falling into the underclass; others plummet rapidly into it. Immigrants from Jamaica dwell (metaphysically) largely in the cellar; those from Barbados do not. The author narrates with grim amusement how doctors come from Mumbai and Manila, brimming with great sympathy for the poor and hugely impressed with how well the British government provides for the poor, and are quickly disillusioned by the underclass’s total ingratitude and failure to take advantage of what they are offered, ultimately concluding that those living in the slums of the Third World are better off, overall, than the English underclass.
Another point of comparison is crime. It is very hard for a casual observer to get coherent data on crime in the UK. Not only does the government not present it longitudinally in any form easily available to the public, there are different sets (is Scotland included, for example?), and widespread consensus that a great many crimes are simply not reported because the police don’t care and can’t be bothered (a theme that recurs repeatedly in this book). However, the left-wing "Guardian" newspaper noted in 2017 that “Police-recorded crime has risen by 10% across England and Wales—the largest annual rise for a decade—according to the Office for National Statistics. The latest crime figures for [March 2016 to March 2017] also show an 18% rise in violent crime, including a 20% surge in gun and knife crime. The official figures also show a 26% rise in the homicide rate. More alarmingly, the statisticians say the rise in crime is accelerating, with a 3% increase recorded in the year to March 2015, followed by an 8% rise in the following year, and now a 10% increase in the 12 months to this March. . . . [T]he country is becoming increasingly violent in nature, with gun crime rising 23% to 6,375 offences, largely driven by an increase in the use of handguns.” From other data, it’s quite clear that all violent and property crimes are much higher in England than America, except for homicide (which is especially relatively under-reported in England for multiple reasons), and that the UK has not experienced the massive drop in crime that America has in the past three decades, at least not to nearly the same degree.
But these statistics don’t capture a related qualitative difference between crime in England and America. It’s hard for people like me to grasp the oppression of the British underclass by crime, something Dalrymple emphasizes. They can do nothing to defend themselves or to preserve their dignity; they must just sit there and take it. If they defend themselves in any way, they go to jail, as numerous recent cases have shown. When, having disarmed the law-abiding populace, the British elite now shriek that knives are evil and that kitchen knives should only be sold with blunted points, it’s hard to imagine the oppressive feeling of powerlessness and fear that must confine the British underclass. In most of free America, where I live, if I am afraid I may be exposed to crime, to prevent it, I simply carry a Glock. I carry it concealed for discretion, or on my side, visible to all, if I think that trouble may be walking the street, and, as a result, there is no trouble. Many others do as well, and as a result street crime and home invasions in free America are practically nonexistent. Aside from its practical benefit, that I and my family are safer, I can tell you from personal experience that the ability to be armed empowers us and adds dignity to our lives, real dignity, not the fake kind of dignity that Anthony Kennedy parades through Supreme Court opinions. That’s something the English underclass is denied.
There are other cultural lessons in this book for those of us outside the underclass, which is probably one hundred percent of the people reading this. Dalrymple often notes the unpleasant habit today of lower-class culture percolating upwards to infect other classes, a reversal of every society prior to the Western late modern. Tattoos are one example of this, but more generally, when rappers and seedy entertainers are taken as fashion and role models by the middle and upper classes, the culture is degraded, not enriched. All the habits of the underclass reinforce this rot, such as the canard that everyone is equal and thus we must believe that doggerel is poetry. But it’s not just body modification and ugly music that’s caught on among the upper classes—it’s loutish, drunken behavior in public, the casual use of obscene language, wife beating, and generally what used to be correctly called “lower class behavior.” (Contrary to feminist myth, wife beating, or to call it by its sanitized term, “domestic violence,” was not at all common outside the lower classes, until quite recently, because of social disapproval. Although, it is true that there are now precious few wives among the lower classes, so maybe the old term is now inaccurate.) Needless to say, voluntary degradation is not the way to build a society that is going anyplace good, though almost nobody dares to say so.
Another cultural lesson, with historical aspects, applicable to the United States, is that the destruction of communities by forcing the poor into planned, Le Corbusier-type Brutalist concrete hellholes was driven exclusively by left-wing ideology. Nobody disputes this in Britain, which is why Dalyrmple just states the fact as obvious and undisputed. The same ideology drove similar destruction and construction in America, which is no surprise. But in recent decades, because of the total failure of such housing in America and the harm it caused the underclass, the Left has taken to lying and saying that it was racist conservatives who pushed building Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor homes, and other fantastically pernicious housing projects. No doubt racists (many, or mostly, left-wing) have negatively affected housing patterns for African Americans, but high-rise public housing is not an example of that; in both Britain and America, it was and is solely the responsibility of the reality-unmoored, utopian Left. This book performs the service of exposing the lies of the American Left on this topic, since there was indisputably no racial element in this forced migration in the United Kingdom.
I also found it interesting that the term “Asians” as a general term for those from the Indian subcontinent does not appear once in this book. That suggests the usage is of quite recent vintage. My 1989 copy of the Second Edition of the "Oxford English Dictionary" does not list that use of the term; nor do the printed Additions through 1997. Like all politically chosen terms, it is also subject to ongoing forced change. In recent years, Sikhs and Hindus, annoyed that Muslim crimes such as terror and rape are characterized as being committed by “Asians,” have petitioned that the term not be used, although it is not clear what they want to substitute. (It’s not like the press is going to start calling Muslim crimes, “Muslim crimes.”) I’m not sure why the new term “Asians” was forced into common use, or what came before. I am told, by the shocked look on my English cousin’s face when I use it, that “Paki” is regarded now as a slur, so presumably “Asian” was brought in as a euphemism, which, like most euphemisms, clouded communication. So maybe the Sikhs now prefer to be called “Pakis” again, a slightly more accurate term, certainly, than “Asian,” and one which does not get them lumped in with child rapists.
Muslims don’t show up much in this book causing the problems they cause in Britain in the twenty-first century. Dalrymple wrote before a toxic brew of Muslim aggression and triumphalism, government fecklessness, and Left ideology, really started to poison Britain. Rumors and echoes of this show up occasionally, though, especially when the author notes that the police deliberately ignore crimes so as to avoid any possible claim of racism, demanding “Zero Intolerance.” (I wonder what Dalrymple thinks of the Yorkshire police’s current campaign to encourage reporting to the police of any non-criminal behavior that constitutes “hate,” while they ignore their actual job of fighting crime.) Part of the poison is terrorism, supported by a significant percentage of British Muslims. In 2017, a large survey showed that 25% of British Muslims were willing to openly support wholly replacing all British law with sharia law, and 33% supported killing anyone who insulted Muhammad. But far worse is the cultural poison of the Muslim underclass not related to terrorism, with the tip of the iceberg revealed by the Rotherham crimes (in Yorkshire), where Muslim men groomed more than a thousand non-Muslim girls for mass rape over many years, ignored by the police who were terrified of being called “racist.” (Such treatment of infidel women is both permitted and celebrated by mainstream, though not by any means exclusive, interpretations of Muslim law.) I suspect that even now Dalrymple doesn’t touch too much on these matters, since it is forbidden in Britain and you will be arrested if you say these things (I would be if I said the preceding paragraph on the street near a policeman). A recent column of Dalrymple’s noted that he keeps his mouth shut on certain topics, not because of fear of arrest (though maybe that too), but because if he talked about them “everyone I know would cut me dead.” The Muslim underclass is, though, at root just a specialized underclass problem, and ultimately all of these problems need a common solution; they cannot be addressed piecemeal.
[Review completes as first comment.]
March 24, 2024
2024 Review
I challenged myself in 2024 to re-read the books that impacted me most in my 20s.
20-year-old me actually met Theodore Dalrymple and had the audacity to ask him to sign my obviously bought-used copy of Life at the Bottom. I remain grateful.
I don't remember anything else about the experience so I'm pretty sure that opportunity of a lifetime was wasted on me.
2013 Review
One of the best books I have read in a long time. Theodore Dalrymple has spent years as a doctor working with the underclass in Britain. What is poverty? Every person seems entitled to four walls, a roof, a TV, and full healthcare but does that make them grateful? He illustrates the mindset that keeps generations and their children trapped in a cycle. "Undiscriminating" policy makers do just that, "un-discriminate" and the result is a dual problem of people getting aid when it offers them no insensitive to better themselves, and people being refused aid because they are trying to do just that.
Dalrymple is blunt, unafraid to point directly to the problem, and not a policy maker. Those three things make this book utterly valuable. Though he writes about the white underclass in England, he might be writing about the inner city of Milwaukee or New York. The problem is widespread and continuing to fester. It is dragging us down.
Highly, highly recommended.
I challenged myself in 2024 to re-read the books that impacted me most in my 20s.
20-year-old me actually met Theodore Dalrymple and had the audacity to ask him to sign my obviously bought-used copy of Life at the Bottom. I remain grateful.
I don't remember anything else about the experience so I'm pretty sure that opportunity of a lifetime was wasted on me.
2013 Review
One of the best books I have read in a long time. Theodore Dalrymple has spent years as a doctor working with the underclass in Britain. What is poverty? Every person seems entitled to four walls, a roof, a TV, and full healthcare but does that make them grateful? He illustrates the mindset that keeps generations and their children trapped in a cycle. "Undiscriminating" policy makers do just that, "un-discriminate" and the result is a dual problem of people getting aid when it offers them no insensitive to better themselves, and people being refused aid because they are trying to do just that.
Dalrymple is blunt, unafraid to point directly to the problem, and not a policy maker. Those three things make this book utterly valuable. Though he writes about the white underclass in England, he might be writing about the inner city of Milwaukee or New York. The problem is widespread and continuing to fester. It is dragging us down.
Highly, highly recommended.
December 2, 2016
When fishing for book recommendations some time ago I've stumbled upon Life at Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple. Now, having read it I wish I had bought and read it immediately instead of postponing it for almost a year.
The book is a collection of essays dealing with the British underclass. The main theme or theory of the book is that the underclass is the underclass not because of economic factors, oppression or lack of opportunities but mostly because of its worldview. The author not only contradicts the current liberal dogma but attacks it fiercely.
The "poor" of today live in times of incomparable wealth, even the poorest of the poor have a roof over their head, food and access to entertainment. They don't lack material wealth yet live in moral squalor.
Each article tackles a facet of the British underclass - the broken families, the battered wives, the entertainment, the living arrangements, habits so on and so forth. The author is a doctor and while his evidence is mostly anecdotal it is also exhaustive: having interviewed thousands of people. The articles are told from the perspective of the author but are written about his patients which share a particular predicament or exhibit the same worldview.
While the underclass existed as long as civilization itself its recent influx can mostly be traced back to social degeneration stemming from liberal social theories. Battered wives and broken families, the author says, originate in the liberal idea of free love, the sexual revolution and lack of morals. Nobody is as progressive in this regard as a typical representative of the underclass. The women have multiple children, each with different man; the men father children to different women. All cheat on each other. Far from being the paradise liberals imagined it to be the living arrangements of those people are more then wretched.
Human beings are unfortunately just humans and untested social theories can have grave consequences when made into flesh. When sex is freely given it is worthless. The family unit doesn't exist and human relationship are reduced to their basest forms. The men don't see themselves as worth anything and knowing the nonexistent value of sex they resolve to violence as a means of an ego boost and a way of keeping the women attached to themselves. The women are battered but stay in toxic relationships because it's the only thing they know (better a known wife-beater to an unknown one). The women see men as an avenue for fulfilling their urges. And in all of this the children are witnesses to daily violence which births new pathology.
I've only summarized one aspect of the life of the British underclass but the book is a full frontal assault against the common ideas that predominate in the current intellectual climate - that crime is born out of poverty, that poverty is due to exploitation, that the welfare state is a positive influence, the denial of personal responsibility and the belief in social determinism. The author suggests that academic ideas like those infect the lower classes through the osmosis of media and popular culture with disastrous consequences. One example that stuck in my mind is how criminals implicitly absolve themselves from responsibility by the choice of language that they use - donning the passive voice and using phrases which make them seem simple victims of happenstance ("the knife went in", "my mind went").
Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple goes to my personal list of most shocking books ever written and I'm hoping to get more of the author! The depressing content of the book is contrasted against the dry-wit of the author which makes the stories even more abhorring. While the topic is sombre, it is an all in all great book, one which I can't recommend highly enough.
The book is a collection of essays dealing with the British underclass. The main theme or theory of the book is that the underclass is the underclass not because of economic factors, oppression or lack of opportunities but mostly because of its worldview. The author not only contradicts the current liberal dogma but attacks it fiercely.
The "poor" of today live in times of incomparable wealth, even the poorest of the poor have a roof over their head, food and access to entertainment. They don't lack material wealth yet live in moral squalor.
Each article tackles a facet of the British underclass - the broken families, the battered wives, the entertainment, the living arrangements, habits so on and so forth. The author is a doctor and while his evidence is mostly anecdotal it is also exhaustive: having interviewed thousands of people. The articles are told from the perspective of the author but are written about his patients which share a particular predicament or exhibit the same worldview.
While the underclass existed as long as civilization itself its recent influx can mostly be traced back to social degeneration stemming from liberal social theories. Battered wives and broken families, the author says, originate in the liberal idea of free love, the sexual revolution and lack of morals. Nobody is as progressive in this regard as a typical representative of the underclass. The women have multiple children, each with different man; the men father children to different women. All cheat on each other. Far from being the paradise liberals imagined it to be the living arrangements of those people are more then wretched.
Human beings are unfortunately just humans and untested social theories can have grave consequences when made into flesh. When sex is freely given it is worthless. The family unit doesn't exist and human relationship are reduced to their basest forms. The men don't see themselves as worth anything and knowing the nonexistent value of sex they resolve to violence as a means of an ego boost and a way of keeping the women attached to themselves. The women are battered but stay in toxic relationships because it's the only thing they know (better a known wife-beater to an unknown one). The women see men as an avenue for fulfilling their urges. And in all of this the children are witnesses to daily violence which births new pathology.
I've only summarized one aspect of the life of the British underclass but the book is a full frontal assault against the common ideas that predominate in the current intellectual climate - that crime is born out of poverty, that poverty is due to exploitation, that the welfare state is a positive influence, the denial of personal responsibility and the belief in social determinism. The author suggests that academic ideas like those infect the lower classes through the osmosis of media and popular culture with disastrous consequences. One example that stuck in my mind is how criminals implicitly absolve themselves from responsibility by the choice of language that they use - donning the passive voice and using phrases which make them seem simple victims of happenstance ("the knife went in", "my mind went").
Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple goes to my personal list of most shocking books ever written and I'm hoping to get more of the author! The depressing content of the book is contrasted against the dry-wit of the author which makes the stories even more abhorring. While the topic is sombre, it is an all in all great book, one which I can't recommend highly enough.
January 14, 2014
I had hopes for this book. I regrettably however, only looked at the title before reading, thinking it would be a detailed testimony on what life is like in the slums. Instead, I was given to empty, and often times pretentious, rhetoric by a British gentleman who appears to be bitter over the apparent end of the British aristocracy. He woes over the foolish underclass—who, according to him, chose their condition completely out of their own volition— and their partying, their self-delusion, their tattoos, their sense of entitlement, and use of indirect language and first person passive sentences. But he doesn’t put all the blame on them; for that, he leaves to the “liberal elites”, who have filled the minds of the underclass with notions of sociological and economic determinism.
And what evidence does Theodore Dalrymple bring for his case? Absolutely nothing. No statistics, no references, nothing— except a misrepresentation of Steven Pinker and his work on linguistics. No, for Dalrymple’s case, all he brings is anecdote, which would be only barely convincing if it weren’t peppered with numerous fallacies of false dichotomy, over-generalization, and straw man. It’s also worth noting that much of his accusations that crime was on the rise in Britain were actually statistically false according to the British Crime Survey (Measuring Crime for 25 Years, 2006). According to this source, trends of violent crime, vehicle crime, burglary, and overall trends in crime, have been falling since 1995, one year after Dalrymple wrote his first essay in this collection, “The Knife Went In”.
With this in mind, it seems obvious that this man has a conservative agenda. For who in their right mind, except in the name of ideology, would say such asinine things? According to Dalrymple, the poor not only freely chose to live the way they do, but they did it because they’re selfish, bored, or foolish in believing the liberal elites (or at least, Dalrymple's poorly characterized version of the liberal elites); they allegedly don’t dare help themselves, because that would force them to give up their worldview of the welfare state. I will posit a question for the reader however: What seems more likely? And furthermore, what seems more elitist? To say that the condition of the poor— and the rest of society— is being influenced by certain factors (whether it be capitalism, racism, family life, education, and/or society’s value of education)? Or, to say that the poor are a self-centered, high-culture-ruining, populace that shouldn’t be given government aid? Regardless, Dalrymple contends the latter, and continues to remark on how these evidently insolent, gullible masses just can’t seem to get over their own egos and stop being poor.
In the end, if one really wants to hear what this man has to say on poverty, they’d be better off finding the nearest conservative tabloid. It will give about the same effect, and be just as convincing, though the writing may not be as good.
And what evidence does Theodore Dalrymple bring for his case? Absolutely nothing. No statistics, no references, nothing— except a misrepresentation of Steven Pinker and his work on linguistics. No, for Dalrymple’s case, all he brings is anecdote, which would be only barely convincing if it weren’t peppered with numerous fallacies of false dichotomy, over-generalization, and straw man. It’s also worth noting that much of his accusations that crime was on the rise in Britain were actually statistically false according to the British Crime Survey (Measuring Crime for 25 Years, 2006). According to this source, trends of violent crime, vehicle crime, burglary, and overall trends in crime, have been falling since 1995, one year after Dalrymple wrote his first essay in this collection, “The Knife Went In”.
With this in mind, it seems obvious that this man has a conservative agenda. For who in their right mind, except in the name of ideology, would say such asinine things? According to Dalrymple, the poor not only freely chose to live the way they do, but they did it because they’re selfish, bored, or foolish in believing the liberal elites (or at least, Dalrymple's poorly characterized version of the liberal elites); they allegedly don’t dare help themselves, because that would force them to give up their worldview of the welfare state. I will posit a question for the reader however: What seems more likely? And furthermore, what seems more elitist? To say that the condition of the poor— and the rest of society— is being influenced by certain factors (whether it be capitalism, racism, family life, education, and/or society’s value of education)? Or, to say that the poor are a self-centered, high-culture-ruining, populace that shouldn’t be given government aid? Regardless, Dalrymple contends the latter, and continues to remark on how these evidently insolent, gullible masses just can’t seem to get over their own egos and stop being poor.
In the end, if one really wants to hear what this man has to say on poverty, they’d be better off finding the nearest conservative tabloid. It will give about the same effect, and be just as convincing, though the writing may not be as good.
October 17, 2019
He lost me at the point where he sneers at the Guardian's characterization of Puff Daddy as one of America's greatest minds...
Just as there is said to be no correct grammar or spelling, so there is no higher or lower culture: difference itself is the only recognized distinction. This is a view peddled by intellectuals eager to demonstrate to one another their broad-mindedly democratic sentiment. For example, the newspaper that is virtually the house journal of Britain's liberal intelligentsia, the Guardian (which would once honorably have demanded that, in the name of equity and common decency, the entire population should be given access to high culture), recently published an article about a meeting in New York of what it described in headlines as "some of America's biggest minds."Fuck you, Dalrymple!!
And who were America's biggest minds? Were they its Nobel prize-winning scientists, its physicists and molecular biologists? Were they America's best contemporary scholars or writers? Or perhaps its electronics entrepreneurs who have so transformed the world in the last half-century?
No, some of the biggest minds in America belonged, in the opinion of the Guardian, to rap singers such as Puff Daddy, who were meeting in New York (for "a summit," as the Guardian put it) to end the spate of senseless mutual killings of East and West Coast rap singers and improve the public image of rap as a genre. Pictures of the possessors of these gigantic minds accompanied the article, so that even if you did not already know that rap lyrics espouse a set of values that is in equal part brutal and stupid, you would know at once that these allegedly vast intellects belonged to people indistinguishable from street thugs.
The insincerity of this flattery is obvious to anyone with even a faint acquaintance with the grandeur of human achievement. It is inconceivable that the writer of the article, or the editor of the newspaper, both educated men, truly believed that Puff Daddy et al. possessed some of the biggest minds in America. But the fact that the debased culture of which rap music is a product receives such serious attention and praise deludes its listeners into supposing that nothing finer exists than what they already know and like. Such flattery is thus the death of aspiration, and lack of aspiration is, of course, one of the causes of passivity.
December 30, 2015
Uma das análises mais avassaladoras e aterradoras já escritas sobre a nossa época. O texto é, ao mesmo tempo, jornalístico e literário, e não é qualquer um quem o escreve: o autor, um médico que trabalha entre a subclasse inglesa (e não um intelectual em sua torre de marfim), fala com muito conhecimento de causa. Seu diagnóstico é preocupante.
Dividido em duas partes — 1. A Realidade Sombria e 2. A Teoria Ainda Mais Sombria —, o livro poderia ser resumido na seguinte frase do autor: "Os pobres colhem o que os intelectuais semeiam" (p. 236). Os dados e experiências que ele apresenta ao longo do livro atestam essa cruel verdade de maneira inequívoca.
Acredito que tenha sido a melhor leitura que fiz em 2015.
Dividido em duas partes — 1. A Realidade Sombria e 2. A Teoria Ainda Mais Sombria —, o livro poderia ser resumido na seguinte frase do autor: "Os pobres colhem o que os intelectuais semeiam" (p. 236). Os dados e experiências que ele apresenta ao longo do livro atestam essa cruel verdade de maneira inequívoca.
Acredito que tenha sido a melhor leitura que fiz em 2015.
May 9, 2009
Excellent book. Dalrymple (a pseudonym) is a British doctor (prison doctor and a psychiatrist in slum hospitals) who has worked in various slum, inner-city, and third-world conditions for decades. And he's a good writer. A great essayist.
This book is made up of twenty-two essays describing the patterns of thought and worldview(s) of those in the "under class"--a class neither poor nor politically oppressed; yet, they live a "wretched existence nonetheless."
Dalrymple obviously has a knack for the sociological. But what's unique about this book is that it combines the impersonal data so common to sociological analysis and puts a concrete face on it, warts and all.
Dalrymple bases his social commentary off of his experiences with thousands of patients. Thus, rather than meeting liberal social theory with conservative social theory, Dalrymple offers an in-your-face, real-life, heavily empirical picture of the class of people that is ultimately the product of elite, progressive, liberal factors.
This book shows, if with a bit of overkill, the utter failure of liberal social ideology. When leaders from third-world countries in Africa come to England to hang out with Dalrymple and comment on how sad and pathetic a life the under class lives while not even close to living in the kind of poverty these leaders are familiar with, you know things are bad. Suicide attempts, crime, mess, poor education, crude, crass and violent behavior (esp. domestic violence), rampant pre-marital sex producing illegitimate children, rather than the product of economics, racism, poverty, etc., are actually the outcome of the philosophy of a culture of elites looking for victims.
This book provides a depressing, albeit necessary, look at the worldview of the underclass and the people and mindset responsible for creating it. Thomas Sowell says of the book that it is "A classic for our times. It is as fundamental for understanding the world we live in as the three R's." Liberal social philosophy--and I say this quite apart from any alleged theological reasons--is bankrupt and dangerous (those who want it stated theologically: It doesn’t help promote the peace of the city we are exiled to as we await the promised land to come at the eschaton), Dalrymple helps explain why.
This book is made up of twenty-two essays describing the patterns of thought and worldview(s) of those in the "under class"--a class neither poor nor politically oppressed; yet, they live a "wretched existence nonetheless."
Dalrymple obviously has a knack for the sociological. But what's unique about this book is that it combines the impersonal data so common to sociological analysis and puts a concrete face on it, warts and all.
Dalrymple bases his social commentary off of his experiences with thousands of patients. Thus, rather than meeting liberal social theory with conservative social theory, Dalrymple offers an in-your-face, real-life, heavily empirical picture of the class of people that is ultimately the product of elite, progressive, liberal factors.
This book shows, if with a bit of overkill, the utter failure of liberal social ideology. When leaders from third-world countries in Africa come to England to hang out with Dalrymple and comment on how sad and pathetic a life the under class lives while not even close to living in the kind of poverty these leaders are familiar with, you know things are bad. Suicide attempts, crime, mess, poor education, crude, crass and violent behavior (esp. domestic violence), rampant pre-marital sex producing illegitimate children, rather than the product of economics, racism, poverty, etc., are actually the outcome of the philosophy of a culture of elites looking for victims.
This book provides a depressing, albeit necessary, look at the worldview of the underclass and the people and mindset responsible for creating it. Thomas Sowell says of the book that it is "A classic for our times. It is as fundamental for understanding the world we live in as the three R's." Liberal social philosophy--and I say this quite apart from any alleged theological reasons--is bankrupt and dangerous (those who want it stated theologically: It doesn’t help promote the peace of the city we are exiled to as we await the promised land to come at the eschaton), Dalrymple helps explain why.
December 19, 2021
This may be a better self-help manual than Jordan Peterson’s books by showing you what not to do, what not to emulate, and how not to live your life. Dalrymple is a masterful writer, laying bare the degeneracy of modern Britain (really, the modern West) through personal examples and wit. The sheer depravity of some people made me cringe.
-1 star for not taking into account genetics. Yes, modern academics destroying all pro-social bonds and making all good and bad into “tolerance of all” has led to the decadence of modern culture displayed in this book. But there is more to the equation. See Sarraf et al. 2020 for a most illuminating perspective (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...). Closing our eyes to the fact that we are biological beings with genes will do us no good, and just lead us to more folly.
-1 star for not taking into account genetics. Yes, modern academics destroying all pro-social bonds and making all good and bad into “tolerance of all” has led to the decadence of modern culture displayed in this book. But there is more to the equation. See Sarraf et al. 2020 for a most illuminating perspective (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...). Closing our eyes to the fact that we are biological beings with genes will do us no good, and just lead us to more folly.
June 13, 2010
The UK is perhaps only a few years ahead of the US in seeing the consequences of the liberal ideology of redistribution, making criminals into victims, tying the hands of the police with political correctness, and condemning any sort of structured education or empirical testing. This book is along the lines of Thomas Sowell's works: a deep examination of socialist policies gone awry and their effects in creating, excusing, and funding an underclass at the cost of civilized society.
January 18, 2009
Fantastic.
September 27, 2014
The whole book is driving the point home of personal responsibility. Much like I WILL NOT take responsibility for my abuse of alcohol and my unwillingness to change my situation out of mind blowing laziness and apathy, Dalrymple argues a lot of this is my own choice?!?! What an asshole!!! He is harshing my buzz... He states that a lot of this originates from academia and most from Liberal thought and blaming "the system" rather than "the self". As if!!! The idea that instead of a murderer murdering someone because they are a shitty person, it was his "upbringing" or it was in a "fit of rage out of his control". The doc states it is this excuse that allows the person to become a victim of their own mentality...
What an asshole this author is!? How dear he! My alcoholism is my own choosing, really??? Has he attended an A.A. meeting?? It is all in my brain and shit. My brain is making me do it!!! DUH! Science and shit, what kind of doctor is this guy anyway?! Also, alcoholism is in my family, so I can't choose!! What a dick... In addition, the culture makes me drink in order to conform to "cool dude" status in vain attempts to pick up loose women at the bar because I glamorize alcoholism, the poor, and the down trodden stereotypes that permeate all of western civilization and is heavily portrayed in pop culture.....
This guy has it all wrong?! Pour him a drink!
What an asshole this author is!? How dear he! My alcoholism is my own choosing, really??? Has he attended an A.A. meeting?? It is all in my brain and shit. My brain is making me do it!!! DUH! Science and shit, what kind of doctor is this guy anyway?! Also, alcoholism is in my family, so I can't choose!! What a dick... In addition, the culture makes me drink in order to conform to "cool dude" status in vain attempts to pick up loose women at the bar because I glamorize alcoholism, the poor, and the down trodden stereotypes that permeate all of western civilization and is heavily portrayed in pop culture.....
This guy has it all wrong?! Pour him a drink!
May 26, 2015
Simplesmente, uma análise social avassaladora!
Em muitos momentos fiquei confuso, pois não sabia se o autor estava falando da miséria moral experimentada pela Grã-Bretanha ou pelo Brasil.
Recomendo!
Em muitos momentos fiquei confuso, pois não sabia se o autor estava falando da miséria moral experimentada pela Grã-Bretanha ou pelo Brasil.
Recomendo!
October 22, 2021
This book is not a fun read. It is a series of stories from a British Dr in who tells stories from his work with low income urban people who he calls the “underclass”. He is clear that poverty and race are not what make up his “underclass” population. Instead there is a mindset that he is analyzing.
This book is challenging to assumptions, and faces the reader to see each member of this group as a person.
I will have to contemplate the stories related here for a long time. Like Hillbilly Elegy it pulls back the curtain on a part of society that I have only encountered is slight ways but reminds me that all people matter and need to not be treated as a program or a statistic, but as people.
This book is challenging to assumptions, and faces the reader to see each member of this group as a person.
I will have to contemplate the stories related here for a long time. Like Hillbilly Elegy it pulls back the curtain on a part of society that I have only encountered is slight ways but reminds me that all people matter and need to not be treated as a program or a statistic, but as people.
August 21, 2016
Reading Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom was like going to McDonalds with Margaret Thatcher and having her constantly whispering in your ear while pointing rudely at strangers, 'Oh, aren't they awful, look at their table manners, oh how ghastly!' Now, while Margaret might be right, there might be a bit of lettuce saturated with orange sauce hanging out of a spotty teenager's oily mouth, and you might indeed be repulsed by it, but after her diatribe you will be determined that you see the dining etiquette of a demigod before you.
While I do suspect that there is more than a glimmer of truth in Dalrymple's entirely anecdotal exploration of the British 'underclass', I found myself mentally contradicting him at every turn. He was just too gleeful in pointing out the proverbial lettuce hanging out of the oily mouth of society; he was almost certainly enjoying himself too much when recounting the abject misery of countless other human beings.
If I were to write a book on the same topic, I might simply copy and paste this passage from Joseph Conrad's (let's be honest, unreadable) Heart of Darkness:
"Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. [...] He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — 'The horror! The horror!'"
This is probably the most appropriate response to the cycle of violence, drugs, domestic abuse, parental neglect, illiteracy, misery and alienation explored in this book. You won't get this from Dalrymple, who at one stage describes nightclub attendees as a 'seething mass of people' who 'move like maggots in a tin'. Lovely.
This isn't a bad book, it's actually pretty compelling, and gives an unwavering look at the realities of life 'at the bottom' in the UK. The author doesn't set out to right these wrongs, he simply states them, and I think he's faithful to this aim. However his lack of true sadness and lament at the situation disturbs me; he is simply enjoying himself a bit too much. All of his evidence is also anecdotal, which is problematic in and of itself, and so anyone looking for an in-depth sociological study into the class system in the UK should look elsewhere. This is more of an opinion piece, a very readable opinion piece, which raises some valid issues which would bear further scrutiny.
As an aside, if you were to read Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom alongside Owen Jones's Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, you might feel like you were allowing a UFC fight take place in your brain. Please someone do this and let me know what it's like.
While I do suspect that there is more than a glimmer of truth in Dalrymple's entirely anecdotal exploration of the British 'underclass', I found myself mentally contradicting him at every turn. He was just too gleeful in pointing out the proverbial lettuce hanging out of the oily mouth of society; he was almost certainly enjoying himself too much when recounting the abject misery of countless other human beings.
If I were to write a book on the same topic, I might simply copy and paste this passage from Joseph Conrad's (let's be honest, unreadable) Heart of Darkness:
"Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. [...] He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — 'The horror! The horror!'"
This is probably the most appropriate response to the cycle of violence, drugs, domestic abuse, parental neglect, illiteracy, misery and alienation explored in this book. You won't get this from Dalrymple, who at one stage describes nightclub attendees as a 'seething mass of people' who 'move like maggots in a tin'. Lovely.
This isn't a bad book, it's actually pretty compelling, and gives an unwavering look at the realities of life 'at the bottom' in the UK. The author doesn't set out to right these wrongs, he simply states them, and I think he's faithful to this aim. However his lack of true sadness and lament at the situation disturbs me; he is simply enjoying himself a bit too much. All of his evidence is also anecdotal, which is problematic in and of itself, and so anyone looking for an in-depth sociological study into the class system in the UK should look elsewhere. This is more of an opinion piece, a very readable opinion piece, which raises some valid issues which would bear further scrutiny.
As an aside, if you were to read Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom alongside Owen Jones's Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, you might feel like you were allowing a UFC fight take place in your brain. Please someone do this and let me know what it's like.
February 20, 2021
Please pass the Prozac.
If only Dalrymple had thrown in a plucky and perfectly innocent orphan who triumphs over his circumstances, he'd have out-Dickensianed Dickens with this collection of essays originally published twenty to twenty-five years ago. One shudders to think how much worse the circumstances must have gotten since then. Saddest, the book is all diagnosis and no cure. The author, an avowed atheist of the benign sort who does not make zealous antireligionism a pillar of his own faith, of course finds no hope in the gospel, which leaves me to wonder if any sincere Christians are out there providing any evidence that such hope might have a basis. Are there any Spurgeons and Chalmerses in Britain today? Lord, send laborers into that field to at least pluck a few stalks from the flames if not reap a harvest of countless sheaves! And send some also to the self-righteous classes whose policies perpetuate the self-devouring despair of the lowest. They may be able to insulate themselves from the worst effects of their blinkered malfeasance (or perhaps nonfeasance or dysfeasance would be the better word) in this life, but they'll find no such clemency in the next.
If I might pick one editorial nit (and I've as strong a claim to being constitutionally unable to resist my temptation as Dalrymple's subjects do theirs), the collection was too Americanized. Did they think we don't know that British currency is in pounds rather than dollars or that soccer is called football across the pond?
The narrator was top-notch.
If only Dalrymple had thrown in a plucky and perfectly innocent orphan who triumphs over his circumstances, he'd have out-Dickensianed Dickens with this collection of essays originally published twenty to twenty-five years ago. One shudders to think how much worse the circumstances must have gotten since then. Saddest, the book is all diagnosis and no cure. The author, an avowed atheist of the benign sort who does not make zealous antireligionism a pillar of his own faith, of course finds no hope in the gospel, which leaves me to wonder if any sincere Christians are out there providing any evidence that such hope might have a basis. Are there any Spurgeons and Chalmerses in Britain today? Lord, send laborers into that field to at least pluck a few stalks from the flames if not reap a harvest of countless sheaves! And send some also to the self-righteous classes whose policies perpetuate the self-devouring despair of the lowest. They may be able to insulate themselves from the worst effects of their blinkered malfeasance (or perhaps nonfeasance or dysfeasance would be the better word) in this life, but they'll find no such clemency in the next.
If I might pick one editorial nit (and I've as strong a claim to being constitutionally unable to resist my temptation as Dalrymple's subjects do theirs), the collection was too Americanized. Did they think we don't know that British currency is in pounds rather than dollars or that soccer is called football across the pond?
The narrator was top-notch.
June 12, 2021
Brilliantly written, although a very uncomfortable read.
The author is radically committed to personal responsibility, and is scathing our our society's obsession with victimhood. This, alongside the attack on marriage and sexual revolution, he argues has caused untold damage on the poorest in British society, particular women.
The question he is trying to answer is 'why is there a greater poverty of soul in Britain, than anywhere else in the world?'
This is a writer who has put his money where his mouth is in terms of being a doctor in a prison and inner city hospital- he actually cares for the poor; even if leftist elites would criticise him for asking individuals to take ownership of their lives and decisions.
As a Christian, this book is a wonderful yet harrowing expose on the damage that a secular, relativist worldview obsessed with underminining the nuclear family has on the most vulnerable in our society. Or to put it another way, it's desperately middle class and privileged to talk as though freedom can be found in absence to the structures that have most helped society; that of a high view of marriage, family and sex.
The author is radically committed to personal responsibility, and is scathing our our society's obsession with victimhood. This, alongside the attack on marriage and sexual revolution, he argues has caused untold damage on the poorest in British society, particular women.
The question he is trying to answer is 'why is there a greater poverty of soul in Britain, than anywhere else in the world?'
This is a writer who has put his money where his mouth is in terms of being a doctor in a prison and inner city hospital- he actually cares for the poor; even if leftist elites would criticise him for asking individuals to take ownership of their lives and decisions.
As a Christian, this book is a wonderful yet harrowing expose on the damage that a secular, relativist worldview obsessed with underminining the nuclear family has on the most vulnerable in our society. Or to put it another way, it's desperately middle class and privileged to talk as though freedom can be found in absence to the structures that have most helped society; that of a high view of marriage, family and sex.
October 29, 2011
Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) is a retired doctor and psychiatrist. In this book of essays he presents to us the view into the English underclass.
I must say that I was terrified at what I read. I guess I have never imagined the extent to which England has sunk. Dalrymple covers everything from domestic abuse, addiction, poverty, education and many more topics.
He gets deep into the causes of the development of the underclass. His essay on what is poverty is brilliant. This book will open your eyes to the dangers of nanny state political systems where people are "taken care of" to the extent that they lose their self respect. They lose a sense of responsibility for their own action and thrust themselves into a vicious cycle of violence, crime and poverty.
I highly recommend this book.
To get a sample go and read the essay on poverty that Dalrymple wrote for the city journal
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_...
I must say that I was terrified at what I read. I guess I have never imagined the extent to which England has sunk. Dalrymple covers everything from domestic abuse, addiction, poverty, education and many more topics.
He gets deep into the causes of the development of the underclass. His essay on what is poverty is brilliant. This book will open your eyes to the dangers of nanny state political systems where people are "taken care of" to the extent that they lose their self respect. They lose a sense of responsibility for their own action and thrust themselves into a vicious cycle of violence, crime and poverty.
I highly recommend this book.
To get a sample go and read the essay on poverty that Dalrymple wrote for the city journal
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_...
April 28, 2020
Who knew that the police in Nigeria rent out their standard issue weapons to criminals, to pursue illegal activities in the night? Ha! That and many more unknown facets of reality in this gem of a book.
I have read by now, a bunch of books by the good Dr. Dalrymple. His criticism of the current sociocultural milieu of Britain is beautifully composed, to say the least. I admire his willingness to go against the grain, which years of experience - as a psychiatric doctor in an English slum - must have bolstered.
I have reviewed his other works on goodreads before, but I must reiterate: given the numerous accusations of elitism and apathy against him; the author displays the classic case of heartfelt consideration turning sour – into abject cynicism.
I have read by now, a bunch of books by the good Dr. Dalrymple. His criticism of the current sociocultural milieu of Britain is beautifully composed, to say the least. I admire his willingness to go against the grain, which years of experience - as a psychiatric doctor in an English slum - must have bolstered.
I have reviewed his other works on goodreads before, but I must reiterate: given the numerous accusations of elitism and apathy against him; the author displays the classic case of heartfelt consideration turning sour – into abject cynicism.
November 8, 2008
This was a very disturbing book, one of the most honest looks at England's underclass. Dr. Theodore Dalrymple has a very real-life look into the world he describes so eloquently in his life as a doctor in a slum district. The similarities with American life are startling. I was also surprised that his stories of addicts and people caught in the system resemble people I have dealt with in my supposedly "insulated" suburban private school. The decline of society cannot be denied but just like the "frog in the pot" we continue down the slippery slope without thought, led by liberal thinking into further and further ignorance.
It was a refreshing change from the "educational drivel" served up, I will read this again with a notebook and pen.
It was a refreshing change from the "educational drivel" served up, I will read this again with a notebook and pen.
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