“The social workers insisted, against her desperate pleas, that the child should stay with his biological father while she was in the hospital. They were deaf to her argument that he was an unsuitable guardian, even for two weeks: he would regard the child as an encumbrance, an intolerable interference with his daily routine of drinking, whoring, and fighting. They said it was wrong to pass judgment on a man like this and threatened her with dire consequences if she did not agree to their plan. So the two-year-old was sent to his father as they demanded.
Within the week he and his new girlfriend had killed the child by swinging him against the wall repeatedly by his ankles and smashing his head. At this somewhat belated juncture, society did reluctantly make a judgment: the murderers both received life sentences.” (p. 182)
Sadly, this is only one of many horrifying and depressing incidents recounted in Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass by Anthony Malcolm Daniels (writing under the nom de plume of Theodore Dalrymple). Daniels is a psychiatrist who worked at a British hospital as well as a prison. Through his work, Daniels interacted with thousands of people from Britain’s lower class. The portrait that emerges from these interactions is a life steeped in violence, drug and alcohol addiction, vandalism, theft, suicide, illiteracy, boredom, fear, and despair.
Daniels argues that the majority of the blame for these horrors lies at the feet of the intelligentsia and academia. He argues that ideas are the fundamental factor shaping human life. The ideas proffered by the intellectuals have had devastating effects on those poor individuals who have swallowed them wholesale. Determinism (whether it be of the economic or genetic variety) has led to fatalism among criminals and addicts: after all, they can’t help but do what they were determined to do by factors beyond their control. Relativism has led to a willful abstention from judging any action or individual as bad or as comparatively better or worse than anything else. Daniels recounts repeatedly counseling women who have been abused by violent boyfriends to avoid getting into relationships with such types of men; the women inevitably reply that it is wrong to judge people.
The following is an excerpt from one these interactions between Daniels and a young female patient who “thought the Second World War took place in the 1970s”:
“‘I can look after myself,’ said my seventeen-year-old.
‘But men are stronger than women,’ I said. ‘When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage.’
‘That’s a sexist thing to say,’ she replied.
A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness and of feminism in particular.
‘But it’s a plain, straightforward, and inescapable fact,’ I said.
‘It’s sexist,’ she reiterated firmly.” (p. 37)
Daniels states that the hospital where he works regularly employs doctors from foreign countries who come to work a year’s stint; these doctors are usually from poverty-stricken countries. Daniels notes that these doctors are initially impressed by Britain’s generous welfare state, but this initial appraisal quickly sours. Daniels recounts how a doctor from the Philippines saved the life of a heroin addict who had overdosed; when this addict regained consciousness he immediately started verbally abusing the hospital staff. Daniels notes that this behavior did not arise from any initial confusion since it continued until the patient was discharged. Daniels writes:
“My doctors from Bombay, Madras, or Manila observe this kind of conduct open-mouthed. At first they assume that the cases they see are a statistical quirk, a kind of sampling error, and that, given time, they will encounter a better, more representative cross section of the population. Gradually, however, it dawns upon them that what they have seen is representative. When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone gratitude.” (p. 136)
He goes on to write:
“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. They come to realize that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes anti-social egotism. The spiritual impoverishment of the population seems to them worse than anything they have ever known in their own countries. And what they see is all the worse, of course, because it should be so much better. The wealth that enables everyone effortlessly to have enough food should be liberating, not imprisoning. Instead it has created a large caste of people for whom life is, in effect, a limbo in which they have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is a life stymied of meaning.
‘On the whole,’ said one Filipino doctor to me, ‘life is preferable in the slums of Manila.’ He said it without any illusions as to the quality of life in Manila.” (p. 142)
The welfare state readily helps those who refuse to help themselves, but it offers no support to those who seek to better themselves. Daniels tells the stories of two different young women who worked hard to elevate themselves to a better station in life. These brave and dedicated young women received no support from those around them—only insolent jeers since any individual’s achievement would represent a refutation of the fatalism used to excuse their own lack of effort. And as soon as individual effort was extended, the “helpful” hand of the welfare state withdrew. Daniels writes:
“As intelligent as she was forceful, my patient found herself a job as a clerk in a local law office and has worked there ever since. She was thenceforth charged the full economic rent for her miserable room, and all pleas to the authorities on her part to be relocated in public housing were turned down on the grounds that she was already adequately accommodated and in any case was unfit yet to manage her own affairs. As to public assistance for further full-time education, that was out of the question, since in order to pursue such full-time education she would have to give up her job: and she would then be considered to have made herself voluntarily unemployed and thus unentitled to public assistance. But if she cared to become pregnant, why then, public assistance was at hand, in generous quantities.” (p. 161)
One is tempted to believe that the architects of such welfare policies construct them with the goal of keeping people in poverty.
In a politically correct society, morality is inverted. Daniels observes that in such a society, criminals are the “victims” and law-abiding citizens are guilty by default; this is held to be the case due to the Marxist notion that inequality equals injustice and that those who are well off must necessarily be exploiting those who are not. Daniels provides many examples of this phenomena; here’s one: the nurses at his hospital called the police because a patient who was admitted for a drug overdose assaulted another patient. When the police arrived, they stated that they couldn’t do anything because the man was a hospital patient who was suffering. Later this same man had to be forcibly extracted from a bathroom by hospital security so that the nurses could administer life-saving medicine to him. After he was discharged from the hospital, this man filed charges against the hospital security staff for assaulting him. Daniels writes, “The police, of course, knew this man to be a recidivist criminal, a drunk, a liar, a general nuisance, and inclined to violence into the bargain: but they took his complaints seriously. Having refused to act when he assaulted the patient opposite him, they now interviewed the security men, not once but repeatedly, under caution that anything they said might be used in evidence against them. They interviewed other hospital staff to ferret out any evidence that might lead to the prosecution of the security men. As of this moment, the investigations continue, despite the fact that the only evidence is the man’s word, and that in the meantime he has committed suicide while drunk, so that he can no longer be called as a witness. The police have hinted that they might still arrest the security staff.” (p. 227-8)
One criticism I have of Daniels is that he is snobbish at times. To put this criticism in philosophical terms: Daniels rejects the fallacy of subjectivism only to embrace the equally fallacious position of intrinsicism. Intrinsicism is the view that values exist independently of a valuer and inhere in objects, actions, qualities, etc. Values are not intrinsic; they are objective. Something is a value if it is judged to further an individual’s life and wellbeing. Since intrinsicists take values to be intuited, they ironically fall back into the trap of subjectivism by equating their emotional reactions with intuited value. For example, Daniels decries tattoos and piercings because the majority of prison inmates sport such accoutrement, but this is merely an association and not an objective judgment of tattoos and piercings. I personally do not have any tattoos or piercings nor a desire for any, but I certainly do not regard them as bad because there is no objective evidence that they are physically or psychologically harmful. Tattoos and piercings are a perfectly optional value for those who derive aesthetic enjoyment from them.
While Daniels provides a stunning indictment against the welfare state and the false and pernicious philosophical doctrines promulgated by the left, he falls short (as all conservatives do) by failing to condemn the moral doctrine that supports the entire edifice: altruism.
His book is still very much worth reading though because of the numerous, compelling anecdotes he provides.
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About the author
Uncomfortable truth
I came to this book with my guard up. Social commentary is dominated by the bourgeois liberal elites whose world view is shaped by their guilt at being educated, employed and all-knowing. Their product is the virtue signal, and their marketplace is publishing, mainstream media and (of course) academia. So, despite having heard that Dalrymple was a wonderful essayist, I approached him with hesitation. He is, after all, widely published, if not widely quoted by the afore-mentioned bourgeois liberal elites. Well, hell, here was someone who has actually spent his working life down in the trenches with those "at the bottom". A doctor and psychologist who works daily in the worst of Britain's slums and prisons dealing with the appalling by-products of social policy and its remorseless implementation of welfare dependency — with its consequential loss of self respect and self-determination. Yes, Dalrymple is a gifted essayist, but he makes his points with a unique blend of real life anecdotes and sympathetic analysis. Life at the bottom is truly awful, and many who exist there cannot be saved from the consequences of the choices they have continually made. But Dalrymple does not reserve his barely contained anger for them. Quite the contrary: his anger is exquisitely focussed on the elites who have designed and implemented the bureaucratic systems behind welfarism.
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