‘Life at the Bottom’: How the Underclass Thinks
A review of ‘Life at the Bottom’, by Theodore Dalrymple; Ivan R. Dee, 2001.
Theodore Dalrymple is not actually called Theodore Dalrymple. He is called Anthony Daniels. He elected to use a nom de plume because he was working as a prison psychiatrist when he began to write and thought his views unlikely to win him many admirers from among his colleagues. As for his distinctive pseudonym, he chose it to evoke a cantankerous old man lamenting the state of the surrounding culture, which it certainly does.
Dalrymple was the first and only writer whom Charles Moore, then editor of the Spectator magazine, agreed to publish on the basis of unsolicited articles. From the start of the early 1980s, he contributed stark accounts of working as both a prison and hospital psychiatrist. He has said somewhere that he would speak to convicts in the morning and the people they harmed in the afternoon. What was and remains unusual about Dalrymple is how he apportions blame. He takes a dim view of the notion that our conditions are chiefly responsible for who we become.
In the essays collected in his most famous book, Life at the Bottom, we find out why. Drawing on interviews with more than 10,000 people who attempted suicide, each of whom, Dalrymple claims, told him stories about four or five other people, he tells stories of men and women who lead lives characterised by criminality, addiction, sexual irresponsibility, disloyalty, violence and neglect. The thread that runs through the accounts each person gives of his actions is the total absence of a sense of responsibility. Vanishingly few see themselves as individuals with a say over how events go.
He tells stories of men and women who lead lives characterised by criminality, addiction, sexual irresponsibility, disloyalty, violence and neglect.
Modern poverty, writes Dalrymple, is marked not by a lack of money but by a ‘wildly dysfunctional set of values’. Financial poverty has been replaced by ‘emptiness, agonies, violence and moral squalor’. Young men, often described as ‘ferocious young egoists’ act violently and obsessively towards their partners. Mothers shirk their most basic maternal duties. Addiction, argues Dalrymple, is more often not the cause of criminality but the result of it.
Dalrymple is hardly sympathetic towards his objects of study; but his attacks are directed at liberal and left-wing people and, in particular, intellectuals, whose theories of social determinism, egalitarianism, scorn for the traditional family, abandonment of bourgeois values and creation of a junk ‘pop culture’ has both given rise to an underclass and made sure that its members cannot escape it. In this, he anticipates the psychologist Rob Henderson, whose now-famous concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ describes views held by educated people that confer status on those people while causing real-world harm to the less educated. The educated person may call for the decriminalisation of drugs or seek to remove the stigma around non-monogamy. As a wealth of evidence shows, says Henderson, this merely licenses behaviour that wrecks lives.
How we view the world matters, Dalrymple says, and it makes itself known in our words and actions. Everyone has a ‘Weltenshauung, whether he knows it or not’. Those to whom he speaks use the passive tense when speaking of themselves, reflecting the belief that the world acts on them, not they on it. An example of this, repeated several times in the collection, is ‘the knife went in’, as though the knife in the hand of the one who stabs his neighbour did the stabbing. It is important to acknowledge that such beliefs are not adopted consciously by the members of the ‘underclass’ about whom Dalrymple writes. They ‘seem surprised’ when he suggests they have a say in events, and tell him he is the first person who has ever suggested to them that they have the power to change their lives for the better.
Everyone has a ‘Weltenshauung,’ he writes, ‘whether he knows it or not’.
The theory of social determinism is, if anything, far more entrenched today in Western society than it was at the time Dalrymple was writing. Public services, established to support those who had fallen on hard times, may not themselves have forced people into a passive relation with the world, but in a society that has largely adopted a deterministic worldview, Dalrymple suggests, public services that go beyond the provision of a safety net support a culture of dependence. At the heart of these rival outlooks — the social deterministic view and one centred on individual responsibility — are rival conceptions of human nature. One says we are ‘nothing but’ objects, bound by the laws of cause and effect; the other, that we are self-conscious human persons, who relate to one another as individuals and make choices based on reasons. Both can be true: the paradox springs from an inability to tolerate a both/and position that recognises that both facts and meanings have their place: that love is both neurochemistry and the most life-affirming feeling there is. One lies in the domain of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology; the other, in the realm of philosophy and religion.
If it is true that we are becoming more reductionist, mechanistic, and ‘scientistic’ in our cultural Weltenshauung, believing science is the only means of accessing the truth, then we are unavoidably raising up the social deterministic position and pushing down the one that believes we are sovereign in our own lives. And in doing so, we debase the human being who, incapable of doing wrong (because he is a victim of his conditioning), is equally incapable of doing right, or doing good. We see this starkly in the quality of our visual art, much of which would once inspire awe and admiration, inviting us to rise to the height of its subjects or, on the other hand, avoid their moral failings, as in Thomas Couture’s The Decadence of the Romans, which warns us of what happens when we stop taking responsibility for ourselves and succumb to our basest instincts.
Dalrymple takes this latter position and argues it forcefully in these essays, which were first published in the Manhattan Institute. His prose is crystalline in its clarity, penetrating in its critique. He has the immensely readable style of one who really does not care what his reader thinks of him, and plenty will accuse him – plenty have – of blaming the down-at-heel for their misfortune. But for Dalrymple, writing in the fashion of Orwell, what matters is striving fearlessly to get to the heart of matters and depicting things as he himself sees them with the greatest honesty and precision possible. In this, he succeeds.
