Life at the Bottom

Life at the Bottom

Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. xv + 263

This is an astonishingly depressing book. You really do need to read it--but there are a few caveats that I will get to at the end of the review.

Dalrymple is a psychiatrist in a large inner city. If you just flipped the book open at random, some people would read these horrifying accounts, and notice that the all the prices and values are expressed in dollars, and start screeching, "Racist!" "He's blaming the victims!"

But Dalrymple is a psychiatrist at a large inner city hospital in London, and he is quite emphatic that while some of the underclass he is describing is black, and some is Asian, most of it is white--and that race is really quite irrelevant to the problems of the underclass. It is the values that have been promulgated by upper class and upper middle class intellectuals that have created the problems of the British underclass.

Listening as I do every day to the accounts people give of their lives, I am struck by the very small part in them which they ascribe to their own efforts, choices, and actions. Implicitly they disagree with Bacon's famous dictum that "chiefly the mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands." Instead they experience themselves as putty in the hands of fate.

Dalyrymple describes how the words that many of those he sees imply that everything bad that happens to them is just random chance. He tells of a convicted murderer who was asking him for a methadone prescription:

I told him that I would prescribe a reducing dose, and that within a relatively short time my prescription would cease. I would not prescribe a maintenance dose for a man with a life sentence.

"Yes," he said, "it's just my luck to be here on this charge."

Luck? He had already served a dozen prison sentences, many of them for violence, and on the night in question had carried a knife with him, which he must have known from experience that he was inclined to use. But it was the victim of the stabbing who was the real author of the killer's action: if he hadn't been there, he wouldn't have been stabbed.

My murderer was by no means alone in explaining his deed as due to circumstances beyond his control. As it happens, there are three stabbers (two of them to death) now in the prison who used precisely the same expression when describing to me what happened. "The knife went in," they said when pressed to recover their allegedly lost memories of the deed.

The knife went in-unguided by human hand, apparently. That the long-hated victims were sought out, and the knives carried to the scene of the crimes, was as nothing compared with the willpower possessed by the inanimate knives themselves, which determined the unfortunate outcome.

He recounts a prisoner who specialized in breaking into churches and stealing valuables, then burning down the church to hide as best he could the crime. And who is responsible for these crimes, in the mind of the prisoner? Churches, because "in general churches were poorly secured, easy to break into, and contained valuable objects in silver."

Dalrymple describes women who move from brutal man to brutal man, with a string of children, seldom more than one by each. When they find a man who isn't violent towards them, they leave, because he clearly doesn't care about them enough to express his feelings.

Oddly enough, as much as anger as Dalrymple has for these members of the underclass who seem intent on destroying their lives, and that of everyone with the misfortune to be their lovers, neighbors, and friends, his greatest rage is directed at the multiculturalists and Marxists who have created this mess.

Dalyrymple, who is pretty clearly not a Christian, points out that the collapse of traditional sexual morality did not free the underclass from all the horrible limitations of narrow-minded rigidity. Instead, it destroyed a system of family ties and duties that provided the most stable situation for the poor to rise up and out. The underclass has all the sexual jealousy that was present in the past (and then some), but without any of the rules or social conventions that punished men for philandering and discouraged them (not always very effectively) from abusing their wives and children. The absence of those rules has only aggravated the sexual jealousy problem that seems to be natural to the species.

I have a few complaints about the book. It consists of a series of essays that first appeared in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, you will find certain ideas and examples appear in multiple essays.

A more serious problem is that because it has no footnotes, there are some claims that Dalrymple makes that leave me wondering, "Could that really be true?" He claims that roughly 1/4 of the younger generation of Britons are illiterate, or so close as to be practically illiterate. He tells me that he now has to ask patients that he sees that over age 16 if they can read and write. He reports that many not cannot do so, but do not find it even slightly odd or embarrassing that they cannot. He says that many who can read can sound the words, but often how no idea what they mean. When it comes to general knowledge--he reports that only a very few can identify when World War II took place.

I visited Britain in 1999, at the time that Dalrymple was writing these essays describing a nation reduced to almost medieval levels of literacy, violence, and ignorance. I saw some very discouraging and worrisome signs of social degradation there. I have read a lot of other sources that at least hint at the decline that Dalrymple describes. Still, I do find myself wondering if Dalrymple is letting his experiences of inner city London too strongly color his perceptions. If all of Britain were this bad off, the country would be completely unmanageable.

Perhaps Dalrymple's account is too dark. Still, I recognize that his description of the promotion of victimhood, the destruction of educational standards, the exaltation of racism and classism as the defining causes of everything, and the creation of a dependency society, has created this quagmire, is accurate. We saw it happen in the United States, and in spite of the welfare reforms that Congress passed in 1995, we still have a lot of these problems. I have known too many examples over the years.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Dalrymple's book is that he fails to acknowledge that there is a legitimate distinction between the undeserving and the deserving poor. There are people who, even with all the horrible bad ideas that have been dropped on them through government schooling and the general destruction of the criminal justice system, are still victims. The girl who gets raped, and ends up in a cycle of destructive relationships as a result. The children who are physically or sexually abused, and end up violent or self-destructive. The many women that Dalrymple describes who have tied themselves to violent losers because they have never seen any other pattern of relationships! These are people that might well benefit from a hand up--if those who are offering the hand up recognize the nature of what put these victims in their situation.

As Dalrymple points out, racism is widely used as an excuse for problems among Britons of African or Caribbean ancestry--and he does not dispute that racism has been, and may still be a problem. But he also points out that it utterly fails to explain white Britons who have reduced themselves to the British equivalent of a "wigger." It also fails to explain why Britons of East Indian ancestry are disproportionately going to law school and medical school. At the same time, there is now a sizable population of third generation East Indians in Briton, who are beginning to take their cultural clues from the British underclass. The parents and grandparents of these kids came to Briton when racism was legal and widely accepted--and yet did not end up as drug abusing, violent criminals.

Well worth checking out of the library. Read it and meditate on Dalyrmple's thoughts about how multiculturalism and class envy (promoted from the top) is turning Britain into a Third World country. It isn't the immigrants that are doing this; it's the intellectuals.