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Theodore Dalrymple
Published by: Ivan R. Dee
 
When you’re a psychiatrist splitting your working hours between an inner-city hospital in one of Britain’s larger cities and a nearby prison, not much
escapes your attention about life at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale. Here is where the rubber meets the road, where social justice ideas combine
with government intervention in an effort rescue those whom contemporary society and the modern economy have left behind.
That psychiatrist is Theodore Dalrymple.
Dalrymple’s penetrating analysis of the ills plaguing Britain’s large and seething underclass combined with a cutting wit and a gift for clarity make him
one of the most important social commentators of our time.
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass is a collection of Dalrymple’s essays challenging many of the self-serving
shibboleths of the liberal-left and the policies that flow there from. In it, he demonstrates how the pet social and educational theories of the elite,
empowered by the state, are more often than not the cause of poverty, ignorance and violence among his clients, rather than their antidote.
What really sets Dalrymple apart from other contemporary critics of government intervention, however, is his utter refusal to absolve his clients – and by
extension all those who inhabit the world of chaos in which he works – from any responsibility for their condition. Drawing on his extensive experience as
mental health professional and his own family background (his father was himself a product of British slum), Dalrymple illustrates time and again how the
actions and attitudes of the “victims” of social injustice contribute in no small way to their repeated victimhood.
Take, for instance, the case of the young eighteen-year-old woman who is admitted to hospital, having taken an overdose after an argument with her
twenty-eight year old boyfriend with whom she has been living for nine months. The boyfriend, who is unemployed, was kicked out of the army for using drugs.
He is extremely jealous and controlling of her. She is clearly afraid of him. Dalrymple asks what she knows about his previous girlfriends.
“He was living with one, but she left him when she found out he was seeing someone else.”
“What is your boyfriend interested in apart from you?” I ask.
“Nothing really,” she replies.
“And what are your interests?” I ask again.
“I don’t have any,” she says.
She hates her poorly paid job, which requires no skill at all – not that she has any skill to impart. She left school as soon as she could, though I would
estimate that she is of above- average intelligence, and in any case she never tried very hard to learn because it was not socially acceptable to do so. In
short, I tell her, she has always taken the line of least resistance, and as is says in Shakespeare, nothing will come of nothing.
“What should I do?” she asks me.
“Your boyfriend will imprison you,” I tell her. “He will take over your life completely, and if you live with him he will become violent. You will spend
several years being ill-treated and abused; eventually you will leave him, but you will not have been a victim. On the contrary, you will have been the
co-author of your own misery because I have now told you what will happen, just as your parents and your friends have told you.”
“But I love him.”
Then there is the case of a prison inmate who demands to know why he repeatedly broke into homes and stole VCRs. Dalrymple refuses to examine ‘his past’,
prompting the exclamation “But something must make me do it!”
“How about greed, laziness and a thirst for excitement?” I suggested.
“What about my childhood?” he asked.
“Nothing to do with it,” I replied firmly.
He looked at me as if I had assaulted him. Actually, I thought the matter more complex than I was admitting, but I did not want him to misunderstand my
main message: that he was the author of his own deeds.
Life at the Bottom takes us on a journey through a world that few have experienced and fewer still understand, including those whose job it is to
solve the problems Dalrymple describes. His penetrating analysis is relentless and uncompromising, but also sympathetic and often humourous. This is a must
read for anyone concerned about the effects of liberalism run amok.
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