In A Discourse
on the Origins of Inequality, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 18^th
century father of modern socialist thought, urged his fellow Frenchmen to
believe that the misery of the poor and downtrodden was entirely the fault of a
greedy and grasping few who, enthralled by an unnatural desire for property,
had usurped more than their divinely allotted share of things, leaving too
little for the needs of their fellows. The awful result, Rousseau said, was the
complete and utter corruption of human nature. 
Lacking enough in the way of material goods to meet even their most basic
needs, the poor had turned to pillage, prostitution, and pilferage by way of
compensation, becoming in the process dependent, distrustful, dishonest, dirty,
and diseased. At the same time, the rich, who possessed more of the world’s
goods than they could use and enjoyed unwarranted power over their fellows as a
result, had become wasteful, boastful, arrogant, and cruel as well as drunken,
dissolute and depraved. In The Social Contract, Rousseau allowed
that, to restore both the witless poor and the wicked rich to their natural
good health and kindliness, it would be necessary to redistribute wealth. Taxes
for the propertied; government welfare for the propertyless. From each according to his abilities; to
each according to his needs. (Yes,
Rousseau said it before Marx.) Equality
for all.

In the nineteenth century, another French
intellectual, the utopian socialist Auguste Comte, held that, to restructure
society so as to achieve equality, intellectuals and politicians would need to
be guided not by a reactionary religion, which now merely helped prop up the
old and unjust order, but by a revolutionary science of sociology, which would
expose its rotten foundations. According to the fundamental postulate of this
new science, everything —including human behavior—is a scientifically
determinate function of its causes and correlates; so, there is no such thing
as freedom of will and, therefore, no such thing as responsibility for one’s
actions. In fact, it was said, the
individual human being does not so much act
on as react to his external
circumstances. Therefore, it is in the
outward—particularly the social—environment that we must seek the causes and
cures for the vices of the poor and prosperous. Furthermore, ‘cure’ is literally the right word here. Evil is not sin but sickness, and misbehavior,
however wicked, is never the agent’s own fault but always that of
“society.” Therefore, the just and
humane prescription for crime must be not punishment but therapy, not
correction but compassion; not judges but physicians. To explain is to exculpate; to understand is to forgive.

We are often told—especially by those who have no
taste or talent for it—that philosophy is an idle pursuit that makes little
difference to anyone’s workaday life. 
This is a delusion that can survive only in the minds of people who take
too shortsighted a view of human affairs. 
No one who knows anything about the 20^th century history of
the West can fail to be impressed by how thoroughly the philosophy—or, if you
prefer, the ideology—just adumbrated has permeated its institutions and imbued
the world view of its populations. The
Soviet Union and its satellites were meant to embody the humanitarian ideals of
Rousseau using the scientistic methods of Comte. These states have now failed,
of course, but the socialist principles that they tried to enact are still very
much with us. Every society in Western
Europe has a welfare state devoted to the confiscation by taxation of what is
deemed to be the undeserved wealth of the rich and to its redistribution by
government bureaucrats to the equally undeserving but less fortunate poor.
Similar policies are in force in greater or lesser degree in the U.S., Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, India, Mexico, and Japan. True, most of these states have market economies, but it is
widely believed that, because capitalized markets generate inequality as they
generate wealth, they constitute regrettable, if unavoidable, obstacles to
“social justice,” a notion that has been both emptied of all reference to
desert and disconnected from all belief in reward for talent, hard work, or
contribution to the happiness of others. 
In the countries just
listed, inequality is invariably equated
with inequity and attributed to exploitation, from which it follows that the
prosperous and powerful can have done no right, and the poor and powerless can
do no wrong. One is hard put to imagine
how embrace of a political philosophy could be more complete.

 

Or more disastrous if we are to believe Theodore
Dalrymple’s compact, 250-page, work describing how the Weltanschauung just described has created and corrupted the British
underclass, the group that was meant to be its main beneficiary. A psychiatrist, himself of humble origins
and the son of a militant Communist, Dalrymple works in a slum hospital and a
nearby prison in Birmingham, England, where he spends his off duty hours
writing exquisitely crafted, acutely sensitive, and surpassingly intelligent
essays about the problems and pathologies of his patients. This book is a
collection of twenty-two of these essays, the earliest published in 1994, the
latest in 2001. Each of these diminutive masterpieces seamlessly weaves
perceptive accounts of the miserable lives of Dalrymple’s patients with
passionate denunciations of the social institutions that were meant to improve
their lives but have instead made them worse.

As Dalrymple views the British underclass that he
serves, it now suffers neither from poverty nor from oppression, as usually
presumed, but from self-destructive habits that are fostered by policy makers
and government bureaucrats guided by beliefs that have filtered down, often in
garbled form, from intellectuals who do not know what they are talking about
because they do not live with it. To support this charge, Dalrymple gives us
not statistics but anecdotes, heart rending stories about the people with whom
he has for decades had daily contact. He acknowledges that these stories would
prove little if taken singly, one by one, but he rightly believes that they
acquire evidentiary force as well as emotional power when, told together, they
begin to display a pattern. (For a statistical argument reaching similar
conclusions, consult Charles Murray’s now classic but still sound Losing Ground: American Social Policy
1950-1980 (Harper Collins:
1984)). His aim here is to assemble
enough anecdotes to make the pattern manifest. 
Some of his anecdotes are about Indian Sikhs and Pakistani Muslims, who
not only cannot get along with each other but also cannot adapt to secular
Britain; but these form a sub theme. Most
of the stories are about whites, who constitute the greatest part of Britain’s
still growing underclass.

Dalrymple’s account of this class begins with
anecdotes about violent criminals—murderers, rapists, thieves, burglars, drug
addicts, and abusers of women. The most
notable thing about them is how they all reject responsibility for their
actions, blaming it on society instead, while claiming to be victims of mental
affliction and environmental circumstance. 
Thus, one man excused his chronic thievery on the grounds that he had an
“addiction” to stealing, and another excused his habit of assaulting people on
the grounds that he lacked control over his temper. Both suggested that Dalrymple would be to blame for future lapses
if he failed to effect instant and effortless cures of these self-diagnosed
maladies. The thief also thought the
wealthy were at fault for not sufficiently protecting their valuables; and the
brute blamed the women he battered for provoking his wrath. Other men even denied being the agents of
their actions: “The knife went in,” was the phrase used by more than one
murderer. As Dalrymple observes,
sophisticated and convoluted rationalizations like these are not likely to have
been thought of without the help of intellectuals, who—as we noted in the
beginning—have encouraged belief that, since the causes of conduct always lie
outside the criminal, it is not he but “society” that should be made to answer.

On the standard social science answer, what society
is guilty of is letting the lupine rich drive people to crime by making them
poor. Therefore, what society must do
to absolve itself is eliminate poverty by redistributing wealth. Dalrymple’s response to this popular theory
is to point out —this time using statistics—that it does not fit plain
facts. The virtual elimination of
poverty in Britain and elsewhere has done nothing to reduce the rate of crime;
on the contrary, it has multiplied it. 
Given any sensible definition of poverty, the underclass in Britain is
no longer poor.  With the government
providing housing, food, schooling, medical care, and monthly checks to nearly
a third of the population of Britain, no one need lack basic comforts, much
less material necessities. By world
standards, in fact, the “poor” are rich. 
Yet, contrary to what would be predicted on the theory that crime is
caused by poverty, the crime rate in Britain is now several times higher than
it was in generations past, when poverty was both real and extensive. Crime is
also rampant in such wealthy countries as the United States and New Zealand,
but it was rare in the truly poverty stricken places in Africa where Dalrymple
once worked. This lack of correlation
does not jibe with belief in causation.

 In
Dalrymple’s view, the main cause of the spectacular rise in crime with the rise
in prosperity is simple reluctance of the police to do their jobs. As Dalrymple
angrily demonstrates with more stories, the police in modern day Britain often
show less solicitous concern for the victims of crime than for its
perpetrators. Frequently repeated
offense against the law is not enough to get a man jailed where the police,
afraid of being derided as tools of the dominant class, believe that hardened
criminals have a special claim on victimhood status that entitles them to
special tolerance. Thus, a man who successively assaulted the nurses in
Dalrymple’s clinic and a physician in another hospital was not arrested but
twice turned loose in the street outside, leaving those who had called the
police in fear that he would return to take vengeance on them. (Instead, he
filed a lawsuit against the hospital’s security staff for its use of
“excessive” force in restraining him.)  
Similarly, a middle-aged woman’s pleas for protection went unheeded
although she had been repeatedly robbed in the street near her regularly
burglarized and frequently vandalized home. As Dalrymple observes, police
practices of this sort encourage criminals by sheltering them from both shame
and fear of punishment, while denying basic security to their hapless victims.

Dalrymple’s parlous tales about brutal and
predacious men are followed by equally horrifying vignettes about the women who
take up with them, bear their children, and suffer their beatings. In one essay, we are told of a sixteen-year-old
girl who had dropped out of school to live with a succession of violent
men. Typical of many other young women
of her social class, she thought that leaving home to have fun and babies would
be more exciting than going to school, and she believed that her consorts were
displaying their affection for her by battering her during fits of jealous rage
over imagined infidelities. When the severity of her lacerations (bruises, a
broken jaw, etc.) caused Dalrymple to suggest that it might be prudent of her to
leave the man who had beaten her, she indignantly replied that she could take
care of herself. Reminded that men are
on average stronger than women, she rebuked him with the retort, “That is a sexist thing to say.”

 Here, again,
Dalrymple detects failure in the public institutions that are supposed to serve
the underclass. The schools, whose job was to educate this young woman, had
instead merely indoctrinated her in the pernicious nonsense of political
correctness. She had had no real
tutelage in grammar or mathematics. No
attempt had been made at preparing her for a better and more satisfying life.
Instead, in accordance with an intellectually fashionable “multiculturalism,”
she had been taught that the self-destructive but egocentric behavior and coarse
speech of the illiterate underclass are as good as the more restrained conduct
and mannerly speech of those who were her social superiors. There had been for
her no discipline in either liberal arts, practical skills, or personal virtues
that she would need to earn a living or keep a household and raise children,
much less rise in the world. Instead,
clumsy attempts at entertainment had been coupled with tiresome lessons in the
rhetoric of class warfare.

Hers was not an exceptional case. As Dalrymple
observes, even the most intelligent members of the British underclass tend to
leave school early. Excruciatingly
bored by daily repetition of supposedly “relevant” but useless trivia, they
decide to take up what will turn out to be an even more boring existence
watching television during the week and going out to clubs for drinking,
dancing, and casual sex on the weekends. 
Lacking not only the skills with which to gain employment but also all
interest in the larger world, these dropouts will have learned nothing in
school that might help them interrupt preoccupation with their own unhappiness
or break their sense of futility. They
will live for the excitement of the moment until drugs, debauchery, and
degradation rob the men of their vigor and leave the women saddled with a
passle of illegitimate children whose diverse fathers are nowhere to be
found. But no need to worry. The state that failed to educate them will
not fail to provide them and their children with the housing, food, medical
care, and spending money that they might otherwise have been able to take pride
in earning on their own. Having taught them to concern themselves only with
their immediate needs and pleasures, the state will keep its end of a Faustian
bargain by taking care of their future, devoid of meaning as it has become.

Over and over
again, Dalrymple reminds us that the demoralized behavior displayed by such
pitiable people is not the result of poverty. 
That they live in squalor he acknowledges, even emphasizes; but he insists
that this is not because they are poor. 
The problem of the underclass is, rather, that they have self defeating
habits reinforced by public policies based on false ideas created by air headed
intellectuals who do not have to live with their mistakes. The underclass now have the material means
to satisfy their animal needs. What they lack is the spiritual and moral
wherewithal to rise above these base needs, and Dalrymple blames the government
for that fact and the intellectuals who put the government up to it. By saving people in the underclass from the
need to struggle for a living, the paternalistic government denies them their
birthright as human beings. By
encouraging belief that middle class aspirations are a form of treachery and
middle class behavior is a form of reproach to their compatriots, this same
government discourages these same people from seeking anything better.

To illustrate his point, Dalrymple tells about the
local housing agency, which eagerly
provides apartments to slatternly young women with the illegitimate children of
absent fathers, but does nothing to help a young woman with gumption enough to
find an honest job and ambition enough to desire more education. Why not? 
Because a government devoted to serving need alone must not ask what
caused the need, and a government devoted to achieving equality above all
things must not discriminate on the basis of merit or desert. As Dalrymple observes, people unlucky enough
to be patronized by such a government are being systematically taught to behave
in ways that do not serve them but degrade them. In his view, the system serves only the bureaucrats whose jobs it
justifies. Thus, he tells of an agency
that runs a smelly hovel for 95 homeless persons from clean and modern offices
housing 41 well paid staff.

 However,
hard as he is on the politicians who created this misbegotten system and the
bureaucrats who administer it, Dalrymple is even harder on the intellectuals
who inspired it and continue to apologize for it in the face of steadily
mounting evidence of its horrific destructiveness. Although it is possible that these intellectuals do not know what
they are doing, Dalrymple is not about to ask God to forgive them.

 

© 2002 Max Hocutt

 

Max Hocutt,
Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, the University of Alabama; author of Grounded
Ethics: The Empirical Bases of
Normative Judgments (Transaction: 2000).

Categories: Ethics, MentalHealth