Theodore Dalrymple is something of a cult figure on the Right. A British physician-turned-essayist, Dalrymple has authored numerous books, including such ominous titles as OUR CULTURE, WHAT’S LEFT OF IT and NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER: The Politics and Culture of Decline. His tone is invariably disapproving, even contemptuous, as he catalogs and condemns the horrible consequences of liberalism and welfarism, both of which, in his view, do nothing but subsidize immorality and irresponsibility.
Dalrymple’s experience as a doctor who has sometimes practiced in Third World countries lends his moralizing a certain legitimacy; after all, his devotees claim, Dalrymple is not just theorizing about social ills, he has seen them first-hand!
Wikipedia offers a helpful summary of Dalrymple’s recurring themes, which include:
- The cause of much contemporary misery in Western countries – criminality, domestic violence, drug addiction, aggressive youths, hooliganism, broken families – is the nihilistic, decadent and/or self-destructive behaviour of people who do not know how to live. Both the smoothing over of this behaviour, and the medicalisation of the problems that emerge as a corollary of this behaviour, are forms of indifference. Someone has to tell those people, patiently and with understanding for the particulars of the case, that they have to live differently.
- Poverty does not explain aggressive, criminal and self-destructive behaviour. In an African slum you will find among the very poor, living in dreadful circumstances, dignity and decency in abundance, which are painfully lacking in an average English suburb, although its inhabitants are much wealthier.
- An attitude characterised by gratefulness and having obligations towards others has been replaced – with awful consequences – by an awareness of "rights" and a sense of entitlement, without responsibilities. This leads to resentment as the rights become violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general.
None of Dalrymple’s diagnoses or prescriptions are new, of course; they are staples of 20th century conservative discourse; which does not mean they are automatically to be dismissed. Dalrymple alternates between what liberals would call “blaming the victims” to blaming the system that enables them; the conclusions he draws from his observations of Third World inhabitants, whose virtues he uses to highlight the decadence of the British poor, are open to question. For all that, however, Dalrymple reminds readers that culture matters, that meaning and purpose matter, that self-respect matters, and that people need to feel that they matter as well.
In a 1999 essay “What Is Poverty?” Dalrymple made the same case he has been making ever since, as these excerpts indicate:
The squalor of England [is] not economic but spiritual, moral, and cultural.
[In England], most [poor people] take a fast-food approach to all their pleasures, obtaining them no less fleetingly and unstrenuously. They have no cultural activity they can call their own, and their lives seem, even to them, empty of purpose. In the welfare state, mere survival is not the achievement that it is, say, in the cities of Africa, and therefore it cannot confer the self-respect that is the precondition of self-improvement.
[The welfare state creates] a miasma of subsidized apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries…a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial egotism [and leads to] the spiritual impoverishment of the population.
[Our welfare system] 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 emptied of meaning.
Nothing I saw [in Third World countries]—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England.
As I said, Dalrymple has become something of a cult figure, and he is (like Jordan Peterson) an acquired taste. Liberals who find him offensive (and he is often deliberately that) ought to remember that the “welfare state” has always had its critics from the Left as well as from the Right; they should also recognize that, for rich and poor alike, the spiritual consequences of modernity—that is, the impact of modernity on the human spirit—are a subject of legitimate concern.
Now, if only Theodore Dalrymple would apply his caustic wit and his sociological/anthropological scalpel to the culture of, say, Beverly Hills or to the entitled denizens of Trump Tower: that would be an interesting read.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/what-poverty-11845.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Dalrymple#Bibliography
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