Theodore Dalrymple is the pseudonym of Anthony Daniels, an English doctor and psychiatrist who has worked on four continents at facilities including a British inner city hospital and a prison. The book is a collection of essays distilling his view not only of the underclass but how their mindset is informed by liberal teachings. His major points concern the disassociation between conscience and acts, the suppression of judgment and law enforcement by accusatory multiculturalists, the hatred of education among the poor, and the obfuscation of criminologists. He pursues these points with energy, wit, eloquence and a confidence borne both of experience and study.
Typical of his anecdotes is the following:
Not long ago, a murderer entered my room in the prison shortly after his arrest to seek a prescription for the methadone to which he was addicted. 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.
(“The Knife Went In”)
His descriptions are unsparing of the circumstances of suicide, violence, murder, addiction and the ruin of family. He is particularly keen to point out that a many of the poor have no interests to speak of, outside of drugs, sex and gambling. In questioning his patients about their interests, many of them are puzzled as to what he means, and when they understand the question reply that they have none. He points out that
A man with an interest to pursue, or at least the mental equipment to pursue an interest, is not in such dire straits as a man obliged by the tabula rasa of his mind to stare vacantly at the four walls for weeks, months, or years on end. He is more likely to come up with an idea for self-employment, or at the very least to seek work in places and in fields that are new to him. He is not condemned to stagnation.
But at the bottom of his arguments is the conviction that liberal policies in education, law enforcement, sexual relations and culture in general have had a disastrous effect wherever they have carried the day. The liberal movement of the 20th century sought to make a brave new world in religion, morality, law, art and academic theory—of which the Soviet state may be the perfect type but of which the Chicago School is nonetheless an example.
[N]ot long ago . . . I entered a store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal pride. Industry and labor were glorified in statuary, and a leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.
“A great shame about the war,” I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. “Look at the city now.”
“The war?” she said. “The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council.”
The City Council—the people’s elected representatives—it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Göring’s air force. Indeed, they had managed to turn it into a terrible visual ordeal for anyone with the most minimal visual sensibility.
. . .
The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it.
(“Do Sties Make Pigs?”)
For literary style, Dalrymple is clear, concise, lively and allusive. It is difficult to think of a reader who might not find his book interesting and beneficial as a clarification, correction, or provocation of thought on important matters. His most recent books include Our Culture, What's Left of It, Romancing Opiates, and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas. Many of his articles can be read at City Journal.
