Rousseau's Children

Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. (Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 2001. 263 pp. $27.50.)

What Lady Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron—that he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know—applies all too literally to the underclass that Theodore Dalrymple describes in this book. But there is no surprise in that. After all, Dalrymple (the pseudonym of Anthony Daniels) is a fifty-three-year-old psychiatrist who works at a hospital and prison in the slums of Birmingham, England. One would expect his patients to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know. What one might not expect is Dalrymple's explanation for how they got that way. He does not blame their environment, or their genes, or even, chiefly, their upbringing. Rather, he says, these people—and the underclass generally—have reached "the bottom" because of the worldview they have adopted. That Weltanschauung might be described as Romanticist, or Bohemian, or simply anti-Enlightenment, but its content is

that some aspects of reality are more real than others; that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side—and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side.

This idea, Dalrymple says, is "the fundamental premise of popular culture" (p. 8).

Although Dalrymple does not trace the origins of this premise in the history of ideas, it is in fact a doctrine preached by many of the West's leading thinkers and littérateurs since 1750, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts launched the Romanticist attack on bourgeois civilization. Rousseau would have chosen the word "natural" instead of "seedy," but that changed as Romanticism metamorphosed into Realism and the authenticity of the savage was replaced by the authenticity of the wretched.

Because Life at the Bottom is a collection of essays from the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Dalrymple's evidence and argument are not neatly laid out. But he demonstrates his points forcefully nonetheless. In the work's first and larger section, "Grim Reality," Dalrymple uses specific stories from his practice and from some journalistic forays to show how the "fundamental premise of popular culture" leads to actions that wreck people's lives. In the second section, "Grimmer Theory," he shows that the twentieth century's intellectuals have provided members of the underclass with a battery of rationalizations by which they can shift the blame for their misery away from their actions and attitudes and can unleash their hatred of everyone who challenges their outlook.

Getting High

The use of consciousness-altering substances has always been a part of the Romantic life, from Samuel Coleridge Taylor's opium to the Latin Quarter's hashish to Oscar Wilde's absinthe. In the essay "Festivity, and Menace," Dalrymple explores this manifestation of Bohemianism in its current incarnation. "To reach Saturday night," he writes, "is the summit of ambition of much of English youth. Nothing fills their minds with such anticipation or eagerness. No career, no pastime, no interest, can compete with the joys of Saturday night, when the center of the city turns into a B-movie Sodom and Gomorrah" (p. 60).

What young people (and not just of the underclass) seek on their Saturday night prowl is mind-shattering noise, alcohol, and drugs. In one bar, sixteen televisions blare forth music. "Ten seconds of this," Dalrymple comments, "and one feels one has a food mixer inside one's skull working at full speed on one's brain" (p. 62). Outside the bar, a girl is being carried by her boyfriend because she is too drunk to walk. As Dalrymple watches, she vomits, fortunately missing her friend's back. Such is the reality that is so much more genuine and authentic than bourgeois, respectable life.

In another essay, Dalrymple reports on his conversation with a young Indian man who has just started to take heroin, much to the despair of his hard-working family.

I asked him whether he had not known the dangers of heroin before he took it.
"Yes," he replied.
"But you took it all the same."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"No offense, doctor, but the people who gave it to me know more about life than you do. They know what it's about" (p. 119).

On Mondays, some of the people who "know what it's about" show up in Dalrymple's psychiatric ward. Many are from the XL club, a large barn of a dance hall where everyone takes Ecstasy. His first patient, after leaving the XL, had begun to gesture wildly at some private vision. Another patient from the XL "had taken Ecstasy every Saturday night for six months, and it had made her paranoid for most of that time. In fact, she had given up her work in an office because she felt the other workers there were plotting against her" (p. 66).

In another part of the hospital, he encounters a young woman who has taken an overdose in order to get an apartment of her own. (The logic is this: The welfare state allocates apartments on the basis of need, and claiming that home life has driven one to attempt suicide is considered a sign of very great need.) This young woman, who dropped out of school even earlier than the law allows, is representative of many of Dalrymple's patients, for she leads a life that is nothing but a search for powerful sensations and fleeting emotions.

"What are your interests?" I ask.
She doesn't know what I mean, and pouts. I rephrase the question.
"What are you interested in?"
She still doesn't know what I mean. All the same, she is of good intelligence—very good, in fact.
"What do you like doing?"
"Going out."
"Where to?"
"Clubs. Everything else is [pointless]" (p. 67).

Don't Know Much. . .

If getting high is one traditional aspect of the Romantic credo, another is the joy of an untutored life, and the British underclass certainly rejects formal education with a will. Of course, the average British drop-out is not able to formulate his opposition as lyrically as the Romantic poet William Wordsworth did in "The Tables Turned":

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Nevertheless, the Wordsworthian spirit is there. One patient of Dalrymple's took an overdose because of her peers' constant bullying. "They told her: 'You're stupid because you're clever.' What did they mean by this apparent paradox? They meant that anyone who tried hard at school and performed well was wasting his time, when he could have been engaged in the real business of life, such as truanting in the park or wandering downtown" (p. 69).

Having pursued "the real business of life" for several years, these dropouts soon find that they are unqualified for any work but the most menial and physical. Dalrymple reports that he cannot recall a single sixteen-year-old white from the local public housing projects who could multiply nine by seven. (He specifies "white" because the members of certain immigrant groups tend to do very well educationally, despite living in the slums.) "Even three by seven often defeats them. One boy of seventeen told me, 'We didn't get that far.' This after twelve years of compulsory education (or should I say, attendance at school)" (p. 70).

King of the Road

What becomes of such children when they grow up? One answer is provided in Dalrymple's essay "Free to Choose," where he recounts a tale that serves as stunning proof of the Bohemian sensibility's sustaining power. Despite its manifest and myriad real-world disadvantages, this outlook can grip a person's mind even as it takes him to the very bottom.

The tale involves a fifty-five-year-old man who, though he did well in school, left off at the minimum legal age and ran away to sea. After an early marriage, the birth of a son, and the acquisition of a mortgage, he began to find life irksome and yearned for his bachelor freedom. He therefore deserted his family and took up a life of drinking. Unable to maintain an apartment, or even a room, he began wandering through the country, living in hostels. He ended up in Dalrymple's ward suffering from delirium tremens.

His condition then was indeed pitiable; he was terrified of the small animals that he saw crawling from the bedclothes and the walls, his tremor was so profound that he could not stand, for him to hold a cup or cutlery was out of the question. . . . He was incontinent of urine and had to have a catheter inserted; sweat poured from him as rain drips from the foliage of a rain forest. It took weeks of baths to clear him of the smell of homelessness and a week of tranquilizers to calm him (p. 128).

Once restored to health, however, the man proved to be intelligent, witty, and charming. To Dalrymple's readers, the outcome must seem inevitable: repentance, a resolution to change, a new and happy life.

But that is not the story.

He regretted nothing: he said his life had been fuller of incident, interest, and amusement than if he had kept to the narrow path of virtue that leads straight to a pension. . . . After about three months of [a] stable existence, my patient confessed that he was growing restless again. Yes, he was happy, and yes, he felt physically well—much better, in fact, than he had felt in years. But something was missing from his life. It was the excitement: the chases down the street by policemen, the appearances in the magistrates' courts, the sheer warmth and companionship of the barroom. He even missed the important question with which he used to wake up each morning: Where am I? Waking in the same place each day was not nearly as much fun.

And sure enough, he missed his next appointment, and I never saw him again (pp. 129-30).

The title of this essay, "Free to Choose," is telling. Dalrymple wishes to emphasize that the man's lifestyle is one that he has freely selected. "It is difficult for most of us to accept that this way of life, so unattractive on the surface, is freely chosen. Surely, we think, there must be something wrong with those who choose to live like this. Surely they must be suffering from disease or mental abnormality that accounts for their choice" (p. 131). Dalrymple denies it. This is the way the man chooses to live, and, according to Dalrymple, his patient's way of life is being taken up by increasing numbers of young people—it is a natural enough progression. Lacking the education to obtain a job, their youth is spent in a perpetual search for kicks and highs. Why not make a life of it? The British welfare state provides the monetary foundations; crime can be counted on to provide extra cash when needed.

Without the welfare state, fewer people might pursue the life of the open road, and crime or begging would surely provide a greater percentage of the wanderer's income. But here, as elsewhere, Dalrymple minimizes the role of welfare relative to the role of ideas. After all, his fifty-five-year-old Bohemian could equally well have exploited the welfare state to support a comfortable, stable, pseudo-bourgeois life. The man simply did not want it.

Let's Do It!

Not everyone chooses hobo Hell, of course. Some do prefer a somewhat more rooted "family life" and arrive there via lust rather than gluttony. But the same short-range philosophy underlies both paths, and the results are equally disastrous. Among the underclass, Dalrymple writes, "personal relationships are fleeting and kaleidoscopic, though correspondingly intense" (p. 25). With no sense of obligation and few pressures—financial, legal, social, or ethical—to keep a couple together, the only bond is "the need and desire of the moment, and nothing is stronger but more fickle than need and desire unshackled by obligation. Unfortunately, the whims of two people rarely coincide, and thus the emotional lives of people—who, remember, have very little else to console or interest them—are repeatedly in crisis" (p. 25).

These liaisons typically begin in a bar or nightclub just after the two parties' previous relationships have ended. Apart from their current feelings of loss and loneliness, the people involved are likely to have nothing in common but sexual attraction and the desire for a night of fun. "These are not contemptible in themselves, of course, but as the foundation of a long-term relationship and parenthood they are a little thin and soon wear even thinner" (p. 187). Once the two people have become a couple, day-to-day trivialities become their whole world: shopping, cooking, a lot of television, and, while the welfare check lasts, a few hours in the pub.

The principal reason that the two partners have no interests in common is that neither of them has any real interests at all, apart from short-term emotions. Again and again, Dalrymple questions his patients to see if there is anything that might serve as the glimmer of a purpose in life. Generally there is not, and the reason usually goes back to their rejection of formal education.

"What are you interested in?" I ask. The question comes like a warning shot.
"Well . . . nothing, really," they reply. They recognize the unsatisfactory nature of their answer—which is all too truthful—at once.
"Did you try hard at school?"
"No."
"What did you do instead?"
"Messed around, like everyone else" (p. 188).

The women involved in these relationships often try motherhood as a way of putting meaning in their life. Soon enough, they find that it is a deeper trap, especially because the father takes no share of parental duties. Then the cycle is repeated. Abandoned by the father of her child, the woman returns to the pubs, forms another liaison (equally empty), compensates by bearing another child, and is again abandoned. At any rate, that is one of the better scenarios.

To Die upon a Kiss

For a woman in a relationship, one condition worse than abandonment is physical abuse. Dalrymple writes: "A hospital such as mine has experienced in the last two decades a huge increase in the number of injuries to women, most of them the result of domestic violence and many of them of the kind that would always have come to medical attention. The increase is real, therefore, not an artifact of reporting" (p. 42). The cause of the sudden increase in abuse, he believes, is a corresponding increase in obsessive jealousy. This was once a relatively rare phenomenon, but "it is nowadays almost the norm, especially among underclass men, whose fragile sense of self-worth derives solely from possession of a woman and is poised permanently on the brink of humiliation at the prospect of losing this one prop in life" (pp. 42-43).

The cause of this sudden increase in obsessive jealousy, and hence abuse, is the hopelessly misguided sexual revolution. "The revolution foundered on the rock of unacknowledged reality: that women are more vulnerable to abuse than men by virtue of their biology alone, and that the desire for the exclusive sexual possession of another has remained just as strong as ever. This desire is incompatible, of course, with the equally powerful desire—eternal in the human breast but hitherto controlled by social and legal inhibitions—for complete sexual freedom" (p. 41).

The good news is that the women who are not murdered almost always leave the abusive relationship. But it can take a long time. One young patient's companion "broke her jaw, fractured her ribs, partially strangled her, punched her regularly, and used her head to break a closed window before pushing her out of it altogether" (pp. 193-94). Dalrymple offered this woman every assistance and protection if she chose to leave her partner, but her response was: "It's all right for you; you don't love him."

Sometimes, the women in these relationships try to excuse their lovers' violence as behavior they cannot help or behavior that they have promised will not happen again. Sometimes, however, the woman cannot even be said to love her partner despite his violence; the violence has become part of what makes him lovable. Of course, that can happen at any socio-economic level, but among people of higher status the relationship is likely to have additional dimensions. For a woman of the underclass, "violence is the only token she has of his commitment to her…. She imagines—falsely—that a punch in the face or a hand round the throat is at least a sign of his continued interest in her, the only sign other than sexual intercourse she is ever likely to receive in that regard" (p. 45).

When the woman does leave, therefore, the lesson she takes away bodes ill for her future:

So convinced is she that violence is an intrinsic and indispensable part of relations between the sexes, that if by some chance she alights next time upon a nonviolent man, she suffers acute discomfort and disorientation; she may, indeed, even leave him because of his insufficient concern for her. Many of my violently abused women patients have told me that they find nonviolent men intolerably indifferent and emotionally distant (p. 46).

As for the man, he regards the woman's leaving as the highest treachery and concludes that he must use even greater severity with his future female companions.

Excuses, Excuses

Some reviewers and interviewers have interpreted Dalrymple as saying that the worldview which leads the underclass to behave in these appalling ways is the product of contemporary intellectuals and of ideas such as relativism, determinism, and egalitarianism. I think that is not quite right. As mentioned in the opening of this review, what Dalrymple calls the fundamental premise of popular culture is nothing but the Bohemian premise that

some aspects of reality are more real than others; that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side—and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side (p. 8).

The principal role that contemporary theorists and theories have played, therefore, has not been to provide a design for anti-bourgeois living. That design is offered everywhere today. The role of contemporary intellectuals has been to provide good-sounding rationalizations for people who find that their pursuit of the Romanticist credo has landed them in dire straits. And this role contemporary intellectuals have played well.

Take the doctrine of determinism, which is frequently in the mouth of Dalrymple's patients. One cannot act on the premise of economic determinism or environmental determinism or genetic determinism. But one can use the doctrine to excuse malevolent behavior in oneself or others. Dalrymple notes that, over the last few decades, concepts of anthropology and psychotherapy have been widely disseminated throughout the culture, albeit in garbled form, and have now become familiar even to the uneducated. Among the most common of these ideas is that people are rarely responsible for their (undesirable) behavior. Again and again, Dalrymple's patients try to con him with some variant of determinism; again and again, he finds a quick way of showing them that the excuse is false and that they know it is false.

Or consider the doctrine of moral relativism. One cannot act—one certainly cannot live—on the premise of moral relativism, no more than one can drive without touching the steering wheel. Nor do people try. As a practical matter, moral relativism is merely a source of excuses for those who are conscious of having done wrong. A scientist may espouse moral relativism but is unlikely to say that he became a scientist because it was no worse than being a thief. A thief does whine that what he has done is no better or worse than what other people do.

Lastly, consider the doctrine of egalitarianism. Like determinism and moral relativism, that, too, is simply false if it is taken as the doctrine that people are equal. They are not. People are born with different abilities and different levels of abilities. And people put forth different degrees of effort with different results. What the doctrine of egalitarianism does, therefore, is provide a rationalization for harming and burdening those who succeed or may succeed, for the purpose of bringing them down to the level of those who have failed. We are most familiar with this practice in the form of progressive taxation. But in some of his book's most chilling passages, Dalrymple describes another way that this hatred of achievement manifests itself.

I often meet young people in their twenties and thirties in my hospital practice who gave up at school under such duress [as being beaten up by drop-outs] and subsequently realized that they had missed an opportunity which, had it been taken, would have changed the whole course of their lives much for the better. . . . In the last year I have treated two boys in the emergency room after such a beating, and two others who have taken overdoses for fear of receiving one at the hands of their neighbors (p. 69).

Hard as it is to believe, Dalrymple's book offers a manifestation of the egalitarian spirit more evil still. He reports on remarks that he has heard from radical teachers, remarks in which they have argued that social mobility simply reinforces the existing unjust social structure by depriving the lower classes of potential leaders. Thus, "to encourage an individual child to escape his heritage of continual soap opera and pop music, tabloid newspapers, poverty, squalor, and domestic violence is, in the eyes of many teachers, to encourage class treachery" (p. 158). What might serve as condign punishment for such "comprachicos" is a question I do not care to ponder.

Uncouth Chic

All in all, then, it is a frightening menagerie of people to which Dalrymple introduces us. But the most frightening is not the thuggish dropout, drugged teenager, or violent boyfriend. It is the British soccer fan. Everyone has heard of Britain's soccer hooligans, of course, so Dalrymple's description of their behavior at a match in Rome is familiar.

Police by the thousands were stationed around the city, he tells us, to deal with the drunkenness, rioting, and looting that continental Europeans have come to expect from British soccer fans. At the match itself, the entire English crowd shouted obscenities in unison at the Italian team and Italian fans—for three hours with scarcely a break.

What is frightening about these people is that they are not drunken young wastrels, as one might suppose. They are members of the British middle class.

The ten thousand Britons who went to Rome—a notoriously expensive city—had well-paid jobs, requiring education and training. The man next to me, for example, was a computer programmer, in charge of the information technology of a city council. All those I asked were employed in skilled capacities; a Sotheby's auctioneer, I was told, was in the crowd (p. 84).

When Dalrymple inquired of these middle- and upper-middle-class Britons why they behaved as they did, "they all claimed it was both fun and a necessary release for them" (p. 84). In short, the Romanticist war against civilization and its mores, having recruited the underclass, is now on its way to recruiting the middle class as well.

Of course, however rowdy they became in Italy, these bourgeois Bohemians no doubt went back to their jobs Monday morning. (The term "bourgeois Bohemian" was coined by David Brooks, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.) But bourgeois respectability and Bohemian abandon are a combination that is difficult to maintain, as the fable of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reminds us. Sooner or later the bourgeois half tends to get lost, as it did for the office worker who quit her job after six months of taking Ecstasy had made her paranoid.

Besides, these middle-class people behave as they do because they accept the Rousseauean principle that Dalrymple calls the fundamental premise of popular culture. Thus, the two halves of their lives do not represent co-equal components, but a conflict between Bohemian principles and bourgeois prudence. Over time, any conflict between principles and prudence will likely be resolved in favor of the former, even though the person who holds the principles is descending into Hell.

Defaming the Messenger

Life at the Bottom is one of the most instructive books that I have read in many years, for it depicts precisely how, two and a half centuries after the anti-Enlightenment movement was launched, it is destroying the lives of millions and is moving upward through society, threatening to destroy millions more. An important supplement to Dalrymple's book is Roger Kimball's The Long March (Encounter Books, 2000), for it shows how the colleges and universities of the postwar era infected the middle class with the anti-Enlightenment ideas of such semi-intellectuals as Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse.

Given the insight offered by Dalrymple's book, it is entirely predictable that the defenders of our debased culture wish to silence or discredit him. One consequence is that Dalrymple had to publish his book at an American house of conservative leaning. It has not been published in Great Britain, although obviously that country should be the one most interested in Dalrymple's findings. Moreover, only one review of Life at the Bottom was published in Britain, a dismissive account in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement that compared Dalrymple to a retired admiral who writes the newspaper about the depravity of British youth because a kid throws a beer can on his lawn.

Dalrymple admits to having been annoyed by that review. For one thing, his analysis does not rest on observing the behavior of a single individual from a distance, but on his experiences as a psychiatrist who has dealt with tens of thousands of patients, of many different ethnic backgrounds, over the course of decades. For another, his analysis does not compare the British underclass to some imaginary, model schoolboy of the nineteenth century. It compares the behavior of the underclass with the behavior of the traditional poor in Africa (where Dalrymple has worked) and in Asia (via discussions with visiting doctors). And then, too, as he told an interviewer, he rejects the implication that he is conservative, except in the sense that he is "aware of the enormous effort it has taken for people to make the discoveries we take for granted," meaning the social and cultural discoveries that make up civilized behavior, as well as scientific and technological ones.

Fortunately, Dalrymple was able to find a publisher in America and readers here are not listening to the sneers of the TLS. Life at the Bottom shot up into Amazon.com's top one hundred books and has already been reprinted. By itself, of course, this book cannot undo the work of the anti-Enlightenment movement. But that is not Theodore Dalrymple's job. He has identified the nature and advanced stage of our cultural disease. It is up to new intellectuals to prescribe the remedy.