Posted on 12/17/2001 4:59:25 AM PST by madprof98
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.
By Theodore Dalrymple. Ivan R. Dee, publisher. $27.50. 256 pages.
Theodore Dalrymple begins his book of essays with one dark and foreboding sentence, free of literary niceties or political disclaimers:
"A specter is haunting the Western world: the underclass."
Compared with the rest of "Life at the Bottom," that first sentence is all lightness and hope.
"The real picture is worse than I paint, actually, in some areas," Dalrymple says by telephone from his home in England. "It is very bleak. Very large numbers of people."
Dalrymple, 52, is a psychiatrist who has practiced for a decade in a hospital in a British slum and in a nearby prison. He also is a remarkably engaging and prolific writer --- a columnist for the London Spectator, a contributor to the Daily Telegraph and a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal (www.city-journal.org).
This book, drawn from columns written over the past seven years, brims with very proper rants on illiteracy, litter, fast food, free love, ungrateful patients, unruly children, incorrigible criminals, "professional redeemers," tattoos and much more.
"It doesn't take long or cost much to have a small tattoo done," Dalrymple writes. "You can stigmatize yourself thoroughly in an hour or more for a mere fifty dollars. . . . Watching as yet untattooed young men browsing through the patterns in the parlor reception areas, I felt like a Victorian evangelist or campaigner against prostitution, an impulse rising within me to exhort them to abjure evil; but their adoption of the characteristic expression of the urban underclass (a combination of bovine vacancy and lupine malignity) soon put [an end] to my humanitarian impulse."
"Bovine vacancy and lupine malignity." Savor the phrase and try to shake the image.
Dalrymple is unrelenting. Poverty isn't caused by economics, he argues, but rather by a wildly dysfunctional --- and rapidly spreading --- set of values. And a blindly forgiving welfare state in which being "nonjudgmental" is the highest objective has helped create a permanent, irredeemable caste of victims, morally adrift and ineducable.
The ideas certainly are not new. What is instructive, though, in reading Dalrymple's unvarnished accounts of these lives, is realizing how much of this conversation we could not have on this side of the Atlantic. Here, any discussion of an "underclass" --- the very word is difficult to stomach --- is firmly and perhaps forever rooted in race.
But almost all of Dalrymple's subjects are white. Without the immediate and automatic risk of being called a racist, he is freer to explore the birth of the mind-set that makes and sustains members of the underclass.
"This is a way of life that doesn't really have much to do with race," he tells me. "It's not a racial problem. That's a very important lesson for Americans, I think."
During the past decade, Dalrymple estimates he's heard firsthand the stories of some 10,000 impoverished Brits, each of whom told him about the lives of four or five others around them.
"From this source alone, therefore, I have learned about the lives of some fifty thousand people; lives dominated, almost without exception, by violence, crime, and degradation," Dalrymple writes. "My sample is a selected one, no doubt, as all samples drawn from personal experience must be, but it is not small."
Sprinkling a few relevant statistics throughout, Dalrymple tells of generations of abusers and abused, single women who have multiple children by multiple men, drug addicts who blame the heroin, burglars who fault the people who keep replacing the stuff they steal. And just when you cannot bear to read one more word, he props you up with the driest of British wit.
He tells of a woman named Gay Oakes, for instance, who's serving a life sentence for the murder of her common-law husband, Doug Garden, father of four of her six children. "She poisoned his coffee one day in 1994, and he died," Dalrymple writes. "She buried him in her backyard; ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and Doug Garden to dug garden, as it were."
Dalrymple swears he doesn't make this stuff up. If anything, he says, he doesn't use the most horrific stories simply because they're too identifiable.
"To reach Saturday night is the summit of ambition of much of English youth," he writes. "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, undestroyed by God only because (it must be admitted), there are worse places on earth, which call for more immediate elimination."
Reading this book is saddening, infuriating and ultimately not terribly empowering. Is the situation hopeless? Is there anything that an individual or a well-intentioned government can do? Dalrymple never really says. "Does the fate of the underclass matter?" he writes. "If the misery of millions of people matters, then the answer must surely be yes. But even if we were content to consign so many of our fellow citizens to the purgatory of life in our slums, that would not be the end of the matter. For there are clear signs that the underclass will be revenged upon the whole pack of us."
After scaring the bejabbers out of us, he might at least offer a few ideas on turning everything around. But the decision not to enter the realm of problem-solving was a conscious one.
"I'm less good at solutions," Dalrymple says with a laugh. "And second, there's a rather peculiar situation in England in that there is a great deal of denial of the phenomenon. . . . The first task is to get people to say that there is actually this problem.
"People would much prefer to pretend that none of this exists."
That's not so peculiar. Many of us would prefer not to make eye contact.
Early in the book, Dalrymple takes readers on a tour of a suicide ward in his hospital, introducing us to the six lost souls present on a given day. "Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary today," he chirps, "just an average trawl of social pathology, ignorance of life, and willful chasing after misery.
"Tomorrow is another day, but the same tide of unhappiness will lap at our doors."
Surely nobody will ever accuse Dalrymple of being a cheery sort of fellow. But look around the streets of any city. Reality would suggest that we at least try harder to understand the causes and the consequences of all these lives spent at the bottom, or at least on the brink.
tweaver@ajc.com
Seems to be the folks who make up the underclass got there by their own choices, not by any oversight of the larger society.
Jobs went overseas because your fellow Americans want products made at bargain prices. You can't blame COngress for this one.
This is subject has interested me for some time. It's worrisome that so many are adopting the culture of "poverty" values. The middle class can afford it to a point, the economically poor cannot.
The first is the tattoo parlor. I don't know how things stand in England, but in the U.S., over the past 20 years, getting a tattoo has become pretty much unrelated to social standing and poverty.
The other is the trip to the suicide ward. For the most part, suicide is unrelated to poverty or income. In fact, suicide is one of the few major causes of death, for which the rate of death is significantly higher for whites than blacks in America.
That said, this book is concerned with poverty in England. So what would be inaccurate for the U.S. could be true for the U.K., for all I know.
Wait, I've got it! We'll seize India!
This book should be required reading for all high school kids, and for all "flaky" college majors (communications, education, psychology-- you know the touchy-feely types I'm talking about). If the white underclass in Britain suffers from the same social pathologies as the US black underclass, that negates rascism as a cause, doesn't it?
Jobs also go to lower-pay jurisdictions in part because of the stranglehold labor unions have on the American economy. When you are forced by unions to pay your workers so much that you can't make a profit (this is also known as being forced to pay workers MORE THAN they are worth in a true economic sense), then you have two choices: 1) go out of business, or 2) move your manufacturing plant overseas.
American consumers want low-priced manufactured goods and high-wage manufacturing jobs that pay more than the market will support. Until people realise that we can't have both, we will continue to see jobs lost to Mexico and the Phillipines.
Did the author make any attempt to find and write about people who were poor, but still managed to be optimistic and happy with their lives? There was a time in my life when I was living pretty much hand-to-mouth, but it didn't make me an aimless derelict. At some point, you have to wonder if we aren't confusing cause and effect. Does poverty cause the welfare state, or does the welfare state cause poverty?
Dalrymple's point about the tatoo parlor was that body decorations like piercings and tatoos were traditionally lower-class phenomena, and the fact that the middle and upper classes are now emulating this sort of behavior bodes ill for the culture.
He brings up the point that formerly, the lower classes used to mimic the upper classes in mannerism, speech, and dress. Though poor, they sought to emulate "respectable" behavior, and thus elevate themselves by conforming to behavioral norms, thus transitioning to a more "cultured" society when they attained the means to do so economically and culturally.
Now, you see the middle and upper classes mimicing the pathologies of the lower classes, such as tatooing, piercing, single parenthood, swearing, lack of responsibility for one's own behavior, etc. This coarsens society, and elevates the lower classes to some sort of "noble" status that we are all supposed to emulate to be "cool" and "hip." If we turn up our noses in disgust at the above-mentioned behavior, we are being "judgemental" and "classist." Freed of the shackles of judgment for our behavior, the formerly respectable middle and upper classes are now freed to act as vulgar and anti-social as our lower-class counterparts. The result: a loss of social niceties, and a loss of respect for courtesy, the rights of others, and civility.
Now, as a small-l libertarian, I'm all for not legislating morality, but when we stop being "judgmental" of anti-social and self-destructive behaviors like that which formerly was only tolerated among the most aberrant of the lower classes, we encourage the proliferation of more laws to keep order, because we ourselves have failed to exercise the moral pressure and disapprobation necessary to maintain some sort of sane and responsible society.
We don't need more laws if each of us has the backbone to condemn aberrant behavior and refuse to subsidize it (to the extent that our tax laws allow us). Am I making any sense here, or is this a disjointed, Monday-morning ramble? :^]
Poor people have poor priorities as well.
Me, too. It was the four years of my life I spent saving for college, and the four years of my life I spent in college. Somehow, though, I managed to join the upper middle class and now have an income equal to the top 1% of income earners in the United States. I grew up in a lower-middle-class household with parents who were high-school educated and had no great career prospects.
My experience echoes the finding of many poverty researchers who note that poverty is a temporary situation for the vast majority of people, and that education and work are the solution. In less than 10 years, I went from the bottom income quintile to the very top quintile. I did not get help from parents, government transfer payments, or affirmative action to help me get there. I just worked, plain and simple. I'm the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I have a doctoral degree as well. It can be done.
That is, as the author himself notes, a phrase to savor, albeit unpleasantly.
Dalrymple gives numerous examples of this sort of behavior in his book. When a woman allows her abusing ex-boyfriend, by whom she has several children, back into her home, in a drunken rage he trashes her subsidized apartment, breaking down the front door, and breaking windows. She, however, will bear no responsibility for letting this man back into her home. She simply telephones the Housing Authority (or whatever they call it in merry old England) and they come out and fix everything for free. He'll be back in a week or two to play out the same tired scenario, and why not? She'll maybe get some money out of him for the kids before he trashes the apartment, and she doesn't have to pay for the trashed apartment.
When you give money to your niece, she is indulging in exactly this same behavior. Of course she can afford a dog -- she knows your generous family will not let her kids go hungry. The kids will learn this behavior, and the happy cycle will continue. Get my drift??
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