Theodore Dalrymple – Life at the Bottom - Review

Dr. Dalrymple proposes a compelling though controversial thesis in this fascinating and highly conservative collection of essays. Over the last twenty-five years a new type of underclass has emerged in western societies, an underclass that uses the welfare system in all its forms, subsidised housing, free by-weekly pay checks, child support and free medical benefits. From a liberal political standpoint, this support for the nation's "have nots" is a compassionate gesture to take care of its own poor. 

One would logically assume that providing the poor with life's essentials would bring the crime rate down and provide incentive for these people to further their standing in society. In fact, as Dalrymple proposes, it has had an opposite effect: crime in his native England has skyrocketed; drug use is at an all time high and domestic violence is a wide spread common occurrence. Why? Liberal values not economics has created individuals that deny any responsibility for their own lives, it is always the rich, the government or societies institutions that is to blame, thus crime continues to rise while England's Welfare State has grown into an unwieldy Goliath.

Dalrymple has worked in numerous countries and has been an attending physician and psychiatric consultant in London's prisons for many years. Thus his thesis is not born from some abstract social theory about human behaviour. He has treated thousands of victims of domestic violence, consulted thousands of prisoners who have been incarcerated for petty crime to murder. The common thread that runs through all these cases is a pathological denial of responsibility for their own circumstances or conditions.

As Dalrymple explains:

"Like so many modern ills, the coarseness of spirit and behaviour grows out of ideas brewed up in the academy and among intellectuals - ideas that have seeped outward and are now having their practical effect on society. The relativism that has ruled the academy for many years has now come to rule the mind of the population." (P.85)

In other words, this post modern notion that there is no high and low art, no good and bad, no subtlety and crudeness, only relative perspectives; taking this further, our behaviour too is not individually determined, but society and its oppressive inequalities that make me who I am, and a biological predisposition which causes me to steal from the old lady next door, beat my wife beyond recognition and consume drugs and alcohol like there is no tomorrow. The trickling down of these academic theories, biological determinism, Marxism and the post modern theory that there are no levels of hierarchical values, only difference, has created an underclass of victims who believe they should get something for nothing and commit crime because society has created them as victims as self-determinism does not exist.

Dalrymple provides numerous real life examples from his practice working in a hospital in London. His writing style is straight forward, at times literary but never sentimental. The arguments in these essays are persuasive and push the reader to examine the underlying modern ideologies that have created and sustain a well provided for underclass of criminal "victims".