Self-control and self-respect have become undervalued
Interview with Theodore Dalrymple - Part II
Claudio Grass (CG): All sorts of economic indicators show there is a considerable rise in financial uncertainty in many households and point to a rise in poverty rates in England and elsewhere in Europe. You have decades of direct professional experience with poor and marginalized segments of society, much of which is reflected in your book, “Life at the Bottom”. In your estimation, is more welfare spending and more state support going to be enough to deal with significant poverty increases?
Theodore Dalrymple (TD): It seems to me that Britain is particularly vulnerable for two reasons; first, successive governments have, deliberately or not, smashed up all forms of social solidarity that do not pass through itself to an extent not equalled elsewhere, using deficit-financed social security to pick up the pieces of a society without (for example) families. I am not an economist, but its seems to me where it uses loan simply to maintain consumption at an unearned level, a society paints itself into a corner from which it will be difficult for it to escape. In short, prudence has been disregarded both by the population and the government.
CG: A lot of the cases you have written about are of people who have been chronically stuck in those socioeconomic margins, as they’re often born into them and have few real interactions with anyone outside of them. But might we now be facing a new phenomenon, of the suddenly and forcibly marginalized? What happens to a person when, through no choice or fault of his own, he stops working, producing and providing, and becomes dependent on the state to put food on the table?
TD: Never having been in this situation, I should be cautious in my reply. I know, however, that I should hate it. In Britain, we have a National Health Service in which the patient is often treated as a petitioner at the court of an all-powerful monarch – sometimes well and kindly, sometimes badly and negligently. But the position of being a petitioner is in itself humiliating. In England, I am granted the privilege of seeing a doctor by receptionists who say yea or nay. When this situation is extended to the whole of existence, it is very much worse.
People vary in their response: some search might and main for a way out of it, trying their hand at something, others resign themselves to it becoming inert, some grow angry (the cold charity of the state is never sufficient and is not given gladly), yet others resort to defrauding the state as best they can. This is wrong, and in the long-run harmful to a person, but at least it shows some spirit. The other thing also to say is that, in Britain at any rate, most people have lived up to their incomes without any thought that they might one day need reserves. On the contrary, they have tended to spend more than they earned. This, of course, makes them more vulnerable to dependence once the crunch comes.
CG: You have argued that we humans are problem-generating creatures and that we’re known to invite misery and strife into our lives just to escape boredom, one of the most unbearable burdens of the human condition. Indeed, we saw a lot of that in previous years, where the great debates in most advanced economies where around offensive words, micro-aggressions, safe spaces and pronouns. As this recession deepens and as vast swaths of the population start facing real problems, like joblessness or bankruptcy, do you expect such solipsistic discussions to give way to more substantial issues?
TD: I think that this has already happened to an extent. To complain that you find something offensive in Jane Austen, for example that there is nothing offensive in it when there ought to have been considering the times in which she lived, would now make you appear what you always were before in any case, namely a spoilt brat. But whether real hardship will make people better or worse as human beings, it is impossible to say. Some will probably be better, some worse (I sound like the famous economist who, when asked by the BBC after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, whether there would be an recession and if so a deep one, replied that there might or might not be, but if there were it could be long or it could be short, deep or shallow.)
CG: Social media have long been blamed for the tribal state of our public discourse and even for the violence that often results from it. However, the human need to belong to a group and the tendency to view outsiders with suspicion was always there. Is it thus unfair to put the blame on modern communication tools for our own failings? Or did they actually manufacture toxic divisions that wouldn’t have organically emerged?
TD: This is a very difficult question. I have noticed that much of the commentary that follows articles on the internet is nasty and insulting in tone, as if calling a person a name were a logical refutation of what he said. The question I ask myself is whether all this bile existed before the internet or whether it was cultivated by the internet. I have no definite proof of this, but I suspect the latter.
The ability to reply angrily both immediately and anonymously removes virtuous inhibitions. The quantity of mental bile is not fixed, so that if it does not come out in one way it will come out in another, even more harmful (‘I had to kill her, doctor,’ as one murderer said to me, ‘or I don’t know what I would have done.’) The expression of bile becomes a habit and a self-reinforcing one as others react to bile with greater bile. But, of course, the bilious on the internet may not go on to commit violent or illegal acts; I don’t know.
CG: Phenomena like tribalism and political polarization have been plaguing our societies for years already, but these internal divisions became markedly sharper and deeper over the last year. These days, the warring factions are not fighting over opinions and ideologies, but over facts, disagreeing on the nature of reality itself. You’ve seen extreme versions of this in your professional capacity in the past, trying to communicate with people with divergent views on what is and isn’t real. Do you have any lessons or advice that we might use as everyday citizens to bridge that giant gap and to bring back productive dialogue?
TD: I am not sure that I do have anything to say. It seems to me true that self-control and self-respect have become undervalued of late years or decades. Yesterday, for example, I saw an article by a student at University College, London, informing readers of the best places to cry in public (certain public toilets were particularly good). She listed the beneficial effects of sobbing in public, including not caring – presumably, among other things, about what others think of you.
Psychotherapy has played a disastrous part here, suggesting to people that an unexpressed emotion will turn inwards and poison the self. These are not ideas conducive to calm and rational debate (what argument could be more conclusive than a good sob?). The idea of not expressing oneself never crosses many minds as it ought.
Claudio Grass, Hünenberg See, Switzerland
Source: pasja1000 on Pixabay
