It is 25 years since Theodore Dalrymple published Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. In this now famous set of essays, Dalrymple, who worked as a psychiatrist in British prisons, describes the damage done to the poorest in society by the West’s progressive middle-classes, who encourage criminals to see themselves as victims and cheer on the destruction of the traditions and norms that once guided working-class life. On the other side of the Atlantic – and the other side of the middle-class divide – the writer Rob Henderson came to the same conclusions as Dalrymple. Henderson grew up in foster care in working-class California and, as his best-selling memoir Troubled details, he experienced from the inside the culture Dalrymple observed and documented from without. When, as a student, he first read Dalrymple, it was a revelation. Life at the Bottom is republished this year to celebrate its anniversary with a new forward by Henderson. In the following conversation, they discuss whether anything can be done to change the culture.
ROB HENDERSON: Your book, Life at the Bottom was astounding to me when I first came across it. I was in my first year at Yale and feeling very out of place as someone who had come from poverty, who had grown up in foster care. I must have read 20 or 30 of your essays in a row and then found Life at the Bottom. I read the book within a couple of days and this feeling came over me: finally, someone understood what life is really like for people in the underclass! What you explained was that in many cases, these desperate conditions were self-inflicted and this was the opposite of what we were being taught by the professors. They blamed shadowy political forces for people making poor choices, or concentrated solely on material conditions.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: I had spent a lot of time in Africa and traveling the world, where material goods were infinitely worse than anything in Britain. Yet in certain respects poverty in Britain was spiritually and psychologically worse than what I had seen in Africa, where people actually went hungry! So I came to the conclusion that there was something other than mere absence of economic wellbeing that explained what I was seeing.
Interestingly, doctors who came from abroad to work in Britain had the same realization. They thought we had relatively high-quality healthcare, because they came from places like India or the Philippines, where poor people could not easily obtain good medical attention. And they would think, “Oh, this is marvelous. This is social justice.” But after maybe three months, they began to see that there was something very wrong with the situation. They came to the conclusion that in certain respects, things were better at home. That is to say, they saw a kind of dishonest passivity and spiritlessness in the population. This is something they hadn’t seen at home, even though life was very much harder there and economically very much worse. So they saw what I came to see. British people had begun to accept things without gratitude. They were ungrateful. At worst, they were resentful.
RH: I had a similar experience. I grew up poor in California, it was relative poverty. My mother was a drug addict and we were homeless for a brief period before settling in a slum apartment. As an adult, I visited Malaysia and saw people living in wooden huts with concrete flooring and under rusted corrugated metal. And in many ways they seemed more socially cohesive and in better spirits than the people I grew up around. There was more neighborliness. People would deliver food to each other. The families all knew one another. The children were remarkably well-behaved. This was so different from my own experience where people didn’t know their neighbors or if they did, it would often result in violence or indirect hostility. It’s often very pleasing to hear, regardless of what social class you belong to, that your own predicament is not your fault – that it’s the system or it’s the political forces or it’s the billionaires. Yet when I dug into some of the statistics, our society used to be very different despite the poverty. You’ve written yourself that crime used to be much lower in the past, despite poverty being much worse.
TD: Yes. For instance in 1938, in Britain, there were 8,500 prisoners. There are now 87,500. That’s ten times as many. Of course, the population has slightly less than doubled since then. But that’s not all. For every prisoner, there are now six times as many indictable crimes as there were in 1938. Now, this is a pretty crude way of looking at it, but nevertheless, there has been a startling increase in crime and it’s completely inconceivable that the difference is an increase in inequality or poverty. Poverty is not the cause of crime. The single cause of crime is the decision to commit it. We can’t think of crime without actually examining the reasons people make their decisions. Yet when professional criminologists examine crime they talk about people as if they’re billiard balls, moved around only by external forces.
RH: In the US, the number of men in prisons has quintupled since the 1970s, and what’s interesting is that incarceration has increased across ethnic groups – for white American males and black American males alike. But then when you look at income categories, this rise is almost entirely concentrated in the bottom income quintile for both white males and for black males. In the middle- and upper-middle class, incarceration has not risen at all. To me, this is evidence that culture matters. The poor were even poorer in the 1970s and yet fewer people were making the decision to commit crimes. It’s the culture that’s changed.
TD: And people are often quite aware that they’re making bad decisions. I remember, when I worked in a prison, a convict, a burglar came to see me and said, “Do you think it’s my childhood, doctor, that makes me burgle?” And I said no. And he said, “What is it, then?” And I said, “Well, you’re stupid and lazy and you want things that you’re not prepared to work for.” And instead of being angry, he laughed. He knew perfectly well that when he burgled a house, he was choosing to do precisely that.
RH: This is one conflict I have with friends on the right. They cite research on behavioral genetics and human differences and say that some people are just genetically endowed with intelligence, impulse control, conscientiousness and low crime preference. They’ll use all this jargon to say some people are equipped to behave well and others less so, therefore we should not hold these people entirely responsible. It’s similar to those on the left who say you can’t truly hold people responsible because they grew up in abject poverty and systemic forces are preventing them from escaping their circumstances.
I think both the left and right ignore the role of expectations. Many human attributes are malleable and responsive to incentives. If there’s a young man who is not particularly bright and you just give up on him – you don’t expect him to develop basic reading and writing skills – then he will actually be at an even further disadvantage.
TD: Yes, we saw this with the Covid lockdowns where there was a dramatic loss of learning but it was concentrated in children in low-income homes. For children who don’t enjoy reading and math and so forth, they require a bit more coercion. If that guidance is absent, then they will fall even further behind. Rather than lowering standards for people who are struggling, the standard should be held firm or even raised. I regard most human characteristics as being on a normal distribution bell curve. But I agree with you, the whole distribution can be shifted in one direction or another using culture. If you create a criminogenic society, then more people will become criminals. I think we’ve shifted culture in the direction of crime. While there may be some genetic difference between people, I don’t think that can possibly explain why, for example, in New Zealand in 1950, there were 200 violent crimes. Fifty years later, there were 70,000. Sure, the population had doubled. But I don’t think an explanation based on genetics works in this case.
RH: It’s like you said before: criminologists want to treat people as billiard balls. They seem to forget the phenomenological experience of being a human. Imagine you are an impulsive person and laws are no longer properly enforced. You know you are less likely to be caught or penalized for committing a crime, then you’re going to be more likely to commit a crime. As you said, the whole distribution shifts because each individual person thinks that way. We saw this with the rise of the “defund the police” movement in the US. Many police departments did have their funding reduced while it also created an atmosphere of hostility toward police. In response, police patrolled less frequently and crime skyrocketed. The genetics of America didn’t suddenly change between 2020 and 2022. We had the same population. It’s just that the sentiment and attitude toward law enforcement had changed.
TD: Actually, it’s dehumanizing when you’re saying that someone isn’t responsible for what he does. To say that is to treat him as if he were an unconscious object, an inanimate object. The problem is that people think that if you make a judgment, if you say, “This is bad,” what you’re saying is “I never want to see you again.” Well, that’s just not true. If people were to reject utterly those who had behaved badly, we would all have to reject everyone we know. Apart from anything else, this is a question of truth. People choose to do things that are wrong and we are all, to some degree, flawed. For example, it simply isn’t true that a heroin addict is hooked by heroin through no fault of his own. In order to become a heroin addict, you have to learn how to find heroin. You have to learn how to overcome an inhibition against injecting it. So it’s not that you’re hooked by heroin. It’s that you chose to take heroin, and disguising that fact from people doesn’t do them any good.
RH: Poorer people are at a disadvantage though because if you are a rich, successful, famous person, you can behave poorly and your life will not spiral in the same way as someone at the bottom of society. If a rock star glorifies drug use and partakes in it himself, he can eventually pay for expensive treatment and then make some music about that journey to recovery and profit even more. Whereas an ordinary person who listens to that music and acts on its message will have a very different experience.
TD: Another trouble is that everyone has an excuse ready to hand to explain away bad behavior – which is that they have poor mental health. I think this idea is extremely destructive because it provides everyone an excuse in advance. If you add up all the prevalences of disorders in the DSM-5, the official United States guidebook for doctors on mental health, it suggests that the average citizen in the western world suffers from 2.5 mental disorders a year.
I was recently on a train, in the quiet coach, and there was a man who was playing terrible rap music very loudly. Nobody said anything to him because I think they were afraid. Eventually I went up to him and said, “Excuse me, could you turn your music off?” He replied, “I’ve just been diagnosed with ADHD and autism, and this music calms me down.” Well, I found it quite amusing to think that rap music could calm anyone down. But anyway, I said to him, “I’m sorry you have this diagnosis but nevertheless this is the quiet coach, you should turn off your music.” He said, “You’re trying to wind me up.” I said, “I’m trying to make you turn your music off.” And he did turn it off, actually. I was pretty sure he’d been taking drugs. But then, of course, he was only taking drugs because he had ADHD. I think there was a part of him that wanted to impose himself on other people. We see a lot of that kind of thing. Take graffiti – it’s a kind of inflamed need to make a mark on society. But that’s in part because our society now values only “changing the world” and has devalued humility in doing perfectly ordinary jobs.
RH: I’m inclined to agree. Elites have downgraded a lot of the bourgeois virtues that are attainable by just about everyone: industriousness, punctuality, honesty, law-abidingness. As those virtues have been dismissed or mocked, people place increasing importance on traits that are less malleable and more rigid: things like how physically attractive you are, or how intelligent you are and how charismatic you are. If you’re not brilliant or talented or beautiful, people tend to take a strange form of vengeance on society.
TD: On the bright side, on some level, people do understand these things, it’s just that they never hear it. So, for example, I wouldn’t allow prisoners to swear in front of me. They would say something like, “I’ve got this effing headache.” And I’d say, “I don’t talk to you like that. And you shouldn’t talk to me like that.” What I found was that, far from getting angry, they appreciated it. So all is not quite lost. But it will require some considerable courage on the part of elites to improve things. That’s what is required.
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