Life at the Bottom

By Theodore Dalrymple, 2001, mostly read by 1/12/2011

This is a collection of essays that first appeared in The City Journal.   According to the book jacket, Dr. Dalrymple is a “British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England.”  Chapter titles like “Choosing to Fail” and “Do Sties Make Pigs?” might make you think that he is a heartless elitist who blames the poor for their plight.  There is certainly blame assigned in this book, but it is not only or even primarily the underclass who are blamed.  Rather than being a polemic condemning the poor, this is a dispassionate description of that which defines and perpetuates the underclass.  Dalrymple chides those politicians and academics who blame society, poverty, or class consciousness for the problems of the underclass, while refusing to consider the evidence that the underclass’s very own habits might be a major determinant of their condition.  Most of his ire is reserved for the intellectual elites whose nihilism and moral relativism has corrosively seeped down to the lowest levels of society, where it has begotten a set of behaviors that couldn’t be better designed to guarantee failure.  Disdain for education, widespread illegitimacy, glorification of thuggishness and the uncouth, all these are detailed for us. 

Dalrymple’s book doesn’t seek to offer solutions so much as to describe symptoms.  As a clinician, he believes that we must first see clearly before we can act wisely.  This book will certainly help anyone who reads it to see “Life at the Bottom” clearly.