Life at the Bottom

"A classic for our times.  It is as fundamental for understanding the world we live in as the three R's."

 The above endorsement by Thomas Sowell beautifully summarizes Theodore Dalrymple's collection of essays titled Life at the Bottom:  The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. This is one of those books that makes me long for a local friend like one I had in Missouri to spend several hours discussing the points Dalrymple illustrates.  If you like to read, like to think, are aware of worldview problems in our culture or are not aware of those problems, this is a book you need to read.  (Did I cover everyone there?  Because I tried to!)

It's not an easy read--Dalrymple is much, much smarter than I am--but it's not as difficult as it could be.  I found his writing very enjoyable as he chooses just the right words, he draws pictures for the reader instead of just stating a fact, and his delightful wit is sprinkled throughout.  As the back of the book states, "he writes in prose that transcends journalism and achieves the quality of literature."

Dalrymple is a British psychiatrist whose patients live in the slums and a prison in England.  His years of treating and observing the poor of England have opened his eyes to their worldview and thus the source of this socioeconomic group which continues to grow both in his country and mine.  He shares his observations, liberally laced with telling anecdotes, of the results of the ideas of the secular left as they trickle down the socioeconomic ladder.

Free love without responsibility or commitment, refusal to judge anyone's behaviors, the "exchange of liberty for a modest (if illusory) security," the exchange of personal responsibility for a victim mentality, an elevation of self-esteem at the cost of correction in education, the exchange of true value and quality for relativism. . .these are just a few of the principles touted by intellectual elites that Dalrymple attacks with the rotten fruits of the very ideas which bore them.

Savor-worthy soundbites stopped me several times:

So accustomed to the idea that the state would (and should) step in, they felt no personal duty to do something. . .Just as no one is guilty when everyone is, no one is responsible when everyone is (125).

If freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it (5).

The sexual revolution has turned the poor from a class into a caste, from which escape is barred so long as that revolution continues (47).

Life is, in effect, a limbo in which they have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose.  It is a life emptied of meaning. . .Nothing has the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. . .(resulting in) loss of dignity, self-centeredness, spiritual and emotional vacuity, the sheer ignorance of how to live. . .poverty of soul (142).

Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgmentalism is at best indifference to the suffering of others (194).

Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness (245).

I have this book on my list of books to read with my teens in the upcoming school year and I look forward to our discussions as I hope they will resist the dominant culture's worldview and its dismal consequences.