DEADLY ASSISTANCE

I am reading another book by Theodore Dalrymple; a collection of essays written during the late 90's and early 2000's. And although I am always enraptured by his erudition and his dark humour, to call this book 'enjoyable' would be to stretch the truth. It is in fact rather frightening.

His life as a doctor and psychiatrist in a major English Hospital and the prison it serves, both of which are situated in the middle of a large English slum, has provided him with an insight into the human condition that rises above most (if not all) ‘academics’ whose intellectual ‘ruminations’ have caused many of the problems that he writes so eloquently about.
His observations provide an important illumination into the results of untrammelled welfare on the very people it was intended to help and is a sobering call-to-arms on the side of  the conservative perspective in the ‘culture wars’ that rage throughout Western  society:

“Life in the British slums demonstrates what happens when the population at large, and the authorities as well, lose all faith in a hierarchy of values. All kinds of pathology result: where knowledge is not preferable to ignorance and high culture to low, the intelligent and the sensitive suffer a complete loss of meaning. The intelligent self-destruct; the sensitive despair. And where decent sensitivity is not nurtured, encouraged, supported or protected, brutality abounds. The absence of standards, as Ortega y Gasset remarked, is the beginning of barbarism: and modern Britain is well past the beginning.” [Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom, 2001. P.166]

My own (decidedly less ‘expert’ but nonetheless empirical) observations when driving a night-time cab usually on weekends, was a wake-up call to a (at times), culturally closeted life experience.

Australia is rapidly heading down the same dark highways and to reflect on his essay’s is to catch a glimpse of the unenviable future; barring a significant shift in the cultural hegemony that is.