theodore dalrymple lunch

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AFRGA1 A053 AFR 16-17 April 2016 www.afr.com | The Australian Financial Review 53 Weekend Fin Lunch with The AFR DO WN THE DRAIN WITH DALRYMPLE The prison psychiatrist-turned-columnist says Britain’s post-war rebellious streak has morphed into unstoppable vulgarity, writes Kevin Chinnery. Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels, is a warrior against downward aspiration. PHOTOS: LOUISE KENNERLEY We used to be known for our emotional constipation. Now it’s emotional incontinence. THE WILMOT RESTAURANT Primus Hotel 339 Pitt Street, Sydney 2 business lunch courses, $110 2 hiramasa kingfish sashimi 1 potato gnocchi 1 Tasmanian salmon fillet 1 Berloka sparkling water, $10 1 green tea, $6 1 English breakfast tea, $6 Total, with tip and surcharges: $140.30 H e’s the psychiatrist who broke a taboo. In 1990, Theodore Dalrymple, prison shrink, slum area hospital doctor and freshly appointed magazine columnist started telling the awful truth about Bri- tain’s poor. Long before motormouth welfare queen Vicky Pollard became the butt of a national joke on the television show Little Britain, Dalrymple was warning of a native under- class utterly impoverished not in money, but in language, ideas and ambition. His books, essays and columns for The Spectator, The Times and the New Statesman have been compared to Orwell in their observations of Britain. But the plight of Orwell’s working class, stricken by the Depression and the collapse of employ- ment, is moving and dignified in a way that Dalrymple’s post-welfare state underclass is definitely not. He shows a new Gin Lane, a Hogarthian horror show of self-destructive behaviour: drink- and drug-addled deadbeat parents, feral children, random violence and chosen idleness. Chaos and ignorance, encouraged by the welfare and education systems, and treated as both normal and unavoidable. ‘‘I didn’t start out to write that. I was just describing what I saw. I probably made it less terrible,’’ he recalls as we sit down to lunch at the less fashionable end of Sydney’s Pitt Street. ‘‘But I saw almost straight away that raw want was not the explanation. It just hit me in the face.’’ Blame is reserved for the intellectual class that made all this happen. Not through the indifference of the 1930s, but over- indulgence. Trendy 1960s social theories have run amok and caused endless harm to the people they are supposed to be helping, he says. Academics, writers, artists and journal- ists tore down old values such as personal responsibility and civility, replaced by ideas that ‘‘society is to blame’’ and a moral relativism that says that nothing is wrong. ‘‘It has disastrous effects on those worst off,’’ he says, ‘‘those least able to withstand the practical results’’ of that moral anarchy. Zero self-control, and zero connection between effort and reward did not make people happy, but left them trapped in ‘‘cheerless self-pitying hedonism and the brutality of the dependency culture’’, he wrote in his book, Life at the Bottom. Dalrymple hazards a precise starting date for this: when John Osborne replaced Terence Rattigan as the leading British play- wright, he says, and angry young men replaced the stoicism of The Browning Ver- sion. It was people who ‘‘showed off their cleverness and their virtue’’ by attacking the status quo. The damage didn’t matter, so much as their pet theories. It’s the radical vanity I well remember at uni in the 1970s, I say, with intellect equated with contempt for conventional life. It’s the same in art, Dalrymple adds, where you have to be transgressive just for the sake of it. He is in Australia as the Centre of Inde- pendent Studies 2016 scholar-in-residence, and will also be lecturing on ‘‘Is Society Broken?’’ at the Sydney Opera House on April 18, and in Melbourne on April 21. Where Britain leads, he warns, others are only a few decades behind. His prose uses adjectives as percussion to beat in the message. Militant philistinism, aggressive incivility. Some newspaper columnists are their writing made flesh. Dalrymple is not. In person he has an imp- ish smile, and an animated laugh at his more outrageous suggestions. His voice is reassuringly doctorly. If you were a terrified newcomer in the prison system, you would be glad to see him. We order. Sashimi to start, then gnocchi for him and salmon for me. No wine. So how did a population that is now wealthier than ever become the world champions ... ‘‘of such decay’’, he says, fin- ishing my question. Did Britain’s old respectable working class, such keen self- improvers, just improve themselves out of existence and leave only a lumpenprolet- ariat behind? ‘‘Except now they are all the lumpenpro- letariat,’’ he says with a straight face. He does not actually like the idea of some isolated underclass, when their vulgarity has become the ideology of the nation. Having trickled down from the top, moral licence has now percolated up again from the bottom. Its tidemark, for Dalrymple, is tattoos. The middle classes began tattooing themselves out of empathy, he once thought, with marginal people such as criminals or bikers. ‘‘But unfortunately, when you imitate something, the role becomes the reality.’’ Mass drunkenness and mass vulgarity is now routine across British society. In the 1960s, stung by criticism it was too middle class, the BBC hired Jimmy Savile, he says. Decades before Savile’s sexual predation was revealed, ‘‘he was the start of an evan- gelical vulgarisation that has proved unstoppable’’. It’s the biggest case of downward aspira- tion ever known, he jokes. Why? He’s not sure. ‘‘Loss of confidence among the middle class – which is quite easy to enter, unlike France which is far more snobbish. And loss of British power and influence in the world. It’s catastrophic when that happens.’’ Leaders now follow the led. In France, politicians ‘‘pretend to be more cultured than they are’’, he says. In Britain, ‘‘it’s exactly the opposite’’. Aren’t you just exaggerating something terrible? I ask. Britain is supposed to be a world leader in soft power: influence through culture and image. Or do they have so much vulgarity they can export it? ‘‘Well, that is what is happening. Why anyone finds British culture attractive I can’t imagine.’’ Brutish behaviour happens in a brutish aesthetic. He bemoans the destruction of graceful cityscapes by careless civic plan- ners. We are lunching at the Primus Hotel, a newly restored art deco gem with huge red marble columns that a Venetian doge would be happy sitting among. It was once Sydney’s water and sewage department: a palace of civic efficiency and pride – pre- cisely the thing that has gone down the drain in Britain, he says. British urban dwellers, he wrote in his book Our Culture, What’s Left of It, are like barbarians camped out in the ruins of an older, superior civilisation they don’t under- stand. You can study them through their lit- ter; there is so much of it, and local councils feel no shame in being unable to control it. That is a deeper corruption of their pur- pose than in Italy, he thinks, where at least you can pay under the desk and things hap- pen. Litter is dropped everywhere, by every- one, he says: there is no underclass in the Lake District. ‘‘You don’t have to wait 3000 years for lit- ter to become archaeology before it tells you something,’’ he says. ‘‘You can track diet, habits, their attitudes, and how they see the world. ‘‘It’s a complete loss of interest in the pub- lic space,’’ he thinks. Graffiti artists have taken it over but as expression, he says, graf- fiti is just individualism without any indi- viduality another modern condition. ‘‘People have great difficulty marking them- selves out as individuals. I didn’t, but then I’m odd.’’ How odd? ‘‘Well, from an early age, I was contrary. Not in any aggressive or egotistical way. But I was always quite happy that I knew best. It’s not true of course, but I never let it des- troy the illusion.’’ What if in a parallel universe Dalrymple also found himself at the bottom of the social heap. What would he have done? ‘‘I have often thought the worst fate is to be an intelligent and sensitive person born into the British underclass. The social pressure on you to fail is enormous. I remember a girl who wanted to study French but, ‘they said I was stupid because I was clever’. Can you imagine growing up in that environment?’’ He looks sad as he says it. What’s the answer? The real problem is ‘‘the modern miracle of British education, in which people come out of school know- ing even less than when they went in’’. When he talked to patients at the hospital where he worked, ‘‘you were plumbing the shallows. I couldn’t find anything that they knew’’. The theme at the bottom of much of Dal- rymple’s writing is lack of self-restraint, from serial litterers to serial killers. He says that he once signed up as the vulgarity cor- respondent of the Daily Mail – he smirks at that one – sent on assignment to an England soccer friendly in Italy. A hundred middle-class Englishmen he travelled with hurled abuse at any passing Italian. ‘‘I asked one of them, a computer programmer, why he did it. He said, ‘you have to let your hair down’. I said, ‘well, no, you don’t. You should keep it up’. We used to be known for our emotional constipation. Now it’s emotional incontinence. ‘‘If you let your hair down often enough, it becomes your character.’’ He says there is nowadays an odd fear of bottling up emotions. Dalrymple once talked to a man who had just murdered his girlfriend. ‘‘He said to me: ‘Well, I had to kill her, doctor, or I don’t know what I would have done.’’’ We can only laugh at the unin- tended irony. Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of the real Anthony Daniels, who was still working in the health system when he began writing. Why did he become a psychi- atrist? ‘‘The gossip,’’ Daniels replies. And he liked the idea of working not just with peo- ple’s physiology, but their lives as well. Is Anthony as angry as Theodore? Both are just disappointed that things are not as good as they could be, he says. ‘‘But disap- pointment is the permanent condition of mankind. Life would be intolerable without it. We would all be so smug.’’ Isn’t it just part of a liberal democracy to tolerate difference and to make allowances for some, even if you find them obnoxious? ‘‘Well, a society that tolerates everything is rather bad. Shouting, screaming and intim- idation? We are prepared to tolerate public vomiting, but if you use the term ‘actress’, you are a sexist. ‘‘A very well-educated lady told me public vomiting is all right: ‘They can clear it up.’ This is how the elite now thinks. They are so anxious not to seem narrow-minded or big- oted, or of being ‘judgmental’. How did that word become a term of abuse?’’ W

Transcript of theodore dalrymple lunch

Page 1: theodore dalrymple lunch

AFRGA1 A053

AFR 16-17 April 2016www.afr.com | The Australian Financial Review

53Weekend FinLunch with The AFR

DOWN THEDRAIN WITHDALRYMPLEThe prison psychiatrist-turned-columnist saysBritain’s post-war rebellious streak has morphedinto unstoppable vulgarity, writes Kevin Chinnery.

Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels, is a warrior against downward aspiration. PHOTOS: LOUISE KENNERLEY

We used to be known for ouremotional constipation. Nowit’s emotional incontinence.

THE WILMOTRESTAURANTPrimus Hotel339 Pitt Street,Sydney

2 business lunchcourses, $1102 hiramasa kingfishsashimi1 potato gnocchi1 Tasmaniansalmon fillet1 Berloka sparklingwater, $101 green tea, $61 English breakfasttea, $6Total, with tip andsurcharges: $140.30

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

He’s the psychiatristwho broke a taboo.In 1990, TheodoreDalrymple, prisonshrink, slum areahospital doctor andfreshly appointedmagazine columnist

started telling the awful truth about Bri-tain’s poor.

Long before motormouth welfare queenVicky Pollard became the butt of a nationaljoke on the television show Little Britain,Dalrymple was warning of a native under-class utterly impoverished not in money,but in language, ideas and ambition.

His books, essays and columns for TheSpectator, The Times and the New Statesmanhave been compared to Orwell in theirobservations of Britain. But the plight ofOrwell’s working class, stricken by theDepression and the collapse of employ-ment, is moving and dignified in a way thatDalrymple’s post-welfare state underclass isdefinitely not.

He shows a new Gin Lane, a Hogarthianhorror show of self-destructive behaviour:drink- and drug-addled deadbeat parents,feral children, random violence and chosenidleness. Chaos and ignorance, encouragedby the welfare and education systems, andtreated as both normal and unavoidable.

‘‘I didn’t start out to write that. I was justdescribing what I saw. I probably made itless terrible,’’ he recalls as we sit down tolunch at the less fashionable end of Sydney’sPitt Street. ‘‘But I saw almost straight awaythat raw want was not the explanation. Itjust hit me in the face.’’

Blame is reserved for the intellectual classthat made all this happen. Not throughthe indifference of the 1930s, but over-indulgence. Trendy 1960s social theorieshave run amok and caused endless harm tothe people they are supposed to be helping,he says.

Academics, writers, artists and journal-ists tore down old values such as personalresponsibility and civility, replaced by ideasthat ‘‘society is to blame’’ and a moralrelativism that says that nothing is wrong.

‘‘It has disastrous effects on those worstoff,’’ he says, ‘‘those least able to withstandthe practical results’’ of that moral anarchy.

Zero self-control, and zero connectionbetween effort and reward did not makepeople happy, but left them trapped in‘‘cheerless self-pitying hedonism and thebrutality of the dependency culture’’, hewrote in his book, Life at the Bottom.

Dalrymple hazards a precise starting datefor this: when John Osborne replacedTerence Rattigan as the leading British play-wright, he says, and angry young menreplaced the stoicism of The Browning Ver-sion. It was people who ‘‘showed off theircleverness and their virtue’’ by attacking thestatus quo. The damage didn’t matter, somuch as their pet theories.

It’s the radical vanity I well remember atuni in the 1970s, I say, with intellect equatedwith contempt for conventional life. It’s the

same in art, Dalrymple adds, where youhave to be transgressive just for the sake ofit.

He is in Australia as the Centre of Inde-pendent Studies 2016 scholar-in-residence,and will also be lecturing on ‘‘Is SocietyBroken?’’ at the Sydney Opera House onApril 18, and in Melbourne on April 21.Where Britain leads, he warns, others areonly a few decades behind.

His prose uses adjectives as percussion tobeat in the message. Militant philistinism,aggressive incivility. Some newspapercolumnists are their writing made flesh.Dalrymple is not. In person he has an imp-ish smile, and an animated laugh at hismore outrageous suggestions. His voice isreassuringly doctorly. If you were a terrifiednewcomer in the prison system, you wouldbe glad to see him.

We order. Sashimi to start, then gnocchifor him and salmon for me. No wine.

So how did a population that is nowwealthier than ever become the worldchampions ... ‘‘of such decay’’, he says, fin-ishing my question. Did Britain’s oldrespectable working class, such keen self-improvers, just improve themselves out ofexistence and leave only a lumpenprolet-ariat behind?

‘‘Except now they are all the lumpenpro-letariat,’’ he says with a straight face. Hedoes not actually like the idea of someisolated underclass, when their vulgarityhas become the ideology of the nation.

Having trickled down from the top, morallicence has now percolated up again fromthe bottom. Its tidemark, for Dalrymple, istattoos. The middle classes began tattooingthemselves out of empathy, he oncethought, with marginal people such ascriminals or bikers.

‘‘But unfortunately, when you imitatesomething, the role becomes the reality.’’Mass drunkenness and mass vulgarity isnow routine across British society. In the1960s, stung by criticism it was too middleclass, the BBC hired Jimmy Savile, he says.Decades before Savile’s sexual predationwas revealed, ‘‘he was the start of an evan-gelical vulgarisation that has provedunstoppable’’.

It’s the biggest case of downward aspira-tion ever known, he jokes. Why? He’s notsure. ‘‘Loss of confidence among the middleclass – which is quite easy to enter, unlikeFrance which is far more snobbish. And lossof British power and influence in the world.It’s catastrophic when that happens.’’

Leaders now follow the led. In France,politicians ‘‘pretend to be more culturedthan they are’’, he says. In Britain, ‘‘it’sexactly the opposite’’.

Aren’t you just exaggerating somethingterrible? I ask. Britain is supposed to be aworld leader in soft power: influencethrough culture and image. Or do they haveso much vulgarity they can export it? ‘‘Well,that is what is happening. Why anyone findsBritish culture attractive I can’t imagine.’’

Brutish behaviour happens in a brutishaesthetic. He bemoans the destruction of

graceful cityscapes by careless civic plan-ners. We are lunching at the Primus Hotel, anewly restored art deco gem with huge redmarble columns that a Venetian dogewould be happy sitting among. It was onceSydney’s water and sewage department: apalace of civic efficiency and pride – pre-cisely the thing that has gone down thedrain in Britain, he says.

British urban dwellers, he wrote in hisbook Our Culture, What’s Left of It, are likebarbarians camped out in the ruins of anolder, superior civilisation they don’t under-stand. You can study them through their lit-ter; there is so much of it, and local councilsfeel no shame in being unable to control it.

That is a deeper corruption of their pur-pose than in Italy, he thinks, where at leastyou can pay under the desk and things hap-pen. Litter is dropped everywhere, by every-one, he says: there is no underclass in theLake District.

‘‘You don’t have to wait 3000 years for lit-ter to become archaeology before it tells yousomething,’’ he says. ‘‘You can track diet,habits, their attitudes, and how they see theworld.

‘‘It’s a complete loss of interest in the pub-lic space,’’ he thinks. Graffiti artists havetaken it over but as expression, he says, graf-fiti is just individualism without any indi-viduality – another modern condition.‘‘People have great difficulty marking them-selves out as individuals. I didn’t, but thenI’m odd.’’

How odd?‘‘Well, from an early age, I was contrary.

Not in any aggressive or egotistical way. ButI was always quite happy that I knew best.It’s not true of course, but I never let it des-troy the illusion.’’

What if in a parallel universe Dalrymplealso found himself at the bottom of thesocial heap. What would he have done? ‘‘Ihave often thought the worst fate is to be anintelligent and sensitive person born intothe British underclass. The social pressureon you to fail is enormous. I remember a girlwho wanted to study French but, ‘they said Iwas stupid because I was clever’. Can youimagine growing up in that environment?’’He looks sad as he says it.

What’s the answer? The real problem is‘‘the modern miracle of British education,in which people come out of school know-ing even less than when they went in’’.When he talked to patients at the hospitalwhere he worked, ‘‘you were plumbingthe shallows. I couldn’t find anything thatthey knew’’.

The theme at the bottom of much of Dal-rymple’s writing is lack of self-restraint,from serial litterers to serial killers. He saysthat he once signed up as the vulgarity cor-respondent of the Daily Mail – he smirks atthat one – sent on assignment to an Englandsoccer friendly in Italy.

A hundred middle-class Englishmen hetravelled with hurled abuse at any passingItalian. ‘‘I asked one of them, a computerprogrammer, why he did it. He said, ‘youhave to let your hair down’. I said, ‘well, no,you don’t. You should keep it up’. We used tobe known for our emotional constipation.Now it’s emotional incontinence.

‘‘If you let your hair down often enough, itbecomes your character.’’

He says there is nowadays an odd fearof bottling up emotions. Dalrymple oncetalked to a man who had just murdered hisgirlfriend. ‘‘He said to me: ‘Well, I had to killher, doctor, or I don’t know what I wouldhave done.’’’ We can only laugh at the unin-tended irony.

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name ofthe real Anthony Daniels, who was stillworking in the health system when hebegan writing. Why did he become a psychi-atrist? ‘‘The gossip,’’ Daniels replies. And heliked the idea of working not just with peo-ple’s physiology, but their lives as well.

Is Anthony as angry as Theodore? Bothare just disappointed that things are not asgood as they could be, he says. ‘‘But disap-pointment is the permanent condition ofmankind. Life would be intolerable withoutit. We would all be so smug.’’

Isn’t it just part of a liberal democracy totolerate difference and to make allowancesfor some, even if you find them obnoxious?‘‘Well, a society that tolerates everything israther bad. Shouting, screaming and intim-idation? We are prepared to tolerate publicvomiting, but if you use the term ‘actress’,you are a sexist.

‘‘A very well-educated lady told me publicvomiting is all right: ‘They can clear it up.’This is how the elite now thinks. They are soanxious not to seem narrow-minded or big-oted, or of being ‘judgmental’. How did thatword become a term of abuse?’’ W