Harm’s Way

The British sociologist Frank Furedi has hailed the victory of Barack Obama last November as meaning “the disintegration of silent-majority populism” in America. In other words, Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” is now not only a minority but more silent than ever.

I have my doubts about the truth of this diagnosis of American politics, but it is much more true of Britain since the watershed victory of New Labour in the 1997 election–with what results you may discover in the writings of Theodore Dalrymple. That is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a recently retired prison doctor who, for more than 30 years, has spoken up for the ever more silent minority of Britons opposed to the liberal-progressive and multicultural consensus–and is one of the few such voices still able to make itself heard as he warns of a moral and social breakdown in Britain that the rest of the media and the government collude in hiding from general view.

His new book, when compared with such hard-hitting earlier works as Life at the Bottom and Our Culture, What’s Left of It is a more relaxed and reflective collection of essays on literature, history, and culture as well as politics–a demonstration of his considerable range of reference as well as a polemic. He is also a sort of anthologist, like all the best essayists and men of letters, with a wide store of reading to draw on. This book includes essays on Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Ibsen, Arthur Koestler, J. G. Ballard, and Anthony Burgess, but he often applies his literary insights to the social problems that are always intersecting with the cultural ones, just as they do in real life.

One of the best things here is its takedown of Steven Pinker on the assumption that “grammatical latitudinarianism is the natural ideological ally of moral and cultural relativism.” He calls upon his long experience as a prison doctor to document the ways in which social problems and poor language skills go together.

But there is plenty here, too, to make the blood of Americans run cold when they reflect on the similarities between the Obamaniacs of today and the Blairites of 1997. The many hypocrisies and deceptions on which the New Labour coalition was built are typified by the system of criminal justice with which, in his prison job, Daniels had an intimate acquaintance. Citing the work of a whistle-blowing policeman named David Fraser, he compares the British police to

The real question is, why isn’t this clearly appalling state of affairs a scandal in Britain? I think the answer is that the media consensus there–and to a large extent here–includes certain core principles, such as that crime is caused by something other than criminals and that imprisonment is society’s shame, rather than that of the incarcerated, which can only be protected by maintaining these hypocrisies and deceptions, and with them, the illusion that nothing can be done about most crime. Therefore, the media are complicit in pretending that these problems don’t exist–because they shouldn’t exist.

That is also the point, I think, of the doctor’s quotation from T. S. Eliot to the effect that “half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t want to do harm–but the harm does not interest them .  .  . or they do not see it .  .  . because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

As a psychiatrist, the doctor is particularly scathing about the mendacity, corruption, and hypocrisy which surrounds the treatment of the insane in Britain, many of whom wander the streets until they assault someone–under the impression, usually, that they have been offended in some way–whereupon they are taken into custody until they can be brought before a magistrate. There, though quite obviously insane, they are said to be sane by doctors who must otherwise obtain for them an unobtainable hospital bed. They may then be released back onto the streets to assault someone else, or held in custody without charge in the hope that a bed can be found.

In prison, however, the doctor cannot find a hospital bed for his mad patient; the psychiatrists outside the prison consider that the patient is now in a place of safety (the prison) where he will not be deprived of medical attention, and he is therefore of lower priority for a hospital bed than a lunatic still at large in the community. He is thus kept, often for months, in the prison on remand. (At one point Dalrymple suggests, only half in jest, that the prison should charge admission to the public for coming to see the madmen, just as they did at Bedlam in the 18th century.)

I think he is a little too hard on Tony Blair in his essay on Blair’s resignation, “Delusions of Honesty.”

I suppose this is fair as far as it goes, but it also has to be recognized that politicians should not be treated quite like ordinary people in such a situation. Those who demand public confessions of private sins from our public men are at least as much to blame as those who condescend to offer such confessions–or something that will pass for one in a dim light. It is, itself, a form of psychobabble to go in search of such “honesty,” as well as an impertinence of the highest order. What it amounts to is the media’s saying that they have a right to use not only a politician’s words and acts but even the private thoughts of his heart against him. Blair should, of course, not have said anything, but his refusing to give specifics to the reptiles of the press so that they could use them to tear him down was at least preferable to a list of sins, which would have been sure to be a fake anyway.

At his most candidly confessional, for instance, he would not have dreamed of acknowledging the corruption of official statistics, particularly to do with crime, education, and unemployment (which has been medicalized as the numbers on disability benefit have soared). This corruption has led to the treatment of shoplifting, among other things, as no longer a crime: “Police now deal with it the way they do with parking violations: shoplifters get on-the-spot fines worth half, on average, of the value of the goods they have stolen.”

This is the opposite of the “broken windows” approach that had such success in reducing crime rates in the United States, and it has, not surprisingly, produced the opposite effect. That it is possible, with the help of a compliant media, to spin this straw of moral and social failure into the gold of political success is something that we in America may be on the point of learning for ourselves.

James Bowman, author of Honor: A History and Media Madness:: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.