Is the US Following Britain Downhill?

Maybe not in all respects but certainly socially and culturally.

Great Britain lost its empire very quickly in the twentieth century, after becoming overextended militarily and economically, especially with the cost of the two world wars of that century. It turned left after the second of those wars, largely retreated to its island home, and lost much of its industrial base to foreign competition.

Is the US following suit and losing its economic and military dominance? That remains to be seen, but the US is clearly following Britain’s lead in one respect: It is beset at home by social pathologies and cultural degradations that are similar if not worse than what has beset England.

The societal rot in England is not seen by tourists when they visit pretty parts of the British Isles, including the gleaming center of finance, London, where, like a Potemkin village, the dark side is hidden from view.

Theodore Dalrymple sees the rot, though.

Who is Dalrymple? He’s an English physician, a gifted essayist, and an erudite observer of social and cultural dynamics and trends. His observational skills stem not only from his impressive intellect but also from his years of working in impoverished outposts of the former British Empire and prisons, public housing, and sketchy neighborhoods in his home country.

Working among Britain’s underclass for years, Dalrymple has seen firsthand the miseries that a prevailing worldview has inflicted on individuals, families, neighborhoods, institutions, and society as a whole, under the guise of social justice, fairness, and equality.

I recently reread his book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 263 pages). The book is an anthology of essays that Dalrymple published a quarter-century ago in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute. It is striking and sobering to read the statistics and anecdotes on England’s cultural rot and to realize that the rot has crossed the Atlantic.

The source of the pathologies and degradation is the same in both countries. An out-of-touch, ivory-tower intelligentsia has:

– inculcated society with postmodernism, moral relativism, and cultural relativism;

– denigrated marriage, religion, law enforcement, capitalism, and bourgeois values in general;

– blamed poverty for all anti-social, self-destructive behavior, but hasn’t blamed anti-social, self-destructive behavior for poverty;

– decreed that the nation and its institutions and leaders, particularly white ones, have no moral standing due to slavery, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and other injustices;

– portrayed selected minority groups as the victims of these injustices and thus worthy of the highest moral standing and immunity from reproach and even criminal prosecution;

– and conveyed that all outcomes have been positive for women as a result of the sexual revolution and the crumbling of what was an oppressive patriarchy.

Actually, as Dalrymple details, the foregoing has brought violence, vulgarity, depravity, listlessness, substance abuse, out-of-wedlock births, and a disdain for education.

Dalrymple writes, “The connection between this loosening [of standards] and the misery of my patients is so obvious that it requires a considerable intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to be able to deny it.”

Lower-class women and children are especially negatively affected. They suffer physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the parade of men who pass through their lives, men lacking self-respect, introspection, ambition, and feelings of obligation and responsibility for their children and the mother of their children.

Believing that all men are the same, and having experienced the same behavior from their father when they were children, women keep hooking up with violent losers and keep being battered and abandoned. Some women, in a perverse psychology, even see the battering as a sign of love.

The battering has become so prevalent that cops often ignore it, hospital personnel often fail to report it, and the bloated, bumbling welfare bureaucracy and public housing authority promulgate policies that sustain it.

As the lower class has sunk deeper into pathology, the higher classes have adopted the lower class’s dress, mannerisms, speech, body art, lowbrow interests, and noise masquerading as music. Where the English had once aspired to be respectable, refined, learned, cultured, and polite, the opposite values have become vogueish. Even a member of the Royal family bragged about having her navel pierced. “Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration,” Dalrymple writes.

There is a chapter on the proliferation of tattoos, including tattoos that are self-administered. An excerpt:

About one in twenty English auto-tattooists adorn themselves with dotted lines around their neck or their wrists, with the instruction to onlookers to CUT HERE, as if they were coupons in a newspaper or magazine—an instruction that many of their acquaintances are perfectly equipped to obey, inasmuch as they routinely carry sharp knives with them.

Another excerpt:

“A considerable number of the auto-tattooed inject themselves with swastikas. At first, I thought this was profoundly nasty, a reflection of their political beliefs, but in my alarm, I had not taken into consideration the fathomless historical ignorance of those who do such things to themselves People who believe (as one of my recent patients did) that the Second World War was started in 1918 and ended in 1960—a better approximation to the true dates than some I have heard—are unlikely to know what exactly the Nazis their emblem stood for, beyond the everyday brutality with which they are familiar, and which they admire and aspire to.”

Not only do an increasing number of Brits graduate from high school not knowing history, but they also don’t know spelling and grammar. Giving a student a failing grade is now regarded as fatally damaging to self-esteem, as inhibiting creativity and self-expression, and as a form of bourgeois cultural imperialism.

Dalrymple says that he recently encountered a boy aged sixteen in his clinic who wrote “Dear Sir” as “deer sur,” and “I’m” as “ime.” Yet the boy passed a public exam that tested his mastery of English.

Naturally, there is a strong correlation between poverty and anti-social, self-destructive behavior. But Dalrymple questions the degree to which poverty is a causal factor. He didn’t see the same dysfunctional behavior in impoverished countries where the poor didn’t have enough to eat, lived in mud huts, and didn’t have access to medical care.

The so-called poor in England get free food, shelter, schooling, and medical care; yet they wander about aimlessly with vacuous looks in their eyes, predation on their mind, drugs in their veins, bruises and scars all over their body from fights, trash strewn in the yard of their public apartment, and a lack of ambition or interest in anything but watching TV all day, consuming vast amounts of junk food, or getting into fights at seedy clubs or football games.

Most eat their meals alone, thus precluding any opportunity for conversing and socializing. As Dalrymple writes, “English meals are thus solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Dalrymple makes the point that it’s misleading to say that welfare recipients live in poverty, considering how much they receive from the government. It’s more accurate to say that they live in self-inflicted squalor.

Why should they live differently? They’ve been taught that the system is rigged against them, that the government and its leaders are corrupt, that corporations are just as bad, and that their failure to learn and study in school is not their fault. Therefore, as their thinking goes, it’s a waste of time to try to improve oneself.

At the same time, certain immigrant groups arrive in England dirt poor but are industrious, ambitious, studious, and family-oriented. They are often preyed upon by native hooligans.

Not all immigrants are a plus to society, however. Some adhere to cultural and religious beliefs that are at odds with equal rights, the rule of law, and other liberal democratic values. But one risks being called a racist for saying the truth about them, because the prevailing progressive zeitgeist is that all cultures are equally good, with the exception of the Anglo culture, which is characterized as intrinsically oppressive and unjust.

Dalrymple says that English institutions are obsessed with race. He writes, “Welfare agencies divide people into racial groups for statistical purposes with a punctiliousness I have not experienced since I lived, briefly, in apartheid South Africa a quarter of a century ago.” He goes on to describe his attendance at a hospital’s racial awareness course, which seemed to be “based on the assumption that the worst and most dangerous kind of racist was the doctor who deluded himself that he treated all patients equally, to the best of his ability.”

Recall that he wrote this 25 years ago, well before wokeness had pervaded America’s institutions.

A prevalent presumption, according to Dalrymple, is that all public services are inherently and malignantly racist, “and that therefore considerations of racial justice should play a bigger part of the provision of services than considerations of individual need.” Then he makes this insightful point: “In this situation, black and white are united by their own kind of folie à deux, the blacks fearing that all whites are racist, the whites fearing that all blacks will accuse them of racism.”

A chapter on skyrocketing crime in England makes the case that the justice system seems to be more concerned about social justice than justice for victims of crime. Noted criminologists espouse crackpot criminology theories that, according to Dalrymple, “lead to the exculpation of criminals, and criminals eagerly take up these theories in their desire to present themselves as victims rather than victimizers.” He continues:

Since criminologists and sociologists can no longer plausibly attribute crime to raw poverty, they now look to “relative deprivation” to explain its rise in times of prosperity. In this light, they see crime as a quasi-political protest against an unjust distribution of the goods of the world. Several criminological commentators have lamented the apparently contradictory fact that it is the poor who suffer the most, including loss of property, from criminals, implying that it would be more acceptable if the criminals robbed the rich.

Dalrymple brilliantly concludes that “those who propagate the idea that we live in a fundamentally unjust society also propagate crime. The poor reap what the intellectual sows.”

The last essay in the anthology makes some final observations about intellectuals. Samples:

The intellectual’s struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when the reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.

Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English has become a nation of sleepwalkers.

[Intellectuals] saw their society as being so unjust that nothing in it was worth preserving; and they thought that all human unhappiness arose from the arbitrary and artificial fetters that their society placed on the satisfaction of appetite. So dazzled were they by their vision of perfection that they could not see the possibility of deterioration.

. . . if family life was less than blissful, with all its inevitable little prohibitions, frustrations, and hypocrisies, they [intellectuals] called for the destruction of the family as an institution.

My concluding remark is that it is pretty clear that the US is following Britain downhill.