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May 20, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:54:40
Life at the Bottom | Theodore Dalrymple (AKA Anthony Daniels) | EP 170
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Hello, everyone.
I'm very pleased to welcome today one of the writers I admire.
For the content and for the quality of the prose itself, he's been compared to George Orwell, which is high praise indeed, as one of Great Britain's finest essayists.
Dr.
Anthony Daniels, better known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple.
He worked as a prison doctor and psychiatrist, retired in 2005, but worked all over the world and traveled.
He's written many books, some of which have had a rather profound cultural impact, including Life at the Bottom, The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, 2001, where he discusses what you might describe as the philosophy of poverty, Our culture, what's left of it.
The mandarins and the masses, 2005.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
The politics and culture of decline, 2008.
Spoiled rotten.
The toxic cult of sentimentality, 2010.
And The Terror of Existence with Catholic theologian Kenneth Francis in 2018.
For The Spectator, he wrote a weekly column on his experiences as a prison doctor for 14 years.
Those were later collected in various books.
He wrote a weekly column for the British Medical Journal as well for six years discussing medicine and literature.
His essays have appeared in the finest newspapers and magazines in the world, including The Times, The Spectator, and The Wall Street Journal.
Welcome, and thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me.
Well, thank you for asking me.
I'm going to start by telling you how I found out about you.
When I was working as a clinical psychologist, I had a Social worker as a client who, immigrant, second generation immigrant, female, who had been a rather radically leftist thinker in her youth, and then spent 20 years in the social work trenches, and was...
Eventually hounded out of her profession, hounded out and bullied out of her profession by the radical leftists themselves.
And she mentioned life at the bottom to me.
And so I picked it up and read it.
And I thought, I've never heard anyone state this so bluntly.
What struck me, I guess, was three things.
You're...
Apart from the quality of your writing and the content, The particularities of your experience.
You said, for example, that you had dealt with poverty, with people who were in poverty in various places in the world.
Africa, for example.
And then in Great Britain, in the inner cities, in what you regard as the underclass, a permanent, multi-generational segment of society that are, in some sense, They've fallen out of the bottom of the culture, in your view.
And what you concentrated...
You focused on the difference between that poverty and the poverty of absolute deprivation that you encountered in places like Africa.
But then you added another twist to it, which was you made a very, very strong case that there was a philosophy in some sense, or maybe an anti-philosophy, but it boils down to the same thing.
a worldview that constituted the essence of the poverty that you saw in Great Britain, which you also regarded in many ways as more severe and less addressable than the poverty that you had seen in the developing world, for which you also regarded in many ways as more severe and So it was your combination of
Broad, worldly experience, intense involvement with the underclass that so many people feel morally obliged to save in some sense, but actually never interact with.
Your experience as a psychiatrist, and then your willingness to put down these very critical and...
Certainly politically incorrect by virtually every measure observations, which to me rang true, generally true, and which I hadn't encountered with any other thinker.
Yes.
Well, I didn't really start out with any preconception, certainly not any political preconception.
I just saw a lot of patience and the penny began to drop about what their lives were like and what they expected from life.
Who did you see?
Tell everyone about the nature of the patients.
I worked in an inner city hospital.
The inner city hospital was right next door to the prison.
And the main difference between these two great institutions was that there was far more violence in the hospital than in the prison.
And I would work in the morning in the hospital and then I would go and work in the prison in the afternoon and often at night and weekends as well.
So in the hospital I saw...
Maybe something in the region of, I didn't count exactly, 10,000 to 15,000 cases of attempted suicide, or at least of suicidal gestures that varied from real attempts at suicide.
To attempts to bring parents to heal.
Everything in between.
But anyway, everyone, I examined them all.
When I say examined, I mean I spoke to them all.
And of course they told me about the life around them.
So they told me about the...
About the lives of people around them.
And so in the end, I probably heard about the lives of maybe 40,000, 50,000 people, of course, refracted through these people's lenses.
But nevertheless, though it was a selected sample of people, it wasn't a small sample of people.
And so obviously I... I began to draw some conclusions, see some generalizations, which I didn't start with.
So we could talk about the selection for a minute.
I mean, because you were working in the hospital and in the prison, you obviously saw people who were hospitalized.
Or who were in prison.
And so obviously there's a selection there, but your patients were drawn from lower socioeconomic strata, so they were poor and dispossessed, but comparatively speaking.
And they had got into trouble of one form or another that was sufficiently damaging so that they ended up Yes.
in trouble.
And, and you, you, you said you didn't start with political intent while you were a psychiatrist.
But, well, walk us through what you saw, if you would, and over and over and what you started to conclude and why you started to communicate it.
Well, I'll deal with why I started to communicate it, was that it was so terrible that I would have found it very difficult to keep it to myself and remain sane.
In fact, my predecessor in the job, I found little bottles of vodka everywhere where he went, because I think he had found it extremely difficult.
It was very, very distressing.
Once, for example, I kept a diary of what I saw every day, rather than I mould it in a kind of literary fashion for articles.
I just wrote down what I saw.
And after a very short time, actually only a few days, I thought, I can't go on with this.
First of all, no one would want to read it.
It's just too terrible.
So actually things were worse than I described in my book.
Now, what I saw was a complete social, what seemed to me a complete social breakdown.
I mean, there were almost no families in the sense of mother, father and children.
That was almost unknown in the area, practically unknown.
If you asked 16-year-olds who their father is, they replied with things like, do you mean my father at the moment?
Or they would say, when I say, who is your father?
They just say, no.
Well, when I went, I was listening to your book this morning, Life at the Bottom, at 2.5 times normal speed, and it was quite the...
I mean, I'd read it before, but I had forgotten...
It's an unending litany of complete calamity across every dimension you can possibly imagine.
And then you said you saw like 20,000 people who were in dire suicidal straits.
In addition, I presume that you had patients other than those who were suicidal as well.
Yes.
Well, mainly because I was working in a general hospital.
Then I would see patients with organic problems and a few others.
People who'd been beaten by their partners?
Oh, I saw that was standard, of course.
I discovered that about 80% of the women whom I saw had suffered violence at the hands of one or more of their sexual partners.
Well, we can dig in there.
You tell this story that's really quite interesting.
So you're...
And very...
What would you say...
Any discussion of it is liable to create controversy.
So you talked about the women that you saw, the patients, who chronically chose males who you could identify at a glance as extraordinarily likely to burst into violent, jealous, rages, and Become physically violent.
And you also point out that the markers for that were not precisely subtle, comparing the men that you were looking at, I believe, to your neighbor's tomcat, who had been in enough fights so his head was a mass of shredded ears and scars and missing an eye.
And so these were men who had shaved heads, multiple scars from battles.
Often tattooed, often tattooed on their fists with blatant messages of nihilism or social rejection or anger or threats or curse words.
So it wasn't exactly subtle.
And you said that they invariably wore an expression of malign contempt, something like that.
And they were people you would obviously give wide berth to in the street in broad daylight, yet they were invariably tangled up with a woman or two or three or ten who they were abusing serially.
The women seemed in some sense blind to this, but not only the underclass women that you were serving, but you also mentioned that that was extraordinarily prevalent among the nursing staff.
And so walk us through that and tell us how you make sense of that.
Well, I wouldn't say it was prevalent amongst the nursing staff.
It was present in the nursing staff.
Well, my interpretation, which would be, of course, regarded as highly reactionary, in the end, this is the conclusion I came to, was that because sexual relations had been freed from all...
Contractual, cultural, economic restraint and constraint, then what was left was a kind of free-for-all.
And the men wanted exclusive sexual possession of somebody, but at the same time they wanted complete sexual freedom.
Now, these things don't go together very well.
I mean, if there's complete sexual freedom, okay, there's complete sexual freedom.
But if at the same time you want, possibly for reasons of boosting your self-image, the exclusive sexual possession of somebody, and everyone around you is the same, then the men would see other men as threats.
And they would become extremely jealous because they would fear any...
Any contact between their girlfriend, they were never wise, girlfriend with another man would lead to or might lead to a liaison.
And after all, since they were sexually predatory in that way, they assumed that everyone around them was...
It was of similar ilk, and which was often true.
And this used to lead to fights, for example, in so-called nightclubs, which, I mean, when I was young, a nightclub was a place where there was a floor show and little tables around, but these were great caverns of thousands of people, where if a man looked at a girlfriend It was assumed to be a challenge by the girlfriend's boyfriend.
And so there could be fights and even murder.
So I got in trouble with the New York Times because I pointed out at one point during the discussion with this journalist that societies all around the world And I thought of this as a universal anthropological truth and something that was well established to the point of being self-evident, but apparently not.
A major problem that every society faces is the control of aggression by young men in particular, and generally as a consequence of sexual jealousy and striving.
And the universal answer to that, insofar as there is one, was the Development of monogamous norms and social enforcement of those norms.
You just described it in some sense as inhibition and control, but I think it's also useful to think about it as integration and into a more sophisticated game.
Being in a marriage obviously does involve not chasing after other people sexually, but It isn't all inhibitory.
Within the marriage, something sophisticated and hopefully wonderful in the long term is supposed to occur as a preferable substitute And I mean preferable, if it's done properly, to the short-term gratification that might be obtained by serial relationships, say, or sporadic relationships, because they're actually very difficult, and they also produce these violent outcomes that you described.
And I was pelleried for that in quite a remarkable way.
Claims were made that, you know, I was making the claim that governments should, you know, Hand over unwilling women to undesirable monogamous men or undesirable men just to enforce monogamy.
But really what I meant was, well, one of the reasons for marriage, apart from the fact that two parent families are clearly much better for children with the father there, is that societies that allow unregulated polygamy or that degenerate into that are invariably rife with extraordinarily high levels of violence.
Yes, well, that's what I saw.
Now, of course, the destruction of the idea of the family as we once knew it has been a long process, started, I think, by intellectuals, literary intellectuals.
And it's perfectly true that a bad marriage from which you can't escape is hell.
I mean, it's a kind of concentrated hell.
And marriage is not easy.
So people thought, well, I think this is my explanation.
They thought that if we could get rid of all the inhibitions and restraints and frustrations, because there are frustrations, Then the full beauty of the human personality would emerge and we would associate with one another just by love and nothing else.
And when love was over, then you just...
You just go on to something else, somebody else.
But this is actually a very shallow view of things, apart from anything else.
In a marriage, if there are difficulties in the way of ending a marriage, this gives you actual incentives to make it work.
It also tells you that society values what you're doing, which helps you continue to value it, which makes you more likely to stick with it during periods of doubt.
I mean, obviously, life is extraordinarily difficult, just on its own.
And it's certainly no easier if you're alone, that's for sure.
And so life is difficult when you have a partner.
And because of that difficulty...
But not because of anything necessarily intrinsic to the state of marriage itself.
You need social institutions to buttress the structure so that all of the weight doesn't fall on those individuals alone.
I've had clients in my practice who are living together, and when I ask them why they don't get married, the man often will say, well, we don't need a piece of paper to signify our commitment.
And I think...
First, I've heard that 20 times, and you might think that's a philosophy, but it's actually a pretty stunningly shallow cliche.
And second, we're not talking about a piece of paper here.
We're actually talking about something serious.
You stand up in front of your family, your peers, your friends, the people that love you, the people that you want to spend time with, Hypothetically, for the rest of your life that you're going to depend on, that are going to depend on you, and you say, look, this is important.
I want you to recognize it.
We're now one thing.
We're going to give it our best shot, and it would be nice if you support us.
And that's not trivial.
It's vital.
And that's still why I think...
Marriage may be less frequent, especially among the lower classes, than it once was, although cohabiting isn't, or perhaps it is as well.
But romance movies that feature a wedding are certainly not any less popular, and marriage is still just as popular among the upper classes, which is something you also discuss in books like The Mandarins and the Masses, for example.
You're not very happy with...
These philosophical discussions of freedom conducted by people, say, like Jean-Paul Sartre and the absolutely catastrophic consequences of that unbridled thinking on people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Yes.
With regard to the piece of paper business, I remember I had a patient who had, and she was not a foolish woman, had tried to kill herself, eventually unfortunately did kill herself.
She wanted very much a man to marry her.
And the man didn't want to marry her, but he wanted to cohabit with her.
And I remember him saying to me, I don't see what she's worried about.
It's only a piece of paper.
And I said, well, if it's only a piece of paper, why don't you sign it?
Because it's only a piece of paper either way.
So obviously, this revealed that it wasn't only a piece of paper.
It was a commitment which he was unwilling or for some reason to make.
He had personal...
Well, there's also the question of, well, what is the basis of your relationship if it isn't actually a...
A formally recognized permanent commitment.
Say you're cohabiting with someone.
Think in Canada, it's six months and it's basically common law marriage.
So what is it?
Is we're going to hang around with each other until one of us finds someone better, but you'll do for now?
Is that the...
Like, I don't know what...
Well, yes, I think it's...
Particularly with the men, I think, they don't want to close off all possibilities.
You see, they think that having an infinite choice is actually not committing to anything, which of course is a mistake.
And what do you think it is committing to?
The hypothetical continual choice.
That is just, they hope to be able to continue a life of pleasure and sensation.
I think that's about it.
And they don't want to...
They have a kind of anti-romantic idea of love.
So do you think that the intellectuals that were actively engaged in the destruction of traditional structures or in the criticism of traditional structures were just so well protected by the fact of those structures that they were only able to see the residual problems?
I think that was it, yes.
And of course, they were also protected economically, because economics does make a big difference here.
I mean, I know that in practice, the upper classes at least They preserve their hypocrisy.
If they break the rules, they at least pretend not to be breaking, or try to pretend not to be breaking the rules on the whole.
But they are protected from consequences of breakdown to some extent, not completely, of course, because there's an emotional aspect, but money does make a big difference.
But if you have no money, And you have no support, or the only support you have is a rather miserable support of the state, then the consequences are absolutely terrible.
And I saw hundreds and thousands of cases.
There's increasing support in the EU, for example, for schemes such as a universal basic income.
You just made an argument that, at least from one perspective, could be viewed as supportive of a scheme like that, given that If you have a dearth of material resources, a dearth of money, you're much more vulnerable to catastrophe.
And so you might think, well, if we grant people a minimum basic income, that eradicates that problem.
But you also tie the degeneration that you saw Which I want to talk about more, to the rise of the welfare state.
And one of the things that...
And I think this is because of my clinical experience.
It isn't clear to me that giving people money actually solves the problem of poverty.
Because poverty is very much more complex than the mere lack of money, even though that's certainly a cardinal element of poverty.
And that's the other thing, I would say, or another thing that you pushed at constantly in your writings, is that there's an entire worldview that is associated with violent and catastrophic poverty.
And That's not precisely an economic issue, even though economic issues might exaggerate its danger.
So tell us some stories and tell us what you concluded from what you watched.
Well, I concluded that we had created quite a lot of people who had nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, perceive of a life different from the life they had.
Going to work wouldn't make much difference to them.
Economically, as failing to go to work would not make much difference to them.
This isn't actually a necessary aspect of the welfare state.
After all, Britain was far worse in these respects than other countries which have welfare states, in some cases more generous than the British welfare state.
But the British welfare state created a class of people who were permanently in this condition.
And had no real incentive to get out of it.
So this created a kind of...
It created sometimes a lassitude, but it was also dishonest.
It created a kind of dishonesty because, actually, the more problems they made for themselves, the more they were rewarded.
I remember we had a peculiar demoralisation of the world.
I don't mean...
I mean actual removal of morality from all human consideration.
I remember once I had a patient with multiple sclerosis.
And her husband worked, but he didn't earn a lot of money.
And she had multiple sclerosis, which was clearly not her fault.
And they needed some adjustments to their house.
So that she could get out of the house more easily and so on.
And it seemed to me this, as far as I'm concerned, that's a perfectly good way to...
This is a place where the welfare state could actually help.
So I phoned a social worker and I made a great mistake.
I said, I have a particularly deserving case.
Oh, yes.
And there was a stony silence on the other end.
And then she said that all cases were deserving.
In other words, you couldn't distinguish between this case of need, which was just one of those things.
It was nobody's fault.
And someone who took drugs, set fire to his house in a state of intoxication.
There was no difference.
And since, of course, people who behave badly become more needy, they actually gain more attention and more sympathy.
That's if you take dessert away, if you remove dessert from all considerations.
And this means that actually one source of meaning in life is completely removed.
And what we saw were these people who had no religion.
That's the case you're making.
It's not even just removed.
It's actually punished.
Actively punished.
Which is even worse than mere removal.
And you kind of claim, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that there's a perverse attractiveness of that to the educated helping classes in producing a group of people who are so much beneath them in some sense that normal moral standards don't anymore apply.
And what that means, I mean, if that's the case, that perverse sense of superiority and the moral gratification that might provide, if that's the case, then people are being actively punished for doing anything that might lift them out of the circumstances that they find themselves in.
Yeah.
Well, I think one of the things that is clear about the, shall I say, the intellectual classes is one of their greatest fears is Is the fear of being considered censorious.
And of course, censoriousness is not a very attractive quality.
But the best way to avoid being considered censorious is to fail to make any judgment whatever.
But this is completely impossible.
It's impossible not to make judgments.
Judgment is part of being human.
Yeah, well, you can't perceive without judging because you have to select the thing you should be looking at from everything else you might be looking at.
So every act is hierarchical and implies a value structure.
That's right.
And a choice.
I mean, choice imposes the necessity to make judgments.
Now, if you pretend that you're not making judgments, then you are actually facilitating the worst judgments.
But as I said, I think the intellectuals And I mean, I have this fear myself.
When I wrote, I thought, is anyone going to think you are an unfeeling, censorious person?
Because you...
I mean, after all, I'm comparatively fortunate.
Here I am coming into the lives of people who...
Who are unfortunate.
Many of them are unfortunate.
There's no question about that.
Many of them, you know, they're born in a low social class.
They've been given an extremely bad education, although it's actually quite a costly education, but it's extremely bad, and so on and so forth.
And here I am coming in and making...
Making judgement, saying your behaviour is what is causing your unhappiness.
It's at the root of your unhappiness.
And actually, I tried to demedicalize a lot of their unhappiness because I didn't think their unhappiness was a medical condition.
Well, that is the danger with judgment.
I mean, I face this with my clinical clients constantly, but also in the case of my daughter and in my own life for that matter.
If you're dealing with someone who's ill, it's very difficult to encourage and it's very difficult to discipline.
And by that I mean encourage and instill discipline, which is something that you want to do if you're a parent.
If your child is ill, it's very difficult to tell when the illness is sufficient reason so that something isn't being done.
And so when you're dealing with dispossessed people, you have the same problem.
Well, judgment is always fallible.
So I would never say that I have never made any mistakes in my judgment.
You know, sometimes I would be too harsh, maybe, and sometimes I wouldn't be hard enough.
But that's just a consequence of not having enough knowledge and so on and so forth.
But to pretend you're not making a judgment is itself a judgment.
I mean, you're judging that you shouldn't make judgments.
It's also the abdication of responsibility.
I mean, I thought this through with my clinical clients at sort of a technical level, too.
I learned a lot from reading Carl Rogers, and I would say a certain amount of unthinking sentimentality can be laid at his feet in the clinical and social work world, partly because he proposed that unconditional positive regard for his clients was the appropriate pathway forward.
His critics pointed out that if you watched Carl Rogers in action, what he was practicing involved careful discrimination.
But what he meant was something like, Accept that the person is of fundamental value and has the capacity to move towards the light, let's say, and work in that vein.
But what I would tell my clients, and this was a consequence of my realization that judgment was not only necessary but crucially important to forward movement, was that I'm...
Not offering you unconditional positive regard.
I'm on the side of the part of you that wants things to be better.
And I'm going to help you discriminate between the part of you that doesn't want things to be better, that might even want them to be actively worse for all sorts of reasons that all people are prey to, and the part of you that is striving to make everything better.
And we'll discuss what better means, and we'll negotiate the strategies, but Let's make it clear, this enterprise is to get rid of what is undesirable, and to foster what is desirable, and to critically distinguish between those two, which is absolutely vital.
You can throw your hands up and say, I'm not going to be judgmental, but that means you're not distinguishing between what's good and what isn't.
Well, I think what I tried to get at with patients was our, if you like, our existential equality.
That I made choices, but they made choices too.
Of course, there are conditions where that is not so, and you have to make the distinction between those cases where people really do not have any capability.
I mean, there are such cases, of course.
But in the prison, for example...
One thing that made me a little bit optimistic was that I never said anything in my articles that I didn't actually say to the patients.
And the patients understood on the whole.
I mean, there were a few in the prison who I think were not reachable by this kind of argumentation.
But, for example, I would not...
I, in the prison, I said I would not allow the prisoners to swear in front of me.
And I had no means of stopping them, of course.
And if they continued, I couldn't refuse to treat them on the grounds that they had sworn in front of me.
But I did actually stop them.
And I mean...
So why do you think they stopped?
Ah, well, I provided an argument.
I don't know whether one is allowed to use bad language on your podcast.
Anything you have to say that you think is necessary, you're free to say.
Okay.
Well, a patient in the prison would come in and say, I've got this fucking headache.
So I would say, well, before we go any further, can you tell me the difference between a headache and a fucking headache?
Tell me the difference.
And he would say, well, that's how I speak.
And I say, yes, that's what I'm complaining of.
And he said, well, why shouldn't I? Why shouldn't I speak like this?
Because that's me, you know?
And I said, well, supposing at the end of this consultation, I say to you, now, here's some fucking pills.
Take two of the fuckers every four fucking hours.
And if I don't fucking work, fucking come back and I'll give you some other fuckers.
You'd find this a bit strange, wouldn't you?
So he said, yes.
So I said, well, we're equal.
I don't talk to you like that, and you don't talk to me like that.
And they just stopped.
And you meant that.
What?
You meant that.
I meant that, yes.
Yeah, right.
So you're complimenting your client instantly.
You're saying, look, we're engaged in a serious enterprise here, and I actually care about it.
And maybe we should attend to the words we're using.
You too.
Or we're just playing.
And I actually care about you getting better.
So how about we watch our language?
I'll do it, you do it, and you can do it.
And so, yes, people are going to agree to that.
I used to have a good laugh sometimes.
I remember the law was that every prisoner had to be examined medically within 24 hours of being received into the prison.
And in practice, it was usually within two hours of being received in prison.
And I used to do these...
I used to do these examinations, and one prisoner said he wanted his medicine, and I didn't think he should have what he alleged he was taking.
I had no idea whether he was taking it or not.
And I said, I see no medical indication for him.
And he started screaming.
He said, you murderer!
He said, you're...
You're a murderer.
You're not a doctor.
You're a murderer.
And of course, this was a Victorian prison with ironwork and everything.
So it was echoing all through this enormous building.
And anyway, in the end, I said, well, that's enough.
You have to go now.
And so he went and screaming still.
And then the next day I saw him and he came up to me and he apologised.
And he said, I was bang out of order.
That was his expression.
I was bang out of order.
I'm sorry, Doctor.
I said, oh, never mind.
I said, I've been called far worse than that.
And then I said, actually, you had a wonderful effect on the other prisoners whom I was examining because they were like lambs when they came in.
And I said, you couldn't come and do it again this evening, could you?
Come in and call me a murderer.
So we had a good laugh.
But on the other hand, of course, what I was saying is that you can control yourself.
It's not...
Well, that's a compliment.
It's a compliment.
And it might be the first time that some of these people had been complimented in that way.
Well, yes.
I mean, unfortunately, I think that services have been set up to make them the victims of their own lives and behaviour.
So that's how they presented themselves.
And I remember another prisoner who came in and said...
Now, he'd been in prison several times for burglary, and such are the British police that really...
You have to want to be caught, to be caught by the British police for burglary.
But anyway, he said to me, Doctor, do you think my burgling got anything...
Do you think it's my childhood that caused me to burgle?
Do you think it's got something to do with my childhood?
So I said, absolutely nothing whatever.
And he said, what?
Because he expected me to say, you know, it must be.
And then I said, why do I do it?
I said, well, it's quite simple.
You're lazy and stupid and you're not prepared to work for what it is that you want.
And he laughed.
Instead of being very angry, he laughed.
Because he knew that what he was saying was nonsense.
And then after that, we could talk about his childhood because it was true that his childhood was a bad one.
And most of the prisoners have a very bad childhood.
Many of them had very bad childhood.
That was all true.
But it's not true that everyone who has a bad childhood is a burglar.
Right.
Just as it's not true that everyone who's sexually molested grows up to be a molester, even though many molesters were molested.
Yes.
Yeah.
Right.
So there were lots of other cases like that.
I remember a chat came to me.
I mean, prisoners were said to be of low intelligence.
On average, lower than average intelligence.
All I can say is that I never found them incapable of understanding what I was saying.
Now, maybe what I'm saying isn't very intelligent, so it's easy for unintelligent people to understand it.
But nevertheless, I found that they could actually follow quite complicated arguments.
I'll give you an example.
There also isn't a clear relationship between IQ and antisocial behavior.
Partly, it's complicated, too, because many prisoners have histories of head trauma, often from...
Violence and from child abuse and damage from alcoholism and so on.
But I know the literature on antisocial behavior.
We looked at predictors for years and even neuropsychological tests that assess prefrontal function, for example, which is hypothetically the seat of inhibition or higher order cognition.
The predictive power of cognitive ability in relationship to criminality is really quite low.
And IQ is completely uncorrelated with conscientiousness, which is a personality factor, and with agreeable It's not obvious that criminals are stupid.
I personally never found that.
For example, a chap came to me and said, you have to give me something because...
If you don't give me something, I'm going to go and attack a child sex offender in the prison.
Actually, generally, they were kept apart because they would be immediately attacked.
But anyway, he said, I'm going to kill one if I get hold of one, if you don't do something.
I said, well, let's think about this.
He said, well, why do you feel like that?
And he said, well, because they interfere with kiddies.
So I took a bit of a risk.
I said, do you have any children?
And he said, yes, three.
I said, how many mothers?
And he said, well, three.
I said, and these mothers, do they have boyfriends?
And they said, yes.
And I said, yes.
One or perhaps more?
Have they had more than one?
And they say yes.
I said, well, is it likely that one or more of these boyfriends has sexually interfered with one of your children?
And he immediately got the point.
And I said, well, you haven't interfered sexually with children yourself, but you've facilitated such, you've created the conditions in which such behaviour is likely to occur.
Now it's too late.
You can't do anything about it now.
It's too late.
But you can make sure that you don't do anything to further it in the future.
And he went out.
There was no more talk about killing sex abusers.
Why do you think you got away with that?
Well, you said you took a risk, right?
Well, I took a risk.
I mean, it was a risk that I didn't know that he had children.
I mean, I had a fair idea because it was so common amongst prisoners and outside prison.
But it's also a risk.
I mean, the risk you took, he asked you to do something because he was going to become murderous.
So that's a pretty salient, immediate, and credible threat, given that a violent criminal uttered it in a prison.
Yes.
And your response wasn't, I better prescribe him a sedative, at least to cover myself up, let's say, if anything does happen.
Your response was, well, let's call this guy out for his rather self-evident moral flaws and Blind ignorance of which is facilitating an unearned sense of homicidal moral superiority.
And let's assume that that's going to be curative.
That's a risk.
Yeah, it's a risk.
And I must say that when I had, and I had lots of, quite a few patients who said similar things.
And I didn't give in to what was, in essence, moral blackmail.
But of course it did always occur to me that maybe one day one of these people who was threatening something like that might actually commit the act and then someone might blame me.
Yes, definitely.
That never happened.
That never happened.
But I was fairly clear that...
Their responsibility was not to behave like that.
And he didn't, in my opinion, as far as I could tell, suffer from anything which would have excused him.
Right.
Some organic impulse control disorder, some prefrontal damage.
I mean, those things do occur.
A certain percentage of violent criminals have rage that's induced by epilepsy, and that can be triggered by drinking.
And there are organic syndromes that mimic virtually every moral failing.
Yeah.
Yeah, if he had a psychosis, for example, I mean, if he had a psychosis, I wouldn't, of course, I wouldn't have said what I said.
My sense in reading your books is, so there is this censoriousness, or that's something you could be criticized about.
Yeah.
And I'm sure, and you can tell me about that, I'm sure you have been criticized for that.
And, you know, you've written provocative tracts like The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, which is a real dagger in some sense, because people...
Let's not call it sentimentality for a moment.
Let's call it empathy or sympathy.
And you make a case that I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that excessive empathy, unthinking sympathy, can produce catastrophic consequences because it's not tempered by judgment.
And then I look at the personality literature.
We have two moral personality traits.
Roughly speaking, one is agreeableness.
And so people who are high in agreeableness are empathetic and sympathetic and self-sacrificing and perhaps resentful because of it.
So it's not an untrammeled virtue, whereas the disagreeable types are more likely to be imprisoned.
So that's a predictor of antisocial behavior.
But they're implacable and stubborn and hard to push around.
And so...
People vary on that distribution.
I think agreeableness, the empathy dimension, is a trait that's particularly good for fostering the care of infants.
Because infants, immediate empathy with an infant under six to nine months is almost invariably the right response.
If the infant is crying or in distress, your job isn't to question or judge, it's to alleviate the source of the trouble.
And it's very hard to take care of infants, and it's no wonder that there's a moral virtue that's essentially devoted to the care of true dependents.
But we have conscientiousness, too.
And conscientiousness is the best predictor of long-term life success, apart from IQ. And conscientious people are good at formulating and keeping contracts, long-term contracts.
It's sort of a cold virtue.
And they are judgmental.
But, as far as I'm concerned, we wouldn't have both these personality traits.
Like, they're two of five, so it's not like it's a trivial proportion of the variation in personality.
We wouldn't have two of our five personality traits aimed at regulating our behavior if empathy alone was sufficient.
And so you go after it.
The toxic cult of sentimentality.
What do you mean by that?
Well, I mean, if you like, the infantilization of people who are expressing emotion.
So we accept now that, I mean, if someone expresses distress, we don't inquire where that distress comes from.
How it arose.
We just simply tried to alleviate it.
Oscar Wilde, of course, said that sentimentality is the desire to have the emotion without the cost of the emotion.
I suppose sentimentality is to empathy what kitsch is to art.
And so what would you regard?
Okay, so let's...
I'll give you an example.
I mean, I start the book with an example, which I read in my local newspaper, which was of a man who bought a chicken in a supermarket and roasted it and then gave it to...
They were eating their dinner, and the girl, the little girl, finds that there are chickens' feet in it.
And screams with horror.
And so the father, the child is so horrified that the father says, I don't know whether this is what he did literally, but I had to throw it out of the window.
So he just took the emotion of the child and said, I have to assuage that emotion instantly.
Any way I can, and the quickest way is the best because, of course, she would have less emotion if it's dealt with quickly.
So there's no rational, there's no attempt to argue rationally about this, that actually chickens do have feet, that they were live creatures once, and this is something that children have to learn.
It's one of the things that children have to know.
And so what's the problem with reflexive empathy, exactly?
Well, it's not exactly empathy, actually.
I think it's not genuine empathy.
Well, then we should define genuine empathy.
We should define genuine empathy and distinguish it from counterproductive sentimentality.
Yeah, well, it's not easy, of course.
No, fair enough.
I know I'm putting you on the spot.
I'm saying that that's something that could be productively attempted.
Yes, I'm not sure I have the complete answer to that.
You're hitting at it from all sorts of different directions, though, you know, like one of the things that emerges from your book, and, you know, I saw you as someone who wanted genuinely to be of help to the people that you were seeing, and tortured by this constant immersion that you had in absolute bloody, nightmarish catastrophe.
To a degree that I don't really understand how you managed, outraged by what you saw, outraged by the thoughtless contribution of skeptical and critical intellectuals to this suffering, which is swept under the table in some sense, or attributed only to the power-hungry depredations of capitalism or something like that.
And so you're outraged by that, and you're trying to use your capacity for...
Judgment to help your clients, your patients, distinguish between those things that they're doing that clearly hurt them and those things that help them.
And also to attribute to them the capacity to do that.
I was talking to my wife today.
We were talking about a woman she's dealing with who is having...
A hard time disciplining her one-and-a-half-year-old.
And, you know, I mentioned to her that one of the things I've seen among especially my seriously affected clinical clients is that they actually have no idea that they could change their behavior in a manner that would improve the future.
That, as a concept, that's not part of the subculture that they're embedded in.
And that's so counterproductive and unhelpful.
Just hinting that's helpful.
We also, of course, give them incentives not to think like that.
Because if, in fact, you have a situation in which changing their behaviour will not improve certainly their economic situation very much, which is actually the condition, the situation of many of my patients, that takes away one of the possible incentives for changing behaviour.
And why is it that finding gainful employment, for example, isn't going to produce a material change in circumstances?
How is it that this is at the level of detail?
Because many people, if they go to work, they lose benefits.
They have to start paying for things which were previously paid for them.
So they end up going to work For X number of hours and being very slightly better off in monetary terms, which doesn't seem to them to be worth it.
And I can understand that.
So you're asking them to do low-level jobs, get up maybe at six o'clock in the morning.
And furthermore, of course, it's not good for their children because often they are single parents.
So they've got no support at home other than whatever it is the state provides them.
And so they have to manage their children and going to work when it's very difficult for them.
Right, for no economic incentive.
Well, I mean, they're marginally better off.
Mm-hmm.
Well, maybe.
Maybe.
They have to buy clothes.
It's expensive to work, to enter the workforce.
It's not trivial.
They have to arrange transportation.
That's also an expense.
And then you said childcare.
That's a devastating expense because most people who would work on the margins don't make enough money to afford childcare at all, let alone childcare of any quality.
Yeah.
So it also means that this unwillingness to pass judgment, let's say, on the part of helpers also means that we abdicate our responsibility to design social welfare systems that would reward productive behavior because we don't want to make the judgments about what behaviors are productive and what aren't.
At least partly because we don't want to make mistakes and throw people out that are deserving, but we can't differentiate.
But then because we won't make those judgments, we produce systems that counter-productively reward the kinds of behaviors that produce the problems we want to solve.
They treat everybody as helpless.
And it's a kind of learned helplessness, actually.
And if you look at, I mean, it's very interesting to see the success, the economic success of certain groups of poor immigrants.
For example, the Sikhs in Britain.
And I'm sure, and certainly in Canada, they may come with nothing, but within a very short time, they've succeeded.
They've risen up the social and economic scale.
Now, you see that with first-generation Asian immigrants in North America.
So I looked into that in detail because it's a very interesting phenomenon.
I was interested in the relationship between IQ and conscientiousness IQ and personality in predicting long-term life outcomes.
And by and large, people with higher IQs do substantially better.
So if you had to pick one attribute to ensure your success at birth, it would be high intelligence.
It's better to be born three standard deviations above the mean in IQ than three standard deviations above the mean in wealth.
In terms of your position at 40, so 40 years later.
So IQ is very powerful.
Conscientiousness is also powerful, but only about a third as much, but it's still powerful enough so that Asian immigrants, their children, perform on average as well as native-born Caucasians who have a 15 IQ point advantage, which is roughly the difference between a college student and a high school student.
And so there's something in the Asian culture, and what it is is quite clear, actually.
It's an incredibly intense work ethic and respect for achievement, disciplined achievement in the economic realm.
That's hammered in right from now.
That disappears after about two generations.
Yes, but presumably also there's the maintenance of the family structure.
So that...
I mean, you don't, certainly where I was anyway, you didn't get this complete breakdown.
I mean, I never met children of Indian immigrants who didn't know who their father was.
Right, right.
Well, and that's an interesting phenomenon, too.
I went to a talk at one point at the university five or six years ago.
And a feminist was speaking, or a former feminist, maybe still, maybe a real feminist now, her name was Janice Fiamengo, and she had been a radical leftist feminist and was in the English Literature Department and eventually realized that what she was involved in was an academic scam, fundamentally, and turned into quite a vocal critic of that particular perspective, postmodern, say, neo-Marxist perspective.
She mentioned to the audience that, In intact families with fathers, the children in those families do much better on virtually every measure you can possibly imagine.
And in my naivety at that point, I thought, well, that's going to be an incontrovertible statement, because all you have to do is be remotely familiar with the childhood development literature, and you figure that out right away.
And yet, it was as if she dropped a live snake into the audience, because...
And this is that toxic sentimentality that you were talking about.
Say, well, look, there are obviously struggling single parents who are struggling for no fault of their own, a perfectly credible job of raising high-performing children.
And then if you say, well, the two-parent family is more desirable, by implication, you're denigrating that accomplishment, let's say.
And fair enough, there is a real tension there.
And there are exceptions to the rule, but it's still the case that if you were trying to design public policy that was of benefit to children...
You would design public policy that would reward people for long-term monogamous relationships where one of the participants was male.
But you need to use judgment for that.
Yes.
But if you look at literature, for example, there has been a consistent attack on that view for many, many years, going back, for example, the Fabians and so on.
And what happens is that people use marginal cases as being central.
And as I've already said, it's undoubtedly true that many marriages were oppressive and that being in an unhappy marriage is a horrible experience.
It's a terrible experience.
It's a long form of torture.
But people then thought that there was a perfect solution to this problem.
There's a perfect solution to human relationships.
And there is no perfect solution.
There's only better and worse.
And whatever form of human relationships you're going to have, there are going to be terrible ones, but...
As far as I could see, and I had no real opinion about this until I actually immersed myself in the world in which I did immerse myself, it's quite clear to me that without a formal structure of relationships, things are absolutely terrible.
for very large numbers of people.
Now, of course, it's perfectly true that I saw, if you like, only the failed cases, but there may have been...
But the question then would be, well, where would you find the successful cases?
Because let's think this through, because it's a crucial point, you know.
Okay, so you have a biased sample, and maybe you approach this from an ethically conservative perspective, and so that produces your viewpoint, and it bears little relationship to the real world.
But let's look for the counter example, So, well, first of all, you can't look among the high-functioning middle to upper classes for counterexamples because they're all married.
Yeah.
Right?
So then you think, well, is there a subset of people who are poor, who are flourishing in their serial relationships, in their fragmented serial relationships?
And well, first of all, probably not, because they're poor, right?
By definition, you've already excluded the middle and upper class.
So I'm kind of curious about...
Well, I mean, I tried to think, I thought, well, how is someone living in these circumstances supposed to get out of this situation?
Right.
What would look like a viable, practical alternative that would be better?
Yes, but that didn't involve changing the way they made their relationships.
Or pursued their relationships.
So we have to keep the structure of the relationships the same.
What else can they do that would make their lives better?
And I just couldn't see how their lives could get better while you have this kind of free-for-all.
Well, it wasn't really free for all, it was free for some.
And so I came to the conclusion that it was a social and cultural disaster.
Well, so let's, we could look at the fantasies of sexual libertinism, let's say.
And I think a good place to look, and you know, I might be way off base here, but whatever, I'm going to forge forward.
Let's look at Playboy, because Playboy was the first mass market magazine that sort of introduced the idea of sophisticated sexual freedom into the mass audience.
Right, and that quickly degenerated into Penthouse and Hustler and then to this bloody online catastrophe where everything goes and it's a cesspit of unimaginable proportions.
But in any case, back to Playboy.
Well, you know, you have two sophisticated people.
The woman's in her early 20s.
The guys may be five years older than that.
They both have a glass of nicely aged wine.
They're sitting in a 50s living room that's sophisticated, discussing literature, and they're both free to make their choices, and so they have sex.
And then maybe your life is an unending sequence of those perfect dates.
It's like, well, what are the preconditions for that?
For that even to be possible?
Well, you both have to be young.
You both have to be attractive.
You both have to be healthy.
You both have to be rich.
You both have to be educated.
In all likelihood, so that you're not rife with psychopathology...
So that that can be an enjoyable and civilized evening, let's say.
Well, you have to have come from a pretty stable family, probably one with mother and father intact, and certainly not characterized by the constant unwanted serial switching of partners.
I mean, it's virtually unattainable, except in an unbelievably protected environment.
But you're in that environment, and you think, well, I could.
Maybe you're in a marriage and you're unhappy.
You have all those attributes.
You think, well, I could jump out of that into this fantasy.
And everyone could share the fantasy, but no, they couldn't.
It's not possible.
But it, I mean, actually what people are really doing, I mean, one of the most important figures in modern cultural history is Marie Antoinette, who played shepherdess.
Who went out and thought it would be nice to be a shepherdess and went out to be a shepherdess for the day, but then always returned to her palace.
And this is what these people are doing because probably they give up that life at some point, the rich people you've described.
And they actually settle down, more or less.
Well, invariably, if they don't, they're not happy about it.
If they don't, it's because they failed to get what they're actually aiming for.
Incidentally, one interesting thing was that I would talk to mothers, single mothers, About what they wanted for their daughters.
And what they wanted for their daughters was for them to find a nice man who would have a good job and would treat them decently and they'd buy a house and so on and so forth.
So, but they had no idea how to encourage them.
Right, they have no idea what the micro elements are.
None whatever.
You see this in illiterate families too, is that if you ask them, do you want your children to be educated?
They say yes, but there's no books in the house.
And they don't know where to buy a book, and they're intimidated by books.
And if they have a book, they don't know how to read it to their child.
You get these huge differences By the age of three, between children in literate and non-literate households, the three-year-olds in literate households might have been exposed to, you know, a thousand hours worth of books by the time they're three.
They can already sit in a child in a house like that.
You give them a book, they know what it is, they'll sit there and mime the action of reading.
They go through the pages, they point at the pictures, they have all these preliterate behaviors built in that's the necessary scaffold for the development of literacy.
And there's micro habits that are invisible.
If you're in that culture, they're invisible because they're just part of how you live.
Like the fact that you have a bookshelf, like the fact that your relatives buy your children books.
And if you don't know how to do that at all, the barriers to entry are unbelievably unforgiving.
Yes, and probably also...
Nobody tries to make up for it on behalf of the parents.
I mean, the schools themselves now doubt the value of literacy, some of them.
The teachers don't know what they're supposed to be teaching, or at least alternatively, a lot of them are more interested in the ideological correctness of the children than they are in their ability to read and Well, it's actually quite difficult to teach children to read.
You have to pay attention to each child, and they radically differ in their intellectual ability.
And then you actually have to know how to teach someone to read.
And that's actually complicated.
You start with the letters, you get the letters pronounced, you get two-letter combinations and three-letter combinations, you automatize that.
It's effortful.
Ideological indoctrination, that's relatively straightforward.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I can't really speak about this because I never tried to teach anybody to read.
I had an interesting experience.
Well, the data on that are pretty clear.
If you teach children to read using phonetics...
Yes.
We have a phonetic alphabet because that makes things easier.
You only have to remember 26 characters and variants on them instead of 10,000, say.
You teach the phonemes and you get them to aggregate them.
And once they get to the point where they can read phrases, they start to read on their own account because it becomes rewarding.
If you use other methods, they don't learn as well.
Well, one thing that I saw with my patient, I was interested in their level of education, which was catastrophically low.
I mean, it was unbelievably low.
And I would give them something to read.
And you could see that they had difficulty doing it.
I asked them to read it out loud.
And then when they came to a long word, they would say, I don't know that word.
I don't know that one.
As if English were written in ideographs.
In Chinese, yes.
In Chinese.
Mandarin, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Some teachers teach an ideogram method of verbal apprehension, which is absolutely counterproductive.
That's how experts read, but that's not how you learn to read.
Yes.
No, and then I would say...
When they got through it, I would ask them, what did it mean?
And they would say, I don't know, I was only reading it.
Unless you can read phrases at a glance?
much intellectual energy decoding the phonemes and the letters that you can't read for meaning.
And that's why it's not rewarding to begin with, right?
You have to go through that slog of automatizing the subroutines.
And that happens at a much earlier age in literate households.
Yeah.
Well, what I found very strange was that there was no sense of outrage that we spend on average $100,000, probably more, on each pupil's education.
And about 20% of them come out Functionally illiterate or barely literate.
The kind of people that I'm talking about who couldn't read a phrase or who had difficulty sounding it out and then at the end of it didn't know what it meant.
Now how is it possible to spend so much money and have these results And this has a catastrophic effect on their lives.
It's obvious that in any modern society it must have a catastrophic effect on their lives.
But nobody seemed to be interested or saw it as a disaster.
You'd think the faculties of education would be interested and you'd think that by now they would have Let's say, assessed an immense variety of methods to teach children how to read, let's say, because I think pretty much everybody could agree that that would be good.
You know, that they would have tried out 200 different educational techniques, subjected them to stringent analysis, and that we would see an increase in the efficiency of treating...
Teaching children to read that would be in keeping with the increase in technological power that we've seen over the last 20 years.
We should be teaching kids to read at a rate that's just beyond comprehension, if the faculties of education were doing their jobs, which they're not.
Quite the contrary.
So, yes, that's a...
And I was thinking, too, you know, this...
One of the things I found really interesting working with people who were dispossessed was, you know, you might think, well...
You don't want to impose these external norms on them.
There's a form of colonialism that would be associated with that, or classism, or something like that.
And I suppose that's part of the non-judgmental stance.
But you can always just ask the people themselves.
And what you find right away is they want for themselves pretty much what the middle class person or the upper class person has.
And I don't just mean material resources.
they'd rather be educated than not educated, or at least they'd want that for their children.
They'd rather have a relationship, if they could figure out how to conceive of it, that was stable and loving.
All of these things that, you know, you could regard as arbitrary.
A child would rather have a father and a mother that were around.
So we could derive norms for the direction of our social policies that could be derived from the populations that we're hypothetically trying to serve, but we don't seem to do that either.
We can't even agree that, all things considered, it would be better to foster, to reward the presence of two-parent families.
Yeah.
Yes, well, I mean...
All that I said in my books I thought was common sense, actually.
Everything was more or less common sense.
It wasn't work of great reflection or anything like that.
It just seemed to me everything was obvious.
And yet...
Maybe it takes exposure to 20,000 cataclysmic failures to make what's obvious salient.
You know, because the problem with what's obvious is that it's invisible.
You know, I've found this out many times, so if I'm called on in an interview, for example, to defend marriage, I think...
Well, I don't actually know how to defend something that until 10 years ago was taken as a self-evident good.
It's not like I have, or any of us for that matter, have a massive array of arguments at hand to justify cultural norms.
The fact that they're norms means you don't have the arguments at hand.
They're so self-evident that they're not buttressed by a differentiated description.
Yeah.
Well, you see, I... I used to write for a left-wing magazine as well as The Spectator, which is conservative, called New Statesman.
I mean, it's not far left, it's moderately left.
And I used to go for lunch there sometimes, and we would have a discussion.
And I met a very distinguished BBC broadcaster in the days when the BBC actually was not terrible.
And he said he'd read me.
And then he said, I wanted to meet you because I wanted to ask you.
He said, do you make it up?
Do you make it up?
I make it up.
So I said, well, I'm very flattered that you think I could make it up, but I don't make it up.
On the contrary, I tone it down.
And of course, I do disguise it for So that people are not recognizable.
But in essence, everything is true.
And actually, things are much worse than I described.
Well, the thing is, in a bad situation, things are so bad that it's both inconceivable and incommunicable to the people that it's happening to and to anyone else.
Like, I've been in families that were dysfunctional for multiple generations.
And what I found was that in some situations...
You dig and you get to a lie and you think, God, I finally got to the fundamental lie.
And then you'd find that there was a lie underneath that that was even bigger.
And then if you dug through that, you'd find another catastrophe that was even more cataclysmic.
And it just never came to an end.
You can't communicate.
What did you say in one of your books?
I think it was you quoted Tolstoy.
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Yes.
Right.
So there's this specificity of misery that's complex beyond belief and densely layered.
And so I know that reading your accounts, which are, you know, hair-raising and heart-rending, that's nowhere near as bad as the actual situation.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, I used to go to the hospital thinking I'd heard everything.
I've heard everything.
They can't surprise me.
But they always could surprise me.
There was a kind of creativity about the miseries that people inflicted on each other without...
I mean, what was distressing to me about the misery that I saw is that there wasn't a government inflicting it, certainly not directly.
It was not like the misery of, shall we say, mass deportation or civil war or anything like that.
But in a way that made it, because I used to have not exactly a hobby, but I used to have a taste for going to dangerous countries and places where there was civil war, where everything had broken down.
And in a way I found it less distressing than the kind of breakdown that I was seeing around me in England, because in a way it was unforced.
Right.
Well, let me ask you about that then for a sec.
I mean, you're making two arguments.
You were making two arguments just then, and I think this happens regularly, is that there is an underclass.
So, three arguments.
There is an underclass that has a multi-generational component.
Things are really, really bad in that class for all sorts of complex reasons, many of which are philosophical, let's say, or ethical or moral.
And it's worse than it was.
And I guess of the three of those, the one I find Least convincing, let's say, or I'm able to accept with less certainty, is the idea that things are actually worse.
I mean, people, you know, if you go back to 1820s, and this is maybe where your experience in poor places in developing worlds might be useful.
If you go back to 1840 or thereabouts, the typical person in the Western world lived on about $1.90 a day in today's dollars.
So below the UN poverty level, life was bloody brutal for people.
Maybe things are worse now.
In the lower class with regards to familial structure than they were for a brief period after the Second World War.
But it isn't obvious to me that they're necessarily worse by historical status.
Well, I mean, it's always a question of when you say something is worse, there's always the question of what you're comparing it to.
Well, yes.
So, I mean, you know, we could compare it with 3000 BC or 1100 or whatever.
The things that...
It's incontestable that we are vastly better off physically.
That's incontestable.
And I mean, when my father was born in the East End of London, and in his borough, when he was born, which is 1909, the infant mortality rate...
It was, if I remember rightly, 124 per thousand, which means that an eighth of children died before their first birthday.
And in 18th century London, 50% of children died before they were five.
And there was poverty and filth and epidemic disease and every kind of...
But I don't think that that's the kind of standard of comparison we should use.
And if we take something like crime, violent crime, I think the evidence is that it has increased enormously in a country like Britain since 1900.
When, of course, there was absolutely terrible poverty by our standards today, the kind of poverty that nobody suffers today in any Western society.
And I was very struck by the story of Jack the Ripper.
There are very instructive things which some people haven't noticed, which was that in Whitechapel, which was regarded as the worst part of London in the 1880s, and the poverty was just, again, inconceivable to us now, when a body was found, people ran off to find a policeman, and they found a policeman.
And the policeman was armed with a bullseye lamp.
He had a truncheon which he was supposed to draw only an extremist.
And he had a whistle.
And that was how he was armed.
And he went around Whitechapel one by one, not in pairs or not in groups, but with one.
So in Whitechapel today, you wouldn't get a policeman doing that.
So I am confused about that to some degree because, you know, Stephen Pinker, for example, I mean, he makes a pretty strong case that overall your probability of being murdered, for example, against a time frame issue has declined.
Well, it depends where you're starting with the future.
So I think the more powerful argument is not necessarily so much that things have...
Tell me what you think about this.
I've...
It could easily be that there's a degeneration of moral standards, let's say, that leads to a higher probability of dispossession, and that you see that in the class that's dropped out of society.
And that is a consequence of, what would you say?
A failure to abide by the same standards that might motivate middle-class prosperity.
And maybe the expectations for that class have transformed themselves over a 20-year period, but it isn't obvious to me necessarily that that's associated with an increase in criminality overall.
Well, again, I think certainly in Britain it's perfectly clear that things like burglary and assault have increased enormously.
I mean, they're not increasing further and they might now be decreasing, but they've increased enormously by comparison with...
With the fairly recent past, I'm not talking about 18th century London when you couldn't go anywhere without meeting a footpad or anything like that.
I mean, this is slightly altering the subject a little.
I personally am not terribly keen on the idea of the underclass because this suggests that it's a bit like...
Marxist lumpenproletariat, if you like.
This is 5% of the population, or whatever percentage of the population, that is very separate from the rest of the population.
Unfortunately, this was one of the points in some of my books anyway, the cultural influence is going from the It's flowing from the bottom now upwards rather than what used to be the case from...
From middle classes or upper classes and middle classes downwards, so that aspiration was to move upwards, but now there seems to be a cultural desire for cultural decline or dissent, it seems to me.
Yeah, you make that case with an upper-class mimicry of lower-class, let's say lower-economic-class styles and that sort of thing.
Which is a form of Marie Antoinetteism because, of course, they hang on to their economic advantages.
Right, right, right.
Well, then they get the advantages of being dispossessed and the advantages of being rich.
Let me ask you, we're going to have to draw to a close here relatively quickly, unfortunately.
Are there other people writing in the same vein as you?
And that's one question.
The other question is, what has been the consequence for you of your writing and your popularization of these ideas?
I'd also like to know...
What sort of audience you're reaching.
Your most successful book, let's say, if you consider success popularity, was Life at the Bottom, correct?
That's 2001?
I think it's fair to say that that one brought you to wide public attention by writer's standards, by non-fiction writer's standards, let's say.
What's been the consequence?
What kind of criticisms have you faced?
And how have you responded to him?
What's been the consequence of that for you as well?
Yeah.
Well, the first thing is, I don't think many people are writing in my vein.
There was a journalist, a left-wing journalist called Nick Davis, who wrote about this.
And he admitted the phenomena.
So he didn't deny the phenomena.
His analysis of the causes of it was different.
Nick Davis?
Nick Davis, yes.
What did he write?
I've forgotten the title.
Okay, I'll look it up.
I'll look it up.
Of course, I didn't agree with his analysis of the causes, but he did admit that the phenomena were there, and we are very reluctant to admit that the phenomena are there.
And if they are admitted, they're regarded as amusing.
There was a very interesting...
A video made about the Toki, it was called the Toki family in In Holland.
And this was a sort of underclass family which was drinking and taking drugs, and it was making the lives of its neighbours terrible.
And they were, I mean, I don't like to use the word degenerates, but that's the word that comes to mind.
And finally, they managed something which is very difficult in Holland.
They were evicted from where they were living.
And this is almost an impossible achievement in Holland.
But anyway, they went off in their white van, and the consequence was that they were going on holiday to...
Their punishment for their behaviour was going on holiday to Spain in a white van.
And some producer made a little video of them singing that they were going on holiday to Spain.
And you see them drinking and, you know, just as my...
They were just like my patients.
And what it was quite clear to me was that they were being exhibited as amusing to the middle classes of Holland.
It was just a joke.
But these people were not a joke.
They'd been very violent to their neighbours.
They'd made the lives of their neighbours hell.
And what we saw was the metropolitan middle classes just turning them into a joke, as if their lives and the lives of the people around them were not to be taken seriously.
So that, I think, is the attitude of the kind of people who have no contact with this world, as I would have had no contact with this world if I hadn't done the work I did.
As to consequences for me, there haven't really been any.
I haven't been viciously attacked.
Why not?
I think, well, first of all, it helps to be a doctor.
Secondly...
Right, well, you have some credibility, too, because you're actually working directly.
Well, that I think was it.
My ideas weren't just born out of...
Some kind of theoretical superstructure.
So for all your flaws, you're genuinely in the trenches.
And that comes across immediately, just the sheer number of people.
You saw how many people who had tried to commit suicide?
Well, I think it was 10,000?
10 and 15,000.
Right.
So that's such an inconceivable number that I would imagine it would sort of leave critics aghast.
It's like, well, I've never talked to three people like that, and you've talked to 15,000.
That's actually quite a difference.
So the best way of dealing with that is to ignore it.
So, I mean, you say I'm well-known.
I don't think I'm well-known.
I mean, it's true that my book has...
I don't know how many my book has sold.
I was very surprised to discover that it had sold 13,000 in the Netherlands, and I was surprised because actually what I was describing was England, and I couldn't see how that could interest a Dutch audience.
But many people have...
Have said, well, I have observed this.
Many people who are in the trenches, as it were, and one of the things that really pleased me, I mean, this was possibly the most pleasing thing to me, was that, oddly enough, the books have sold quite well in Brazil, of all countries.
I mean, it never occurred to me that they might sell in Brazil.
And I gave a lecture in Sao Paulo, and people came up afterwards, they wanted the book sign, And there were a couple among them who said, we were born in the favelas of Sao Paulo, which actually are not the worst in Brazil, but still pretty bad.
And it said, we recognised all that you said.
All that you said about England, we saw in the favelas.
So let's go through what you saw, and then maybe we could talk about what you've seen and what you think might be effective amelioration.
So you see fragmented intimate relationships.
Is that the most salient feature?
Is the impermanence of intimate relationships?
Yes, I would say so, because I think without better relationships, it's very difficult to see how large numbers of people can escape this world.
Okay, and so out of that, because the relationships, the sexual relationships aren't bound by mutual long-term support, love, contractual obligations and all of that, that spins into higher levels of male violence and also predation on vulnerable females by psychopathic and aggressive males.
Yes, although I wouldn't say that the women are just passive victims.
They're not just passive victims.
I mean, they are victims, but they're not passive victims.
Sorry, I was thinking that they're easier prey with multiple children.
They're easier pickings.
That's what I mean.
Yeah, that's right, yes.
Right, so the fragmentation.
So if you have a fragmented couple of relationships and you're a woman, you end up with children, you're no longer 20 and single.
You're 28 or 35.
You have two children.
The array of high-quality men that you have to choose from is going to decrease substantially.
Yes.
It was never very great to begin with.
Right, right, right.
Okay, so then we add to that...
I studied alcohol for years and its effects on violence.
And you can basically say that if people didn't get drunk, half the violence in the world would instantly disappear.
So rape, murder, familial abuse, the contribution of alcoholism is stunningly high, stunningly high.
So maybe that's the third factor that plays in it.
Was that reasonable?
Well, it's certainly unmistakably a part of it, yes.
You say 50% of murderers are drunk when they kill and 50% of victims are intoxicated when they die.
Yeah.
And it's the only drug that has that magnitude of an effect on violent behavior.
So then low educational attainment.
Yes, that's obviously very important.
And interestingly, the state does very little to try to address it or try to make things better.
Okay, and then beliefs.
What do you think are the key beliefs that characterize the phenomenon that you saw?
Well, there is now certainly a sense of entitlement.
The sense of it's wrong for anyone to judge.
People have internalized that, so not only do they not judge others, but they don't judge themselves, and it's not right for anybody to judge them.
So that's an abandonment of judgment or even a demonization of it when it's a crucial thing that you need to separate your...
While at the same time, because it's existentially impossible not to make judgments, they are making judgments, but they don't accept that they're making judgments, that they are making judgments.
Attitude towards the future?
What's the attitude?
I think, shall we say, it's not thought about very deeply.
Right?
Okay, so that's the first thing, is that it doesn't come up much.
Yes.
What I've noticed is that there's no implicit sense that the future is something that could be altered for the better by changes of behavior currently.
Yes.
Yeah.
Which is...
There's an element of truth in that, in the economic aspect, because they're not going to get good jobs.
Even if they behave responsibly and so on, they're not going to get good jobs.
However, their lives will be better if they behave responsibly.
But another thing that I would...
I mean, this is very speculative, but I thought that...
Lots of people have become stars in their own soap opera, and they prefer a dramatic life, a life full of incident, to a life that would be actually very flat.
If they did the kind of things that you and I would suggest, their lives might be very flat because they would not be well off.
They would still be struggling economically and so on, and their lives would be very, very dull.
Well, that's Dostoevsky's famous criticism of socialist utopia, right?
People are fundamentally unable to deal with satiated dullness.
They'll break it, they'll fragment it, just so that something dramatic and exciting happens.
And there's definitely truth in that.
I think that's a testament to some degree to the adventurousness of the human spirit, even though it's something that can, well, manifest it in the ways that you described.
He's not boring.
Well, I mean, I've fled.
I mean, I can't say that I haven't...
I haven't liked chasing sensation myself because when I was younger, I used to like danger of a certain kind.
I used to like going to countries which were dangerous.
I crossed Africa by public transport in days when it was impossible to communicate with anyone.
There were no mobile phones or anything, so I was incommunicado for months at a time.
Well, and you did work in prisons as a psychiatrist.
Yeah, I never felt really that was very dangerous.
But countries where there's civil war and so on are dangerous, and I liked it.
But I always felt, I suppose, maybe falsely, that there was some higher purpose.
It wasn't just a liking for danger.
There was some kind of purpose behind it all.
Well, there is some utility in seeking out adventure and strife.
If that's integrated into a functional and productive, generous, honest life, that's better.
It's better.
So, obviously, in and of itself, it can become a problem.
So, how did you handle this emotionally?
Well, the endless onslaught of misery amongst your clientele.
Well, I mean, one way of dealing with it, of course, was writing about it.
Because what I've found is that when you write about an experience, even an unpleasant experience, it distances you from that experience.
So you're not only having the experience, you're observing having the experience.
I was once arrested in Albania and mildly, if you could say, mildly beaten with a truncheon by a policeman.
And actually, as he was hitting me, I wasn't thinking, this is painful.
I was thinking, how am I going to describe this subsequently?
So that being able to describe it, or having the intention of describing it, actually distances yourself in a good way, I think, from your experience.
Well, you draw the conclusions that way.
I mean, the purpose of your memory, in some sense, is to draw the appropriate conclusions from your experience to guide you into the future.
I have a series of writing exercises online at a place called selfauthoring.com that steps people through writing a biography.
And it highlights experiences that were emotionally extreme.
And because there is plenty of evidence that writing them out, they have to be somewhat distant from you.
Yes, you can't do it the next day.
Yes, exactly, because you're just re-traumatizing yourself in some sense, but the evidence is quite strong, I would say, that doing that, well, you're transforming the emotion into words and replacing, in some sense, the emotion by the words.
You're making sense of it.
Yeah.
There was a very interesting experience.
I had an interesting experience in that regard in the prison.
We had a writer who would come in and teach writing...
Creative writing, if you like, to interested prisoners.
And they were, of course, a selected group and so on.
And the writer, he came to me because, of course, there wasn't really any evidence that he was doing any good because, of course, that such evidence would be almost impossible to gather.
Right.
And so, of course, the prison authorities are constantly trying to cut down costs so they wanted to get rid of them.
So he wanted me to write in his favour, which I did, which, of course, sealed his fate.
But anyway, he told me something very interesting.
All the people who wrote wrote autobiographically, as you would expect, and they would come to a point in their lives when they had to stop, when they found it extremely difficult to go on, Because actually what it did, this was the first time in their lives they'd really ever thought biographically.
Or perhaps even thought.
Well, I really mean that.
It's like, you know, people think they think, but what happens is thoughts appear in their head.
That's way different than sitting down programmatically and voluntarily going over your life and trying to make sense.
Anyway, they came to a point where they couldn't go on at least for quite a long time.
And that point was when they realized that all that they'd been telling themselves about their own behavior was actually false.
And so I came to the conclusion that this actually...
Now, whether it changed their behavior subsequently, I can't tell you.
I don't know.
And anyway...
Well, you know, you probably need to marry that with a plan.
Yeah.
You know, like, the problem is, is that if you realize that what you're doing is wrong...
But it's habitual, and you don't know what else to do.
You're going to do what you know, because what else are you going to do?
You don't know anything else.
I mean, one thing about the statistics in Britain are quite clear, that people stop coming into prison on new offences.
I mean, overwhelmingly, not absolutely 100%, but overwhelmingly for offences like burglary and violence.
They stop after the age of 39.
And their rate of Conviction goes down in the 30s, so there is a kind of spontaneous change.
Now, whether this would accelerate, I mean, what you would want to do is accelerate that change so that they didn't have to reach the age of 39 before they stopped committing those crimes.
And my guess was that this did actually have an effect, but I have no proof whatsoever.
I don't know of any studies that look at autobiographical writing and recidivism.
Well, it would be very difficult to find the control group and so on.
But instinctively I felt that this was a good thing to be doing.
Well, insofar as thought is useful and verbal thought is high-quality thought, you'd hope that it would be helpful.
Okay, so how did your conclusions change your clinical practice for the better, let's say, in your opinion?
And what about social policy suggestions?
Well, the first clinical practice, it made me very wary of medicalization of misery.
That's the first thing.
So that I spent far more time persuading people not to take medication than to take it.
In fact, there's a kind of law in prison.
If people want medicine, they don't need it.
and if they won't take it, they do need it.
But as far as social policy is concerned, I'm very, very wary of making, and perhaps this is very cowardly of me, very wary of making any suggestions because very wary of making any suggestions because if anyone were to take me seriously and the results were catastrophic, I would feel very bad.
Well, it's a non-factor.
Actually, I'm...
I think also that actually what we need is a cultural change, and I'm not sure how much the government can bring about a cultural change.
So I was trying to, in my way, trying to persuade people, particularly the Maybe this is grandiose, but I was trying to persuade intellectuals that a lot of their world outlook was bad.
And was doing harm rather than good.
And to be cognizant of that.
To be cognizant of the fact that radicalism translated down the socioeconomic hierarchy is often devastating.
Yes, yeah.
So that the destruction of the family, which...
Rich people perhaps can survive is devastating for people who need solidarity, social solidarity, more than anybody else.
And that the social solidarity, which now runs entirely through the state, is a very cold form of solidarity that is very unpleasant.
That's a good place to stop.
Yeah.
Thank you very much for your conversation.
I appreciate it for talking with me today.
I hope everyone finds this useful.
Yeah, I hope.
I don't know whether...
How many people watch or see it?
A million.
A million.
Yeah, and do you get abuse?
That's a long story.
I mean, I know you have abuse from this kind of thing, from a podcast.
No, not at the moment.
And likely not from this one.
Yes.
Good.
I must say, I haven't really had any abuse.
But then, of course, I don't look to see whether people are abusing me.
What the eye doesn't see, the heart can't grieve over.
Much appreciated.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
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