Life at the Bottom : The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
About halfway through this book, I am still puzzled by the inherent contradiction of the thesis. Dalrymple asserts that the "underclass" is and remains completely and utterly messed up because they get contradictory messages from the "overclass" -- that spelling is optional, that not getting married is fine, that their condition is caused by external forces, not their own mistakes -- and that the media and intellectuals are irresponsible by allowing this information to get out to the stupid.
OK, fine, not something I agree with, but then he spends several chapters talking about how messed up people blame their problems on anything but themselves, when we really know that they're the cause of their own problems (because they didn't get an education, because they pulled the trigger, because they took the drug, whatever). So on the one hand he sets up a mandate of noblesse oblige while on the other hand he says the poor are responsible for their own destinies.
Maybe it's because he's English, but I see a couple of fundamental problems with his assertions:
1. If what he says is true, then most poor people would stay poor, and their children would be poor. Which we know not to be true. Most poor people are temporarily poor, and their children tend not to be poor.
2. The upper class has an obligation to take care of the lower class, rather like parents have an obligation to take care of their children. While this seems nice and all that, society is not homogenous enough for this to work outside of the British Isles.
On the whole, I find this book contradictory, preachy, and condescending. It's not giving me much more than anecdotes about the experience of one doctor, who deals with deeply disturbed people as part of his job (he's a psychiatrist for the prison system in Britain). It seems as if he is taking his day to day experience and extrapolating from that, as if the segment of the population he sees is representative of a whole social class.
# Posted by ayse
Comments:
Ugh. I'm having a hard time finishing this book. I've read three other books while trying to struggle through it.
Further into the book, his discussion seems to be unreavelling as a series of rants about the patients he deals with and how their lives are messed up. He has a whole chapter that raves about the arranged marriages of foreigners in England, and how they make people's lives miserable. He seems to imply that no matter how rich those families, they are de facto part of this "underclass" he's writing about.
I just can't seem to make myself as upset about how other people ruin their own lives, but then again, I'm not a psychiatrist dealing with them every day. I suppose accidentally caring about your patients comes with the territory.