Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass is a collection of essays written by British writer, physician and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple. They are about personal responsibility, the mentality of society as a whole and the troubles of the underclass. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank based in New York City, started publishing the contents of these essays in City Journal magazine in 1994. Dalrymple had problems finding a British publisher to help him turn his individual essays into a collection, so he eventually sought an American company for publication. They were published in book form by Ivan R. Dee in 2001. The main themes expressed in the collection include how an individual's worldview affects their actions and the attitudes of those around them, the philosophy of social determinism and why a lack of personal responsibility for one's actions results from an individual's beliefs in determinism. The writing style that Dalrymple explains these in was praised by reviewers for its clear, witty prose and for going immediately to the heart of the matter that is being discussed. Many reviews of the collection were positive, applauding how Dalrymple had used his experiences to create a work that gives a transparent look at poverty in England. The main detraction that reviewers had for the collection was that Dalrymple often became too opinionated in his writing while he was trying to get across the results of his experiences.
Background Between 1990 and 2000, "Theodore Dalrymple," whose real name is Anthony Daniels, worked as a physician at City Hospital and Birmingham Prison, both located in the Winson Green area of Birmingham, England. During this time, he wrote essays on topics related to his work, such as his discussions with patients and inmates. Individual essays began being published periodically in the American quarterly magazine City Journal in 1994. The collection does not contain all of the essays he wrote about his experiences, but only the ones he considered the best, whether for their humour or their truth. The experiences and situations described are largely anecdotal, but Dalrymple explains that he interviewed over 10,000 people who attempted suicide and had them tell stories about "the lives of four or five other people," resulting in a sample base of around 50,000 individuals. Since he is writing about the English underclass, Dalrymple acknowledges the majority of the people interviewed, remembered and discussed about are white. According to economist Thomas Sowell, this allows a look at the underclass "without fear of being called 'racist'." In his attempts to have his collection published in a single work, Dalrymple turned to "an American house of conservative leaning" because he had little luck with British publishers. The publisher who eventually helped Dalrymple release the book was the Ivan R. Dee imprint of Rowman & Littlefield publishing house. They published the collection as a hardcover in 2001.
Content The collection of essays has an introduction, an index, and two sections called "Grim Reality" and "Grimmer Theory." The sections are individually broken up into chapters, with sixteen in "Grim Reality" and six in "Grimmer Theory." Each chapter is an individual essay, which were published in separate issues of City Journal around seven years prior. The chapters are organised thematically, not necessarily in chronological order. The essays focus largely on the underclass and the premise that in the latter half of the 20th century, poverty and hunger are no longer descriptive of the poor. Instead, lack of money has been replaced with "emptiness, agonies, violence and moral squalor." The main argument represented in the collection is that, rather than economics and wealth, modern-style poverty is described by a "wildly dysfunctional set of values." A number of chapters discuss the "ferocious young egoist" that is meant to represent male youths who are violent and obsessive toward their significant others. Dalrymple also writes about his views on the "destruction of...family ties," arguing that without family ties it is nearly impossible to rise out of the underclass. These issues, among others, are described as resulting from the "intellectual foundation...[which] makes a permanent underclass possible." This is meant to be directed against intellectuals and liberals that form the many ideas absorbed into the mentality of the underclass. In the larger first section titled "Grim Reality," Dalrymple "uses specific stories from his practice and from some journalistic forays to show how the 'fundamental premise of popular culture' leads to actions that wreck people's lives." This section covers things like modern Bohemianism, drug addictions and overdoses, lack of education, familial obligations, physical abuse and the concept of personal responsibility for choices made. Then, in the section "Grimmer Theory," he "shows that the twentieth century's intellectuals have provided members of the underclass with a battery of rationalizations by which they can shift the blame for their misery away from their actions and attitudes and can unleash their hatred of everyone who challenges their outlook." Focusing on ideas more than events, this section considers the concepts of relativism, determinism and egalitarianism, and how each idea, in their creation by the bourgeoisie intellectuals, adversely affects the underclass.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
