The Psychiatrist to the ‘Underclass’
Anthony Daniels is a firsthand observer of the ‘squalor produced by the welfare state’ and by the ‘widespread abdication of personal responsibility.’
By Tunku Varadarajan
Anthony Daniels Ken FallinParis
If you toss your cigarette butt onto a train platform or play rap music loudly in the quiet car, you’d better hope Anthony Daniels isn’t around.
He is the sort of man—a vanishing species in our age of civic nonintervention—who will tell you to “pick your fag end up, please,” as he did to a slovenly young woman at London’s Euston Station recently, or ask that you turn the music off.
Dr. Daniels, 76, is a retired British psychiatrist who has written more than two dozen books—most of them under the nom de plume Theodore Dalrymple.
He adopted a pseudonym because he was writing about his work “in an inner-city hospital and in a prison, and I therefore needed an extra layer of disguise,” he says.
He chose that particular name because “it conjured up someone old-fashioned and bad-tempered lamenting the state of the world through the window of a London club while clutching his glass of port.”
He continues to use it because he finds that “a fictional personage does exert a slightly disinhibiting effect” on his writing—“always in the service of truth, of course.”
Call Dr. Daniels the doyen of disenchantment, a lifelong despairing observer of the Western “underclass,” about which he first wrote in a series of columns titled If Symptoms Persist for the Spectator magazine in London in the 1980s.
Starting in 1994, he has written for City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s quarterly.
“I have not missed an issue in 32 years,” he brags.
Myron Magnet, the magazine’s editor from 1994 through 2006, says he “hired Tony Daniels almost as the first order of business when I took over.”
A persistent theme of his writing is the “squalor produced by the welfare state” and by the “widespread abdication of personal responsibility” that characterizes “Life at the Bottom” (2001), his first collection of City Journal essays.
In his introduction to the book, Dr. Daniels wrote, “A specter is haunting the Western world: the underclass.”
He observed that “the mental, cultural, emotional, and spiritual impoverishment of the Western underclass is the greatest of any large group of people I have encountered anywhere”—including the poorest countries of Africa, where he did volunteer work as a young doctor.
Observing his patients in a Birmingham hospital, he wrote: “Each day my faith in the ability of human beings comprehensively to ruin their lives is renewed.”
“Life at the Bottom” will be republished next month in a 25th-anniversary edition, and he sums up its message: “It is dehumanizing to think of social problems, or social pathology, as if human beings were mere inanimate objects, reacting like billiard balls to other billiard balls, without ideas or agency of their own.”
Troubled members of the underclass—burglars, rapists, muggers, wife-beaters, beaten women who refuse to leave their partners, alcoholics, drug addicts and so forth—see themselves as “the marionettes of happenstance,” Dr. Daniels says.
They expect us to “consider the source of their ideas, or the cultural influences upon them, which are often malign and give them perverse incentives to acquire the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ with which they live.”
That’s a phrase from the poet William Blake.
In the course of our conversation, Dr. Daniels quotes Shakespeare, Homer, the historian Edward Gibbon, the playwright Terence Rattigan, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and the poet A.E. Housman.
He also cites the mystery novelist Agatha Christie, about whom he has a new book out in May that aims “to show that any stylistic and intellectual condescension towards her is unjustified.”
Christie (1890-1976) was more than “simply a writer of puzzles,” Dr. Daniels says.
“She was a social satirist who was very well aware of currents in sociology and, in particular, psychology and psychiatry, which she mocked in a gentle but devastating way.”
Dr. Daniels has no small amount of scorn for his own specialty: “Psychiatry has a small but vital role, when it is needed, as when people are mad or extremely disturbed.
Unfortunately, it has expanded grotesquely.
It has turned problems of living into technical ones, thereby increasing their prevalence.”
Nibbling on a pastry in his tiny Paris apartment—he also has houses in the Ardèche, a department in southeastern France, and Shropshire, a county in the English Midlands—Dr. Daniels recalls his encounter in November with a young man in “the quiet carriage” of a British train.
“He was dressed in the universal slum costume, a hoodie and tracksuit-ish bottom, not necessarily cheap of course, and probably very expensive sneakers.”
The stranger was blasting rap music, “and nobody did anything, because everyone in Britain is afraid now.”
Many young men carry knives.
Eventually, Dr. Daniels approached him and said, “Excuse me, can you turn your music off?”
The other passengers “probably thought me quite mad.”
The young man reacted badly.
“You’re f— winding me up!” he snarled.
When he realized that Dr. Daniels was serious, he said—entitled and defensive in equal measure: “I’ve just been diagnosed with ADHD and autism, and the music calms me down.”
Dr. Daniels stood his ground, and the man turned off the music.
Dr. Daniels acknowledges that this was a rare civic triumph.
The smoking woman in London told him to buzz off, and some days before another young man refused to take his feet off the seat opposite the doctor on a train.
“I asked him to, and he said ‘Why?’
He turned into a sneering moral philosopher, all the while keeping his feet up.”
Dr. Daniels found himself “in the ridiculous position where I had to think of reasons why people shouldn’t put their feet up on the seat.”
He insists that he isn’t “a one-man vigilante committee, going around trying to get people to take their feet off train seats.
I suppose I’ve done it only about 10 times.”
But he says the problem is pervasive: “The number of people who don’t conform to the most elementary manners has grown, and they become aggressive if you ask them to change.”
He cites John Fletcher Moulton (1844-1921), a British judge and member of the House of Lords who wrote of “the domain of duty, public spirit and good form,” as Dr. Daniels sums it up.
I pull out my smartphone and search for Moulton’s essay, published posthumously in 1924.
It is about the importance to society of “obedience to the unenforceable”: “the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey.”
That attitude “has pretty much vanished from British society,” Dr. Daniels says, and it makes him despondent.
“One doesn’t want a society in which the only reason people do things is because there’s a policeman around the corner or some harridan is going to attack you if you don’t do it.
But there does need to be some kind of agreement on lots of little things.
And if there isn’t, then what you get is something that’s rather unpleasant.”
Dr. Daniels writes with verve and wit—wry and dry.
His parents were both Jewish—his father born in London to Russian immigrants; his mother in Berlin, escaping to England in 1939 at 19.
He grew up in a home that was “a kind of hell on a small domestic scale.”
His parents hated each other and “addressed not a single word to one another in my presence during the 18 years I spent in their house.”
Not even at dinner, which the family ate together daily.
In another essay collection, “Our Culture, What’s Left of It” (2005), he writes that after leaving home and making his way in the world, he realized that “the only thing worse than having a family . . . is not having a family.
My rejection of bourgeois virtues as mean-spirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent.”
In the quarter-century since “Life at the Bottom” was first published, he says, the world hasn’t changed “all that much in its essentials.”
The most important “and, I think, malign, change” has been the arrival of social media—or “antisocial media,” as he calls them.
“These have reinforced the worst tendencies of an already debased culture.
As the paralyzed are encouraged by faith-healers to lay down their crutches and walk, I would encourage people to lay down their phones and think.”
But thinking can be painful.
“ ‘Can’t you stop me thinking, doctor?’ patients would ask me.
Not think about anything in particular, but about anything at all.
The social media are a sovereign method of doing this.”
Dr. Daniels’s essays are based on a meticulous, intimate observation of members of the British underclass over several years, including at least 10,000 people who have attempted suicide.
(“To be or not to be?” he has written.
“Overdosers opt for something in between the two.”)
His narratives are concrete demonstrations that what gives rise to an underclass is culture, not poverty.
In any case, he says, “in modern welfare states, the struggle for subsistence has been abolished.”
Material survival is “more or less assured.”
He’s “surprised” by the success that “Life at the Bottom” has had in several countries—particularly the Netherlands, where it has gone through 14 printings.
He was “fortunate” in the timing of the Dutch translation, which “followed closely upon two political murders, that of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the first such murders there since the assassination of William the Silent in 1584.”
The last led a revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs; Fortuyn (shot to death in 2002) and van Gogh (stabbed in 2004) were anti-Islamist activists.
Dr. Daniels finds “particularly gratifying” the reception of his writings in Brazil.
Several readers there have likened his descriptions of the British underclass milieu and beliefs to life in the favelas, with “the same family breakdown and violence, the same resort to drugs as a source of instant gratification, the same disregard and even contempt for education, the same refusal of the population to examine its own contribution to its misfortunes, the same waiting for a governmental Godot to sort everything out.”
Missing in the underclass is any ambition, cultural interest or the sort of transcendent meaning we used to derive from religion.
Dr. Daniels doesn’t believe in God, “but I respect religion, within limits, and think that religious people, provided that they are not fanatics, tend to be better people than the irreligious.”
He specifies that there is “a certain religion, which shall be nameless, that I exclude from this calculus.
I’m talking mainly about Christianity and Judaism.”
Dr. Daniels’s observations appeal to American conservatives because they demonstrate that the problems of the underclass transcend race.
The British underclass is mostly white.
“The social problems of America,” Dr. Daniels says, “are not primarily racial in origin, in the sense that the black population was disproportionately disposed to them either because of inherent defect or historical injustice.”
The cause of our social decline lies rather in the “culture and mores that a proportion of that population” espouses.
Indeed, it is “inconceivable that anything could be done to improve their life without a change in their culture.”
How can that be brought about?
Dr. Daniels shrugs.
He is a “small-c conservative, skeptical of intellectual schemes of universal improvement.”
In that vein, he believes that “it is easier to produce large-scale deterioration than even moderate improvements.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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