#066 - Theodore Dalrymple - Why Being Non-Judgmental Does Not Make You More Moral & Makes The World Worse

Today, I’m speaking with Dr Anthony Daniels, better known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple. He is an English cultural critic, prison physician, and psychiatrist who has worked in several sub-Saharan African countries and London’s East End.

**Please excuse the audio issues on my side. This problem was caused by my audio interface. Anthony's audio is clear and that is the main thing**

Before retiring in 2005, he practised at City Hospital and Winson Green Prison in Birmingham. He is a contributing editor at City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. His writing has also appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, New Statesman, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, The New English Review, and The Wall Street Journal. Theodore has authored numerous books, including Life at the Bottom, The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Our Culture, What's Left of It, and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality.

In this episode, Theodore and I think out loud about the state of Britain, the influences that have led to increased crime and moral degradation in the country, the impact of widespread skepticism on our culture, why non-judgmentalism is not a worthy moral position to take and how it has become so prevalent, why we should beware of promoting pauperism in society, the importance of emphasizing moral agency in people's lives and why each of us needs to take responsibility for our actions and avoid adopting a victim mentality, why poverty is not an unbreakable state, and much, much more.

To get access to the exclusive paid subscriber Q&A become a paid subscriber to Thinking Class on Substack in the links below.

You can find Anthony’s work here:

• Theodore Dalrymple’s books
• Law & Liberty

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Anthony Daniels, otherwise known by his pen name, Theodore Dolrymple. Theodore is an English cultural critic, prison physician, and psychiatrist. He has worked in a number of sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London, and before his retirement in 2005, he worked at City Hospital and Winson Green Prison in Inner City Birmingham, England. Theodore is also a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, Theodore's work has appeared in the British Medical Journal, The Times, New Statesman, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, The National Review, The New English Review, and The Wall Street Journal. Theodore is also the author of a number of books, including Life at the Bottom, The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Our Culture, What's Left of It, and Spoilt Rotten, The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. In this episode, Theodore and I think out loud about the state of Britain and a bit about France, the influences that have led to increased crime and moral degradation in these countries, the impact of widespread skepticism on our culture, why non-judgmentalism is not a worthy moral position to take, and how it has become so prevalent, why we should beware of promoting pauperism in society, the importance of emphasising moral agency in people's lives, and why each of us needs to take responsibility for our actions and avoid adopting a victim mentality, why poverty is not an unbreakable state, and much, much more. Well, despite the things that we spoke about, it was still a pleasure to speak with Theodore. Having read his work for many years, it is always gratifying to get the opportunity to speak to people who have such a deep, I suppose to borrow a very common term in modernity, a deep lived experience. And they're not just speaking to you in an abstract theoretical sense. This is a man who understands human nature. And I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. And make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice, and Substack, which now paid subscribers get the opportunity to contribute questions in a special QA that I pose to my guests that only you as a paid subscriber will get access to on Substack. Let's grow Thinking Class together. Enjoy the show, classmates. Theor Dalrymple, otherwise known as Dr. Anthony Daniels, welcome to Thinking Class. Thanks so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Thank you for asking me.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

I think it's fair to say it's a common conservative refrain to exclaim that the world has gone to the dogs. And if you do look at images from the Britain of old, perhaps pre-1970s, but indeed even a little bit after that, you can see a safe, happy, and pretty well dressed country. But it doesn't really matter if you were to put these images up in front of people who think we are making big P progress towards some sunny uplands, they would say no, uh it's not going to the dogs. We're clearly getting much better. Uh I'm not necessarily convinced by that, but I I'll let you make the case, if indeed there's one to make, that what in your estimation is the current state of the country and and by extension it's culture.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Well, uh the idea that there has been progress is not entirely false. Uh when uh you talk about the when I was born, for example, my life expectancy was 66 years, and now uh the life expectancy is 80 uh um uh uh male uh at birth. So that is progress, and no one would wish to go back to the telephone system of old, where to uh telephone more than 30 miles away uh was a kind of effort of Hercules. Um so there has been undoubted technical progress, but technical progress is not the same as moral progress, although there has been some moral progress as well. However, uh there is undoubtedly a feeling, and I don't think it's an unreasonable feeling, that there's a kind of deterioration as well. I was recently writing an essay, and I found something that was very um striking. In a book I was reading about uh juvenile delinquents, I read that in 1938 in this country there were 8,750 prisoners. Um and uh if you take now we have about 10 times as many. If you take the increase in population, we have perhaps six times as many prisoners as we did. But it's not just that. For each prisoner, there are now six times more indictable crimes than there were in 1938. In other words, if you just put this together, you've got 36 times as many uh crimes now as in 1938. Well, of course, you can't just extrapolate quite like that. But nevertheless, there is no doubt that a country that was almost as crime free as any large society uh ever is or ever will be, uh we have gone to an extremely high rate of uh crime. And that seems to me a very serious uh indictment of our society. Uh and we can talk about why that should have uh why that should have occurred, but I don't think you could just say that because we have more uh uh indoor laboratories and everyone has a coloured television, that uh is necessarily means that we have made progress in all fields.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Well, you teed me up for the next question. So what are the key influences that have led to both the key increase that the increase in crime and as you see it, the the migration, I suppose, of culture at large?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Well, I suppose it must really stem from the spread of certain ideas, and those ideas come from intellectuals and um and the academy. And uh they have so undermined our society that people like the police ha no longer have any idea what they're supposed to be doing. In 1938, a policeman would have known what he was supposed to be doing if you were a little boy and he would, behaving badly, pull you by the ear and say, Here, stop that. And if he did that now, of course, he would be accused of the most abominable violence. But they really, the police, for example, do not know what they're supposed to be doing. Uh, and of course, bureaucrats prefer doing things which involve a lot of desk work and and so on and are not at all dangerous. So, of course, supervising COVID was very pleasant for them, as against trying to catch burglars, which is hazardous and rather difficult. So uh they don't know what they're supposed to be doing, uh, teachers don't know what they're supposed to be doing, nobody knows what he is supposed to be doing. And that comes from a kind of uh a kind of skepticism uh which uh has been spread, I think, uh, by the extension of universities. And of course, is a bureaucratic opportunity for people. Once you educate people, you have to employ them. So because they're very dangerous if you don't employ them. And incidentally, this I I first uh thought about this in Central America, oddly enough, when I was in Guatemala, I was writing a book about Guatemala and the Civil War in Guatemala, and I came to the conclusion that the uh uh the the um uh the violence and the violent revolutionary movements, they were not they were not spontaneous movements of the peasantry. They were of university educated types who were disappointed, I think, by the fact that university no longer uh imply joining an elite because there were too many people uh uh at universities. And something similar, I'm not exactly the same, but something similar has happened in Britain, I think.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Is that is that a common theme about the uh uh the overproduction, I suppose, of cultural elites that it can lead to uh a kind of disappointment that the entitlement hasn't been achieved? Because uh if I'm if I'm thinking correctly, and you you can you can you can certainly put me right on this if I'm not, uh is that not also similar to the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany that it was uh there's a groundswell of support from the defected youth and the students of of the day? Is that is that right? Uh is this something we're seeing as a theme?

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Well, I suppose there's a vague analogy, but I I would put it more with uh I would say the analogy with uh with Latin America is actually stronger. And also uh with Russia of the 19th century, you can see the intelligentsia uh produced the catastrophe that uh Russia is even now not able to overcome. So um uh obviously it's just uh uh this isn't a a perfect explanation or anything like that. And to some extent you're better able to say than I, since you're you appear to be younger than I, and so you're you would know more people in the age group I'm talking about than I. Um but it does it uh it does seem uh a reasonable partial explanation.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Okay. Uh skepticism, that was a a point brought up earlier which has contributed to uh to the the cultural degradation degradation that we've experienced. And I I we we often talk about it beginning, particularly post-World War, as a big a big break, I suppose, from what came before. And indeed, you can spot that obviously big anti-establishment right uh rhetoric that that starts creeping into the academy. And I I've always been convinced that that was the moment it really started, but then I I'd be interested in getting your view on this. I was been reading a book in the last uh few days called God's Funeral by A. N. Wilson, and it was published 25 years ago, and it was about the loss of faith in the Victorian era and just how seismic a shift it was for the people at the time, intelligentsia, uh their own cultural elite, and then for the working people when all of these age-old certainties were being stripped away because scientific endeavor and suicide was going through the roof, and a lot of the media started to be uh unbelieving in its outlook, and it was a big change, and it made me realize that when I think about skepticism, I grew up in the I was born in the late 80s, grew up through 90s and 2000, and I remember being that militant atheist tearing down the old order, but really I was actually just bombing the rubble of what was already there, um, this very anti-establishment view, and I thought, oh god, I've been brought up in this godless era, uh, this kind of anti-establishment era that began post-world war. But actually, it seems to have begun earlier than that. Maybe that's the maybe that's the um the ancestor of all of the anti-establishment feeling.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Well, of course, yeah, yes. I mean, you you can't say, well, it all started on the 17th of April, such and such a day at 2.30 in the afternoon. You can't say that. But I think the first world war actually was the biggest uh catastrophe to uh overcome uh Western Europe, or the Europe overcame Eastern Europe as well. Um so I think we're and the Second World War was, if you like, the uh cherry on the cake of degradation. I I think the after the catastrophic First World War, people naturally ask themselves, I mean, I don't think it's an unreasonable question, if this is what our civilization ends up producing, what is the value of our civilization? And I think if, for example, you look at modern modernist architecture, I think probably people like uh Le Cormusier and um and Gropius will just have been regarded as cranks, and they were cranks, of course, but they would have been they wouldn't have been successful uh if there had been no first world war. And people would just say, well, they're cranks. So um uh I think the First World War from that point of view was probably the most important uh event in explaining this. Not that there were no I mean th there were, of course, um rumblings before the First World War. So I mean you can't actually, as I said, find the the the point at which we started. I I suppose you you'd end up thinking of the Garden of Eden if you thought like that. But I think the First World War was an extremely important um turning point.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Pete Ditchens made a similar point on on this podcast where he said that there was a a moral exhaustion that came off the back of that and it opened the door for all of the various, as you've just said, different different worldviews that were ultimately setting themselves counter to whatever the prevailing culture had been. Uh and indeed Ed West, I talk about this all all the time, has said that that that pre-World War I civilization was recognizably the same up to Middle Ages, but from that point it really went through quite a big break. Uh I know you're not a man to make predictions, so I wouldn't I wouldn't ask you to do that, but uh people often go, right, if we're now in a recognizably different civilization, we're perhaps or perhaps we're just morally exhausted. There's little resources, there are few resources to to pull on, or that people are willing to pull on. What what are the prospects for a civilization that has cut itself off from its root? And where could the obvious sources of our civilizational sustenance come from, if ever?

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Um well that's uh extreme. That is a very difficult question. Of course, I always recommend I recommend people to read my books. That's the first uh that's the first um uh stage of recovery. Um click order now, let's say. Yeah, I don't have any large scale uh predictions. I think that the predicament of Britain is particularly bad. It's worse than in France. Um but France is only 20 years behind us or something like that. Um and I, if you ask what we can do about it, uh the only thing I've ever been able to come up with is to do our best and uh not to uh live by lies, for example, not to accept the absurdities that are now uh uh pass for truths. Because actually there's a very strange paradox. On the one hand, people are extremely skeptical, but on the other hand, they're very dogmatic about uh certain tenets. And I can give you an example, and I've given it before, and uh I'll uh I hope people will um forgive me for repeating myself, but I've only got a limited repertoire. Um I had a patient, a young girl who was about 17 at the time, and I asked her what she wanted to do, and she wanted to be a lawyer. And I said, What kind of law do you want to do? And she said, I want to be a uh a uh uh human rights lawyer, with a kind of beatific smile on her face, as if she had just got a I mean, I suppose a hundred years ago she would have wanted to be a nun. But um so I said, Well, that's interesting. I said, Where did where do uh human rights come from? And uh and she said, What do you mean? I said, Well, do you go out and discover them? I mean, are they always there? Are we like Columbus? We go out and discover a human right, or where do they come from? And she said, you can't ask that. And it's true that it was a kind of um slightly cruel because she was only 17. Uh but uh there was a certainty about her belief in the unequivocal goodness and justification of human rights that would not brook any question about them at all. And my impression was, and it's only an impression, I can't say that I'm correct, my impression is she would probably go through life, or at least go through a lot of life, including career, never questioning the fundaments of her uh viewpoint. But on the other hand, if she was on a train and she had put her feet up on the seat, and you said to her, I don't think you should put your feet up on the seat, she would immediately turn into a moral philosopher and demand a kind of Archimedean point from which I could prove beyond all possible, all possible argument that one shouldn't put one's feet up on a seat in a train. And in fact, more than once I've had that discussion. And people say that their feet are clean or uh, you know, it's not going to do any harm in the sense that no one's going to get cholera from it or anything like that. Um so in other words, their skepticism is a kind of skepticism uh that justifies a lack of self-discipline. But when it comes to the fundamental ideas uh that will give them a living, uh then they are not very skeptical. On the contrary, they they believe in it as firmly as any Latin American peasant believes in the miracle working virgin in his local church.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Hmm. Hmm. Very sage point. This this leads me on to something I wanted to talk about that you've written in one of your essays, which I I read within uh your collection, Our Culture, What's Left of It. And uh as a bit of a preamble to a quote before we get to unpack it a little bit, uh it's uh commonly understood for anyone who has any semblance of understanding around political philosophy that uh there is this leftist idea, I suppose, uh came from Antonio Gramsci about if you want to change society, you need to you need to hunker down for the long haul, get into the institutions and mould the institutions in your own image, and then you've got your hands on the levers of power and you can have society that you want. The long march through the institutions. So you wrote, Theodore, Anthony, there has been a long march not just through the institutions, but through the minds of the young. When you when you when young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as non-judgmental. Then the highest form of morality is amorality. That's quite clear. What are in your eyes the consequences for a society of widespread non-judgmentalism?

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Well, non-judgmentalism is, of course, inherently uh hypocritical and self uh self-contradictory, because of course, if you think that not making a judgment is a good thing to do or not to do, then you are making a judgment. So my point would be that making judgments is part of our existence. So we we can't I don't think we could live I don't know how long I haven't timed it, but I don't think we can live for very long without making judgments. Um and the problem with judgments is of course that they sometimes turn out to be wrong. So You mustn't be inflexible in your uh judgments, but that's not the same, and many of your judgments will be wrong. Uh but that's not the same as saying I'm getting rid of judgment altogether because you can't. And if you claim to do something that you can't do, then you are turned into a liar. Essentially, you're turned into a liar. You're lying about yourself, you're lying about what you really think. So a society of liars is a society uh that is uh, first of all, it's very unpleasant. It's a society in which the most ruthless people will come to the top, and it's a society um in which um uh in which people will be very easily manipulated. So we we so the claim that we don't make a judgment is nonsense. It's nonsense and intellectual jungle. It's also of course self-congratulatory. It's hypocritical and self-congratulatory. Uh it's false. And actually at heart it's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

What do you think is behind it? Is it picking up on that self-congratulatory point, is it is it a kind of moral narcissism? Is it a cowardice not wanting to um not not wanting to judge a culture which you actually may well have decided that is inferior in some way? What is it that drives people to be non-judgmental?

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Well, there's a cowardice is a very important element of it. So that for example, I would say the medical profession is very cowardly with regard to the problem of addiction, so particularly to opiates. Um the addiction to I mean, it's a bit of a hobby horse of mine, but everything I say is a bit of a hobby horse. But um uh we have, for example, turned uh addiction to opiates into a kind of illness, uh, which is in the same category, shall we say, as multiple sclerosis or motor neuron disease. It's something that just happens and you don't make a contribution to it. But this is obviously false. And what we are trying to do by saying this is just an illness is to exculpate completely the person who is addicted. And the reason for that is uh you don't want to seem uh horrible or censorious. The most terrible thing you can say about anybody now is that he is censorious. Now, censoriousness is an unpleasant um uh uh attribute or characteristic, there's no doubt about that, and you can easily make a very wrong judgment. I'll give you an example of a very wrong judgment of mine. I mean, not it didn't result in any tragedy or anything like that. But I was on a bus recently, um, and it was a bus journey that took about 45 minutes, and there was a young woman, a rather beautiful young woman, in front of me. Um and uh she was uh making a dolling herself up the whole way. I mean, I don't know how you can spend 40 minutes dollying yourself up with various um uh paints and powders and things like that, but that's what she did. And uh in the end I got I was in inwardly, I didn't say anything, of course, but I was rather irritated. I thought, this is terrible. You know, what kind of culture is this in which people spend uh 40 minutes dolling themselves up in this ridiculous way? And then bef she got off the bus before me and bus stop before uh I was going to get off. And I s and she was actually smartly dressed, but I saw as soon as she got off that she had a terrible withered leg and that she was um limping terribly, and so that actually walking was a huge effort for her, really. Um it wasn't something she could just take for granted. And suddenly I saw uh the tragedy of her existence, in fact. And I understood then why making herself up might be so enormously important to her. And uh so I, you know, my initial judgment was wrong, you know, and it was hasty, and I'm sure I will make it again if I see it again, you know, the same kind of thing. Um so uh uh people are so afraid of being uh wrong and hasty in that way that they claim not to want to make any judgment. And in order to not make any judgment, they turn what is a moral question into one that is simply a physiological one. Yes. And that comes from a certain cowardice because they don't want to be they don't want to be wrong, because as I said, censoriousness is an unpleasant is an unpleasant characteristic.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

This is something I've seen a lot. I I've got my own experience with people who've uh dealt with uh issues that are uh deal with addiction, uh specifically alcohol, and uh a lot of people within my uh milieu, as it were, um, took the line of well, it's an illness. And it was a sensitive time over over many years, and uh you don't necessarily want to come across as the heartless person who suggests that there is agency on part of the other person that it wasn't that they just landed in that position, and uh it's it's a hard, it's a hard pill for people to swallow, I think, because when people are suffering, you must feel like you don't want to turn the screw, and yet I think we try to avoid uh the evidence of our eyes and ears. And uh sometimes I wonder whether this thinks back to this skepticism point or this destruction of the old order, because I suppose if we like if you go and walk around any of our gothic cathedrals or churches, and you can go and find the seven deadly sins chiseled into the wall, uh, the dance with death, your your final judgment, as it were, this idea that you have to answer to something beyond yourself at the end of your times, and uh, in many cases trying to push you quite forcibly onto the path of uh of virtue and say, you know, you're a worthless, worthless sinner. And uh I suppose therapy culture that has sprung up in the place of that that old uh way of seeing um runs counter to that. It says, no, that was actually really deleterious to the human mind, and actually it's better that we just accept there are things outs out of our control, but I I I'm not too sure I see the benefit for each of us in denying this agency, because uh then it almost makes it look like we have no say whatsoever in how our existence pans out or how we respond to the cards that were dealt, even if they're hard.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Yes, I I mean that of course hands uh power over to other people, of course. I mean, if you have no agency, then someone must act on your behalf. Um I mean, one has to be uh uh as I said, censoriousness is very unpleasant. And uh uh in the 1920s, for example, people were still mother, unwed mothers were still put in uh mental hospitals for having had a child out of wedlock, which was then regarded as something uh outrageous to do. And there was a lot of uh censoriousness about it. And that was very unpleasant because in particular, and this strikes me as terribly cruel and stupid, the child itself was blamed for the fact that it was illegitimate. I mean that happened uh and that's terrible. On the other hand, if you have a society in which people don't care where their children come from, as it were, that yeah, I mean I used to interview um 16-year-old children or adolescents, if you asked them who their father was, they would say, Well, do you mean my father at the moment? Or they would simply deny that they had one. So uh uh they were, I suppose, children of virgin birth or something. And but anyway, uh it was so self-evident to me that this is catastrophic socially, and that uh it leads to the state being father to the child, in fact. Uh this is catastrophic. Um that it seemed to me that we've lost the ability to tread between, on the one hand, being horribly um censurious, censorious, and on the other hand, denying people any uh any agency, any moral agency. And and so you're constantly having to estimate and so on. If you take uh things like drug addiction or addiction in general, of course it has medical consequences. And the doctor doesn't say to the patient, you know, you are responsible for your situation, depart my side and never come back, whatever your situation, because it's all your own your own silly fault. You don't say that. But on the other hand, if you deny someone their agency, then you deny them the possibility of contributing to their overcoming of their own personal problem. Which is a lie and is a lie, incidentally, it's a lie.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button. If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you're watching or listening to Thinking Class on. You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class. You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at Thinking Class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox. You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support. Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate. And on top of that, I suppose for those people who commit heinous acts against others, uh, you can see this quite clearly in how we talk about crime. I think the response to the terrible Southport atrocities committed by Axel Rabakubana against the three young girls, uh, and indeed the other victims who uh got away with their lives. Uh, the the the narrative uh that immediately spun around our our newspapers, led by figures like Idris Elba, talked about the response to this should be uh rounding the ends of kitchen knives, as though the knives were the things that had conducted the uh the atrocity.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Um and there seems to be a Well, I if I may if I may interrupt you, I mean one of my the first essay I ever wrote in the city journals called The Knife Went In, because every person that I every murderer who had stabbed someone to death and was in prison always described the crime as the knife went in, as if the knife were guiding the hand rather than the hand guiding the knife. Um so uh uh it's a very common thing to try and make uh I I mean we've we've all done it, I'm sure we've all done it to an extent. I very much doubt if someone says you behaved badly last night, the first thing that would come into your mind would be excuses.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

No doubt about it.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

That's uh that's normal. Uh the difference is that generally speaking, on reflection, not immediately, but on reflection, uh we look back and say, yes, actually, I knew what I was doing, and probably I knew it was wrong at the time, but I did it all the same. Um and there are some people who never do that, and they're not required to do it because they are actually encouraged to think in that way by all kinds of agencies. So uh, like you know, social workers or psychologists or psychiatrists and even lawyers and so on. So um uh uh with the case of uh the Southport case, one I've noticed this, I uh I haven't followed it terribly closely, but the little that I have read has not addressed the question, which to me is an obvious one, is whether he took drugs at any time. And you would expect that to be answered. Maybe he never did. I mean, I'm not saying he did, and I'm not saying he did it because he was taking drugs. But in a situation like that, it's such an elementary question, and yet I haven't seen any reports. I mean, I haven't followed it very closely. Maybe you have seen reports about that.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

No, I've I've only seen Peter Hitchens speculating that that could be a contributing factor.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Yeah, well, uh I haven't read Peter Hitchens on that subject, but but he's right. And um and it seems very curious that no one talks about it, given that you know there have probably now been Encyclopedia Britannicas full of articles about that case. And yet I it doesn't seem to be mentioned. And incidentally there was another case, I don't remember with the the case in Nottingham. Do you remember that? Where the chap killed three people. One of the the young woman killed, uh her father was a GP, and he drew attention to the fact that no one had tested this man for drugs, even though that man was known to be consorted with drug dealers.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

Why do you think that is? Is it because we've become so normalized to drug taking in our society, whether it's cannabis or or classes?

SPEAKER_01 37:37

I think there would be a large number uh I I can't prove this. Of course, this is all speculation, but I think there would there are large numbers of people who still attach to the idea that no harm can come from taking drugs because they're still stuck in the 1960s flower type people. And that has that has sort of entered the culture so that you know uh you can take tri, it's all right for you to take drugs because it doesn't do you any harm. And that is true in probably most cases, just as it is true uh that most people who drive while drunk get home perfectly safely. The numbers of people who crash while drunk, uh compared with the number of people who drive with drunk, who drive drunk, is small. Nevertheless, it's a large contribution to uh uh road deaths. So I mean it always used to be said, you know, uh uh uh people would say I always drive a bit better after I've had a drink, you know. They said that, they used to say that. And uh and uh Andy, I suppose uh you might even find one or two people of whom that might be true. I don't know. But uh uh but as a a kind of social policy, driving while driving is not a very good one.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

No. Um you you reminded me of other jokes that used to come up in the the Northumbrian pubs that I would requent growing up, where um there's frequently jokes about um don't worry about having another pint, it's five and drive around here. Um, or you'd be playing pool and someone say he's had it, he's on the fourth pint and he's really getting into it now. He's got he's got his eye in. Um so yes, uh it seems to be a common common cultural trait of the people of this country. Um let's let's stay on the topic of framing, the framing of issues. So we've talked about how we often talk about addiction being a disease and we strip away the moral agency of those people, the ability to make decisions in their own lives and how they might have contributed to it. I'd like to turn to how we talk about um people's economic situation. So, politicians, if you listen to any of their solutions, they're always talking about the needing to the needs to uh lift people up out of some deprived situation, or the reason why things are a problem is it's a deprived area, uh relative whilst whilst the the boats might be rising, for people we've got a relative poverty issue. And um I think it's fair to say that you don't subscribe to that notion of viewing people in this economic way, and and in fact, you say uh that this is indicative of pauperism. So maybe you can tell us what pauperism is and how it affects us.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

Well, pauperism is a condition in which people have to accept what they are given. They uh they they uh or do accept what they're given. Um and in a sense, the NHS makes us paupers because we don't have any choice in the matter of what we get. And uh you can see down my uh my um doctor surgery, people queuing up for an appointment, and when they get an appointment, it's like they've been awarded a medal. And uh it's very difficult to get an appointment. And uh and and so this actually, with regard to the medical treatment, it pauperizes them in the sense that they have to get, they have to accept what they're given, uh, and can't really go elsewhere. Now it is true that they may get very good treatment, but they're still paupers. I mean, it's uh uh obviously people many people do get very good treatment under the National Health Service, many people don't, and it and it's uh I mean trying to get treatment, uh certainly for anything that is not an emergency, is a very unpleasant uh process in Britain, which it isn't actually so much anyway, in France, for example, where they spend about the same on health care as we do. So we have pauperized ourselves, and one of the things that has maintained that pauperization is a long lie, which was that the National Health Service was a tremendous achievement. And when we go out and start clapping the NHS, and thank you, NHS, you think that no other country in the world had any doctors or any medicine or any hospitals or any care of anyone. And furthermore, in this country before the NHS, there was no health care whatsoever either, which is a lie. It's a lie, but it has been successfully insinuated into the minds of the British population. Um I thought from what you asked now.

SPEAKER_00 42:55

Well, I would I I I was I was asking about pauperism, what it is which you described, but also how how it affects us, and specifically linking it back initially to uh the way that we talk about um poverty in the country, uh deprived people, deprivation, deprived areas, used it using that as a reason behind uh bad things happening. Um I know we've talked a lot about agency. Uh I know this is another example perhaps of stripping people of agency. Maybe there's something else to add to it.

SPEAKER_01 43:32

Well, uh yeah, I mean, one of the things that is devastating is the idea of i the economy as a cake. And uh if you have a slice, then that's a slice I don't have. Uh so uh the question is how we divide up the cake. And that is uh I think uh I mean it's a disastrous way of thinking about an economy. I was once in a debate, I won't say who it was, because I don't want to be personally nasty, but it was a journalist from The Guardian about the nature of poverty. And I pointed out that her own newspaper had recently published a survey of household wealth, not by social class or by employment or by education or by anything else, but by religious affiliation. And what was interesting is that the two richest religions were Judaism and Sikhism. And interestingly, both these groups had a certain degree of prejudice against them when they arrived en masse in this country. But within a generation or two, they were the most prosperous group as as you look at the at religious groups. And the the person with whom I was debating said, well, of course they were immigrants, and immigrants uh often have um uh a drive, um, a different character. I said, yes, that's precisely my point. My point is that uh uh poverty is not a statement, uh a state from which it is impossible to um to escape in a reason in a reasonably open society, as Britain uh still was and to an extent still is, although I believe less so than it was. Uh so that we're changing largely from a class to a caste society. What do you mean by that? Um it seems to me. Well, that actually it's more difficult to escape your if you it's more difficult to escape your the the uh the social milieu in which you were born than it used to be. Of course, it also means that there must be the possibility of of going downhill as well as uphill. So uh and I do know people whose whose children do precisely that. Um so uh the whole point is that if poverty were a condition from which it is impossible to escape, we could none of us ever have become richer. But even now, even the poorest person is in certain respects much richer than Louis XIV, lives a much more comfortable life than did Louis XIV, and certainly lives more comfortably than the poorest people fifty years ago or sixty years ago. You have only to look at photographs, shall we see, say, of the back streets of Newcastle sixty years ago, to know that nobody lives like that now. Um so it simply isn't true that uh that one is just the victim of one's fate and and nothing else. Of course, it's much easier for some people than others. Some are born with silver spoons in their mouth, and some are not. And there is a level of misery and degradation from which it probably is very almost impossible to escape. But that's not that isn't the case with most people, even now. And yet we propagandize as if it were true. And the problem is that this forges uh the manacle, the mind the mind more uh the mind forge manacles, as William Blake put it. I don't know that he meant it in my in my meaning, but I think it's a very good uh it's a very good line to describe what I'm talking about. If you believe that you can't escape from something, and there's no point in what you doing anything, then of course you won't make any great efforts. And um and there is that kind of attitude in Britain to a greater extent, I think, than in most countries.

SPEAKER_00 48:32

I think what's also interesting about this pauperism, this psychological condition, is that uh even those people that you drew as an example uh living in Newcastle back streets, you can say that people don't live like that now. Is you could I'm not entirely sure they suffered from pauperism because when you look at photos of say that there's some there's some wonderful footage from uh 1900s that it's resurfaced where you see factory workers standing outside of buildings in Preston, they're working class, or they're in Blackburn, or they're in Newcastle, and they're dressed in their tweeds, they've got their flat caps, they look good, and um that's different to and I know this isn't exactly the same point, but you walk the streets today, and well-dressed people are absolutely in the minority, including amongst the more well-to-do classes. Um, but those people who had not a lot, you know, as as we would say, they didn't have a pot to piss in, they didn't seem to grumble so much. In fact, there were always those stories of the hardy grandmothers who were just like, Well, I never had that when I was growing up, and yet they still managed to berth these progeny that went on to make something of themselves. So they didn't have a God, we're we're bugged story.

SPEAKER_01 49:47

Yeah, well, when I I mean there has been an enormous change. If you look at the if you look at um football crowds um of what, 70 years ago, eighty years ago, they were well dressed. Uh they seemed to be well, I mean, they didn't always behave well. We were there is no golden age in all respects, but on the whole, they behaved uh pretty well. They were not vile. I remember I used to go to football matches when I was eleven, on my own, or not on my own, with another boy of eleven or ten even, and there were huge crowds. And I can remember once, uh and in those days you stood up, there were uh the seats were for the for for the richer adults, um, and they were in a minority. And I stood on on the on the uh the terrace with 40 or 50,000 people, and I remember hearing, and this is um what late 50s, people saying, no swearing, there are children present. Now a newspaper sent me to a newspaper to a football match where we were all sitting, so the physical conditions were infinitely better than they had been. And I was sitting and I was uh I had been sent by the newspaper to report on what I saw. And uh I don't am I allowed to swear on this, uh anyway. There was a man and his son, and he looked perfectly normal to me, and something happened on the field, and the man stood up and started swearing and shouting and saying, Can I I'll use what he actually said. This is a quotation. Oh the fuck do you think you are? Oh the fuck do you think you are? Now that father was being watched by, I think his son was about eleven, about the age that I remember people saying uh no swearing there's a child here. And um this is a a uh this is a I think a significant change. Um so uh and uh unfortunately uh it has gone right throughout the whole of society. So vulgarization has occurred throughout society. The same newspaper sent me to Rome to watch a uh a so-called friendly match between England and Italy, and there were 10,000 English fans there. There hadn't been there hadn't been anything like it since the downfall of the Roman Empire, you know, in 410. There it was terrible. And these people were shouting abuse for hours on end, vulgar abuse. And it of course, going to Rome for a football match, you have to have quite a large discretionary income. It's not the kind of thing that a very poor person can do. And actually they were all middle class. And I asked the chap next to me at halftime because he was he was uh making a terrible noise the rest of the time, as they all were. I said, uh excuse me, I hope you don't mind me asking, but why have you come all this way to shout abuse at the Italians? And he said uh he said, you have to let your hair down. So I said, why do you have to? To which he had absolutely no answer. And in fact, this kind of behavior is uh there's a kind of uh um vicious circle because the more you indulge in it, the more you indulge in it, and the more the more vulgar you have to be.

SPEAKER_00 54:12

Yeah, it is remarkable the difference between the um the the middle classes, the cultural elite of today, compared to those in the past. And I suppose this is what uh philosophers of a more conservative band would say there is no no less oblige anymore. This idea of recognizing that you're in a different station in life, you want to both steward everyone, you should make the most of the abilities and capabilities you have to uh lead by example and lift other people up. And I think at the beginning of this we talked about how that pauperism didn't exist even amongst the lower classes, and indeed they dressed quite a lot like the the upper classes and comported themselves in a similar way.

SPEAKER_01 54:52

Yeah, I mean, I uh one particular fashion that I detest is uh people wearing torn jeans. And one of the reasons I detest it is that I've spent quite a lot of time in Africa, and once I crossed Africa by public transport, and I saw people from the bottom up. I mean, really, I was amongst very, very poor people, and they did everything they possibly could to make themselves look good and decent. And uh the idea that the spoiled brats of our country should try and look as if they have sympathy for the poor by wearing pre-torn jeans absolutely infuriates me. It revolts me actually. Because obviously, but I because I've seen in in really poor places the efforts people go to not to appear in rags.

SPEAKER_00 55:56

That's that's a uh a point I haven't really meditated on, but I can see how that's that is uh quite an exciting uh and not in a good way um feeling to have. Um we've spoken quite a lot about uh the change we have seen within our culture. We've talked about non-judgmentalism, we've talked about the way that we frame things, that removes agency from people. And I suppose it's fair to say that a lot of your writings are about understanding human nature and the importance of trying to do so, so you can make the right decisions, so you can either be a good governor or a good citizen. And David Stuckey, who I spoke to recently, he he made the case look, we need to go back to reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoevsky. You want to understand why people do things? These books will tell you you don't need a self-help book, you don't need someone to come up with these fancy theories. You want to understand human nature, go back to people who who who lived it, a more humane way of seeing uh the world. And I think if I look at the nature of public conversation now, it's either obsessed with all of those topics we've made, or it's a wash with statistics, or you'll see calls for making things relevant. So let's talk about school curriculum, for example, um, all of those great writers we've talked about. Should we be concerned as a society to be making the curriculum relevant for today by modernizing it, bringing modern voices in? Do we need to reimagine Shakespeare and these other places where you can understand the great questions of humanity or not?

SPEAKER_01 57:38

Well, it seems to me that uh what education should be doing is actually uh making more things relevant to the children, enabling children to see the relevance of things which they don't uh have around them. So actually it should be irrelevant to their day-to-day lives, or largely irrelevant except in a in a philosophical or questioning way. So the assumption, of course, is that people can't enjoy things that are a little bit difficult, but that is that's actually not true. And I think it's um I mean I was very interested in this question in prison, because the assumption was A, that prisoners were more or less brutes, and secondly, they were unintelligent brutes as well. Uh but I never found that, actually. I never found that they were uninterested they that they could not be made interested in something other than their immediate uh circumstances. And I would have liked to extend try and extend the culture of the prisoners. It's very difficult to do because there are all kinds of bureaucratic obstacles. Um but um it was something that I thought we should be trying to do with prisoners. I have no statistics to show that it that it would actually work or have a practical effect, but I feel that uh enlarging their cultural um their cultural horizons would actually be enormously beneficial to them. And the fact that we deny children um uh uh any deeper culture it seems to me to be terrible.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

Well, listeners to this podcast will know that you're you're preaching to the converted there. Uh there is certainly a few a few episodes on on the topic alone. Uh before we move to subscriber-only questions for subpaid subscribers, but don't worry, I won't keep keeping you too much longer. You've been more than generous of your time. Is uh there's a one more question which I ask all of my guests at the end of the show, which is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life that you once thought perhaps was set in stone, an absolute, and what was it that made you think differently?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:14

Uh well, uh I mean this might seem a fairly trivial thing. I I um uh uh when I was young I thought how one appeared to others, uh the dress that one appeared in was unimportant, and that only uh only people who were either vain or um self-obsessed gave any thought to how they appeared, how they dressed. I mean I'm not particularly well dressed at the moment, but that doesn't matter. Um but but I have changed my mind on that because I think that what our sloppy way of dressing indicates is a kind of terrible narcissism. I have to accept you as you are, but you have to accept me as I am, and I'm not going to make any effort uh to please you as far as my own appearance is concerned. Uh and so I've changed my mind on that. Um I've changed I mean I used to admire uh Bohemianism. Bohemianism isn't possible now. The tropology, I I would like love to have been a bohemian, but you can't be a bohemian now because everyone is a bohemian. And uh where everyone is a bohemian, no one is a bohemian. Um but uh uh anyway, that that's one thing that I've changed my mind about. That I think one does owe it to other people. It requires an effort on behalf of other people. It's not vanity, it's actually trying to to please other people. It's a social um it's a s it's the difference between self-respect and self-esteem. Self-esteem is saying I'm a very important, good person intrinsically, and I don't have to do anything to be of worth. Self-esteem requires self-respect, sorry, requires an effort and is um other directed. You have to imagine what other people are thinking in order to have self-respect.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:33

Well, sage advice for everyone get out there, go and put some good threads on. If you don't own any, go buy some. Have some self-respect. Uh Theodore, before before we move into the the quickfire questions for the subscribers, uh what uh what are you working on at the moment? Anything anything we can expect coming out anytime soon? And where can people follow your work? Well, um uh I've written a few books.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:59

In fact, I'm writing a series of books, which are just reflections on what I read. That's one thing I'm working on. And not long ago I published a book about the about some uh forgotten writers who are buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. And they're not forgotten because they weren't good writers, it's just you can't remember everyone. And it was a real, for me, a real journey. I was very good journey of discovery because I had no idea about these people at all. I had no prejudices either in in favour of them or against them. And what I discovered, of course, was that they all had something very interesting to say. Well, I'm doing a same book, the same type of book, uh, for uh Highgate Cemetery in London.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:48

Interesting. Uh famous for Karl Marx, amongst many others, I think Herbert Spencer.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:55

Yeah, there are there are many there, but of course there are uh George Eliot is there. But there are many uh writers uh buried there um of whom people have not heard and certainly wouldn't have read, even if they've even if the the name rings a faint bell, which it will in I suppose graduates of of literature perhaps. I don't know what they teach in in universities and literature now, but anyway, um, but certainly are now unread. And it's very interesting to go back to see to and without prejudice, because you don't you don't know anything about them.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:40

Wonderful projects. When can we expect any of those to be published?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:45

Well the uh the the um one of the uh the one is already, but the the one about um uh Père Lachaise Cemetery uh is already published, but under my real name, Anthony Daniels, and I published uh um these book one uh books uh of my literary reflections. What I try to do is um it's a kind of dialogue between the book and my life, as it were, because that's I think that's what reading should be, a kind of dialogue between uh your experience and what you witness and so on, and uh what other uh minds have thought about uh the same things. Um and I've published one is called um uh what are they called? I've forgotten.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:41

So engrossed by the other people you're reading, you forgot what you're writing.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:46

I forgot, yes, I've quite often I do forget what I've written. Um uh these spindrift pages. That's taken from uh a poem by uh Dylan Thomas. These spindrift pages uh that That's um that's the title of uh the book, which is just a series of reflections on what I've read.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:07

Great. Well, I will certainly keep an eye out for those, and you've piqued my interest in the forgotten writers buried um in Paris. Uh well it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you on the main body of the show. Uh I hope we get to speak again, and I'm sure there is much of more we can talk about. Your your writings are vast as are your thoughts on things. Uh for everyone else who'd like to listen to the subscriber-only section, then please do go and subscribe on Substack. Anthony, it's been an absolute pleasure. I've really enjoyed the conversation. It's always so great to speak to people that I really admire and that I've read the words of for so long. So it's been really wonderful and thanks so much for all of your time.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:50

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:59

To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters. Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are run making it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond. Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you. I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.