Rob Henderson interviews Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom and many, many essays: What's Wrong With the West, in The Spectator. Henderson has written a new introduction for the 25th anniversary edition of the book. I have linked to or written about Dalrymple a score of times if you are interested in my experience with his work. He was an inner-city psychiatrist in England and saw much of what I did in my career. I usually agree with him.
I had spent a lot of time in Africa and traveling the world, where material goods were infinitely worse than anything in Britain. Yet in certain respects poverty in Britain was spiritually and psychologically worse than what I had seen in Africa, where people actually went hungry! So I came to the conclusion that there was something other than mere absence of economic wellbeing that explained what I was seeing.
Even people who are answering off-the-cuff will mention that there is less community in America and the West than there once was, and less than they observe in other cultures. Much of this is perception. As Garrison Keillor once said and I have repeated many times "We think times were simpler then because we were children and our needs were attended to by others." We remember getting together with cousins - or even siblings - but that doesn't happen anymore. We generalise that into believing that the culture as a whole has lost something. But we don't see the cousins because they now have other people that they love - spouses, children, grandchildren. It is the natural order of things for cousin closeness to be recreated in every generation. Similarly, we don't share a home with our siblings anymore.
When we view other cultures and the closeness and camaraderie they have, we are seeing a survivor bias of those who stayed in the village or neighborhood. Yet they also have young people who moved to the city.
Yet with all that said, there might be something to it. The fragmentation of culture may not all be illusion.
It's a good thing to comment on at Christmas, I think, when you were thinking about similar topics already.
5 comments:
Somewhat random thoughts
My first reaction to the Dalrymple quote is yes, the poorest in England were likely much more intensely aware of the gulf between their existence and that of the wealthiest Britons because of mass communication, as well as their own relative affluence with respect to the poorest in Africa. If you're scrapping out an existence in extreme poverty you don't have much time to read the social columns in the Daily Mail or (now days) scroll TicToc reels.
If you and your parents only have one or two siblings, you don't have many cousins.
In terms of perception, I commented on a couple of the 'affordability' posts that those of us who might indulge in nostalgia might want to think of it in a different way. There was a lot of enforced egalitarianism in a place and time where everybody was watching the same three TV networks, going to the same movie theaters, and shopping at the same stores with the same relatively limited selection.
This "time with others" article seems related: https://flowingdata.com/2025/12/17/time-with-others/
I think there's something to the shrinking of the average family size, which reduces the cousin exposure. I had three first cousins and quite a few second cousins, and third cousins are in double digits. My son has two first cousins and no second or third cousins, as neither of his first cousins has had children. Nor, so far, does he.
One grandfather had seven brothers and a sister. As a consequence, I had lots of 'cousins once removed' as well from the great uncles and aunt. My father and mother had one sibling each, as I did; my son has no siblings, nor does my sister's daughter.
I think there's a lot to that. With a larger cousinage, there is more chance that one or more will be near you in age.
"The poor" was once a very large class that included people who were poor by circumstances and not by nature. They were called the "respectable poor" and they were recognized by higher intelligence, greater self-discipline, and a strong impulse to be tidy and clean. Among my respectable poor ancestors, religiosity, sobriety and chastity were conspicuous. The industrial economy rewarded the respectable poor, so "the poor" of today is much more exclusively "the dregs." They are human and entitled to compassion, but "the poor" of today are not "the poor" of 1820, or even 1920. They are what remains after all the "respectable poor" have been promoted to the middle class. This explains the squalor Dalrymple described in Life at the Bottom.
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