.I'll go into greater detail later, but Dalrymple's book has the one thing traditionalists need in order to be able to make their points in today's politically correct world: an underclass that is white. Whereas American sociologists like Charles Murray pour over US data and compare black America with white America because the census statistics make it easy to do so, Dalrymple's experience in Britain is the racial inverse. In his impoverished neighborhoods, the self-destructive behavior is dominated by whites and the immigrant Pakistanis and Indians struggle to maintain some semblance of civilization.
Combining Charles Murray with Theodore Dalrymple gives you a pretty good look at the behaviors and intellectual constructs that have destroyed so much of society independent of race. I highly recommend the book.
3 comments:
I enjoyed Dalrymple's book as well. Another volume making many of the same points for American society, which also meets your criterion of deriving from a white underclass, is Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
Basically Sowell documents the fact that, far from being an "authentic" expression of black "identity", the social pathologies observed in many black communities are inherited from "the white redneck culture of the South and characterized by violent machismo, shiftlessness and disdain for schooling."
Sen James Webb (D-VA) has doe an excellent job of establishing the roots of this "redneck" culture to the Scots-Irish immigrants of the 18th century. As much as it pains me to say this because I am of Scots-Irish heritage myself, the "redneck" culture is very much alive in white Appalachia today. In fact, I have close family members who belong to this culture.
And it has precisely the same pathologies as one sees in South Memphis: willful unemployment, defective schools, rampant single motherhood, broken families, absent fathers, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and gun crime. It's crack and heroin in the black ghetto and meth and Oxycontin in the rural redneck enclaves.
I've read it twice. It's that good.
Life at the Bottom is a mesmerising read and destined to be a classic. I found it a moving experience frankly. In this book, my worst suspicions were confirmed, which I perversely found salubrious insofar as it helped me from going mad. There can only be a handful of people in the world with as good a grasp of the human condition as Dr Dalrymple. By far one of the most interesting men alive.
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