Into a dangerous void -- part 2

Psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, who is in New Zealand to talk about crime and how to combat it, knows why people go bad, as Carroll du Chateau reports in part 2 of this extended nzherald.co.nz feature.


Much of Dalrymple's effort now goes into literary criticism. His latest book, Our Culture, What's Left of It, includes an essay that rips into feminist heroine Virginia Woolf's book Three Guineas.

"She displayed astonishing insensitivity and unawareness of what was going on in the world," says Dalrymple. "It's quite a nasty book actually. But then I think she was quite a nasty person."

But what really upset Dalrymple was the response to his essay. Instead of the intellectual arguments of misrepresentation he expected, he got emails - from American university professors especially - saying 'you're a bastard'.

"They were grossly insulting. But there was no argument - they had no argument. But their language was vile. It actually bore out what I was saying."

And what did he say to promote such an angry response? Woolf's book might be better titled, "How to be privileged and yet feel extremely aggrieved". Had Woolf survived to our time he ended, "she would have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind - shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine and ultimately brutal - had triumphed amongst the elites of the Western world.

Another essay from the same collection, which was named by David Brooks of the New York Times as the best journal article of 2004, is titled When Islam Breaks Down. Dalrymple's conclusion reads, in part: "To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be very dangerous for some time to come [but]...The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle."


But it is the British medical system, which has been taken over by managers and highly paid consultants, that attracts Dalrymple's real anger.

He believes politicians and managers dislike and fear doctors: first, because of the nature of their work, doctors actually have to know something; second, because they have to conform to a code of behaviour; and third, because people do have a relatively high opinion of the medical profession.

"In this kind of poisonous mixture you've often got a defacto monopoly provider which encourages people to think of themselves as customers which gives an opening for managerialism to try and provide what customers want. They are, in fact, just parasites who are consuming taxpayers' money. So in Britain we've seen enormous increase in expenditure on the health service and now quite large numbers of hospitals have had to close down.

"It's very corrupt of course. In Britain that corruption's been legalised, institutionalised. One example is the use of grossly and historically incompetent consultants who do nothing - and the government has spent billions. And, of course, the government does them favours and they do the government favours. It's very pernicious, and it consumes huge quantities of money, but it keeps certain people very rich.

"In some hospitals there's a big board of directors, most of whom are paid quite a lot, others who are just jumped-up functionaries. And very low on the board, five layers down, you get to the medical director."

"Politicians can't increase their own standing in the eyes of the public - that's impossible," he continues. "But they can at least reduce the standing of the doctors or any other professional who has a high standing."

Dalrymple says it all boils down to a systematic destruction of professionalism, designed to protect Britain's "corporatist government".

"Professionalism is a danger because it's an alternative source of authority - and they don't want that."

He gives the example of Robert Lord Winston, the world authority on IVF and fertility who was sent to the House of Lords as a Labour peer.

"Soon after, he just happened to say, in an ordinary way, like you and me, that his mother had been in hospital and the NHS has got worse in the last few years," says Dalrymple. "But there was no doubt he was speaking the truth, and this caused enormous panic in government."

Why?

"Well, they could put the Minister of Health up, saying what he's saying is not true, but no-one would believe him compared to Lord Winston. This was a great problem for them."

He believes the undermining of independent professionals extends to teachers and university professors who they undermine by making them do things they wouldn't want to do.

"It's very destructive. What they do is give them targets and judge people by how they meet these targets. But everyone knows that if you have a centralised system in which you have targets you don't get people meetings these targets but lying in a systematic way.

"And once people start doing this, and are told their jobs depend on it and their promotion depends on it, they start doing things in which they don't believe. And when they do things in which they don't believe they're corrupted because they have no probity [honesty].

"Going through exercises in which you don't believe completely emasculates you," he continues. "They use measures of your competence which have absolutely nothing to do with the value of what you do.

"What I'm saying, and it's very reactionary, is that the only way the whole thing will work is if people actually have a sense of public service. And that can only happen if they're small and if they're doing things that are self-evidently of value. But most of what public servants do is not of value, and they know it - on the contrary it's actually harmful."


Dalrymple believes that the rot has already attacked most areas of public governance.

"In Britain we can't even run a public examination system any more because they change the criteria, weightings and marks, so all you have is this global impression that there are very large numbers of people who, despite being at school for 11 years, can't read or write.

Officially speaking, the results of exams are getting better all the time. Yet all the anecdotal evidence shows standards are falling - even further.

"And it all applies to New Zealand."

According to Dalrymple the ultimate danger is that the weight of bureaucracy will thwart reform: "While I can think of solutions in the abstract, I'm not sure they're politically possible. If you create a sufficiently large demographic group [over 50 per cent] who rely on the government either directly or indirectly for its income, then it's very difficult to see how you can change something by parliamentary means."

Which, he contends, is plain sad. "What we've done is create a lot of unnecessary misery - and, of course, any preventable misery is entirely regrettable."

<< Part 1


Theodore Dalrymple's Cradle to Jail tour

Wellington: October 11, 12 noon, ground floor theaterette BP House, 20 Customhouse Quay

Napier: October 13, 6pm, Century Theatre, tickets $10

Tauranga: October 17, 1pm, Bay Court Exhibition Room

Auckland: October 18, 7.30pm, Centennial Theatre Auckland Grammar School, tickets $10 from Ticketek

>> Further details


Books by Theodore Dalrymple:

Romancing Opiates; So Little Done; If Symptoms Still Persist; Mass Lysteria; The Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine; Life at the Bottom; Our Culture, What's Left of It.