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The Christchurch Civic
Creche Case |
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Psychiatrist and author Theodore
Dalrymple, who is in New Zealand to talk about crime and how to combat it,
knows why people go bad. Carroll du Chateau reports:
He's referring to highly paid
consultants who, he says, are draining Britain's National Health Service of
funds to a point where some large hospitals have been closed despite the
government pouring more money into the health sector. The sobering thing is, it's
already happening here. That's the thing about Dalrymple,
unconventional psychiatrist, essayist, author, social commentator,
intellectual. He thinks issues through, gets his facts right. He also
believes in evil - and that criminals commit crime because they choose to. Dalrymple's opinions on the
criminal mind come from 15 years of treating 5000 perpetrators of extreme
violence - most perpetrators and their victims have attempted suicide. For
example, the 25-year-old man who arrived at Dalrymple's Birmingham hospital
to have foil-wrapped packets of cocaine removed from his stomach. He had just
left the latest of his three partners with their week-old baby - although he
knew he was condemning her and the child to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse,
and hopelessness. Unlike other psychiatrists, Dalrymple
did not sympathise with the plight of his patients who blamed their crimes on
drugs, deprivation, or the system. He refused to prescribe heroin or
substitutes to soothe their addictions, talked to them sternly - and wrote
about them in right wing magazine, the Spectator. As he says drily, yes he did
interview people having a really bad time, "though not as bad as their
victims". "They're kind of infinite in their ability to destroy
themselves. They used to say the most revealing and hilarious things. I
didn't know whether to fall about laughing or throw myself off the roof in
despair." He also formulated one of the most
cogent rationales about why, in an age of plenty, crime has escalated to an
all-time high, which is why Garth McVicar, of the Sensible Sentencing Trust,
has invited Dalrymple to New Zealand to talk about crime and how to combat
it. Dalrymple's "Cradle to Jail Tour" about the abdication of
personal responsibility, nurtured by welfare states, starts in Wellington
next Wednesday. This is Dalrymple's third trip to
New Zealand. In 1998 he wrote an essay, "What Causes Crime"
(published in his book, Life at the Bottom) which discussed our post-1950s
surge in crime. Dalrymple talked about the Parker Hulme, David Bain and Peter
Ellis cases, and concluded about the Ellis sexual abuse affair, that "a
New Zealand court has given credence to accusations that even the Spanish
Inquisition might have found preposterous." He also suggested our justice
system was obsessed with lax enforcement, pleas of mitigation, excuse
finding, and leniency - "anything but punishment". Nearly a decade later, after
talking to hundreds more criminals, Dalrymple hasn't changed his mind about
why people go bad. "If you believe that because
you have had certain experiences in life you can't be expected to control
yourself - then of course you won't control yourself," he says. "And if, in addition to all
that, you're actually rewarded for not controlling yourself [or at least
there are no penalties] then well, you get the kind of mess that I think we
are in." The most pernicious combination,
he contends, appears when over-generous bureaucracy and political correctness
combine with a lack of self control and any shred of conscience. When asked to discuss the Kahui
case he replies "it's horrific". "But it's very dangerous to
take one particular case, and say 'oh the world's going to the dogs'. What's
striking is that not only do you get these horrible stories, but the
statistics bear out the idea that things [child abuse and murder] are getting
worse." How to turn it around? "It's
much easier to create these problems than to solve them once you've created
them," says Dalrymple. He points to the large vested interest that has
grown up round the British justice system - including politicians and the
bureaucracies they fuel - which stands in the way of reform. "The
solution, which would be good for the economy, would involve less government
expenditure. Bureaucracies would have to decline in size and the government
would have to become less powerful. "And," he adds, with a rueful
laugh, "as an American senator once said 'you can't get a hog to
slaughter itself'." Dalrymple does have suggestions
for New Zealand, but they are not of the quick-fix variety. "If I may say so, you do have
a habit of copying other countries - especially in their bad habits. You
should look at Britain and learn ... I think you've been got at by
sociologists, criminologists and, no doubt, politicians who use these kinds
of ideas to increase their own powers over society - and have decreased
people's will to self control." Dalrymple says it is the void in
people's lives that drives them bad - and often mad as well. "I think quite a lot of
social pathology is caused by boredom and the desire for sensation and
interest. Then your life will be full at least. Because if there's no
transcendent meaning to your life, if you don't feel you contribute to
society or have any social purpose, if you take away from people the dignity
of earning a living for themselves or feeling that they're doing so, and you
have no cultural or intellectual interest, what is there? "The generous-sounding idea
that people behave badly because of social forces creates the idea that one
can behave badly and therefore be justified in doing so." He also thinks the experts have
the link between drugs and crime wrong. In his experience opiates are not
difficult to get off, withdrawal symptoms are not serious, and they've got
the relationship between criminality and addiction - that people commit crime
to feed their additions - the wrong way round. "Whatever causes people
to become criminal causes addiction." He acknowledges P is different. On
the other hand, he says, it is clear that P addiction is fuelled by people
desiring excitement and euphoria - which all human beings have - without
having to earn feeling good about themselves and the world. "They don't want to earn it,
they can't earn it," he says. "That's what's rather sad about it,
they don't have the religious belief, they don't have the self-respect of
earning a living in difficult circumstances and they don't have any cultural
interests. "I think it's very sad, it's
terrible, devastating." Personally Dalrymple is at a crossroads.
The son of a former communist activist and German mother who fled to Britain
to escape Nazi persecution, he is nearly 57. Last year he gave up his
psychiatric jobs and Spectator column. Now he and his French wife spend half
their year in a small village deep in the countryside 640km south of Paris.
They have no children. So how will he occupy that fertile
brain? "I still do a bit of medico-legal work - courts, reports, that
sort of thing. I'm writing a book and quite a lot of literary criticism as
well." The life change came out of a
feeling that "if I didn't do it now, I probably wouldn't get round to
it". He certainly wasn't unhappy
working as a doctor "though not happy about the managerial level in the
British medical system". After 14 years' marriage, Dalrymple
favours marriage for its stabilising effect on society. "Marriage
protects and reduces violence - not increases it," he says. His complaint is with the
institutional and fiscal lack of support for marriage that has spawned the
usual gush of fatherless families. "It's a social disaster and it's a
disaster for individuals," he says, implying that the money poured into
one-parent families should be at least be echoed for married. 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. "Politicians can't increase
their own standing in the eyes of the public, that's impossible. But they can
at least reduce the standing of the doctors or any other professional who has
a high standing. "For a corporatist government
the professional is a danger because it's an alternative source of authority.
I think they want to undermine independent professionals. They've done it
with the teachers, they've done it with the universities. To get power over
people [via unattainable targets and insulting performance reviews] is to
corrupt them. "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." And as he says, "It all
applies to New Zealand." The world according to Theodore There are several moments of truth
when talking to Theodore Dalrymple. He thinks: * "The fanatics and bombers
do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its
death rattle." * That had Virginia Woolf survived
to our time, "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". * "What we've done is create
a lot of unnecessary misery - and, of course, any preventable misery is
entirely regrettable." * Theodore Dalrymple will speak in
Wellington, Napier, Tauranga and Auckland between Oct 11 and Oct 18. See link
below for more details. |
