Posted on 07/29/2002 7:27:13 AM PDT by Gumlegs
Peter Saunders: You’ve been writing this column in The Spectator for 12 years, and now the book has come out. Your essays are very rich descriptively, but what is the basic message that we should take away from reading them?
Theodore Dalrymple: I think it’s the idea that people are not billiard balls. They’re not impacted on by forces like cold fronts in the weather and react accordingly. They actually think about what they’re doing. For example, criminals are conscious of what they’re doing and they respond to incentives. And they have a culture—they have beliefs about what they’re doing.
PS: But what comes through in your essays is that they themselves talk as though they are billiard balls.
TD: Well, I think they’ve been taught to speak like that. And you can actually break it down by saying to them, ‘Now come on! You didn’t burgle that house because of your bad childhood, you burgled that house because you wanted to take something in it and you didn’t know how else to go about getting it because you’re unskilled, you have no intention of getting any skills’—and they start laughing! And oddly enough, when I speak with them quite plainly, my relations with them improve.
PS: Has anybody ever hit you!?
TD: No, never! I mean there are the true psychopaths who make one’s blood run cold because they are untouchable by normal human relationships. But they are relatively few. So my relations with the prisoners are extremely good. To give you another example, drug addicts come in and they spin me a line, and I just won’t have it. There’s initially friction because I refuse to prescribe for them and one of the things that’s very difficult to get across is that withdrawal effects from heroin, for example, are very minor. They’re trivial. PS: Really? That’s not the way it’s portrayed, is it?
TD: It’s not the way it’s portrayed but it is actually the truth. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve withdrawn from heroin. You never get any problems with it. It’s not like withdrawal from serious drinking which can be, and often is, a medical emergency. From a medical point of view, I’m much more worried in the prison when someone tells me he’s an alcoholic. I’m much more worried about the physical consequences of his withdrawal because they are really serious, and he can die from them. But nobody ever dies from heroin withdrawal. With the vast majority of them, you just take them aside and say: ‘I’m not prescribing anything for you, I will prescribe symptomatic relief if I see you have symptoms, but what you tell me has nothing to do with it, I’m not going to be moved by any of your screaming.’ One chap came in and said ‘What are you prescribing me?’ and I said ‘Nothing’, and he screamed at me, ‘You’re a butcher! You’re a f***ing butcher’, and he screamed and shouted and eventually I said ‘Take him away’. Everyone outside heard this, and they were like lambs!
(Excerpt) Read more at cis.org.au ...
If criminals got this idea from anyone, it's leftist academics. It's called determinism, or the denial that free will exists. It also denies good and evil, responsibility for actions, and even personal identity.
When it comes, for example, to dealing with drug addicts, there’s no question in my mind that the drug-treating establishment tries to ingratiate itself with the drug takers by seeing everything from their point of view. But I don’t see it from their point of view. I see what they’re doing as wrong. It’s wrong from every point of view and it’s wrong for them personally, and I’m not going to tell them anything else. I refuse to use their argot. I call needles ‘needles’ and syringes ‘syringes’. I absolutely refuse to pretend that I have anything to do with their (I hate to use the word ‘culture’) way of life.
I like the fact that we're getting back to clearly defined morality, not the "shades of gray" subjective reality we've had for the past 30 years. There may be hope for us yet.
I like this guy. We need more folks with the confidence to speak their minds. Then he had to say this:
So what I object to is the cultural liberals view that they are being kind to the poor when actually they are making their lives hell.
Now I really like him and just may order his book.
In all likelihood, but there is a disturbing number of people on the right who think the same way. Look at the efforts to ban pornography and strip clubs, or against violence in movies, or against offensive language in music. Self-righteous moralists like to think that these things cause people, who ostensibly have no say in the matter, to become wicked. Prohibition, and also the Comics Code (which destroyed the comic book industry in the 50's) came from paternalistic busybodies on the right.
Later in the interview Dalrymple gets to how well West Afrians are doing in England and how it's never reported because that success runs counter to PC myths about race.
Bill Bennett and Robert Bork don't always seem to think so.
As for self-righteous moralizing, please explain to me why, for instance, child molestation is morally wrong. I ask because I'm assuming you're an atheist.
A Deist, actually. Child molestation is wrong because it violates the rights of the molested child. Isn't it obvious?
Anyway, if you are an atheistic materialist, you believe that all things precede in cause-and-effect manner from the Big Bang. Thus, how can what a rapist, or a murderer, or a child molester do be described as "evil"? Their actions were pre-determined as much as a domino falling is predetermined by all the dominoes behind it. This is why, as the article states, you see leftists saying that "society is responsible" when crimes are committed. They don't believe that we have free will.
So, how could an child molester's actions be morally wrong if he's doing nothing more than what he's pre-determined to do? That's the point.
Cheers, here's to friendly debate.
First of all, it's an incontrovertible fact that not effect in the universe is caused. Fate has been ruled out by experiment, in consonance with the predictions of quantum mechanics.
Second, even if it were true that Laplace's hypothetical omniscient genius could predict any future event, that wouldn't mean that people aren't responsible for their actions. The story is often told of the philosopher Zeno, who taught that every event of the world is preordained. One time he caught his slave stealing from him, and proceeded to beat him. His wily slave told him, "but master, I was fated to steal from you!" Zeno replied, "and I to beat you."
Finally, I don't agree that in a completely deterministic universe, free will doesn't exist. I submit that if our brains worked in a completely deterministic manner, it could just as easily "feel the same" to us as it does now. I don't want to retype the argument I made on this thread two years ago, but if you'll read through it, you'll see where I'm coming from.
So, indeterminist philosophers have had a pretty difficult time trying to pry free will out of quantum mechanics. On the "feel the same" issue, I believe that's called "soft determinism"; i.e. there are so many myriad conditions that affect us, from genetics to gravity to the lunar tide cycle, that we simply don't have the ability to take it all in thus illusory free will. I believe this is the most widely held argument in the free-will/determinism debate. It's compelling, but still denies free will.
Still, it doesn't solve the materialist problem with libertarianism. Why are two people equal before the law? Why is someone with Down's syndrome be equal to you, a highly trained physicist? The person with Down's syndrome is a net drag on society, whereas you are a net plus. I'm a lawyer, so I'm at the top of the list of net-drags on society, but I digress. Anyway, under utilitarian ethics the child with Down's syndrome should be put to death at birth, shouldn't it? And Shakespeare would finally get his main wish regarding lawyers.
In my opinion, religious people like myself get a bad rap for moralizing (getting back to the original dispute), yet it seems that Judeo-Christianity provides the only solid answers to these questions. We have free will, and thus a difference between good and evil, because we have a soul from God that knows between right and wrong. People are equal before the law, because again we all have a soul and are thus ontologically equal, not just physically equal. The only problem: the soul can't be proven, yet. But assuming the soul makes for a good society. And if you assume either illusory or real free will, should society regulate those things that make it more likely to choose vice over virtue--drugs, porno, homosexuality, etc?
Yep.
Cheers, nice to have high-quality debate.
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