A Word to the Wise
by Theodore Dalrymple (December 2012)
Recently I read a slim volume that makes you tremble for humanity as you read it, and this is so even if it presents only a one-sided account of its subject matter as some critics allege: for that one side is more than terrible enough to induce the said trembling.
He uses a method that, in a very different context (thank goodness) I have used myself. He quotes the testimony of several survivors of those times, the very language in which it is couched being very, one might say horrifically, instructive. I quote at some length just one of the cases:
are witnessing a conversation between an older woman and other adults that is premised on the assumption that one gains a right to valuable goods by taking part in murder of their owners.
Assuming that this story is not wholly false and is substantially true (there are inconsistencies in it, for surely Klimaszewska, if she was as presented here, would have replied that the returning brother needed only one house, not four, and that therefore his return could not be a reason for not giving her one), it points to a moral attitude that could not possibly have been that of one person or a few persons alone: it must have been shared by a substantial number and proportion of the population, though it would be impossible to be dogmatic about how large that number or proportion must have been. In effect, the grossest criminal behaviour was now deemed normal, acceptable and as conferring rights on those who indulge in it. Here indeed was a transvaluation of all values.
Gross insists that such anecdotal evidence, assuming it is not made up of whole cloth, is of as of great importance as more abstract statistical evidence would be, and I too have taken this view in my own work.
Let me give an example of what I mean. I was asked by the courts to examine a young woman who, under the influence of both cannabis and alcohol, had an argument with her aged great grandmother, with whom she was living, pushed her over and broke her thigh. Fortunately the old lady survived, but the young woman was charged with causing her injury.
In the course of my interview with the young woman, I asked whether her own mother had ever been in trouble with the police. She replied that she had, and I asked what for.
This was said with no hint of irony, indeed as if it were so perfectly obvious that no other answer was possible and the question was almost a foolish one.
The answer did answer a quite specific question, but it also had a hinterland of meaning. It meant that money obtained by working was not considered the natural prime source of income, but rather as a top-up of the basic source of income which was social security. Work, if any, was for pocket money. And while, from this case alone, it would have been impossible to conclude anything very much about the state of society (for the young woman might have been a totally exceptional person, though this was not likely), what she said was consonant with a revealing locution that I heard many times.
This new form of words is very revealing, and signifies (to adapt slightly a Gramscian formulation) the long march of dependence through the mentalities: for to get paid, in normal parlance, is to receive money in return for something that one has done for another person or entity. What is it, then, that they are paid for having done? The answer is and can only be: for having continued to exist since the receipt of the last money.
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