Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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Theodore Dalrymple. Life at the Bottom: The
Worldview That Makes the Underclass. Chicago: Ivan R Dee,
Inc. xv + 263 pp.
Simon Winlow. Badfellas: Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities. Oxford: Berg Publishers. x + 192 pp.
<1> A couple of years ago, a fleeting "scandal" flickered across the pages of the British tabloid press. Through a combination of coincidence and British Data Protection laws, a woman acquired a copy of her own – formerly confidential – medical records. It transpired that her General Practioner (family doctor) had covertly recommended she be sterilized, following multiple pregnancies by different fathers. Needless to say, as the target of these recommendations, she was outraged, taking her story to The Sun, Britain's bestselling newspaper (July 21, 2006). In turn, the tabloid transformed her individual fury by redirecting hostilities towards the woman herself, on account of her alleged fecklessness and welfare dependancy.
<2> Long since forgotten by all except the immediate participants, the episode remains an instructive one. The press coverage displayed a well-established mixture of prurience and carnivalesque language, deployed as part of a moral fable about white trash and social decay. The news agenda moved on, but the doctor himself did not escape censure. Whereas the red-tops did not dissent at much of this diagnosis, a throwaway remark about the patient's "penchant for men of West Indian extraction" attracted some criticism. In the new ettiquette, prejudice towards "Britain's chavviest mother" is acceptable, but racism is not, or so it appears.
<3> Doctor Theodore Dalrymple (pseudonym) is unlikely to attract the same type of criticisms. Dalrymple is a recently retired inner-city general practitioner, who for over a decade has enjoyed a parallel career as a journalist, writing a regular column for the right-wing Spectator magazine and appearing frequently in several national newspapers. It would be no exaggeration to say that the majority of his columns and op-ed pieces bear a close resemblance to the leaked medical records that made the news. Week in week out, it seems that there are no depraved depths to which his socially deprived patients will not sink. According to Dalrymple, complicit in this process is an endemic victim culture, a supine state and a liberal ideology of welfare dependancy, compounding all the problems.
<4> If some of these arguments sound familiar, they have been circulating in US conservative circles since before Charles Murray's writings on the underclass emerged in the 1980s. Once Murray came to Britain to confirm the existence, in his estimation, of an underclass in 1990 [1], commentators like Dalrymple have enjoyed a secondary income from further embellishing Murray’s argument. For these observers, poverty is something to be explained in behavioural rather than structural terms. Life at the Bottom collects over twenty of Dalrymple's feature articles, in order to reverse the circuit initiated by Murray, evangelising in Britain for a scapegoating critique of the US welfare system. Hence the target readership appears to be Americans who, while convinced by the underclass concept in domestic affairs, might be surprised to find it applies to England. (To help them along, the text is littered with currency conversions, pavements that become sidewalks and so forth.) Dalrymple himself notes that his US audience is shocked frequently by his opinion that the British underclass has a white majority (more or less the book's unique selling point in the USA).
<5> Unlike the hapless G.P. whose medical opinion entered the public domain by accident, Dalrymple is deliberate in leaking his anecdotal evidence to his highbrow readers. He grants his patients anonymity, and his own use of a pen-name makes the precise setting of these grim anecdotes hard to identify. Accounts of patients' foibles and social problems are used to flesh out some pretty basic elitist assumptions. The first two thirds of the book revolve around describing the urban poor and their seemingly self-inflicted injuries, so as to confirm the book's basic thesis. (We can afford to ignore the sole "theoretical" claim at the heart of these "grim reality" tales – that criminality is a virus spread via tattooists' needles.) Without doubting the veracity of some of the descriptions, cynics might say that the point of these case studies is to titilate rather than explain.
<6> The final third of the book, subtitled "Grimmer theory", is an attempt to assess competing structural explanations for crime and poverty. Dalrymple's theoretical section wishes "to lay bare the origin of that reality [i.e. the underclass], which is the propagation of bad, trivial, and often insincere ideas" (p.xv). As such it is deliberately anti-theory. There is little serious engagement with anything much that rises above the daily grind of consultation and diagnosis, although Dalrymple's overseas speaking engagements – in social policy rather than medicine – provide some variety here.
<7> The precise theories and theorists under attack are hard to identify. Like Dalrymple’s pen-portraits of his patients – the career criminal, the self-hating suicide, the bright kid bullied at school – the named thinkers cited and polemicised against are equally sketchy. Few specific publications are cited; indeed much of the theoretical section seems to have been gleaned from hanging around in New Zealand's bookshops. Targets include a "liberal criminologist" (p.196), "two lesbian academics" (p.197; Julie Glamuzina and Alison Laurie) and other intellectuals engaged in a "rush from judgement", the "bien-pensants of our age" (p.199). One such author is Gay Oakes, whose autobiography detailed a life of destitution and institutionalisation, which for Dalrymple illustrates the wider problem of moral decline.
<8> Contemporary sociology and criminology are assailed for expressing a form of relativism which, when adopted as an outlook by the great unwashed, has terrible consequences. Thus criminologists foster crime (p.208), sustained by 1960s psychiatrist Karl Menninger and trained by "left realist" criminologist Jock Young. The only public intellectual with whom Dalrymple has much sympathy is George Orwell, with whom he compares himself when facing allegations of "making things up" about Britain’s underclass. Beyond this general level of complaint, no attempt is made to explain how such ideas are transmitted within society. The underlying analysis revolves around "common sense" and conventional wisdom, relying on such old canards as human nature, good and evil and the need for correct moral instruction. Life at the Bottom concludes by treating these building blocks as the social facts invalidating any attempts at a more serious understanding of social trends.
<9> The methodological issue at hand is whether or not Dalrymple is an adequate ethnographer. On the surface, his daily encounters at a prison hospital and an inner city clinic provide anecdotal evidence for his wider sense of social decay and diminished individual agency/personal responsibility. Many of the observations – victim culture, incompetent public authorities, a social elite which refuses to take a lead – should be familiar to observers of the British scene, including those – like me – who are skeptical of the underclass concept. Time and again it seems that the fish rots from the head. Yet rather than providing an account of how beliefs shape society, Dalrymple demonstrates a sectional worldview of his own. It was once said that Margaret Thatcher's outlook developed as a Grantham shopkeeper, forever looking on folks with the suspicion they were about to haggle over prices or pilfer (or both). Since Dalrymple's patients are forever asking for something – methadone, certification of mental illness or other conditions, excuses to vindicate bad behaviour – this forms the a priori viewpoint he brings to all his journalism. All the anecdotes in world won't change his mind.
<10> Dalrymple presents the unrelenting character assassination of his patients as based on experience, but it conceals his own inadequacies as a sociologist and anthropologist. For instance, the chapter on nightclub bouncers entitled "Festivity and Menace" serves up hackneyed images of steroidal golems driven by barely restrained homicidal urges. In keeping with mainstream opinion – where a negative personal experience bolsters extravagent claims of hedonism and depravity – his hostility to bouncers unfolds through a handful of anecdotes. Dalrymple's descriptions may ring true, but it takes real scholarship to provide a convincing account of the profession of the bouncer.
<11> This task falls to Simon Winlow, who combines theory and ethnography in Badfellas to bring him close to paint an accurate picture of 'working doors'. Winlow's radically different conclusions are explicitly based on participant observation and using other ethnographic methods. An in-depth, close-up study of the lives of bouncers and their millieu, Winlow's often vivid prose brings this world to life. Writing as a former "security operative" myself, I can vouch for the authenticity of subculture he explores. The camaraderie and fast fluctuations between boredom and danger are all instantly recognisable. (Regional differences exist, between Sheffield – where I worked and where the trade was overshadowed by football hooliganism [2] – and Winlow's Sunderland, where protection rackets seem to play a greater role.) All this makes for a risky millieu in which to conduct field research but this was no barrier to the author transforming his employment as a bouncer into a solid monograph.
<12> "Door supervision" is now a highly regulated industry in Britain, thanks to parliament, local government and a nationwide Security Industry Authority (SIA). Bouncers – known in jargon as 'door supervisors' or 'security operatives' – attract Dalrymple-style derision from the cultural elite and policy discussion around the doors trade rests on similar perceptions. Comparisons with gorillas are the norm.
<13> Using ethnography provides Badfellas with both its strength and its novelty, providing a far better explanation of the nocturnal life of British cities than the countless write-ups of "binge drinking Britain" saturating UK newspapers. By putting the long-term work in, Winlow demonstrates how individuals operate in specific social networks and occupations. A concern with evidence supplants theoretical speculation, but it would be wrong to say he is unconcerned with theory. (Indeed, he has gone to some lengths to substantiate it here.) The book opens with a sociological portrait of Sunderland, a working class city in the English North East once characterised by heavy industry. Over time, the consequences of "globalization" – and a more subjective defeat of organised labor, which Winlow doesn't explore – impact on this locale. As with many accounts of globalization, Badfellas asserts rather than explains the process, as if an article of faith. This matters little, as starting the analysis at the level employment supplies a springboard from which to explore globalization's implications, for crime and gender alike.
<14> As heavy industry declined, with it went a range of associated masculine beliefs and conventions. Sunderland's economy hinged on muscular, manual workers who could earn both "respect’ and a "family wage" in equal measure. Novelist Howard Fast's description of steel workers – "their very work is constant close contact with mechanical violence" [3] – applies equally to the shipyards. Moreover, the capacity to commit interpersonal violence found localised, instrumental applications in and around the city. In industrial Sunderland, being a "hard man" seldom became a career in its own right, representing at best a chance to turn fighting prowess into free drinks and jobs minding the door at rough public houses. Some of Winlow's interviews and profiles reveal the limited opportunities available to such men, now fast approaching retirement age.
><15> This contrasts with the present day, where certain characteristics of the 'post-industrial' economy create new opportunities to benefit from controlled levels of inter-personal violence. Winlow's fieldwork shows how within organized crime a reputation for 'hardness' can function as a kind of cultural capital, enhancing routine moneymaking operations such as fraud, counterfeiting, dealing drugs and selling stolen cars. Such activity has led to the emergence of an illicit, semi-formal career structure for its participants.
<16> Crime also plays a significant role in Sunderland's "night-time economy" – pubs, clubs, drinking dens and so forth – which is where the analysis comes into its own. Badfellas shows how fighting ability and physical stature now translate into a distinctive occupational niche, keeping bars and dancefloors free of trouble and drug dealing, except insofar as the bouncers themeselves initiate it. (Little wonder Winlow's monograph – like his career working doors – culminates in a brawl involving protection rackets and serious injuries dispensed in a pub car park).
<17> Perhaps strangely, the regulatory dimension of door supervision seems to have little impact on the book's protagonists. When I worked the trade a decade ago, local government licensing schemes were already coming into operation and compulsory training in self-defence, drugs awareness and multiculturalism were widespread. (Even Theodore Dalrymple's caricatures of doormen claim to have received fire safety and first aid tuition.) There is a case to be made for "putting the state back in" and accounting for the new regulatory regime within the night-time economy.
<18> There exists quite a contrast between the bold participant observation of Badfellas and its theoretically cautious approach. Granted, the book accepts academic shibboleths around globalisation and masculinity almost uncritically in the opening chapters, reversing Dalrymple’s blanket dismissal. Yet Winlow wisely refuses to use his substantial base in fieldwork to make broader claims about the nature of the times we live in (beyond the usual genulflections to notions of globalisation and masculinity). For instance, it is clear that gyms constitute a key base from which to both socialise as 'hard men' and to bodybuild during the day, further expanding the distinctive form of cultural capital – deterring trouble by presence alone – at night. Having demonstrated the existence of this physically active subculture in the North East, he does not then make unsupported jumps to, say, cyborg theories of the social transformation of the body. Likewise, the entertainment industries – Hollywood gangster films, gangsta rap – are shown to provide shared points of reference for the subculture as a whole, without leading to postmodern claims for the 'hyperreality' of this situation.
<19> Seldom discussed here is the way that the British public's nocturnal leisure activities inspire government ambivalence. On the one hand they play a large role in strategies for "regeneration" (urban renewal), expressed in a preoccupation with casinos and "European-style café society". On the other hand, our actual "nightlife" is perceived as a site of carnivalesque and self-destructive disorder, prompting local conflict and new legislation. Discourses that recast routine leisure activities as sinister are sometimes reinforced by the activities of the bouncers themselves when empowered to police an evening's entertainment. Explaining this paradoxical view of leisure activity could be central to future studies such as this one. As it stands, many of the building blocks for such an analysis are here.
<20> All in all, Badfellas is a very good first book which both shows the potential of solid fieldwork and ethnography. Its caution when moving between the fieldwork and the broader theoretical picture is to be welcomed, although sometimes this means that the basis for Britain's wider preoccupation with binge drinking, abusive men and anti-social behaviour is largely absent. Consequently, Badfellas does not always account for the significance of its subjects in the wider scheme of things. Fieldwork can show what matters to those being observed, but it doesn't necessarily do the same in terms of why it matters to wider society. Winlow's "humanscape" of individual survival strategies is nevertheless compelling: by avoiding a solely theoretical account, he maps out the underlying transactions influencing a slice of life in Britain today.
Notes
[1] Charles Murray, The Emerging British Underclass (Institute of Economic Affairs, May 1990). [^]
[2] See Steve Cowens, Blades Business Crew (Milo Books, 2001). [^]
[3] Howard Fast, 'An Occurrence at Republic Steel' (1937); reprinted in Isabel Leighton (ed.), The Aspirin Age: 1919-41 (Penguin, 1964 ed.), p.397. [^]
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