Samstag, Dezember 21, 2002

 

Don’t set the people free

Theodore Dalrymple says that many poor souls need institutions, but the ideologues and cost-cutters insist on giving them autonomy

If freedom entails responsibility, a fair proportion of mankind would prefer servitude; for it is far, far better to receive three meals a day and be told what to do than to take the consequences of one’s own self-destructive choices. It is, moreover, a truth universally unacknowledged that freedom without understanding of what to do with it is a complete nightmare.

Such freedom is a nightmare, of course, not only for those who possess it, but for everyone around them. A man who does not know what to do with his freedom is like a box of fireworks into which a lighted match is thrown: he goes off in all directions at once. And such, multiplied by several millions, is modern society. The welfare state is — or has become — a giant organisation to shelter people from the natural consequences of their own disastrous choices, thus infantilising them and turning them into semi-dependants, to the great joy of their power-mad rulers.

It was by visiting prison that I first learnt that not all men desire freedom. Until then, I had rather airily supposed that all men wanted to be free. Not a bit of it. It gradually dawned on me that many of the recidivists whom I was seeing had shown considerable determination to get back into prison: after all, our police force shows an equal and opposite determination not to arrest and charge wrongdoers, mainly because of the subsequent paperwork involved. To be imprisoned for burglary, therefore, you have almost to want to be imprisoned for burglary, and what I discovered was that many burglars did want to be so imprisoned.

I would meet old clients of the prison service (as I suppose we shall soon have to call them) who showed no dismay at their own return to incarceration: quite the reverse, in fact. They were buoyed up, even euphoric, and greeted the officers like old friends. They knew the ropes and liked them. In the privacy of the consultation room, I would ask them whether they liked prison. This was not something they could readily admit to their fellow-prisoners, of course: with them, they had to pretend to hate prison, to be the victims of a police stitch-up or a miscarriage of justice. But with me, with no one else to listen, they would admit that they preferred ‘the in’ to ‘the out’. It was a startling admission. Naturally, I would ask them why, and the answer was always the same. ‘I got no worries in here,’ they said.

The worries they had on ‘the out’ were, of course, entirely of their own making. Here we came to a bit of a sticking-point: they would not recognise the truth of this, or not at first, not until we had had something of a sub-Platonic dialogue. They regarded their domestic and other tribulations as heaven-sent, the practical joke of a malevolent fate. Prison was their only shelter from this malevolence, and they were glad of it. Prison was warm, prison was predictable, prison offered them companionship; above all, prison was safe. Those of them (the great majority) who were not out-and-out psychopaths recognised that prison limited the harm that they invariably did to others when they were at liberty. And they were noxious to others because there was no structure to their lives, and they therefore acted upon their whims of the moment. Sometimes, indeed, they would rail at the shortness of their sentences that forced an unwanted and useless liberty upon them. They vowed to take revenge and ensure a longer sentence next time by committing a really serious crime.

Needless to say, a society in which there is no structure to the relations between the sexes, which purposefully disconnects itself from all sense of its own past, which glorifies the eternal present moment, which subsidises social pathology, and which severs the relation between acts and their consequences while simultaneously emphasising the right of everyone to behave as he chooses, is a society which will grow ever-richer in these sad creatures. At least these people, however, have the potential under the right cultural conditions to live lives of sturdy independence. But this is not true of everyone: there is a small but not entirely negligible number of people in our society who, through no fault of their own, are unfit to live independently, and yet are forced to do so because of the ideology of personal autonomy as the supreme, indeed only, good (tempered, of course, by state intervention).

The ideologists of personal autonomy have made common cause with the cost-cutters — though, as we know, all attempts by state systems to reduce their costs increase them, just as all their attempts to reduce bureaucracy in such systems increase it. So we have a strange kind of pincer-movement in operation in our society: on the one hand, perfectly able-bodied and mentally capable people are deprived of their autonomy and responsibilities, and rendered dependent, while the physically infirm and mentally disabled are forced into ever greater independence, irrespective of their ability to cope with it.

The prisons fill up with people who once would have been looked after in our mental asylums; and there is a steady stream of people through our hospitals who desire admission, and want never to go home, because the self-directed life that has been forced upon them is beyond their intellectual capacities. Time after time, with a heavy heart, and because their hospital bed is needed for someone else, we have to return them whence they came and whence they fled, because there is nowhere else to send them. The heartlessness of it all, while extravagant aid is given to those who deserve none and whom such aid will actually harm, is sickening.

For the cost-cutters and the ideologists of personal autonomy alike (the latter believing that people in society are, or should be, like molecules in Brownian motion, except, of course, for their tax-paying obligations, which are the sum total of their social duties, and which keep the ideologists in pay), the word ‘institution’ is a dirty one. Institutions lead to institutionalisation and, of course, to institutionalised racism. It is true, of course, that many of our institutions that look after the defenceless members of our society were highly defective in the past. I saw some of them myself: cheerless barracks with beds so crowded together that you couldn’t walk between them, and so lacking in stimulation that they seemed to empty the minds of their residents of all content. But at their best they also offered many advantages, not least of which was a stable and predictable environment (precisely the qualities the prisoners like), space and a sense of community, with devoted staff and real social events. To conclude from the worst of them that such institutions were and are unnecessary is like concluding — from the fact that our schools teach at least a third of the population virtually nothing at all — that education is unnecessary.

In fact, the desire to be enclosed, at least partially, in an institutional community is very widespread, and not only among the feeble and deficient to whom the fulfilment of that desire is now steadfastly denied. Nor is such a desire deplorable or reprehensible, for it gives the person performing the humblest task a sense of personal worth, purpose and importance. When institutions are heedlessly destroyed, often in the name of economy and efficiency, but usually in the pursuit of power, lives are destroyed and lifetimes of service effectively derided. He who closes down an institution spits upon the labour of those who worked in it, and suggests that those who were attached to it were in some way deluded.

Of course, I am not suggesting that all institutions, regardless of quality, cost or utility, should be kept going for ever. But no sensible person would have entrusted the decision-making powers on such matters to the British public administration, whose moral and intellectual corruption is now total, and whose inhumanity is obvious to anyone who has the most perfunctory dealings with it.

The weakest members of our society should, of course, be helped to the richest life of which they are capable; but independence is not necessarily an ingredient of this, especially when in effect it means plunging them defencelessly into the pitiless world of the contemporary British inner city, in which even those in wheelchairs are regularly robbed, and where respectable or vulnerable inhabitants lock themselves indoors after the sun has gone down with the alacrity of Transylvanian peasants avoiding the attentions of Count Dracula.

Spare a thought, then, for those poor souls this Christmas who will try desperately to insinuate themselves into hospital, in order that they should not be alone during the festive period; upon whom our society places a burden that they cannot bear, for lack of real charity and in the name of a crude ideology. Our giant apparatus of welfare, to which we devote an ever increasing proportion of our income, is — to adapt, slightly, a well-known phrase from an official report — institutionalised callousness.

posted by nadia 11:17 PM