James Hamilton, a psychotherapist, recently interviewed me for his blog. This is an excerpt:

Do you feel that the protective conservative virtues and values, have been repressed by state intervention?What do you think of Theodore Dalrymple's assertion that it was the middle-class abandonment of traditional values that led to a similar abandonment by the working classes whom those values had most urgently protected in the past?

The circumstances in which we are brought up and live determine which parts of our nature will come to the fore. I used to enjoy telling my father - a classic 'English gentleman' - that if he had been born as one of the ravaging hordes of Attila the Hun, he would have murdered, raped and robbed without hesitation. He was amusingly discomfitted by the idea and tried to deny it.

But if we are brought up, say, where it is normal to be a member of a Friendly Society (as it was at the beginning of the 20th century) which offers help to us in times of need and requires to help others when they are in need, if we are bought up in a family in which mutual help is expected, all this and more brings out different parts of our nature than if we are raised in, say, a vandalised council estate where a large number of people are on state benefits and not working.

In the former, there are various pressures to be what we regard as 'virtuous'. There is peer pressure. There is the pressure of knowing that we will be helped only because of the deal whereby help we must help others. In the benefit-dependent estate, on the other hand, the need for mutual help has been taken away by the state. The people are put in the position where they are perennial takers. That develops a different attitude. This is just a part of the way in which, I believe, the welfare state has changed the the nature of British people.

I admire Theodore Dalrymple's writings enormously. However I disagree with the idea that the the lower classes have somehow followed the example of the upper classes in living in a less virtuous way. There is far more divorce and separation among the poor than among the rich. In this, as in other things, the poor have not copied the rich. They have developed different habits. Benefits dependency, the drastic reduction in incentives to save and to marry and many other changes have strongly affected the poor. They have been changed, not by a bad example, but by bad laws and, in particular, the welfare state. The welfare state has profoundly changed the circumstances of the poor.

Through this, not example, the character of the poor has been changed.

What are your views on the role of popular culture in the decline of civility? It is a theme of Nick Hornby's novels (High Fidelity, About A Boy) that pop culture can have the effect of trapping people in an extended, damaging adolescence. In the absence of the Welfare State, would civility have survived pop culture?

I find this idea wholly unconvincing. Pop music and words come out of the culture. They do not create it. It is true that in reflecting a culture, popular music re-inforces it. If you have obscenities from Eminem, then people will be influenced. But first you have to create Eminem - the culture in which he develops and becomes successful.

Popular music has been around for centuries, indeed millenia. The idea that popular music has a life of its own and goes around creating cultures is incredible. We did not move from "I give to you as you give to me" (part of a Bing Crosby song) and "Get yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again" (part of a Fred Astaire song) to "F***, you, Debbie, Debbie, f**** you!" (Eminem referring to his mother) by some sort of arbitrary, self-creating vagary of the history of popular music. The change in the music grew out of the change in the culture. That, in turn, was changed by the creation of the welfare state which so profoundly changed the circumstances in which most people live.

For the complete interview, go to the March 4th posting on James Hamilton's website which should be here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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