The Cult of Insincerity

by Theodore Dalrymple (October 2009)


I once had a patient who had had the words ‘Fuck off’ tattooed on his forehead in mirror writing. When I asked him for the reason for this, he said that it was to wake him up in the morning when he looked at himself in the glass. It never failed, he said. 

Newspapers perform more or less the same function for me. There is always something in them to irritate me profoundly, and there is nothing quite like irritation to get the juices circulating and the mind working. Oddly enough, only the print version of a newspaper, not the online one, has this tonic effect upon me; perhaps this is a conditioned response. I am like one of Pavlov’s dogs, who salivated at the sound of a bell. I have only to hold a newspaper in my hand to feel a pleasant frisson of outrage coming on.

Whenever I am in France, I read the French newspapers (the French read fewer newspapers than any other nation in the western world, by the way). There is always plenty in them to infuriate me, and so they are well worth the reading; for it must be confessed that indignation is one of the most rewarding of all emotions, as well as one that automatically gives meaning to life. When one is indignant, one does not wonder what life is for or about, the immensity of the universe does not trouble one, and the profound and unanswerable questions of the metaphysics of morals are held temporarily in abeyance.

The other day – well, on Saturday, 5th September, to be exact – I opened Le Monde to the page called ‘Debates.’ The page was devoted to prisons in France, where conditions are acknowledged by almost everyone to be very bad. The prisons are overcrowded; there is much violence between prisoners; the staff, according to Dr. Dominique Vasseur, who wrote a best-selling book about her time as a doctor working in the largest prison in Paris, are callous and often corrupt. If her book is to be trusted – and no one, I think, has suggested that she was lying or grossly exaggerating – prisons in France are far worse than those across the Channel, which themselves are by no means always model institutions.

Prison reform is an honourable cause; and while I don’t agree with Churchill, that a nation’s level of civilisation can be gauged by the way in which it treats its prisoners, I have always opposed the brutality that can so easily pervade what Erving Goffman called ‘a total institution.’ In the prison in which I worked, I insisted to the staff that their ascendancy over the prisoners must be moral rather than merely physical; and that, while they could be sometimes stern, they must always be fair. Moreover, they should always remember that, in prison, small things become large; and therefore, if they have promised something to a prisoner, they must always fulfil their promise. For otherwise the prisoner will be eaten up by a sense of grievance, and there is nothing like grievance to prevent a man from examining his own responsibility for his situation.

But half the page of Le Monde was taken up with a plea for the greatest reform of prison of all: total abolition. It was written by a teacher of philosophy at a lycee, one of the elite state schools of the country; and if it were not for the fact that many young people tend to believe exactly the opposite of what their teacher teaches them, I would have said that he must be a corrupter of youth. It is odd that a man who presumably has spent a large part of his life on abstract questions should show such little capacity for critical thought. In him, at any rate, the Cartesian spirit is dead.

The article’s title is: "An absurd system in a modern democracy." The headline continues: "Over and above humiliation, it has become more murderous than the death penalty."

The evidence for the latter assertion is that, since the abolition of the death penalty in France de facto in 1977 and de jure in 1981 (incidentally, you’d think it was BC 1981, the way Europeans look down on countries like India and Japan that retain he death penalty), at least 3000 prisoners have committed suicide in prison. And this fact alone is taken by him as indicating that prisons should no longer exist in France.

He writes:

The abolition of the death penalty brought about by the Left appeared logically and sociologically unavoidable; but it was only paralogical and paradoxical. It must be recognised: suicide kills more in prison than the death penalty ever did.

Only the abolition of prison, of course, will prevent suicide in prison. I leave aside the question of what ‘unavoidable’ means.

The malign influence of Foucault is everywhere in the article. Foucault has demonstrated that the end of cruel public punishments consecrated the arrival of the modern state which manifested its power hidden from view.

Personally sado-masochistic, Foucault tried (using an entirely bogus historiography) to demonstrate that humanitarian reform was actually nothing of the kind, but the replacement of one kind of raw power by another, more hidden and therefore dangerous and sadistic power.

Using precisely Foucault’s paradoxical thinking, the author writes:

The abolition of the death penalty therefore constituted less the symbolic accession of the left than the event that signified the defeat of its thought. Far from resolving a moral and political problem under the banner of the rights of Man, the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 sanctioned and sanctified punishment as incarceration. The left ratified a vast tendency in society in which squeamishness vies with hypocrisy.

The argument seems to be this: that the abolition of the death penalty led to an increased number of prisoners, which in turn led to an increased number of suicides among prisoners. Therefore the abolition of the death penalty was not a humanitarian measure.

I will not comment on the empirical evidence, or lack of it, for the assertion that the number of prisoners increased because of the abolition of the death penalty. Nor will I ask whether the increase in suicides after the abolition of the death penalty was predictable, as it would have had to have been if the abolition is to be designated as hypocritical. (We can blame people for not knowing that there are unpredictable consequences of their acts, but not for not knowing what those unpredictable consequences are.) Nor will I point out that there are rather obvious moral differences between an execution carried out by the state and a suicide, even that of a prisoner in the state’s care.

Let us, for the sake of argument, accept what the author claims. It would seem to entail the rather odd conclusion that a restoration of the death penalty would be a humanitarian measure. It would reduce the total number of deaths by reducing the prison population, and therefore the number of suicides in prison (assuming what is highly probably, that the rate of suicide among prisoners is higher than it would have been if they had not been imprisoned). On this view, the death penalty is a kind of expiatory sacrifice made on behalf of the whole population, rather than just a punishment properly so-called.

This, of course, is not the conclusion that the author draws. Rather, he wants the abolition of prison. As we shall see, he even wants something even more radical that that.

One thing that is notably absent from the article is any notion of crime or of the effects it has both on individual victims and on society as a whole – in the sense that a lot of crime causes fear and alters the mentality and behaviour of almost everyone in the direction of mistrust, caution and loss of freedom. It is as if only the criminal, and neither his act nor his victim, were of any interest to the author.

He suggests liberating prisoners ‘who can leave prison only humiliated, raped or desperate.’ For him, prison should be nothing but a therapeutic institution, one that does the prisoner good; if it fails to do that, it fails to do anything.

Again, I will pass over the question of whether humiliation is always and everywhere a bad thing. After all, the prospect of humiliation is one of the things that keeps us upright, as a cane keeps many a rosebush upright. We are social beings because we have a capacity to feel humiliated – or it might be the other way round. Be this as it may, there could be no prospect of humiliation if there were no actual means by which we might be humiliated. I am not particularly criminally-inclined, no more than average I would say, but I have often been kept on the straight and narrow path that leads to respectability by fear of humiliation. However, let us leave aside the interesting question of the necessary dose of humiliation necessary for the maintenance of society.

What would our author have instead of prisons? He says that he would build institutions designed by men and women who really wanted to look after wrongdoers, not institutions built by ‘betonneurs,’ those who construct in raw concrete. (Here, in his contempt of those who build in concrete, I agree with him.) But what kind of institutions would these be?

Here we come to the heart of his outlook, and that of many like him. He says that those prisons that are salubrious as buildings should be converted into ‘places of social reintegration,’ not only for those who have committed a crime, but for those ‘socially disintegrated people’ who have committed no crime: tramps, perhaps, or schizophrenics in need of rehabilitation. In other words, criminals are not to be marked out from any other people with difficulties of one sort or another, or treated differently from them.

The desire to blur limits and boundaries, in order to overturn society, has long marked out a certain kind of leftist. Because in social phenomena there are always borderline cases, they wish to undermine the very idea of categories. They are like people who would deny that anyone is tall because there is a fine gradation between tallest and shortest. Thus, because some things were considered crimes that are so considered no longer, and some things that were once legal that are now deemed criminal, they deny that the crime is anything other that an arbitrary social construction. A criminal is someone who merely has difficulty in his relations with society as some men have difficulties in their relations with their wives (and vice versa). What more natural, therefore, than that they should all attend the same day care centre, where they will be cured of their difficulties by psychological means?

‘It is necessary,’ says the author, ‘that the punished person should understand his mistake.’ Prison is obviously not the place for this; he comes out with as little understanding of his ‘mistake’ as he went in with. He therefore needs some kind of psychotherapy until he gains the requisite insight. We can see the Socratic paradox underlying this: that no man does wrong knowingly. There is no such thing as a wicked man.

This does violence not only to our knowledge of the behaviour of others, but to our self-knowledge. Which of us has never done wrong knowingly? Indeed, under most jurisdictions, a person is not guilty of a crime unless he has the requisite mens rea, a guilty mind, which implies the ability to have acted differently if he had so chosen.

There is no recognition whatsoever in the article that the purpose of the criminal law is to protect the population from criminals, not to make criminals better people. Of course, it would be nice if they became better people, as indeed they often do with the passage of time; but criminal justice is not group therapy. It is, moreover, preposterous, and deeply condescending, to suggest that criminals do not know what they are doing, and that what they need is therefore some kind of help to know it. As for calling crimes a ‘mistake,’ equivalent, shall we say, to putting the wrong postage on a letter or forgetting to put salt in the soup, it empties the world of all moral meaning whatever.

There is in the article a moral exhibitionism, which is generosity of spirit at other people’s expense. This, I think, is one of the sicknesses of our age, the desire to appear more-compassionate-than-thou. I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, the author does not believe a word of what he says: a common thing among intellectuals.

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