Please Feel My Pain

by Theodore Dalrymple (February 2010)


Shortly before Mr Blair was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, a newspaper discovered that I had not had a television in my home for about thirty years. This struck the editor of the newspaper as an extraordinary circumstance; so extraordinary in fact, rather like having been an anchorite in the Syrian desert subsisting on locusts and honey, that he contacted me to ask whether I would agree to having a television installed in my home so that I could tell readers, after a week of watching it, what I thought of it. This I consented to do on one very firm condition: that the newspaper took the television away at the end of the week. The newspaper agreed.

When the television arrived, I plugged it in and turned it on. The picture was grainy, for something else was required, evidently, to have a good reception. But it was good enough to know what was going on.

The programme was one of those in which a degraded family, or perhaps I should say a group of human beings who have lived in close association for some time or other, airs its appalling behaviour in public in return, I should imagine, for money, and for the prurient delectation of a voyeuristic audience.

A fattish woman approaching middle age was complaining in a monotonously high-pitched voice, halfway between a harangue and a wail, about her three daughters who were aged twelve, thirteen and fourteen respectively. According to her, they ‘did drugs’ and had left home to be prostitutes.

At this point, the presenter of the show interrupted her and asked the audience to give a warm welcome – with, of course, a round of applause - to the three young trollops in question, who came tripping down the steps to the television set with smirks of self-satisfaction on their faces. No lack of self-esteem there, I thought; rather too much, in fact.

Of course, mother and daughters began at once to trade high-pitched insults and accusations, and generally behaved like a dog and a cat enclosed in a sack. There was undoubtedly a morbid fascination in all this, though the spectacle was disgusting; suffice it to say that I was not encouraged by it to take steps to ensure that the television had a permanent presence in my home.

The newspaper had given me a timetable of programmes to watch, though it did not inform me as to the criterion it had used in their selection. Whether what my wife – who likewise had had no exposure to television for years before I met her – and I watched was better or worse than the average that was on offer to viewers, we could not say; but it seemed terrible pabulum to us, having approximately the same effect on our consciousness as a food-mixer on vegetables. It turned it into a kind of soup.

One of the programmes we were enjoined to watch was a breakfast time chat-show. The chief guest on this occasion was a man called Tony Blair, who at this stage was only Leader of the Opposition, though it was clear by then that he might very well be the next Prime Minister.

However, both my wife and I thought that the man on the television was not really Mr Blair, but someone imitating him, a clever impersonator perhaps, satirising the state of British politics. We had never seen or heard Mr Blair before, of course, or any other contemporary politician (one of the inestimable benefits of not having a television, and of never listening to the radio), so we had no standard by which to compare the guest of the breakfast TV with the ‘real’ Mr Blair. We both of us independently assumed that the preening, self-satisfied young popinjay could not possibly be the real thing.

Alas, we were wrong. In so far as anything about Mr Blair could be called real, this was the real Mr Blair. In the years that followed, the fact emerged - though it took a long time for many in the population to understand its significance - that thinking about Mr Blair’s mind and its verbal productions was a little like looking at the drawings of M C Escher, the Dutch artist, ‘in which lines of people ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which is impossible to build and possible to draw only by taking advantage of quirks of perception and perspective.’ (I have quoted from the excellent characterisation to be found on Wikipedia of one of Escher’s most famous pictures.)

To look at Escher’s work for too long is to drive oneself to complete distraction; and so it is with the contemplation of minds and characters like that of Mr Blair. The problem with an Escher picture is that it undoubtedly exists in itself, so it a tangible object; likewise the minds and characters of Mr Blair and his ilk (the ilk to which I shall return), for they are tangible too in the sense of undoubtedly being existent. But looking at an Escher picture is also to enter a clearly impossible world without being able to put one’s mind’s finger, as it were, on what exactly it is that makes it impossible, and keeping it there. One oscillates constantly between a sense of reality and its opposite, without ever one or the other achieving final victory. The cleverness of Escher is to make us know and not know something at the same time, which is both infuriating and anxiety-provoking.

We both know and don’t know that people like Blair and his model, Mr Clinton, are liars: we don’t know it because, while they constantly say things that are demonstrably and patently untrue, they subsequently claim not to have lied because, at the time they said those things, they believed them to be true, with all their hearts and with all their soul: a claim that is very difficult to disprove. And they themselves know that they believed them to be true with all their hearts and with all their soul because they said them, and they never say anything that they know to be untrue, because they are not liars. This is a labyrinth from which, once entered, there is no return.

It would be comforting to imagine that politicians like Blair, Clinton and, I fear, Obama have been visited upon us like aliens arriving from outer space (George W Bush was dreadful in a rather different, and perhaps slightly more traditional, way). But they have not: they were, after all, elected - Blair and Clinton re-elected - by millions and millions of votes. Such politicians are the natural product or culmination of a certain cultural development over the past sixty years; they not only rule us, they represent us and what we ourselves have become.

The cultural development in question is the systematic over-estimation of the importance not so much of emotion, as of the expression of emotion – one’s own emotion, that is. The manner with which something is said has come to be more important than what is said. Saying nothing, but with sufficient emotional vehemence or appearance of sincerity, has become the mark of the serious man. Our politicians are, in effect, psychobabblers because we are psychobabblers; not the medium, but the emotion, is the message.

Often in the street I hear people say to one another ‘I really, really think that…’ But is ‘to really, really, really think that…’ to provide even stronger evidence for the proposition that follows than ‘to really, really think that…’, which in turn is to provide stronger evidence than ‘to really think that…?’ And in what way, precisely, is ‘to really, really think that’ different from simply ‘to think that?’

And how can one contradict someone who really, really thinks something?

Is that not an attack on his or her whole personality?

Of course, the emotion with which an utterance is made has always been important in our assessment of how much to trust or believe the utterer of it. But whereas emotional expression was once the servant of meaning, now it is the other way round: meaning is the servant of emotional expression. Thus, Mr Blair has repeatedly defended himself against criticism by stating that he always did what he thought was best, even when what he apparently thought was best was, to many others, transparently corrupt or self-interested. Not his policy, but his goodness, is being defended.

This tactic worked for a long time. This is because we ourselves often seek indulgence for our own wrongdoing that allegedly derives from a pure heart. We want people to concentrate on the purity of the heart, and forget the wrongdoing.

One sign of the elevation of feeling over thought and reason is the way in which the proof of allegations such as bullying and racism has been emptied of any requirement of objective evidence that they have taken place. In the British public service, for example, a great deal of time is wasted (that is, wasted from the point of view of the ostensible end of that service) in investigating complaints and grievances by people who claim to have been the victim of one or other of these things.

In many organisations, bullying or racism is said to have taken place if the victim, or alleged victim, feels that he has been bullied: and since, of course, the complainant is the final arbiter on the question as to whether or not he feels bullied or the victim of racism, human relations become extremely difficult. Anything at all, any small jest or expression of displeasure or disdain, can be interpreted as bullying or racism. The best form of defence is attack; the alleged perpetrator can lodge a counter-claim against the complainant on similar grounds.

Everyone therefore walks on eggshells all the time, wondering who will be the next to take offence at what; and everyone becomes supersensitive himself to perceived slights and insults. Fragility becomes general, and everyone is on tenterhooks either as a potential victim or potential perpetrator.

As if this were not bad enough, financial incentives are often offered to those who feel victimised: a fact that gives superior levels in the administration immense power over their underlings, for it is the superior levels that must, in the first instance, arbitrate between the complainant and the complained against. But the superior levels can never feel safe themselves, for they operate in the very same atmosphere of fear. The principle applies that was first enunciated with such clarity by Jonathan Swift:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bit 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.

An official report in Britain into the murder of a young black man by five white thugs, which the police through their habitual incompetence (or, quite possibly, corruption) failed to solve in the sense of securing convictions against the murderers, suggested that the legal definition of a racial incident henceforth be any incident that is perceived by anyone, either involved in it or as a bystander to it, as being racial. In other words, there should be no requirement of actual racist behaviour, no objective correlative whatsoever.

In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that so many of us have become like the princess in the story by Hans Christian Andersen, who could not sleep on twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds when a single pea was placed under them. We are so busy examining and cherishing our own feelings that reality itself ceases to interest us very deeply.

This is the world in which Messrs Clinton and Blair - the latter of whom Peter Hitchens, the brother of Christopher, has so accurately dubbed Princess Tony - flourish. If these characters, who have long combined unctuous self-righteousness with complete ruthlessness, have been able to make fortunes from claiming to feel the pain of others, it is only because they so brilliantly distil the psychology of the age.


Dr. Dalrymple's most recent book is Second Opinion (Monday books).

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