Director of the center for principal and politics and we are joined by one of my favorite writers, Theodore Dalrymple. When i say his name many look at me with eyes of recognition confirming the numbers among their favorite writers as well. Others to stare back with puzzlement ask with their eyes, what is Theodore Dalrymple . Tonights event is about Theodore Dalrymples new book admirable evasions how psychology undermines morality. A close examination of modern psychology, psychiatrist and neuroscience from the perspective of literature and philosophy is long overdue. The scope of modern psychologys influence is remarkable. Indeed to what or to whom do we most turn to learn about what man is and what is good for him . What other authority in modern secular democracies is as widely presumed capable of addressing Human Happiness . Our predisposition toward him, not genetic of course but social is on account of notions wheeled onto for dear life let equality for example. Equality implies all human beings are sovereign in their own judgment meaning we rarely take individuals or traditions on their word. That is to say we dont want to be ruled by human beings but we can stomach abstract not human wisdom. Moreover the fruits of Natural Science have been so thoroughly successful that it may seem all things can be known through the Scientific Method and all things can be fixed through its application. Even human beings. The decline in religion and other traditions means psychology is left almost alone to comment on Human Happiness. When it terms, strange picture arises. One half of the world is ill and the others that it sometimes pronounces and the past, indeed all history can be accounted for and misdiagnosed illness. Caesar was merely got megalomaniac. Psychologys fruits are not held privately by a few but disseminated into the public and their effects in range from the shocking to the amusing to the disenchanting. The fact of his biography suggests his life was guided by curiosity rather than social standing or other motives. He has traveled throughout the world as a doctor and writer, his travels to cam to several dictatorial and communist regimes, presumably at threat of his life. Has worked as a psychiatrist among inmates in british prisons, also presumably and thread of his life. On these and other experiences he has written thousands of articles and numerous books. She is without doubt among the most grateful and this to writers around. We will have a q a session and will be followed by a reception just down the hall here. Tell me to welcome Theodore Dalrymple. [applause] thank you very much. I should say perhaps prisoners fought i was more a threat to them than they were to me. But first i should like to thank the Heritage Foundation for having asked me for a second time, great honor. It doesnt seem long ago to digest the foundation in the first place, it actually wasnt that long ago. 21 years ago i wrote a piece in the city journal titled the knife went in and it referred to a curious phenomenon i have noticed in the prison in which i worked. That was virtually all murderers who stabbed someone to death said of the relevant moment the knife went in and i thought this was a curious way of describing what had happened implying as it did that the knife had a evolution of its own, it was fun knife that guided the hand rather than the hand fit guided the ninth. And my wife who was also a doctor thought that i was exaggerated and it was absolutely never exaggerated. But one day she was in her clinic and had a patient and it was a lady and she said she asked about her husband and she said the knife went in. Realized i hadnt been exaggerating. This way of putting it is significant, at least i thought it was significant because it suggested the perpetrator was by his rather peculiar locution distancing himself from his unasked and his responsibility for it end he was telling it in to some kind of natural event rather like an eruption of this dubious for example rather than motivated, will traction with cumin intention behind it but of course it is not only murderers the use this mental device and im not going to ask for a show of hands but i doubt theres anyone in this room who has never resorted to it. And certainly the mind, the cuban mind really displays its flexibility so brilliantly as when it is finding excuses for bad behavior or rationalizations of having done was ought not to have been done and even the dullest person who has never had an original idea in his life instantly becomes wonderfully inventive the moment he is justly accused of having done something that he ought not to have done. This is an important if not necessarily credible fact or aspect of human psychology and nature that is surely available to anybody who would either Pay Attention to or think about the words and acts of others or to what dr. Johnson called the motions of his own mind. Is my contention that honest attention to the words and deeds of others and our own faults and demotions reveals to us infinitely more about the human condition than the formal study of psychology has ever done or would ever do. And in fact it is my contention in the book that psychological theory whether it be psychoanalytical, behaviorist, darwin this or neurochemical, whatever it is, any theory that claims to explain all or a very large part of our human existence and experience actually creates a barrier to human self understanding rather than advancement of it. It encourages people to think of both themselves and others as objects rather than subjects. This inevitably leads to an increase in intellectual and moral dishonesty because try as we might we cannot experience ourselves as objects rather than subjects. There is inevitably a tension that is created. As i said this is the thesis of my book which is in very kindly published by encounter books and i dont want to praise myself but i think i can say without fear of being accused of false modesty or boast fullness that it is very short. [laughter] even if what it says is mistaken, completely mistaken at least it doesnt claim too much of anybodys time. It is probably true to say that theres a general impression in the population that mankind thanks to increase technical prowess has made enormous and accelerated advances in self understanding in the last decades especially in the last three decades and i dont want to deny the reality of technical advance or devalue of drugs in some conditions, advances in neurosurgery and the like but it seems to me if that an important question of human existence, how we should live, what is the purpose of our life, what is the good, what should we strive for, we are no more advanced than our predecessors and it is quite probable we shall never be more advanced than our predecessors for metaphysical reasons but the fact that some questions are not susceptible to indubitable answers or technical lancers does not mean that they cease to be questions and important ones at that. The thesis of the book is over the last century or so different schools of psychology have repeatedly claimed much more for themselves than are justified by their actual achievements and they have revealed a letter that adds to cumin understanding in the broad sense. We accept the latest claims at least for a time because to us we find it an affront that we are unable to unravel our own mystery. When hamlet says what a piece of work is a man how noble in reason, how infamous and faculty, in form, in movement how expressive and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, we feel like a god we should be able to understand ourselves but in fact we do not understand hamlet cologne ourselves. And actually i think that is one possible interpretation of the play that shakespeare is actually telling us we do not understand ourselves we cannot understand ourselves, we cannot understand others. We tend to assume understanding that we have it not. To claim knowledge where theres actually ignorance is a harmful thing. Indeed there isnt even an understanding of what understanding would actually be. When a patient asks me why do i behave as i do and of course theyre always asking about bad behavior because nobody ever asks why do i do what i do about good behavior, no one asks why july helped hold ladies across the road for example. I would ask them to give me an example of what would count as a satisfactory and complete explanation and not one of the was ever able to give me such an example. There are certain types of explanation that seem satisfactory. When i see a man or in my youth when i saw a man eating a sandwich and assume, i assumed it was because he was hungry, i no longer term make this assumption because people are eating all the time and im not sure people can be hungry all the time but that is the kind of explanation we to accept and understand. In my hospital i would see a man who became confused when he had all lowlevel of sodium in his blood and when that level was corrected, he became no longer confused he returned to normal land we would look no further for the cause of his confusion or the cause of low sodium, we would not say we didnt understand why he was confused and say theres a satisfactory explanation that had been found but this is far from a tactical or common situation and not much should be made of it but i think we do it exaggerate the potential for this kind of naturalistic explanation in settling deepest questions of human existence and i think this leads to a certain shallowness and you can hear it on buses when people are talking about themselves. Theyre talking about themselves as if they were objects in a very shallow way and they are, if you like, self obsessed with out self examination. This kind of desire for explanation alienates us from our own experience. I am not going to illustrate the point by quoting or referring to the contents of the book because i want you to buy it afterwards. The process is to have read it. I would prefer to refer to the fact that a book was recently sent me through the post by its publishers and the hopes that i would make reference to review it. In 360 pages, sought to prove with an immense and the enormous machinery of academic references that human beings on the whole are happier if they have some facetoface and person to person contacts. And much happier if they do have some. Imagine someone going to shakespeare and earnestly explaining to him the content of this book. Well, william, did you know that human beings meet one another to be happy . I bet you didnt. Because for chat, you lived in the sixteenth century. I dont think the bard would be be used because nothing really cumin been used him. But he might have been amused. Two lines of his son might have run through his head. Lord, what fools these mortals be, and oh brave new world that has such creatures in it. I am going to embark on a procedure that might strike u. S. Lately and fair but fairness is rather dull and in any case sometimes misses the point. I am going to compare typical modern psychologizing with more literary psychology of an earlier period and leave it to you to decide which you think is more important from the point of view of human self understanding and understanding of what might be called the human condition which is a slightly vague term but we know what it refers to and words cannot be made to be more precise than their subject matter allows because false precision is imprecision. At the airport on my way to new york i bought the first two books of psychology that i happened to see. Two sections of happiness or wealth. It has been the same for 50 years. To suggest we are not all to successful these blocks are from the point of view that they are sensible objects. Sometimes you claim humanity has made tremendous in dances in psychology and these have added to our self awareness and understanding, which surely should have translated into an ability or knowledge of how to live. I opened the first book at random and it truly wasnt random. Was on page 83 and my eyes fell on the folly. Clarity is what a persons psychology is always endeavoring to return to. I dont think that is empirically true. Clarity and resilience are always a shining beacon even when the persons seems hopelessly lost you see and hear the writer is the emphasis so we must assume this is something very important. Clarity isnt an achievement. Is a preexisting condition. It is not something you need to practice or work on. Is an expression of to you really are. I hope this is clear. And that you find it useful or at least that part of the is that is of a real you. I opened the second book and what do i find at . Acceptance means understanding that things are or are not happening. Mindful this involves accepting what happened and what is happening right now. It involves feeling what you feel without trying to restore control those feelings to whatever it is that is happening. He doesnt dad or not happening. What doesnt happen actually arouses us almost as much as what happened. I try to imagine what it is like to find this kind of drivel eliminating but i am not sufficiently a good psychologist to understand what state of mind you would be to find that eliminating. One of my many ideas of hell, i have no ideas of heaven but i have many ideas of hell to wade through hundreds of pages of this stuff. There are millions of pages of it. It is published and box and it is claimed these books were best sellers. If you listen to people talking about themselves you will hear them repeating it. Often with a and little white neurochemistry thrown in which almost always involve serotonin, too much or too little. Or any way the wrong balance work lithium. Which many people think is a natural constituents of the human brain. One might have thought that if psychology had shrewdly eliminated our existence some rumor of this fact might have reached the population to prevent the sale of such books and the use of such language but there is no sign of this it seems to me we havent progressed beyond Norman Vincent peale little low and shakespeare. And psychiatry at dont think is in much better shape. The diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association Provides checklists of symptoms and if a person has a certain number of symptoms he is regarded as having an illness or at least for the most important purpose which is insurance. But many of those symptoms are normal experiences of daily life and i may tell you i personally examined from 10 to 15,000 people who have attempted suicide and i only ever heard the news the word on happy three times out of thousands and they all used the word deep first instead. That is an important semantic shift. It is hardly surprising when you add up the prevalence given at the bank the average person has 2. 5 psychiatric conditions year. In other words we are all practically all of us, none of us is normal and we all need a psychiatrist if we can find the normal one that is. With this approach you can make up the disease is as you go along. If i take my own case it could be said that i was suffering from book purchasing disorder. The criteria for this disorder, it is a serious disease, there was a satirical pamphlets or poem written back in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century called this fatal disease. The criteria follows, the sufferer must suffer from three of the following. He buys more books for 99 of the population, general population statistically abnormal. Such purchases amount to a significant proportion of his discretionary income. Experiences difficulty in passing a bookstore without entering it. He experiencing rising tension which can be alleviated normally by purchasing another book. He buys more police than he can possibly read. And he has either argued with his wife about the number of books in the house or has suggested a one in one out policy or band of the presence of books from a number of rooms in the house. I dont have to emphasize the absurdity of this procedure which speaks for itself. But i am afraid this procedure actually is treated with superstitious of and in fact the diagnoses mandated by law in some countries and i believe so in this country to be treated in the same way as serious physical disorders. Let me now contrast this with dr. Johnson who i could have picked out many other great writers to equal effect. Johnson is particularly apt to remark on what no man would have fought on they now appear scarcely possible for any man to lift and he said this characteristically of someone not himself. In one of his brief essays johnson discusses whether it would now be called social phobia. Nothing more frequently causes bash fullness says dr. Johnson van too high an opinion of our own importance. Doesnt say so in every case that he doesnt say it is always and desirable to be shy. When i look back on my own childhood i was shy as a child, as an adolescent. But i am afraid i never lacked any sense of my own importance however shy i was so i recognized what dr. Johnson says. Continues the bashful person considers what he should say or do will never be forgotten but we have now suspended on every syllable nothing ought to fall from him which will not bear the test of time and he concludes he fact considers how little he dwells on the condition of others will learn how little the attention of others is attracted to himself. Be at most we can reasonably hope for is to fill a vacant hour with prattle end be forgotten. This is not actually pessimistic, is both realistic and consul later read because it takes a great burden off of our shoulders if we truly take that to heart. Dr. Johnson calls our attention to the complex relationship of our states of mind and morality without ever suggesting that there is a complete solution to our problems. Johnson says things that are obvious and yet we never thought of them and enables us even if he does not compel us to control ourselves. For example, he says, as pulte looks upon misery without partaking pain so envied the holds increase of happiness without partaking joy. Dr. Johnson is not so naive as to suppose that by simply in unseating this reality, such as envy can be eliminated. In another context, he says nothing is more unjust, however and then to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues in la to practice. He may be sincerely convinced of the inventor of of conquering his passions without having obtained the victory. His surely is the experience of everyone in this room. But a clear annunciation of what in the is and what dr. Johnson says is pretty obvious in a way but you may tell me afterwards this is how you thought of envy all along. I dont know. But once it is put into your mind it may help you if not to conquer it, at least to control it because you know what it actually is. Johnson says nothing that any mind could not have fought for itself even if that person has not thought of it but everything he says has obvious application to our own meet lives. On another occasion he says what is true. A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divine and moralist without any dont mudguard to morality or religion. He may be learning not to live but to reason. Nowadays i think he would have added psychology to that end even which does not and cannot teach us how to live even if we have no idea how to live is not going to help us. Indeed it serves as an obstacle to living well as it prevents honest reflection or discourages, doesnt prevent, discourages the kind of honest reflection that dr. Johnson constantly exhibits. The disease it pretends to cure. Not just any rate, the drift of mine little book. Thank you very much. [applause] i think if there are any questions call yahoo october 15th is clear lawbut thank you or your lecture. That is very fascinating. C. S. Lewis and in demand at kerri in theory of punishment have a lot of the same scenes from it. You talked about how in Popular Culture random society we can be corrupted by not taking morality seriously enough to the extent where we start to revalue human depravity and dont think about how to be responsible for things and can you comment on the this side of the corner where we can go to the other extreme and tend to keep those the we deem to be psychologically deficient or criminally minded in a state where they can never change and use that as an excuse to socially engineer society or criminals or rehabilitation can you talk about defeating that is a problem now in our society . I am glad you mentioned that. Is a very brilliant little as a and actually he doesnt say so directly but the humanitarian theory of punishment is compatible with the most absurd leniency and most terrible cruelty because if you regard punishment as therapy, obviously cutting off arms is therapy. For certain kinds of behavior, what could be regarded as such. And we actually see the problem in the jurisprudence of europe. Recently the European Court of human rights ruled that several light sentences, prisons will never be released were against fundamentally human rights because it was cool and it was cool because it offered them no hope of redemption or rehabilitation and they were not reading, writing and arithmetic but the other one was remorse. I found this truly astonishing that on a continent in which within living memory, 50 Million People had lost their lives the judges could imagine no crime that was so terrible that it meant you should be excluded from society for the rest of your life which is not the same as treating people cruelly because there are reasons you shouldnt be treat people cruelly. If you see the case of command who shot 69 people in norway, under norwegian law a maximum sentence anybody can be given is 21 years and he killed 77 people in total. Norwegians quite reasonably thought it should be 21 years consecutively for each of the 77 who he killed which i would say is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Now the norwegian law says, however, after 21 years if the person who is deemed still to be dangerous can be kept in for another five years and after another five years can be kept in another five years and so on. This is fundamentally against the will of law because if iman has been punished not for what he has done but for what he might do and what he might do is intrinsically unknowable and i am opposed to that kind of thing but that shows the influence of psychological fear your psychological kinds of thinking anyway as well as a certain moral pherae on jurisprudence which actually leads to some things that arbitrary. I would be asked to speculate on whether someone was dangerous and i refuse to do so. In my opinion the person i was speculating about should have been given sentence and serve that sentence and if the sentence was inadequate, the sentencing policy should be changed, but shouldnt ask someone like me to arbitrarily decide on a persons fate. I dont know if that answers your question. The gentleman i am mack apple and of the Heritage Foundation. What is the number one take away that you what is the take away you want people to have after reading this book . Exercise judgment as to accept that life is never going to be wholly satisfactory. Dont expect satisfaction in airport psychology books. I dont actually, quite so far as to say psychiatrist could never help but i dont think psychiatry has exercised much judgments as to when it can help when it cant help. For obvious reasons. Run the Heritage Foundation. Anything special about psychology or is a case study in the broader refashion seas of modern Political Science . Is a particular example of it. I certainly think the same tendencies in criminology and sociology. But in a way it goes deep because there are metaphysical questions. Im not a philosopher or metaphysician, no doubt the church would disagree with me when i say their metaphysical reasons for supposing science is never going to solve all human problems or even explain everything about human beings and i say that without having any explanation myself of everything. Probably because professional metaphysicians, i am not a professional manner physician and no doubt there might be perhaps in this audience them efficient who disputes what i say. But if there are such metaphysical reasons why psychology will never explain as much as it is about to explain it is harmful to think that it will. Which is not to say there is nothing it can say, but i think there is commonality with criminology which seems to treat people as objects rather than subjects and i must say i never came across a criminal who did not have contempt for criminology. Thank you for coming today. I am curious as to your operating message of morality itself not only where it comes from but how to reinvigorate Society Today with. I am not sufficiently a moral metaphysician to give you a castiron metaphysics of morality, but i would say i dont think people can actually is impossible for people not to make moral judgments and i dont think it is possible not to make other judgments and pretend you can go through life without making a moral judgment is false and the ideas that you should do so is itself a moral judgment. I dont have a fullfledged theory of morality because none i ever heard of satisfied me or seemed to be watertight. If there is anyone here who has the watertight metaphysics of morals i would like to hear it. Nevertheless i think there are things one can say which most people would agree with. One of the hardening things which i worked was when i talked to prisoners in moral terms they were understanding what i was talking about with the exception of a few extremely dangerous and very strange people but they were relatively few. It is a very peculiar thing you can almost feel they are different in some way. But otherwise people understood if it is pointed out to them you could have some kind of dialogue with people in practice you get some kind of agreement. The point is let me give you an example, a small example. I assume can i use bad language here . Patients would come in and say i have a headache. Can you tell the difference between a headache and the they looked at me strangely. Hi said please dont use that word with me. That is how i speak. That is what i am complaining of. Why . I would say supposing i said to you here is a prescription or pills take two of those every four hours, come back, i will give you some other ones. You would be a bit surprised if i said that, wouldnt you . I said we are equal you dont use that language to me and i dont use that language to you. As simple as that and they would stop. And had no means of enforcing my request. I couldnt refuse to treat some if they continued to use bad language but they did stop using bad language and i would imagine i was the first person who had never asked them to do so. I can if you ask me to provide the parties in point from which it indubitable followed that people should not use that language to talk to them i couldnt give it to you but nevertheless there seems to be some kind of agreement that this this i wanted to ask about the idea of a mental disease overall. This term gets thrown around like the german wings pilot who crashed into a mountain has some kind of disease, something wrong with him. Is that language in and of itself in this idea the week and scientifically treat this the way we could something on the skin or if you could explore that. When that happened and it was revealed that he had flown the plane into the alps i thought the most likely explanation was he had what some kind of difficulty with his girlfriend, was probably a narcissistic person he couldnt stand the wound. His desire to kill others might have come from some desire for revenge including making whoever it was who had upset him feel guilty. Team might have set i will show you. There is a report that he did say that whether it has been confirmed but at any rate i dont think he was a depressed man. I think he was an painfree embittered man. There is an intrinsic difficulty about psychiatric diagnosis which one must admit. There are conditions this guy used to have a discussion about this and i will give you an anecdote about my disagreement. Anyway. It does seem to me is that Something Like mania for example exists and is a disease in the most banal sense of the word. Is a real disease, but almost no biological distinction between that and degrees of elation for example over a period of time. There is an intrinsic tendency for these diagnoses which at one time where rare to become more and more and more common hand as i said that happened. Melancholy at i think really exists and is a real disease. Unfortunately the criteria becomes looser and looser so that everyone is on antidepressants. I have a disagreement about this he said where there is no physical or physiological abnormalities you cannot designate something disease and any attempt to treat it as such he is certainly compulsory, is the oppressive and i had dinner with a friend of his with him there and you want us to discuss this, had not been on duty in the prison the night before and i had a case in which i was called into the prison. Was amendments, stark naked who was trying to screwed himself into the light socket having first seen the light. This kind of things sometimes happen. Stock naked and was talking in comprehensively couldnt understand what he was saying, you couldnt take history from the board to tests on him but obviously what he was doing was very dangerous. So i sedated him and the next day he was perfectly all right. In the most likely explanation he had taken drugs of some description or other although i never approved it and i asked what he would do in that situation, would he stick to his view that if there wasnt a physical the established physical cause you couldnt treat someone against his will . This objection was against his will and he just said i shouldnt have been there because i was part of the oppressive apparatus of the state. Does that mean prisoners shouldnt get medical attention . But anyway, this crew is to my mind the difficulty of the difficulty in the real world of that situation and that is why people must constantly exercise judgment and i think judgment is not a very well exercised but of course if you exercise judgment you are often or at least sometimes going to be wrong so people want to have some kind of checklists that will show them they are not wrong. The system of diagnosis is a manifestation of anxiety that one will make mistakes in judgment so in order to avoid occasional mistakes in judgment one makes massive mistakes congestion and. I am acute scale. In this country, one of the great medical scandals is that 16,000 people iodine from opioid poisoning a year. It has gone up by Something Like 400 in ten years, 100,000 people have been killed by a opioid prescriptions, perfectly legal ones over the last in this century in my view in the vast majority of cases those drugs should never have been prescribed in the first place. But there has been a change in attitudes that the doctor should not make his judgment he should just take what the patient says and act accordingly. If the patient says i have got this terrible pain, that is it. He prescribes he doesnt go much forever into it with the result of 16,000 people a year dying of overdoses of these drugs. I dont know, havent followed it enough. Has this created a big scandal in the United States . I dont know. Yes . No . But i think part of the problem is failure of doctors to exercise proper discrimination and there is a culture in which doctors are there to give their patients just what they want not what the doctor thinks is right and the patient, if the doctor says i dont think that is right for you, the patient wont accept it. Is certainly true in england where many doctors have been insulted because of refusal. I dont know if that answers your question. A hallmark of the Scientific Method is posing a hypothesis and subject it to an empirical test. I may be very uninformed but it seems to me that in the field of psychology and psychiatry there are various competing methods, a distinct lack of attempts to verify the a effectiveness or falsified the effectiveness of means of treating patients once you get beyond describing some syndrome. I was curious what your thoughts where on that aspect of psychology . I dont think it is quite fair to say there havent been attempts but if what i am saying is true the very attempt does not actually cannot be made in many cases because for example expectations culture and so on make so big that difference to any potential results that the interpretation of the results becomes very difficult. We were talking about this before i came in. Supposing i think of an experiment. I get 100 volunteers. The very fact that they are volunteers may make a difference. The fact that this particular place, got those volunteers means anything that i find is not generalizeable to the whole of humanity. All times and all places. End that is intrinsic, that is an intrinsic difficulty of the reflexiveness of our mentality. Our mentality changes with circumstances so we will not find eternal verities about the kinds of things people do experiments on. With regard to testing of drugs for example, it wouldnt be true if people had made hypotheses and tested them but had not reported them. There is an intrinsic if there really is of metaphysical problem here it cant be got round by better and better, more refined Scientific Method but there might be people here who disagree with that. My name is todd wiggins, good to meet you. Enjoy reading about you and hearing you. I have a question about the differences you may perceive in the way americans think versus the way people from where you are born think and criticisms you have for americans that you would like to provide us with now that you have opportunity. One of the criticisms is they are asking me for criticisms. And always asking me for takeaway messages and i dont have any takeaway messages. They are obviously great differences. Americans are optimists, more optimistic than europeans, often unjustifiably so. Dare i say it . I think pessimists have a better sense of humor than optimists. That is why American Literature is so pessimistic, tragic, treasury plays so large a part in American Literature. If you live in an optimistic culture you are not things dont go well, is even worse than if you live in a miserable culture where you expect to be miserable. It is normal to be miserable. Like hungry for example. I dont know if that answer your question. But i wouldnt, you see, i wouldnt just take a sample of americans, do a study on demand estimate must apply to austrians or koreans. The seeking of that universal explanation which i think is mistaken. I will ask you to make another criticism. Now that i have you here and i have read your previous books about the decline of culture as a whole you talk about the underclass but also the middle class, etc. Etc. Singleparent families, i am itching with desire to ask you what do you think . If you were to guess if you can guess. Headings are more of the same. I saw 48 of American Children are born out of what used to be called wedlock. In britain is 52 so we are in advance of you and i am afraid i cant see anything but a social disaster. If i were asked for the metaphysical justification i dont have an apocalyptic vision. I just think in many respects this will cause unpleasantness, we will just model frug and those of us it might lead to a bigger and bigger separation of society into those who behave in that way and those who dont. And i dont like that but if you are asking is there going to be a complete collapse, i dont think there is going to be a complete collapse. One thing about america that i think is much better in britain is that there is much more resistance to it and much more resilience in society. At least theres a kind of critical matter, people who are at least thinking about these things and have there is no frankness about it at all. Wamu last question back there, we said we are just out of time. 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