L’opinion de Theodore Dalrymple

City Journal

It was in Africa that I first discovered that the bourgeois virtues are not only desirable but often heroic. I was working in a hospital in what was then still Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. I was still of the callow—and fundamentally lazy—youthful opinion that nothing in the world could change until everything changed, in which case a social system would arise in which it would be no longer necessary for anyone to be good. The head nurse on the ward in which I worked, a black woman, invited me to her home in the township for a meal. At that time and in that place, social contact between blacks and whites was unusual, though not actually illegal.

She was a splendid, kindly, hardworking woman. She lived in a township in which there were thousands of tiny, identical, prefabricated bungalows, the size of huts. The level of violence in the township was very great: on Saturday night, the floors of the emergency department of my hospital were slippery with still-flowing blood.

In this unpromising environment, I discovered, the nurse had created an extremely comfortable and even pretty home for herself and her aging mother. Her tiny patch of land was like a bower; the inside of her house was immaculately clean, tidy, and well—though cheaply—furnished. I would never laugh again at the taste of people of limited means to make a comfortable home for themselves.

Looking around me in the township, I began to see that the spotlessly clean white uniform in which she appeared every day in the hospital represented not an absurd fetish, not the brutal imposition of alien cultural standards upon African life, but a noble triumph of the human spirit—as, indeed, did her tenderly cared-for home. By comparison with her struggle to maintain herself in decency, my former rejection of bourgeois proprieties and respectability seemed to me ever afterward to be shallow, trivial, and adolescent. Until then, I had assumed, along with most of my generation unacquainted with real hardship, that a scruffy appearance was a sign of spiritual election, representing a rejection of the superficiality and materialism of bourgeois life. Ever since then, however, I have not been able to witness the voluntary adoption of torn, worn out, and tattered clothes—at least in public—by those in a position to dress otherwise without a feeling of deep disgust. Far from being a sign of solidarity with the poor, it is a perverse mockery of them; it is spitting on the graves of our ancestors, who struggled so hard, so long, and so bitterly that we might be warm, clean, well-fed, and leisured enough to enjoy the better things in life.