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Litter: How Other People's Rubbish Shapes Our Lives
Writer Theodore Dalrymple drove the four hundred miles from Glasgow to London recently, and found practically every yard of roadside to be littered with rubbish flapping in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags, which prompted him to write this heart-felt polemic about modern Britain. What does it mean when a country tips its rubbish anywhere it likes? At the very least, it suggests that a modern Englishman's street has become his dining room...This short, brief book, then, sifts through the excesses of Britain's public 'dining room' and analyses what litter says about our brave new world. Have we become barbarians?
159 pages, Hardcover
First published July 21, 2011
23 people are currently reading
199 people want to read
About the author
Theodore Dalrymple
98 books624 followersAnthony Malcolm Daniels, who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 21, 2011
Dalrymple recently travelled the 400 miles between London and Glasgow, and observed that the roadside was strewn with litter practically the entire way. The grass verges were full of plastic bottles, newspapers and crisp packets, and "many of the trees were hung with plastic bags and tattered remnants of sheets of polythene that flapped in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags on a high Himalayan plain."
What does this preponderance of litter tell us about modern Britain? For Dalrymple, it illustrates the profoundly anti-social nature of modern British society. With characteristic wit, clarity of thought and precision of expression, Dalrymple explores the wider sociological causes and consequences of the littering of Britain. In doing so he shines a light on the unsavoury aspects of modern British culture: the disappearance of self-restraint as a national characteristic; people's inflated sense of self-importance and sense of entitlement; their lack of personal responsibility; the intrusiveness of the state. Dalrymple concludes - tongue firmly in cheek - that "Trace litter to its origins, and you soon encounter the knotty questions of political philosophy, political economy and even the meaning of life."
The one minor quibble I have with the book - and this has nothing to do with the author - is its production. The book is full of (I was going to say littered with) typographical errors, and cannot have been proof-read. Is the publisher so short of resources that it can find nobody to read the book before publication and correct its many obvious errors?
What does this preponderance of litter tell us about modern Britain? For Dalrymple, it illustrates the profoundly anti-social nature of modern British society. With characteristic wit, clarity of thought and precision of expression, Dalrymple explores the wider sociological causes and consequences of the littering of Britain. In doing so he shines a light on the unsavoury aspects of modern British culture: the disappearance of self-restraint as a national characteristic; people's inflated sense of self-importance and sense of entitlement; their lack of personal responsibility; the intrusiveness of the state. Dalrymple concludes - tongue firmly in cheek - that "Trace litter to its origins, and you soon encounter the knotty questions of political philosophy, political economy and even the meaning of life."
The one minor quibble I have with the book - and this has nothing to do with the author - is its production. The book is full of (I was going to say littered with) typographical errors, and cannot have been proof-read. Is the publisher so short of resources that it can find nobody to read the book before publication and correct its many obvious errors?
August 23, 2019
Theodore over-exaggerates the litter problem for effect . Go to India or nearly any Asian city and Britain is Switzerland in comparison. He uses litter is more a proxy for society in general. A symptom to be examined.
Although Theodore seems to relish the role of grumpy old man perpetually moaning about the youth of today, there is more to him than that. It would be a mistake to dismiss him as an older man indulging in nostalgia, pining for a world gone by never to return. A very serious point is being made.
He is genuinely illustrating how we as a civilisation are in serious decline. And he should know. He worked in the prison service for many years so is more than qualified to judge where we are as a society, the quality of our prisoners being a extrapolation of ourselves.
He is especially aggrieved at litter and who can blame him?
Litter is voluntary and unnecessary, the domain of the stupid. It is a reflection of the population and by extension the civilisation. Worst of all, it's ugly. A civilisation that cannot see the ugliness it is wallowing in is doomed. Litter is a canary in a coal mine and its tweeting very very loudly..We're in serious trouble.
Although Theodore seems to relish the role of grumpy old man perpetually moaning about the youth of today, there is more to him than that. It would be a mistake to dismiss him as an older man indulging in nostalgia, pining for a world gone by never to return. A very serious point is being made.
He is genuinely illustrating how we as a civilisation are in serious decline. And he should know. He worked in the prison service for many years so is more than qualified to judge where we are as a society, the quality of our prisoners being a extrapolation of ourselves.
He is especially aggrieved at litter and who can blame him?
Litter is voluntary and unnecessary, the domain of the stupid. It is a reflection of the population and by extension the civilisation. Worst of all, it's ugly. A civilisation that cannot see the ugliness it is wallowing in is doomed. Litter is a canary in a coal mine and its tweeting very very loudly..We're in serious trouble.
November 18, 2019
A fun and enlightening read, despite the many typos. I agree with him that now people seem much more self-centered and touchy. For me the marker is the slob dress culture here in the USA. We are notorious for putting personal comfort above all else. For him it is the slob trash / eating culture. He makes a good point I had not thought about before – how the disappearance of the family meal turns people anti-social, mainly because they never have to think about anyone else. You eat on your own schedule, whatever you want, wherever you want. You make no concession to others taste or needs and it translates to not giving a damn in the public space. It fits my experience from picking up litter on my daily walks with the dog that litter is basically all fast food wrappers and plastic bottles.
July 13, 2024
Yikes on a bike. An important message buried under an intolerable author. It's like trying to agree with a really good point but Piers Morgan is making it.
This book is overly verbose for an accessible look into the causes of litter and the examination of what this means for society. I have a bad habit of making sentences far too long at times, but this is just insufferable. Rather than excessive length, it's countdown dictionary-corner thesaurus words your word-count essayist uses.
This book deserves 1 star, but I'm giving it 2 since it's making good points very badly.
Here's a line in the introduction (brackets are my paraphrasing):
(except for the odd tat nearly all litter is scrap from food packaging. If I'd done a year's long survey I bet I could track how people's diets and tastes change):
"as it was, I noticed in these years the sudden appearance of cans of a drink that was advertised and marketed as energising and restorative after excess, particularly alcoholic excess".
(all these cans showed up the same time Red Bull did a massive advertising campaign, which makes you wonder what it says about the people buying it.)
"what, then, was the source of my irritation at the sudden appearance and rapid dissemination of this new drink with a bright metallic blue, silver and red can to discard?"
Red Bull tins. Everywhere. That's all you had to say. Typical sneering Tory looking down on the chavs and skallys, but he has to say it posh or people might think he's secretly one of them Taurus Rojas enjoyas.
Dally-not a-Skally talks a lot about excessive litter being bad for society and a symptom of bad society, but literally litters his points with the posh, Polonius-level flourishes ChatGPT would cringe at.
Here are the cliff notes, and I'll paraphrase it for you:
* There's litter everywhere in Britain, and it didn't show up on one day. It's endemic of a social problem back in 2010 and still unsolved now (you've been outside, you've seen it for yourself).
* People litter junk food wrappers and other cheap food tat, and it tells you more about those people than you'd think.
* As in, they're uneducated, unskilled (at running a household) and - let's face it, scruffs. Littering is fatherless behaviour (ok based) and the people who do it have crap parents with abusive dads and mums who don't know their arse from their ankle and couldn't take a stand against their kids if they were in Jojo. Littering therefore is ultimately a consequence of families not having meals together, parents not learning to cook, and the [children] inmates running the asylum.
* Littering is a new phenomenon young people do, older people don't litter because they never littered. Uni students who aren't scruffs litter, and bottom of the barrel social strata people fifty years ago didn't litter.
* Littering is basically because people don't consider other people anymore, a consequence of society becoming more cloistered and cocooning into your own safe space.
My review is this: These are all points I agree with and can actively see have gotten worse in 15 years since. But the way they are presented is just dire. Dalrymple just want to talk and waffle bollocks to you. He's trying to spread one slice worth of butter over a whole loaf of bread.
Dalrymple says in his introduction historians study the litter from previous civilizations to understand their day to day living. He says this in a way to make you wonder "What are future historians going to think of us?"
It reminded me of a tweet a parody account for Aquinas College made when I was in sixth-form. This was a posh college named after the St. Thomas (and the account pretending to be him) and across the road from another college with a grotty and scruff reputation. The tweet was: "we all know I'm the saint of aquinas college but do any of youse know who the saint of Stockport college is?" with a picture of Vicky Pollard (which to be honest was spot on).
That's this book in a nutshell. It's not even about litter so much as it's a sneering view on the unemployed, uneducated, unskilled, Idiocracy-type yobs, chavs, scallys and scruffs of Britain.
Which is ironic since this book is just a Primark version of Owen Jones' Chavs.
This book is overly verbose for an accessible look into the causes of litter and the examination of what this means for society. I have a bad habit of making sentences far too long at times, but this is just insufferable. Rather than excessive length, it's countdown dictionary-corner thesaurus words your word-count essayist uses.
This book deserves 1 star, but I'm giving it 2 since it's making good points very badly.
Here's a line in the introduction (brackets are my paraphrasing):
(except for the odd tat nearly all litter is scrap from food packaging. If I'd done a year's long survey I bet I could track how people's diets and tastes change):
"as it was, I noticed in these years the sudden appearance of cans of a drink that was advertised and marketed as energising and restorative after excess, particularly alcoholic excess".
(all these cans showed up the same time Red Bull did a massive advertising campaign, which makes you wonder what it says about the people buying it.)
"what, then, was the source of my irritation at the sudden appearance and rapid dissemination of this new drink with a bright metallic blue, silver and red can to discard?"
Red Bull tins. Everywhere. That's all you had to say. Typical sneering Tory looking down on the chavs and skallys, but he has to say it posh or people might think he's secretly one of them Taurus Rojas enjoyas.
Dally-not a-Skally talks a lot about excessive litter being bad for society and a symptom of bad society, but literally litters his points with the posh, Polonius-level flourishes ChatGPT would cringe at.
Here are the cliff notes, and I'll paraphrase it for you:
* There's litter everywhere in Britain, and it didn't show up on one day. It's endemic of a social problem back in 2010 and still unsolved now (you've been outside, you've seen it for yourself).
* People litter junk food wrappers and other cheap food tat, and it tells you more about those people than you'd think.
* As in, they're uneducated, unskilled (at running a household) and - let's face it, scruffs. Littering is fatherless behaviour (ok based) and the people who do it have crap parents with abusive dads and mums who don't know their arse from their ankle and couldn't take a stand against their kids if they were in Jojo. Littering therefore is ultimately a consequence of families not having meals together, parents not learning to cook, and the [children] inmates running the asylum.
* Littering is a new phenomenon young people do, older people don't litter because they never littered. Uni students who aren't scruffs litter, and bottom of the barrel social strata people fifty years ago didn't litter.
* Littering is basically because people don't consider other people anymore, a consequence of society becoming more cloistered and cocooning into your own safe space.
My review is this: These are all points I agree with and can actively see have gotten worse in 15 years since. But the way they are presented is just dire. Dalrymple just want to talk and waffle bollocks to you. He's trying to spread one slice worth of butter over a whole loaf of bread.
Dalrymple says in his introduction historians study the litter from previous civilizations to understand their day to day living. He says this in a way to make you wonder "What are future historians going to think of us?"
It reminded me of a tweet a parody account for Aquinas College made when I was in sixth-form. This was a posh college named after the St. Thomas (and the account pretending to be him) and across the road from another college with a grotty and scruff reputation. The tweet was: "we all know I'm the saint of aquinas college but do any of youse know who the saint of Stockport college is?" with a picture of Vicky Pollard (which to be honest was spot on).
That's this book in a nutshell. It's not even about litter so much as it's a sneering view on the unemployed, uneducated, unskilled, Idiocracy-type yobs, chavs, scallys and scruffs of Britain.
Which is ironic since this book is just a Primark version of Owen Jones' Chavs.
July 23, 2024
"Truly, there is philosophy in litter" - this is how Theodore Dalrymple concludes his introduction to this excellent and prescient attack on modern culture! Even more so, this attack is ensnared in prose of such literary quality that is almost of equal merit to the quality of the content. The decline of modern man from a social being to an atomized, hedonistic and egotistical individual is epitomized through our relation to litter. And indeed, this book drives its point home with such clarity and humor that makes this book a very enjoyable read. One may even find oneself reading about the carnage of litter that now is part of our everyday life, and yet read with a smile on one's face.
The book is really short, so I would not go through the details of the chapters here - I will only say, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. Personally, I would have liked a more direct confrontation with the ideology of multiculturalism and how this is reflected in the propensity to litter - but that is purely a matter of my personal taste and it does not take away anything from the quality of the book. Nevertheless, it caught me by surprise, and a very pleasant one. My only regret is that this is the first book by Theodore Dalrymple that I have read - something that I will need to correct in the very near future.
The book is really short, so I would not go through the details of the chapters here - I will only say, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. Personally, I would have liked a more direct confrontation with the ideology of multiculturalism and how this is reflected in the propensity to litter - but that is purely a matter of my personal taste and it does not take away anything from the quality of the book. Nevertheless, it caught me by surprise, and a very pleasant one. My only regret is that this is the first book by Theodore Dalrymple that I have read - something that I will need to correct in the very near future.
October 7, 2022
Dr. Dalrymple (a pseudonym) writes books about modern society and culture, focussing primarily on the UK. He is not sanguine about the condition or future of either, mainly due to the continuing loss of any sense of personal responsibility. His books can be depressing to read but they also give one a sense of optimism because he proposes solutions to the problems he sees. He has a very sense of humor, and the books inspire an occasional chuckle.
August 2, 2017
Truth and Humor too
Dalrymple has a way with words. His command of the English language is very rarely found in contemporary writers. What a pleasure to read. His insights into man's behavior is spot on. He uses satire, humor, and irony wrapped around truth to comment on a subject thought mundane but one that reaches to the depth of the soul.
.
Dalrymple has a way with words. His command of the English language is very rarely found in contemporary writers. What a pleasure to read. His insights into man's behavior is spot on. He uses satire, humor, and irony wrapped around truth to comment on a subject thought mundane but one that reaches to the depth of the soul.
.
March 24, 2018
Racist, classist, and nasty. The poor are poor because they don't buy 10kg of onions at a time. It's fine that Haiti and the Pacific nations are suffocating under piles of rubbish, because the people there are different (i.e. Black), but heaven forfend old Blighty suffer the same. It really is stunning that someone so educated can be so completely ignorant. Avoid like the plague.
May 23, 2019
Dalrymple bom como de costume. É interessante ver o desenvolvimento do livro a partir do lixo que as pessoas descartam na rua e a busca pela origem desse comportamento. Ou seria a falta de controle sobre o impulso de se livrar do lixo?
O livro é curto mas tem bastante "food for thought", inspiração para o pensamento.
O livro é curto mas tem bastante "food for thought", inspiração para o pensamento.
October 19, 2018
Dalrymple brilliantly manages to tie the littering problem in Britain together with:
- poor choices in diet
- the damaging effects of divorce on children
- the entitlement in this day and age
- herd animal behaviour in humans
- poor choices in diet
- the damaging effects of divorce on children
- the entitlement in this day and age
- herd animal behaviour in humans
April 15, 2021
Surprisingly interesting.
I'm not super attached to the topic of litter and whether it's a serious problem or not, but man does he use that as a jumping off point for some worthwhile meditations on freedom, psychology, sociology and morality.
Short and worthwhile read.
I'm not super attached to the topic of litter and whether it's a serious problem or not, but man does he use that as a jumping off point for some worthwhile meditations on freedom, psychology, sociology and morality.
Short and worthwhile read.
February 24, 2024
Dalrymple is perhaps the only atheist author who has the ability to elevate my soul, with his lucid and penetrating analysis of society, which dialogues intuitively with my thought processes and to which it is a refreshing pleasure to return again and again.
August 21, 2021
Litter was a great essay to read.
April 14, 2016
Dalrymple on autopilot. This book added little that was new. Like some of his other works, it was dreadfully edited- it was "littered" with passages that did not make sense.
Read
June 1, 2014loved the bits on language and public administration
April 17, 2017
I got this book because I wanted to read about litter, not litter --that is, author's naive blabbering about a degenerate present versus glorious old heydays.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews