The rise of the modern ideology

The system of interpretations and evaluations that forms the modern anti-individualistic ideology is now apparently universally understood and applied, so it may be difficult to realise that it is a quite recent development.

I was shocked by it when I first started to encounter it at 13 or 14. There was really no hint of it in what I had read up to that time. ‘Socialist’ writers such as H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw took a pretty detached view of the goings-on of human society; and suggestions that it might be nice if all people lived in larger, cleaner houses, or lived in a cleaner, healthier and more aesthetic way, did not draw attention to the erosion of liberty that would be necessary even to attempt to bring this about.

My ideas of human society were based primarily on books written in Victorian or Edwardian times, with a bit of influence from such things as cynical Aesop’s Fables. I always took note of ideas about motivation and reflected upon them.

Consider, for example, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The message of this book, to me at any rate, was that no one will do anything for anyone unless they are paid with money for doing so. In the story, Sara is left by her father at a select boarding-school. She is a parlour boarder and treated as a show pupil by the headmistress, who nevertheless resents her cleverness and self-possession, until her father dies and she is left penniless. Then she is made to sleep in an attic, where a scullery-maid also sleeps, and to work for her keep as a drudge and errand runner in all weathers, and assistant teacher of elementary French.

It is only if you have a parent who will pay for things for you that you get them, and what you get will be in accordance with how much the parent has to spend. Otherwise you will be reduced to the state of the servant girls and beggars in the streets.

Of course, people other than parents may give other people things; when Sara was well off she used to buy items of food for one of the scullery maids, and when she is poor she gives some buns to a starving beggar girl. This attracts the attention of the lady who runs the bun-shop, and she (the lady) takes in the beggar girl and feeds and clothes her from then on — in effect, adopts her, but without having to account for what she is doing to any agents of the collective.

In those days there was no compulsory education. Child adoption was a matter for individuals to undertake if they chose, with no need to seek permission.

That was the way the world was; the way people treated you depended entirely on whether you could pay for what you wanted, or needed.

Eventually Sara is found and rescued by a wealthy friend of her father’s, who has been searching for her. While he is searching for her he is made aware of how many children are living in poverty. He is sorry for them, and harrowed to think that Sara may be in a similar state, but his friend tells him that his resources are limited. He could not provide for all the destitute children, but must concentrate on finding and helping Sara, whose father was his friend.

In the world as depicted in the books that I read there was no disapproval of ambition. The respectable bourgeois worked hard and rose in the world if he could; his children lived in well-built houses with a few servants and might have Mary Poppins as a nanny.

My father had been a very poor boy, and the great efforts he had made to rise in the world had not got him very far; he was headmaster of a primary school at the London docks. My parents were respectable but still very far from rich. Nevertheless, their efforts had resulted in their being able to give their child a better start in life than they had had themselves; they had delayed having me until they had saved enough money to be sure that they would be able to pay for a professional training for me.

When I came top of the grammar school scholarship exam at the age of ten, very soon after the 1945 Labour landslide election, egalitarian ideas were bubbling invisibly below the surface, but nothing I had read had prepared me for the idea that I should not want to take exams as fast and as hard as possible, or that I should be prevented from doing so because not everyone could. To take more exams than other people and at an earlier age was apparently viewed as reprehensible; it was an attempt to score off other people. Having social interactions with other people should be one’s sole aim in life. One should not want to do scientific research just because it was what one wanted to do and what would enable one to feel most alive. One should, apparently, only want to spend one’s life doing good to other people, in some shape or form, and interacting with them socially.

These ideas may not seem strange or surprising to a modern reader, but it was the first time I had encountered them and I found that they were being used to obstruct and hinder me.

In retrospect, as a recipient of a grammar school scholarship, I was in the position of Sara in A Little Princess. With my fees not being paid by my father but by the state, I was exposed to the tender mercies of the local education authority and community generally, as Sara was exposed to those of Miss Minchin — who could no longer be bothered to provide her with a formal education, but allowed her to read the schoolbooks in the empty schoolroom when she had run her errands for the day. And she did this, not because she felt any concern for Sara’s need to rise in the world to a position that might suit her, but so that Sara might become useful to Miss Minchin as an inexpensive teacher when she was a few years older.

Similarly, my tormentors did not mind how seriously they blocked my attempts to establish my claim on the sort of university career I needed to have. My acquisition of skills and qualifications was reduced to a snail’s pace, but I was allowed to proceed with heavily handicapped supervised ‘courses’ which might eventually lead to my being useful, not to myself, but to society, in a lowly capacity as a teacher of maths.

Then I was thrown out into a society where all my efforts to recover from a bad position and regain an academic career of a suitable kind were blocked by the continued advance of the modern ideology, according to which, as I found, it is criminal to go on trying to get a career that society has shown it does not want one to have.

Celia Green

A version of this post was published in 2007.

Hayek on intellectuals and socialism

The following quotation is from Friedrich Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit, first published in 1988, about the attitudes of intellectuals to capitalism and socialism.

The Condemnation of Profit and the Contempt for Trade

The objections of [intellectuals to capitalism ...] do not differ so very much from the objections of members of primitive groups; and it is this that has inclined me to call their demands and longings atavistic.

What intellectuals ... find most objectionable in the market order, in trade, in money and the institutions of finance, is that producers, traders, and financiers are not concerned with concrete needs of known people but with abstract calculation of costs and profit. But they forget, or have not learned, the arguments that we have just rehearsed. Concern for profit is just what makes possible the more effective use of resources. ...

The high-minded socialist slogan, ‘Production for use, not for profit’, which we find in one form or another from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell, from Albert Einstein to Archbishop Camara of Brazil (and often, since Aristotle, with the addition that these profits are made at the expense of others), betrays ignorance of [how economic activity functions].*

Hayek makes some important criticisms of the socialist attitude to capitalism. But he may be misled by the apparent concern of socialist intellectuals for ‘concrete needs of known people’. He assumes that it is merely ignorance that is the problem, and not underlying motivation.

We could postulate, instead, that socialist intellectuals have a dislike for the market order because it allows some people to become rich and, in some cases, very rich. Socialists may dislike people becoming rich because they are aware that money provides freedom, and because they are envious of this freedom.

We could also consider the following possibility:
Socialist intellectuals would prefer a situation in which they, and like-minded people, had complete control of the economy, the government, the media, and the educational spheres. They are motivated by desire for power, just like people in any other profession.

Christine Fulcher

* Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, Routledge, 1990, p.104.

Guest post: Abolishing compulsory education

Extract from an article by Gene Epstein on City Journal:

In The Case Against Education, a persuasive indictment of his own industry, George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan quotes Harvard professor Steven Pinker ... ‘A few weeks into every semester,’ says the eminent psychologist and polymath, ‘I face a lecture hall that is half empty, despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, that the lectures are not video recorded, and that they are the only source of certain material that will be on the exam.’ ...

Such apathy is the norm. According to data cited by Caplan, 25 percent to 40 percent of college students don’t show up for class, even when attendance counts toward the grade. What share of the rest would bother to show up if that weren’t the case? As for high school students, for whom cutting class is a serious offense, two-thirds report being bored in class every day, according to a survey Caplan cites.

Caplan’s subtitle promises to explain ‘why the education system is a waste of time and money’. He exempts the teaching of essentials like reading, writing, and basic math, and professional and vocational programs that develop in-demand job skills. As for the rest of the curriculum, forget it. ‘Teach curious students about ideas and culture,’ he suggests. ‘Leave the rest in peace and hope they come around.’

The author floats some radical proposals for reform. One is a massive rollback of formal years of schooling that would retain emphasis on basic skills and on vocational education.

Professor Caplan’s ideas are in the right direction, but his proposals don’t go far enough.

Education in any form should stop being compulsory and State-monitored. Government and State authorities should get out of education altogether.

CHRISTINE FULCHER
co-author of:
Power-mad and Hypocritical: Why professors love Marxism

Religion, Shelley and Milton

All basic religious ideas can be expressed in two forms: one personal and the other existential. In the first case the result is obnoxious, and in the second dangerous to common sense. The human race prefers to consider only the obnoxious versions, whether accepting or rejecting them. To do it justice, it must be admitted that it does not say that the existential versions are dangerous. For the most part it ignores them, and if they are forced upon its attention it calls them cold, negative, intellectual, metaphysical — and so on.

So you can say (but no one does): within the inconceivable there is scope for many orders of significance, each totally overriding those beneath it; and in particular, the reason for which existence exists must, in at least a certain sense, be more important than any purpose that can be formulated in terms of that which exists.

But in fact the nearest approximation to such an idea is stated — by someone like C.S. Lewis — in some such form as: God has super-fatherly rights to obedience from his creatures because he created them for his pleasure, not their own. This repellent situation leaves you a choice between emotional attitudes called ‘rebellion’ and ‘submission’. If you accept this formulation of the situation, there is virtually no scope for an existential reaction — i.e. for any reaction which releases your psychology from unrealism.

Since I have defined two characteristics of existential psychology — i.e. centralisation and open-endedness — you may see that it would be very hard to react to this situation in a way that had either of these qualities. Perhaps the best one could do would be a Shelleian attitude of anti-authoritarianism, which consists of a determination to be open-ended in spite of everything.

Milton’s Satan is half centralised and half reactive; insofar as he is centralised he is noticeably heroic. But Milton confuses two things, the existential and the personal. When Satan is heroic he might be seen as reacting to impersonal adversity in the spirit of Henley’s Invictus. When he is reactive he is just trying to do something that God won’t like — not because he, Satan, has any intrinsic reason for doing it. ‘Evil, be thou good’ means ‘I shall regard as good anything you think is evil’ — and this is in antithesis to the centralised position: ‘I shall regard as good what I regard as good, whatever you may think’.

(‘Reactive’ in my terminology means ‘directed towards producing an effect on other people in reaction to or against something they have previously done to you’.)

Extract from Advice to Clever Children.

Hatred of intelligence

The late Professor Hans Eysenck once told me about an experiment in which a population of rats was divided into ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ on some criterion for rat intelligence. The rat offspring were then switched to different parents, in such a way that the bright rats were given the offspring of the dull rats to bring up, and vice versa. It was found that the bright rats brought up the dull rat babies successfully, while the dull rats killed the bright rat babies which they were given.

As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, natural selection encourages forms of behaviour which secure favourable conditions for the descendants of the individual in subsequent generations. So it looks as if it may be advantageous for the survival of a rat if the number of rats in the population it has to compete with, which are descended from parents cleverer than its own, is minimised.

The experiment suggests it may have become programmed into the genetic constitution of rats that they should kill, if possible, young rats which are cleverer than themselves. On the other hand, it appears rats have no programming to kill young rats which are less clever than themselves, presumably because their presence in future populations would pose no serious threat to their own offspring.

If natural selection has favoured such behaviour in rats to the point of modifying their genotype, we may speculate that it is even more likely to be present in the human constitution, since the range of opportunities present in human society, and the ways in which advantage may be taken of them, are even more varied, and offer greater potential advantages to those able to make use of them, than the variety of circumstances which may be made use of by rats of differing abilities.

Someone who becomes aware of this experiment may well be shocked by the result, and protest that it could not possibly be applied to humans. Professor Eysenck himself seemed to have resistance to the implication. He told me that anti-high-IQ behaviour would only prove adaptive for people in more developed societies, and thus could not have had time to modify the human genotype. His argument was that only in developed societies, with extensive business and finance activities, would having a higher IQ give the owner a sufficient advantage, to motivate other people to be hostile to him, or even kill him. This argument did not, however, make much sense to me, given that rats can scarcely be said to have ‘developed societies’ in this sense.

If there is a tendency in humans corresponding to the desire of rats to kill young rats cleverer than their own offspring, it would certainly help to explain the way the education system has developed as society has become progressively democratised. In spite of occasional nods to the supposed special needs of the ‘gifted’, the system is clearly geared (and increasingly so) to promoting the interests of the low-IQ population, and to making life well-nigh impossible for those of exceptional ability.

There is evidently a resistance to considering the possibility that the average human being may have hostile (potentially to the point of murderous) attitudes, whether conscious or not, to individuals of exceptional ability. Professor Eysenck told me that the results of this experiment became unavailable soon after it had been carried out — though he didn’t explain why — so it may be that they have never been published.

Previously posted in 2014 under the title ‘Killing bright rat babies’.

The basic moral principle

Modern society has lost sight of the only moral principle of any importance, so that the individual citizen is basically unprotected against unlimited oppression.

Since the ignored principle is never enunciated, it is difficult to express one’s horror at what already goes on, and at even worse developments that might go on. If someone says, ‘People ought to be heavily taxed in order to pay for state-administered medicine and education’, I am shocked and horrified, but inhibited from replying: ‘People ought to be taxed as little as possible, and certainly not at all to provide funding for organised crime.’

Usually I do not reply in this way, because I realise that prolonged explanation would be necessary. In reality, at least as much explanation should be required to make plausible the idea that individuals should be taxed to provide for greater oppression of individuals by the collective, but one realises that a high proportion of the population has learnt to proceed smoothly to this conclusion without examination, or even recognition, of the underlying assumptions being made.

If I say that people should be taxed as little as possible, and least of all to finance collectively organised oppression, this depends on the basic moral principle that society should interfere as little as possible with the individual’s freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit.

The basic moral principle applies between individuals as well, and everyone should respect the right of others to evaluate for themselves the weighting to be placed on the factors which enter into any given situation, since in reality the existential situation is one of total uncertainty.

However, in practice it is only socially appointed agents of the collective, such as doctors, teachers, social workers, etc, who are invested with legally conferred powers to impose their valuations on others. They should be deprived of these (immoral) powers.

In the presence of the modern ideology, the deplorable practice has arisen of taking into account only factors which appear obvious to a large number of people, and of assuming that any others should be ignored.

In place of the basic moral principle enunciated above, an alternative one is implicitly assumed. This is to the effect that what is ethical consists of what the majority of people agree to regard as ethical. Dissenting individuals can, and should, be forced to submit to the views accepted by the majority of people in their society.

As people are subjected to continuous indoctrination in modern society, from the educational system, which increasingly regards indoctrination as a primary objective, and from the continuous stream of propaganda being put out by such media as television and newspapers, it is not surprising that there is a nearly universal tendency to prefer currently fashionable ways of evaluating things.

We may suppose that similar unanimities of evaluation were usually found in primitive tribal societies. This is notwithstanding the fact that a member of modern society, under the influence of the prevailing ideology, would tend to regard some of the practices of primitive societies as immoral. This however does not present itself to the modern mind as a problem, since there is an implicit belief that the human race has recently arrived at the best possible way of evaluating things, and that the way it thinks now is unquestionably right.

Extract from The Corpse and the Kingdom

The melancholy of genius and its causes

guest post by Christine Fulcher

Havelock Ellis makes some interesting points about the personality features of geniuses in his book A Study of British Genius (1904).

Discussing the characteristics of men and women of genius, he writes:

This marked tendency to melancholy among persons of intellectual aptitude is no new observation, but was indeed one of the very earliest points noted concerning men of genius. ... It is not altogether difficult to account for this phenomenon. ...

He continues by suggesting that persons of intellectual aptitude tend to be anxious, and ill-adapted to society, and that these factors feed into their melancholy. He also mentions the sedentary and ‘nerve-exhausting’ nature of the kind of work in which they are likely to be engaged, such work producing or exacerbating ‘moods of depression’.

Finally, Ellis mentions one factor which tends to get ignored in modern explanations of the apparent predisposition of genius to suffering from ‘melancholy’:

Another cause that serves largely to accentuate the tendency of men of genius to melancholy is the attitude of the world to them. Every original worker in intellectual fields, every man who makes some new thing, is certain to arouse hostility when he does not meet with indifference.

He sets out on his chosen path ... content to work in laborious solitude and to wait, and when at last he turns to his fellows, saying, ‘See what I have done for you!’ he often finds that he has to meet only the sneering prejudices of the few who might have comprehended, and the absolute indifference of the many who are too absorbed in the daily struggle for bread to comprehend any intellectual achievement.

Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1904, pp.220-222.

Galton on ‘steady application and moral effort’

Francis Galton (1822-1911), from his book Hereditary Genius:

I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.*

It seems, from Galton’s quote, that there were already in the Victorian era motives for suppressing facts about heredity. Perhaps the Victorians felt that the concept of innate talent would undermine their ideology that effort was virtuous and would be rewarded.

Galton argues, in passages following the one above, that no amount of effort or training will overcome large differences in innate ability.

* Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences, University Press of the Pacific, 2001, p.56, italics added.

The impoverishment of the English aristocracy

P.G. Wodehouse was one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His most famous fictional creation was Jeeves, the knowing and somewhat manipulative valet to feather-brained young gent Bertie Wooster.

In the following extract from Wodehouse’s 1953 novel Ring for Jeeves, Jeeves has temporarily become butler to the impoverished Earl of Rowcester.

[Lord Rowcester:] ‘I haven’t a bean.’

[Jeeves:] ‘Insufficient funds is the technical expression, m’lord. His lordship, if I may employ the argot, sir, is broke to the wide.’

Captain Biggar stared.
‘You mean you own a place like this, a bally palace if ever I saw one, and can’t write a cheque for three thousand pounds?’

Jeeves undertook the burden of explanation.

‘A house such as Rowcester Abbey, in these days is not an asset, sir, it is a liability. I fear that your long residence in the East has rendered you not quite abreast of the changed conditions prevailing in your native land.
   Socialistic legislation has sadly depleted the resources of England’s hereditary aristocracy. We are living now in what is known as the Welfare State, which means — broadly — that everybody is completely destitute.’

From: The Jeeves Omnibus Volume 3, Hutchinson, 1991, p.98.

The work ethic and its decline

I have noticed over the last forty years that it has become more and more difficult to find anyone willing to do useful work in a polite and efficient manner.

Dissident sociologist David Marsland commented on the work ethic in his 1988 book Seeds of Bankruptcy:

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has been subject to extensive criticism ever since its publication in 1904-5. Some of this criticism is certainly valid. It remains, nevertheless one of the few genuine contributions by sociology to the advance of real knowledge. Its fundamental insight into the requisite institutional and psychological underpinnings of capitalism remains to this day incontestable.

What Weber enunciated — indeed celebrated — was the indispensable role in the development of capitalism of active and positive attitudes to work, and of values justifying such attitudes. Surely he was right. Among the prerequisites of the survival of liberal democratic capitalism, none is more essential than systematic, enthusiastic commitment to effortful work on the part of at least a large proportion of the population.

Commitment to the work ethic presupposes in its turn a number of other characteristics in any society which intends to become or remain capitalist, and to avoid entrapment in feudalistic, authoritarian, socialist, or other forms of serfdom. [Each of those characteristics] has been increasingly subject to attack in recent decades. Sociologists, as evidenced by the teaching material I have examined, are in the front rank of anti-capitalist critique of work and the work ethic. Undermining work is one of the major effects of the arguments deployed by sociologists in their prejudiced, negative treatment of business, freedom, and capitalism.*

A recent Daily Telegraph article was entitled ‘How the UK lost its work ethic’. The following is an extract.

‘Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.’

So said a now notorious passage in the 2012 book Britannia Unchained, co-authored by Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and Chris Skidmore. Naturally, headlines were made by such an accusation, not least because the British have traditionally prided themselves on their ability to graft, assisted by a temperate climate and an ingrained national culture of invention and ingenuity.

But it seems all that may be on the slide. Last week, Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s former chief economist, stated that a ‘sandwich generation’ aged between 35 and 50 were footing the bill for younger and older generations who had dropped out of the workforce. An ever-diminishing number of earners is alarming enough, but then the Wall Street Journal reported that many corporate leaders advocate that employees should never give more than 85 per cent, as complete dedication is unsustainable and leads to burnout.

* David Marsland, Seeds of Bankruptcy, Claridge Press, 1988, p.54.
Chart taken from B. Duffy et al, ‘What the world thinks about work’, Kings College London, 2023.