No such thing as genius

The commonsense view of invention ... overstates the importance of rare geniuses ... the question for our purposes is whether the broad pattern of world history would have been altered significantly if some genius inventor had not been born at a particular place and time. The answer is clear: there has never been any such person. (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, Jonathan Cape 1997, pp. 244-245.)

I think that the wish to establish that there is no such thing as genius, in the sense of ability to do things in a way that is qualitatively different from other people, is very strong in the modern ideology, and this accounts for the constant opposition which I have encountered.

When my mind gets enough to work on I don’t think it does work like other people’s. When I mentioned to a philosopher that Rosalind Heywood wanted to prevent my incipient research institute from building up to any size, he asked ‘Why?’ Various answers can be given but certainly one is that if I were allowed any freedom of action at all there would be a distinct risk of my noticing some relationship that other people had not noticed and would be unlikely to notice, and also starting to build a quite complex system of relationships on the first one. (As I did with the areas of potential research that I identified when I was at the Society for Psychical Research and have been prevented from proceeding with.)

I suppose that is why there was so much aversion to my taking degrees in science when I was at school so that I would be able to have a suitable career in research. Consciously or unconsciously, people perceived that I did not have the inhibitions that would have made me safe. At that time I did not think about being able to do more than other people in the way of making progress in research; I thought only of having as intense and hardworking a life as possible, both in exam-taking in the present and in research in the future.

Now, of course, I do think that I could make a lot of progress in any field that I was able to work in. Other people are inhibited by their social belief-system as well as by relative lack of IQ.

I say I could make a lot of progress in any area in which I was permitted to work, but that depends on its being something to do with reality. I know that no real progress could be made if I were financed to run a large research department on topics such as Causes of Absenteeism in a Bootlace Factory or similar. However, provided it were large enough to have a hotel environment attached, my life would become liveable and I might get something out of any research or writing which I might do in my spare time, as well as its contributing to the progress of science.

If I were provided with finance for a philosophy department, primarily devoted to criticising the pernicious rubbish that is being freely produced by other university philosophy departments, the same would be true. It would not exactly be making progress to criticise what has sprung up under the auspices of the modern ideology, but it should be done.

When someone I know was studying philosophy of science at Cambridge, they showed me a paper which included dogmatic assertions that no advance in science depended on above-average individuals. There was nothing that could not be done by ordinary people, provided they worked together as a group. This paper also, if I remember correctly, referred to the concept of IQ as an example of a false hypothesis which (it was apparently considered self-evident) had failed.

That was over twenty years ago; there must be a great many equally criticisable papers being produced all the time now.

The right not to be killed

Debbie Purdy is a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis who thinks she may, in the future, wish to commit suicide with the assistance of the Swiss euthanasia group Dignitas, and who says she would want her husband to accompany her on her trip.

The Director of Public Prosecutions has been ordered to clarify the factors which would be taken into account when deciding whether to prosecute someone for the crime of ‘assisting suicide’. The Daily Mail claims this has taken Debbie Purdy ‘a step closer to dying on her own terms’.

Critics of the latest development seem to fall into two camps. They may deplore suicide on moral grounds. For example, Ruth Dudley Edwards writes about a friend, a successful lawyer, who ‘decided when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer that he would try to make his dying life-enhancing for others’. Her comments seem to imply that other should follow his example, whether they want to or not.

Curiously, one does not hear the same people condemning the common practice by doctors of hastening the death of terminally ill persons by administering excessive doses of painkillers, or suggesting those people could have been induced to make their dying ‘life-enhancing’ for others. Perhaps it is presumed that a doctor’s judgement on this issue can never be wrong.

The other type of critic regards the latest development as a move down the slippery slope towards legalising murder. Part of the problem here lies in the definition of ‘assistance’. Accompanying someone to the place where they plan to commit suicide seems innocuous. Giving an elderly person a lethal injection and claiming afterwards that they asked you to do it may seem less so.

As is usual in such discussions, however, the context – that medical goods and services are immorally controlled by a monopolised profession which transfers the right of decision from the patient to the doctor – is ignored. If the law on medicine reflected the basic moral principle (respect for individual volition, unless others are harmed) a number of consequences would follow.

First, medicine delivered by doctors would become more accessible to many people who currently find it obnoxious to submit to arrogant authority figures who can choose to refuse them what they urgently need. Second, the goods and services necessary for treatment would also become available without the involvement of doctors. For both these reasons there are likely to be people currently contemplating suicide who would be able to recover their health sufficiently to want to go on living.

Third, the issue of ‘assistance’ would become far less relevant. In a free market for all medicines, including those which can be used to produce a painless death, ways would be found for individuals to administer the means of suicide themselves, even if they were incapacitated, without an active role being played by outsiders. Family members could be present at the suicide without having to become involved. People would not have to travel to far-off locations to achieve their objective.

Fourth, and most importantly, the issue of assistance by medical professionals would also cease to have the same level of relevance. This – not assistance by laymen, and certainly not ‘assistance’ in the sense of accompanying on a journey – is the most worrying possibility among those being contemplated. In the institutional setting of a hospital, where respect for autonomy is absent, and where ‘best interests’ arguments have been used to perform euthanasia without consent*, legalising suicide-with-assistance in general seems certain to lead to even more surreptitious medical-killing-with-presumed-consent than is already going on.

* as for example in the case of Hillsborough victim Tony Bland

Capital, freedom and the King's head

Copy of a reply to an email from a person living overseas, who appears to have been a fan of my books for some years. What I have written is of general relevance to people who might consider coming.

I gather you are thinking of coming to this country. There are problems associated with someone coming from outside the EU, and I am afraid we could not give you any help with them. Things are very difficult these days with all the restrictions on personal liberty that have arisen. We are extremely overworked as it is. You would have to solve these problems for yourself, if at all.

The idea has been widely encouraged, in this country and elsewhere, that the difficulties of becoming sufficiently independent to do what you want to do by building up capital (if you have not inherited enough without building it up for yourself) can be avoided by accepting an impoverished life and finding something ‘creative’ or ‘interesting’ to do within it.

I do not myself subscribe to this idea, although unfortunately I think that some people have taken my books as providing support for it.

If anyone wants to come and form an association with us, it is very desirable that they first build up enough capital, by saving out of income if necessary, to get themselves to Oxford in a trouble-free way and pay for rented accommodation for themselves near to us.

It is only by building up money for oneself that one increases one’s freedom of action, which includes freedom from social interference.

In the pre-1945 world, saving money had a numinous respectability. Children had money-boxes, provided by the Post Office, with the King’s head on the front. When the boxes were opened, the coins could be used to buy savings stamps or savings certificates, which were stuck into books with the child’s name on the front, encouraging him to think of his capital – built up by saving – as his territory and as an extension of himself.

Now capital is seen as faintly immoral, and idealistic young people are encouraged to believe it would be better if it was not in the hands of private individuals at all.

The Killing Fields

Watching, as usual, the least offensive thing I could find on the TV while I used my exercise machine, I found myself seeing The Killing Fields, about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Everyone in this film was risking, and trying to avoid, torture and death at short notice, as murderously inclined collections of people washed around the country, and other people tried to guess where they would go next and what would be the best direction in which to run.

Now the effects of the Khmer Rouge were obviously terrible in one sense, and (like other instances of communist revolution) destructive towards the more middle and upper-class elements of society. However, such a condition of society would seem to select against some relatively dysfunctional genes. And it seems very reminiscent of the gang warfare now prevalent in many inner cities, as one hears.

So perhaps it is the case that, whenever relieved of immediate pressures of any other kind, such as the need to work in some way to keep alive, human beings are programmed to form up in groups to start fighting one another. Like mating rituals, this clearly serves a function in selecting against unfavourable genes, and selecting in favour of intelligence sufficient to guess accurately who is likely to want to kill one, provided it is combined with an ability to run fast. Both very low intelligence and weak legs are being selected against.

However unpleasant, this may be an inevitable feature of human society. Perhaps civilisation is intrinsically unstable, because it tends to produce forces that promote certain changes in the gene pool, these changes being of a kind perceived as dangerous because they are potentially maladaptive for survival, and this produces a hardwired backlash in favour of more primitive conditions.

1850: the watershed

The rise of individualism prior to 1945 was not a simple matter. Probably the factors that would lead to its downfall were present from an early stage, and certainly so by the time the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882.

Herbert Spencer identified a watershed at about 1850. Society, as he saw it, was always in a state of conflict between collectivism and individualism. Up to 1850, individualism was gaining ground; after it, the balance turned the other way and individual freedom declined in favour of collectivism.

Prior to the 19th century, there had been many monopolies. For example, Queen Elizabeth I had granted an exclusive right to print music to Tallis and Byrd (1575). No one could have their music printed by anyone else if they happened to have fallen out with Tallis and Byrd. And the guilds were as monopolistic as the modern medical profession. No one could make and sell candles, for example, unless they had been apprenticed and become a member of the candlemakers’ guild. As the monopolies were abolished, commercial freedom gave rise to intellectual freedom.

After 1850, we may suppose, the consequences of the earlier legislation in favour of free trade and against monopolies continued to bear fruit in the expanding activities of the intellectual upper class, but also in the psychological reactions of some of them against the enjoyment of this freedom by others, even if they had benefitted from it themselves.

In 1794 Prussia was the first European country to bring in state education, wishing to have an educated and indoctrinated population which would provide competent and compliant soldiers for its armies. It also brought in universal conscription in 1862. Prussia won the Franco-Prussian war; other countries thought that the universal education had provided Prussia with an advantage, and followed suit.

My suppressed independent university has a suppressed History Department as well as one in Philosophy, which needs only funding and status to be contributing significantly to the intellectual life of its time.

Picking one's way through the debris

copy of a letter to a person who came to one of my seminars

You seemed to understand why what I say in my books, and my outlook in general, arouses such hostility and makes me an Outsider. If I meet you again I hope you might explain it to me because, however odd it seems to you, I do not actually see anything outrageous in it. I am just, as I always was, a perfectly respectable bourgeois capitalist, and since my official ‘education’ left me excluded from an academic career, it seemed to me obvious and inevitable that I would proceed to try to build up an academic institution (an independent university) around myself. But, of course, by now I am familiar with the fact that this arouses extreme hostility.

Nowadays, practically everyone takes socialism for granted and discussions proceed within that context, so my views are regarded as ‘extreme’ although they are more or less what everybody else took for granted before the socialist ideology became dominant. A crucial date was 1945, when the ‘Welfare State’ (the Oppressive State) was initiated, which was also when I started attending the Ursuline High School, aged 10.

You say that I said in some book that existential psychology is optimistic. That is a very vague statement, especially as there is so little existential psychology around, and it is probably only true at all of a fairly advanced sort of psychology with considerable awareness of the existential situation.

So it is more meaningful to say what is the case so far as I personally am concerned. I certainly have no optimism at all about developments in the society around me, or about my chances of making any progress that depends on any response or feedback from the social environment, which becomes ever more hostile and unfavourable to my efforts to improve my position and become intellectually productive. And leaving myself out of it, the global future appears unsavoury and uninteresting, wiping out the advantages of the recent brief period of Western civilisation. The world appears to be ‘progressing’ towards a type of global communism, via terrorism and street riots, so far as I can tell from the French television news.

Nevertheless, it is true that I have an underlying optimism which enables me to keep going, and to keep hoping that I can pick my way through the falling debris of society, and even hope to find ways of improving my position by trying (among other things) to appeal to outsiders for financial support. The deterioration of society around us makes it even more difficult for us to progress, and thus even more urgent for us to appeal as widely as possible for the financial support we need, as well as for people to come and work here, and for moral support of all kinds.

Adler and modern society

If there were any principle of permitting expression of all valid points of view, then we would have a claim on financial support and social recognition for our squashed and suppressed philosophy department.

But why should one expect that to be the case? Neither Nazi Germany nor Marxist Russia permitted the expression of views critical of their ideology, so why should socialist Britain? In fact socialist America and Europe as well. We have never had any interest taken by any overseas university in the possibility of setting us up properly with funding and status.

Why should a state-financed system have any interest at all in providing opportunity for intellectual activity of any kind? Both Nazi Germany and communist Russia successfully eliminated contributions to culture from relatively high-IQ sections of the population and reduced them in numbers. This was not explicitly stated as the real object of the exercise, but should one expect any ideological movement openly to state its real aims and objects?

As Adler said (but it applies more precisely to the users of public money – freedom confiscated from individuals – than to the individuals who may be left with very limited resources) what someone is aiming at in life may be more realistically inferred from the situations he consistently brings about than from his verbal protestations.

Accepting that the society in which I live is aiming to destroy people like me, which seems the only realistic conclusion, it is no surprise that my life is still so bad.

Vulnerable to doctors

Another terrible development which has not yet come about, but soon will, and which as usual we are prevented from speaking out against by lack of social status and financial support. Discussing different plans to computerise medical records in a recent Daily Mail:

Patients’ medical records could be transferred to Google under plans being considered by the Tories ... But campaigners and doctors claim patient information could be vulnerable to hackers.

And there are also concerns it could put lives in danger because it would be harder for doctors to access vital medical information in an emergency than under Labour’s rival NHS computer scheme. *

Campaigners claim that the medical records of victims might be ‘vulnerable to hackers’. But it seems no one is complaining that they would be vulnerable to doctors which is – or ought to be – the most serious concern. ‘Patient confidentiality’ now means that not only the socially authorised sadist you have consulted will be free to record his opinions about your problems, but that these opinions are accessible to all members of the medical Mafia. Which makes a mockery of the idea of seeking a second (or third) opinion and starting from scratch with another doctor, difficult though that is anyway already, and almost impossible without the ‘permission’ of the doctor first consulted, and without the second doctor knowing that he had a predecessor.

* 7 July 2009

The genius of the proletariat

I think that statusful agents of the collective should want to visit the least fortunate members of society to hear how they experience the difficulties of their position. But I know that this is an old-fashioned idea which seems natural to me because I remember pre-Marxist society, and it has no applicability within the current quasi-Marxist society in which everyone, even those old enough and middle-class enough to remember society before the revolution, has converted to the new religion and regards themselves as agents of it.

The idea that innate ability is to be done down and suppressed has always been intrinsic to communist ideology. This is a quotation from a book about Marxism which shows that Trotsky had this idea.

The proletariat, [Trotsky] argued, could not produce any culture at the present time because it was not educated, and, as for the future, socialist society would not create a class culture of any sort but would raise the whole of human culture to new levels. The dictatorship of the proletariat was only a short, transient phase after which the glorious classless society would set in – a society of supermen, any one of whom could become the intellectual equal of Aristotle, Goethe, or Marx. *

What such ideas mean in practice, in Britain today and for at least the last 60 years, is that those who have shown any signs of the sort of ability that makes them potential geniuses (i.e. who might do something noticeable if not prevented from doing so) are thrown down and out, and kept down and out.

* L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, 1978, p 52.

The outsider-hero in children’s fiction, then and now

.
1905:
The look in her eyes was exactly the look which Miss Minchin most disliked. She would not have it; she was quite near her, and was so enraged that she actually flew at her and boxed her ears …
It made Sara start. She wakened from her dream at the shock, and, catching her breath, stood still a second. Then, not knowing she was going to do it, she broke into a little laugh.
'What are you laughing at, you bold, impudent child?' Miss Minchin exclaimed.
It took Sara a few seconds to control herself sufficiently to remember that she was a princess. Her cheeks were red and smarting from the blows she had received.
'I was thinking,' she answered.
'Beg my pardon immediately,' said Miss Minchin.
Sara hesitated a second before she replied.
'I will beg your pardon for laughing, if it was rude,' she said then, 'but I won't beg your pardon for thinking.'
'What were you thinking?' demanded Miss Minchin. 'How dare you think?'
‘… I was thinking what would happen if I were a princess and you boxed my ears – what I should do to you. And I was thinking that if I were one, you would never dare to do it, whatever I said or did …'
'Go to your room,' cried Miss Minchin breathlessly, 'this instant! Leave the schoolroom! Attend to your lessons, young ladies!'
Sara made a little bow.
'Excuse me for laughing if it was impolite' …
(Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Little Princess)

2005:
Narcissa Malfoy strolled out from behind the clothes rack.
'Put those away,' she said coldly to Harry and Ron. 'If you attack my son again, I shall ensure that it is the last thing you ever do.'
'Really?' said Harry, taking a step forwards and gazing into the smoothly arrogant face that, for all its pallor, still resembled her sister's. He was as tall as she was now. 'Going to get a few Death Eater pals to do us in, are you?'
Madam Malkin squealed and clutched at her heart.
'Really, you shouldn't accuse – dangerous thing to say – wands away, please!'
But Harry did not lower his wand. Narcissa Malfoy smiled unpleasantly.
'I see that being Dumbledore's favourite has given you a false sense of security, Harry Potter. But Dumbledore won't always be there to protect you.'
Harry looked mockingly all around the shop.
'Wow ... look at that ... he's not here now! So why not have a go? They might be able to find you a double cell in Azkaban with your loser of a husband!'
(J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)