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’.