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’.