Hindrances to the progress of research (part 1)

This is the first half of a paper written some years ago for a collection published by Praeger (Medical Science and the Advancement of World Health, ed. Robert Lanza MD). The points made appear to be as applicable now as they were then.

We live at a time when the most fundamental ideal of scientific enquiry is being called into question, and indeed explicitly rejected. This cannot fail to have a profound effect on research in all fields, not only the medical. But the effect of the dominant ideological climate may be particularly distinct in relation to medicine since this concerns the nature of human beings and the extent of their dependence on the society around them; these are matters that carry a particularly strong emotional loading from the viewpoint of the prevailing orthodoxy, and this loading sets up stringent requirements for what shall and shall not be done.

But first let us consider what may be the fundamental ideal of science. The Duke of Kent, in his 1981 presidential address to the British Society for the Advancement of Science, asserted, "I say without any equivocation that I consider it the scientist's first and imperative duty to expand the boundaries of knowledge." Similarly, Hans Eysenck stated, "Personally, I would take my stand with Thomas Jefferson: 'There is no truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world'" (1).

Both these assertions were made in the awareness of, and in explicit opposition to, a climate of opinion in which they are no longer widely accepted. It is old-fashioned and naive to talk of an external truth or reality toward an understanding of which the human race is advancing by successive approximations. There is no criterion of reality other than social agreement. Reverence is due only to what is socially desirable.

A central, maybe the central, determinant of contemporary attitudes in all fields of intellectual activity is the modern drive toward eliminating any sense of tension between socially agreed-upon opinion and external reality. The tension is removed by denial, more or less explicit, that there is any such thing as external reality or that it has any right to numinous status if there is. Why does it matter what is true? What is important is what is good. There is even a school of thought in the modern philosophy of science that teaches explicitly that it is impossible to arrive at objectivity in scientific observations; all observations are made in the context of the received ideology of their time and cannot be separated from it.

So we find ourselves in a situation in which one ideal of science is being, with increasing explicitness, replaced by another. The old-fashioned ideal conceived of science as striving to establish the truth, whatever it might turn out to be, whether at variance or not with what human beings would expect or prefer it to be. The new ideal conceives of science as subservient to the requirements of social desirability. This view of the matter depends on the idea that the outcomes of research can be foreseen, the social consequences of it predicted, and a definite opinion formed whether these consequences are desirable.

In fact, immensely useful, practical consequences have often arisen from the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. The Curies studied radium without foreseeing its medical applications; Sir Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic properties of penicillin by chance. It is impossible for the consequences of an increment in human knowledge to be accurately foreseen, even by those most directly concerned with it. Twenty years before the first use of atomic power, Einstein and Rutherford expressed their opinion that no practical harnessing of atomic power would ever be possible.

In general, it is certainly possible to argue that the ostensible modern goal of beneficial effects on society as a whole is more likely to be achieved, and to be achieved more effectively, by an adherence to the old-fashioned principles that knowledge is good in itself and that the extension and dissemination of knowledge of all facts without distinction is intrinsically desirable. Nevertheless, it is a somewhat weak position to defend a principle by demonstrating that it may be defended in terms of another principle, as if admitting that the latter is the really important one, and the former can only be justified in terms of it. As Eysenck observes, "According to the scientific ethos, scientists should fearlessly speak the truth; in theory, truth is the supreme god to whom the scientist bows. The position now is departing rather rapidly from this belief" (2). He quotes Carl Sagan as saying, "In a time of trouble, the tendency of society is to constrict the range of accepted ideas. But just the opposite — diversity, heresy — is what is needed if problems are to be solved."

The qualification "in a time of trouble" is unnecessary. Any society has a strong tendency to foster and favour only activities and intellectual productions that support the received ideology of the time, and the notion that individualistic heretics are good for anything is never likely to be applied with much energy. In a society in which the financing of research is largely, indeed almost exclusively, undertaken by the state or by collective entities which are answerable to the prevailing orthodoxy, there will be little opportunity for heresy to take effect.

The modern ideology produces two kinds of pressure, one practical and one moral. The practical one is that there is a constant transfer of freedom of action (or financial power) from individuals to the state. Individuals are heavily taxed, and their ability to pass on by inheritance even such accumulations as they are able to build up in a heavily taxed lifetime is itself subject to heavy taxation. In addition, there is taxation by inflation, and state control over the supply and value of money held in the hands of individuals. This is confiscation as surely as would be open levies on the assets every citizen, but its effects are indirect. The cost makes it less and less likely that any individual or group of individuals can carry out independent research on an adequate scale; the freedom to set up research establishments and to do independent work has thus effectively been confiscated and transferred to the state.

The moral pressure of the modern ideology is simply towards doing what reinforces it. The fact that the beliefs that actually make up the modern ideology are largely implicit, although all-pervasive, makes it more, and not less, dangerous. You will gain social reward and approval by doing research that has results other people will approve of; you will not gain it by doing research that calls into question some important, even if implicit, belief. Even if this were not supported by the financial censorship already described, it would be a powerful force.

1. Hans J. Eysenck, "The Ethics of Science and the Duties of Scientists," British Association for the Advancement of Science, New Issue, No. 1 (August 1975), reprinted in H. B. Gibson, Hans Eysenck: The Man and His Work (London: Peter Owen, 1981).
2. ibid.

Part two of this can be read here.

Dawkins: more straw men

Headline and lead from a recent article in the Sunday Times by Peter Millar:

The gullible age
Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion sold a million copies. In a new and hilarious onslaught he pits hard science against astrology, tarot, psychics, homeopathy and other ‘gullibiligy'. The Enemies Of Reason starts on Channel 4 on August 13.

I would have liked to publish a reply to The God Delusion entitled The Social Delusion, but I do not have Richard Dawkins’s social status; in fact I have no salary or financial support apart from what I can make for myself. My book would probably not have been reviewed, and would have been lucky to sell any copies at all.

In ‘The Enemies of Reason’ Richard Dawkins is evidently embarking on attacking another series of straw men which will be taken as proof by many people that there is no possible competition for the worldview of the modern ideology as the sole source of reality. He will not be attacking, I think, anyone funded by public money (i.e. money obtained by the taxation of individuals) or anyone with socially conferred authority as an expert — although there are many in those categories who are as deserving of his strictures as fraudulent mediums, or as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, of whom Dawkins says (quoting Peter Medawar), “He can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he took great pains to deceive himself.”

I would think that latter remark applies to a good many purveyors of supposedly ‘hard-edged’ science in the modern world.

However, unless I get a financial supporter or a Professorship, I am not going to be in a position to reply to Dawkins’s new series in detail, any more than I was to reply to The God Delusion, although I may manage to get a few snippets of what I am thinking onto my blog. Meanwhile, I reproduce below a section from my book The Lost Cause (Introduction, pp.24-25).

The perceived advantage of anomalous monism

Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, pointing out that human evolution is explicable in terms of the survival of the genes of those who behave in the ways most likely to ensure the presence of their offspring in future societies, wishes nevertheless to ascribe some independent value to ideas about how human societies should be run, and how individual human beings should behave. So he proposes the concept of a 'meme': an idea which, if it is a good one, has a survival value of its own, presumably in the context of human society. The value of the meme is not supposed to depend on selection processes as they apply to biological evolution.

Somewhat similar advantages as a solution to the dilemma of reductionism as described above are probably perceived in the anomalous monism of Donald Davidson, which may account for its influential position in philosophy of mind over recent years. While the mental is always to be regarded as an aspect of the physical, which is primary, the relationship between the mental and the physical is not law-like (i.e. is anomalous). This supposedly permits us to regard ideals of egalitarianism and collectivism, for example, or Richard Dawkins's memes, as possessing an intrinsic value of their own, even though they arise in the minds of individuals as a result of neuronal events.

Thus it seems to be implicitly accepted that such theories as anomalous monism provide an acceptable framework within which ethics about social groups can be regarded as meaningful, while individualist ethics can not. Deterministic reductionism, i.e. the theory that mental events are caused by physical ones, need not in itself have been taken as devaluing mental events, which might include individualistic ethical principles. Nevertheless, I believe it is felt, and I have heard it asserted to be the case by academic philosophers, that anomalous monism permits us to continue to ascribe emotional value loadings to the mental, i.e. to certain psychological attitudes to human interrelationships, while rejecting the mental's claim to onotological status.

Philosophically, the issues concerning morality and determinism continue to be debated. When finality on these issues has been reached, we need not suppose that it will be clearly stated and widely publicised. It is more likely that philosophers will stop discussing such things, and write as if certain conclusions could be taken for granted, rather in the way that materialist monism is the common starting point in the great majority of up-to-date books on philosophy of mind.

In fact, it is not difficult to guess what the final conclusion may be, in fact already is. The individual can have no higher freedom than that of fusion with the collective.

... to be free, people must be able to employ the material resources which they need to give effect to their choices, and this is possible only through collective control over the productive powers of society. All of these suggestions call into question the idea with which we began, of a compromise; between the freedom of the individual and the power of society, since they imply that only as social beings are people capable of exercising freedom in the first place. ('Freedom, political', Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1991, p.292)

Only collective society retains a numinous soul, but nowadays we do not draw attention to it. We would not bother to give it grandiose names, as earlier writers did, such as sovereign or general will or Hegel's Geist.

What it means to be an exiled academic

A piece I wrote some years ago

Recently I was interviewed by an undergraduate for Cherwell [the Oxford University student newspaper]. He first told me what I thought, and then told me that, in the light of my other views, I shouldn't think it. I said he was quite right; I didn't think what he said I thought, I actually thought what he said I ought to think. But I have no reason to think he was listening.

When the Cherwell undergraduate came, he asked me how we considered ourselves different from normal academics. I didn't think he would publish the answer, even if I said it, so I didn't. But maybe I ought to write down these things that other people won't publish and publish them myself.

Well, of course, I don't think of myself as different from an academic.

From the time I was about eleven, when I realised that the academic world was where you did theoretical scientific research, I expected to spend my life in the academic world and thought of myself accordingly. The fact that my education was ruined so that I couldn't be a socially accredited academic doesn't change that. One still has the same standards that one would have if one were able to have one's career inside the academic world instead of outside it.

I don't think there is anything in my life that wouldn't be in it if I were having a career in the academic world.

Of course the difference is that as a non-socially accredited academic you are debarred from earning a living, from eligibility for research grants, and from use of laboratory facilities unless you can get enough money to set up a laboratory of your own.

Another difference is that a group of private sector academics is free to do research in areas which, although not explicitly ruled out by the. professed scientific ideal, actually are ruled out by the implicit adherence to a certain ideology of the socially accredited academic world.

If that sounds like an advantage, it may be pointed out that in practice it is likely to be cancelled out by the previously mentioned disadvantages. If you could get the money, you would be free to do research in areas that a socially accredited academic probably wouldn't feel free to work in. But you can't get the money, so everyone is pretty safe really from anything that doesn't support the ideology getting done.

Einstein "didn't need an academic post"

Before, during and immediately after 1905, [Einstein] was incapable of securing an academic post. In fact, he didn’t need one. He was perfectly able to think while working as a patent clerk in Bern. (From Bryan Appleyard’s comments about Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, Sunday Times, 3 June 2007.)

This sort of attitude is widely held, in fact by now we may say it is the received wisdom. People often tell me that I cannot complain of my position because I have just expressed a criticism of some academic goings-on (which I could not prevent myself from making, with the most passing attention, however stultifying and exhausting my life was being). Therefore, although I have no status, salary or financial support, and have to spend nearly all my time working very hard at investment and administration, I am evidently free to think (they say). So I can’t say I am frustrated (they say). But I do say it, and I go on appealing for workers, money, status and support of every kind. Actually this attitude to Einstein, quoted above, demonstrates the hostility to ability which is the real driving force of the modern ‘egalitarian’ ideology.

I am reminded of a conversation between one of my colleagues and the Master of an Oxford college, which took place at a social gathering. He asked what my colleague was doing now and my colleague said he was writing a book about genius. ‘Oh, there have been a lot of books about that,’ the Master announced, as if there would be nothing more to be said. My colleague said that his book was about how intellectuals were disadvantaged in modern society by the reduction in the number of people with private incomes.

‘It is not a disadvantage to have to earn a living,’ the Master said. ‘It is not possible to do concentrated intellectual work for more than three hours a day. It was no disadvantage to Einstein to have to work in the Patent Office. It did not prevent him from producing Relativity.’

However, as my colleague pointed out, Einstein had complained of being reduced to near-breakdown by working on relativity at the Patent Office, and by the stress and guilt induced by having to shovel his papers away into a drawer whenever anyone entered the room.

The fact that a Master of an Oxford college expresses such views is a clear indication of the hostility of Oxford University, and of the educational and university system generally, to the idea of innate ability and the circumstances it may need to be fully productive.

’We appeal for £1m as initial funding for a social science department in our unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish analyses of the unexamined assumptions which currently protect from criticism utterances by academics such as those discussed above.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Melanie Phillips on the UCU boycott

Anyone not yet convinced that Britain has somehow turned against its own most fundamental values, not to say departed altogether from reality, should look at the decision by the University and College Union (UCU) to urge a boycott of academic institutions in Israel.

This deplorable move destroys the most sacred role of a university - to act as the guardian of free speech and inquiry in order that knowledge, opinion and truth can flourish and grow. (From ‘A deplorable decision which shows that Britain’s academic elite has taken leave of its senses’ by Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, 4 June 2007.)

It is ridiculous to think of a university as having a ‘sacred role’. It is as ridiculous as saying that a doctor becomes a trustworthy person because she is given immoral power over other people by the oppressive socialist society in which we live.

Academics get into their positions by being appointed by other academics, and their prime motivation is to reinforce and promote the modern ideology, which includes the dogmatic belief that academics are experts and authorities on what is true, and on the right way of thinking, and that a person holding an academic appointment is qualitatively different from, and better than, someone who does not. Individuals who might express points of view which do not support or appear immediately to reinforce the modern belief system are viciously and slanderously opposed and suppressed.

Superior performance is "due to practice"

It is important, in fact central, to the modern ideology to believe that the individual is infinitely malleable by society. Perhaps this is because the driving force of modern society is its desire to destroy all individuals who are in any way perceived as ‘superior’.

It follows that ‘education’ in the modern world must be antagonistic to able individuals. As I have pointed out before, if you wish to ‘refute the supposition that top achievers possess extraordinary talent or aptitudes that allow them to outpace their less fortunate counterparts’, as the website of Florida State University puts it, then if a person appears likely to provide evidence to the contrary, they must be deprived of opportunity — as I was throughout my ‘education’, continued to be afterwards on account of lack of paper qualifications and any way of earning money, and still am being. My life was ruined at an early stage of the development of the Welfare State, but the ideology was already then clearly present and quite highly developed.

Whenever I was being prevented from doing something that I wanted and badly needed to do, it would be made to depend on my asserting something about my having some specific level of ability, usually ‘being a genius’ (genius undefined) or being ‘better than everybody else in some category of persons’. Opinions of this sort had not entered at all into my considerations about the desirability of doing whatever it was, but it was an effective way of blocking any further presentation of my reasons for wanting to do it — not that any such presentation would have had the slightest hope of success. Thus, to quote the headmistress of the deplorable Woodford High School, which I had wanted to leave at the end of the first day, and not expected to be opposed by my parents in doing so, ‘It would not be fair to treat her as a genius before she has proved that she is one.’

Now, of course, the wish to assert that there is no such thing as exceptional ability is much more explicitly expressed, although it has been influencing everyone in the educational and university systems for over 60 years. Consider the great enthusiasm which is expressed for the views of the well-paid and statusful Professor K Anders Ericsson. (Article here, found via Stumbling & Mumbling blog; my comments in square brackets; italics mine.)

Widely acclaimed as the torchbearer in the Expert Performance Movement, Ericsson's ascent to superlative status is buoyed by his contrarian [?] view. His research refutes the conventional wisdom and everyday supposition [not any longer, surely] that the top achievers among us possess extraordinary talent or aptitudes that allow them to outpace their less fortunate counterparts. Ericsson's work tells the world that, in fact, there is no mysterious genetic hard-wiring for greatness, no intrinsic tendency for talent and no natural high-performance endowments. ...

With the November 2006 release of "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," Ericsson led a team of researchers that produced this first-ever collection of academically reviewed studies of expertise and expert performance. The seminal [?] work received enthusiastic reviews and critical accolades in the academic and mass media alike.

Ericsson’s work purports to prove that there is no such thing as innate ability, and the enthusiasm with which it is greeted demonstrates how fundamental to the modern ideology (the new religion of collectivism) is the destruction of the concept of the individual.

Actually his work does not, and could not, prove any such thing. He has paid a good deal of attention to activities involving motor skills, such as sports and the playing of musical instruments. It certainly does not seem likely that a person will excel at such things without a lot of practice, but that does not prove that anyone could reach the same level. I am, I imagine, below the average in ability to play games, and although I can slowly improve by practice (at playing squash, for example) to something approaching a normal level of performance, I would never expect to be able to perform well. There is some component of aptitude that I do not have, although my mother did. She was a natural athlete, captain of most games at school. She had medals for swimming and, until I was born, played hockey for the county. My father, on the other hand, was unsuited to games. My mother said that people laughed at him when he ran.

In games-playing aptitude I would seem to have inherited more of my father’s genetic endowment than my mother’s.

Even if Professor Ericsson has included leading ‘intellectuals’ or ‘academics’ among his experts, that is a population consisting of those who, like himself, have found it possible to rise to socially-recognised prestigious positions in modern society.

Demonstrating that a good deal of practice and conscientiousness has contributed to their position as recognised experts does not, and cannot, rule out the possibility that other, less quantifiable, factors may be present. (One factor that is very likely to be present, as in Ericsson’s own case, is an ability to tolerate the modern ideology and to bring one’s own thinking in every area into line with it. A predisposition to do this might have genetic determinants.)

No, according to Ericsson, there was no special genetic aptitude present in the case of Mozart. He just put in a lot of practice at an early age.

The type of logic being invoked is rather like the lines of argument unfortunately adopted in many modern court cases. Did someone kill his/her babies/parents? He/she can only claim innocence if medical or psychological ‘experts’ are prepared to agree that there is a more plausible culprit in the form of a recognised medical condition or an alternative murderer with the right sort of personality and motivation. Provided there is a good alternative story (or one considered ‘good’ by socially approved experts) the person may be declared innocent.

Similarly, we can produce an alternative explanation of outstanding achievement in terms of practice. Maybe practice alone is enough to account for it. It is certainly not possible to prove that any other factor is present, and so (thus the modern mind works), since this is the most socially acceptable story, we are justified in asserting that there is no other factor in the situation. To quote Ericsson, ‘With the exception of the influence of height and size in some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body has been shown to constrain an individual from reaching an expert level’.

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, completed his Ph.D. in psychology from University of Stockholm in 1976, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Carnegie-Mellon University. After a 12-year tenure at University of Colorado at Boulder, which included a two-year stint at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin, Ericsson joined the FSU psychology faculty in 1992 as the distinguished Conradi Scholar, the first endowed chair in the College of Arts & Sciences.

"Dr. Ericsson was critical to launching a doctoral degree program in cognitive psychology," says Janet Kistner, FSU department chair, clinical psychology. "His presence enabled us to recruit some outstanding cognitive psychologists to join our faculty, as they were eager to have opportunities to interact with Ericsson and happy to be part of a developing program in expertise."

Lucky Professor Ericsson. How I envy him his status, salary, and expanding opportunities. Just what I need myself, continue to suffer from the lack of, and could make good use of, but have not yet been able to get.

You see the great enthusiasm for endowing academic institutes in which well-paid and socially statusful people can energetically produce work which is of little informational value in itself, but which may appear to an uncritical mind to support the modern drive to destroy individuality.

If the funding being devoted to the development of Dr Ericsson’s programme in expertise were to be deflected to my incipient independent university, which is being kept as inconspicuous and unproductive as possible by financial deprivation, some really progressive research might be done and at the least a few books expressing suppressed points of view could be published.

Functionality, confidence and research

I think that functionality, and what appears as confidence, arise paradoxically from giving up any attempt to have an opinion about it, or to relate to one’s social image. Although, as usual, I have to emphasise that I do not accept, and am in no way reconciled to, the unrealistic and degraded image which society has forced upon me.

To be functional in a given situation depends on what occurs to one; confronted by any field of research I would, as I did when I made contact with psychical research (immediately after being thrown out of Oxford University with a second-class degree) be as openminded as possible in looking at all the data that presented themselves, and allow relationships between them to occur to one’s mind. Gradually, in fact probably quite soon, I would expect to see what appeared to be the best lines to pursue in advancing understanding of the phenomena and relating them to other fields of science.

This happened when I considered the phenomena of psychical research, and I am sure that it would happen again if I had any opportunity to develop any of the areas of research which I began to delineate, or if I were able to work in any other field of research.

An extensive knowledge of what had been done beforehand in the field of psychical research was irrelevant because everyone else’s mind had evidently worked so differently. (This applies also in other fields which present any threat to the modern ideology, such as theoretical physics, philosophy and psychology.)

I had not been at the SPR many months before I had concluded that out-of-the-body experiences would provide an area of research which could lead to revolutionary insights, and would be the best way of starting to develop the field of psychical research, if one were able to work on it on an adequate scale. There were written accounts of people having such experiences, and there were people coming to the office, both as occasional visitors and as permanent personnel, who described having similar experiences, some of them habitually. The experiences often had characteristics in common.

And yet out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) were regarded as the dubious imaginings of people who had spiritualistic belief systems. Any number of academic and supposedly scientifically-minded people would have been able to make the same observations as I did of the occurrence and potential availability for study of such phenomena in the population, but (to the extent that they were ostensibly interested in advancing knowledge of reality at all) their attention had always been elsewhere.

There was much resistance to my appealing to the public at large for actual cases of OBEs, even among our “supporters”. To do this was, apparently, to expose the subject of parapsychology (and, of course, oneself) to charges of unscientific credulity and spiritualistic belief. There is a strange kind of logic here, which I have found even among the most intelligent intellectuals (e.g. philosophy professors). The logic goes something like this, I believe — although it is never actually stated. "It is okay to obtain information about hallucinatory experiences such as OBEs provided the only purpose is to demonstrate that they are not, in fact, supportive of any spiritual or other non-reductionist beliefs. It is not okay to obtain information about them in their own right, however, since that is providing implicit support for spiritualist beliefs." Yes, there is a fundamental inconsistency here, but even philosophy professors seem not to notice it.

Actually, there are plenty of inconsistencies that are not noticed by philosophy professors, and to which the philosophy department of my independent university could be drawing attention, if not kept harmless and inactive by financial deprivation.

The value of "friendship"

Report in the Daily Mail of a ‘study’ published by the Journal of Socio-Economics.

They say you can’t put a price on true friendship. But that hasn’t stopped economists having a go. And after all their additions and subtractions, they have calculated exactly how valuable friends and family can be. Seeing them every day is worth the equivalent of an £85,000 pay rise, they say. Even chatting to neighbours frequently makes us as happy as if we had been handed a £37,000 increase. And getting married is the same as an extra £50,000 in the pay packet (and that’s after the cost of the wedding). ... The study took information from 8,000 households across Britain. Those surveyed were asked to rate the level of happiness certain changes in their life would bring, ranging from pay increases to face to face time with friends and loved ones.

‘An increase in the level of social involvements is often worth many tens of thousands of pounds a year extra in terms of life satisfaction,’ said Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee, from the University of London’s Institute of Education, which carried out the research. ‘Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness. One potential explanation is that social activities tend to require our attention while they are being experienced, so that the joy derived from them lasts longer in our memory. ‘Income, on the other hand, is mostly in the background. We don’t normally have to pay so much attention to the fact that we’ll be getting a pay packet at the end of the week or month, so the joy derived from income doesn’t last as long.’ On average, a person earning £10,000 a year who has face to face time with friends and loved ones every day was as happy as one earning £95,000 a year who hardly ever saw their friends and relatives. (‘Why true friendship is as good as an £85,000 rise’, Daily Mail, 1 May 2007.)

This ‘research’ is said to have been carried out by an Institute of the University of London, so it may be presumed that it, and all concerned in it, were supported by money (freedom) confiscated from taxpayers (individuals).

How meaningful is this ‘research’? The measure of ‘happiness’ used is how individuals would rate their ‘happiness’ when asked about it, knowing what the prevailing social views on ‘happiness’ are and what they ought to say. And, even then, it is only statistical. Who but a collective body, or someone with a vested interest in promoting collectivist ideology, would have had enough interest in obtaining this dubious information to pay for it to be done?

These days statistical ‘research’ is taken to justify universal prescriptions, leaving out any possibility of individual differences (or at least, any possibility of respect for individual differences.) ‘Friends’ are supposed to be people who make you feel reconciled to your frustrated position in life, not those who help you in your efforts to improve it.

On not doing physics

Remembering about my physics research thesis topic that was turned down (I used some bits of the initial material in the philosophy thesis, which I would have expected to develop more extensively in a physics thesis) I realised that that is another department of my independent university that has been kept inactive all this time, and should not have been, in some unusual sense of the word ‘should’.

As the preliminary mathematical developments that would be necessary fully to develop my ideas have been carefully neglected, in much the same way that opportunities to observe psychological/physiological correlates have been, I could easily keep several research assistants fully occupied. Although the mathematical developments have been only very partially made, computer techniques have been developed which could handle them much better than at the time of my rejected thesis topic. Although I could see, 50 years ago, what I would like to do, it would have been very heavy weather at that time, for a single person working without the more recently developed computer techniques, and I could not have got very far in a two-year thesis, even if I had been allowed to do it.

So that, the physics department of my independent university, is another department that could have been being productive all this time, and could start being so any time that anyone should see fit to finance it on an adequate scale – i.e. allowing for a residential college environment with full ancillary staff for at least the senior people working in the department. (One residential college would be adequate for the senior staff of several research departments.)

Are my books ideological anathema?

This is a comment from someone to one of my books, and to the letter written by Fabian which he found in it. This buyer of Advice to Clever Children sent a message via Fabian’s blog.

I recently bought Celia Greens 'Advice for Clever Children' from a dealer on Amazon. In the book I found a letter written by a certain 'Fabian Wadel' adressed to the Librarian of the Institute of Education at the University of London which says;

"We enclose two complimentary copies of books by Dr Celia Green, which we hope you will accept as gifts to your library" and, "We hope the books may be of particular interest to young people of undergraduate age."

This is dated September 17 2004. I have it now in front of me. Is it at least plausible to surmise that the librarian took one look at this book and was so freaked out by the content that it was immediately donated to another book dealer and put up for sale?

Having read the book myself I can tell you that — if what you describe is true — any academic library would rather accept 10 complimentary copies of Mein Kampf than anything by Celia Green — an ideological closed shop after all.

My comments

Thank you for sending the information about what happened to our presentation of books to the London University Department of Education. It is no surprise; we are heavily censored and it costs us a lot of money (and of course, effort) to get even a few books out into the world.

As usual, my aims and objects are diametrically opposed to those of society at large, so far as I am concerned. I need my books to reach the widest possible audience because those who might give us any assistance, by work, money or moral support, are clearly extremely few and far between. Society at large, and practically every individual representative of it, wants me to remain as inconspicuous, inactive, and as nearly as possible non-existent at possible.

Asking libraries for our books might be of more use to us than buying them, unless (or perhaps even if) you are a person whose bookshelf is frequently visited by other people. But what motive could anyone have for making the exertion involved in asking for one of our books at a library?

You seem to take a very dim view of the objectivity and openness to criticism of academics; of course you are quite right to do so, but the academic world is supposed to be passionately devoted to freedom of expression, as I read only a few days ago, so shouldn’t you sound a bit surprised, or even shocked?

Doing the washing-up

(copy of a letter)

You commented on the fact that "Mary Poppins", as you called our incipient potential associate, did some washing-up before she went away.

This is indeed a loaded issue and I will try to explain our position a bit more, because I hope that you, like any other permanent contact that we acquire, may one day pass on some of the right ideas about us to somebody who might be interested enough to come and work here themselves, even if only part-time or temporarily. Although in fact we could easily make use of several full-time people and suffer badly from our shortage of manpower.

In exile from an academic career, I have had no option but to work towards setting up an institutional environment of my own, and the most essential part of a college or research department is the domestic and caretaking staff for keeping the environment going within which intellectual work may eventually become possible.

So we do express the hope that anyone who comes to visit in order to get to know the situation better will be prepared to lend a hand with whatever work may be going on, and this is likely to be domestic, as it is not possible for people who are new to the situation to contribute constructively to office work or word-processing associated with correspondence or books in preparation.

I spent a long time talking to the two people who came, as one has to do with potential associates, and I talked quite a lot about work we had done in the past and how it was only lack of funding that had prevented us from continuing to develop various things. Also we gave them a meal at the pub and paid for their taxi back, because I do not want potential associates to feel out of pocket after coming to spend time here.

But in fact the washing up was all either of them had done on two visits, the first one quite long, during which I had spent several hours giving them information which they seemed to want to have, mostly about areas of research which I do not like thinking about. I have no interest in empty speculation when the data cannot be increased by actual research. I mean, when I am not being able to do any research — although some fictitious theorising, and fraudulent or rubbishy ‘research’, may be being done by other people with academic status and salaries.

If I did not stipulate that visitors have to be prepared to do a modicum of whatever is necessary, our lives could be totally occupied with entertaining people who are prepared to waste our time. And don’t worry, I never get a good deal out of it, usually I get an even worse one, because most of those who come to visit take care not to stay long enough to do even that much work, or for me to start saying anything I want to say.

In case you think we have a lot of money to spend on garden plants, remember that we are outcast intellectuals, the true underclass of the egalitarian society. We cannot afford holidays, or only the shortest and cheapest, occasionally, so we think it best to make our gardens interesting so we will not suffer too much from staying at home throughout the year. Also this has the effect of enhancing the value of our houses when we come to sell them.

You know I would still be willing to lend you some money and help you make capital gains in a Pillings ISA, if you would ever like that. This is something I am prepared to do for any fairly permanent contact that we can manage to get.

It is very difficult to get people to realise that there could be any advantages in coming to work here because the modern world is anti-capitalist (as well as anti-ability).

In fact, since we are attempting to make academic careers without being able to derive any status or salary from society by giving tutorials and lectures or by doing research, we have to substitute investment for those things as a source of income, and it is a very stressful and time-consuming way of making a living. Also of course we have to pay for many facilities for ourselves which non-exiled academics are provided with. Oxbridge colleges still provide their resident academics with automatic dining hall (which implies washing up) facilities. In addition to which we have to pay for the publication of our own books. When I finished my D.Phil. philosophy thesis, Oxford University Press refused to publish it, which it would have been almost certain to do if I had been a Professor or even held any lesser appointment. My thesis was radically undermining of a large part of what is being produced worldwide by salaried academic philosophers – there are said to be 10,000 of them in America alone.

Therefore, although I got the D.Phil. for the thesis, it was largely ignored, except that its ideas were reproduced by some salaried philosophers, twisting them to produce a quite different conclusion.

Of course, you may say that the reason I do not have a Professorship, or any other statusful and salaried academic appointment, is that it was always clear that I was liable to write theses which would not be found congenial by a majority of modern philosophers.

"The need for balance" and other euphemisms

... in the end there is no substitute for regulators such as the Financial Authority’s Callum McCarthy, a man who knows how to balance the need for intervention against Ronald Reagan’s warning: “Don’t just do something, stand there”. (Irwin Stelzer, The Sunday Times, 21 January 2007.)

My comments

This is what you might call ‘praising interventionism with faint damnation’ and that is as far as any criticism of the modern ideology goes, to the extent it can be found at all.

We at Oxford Forum are the only people attempting to publish the radical criticism that is really needed and so our books and, indeed, our existence, are censored and suppressed. There is no possibility of the downfall of civilisation being averted, reversion to a genuinely free market situation is not possible. Nevertheless we should be able to publish contrarian points of view on a scale more commensurate with the problem.

And I should be able to set up a Department of Philosophy, sub-Department Ethics and Political Theory, to make the world aware of the unexamined assumptions that go into all the pernicious pseudo-philosophy that is currently supposed to constitute the whole of what can be put forward in those areas.

Doing rubbish research

(copy of a letter)

I have to be awfully careful, when I am talking to you, not to appear to support your (i.e. everybody’s) underlying misinterpretations of my position.

Well now, when I said that the recognition of my priority in the field of lucid dream research had never done me any good, you suggested that I might have been invited to work with one of these nitwits with academic status and salary, and I pointed out that it would have been a complete waste of time and what was needed was research on a large scale carried out under my direction. That, perhaps, sounded dangerously close to the idea that I preferred to do something outside of a university career that was interesting and of real progressive value.

Now actually there has never been any question of my being able to do anything for such purist reasons. Everything I did since being thrown out fifty years ago has been motivated only by my need for career progression, as rapid as possible, towards Professorial status and salary and towards the living conditions of a residential college (hotel environment). I was certainly prepared to do any rubbish research that was possible in my atrocious conditions if it was going to secure career progression towards restarting a liveable life.

If I had been offered a position doing rubbish research in a university within the constraints of some academic’s ideas I would have asked myself whether it would lead to career progression towards my goals. I would also have had to ask myself whether it would be possible for me to do what was proposed. Doing single-channel experimental work myself, without a research assistant, would be only marginally possible if I was doing it in the best residential college circumstances, although it could be imagined that I would accept an appointment to do such a thing if and only if it was a way of obtaining those circumstances. I had always accepted that some of my time in an academic career might have to go to waste on teaching etc. in order to secure the circumstances and status of an acceptable life.

In my present constricted circumstances, which are still far from providing me with an adequate institutional environment within which to do even the smallest amount of work in a satisfactory way, small scale experimental work has been, and still is, out of the question. That is why I have not done further work on lucid dreams, or on any of the other fields in which I attempted to establish that a field of possible research existed for which I might (should) be provided with the circumstances to enable me to develop it. (Whether as a Professor in a university, or working in my own academic institute to produce work which would eventually establish my claim to a Professorship.)

There is no possibility whatever of any work that I can do in my present constrained circumstances being of any interest to me, or of my being able to derive any sense of wellbeing from so constricted a life.

Dawkins and Nietzsche

Dawkins tells us that God is dead, but he is a little late. Nietzsche said this over a century ago, seeing that traditional religious and metaphysical ways of thinking were on the wane - leaving a void that science could not fill, and endangering civilisation.

In the early 1880s, when he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche arrived at a conception of human life and possibility – and with it, of value and meaning – that he believed could overcome the Schopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism that he saw as outcomes of the collapse of traditional modes of religious and philosophical interpretation. He prophesied a period of nihilism in the aftermath of their decline and fall; but this prospect deeply distressed him. He was convinced of the untenability of the “God hypothesis”, and indeed of all the religious and metaphysical interpretations of the world and ourselves; and yet he was well aware that the very possibility of the affirmation of life was at stake, and required more than the mere abandonment of all such “lies” and “fictions”. He took the basic challenge of philosophy now to be to reinterpret life and the world along more tenable lines that would also overcome nihilism. (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy)

Civilisation has destroyed itself in giving birth to the new religion of socialist materialism for which Dawkins speaks. Dawkins is, of course, attacking a straw man in criticising those who still entertain an unsophisticated kind of God and a creationist myth.

In reality, Dawkins is attacking something subtler and more profound than Christianity. He is attacking the individualism that still presumes to relate itself to reality rather than to other people, or to society.

What are universities for?

Letter from Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University to the Financial Times:

Sir,

Competition in higher education is an excellent thing, but some of those quoted in your recent articles do not understand universities. A successful university has to make losses. For that reason, it must be supported by philanthropy or taxation.

First, our universities do not exist to discover how to make a quieter car, a brighter lipstick, or even a more informative newspaper. That is what companies are for. Much discussion in the UK over the past decade has suggested how valuable it is for universities to create commercial spin-offs and to license new patents. Such views are wrong.

Second, universities are not high schools for people who are older than 18. They do not exist primarily to educate.

Third, the main role of universities in a society is to find out new ideas and give them away. It is therefore a mistake to tell universities to make money or encourage them to set up private-training arms. Their job is to uncover those things that matter to the emotional prosperity of our world but that intrinsically will not be discovered by commercial organisations.

The carmaker and the lipstick designer both rely on basic chemistry. Yet they would never have paid for the periodic table. Society needs universities, moreover, as centres of wisdom that, when a globe is heating up, or a war is being considered, or a public health service is being designed, can do what they and no commercial organisation can do – to provide answers that are disinterested.

Outstanding universities cannot be for profit. They matter more than that.

In practice, a university exists for the promotion of an ideology. It does not exist so that people can get qualifications that will be of any real use to them, and it does not exist for the advancement of science. It exists as a centre for the dissemination of ideas which will contribute to the 'emotional prosperity of the world' - i.e. the downfall of civilisation and the abolition of individual liberty.

According to Professor Oswald, a university is a 'centre of wisdom' that is totally 'disinterested'. Those concerned in disseminating the wisdom are well provided with salary and status as socially-appointed disseminators of wisdom, and are able to be undistracted by a need to derive any other benefits for themselves or for any other individual from the application of their advice to important arrangements. In other words, they are completely free to accelerate the rush to destruction, on a global basis, of the human race.

’We appeal for £1m as initial funding for a social science department in our unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish analyses of the unexamined assumptions underlying current discussion of the philosophy of education.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Centralisation and the Nobel Prize

It is very difficult to say anything about higher level psychology without it leading to misinterpretations. For one thing it is very layered.

As I said, I got centralised by accepting that I had lost my destiny, I couldn’t make society give me any of the things of which it had seen fit to deprive me; I didn’t think that I ought to be able to, because other people were not under my control. I could not prevent everyone from being against me if they wanted to be.

There was nobody in my life any more. What mattered to me most was that if I could ever manage to get a Nobel Prize I wouldn’t be able to get anything out of it because I had no respect for the sort of people who awarded it as sources of significance or recognition. But I had to think I wouldn't, in order to be free to go on pursuing it in such hopeless circumstances. I was going to go on for ever pursuing the things that I might once have had easily; I still did not want anything except the open-ended mental landscape that I had once had.

Similarly, however much I had thought that my interests in finiteness were not worth defending, this only made my frustration the more intense at being in exile from academia and from opportunity, and I was appalled at my degradation among the Professors at the Society for Psychical Research in being deprived of the status which I should already have had myself for several years, and being treated as a statusless, young and female secretary. This prevented me absolutely from identifying with my social image in their eyes, or caring what any of them said or thought about me, and I could only apply all the drive I had to working towards reinstatement in a proper Professorship as soon as possible, even if the only ways I had of working towards it were useless in the eyes of society.

I believe the approved method for becoming reconciled to your position is not to think about the important issues, pretend you don’t mind and you haven’t anything against anybody who messed up your life, pursue beauty or intensity or happiness in a vacuum, and interact with lots of people. This is supposed to give you some sort of feeling of belonging or being valued, or something.

Dawkins, Oxford ideology, and God

Oxford is the ideological centre of this country and Richard Dawkins continues to attack a very crucial element in pre-higher level psychology. In fact the whole of modern ideology is designed to eliminate any possibility of higher-level psychology.

Some time ago, Richard Dawkins declared it is more harmful to bring up a child as a Catholic than to abuse it sexually.* This is because Catholics are supposed to believe, and to teach children to believe, that certain things are the case which cannot be experimentally verified or (which is actually more important, although he does not say it) verified to be in agreement with the social consensus.

What Dawkins is really asserting, on behalf of the modern ideology, is that:
a) there is no God in any sense (other than perhaps that of ‘society’ acting as a god-substitute) and
b) nothing inconceivable can exist.

He wants to eliminate entirely any tendency to notice, however fleetingly, the uncertainties actually present in the existential situation, which might possibly develop into an interest in reality in a sense other than ‘other people’.

It is true that people of his ilk sometimes refer to ‘reality’ in the sense of the physical world, and life forms other than human, as something which gives them feelings of sublimity and transcendence. People such as Dawkins tend to say things like: ‘Why should anyone need an unrealistic religion, when we can lose ourselves in admiring the wonders of nature, which is so much more special than we are ourselves, and makes us feel thoroughly unimportant’.

Actually Catholicism does, or at least did, tend to provide people with some openness to the idea that there might be an extended reality beyond their immediate sense data. Of course this was combined with some psychological drawbacks which were designed to prevent anyone from going too far in the direction of taking an interest in reality, but this could hardly be otherwise in a system designed for mass consumption.

Certainly the psychological drawbacks are no more than are provided to those brought up with the more implicit belief systems of various forms of atheism.

Explicit beliefs are much easier to consider objectively and possibly to reject than are implict beliefs which are being foisted on the schoolchildren of socialist and communist countries, to some extent by systems of compulsory education, before these children can be expected think for themselves. Even as adults they usually do not think for themselves anyway. Independence of mind and analytical thought occur rarely, even in high-IQ adults. But it is certainly much harder work to see through a belief in society, since this involves defining the implicit beliefs before you can criticise them, than to see through a belief in God, in the sense which Richard Dawkins ascribes to that concept.

The God of Richard Dawkins is a loose association of characteristics derived from mass religions, such as Catholicism. This God has directed the course of development of life forms, must be available to receive and answer prayers and forgive sins, and is also supposed to have strong feelings about the ways in which human beings treat one another.

This is not necessarily a bad sort of God for a mass religion to have, but it is easily made to sound absurd by the fact that evolutionary processes can be accounted for on the basis of the laws of physics, and that when people do crude experiments on the efficacy of prayer, these are usually inconclusive. (For example, you have some people in hospital prayed for by a number of people and triumphantly demonstrate that a matching number of hospital patients who are not prayed for do not fare any worse.)

So, of course, it is easy for Richard Dawkins to show that there is no experimental evidence for the existence of God, and hence that it is harmful to bring children up to believe that God does exist. What he, and the modern ideology in general, are really aiming at is to make it impossible, or socially taboo, to allow mental space to any speculative ideas about reality beyond the world of everyday experience, as it is normally experienced.

It is supposed to be damaging to bring people up to believe in the infallibility of the Pope (if they still are) or to have to tell their doings to a priest in order to be absolved from their sins. It is, on the other hand, quite OK to bring them up to believe in the infallibility of the state and its agents, who supervise and interfere in every aspect of their lives and the lives of their parents, taking them into ‘care’ if their parents are not assessed as having a suitable outlook.

There is to be a massive data base on which will be recorded every particular ever observed about every child born in this country by any agent of the collective, so that in their future lives all authorised agents of the collective will be fully informed of any assessment, motivated or otherwise, that has ever been foisted upon these children, and their evil tendencies can be monitored and checked (if considered necessary) by drugging or incarceration when they reach a more mature age.


* The Dubliner magazine, October 2002

Degree-taking a dead loss

(copy of a letter)

Well, you may say a second class degree in maths is some good, and of course that was what everyone wanted to make me accept at the time (instead of offering me any help) when I was just aware of being thrown out empty-handed. But the fact was that since it did not get me into the sort of academic career which I absolutely needed to have (residential, with hotel facilities, and socially statusful, such as a Fellowship or Professorship) it was useless to me. I hadn’t got anything out of doing the work for it either, because it had for many years been a case of working without any motivation, in fact in a state of nightmarish stress which reduced my functionality to the lowest possible ebb.

If you neither get anything out of the experience, in fact you get negative experience, and you are left without any usable qualification to provide you with entry to the sort of career which you need to have, and without any tolerable way of supporting yourself at all, then doing a degree is a dead loss. And the B.Litt and D.Phil were, in neither case, positive experiences. They were both just attempts to struggle back towards the sort of career which I needed to be having by doing some tedious and pointless work in bad circumstances, and they produced no result in providing me with academic position or salary, or even access to funding to do research in my own independent academic institution. So all my degrees, so far as I am concerned, were a dead loss, although the maths was the most agonising.

Why people didn't want me to do science

(copy of a letter)

You once asked why everyone was so opposed to my doing science (and also you might have asked why they were so opposed to my getting qualifications in several subjects as an earlier age than other people). Well, of course, the opposition was expressed by everyone talking as if it was a foregone conclusion that it was out of the question, I mean, never mentioning it as a possibility. I think this is approved technique for agents of the ideology. They are supposed to listen to what the victim has to say, reinforce whatever is in line with the approved interpretations, and then go on talking as if he had never said the unacceptable bits. This avoids ‘confrontation’, is not supposed to be ‘forcing’ the right attitudes upon him, but is expected to ‘help’ him (eventually) to adopt the right outlook on his position in society.

Well, one explanation of why everyone was so opposed to my doing science:

That wicked woman at the Glasgow University Department of Educational Studies, speaking about gifted children, said, ‘If they do everything easily, they are never challenged’. I did everything easily, and expected to go on doing so. This was a perfectly realistic expectation. I could see very easily what was needed for taking degrees in sciences, languages, and anything else except maths, where I was not provided with the right textbooks, which possibly did not exist.

Mother Mary Angela expressed an attitude very similar to that of the wicked woman at Glasgow. It was supposed to be bad for me that I could do everything I tried to do easily and without effort; at least without the sort of struggling effort that is needed to do things against the grain, in circumstances in which motivation is impossible.

Supposing it was considered essential that I should be ‘challenged’, and that the moral (or social) desirability of this overwhelmed any consideration of whether I might eventually be left with no usable qualification at all, there was only one way of bringing this about. I had to be made to do maths against my will on a ridiculously protracted timescale, in circumstances that I would never have chosen or continued to tolerate as a free agent, and prevented from getting qualifications in anything else to alleviate my position.

You seemed to agree that ‘you don’t have to be the greatest mathematician ever to do physics or chemistry’, so I suppose that is steering me in the direction of thinking that I am really inadequate at maths but I can still do physics or chemistry for my own ‘interest’, as an academic outcast living in constriction and degradation. Doing things for ‘interest’ is the socially approved compensation for an outcast. I do not accept that anything that happened shed the slightest light on how ‘good’ I was at maths, since it only shed light on how badly I could be made to perform, after several years of a war of attrition, at work set by hostile tutors with whom I did not wish to have anything to do. If I had been a free agent, even if only in that one respect, I would have preferred to dispense with tutorials and take my chance on preparing myself for the final degree examination.