Fat cats and starved cats

text of a letter to an academic

Everything goes from bad to worse, as it is intended to do.

Professor David Eastwood, the vice-chancellor of Birmingham University, has been getting £419,000 a year, and others in comparable positions something similar.

If my education had not been so deliberately ruined, or if recognition had been given to my ability to do things whether or not I had been allowed to get paper qualifications in them, I could easily have got into one of those positions. What a difference! Between several hundred thousand a year on the one hand; and no salary at all, not even eligibility for so-called ‘social security’, on the other.

That is the difference between someone who has risen to the top of the educational system which favours mediocrity, and someone who has failed to make their way successfully through the educational obstacle course.

I thought the powers that be were not supposed to like ‘inequality’. When I was at the Society for Psychical Research it was still supposed that the Oppressive State was aiming at ‘equality of income’. I remember Salter at the SPR, a person of independent means, asking me if I did not agree that equality of income was a grim and unpleasant idea. In those days there was still at least a minority of people who did not think that aiming at equalising incomes was automatically virtuous and desirable. Terms such as ‘fair’ and ‘fairness’ had not yet become buzzwords.

Let me know of any vice-chancellorships or similar that you see falling vacant, so that I can apply for them.

Yours, etc.

The departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

Professorship in Education

Below is the text of a letter of application to Oxford University recently sent with regard to a professorship in Education.

Dear ...

I am applying for the Professorship of Education being offered by the Department of Sociology in association with Green Templeton College, as advertised in the University Gazette, and attach my CV, which includes the contact details of three referees, together with notes on my CV and a testimonial from the late Professor H J Eysenck.

As my position is an anomalous one, I would be grateful if you could read the enclosed notes on my CV, as they give information about how I came to be in this position. As you will see, my CV is one that was prepared to go with an application for an appointment in philosophy, rather than education. I cannot in fact comply with all the criteria listed in the requirements for the post. However, I can comply with some of them.

I have decades of administrative and fund-raising experience as the Director of the Institute for Psychophysical Research. I also have completely original insights into what is called the educational process, due to the unique and extreme circumstances of my early life and education. The introduction to my book Advice to Clever Children provides some background on how I have been exposed to the inner machinery of the educational system, from being observed by educational experts as a case study at the ages of 4 and 11, to experiencing the contrasting approaches and outlooks of private and state schooling. The latter provided me with knowledge of the underlying motivations of those that chose to teach; having teachers for both of my parents doubtless also contributed.

I am in fact capable of carrying out research, teaching, and administration in areas in which I do not have paper qualifications, owing to my own ability to learn new topics very fast and very thoroughly in any situation in which I need to learn them.

For realistic information about my life, abilities, and situation, please see the Preface ‘How this Book came to be Written’ to my book The Lost Cause, a copy of which is available at http://celiagreen.com/thelostcause-preface.pdf. I apologise for the anomalies in my application, which arise from the extreme social misplacement which has resulted from my ruined education. There is no recognition of the predicament of the exiled academic.

I am making this application in spite of being above the normal age for a Professorship because the process of recovering from a ruined education is extremely slow, in fact there is no provision for it to be possible at all. There was a time lag of decades before the work which I had done in exile from an academic career led to my being offered testimonials from senior academics who were willing to act as my referees. After still further delay, one of the areas of pioneering work which I had initiated (lucid dreaming) came to be recognised as a suitable topic for doctorates, yet this still did not lead to my reinstatement in a normal academic career.

The enclosed notes can give little impression of what I would have achieved by now if I had had a normal life, i.e. one that was normal for a person like me. As it is, they are a statement of how efficiently the expression of my abilities has been prevented by the society in which I have been living. Academics advising me have often said, ‘Don’t say anything about your ability, only about what you have done’, and ‘Don’t mention your unofficial teaching and research.’ But society can prevent one from doing anything officially, i.e. within a normal academic position, and is what one does outside its auspices in an attempt to regain reinstatement, automatically to be regarded as disqualified from consideration?

Apart from the fact that getting me back into a normal position as a senior academic would be remedying an extreme anomaly and injustice, there are strong reasons for supposing that the field of Education would be benefitted by a Professor who is prepared to take into account factors other than those which have supposedly been considered by those who have done research in this field over the preceding decades. Clearly their insights into the situation have not created any solution to the current situation, and in practice the results of the current educational system are deteriorating rather than the reverse.

So the academic world should consider there is a need for work to be done under the auspices of someone who does not have a vested interest in the rationalisations which are currently fashionable. Those who were successful in entering normal academic careers to which, no doubt, they felt they were suited, did have such a vested interest.

The attitude to the outcast of the socially approved academic system should, in itself, be the subject of research. When one is outcast, destitute, and socially disgraced, one is described, amazingly, as being ‘free to follow one’s interests’, it being supposed that a university appointment would be a restriction on one’s freedom.

It should not be held against me that I have published fewer papers than other applicants. The exiled academic, struggling to build up an institutional environment from scratch without an income, and with no eligibility for income support when not receiving a salary, lives in circumstances which negate the possibility of carrying out research of any kind, even leaving out of account that if one did manage to produce publishable research it would have little chance of acceptance by academic journals, on account of one’s lack of an academic appointment.

I give the referees I do, as best I can, because it should be regarded as amazing, and highly creditable, that I am able to give any at all. However I expect that my referees will observe the usual conventions that (a) one’s case is not to be considered highly anomalous and in need of redress, that (b) only work done by the holders of official academic positions counts as academic, and that (c) there is supposed to be no such thing as ability which is transferable from one field of intellectual activity to another. Therefore they can do no more than damn me with faint praise for the few pieces of work which I have been able to do within the restrictive parameters of what is regarded as ‘relevant’.

Finally, I should like to make a statement. It may be that you reject this application out of hand, on the basis that it does not meet the ‘essential requirements’, or that I otherwise fail to fit the University’s idea of what an education professor ought to be like. However, it is my belief that if the University really wanted to contribute to the advancement of education, rather than merely occupy a prestigious role in what has developed under the label of ‘academic educational theory’, it would take this application very seriously indeed.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Celia Green

Lucid dreams, Disney, and a new philosophy department

copy of a letter to a salaried philosopher

I suppose a Philosophy Department would be the most obvious thing for my incipient (squashed and suppressed) independent university to start with. It is incredible that no university anywhere has taken any interest, nor any sufficiently wealthy individual.

On the face of it, a Philosophy Department is cheaper to set up than a Science Department, which makes it less good from our point of view. The larger the scale of the operation, the easier to include a dining hall and kitchens, and live-in staff.

A further shocking reminder of our continued lack of support (not to mention hostility towards us) is provided by the fact that lucid dreams are now part of the popular culture, as well as continuing to provide an area of research for many salaried academics. A recent episode of a popular new Disney cartoon series, evidently expected to reach a wide audience, starts with one of the main characters having some odd experiences, then saying, ‘Oh, this must be one of those lucid dreams.’

I was shocked when I first found that lucid dreams were being taken up by various American academics without the slightest benefit to me, and I have been more amazed the longer lucid dreams have continued to receive attention (of a kind – though not of such a kind as to advance understanding of them, or to provide the slightest opportunity to any of us).

As you know, I worked on them in bad circumstances as the best thing I could find with which to regain entry to a suitable academic career.

I do not think you, or any other senior academic, should find the continuance of our cold-shouldered position acceptable.

David Cameron is proposing to spend about half a billion pounds on advising ‘problem families’, and it is long odds that this will do no good to anyone, in fact it may make things somewhat worse. But that amount of money, although small for setting up a full-scale university with several research departments, would enable me and some other downtrodden people with high IQs to use our abilities to be productive.

Oxford Professorship in Psychology: not even shortlisted

In response to my application for the Oxford Professorship in Psychology I received a brief rejection letter from the University's Personnel Officer. Herewith the text of my response.

As it said in my letter, I hereby appeal to any senior academic to come to visit me at my impoverished independent university, to discuss ways of supporting me, so that I do not go on being prevented from contributing to the intellectual life of my time.

I continue to apply for professorships and other posts. I still need to start on my forty-year academic career with full salary and status at professorial level.

Dear ...

Thank you for your letter of 6 May. It appears I was not even shortlisted for the Professorship of Psychology being offered by the Department of Experimental Psychology in association with Magdalen, for which I made an application in March.

It is an indication of the oppressiveness of modern society that nobody considers it their business to enquire into the predicament of the victims of social outrage and support them in recovering from it.

And yet, not long ago, a teenager with an IQ said to be 130, currently in prison, was awarded damages against an education authority which had failed to provide him with enough intellectual stimulation. This was regarded as having led to his turning to crime instead of to gainful employment. I realise this provides no grounds for my entertaining any hope that I could sue for loss of my earnings from an academic career as well as my father’s loss of salary as a headmaster when he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance.

Normally in this situation I would ask you if you would let me come to see you to explain my position, to make it more likely that you will remember me if a suitable appointment arises. However, I realise that it would be unlikely to do me any good if you did grant me an interview with you. Nevertheless, I think that you should wish to come to see me to find out what help you could give me in returning to a normal position in society.

One form of help which you could certainly give me, even without coming to see me, would be money. Without a salary, and having to provide myself with an institutional environment as best I can, it is almost impossible for me to write books expressing my views, to publish those which have already been written and stockpiled awaiting editing, or to carry out any of the research which I have now been prevented from doing for several decades, and which I need to do to enhance my claim on restoration to the sort of career which I should have been having all along.

In your position, I would probably be happy to contribute half of my salary on a regular basis if I heard of someone in so grievously anomalous a situation as mine is.

This is a standing invitation to you or any other senior academic, to come to visit me at my impoverished independent university, to discuss ways of supporting me, morally or financially, so that I do not continue to be prevented from contributing to the intellectual life of my time, as a headmistress (who perhaps lost her job for the crime of allowing me to be too happy at her school) once said that I was certain to do.

However, I am not inviting you or anyone else to come without warning, and an appointment would have to be made well in advance, and accompanied by a donation of at least £5,000 towards the support of my institution, or to me personally. In fact, it would be better if made to me personally, as our affairs are too constricted and under-staffed to accept any additional burden in the way of processing and accounting for donations.

I do not expect you to come, although I think you should, but a donation of that size would at least prevent a visit, if it were to happen, from being an entirely fruitless drain on our time and energy.

Yours sincerely,

etc.

The real reasons for a ‘failure to fulfil’

copy of a letter

I was talking with Fabian, and asked him why he thought it was that there was such a resistance to the idea of reparation being made to a person who had been placed in an unsuitable and unacceptable position as a result of their ruined ‘education’.

Fabian told me about somebody who wrote rudely in response to his blog that ‘society does not owe anyone an academic career’.

I said, ‘But I think it does, if it has taken over the running of someone’s education, so that they have no control over it, and thus end up deprived of the sort of career they need to have, which they could easily have got for themselves if left alone to get on with it.’

Fabian seemed to agree but said, ‘I suppose there is an idea that it is somehow morally wrong to sue public institutions for reparation, although perfectly acceptable to sue private ones.’

As I have said before, I am sure that suing would be a waste of time and energy because judges would be on the side of the ideology of the public institutions.

But individuals might (and should) realise that victims of the system who are regarded as beyond the pale for reparation by the collective, could and should be recognised as needing help from individuals to get back into a social and financial position approximating to that in which they should have been if not subjected to social interference.

An article in the Daily Mail (10 September 2011) about Simon Norton, the subject of the previous post, refers to a study of gifted children by researchers at Middlesex University.

Simon is, of course, far from the only brilliant child who has failed to live up to the enormous expectations placed upon him.

A study published last year found that out of 210 gifted children whose progress was followed into later life, only 3 per cent went on to fulfil their early potential.

Researchers from Middlesex University found that many failed to excel because of the way they were treated — often put under too much pressure and separated from their peer group so they found it difficult to make friends.

Researchers at Middlesex University are, of course, not academic exiles, and the interpretations they give of what went wrong with the lives of gifted children are the accepted and mostly fictitious ones.

Among the people with high IQs I know or have met who live in exile from society, I cannot think of any who would have ascribed their problems to ‘pressure’ or ‘high expectations’, even if none of them would have been so unequivocal as I would myself in ascribing the problems to the hostility of modern society towards exceptional ability.

If adequately funded, as it should be, the appropriate department of my suppressed and unrecognised independent university could publish, not only criticisms of such research as that done in Middlesex University, but also make studies of its own, taking other, more realistic, factors into account.

An uncomplaining, unfrustrated genius

Simon Norton is a former child prodigy, whose story superficially resembles mine. A book about him, The Genius in the Basement by Alexander Masters, was recently publicised in the Daily Mail.

Very precocious, very high IQ, but now exiled from academia and living as a recluse. What went wrong? He is quoted as saying vaguely that perhaps he did not apply himself enough. No suggestion that it was hostility that threw him out, or that he is suffering agonies of frustration now.

But then in some respects his story is very different from mine.

His family were wealthy, with a long-standing business. He went to Eton and became a lecturer at Cambridge.

He was, apparently, only interested in maths, and that probably makes him a sort of person by whom people feel less threatened than they do by me.

Even now that he has been thrown out, he does not complain of suffering. He is supported by an income from his family and by rents from tenants in a house which he owns. He makes no attempt to provide himself with a hotel environment but tries to avoid the problems of material living by subsisting below the respectable level, rather than by working up to an above-average lifestyle. Allegedly, his clothes are dirty and his diet restricted. He hates shopping and does it in a perfunctory rush. He does not try to employ a housekeeper to do it for him.

Perhaps this is supposed to demonstrate that the most precocious and initially successful can be thrown out of a university environment without it leading to them complaining about how much they are being prevented from doing.

The Tavistock Clinic

copy of a letter

It is certainly not the case (as people have often assumed) that we did not want people to have outside careers. Charles McCreery was very dubious and critical of what was going on in modern psychiatry and experimental psychology and therefore was not much attracted by either, but the penniless dropout option was even worse and he certainly never considered it.

I had set up the Institute as a way of getting back into a recognised academic career for myself in which so far I had failed.

This made it all the more desirable that new associates should have the best careers they could, so as eventually to lend their support as statusful academics to my applications for re-entry.

Everything depended on getting enough money for an adequate institutional environment. Certainly the objective of our fund-raising was to set up a research institute large enough for research to be carried on within it with adequate living circumstances for intellectuals, the research being of a kind that would constitute a claim on recognition by socially authorised academia. If we had got adequately set up, it seemed a possibility that Charles might work with us doing research, instead of (at least in the first instance) having a salaried career outside. Then one would have been considering how we could aim the work we were doing at getting a D.Sc for each of us to stake a claim to university status as a senior level.

Professor H.H. Price, however, had been unhelpful when I talked to him about what qualified for a D.Sc. Work had to be published in the official journals; but could it be, if one did not have a university appointment? He did not say. And he offered no help in obtaining either funding for the research or a university appointment.

Everything depended on how well we could get set up financially, as the enemy realised, blocking every attempt to raise money, and slandering Charles so that he would be disinherited.

Our lives were made so difficult that, in spite of the lack of money, Charles did not pursue possibilities at either the Tavistock Clinic or the Department of Experimental Psychology. Due to the constant hostility, the merest physical survival became a problem.

Then of course we could be (and were) represented as preferring to live in poverty instead of having normal careers. If we had been well enough set up to do research in adequate circumstances, Charles might have preferred doing that to what was open to him either as a clinical psychologist or doing a D.Phil at the Department. But nothing could have been worse than what happened; all ways ahead blocked, impoverished and besieged. Well, I suppose what would have been even worse would have been if they had been able to pin something on one of us, so that we were at their mercy as criminal wrongdoers. I am sure they would have liked to.

As it was, they could only pretend that we had deliberately chosen our position as impoverished outcasts, on account of some weird ‘interests’.

Somerville College, of course, represented me as ‘free to follow my interests’, and Charles’s family placed similar interpretations on him.

Forty years later, we are still essentially facing the same problems. We are seeking to restore our rightful positions in mainstream academia, as well as seeking funding for our institution, but are still blocked by the hostility of modern society to genuine ability, and to genuine independence and real impartiality. Of course, the hostility takes the form of the spurious theory that anything worth supporting is already going on inside universities, and anything outside should be stigmatised.

The Wardenship of New College

Three years ago my colleague Dr Charles McCreery, as an alumnus of New College, nominated me for the position of Warden of New College. His application was not accepted and I was not on the list of nominees circulated for voting.

This is the letter from someone at New College, turning down the nomination. Charles did not make any reply at the time because we thought the effort would be wasted on a single person, and we should reply only in the form of an open letter which could go on my blog.

Dear Dr McCreery,

Thank you for your letter about your colleague Dr Celia Green. You were unable to find the further details of the Wardenship on the College website because they were removed when the deadline for applications passed on 11 January. From the information you've provided, it appears that Dr Green is 72 years old, putting her above the statutory retirement age for the post, which is 70. I'm afraid this means we will not be able to consider her.

It is only now, three years later, that I am managing to put a reply to this on the blog, which in itself shows how bad is our position in exile from society, and how effectively we are stifled and censored, although there are many areas to which we could and should be able to contribute.

The fact is that a rule about retirement age cannot be held to apply to someone who has been wrongfully deprived of even starting on a career. If an egregious injustice has been committed, then it may be necessary to break an artificial rule in rectifying it.

No rules were broken in ruining my career because there are no explicit rules about an obligation to provide a person in the ‘educational’ system with qualifications appropriate for the sort of career to which they are suited and which they need to have; their need to get started on it being made more urgent, and not less, by the passage of time. There are no explicit rules which the educational system breaks in not allowing them to obtain qualifications suitable to their ability, and, one may think, this is because the educational system has the express underlying purpose of destroying the lives of those with the greatest ability. Even if one does not think this, it indicates that the educational system is extremely dangerous.

Simon Cowell's £165m: is it enough?

Discussing the rivalry of two people called Simon Cowell and Simon Fuller, today's Mail on Sunday Review quotes someone as saying: ‘This is not about money – both men have more money than they could spend in their lifetimes.’ They are said to have £165m and £350m respectively. Well, that is taking a distinctly limited view of what they might want to do in their lifetimes.

Suppose, like me, they need to set up an independent university to be productive in many areas of research, starting with just one residential college, at least one scientific research department with laboratories, a few departments for purely intellectual research in philosophy, history, education, etc, and a university printing press to publish books. I do not think £350m would go all the way to setting up such an establishment and running it for long, as deriving an income from capital becomes ever more hazardous.

But do not get me wrong. I would be very pleased to be given any lesser amount and would make the most productive use of it that I could.

In the same issue of the Review, there is a two-page article by a salaried academic called Ian Morris about his own tendentious and fashionable views, reminding one of the burning need for a historical department to be set up under my auspices to publish criticisms of such views, along with a more realistic account of the rise and ongoing fall of Western civilisation. The article in the Review is introduced by this paragraph:

Last week, historian Ian Morris revealed how, at the end of the last Ice Age, a simple accident of geography gave the West the advantages that led to it dominating the world for the last two centuries. His argument forces us to accept that our success was nothing to do with superior brains, leaders or culture – and that the East is on the brink of taking over. That idea may be hard to get used to . . .

No, it isn’t hard to get used to. It has been prevalent for a long time. What would be hard to get used to would be the accounts of the situation that my history department would publish if it were able to. And it should be able to; only financial support is needed to make it so.

Professor Ian Morris is at Stanford University, where research on lucid dreams was carried out for decades by salaried academics, and may still be being carried out – without any funding being offered to me to enable me to continue contributing to the development of this field of research, which had been initiated by me.

Care workers back death tax

Apparently, care workers support bringing in a death tax.

That is to say,

families with assets over a set amount would have to find the money to pay a death duty bill – possibly meaning they have to sell their homes – even if they do not draw on social services care for their ageing relatives ... Ministers released a document insisting that social care experts and charities agreed with their plans for a tax. *

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

What is a ‘care worker’ anyway? People who are agents and beneficiaries of the oppressive society, being paid salaries out of confiscated (public) money to exercise power over people.

One might think, and I do think, that if you have state pensions at all they should not be means-tested and should be adequate to enable a retired person to employ whatever housekeeping and other help they need. But of course there should not be state pensions at all. Deterioration in the direction of total oppression was bound to take place once such a thing had been initiated, even if at the outset there was no suggestion of means-testing, and the possibility of being forced into subjection to ‘aid’ from the NHS did not arise, since there was no NHS.

But now, even if you manage to keep yourself at liberty and do not fall into the clutches of the NHS before you die, it is proposed that your estate should pay a levy on your death as a contribution to the bad and expensive ‘help’ which might have been meted out to you.

* Daily Mail, 20 February 2010 ‘Care workers back death tax, says Burnham'.

Further on nonsense research

In the article referred to in the previous post, we have an ‘academic’ with socially conferred status and salary paid out of taxpayers’ money, informing us that it is in our best interests not to have money which might make us free not to support ourselves by doing ‘jobs’. Evidently we should be overjoyed that the government takes away our money in taxes, so that it can be allocated to the support of salaried academics such as him, and to salaries for other jobs, doing which will give people a sense of purpose and self-esteem.

Who but policy-makers would be interested in such ‘research’ being carried out and published? People with money to spare would scarcely be interested in paying to find this out. Those without money to spare might conceivably like the rich to be told that they should wish to get rid of it by giving it to the poor ... but they would have no money to spare. Would a freelance intellectual, supported by his private income, be likely to find this a stimulating field of enquiry?

The government alone, stuffed as it is with policy-makers, has an interest in encouraging such pronouncements, and plenty of (taxpayers’) money available to do so.

Much academic ‘research’ has the underlying motive of justifying the extension of future confiscatory and interventionist policies. This has been true from a very early stage of the development of egalitarian Britain.

I am reminded of someone I knew, with an IQ little, if at all, above average, who became a lecturer in the new and imaginary subject of sociology at a polytechnic (now, of course, called a university). Sociology, like many new academic subjects, was designed to be accessible to people with low IQs, having little detailed informational content. My acquaintance was keen on Durkheim, whose work had much the same implications as the more modern ‘research’ drawn on by Dr Boyce. What makes people commit suicide, Durkheim said, was not disastrous changes in their objective (including financial) circumstances, but finding themselves isolated from social groups to which they formerly belonged. So, policy-makers, it doesn’t matter a bit if you make people’s circumstances worse, so long as you provide them with plenty of inexpensive group activities.

Mary Adams of the BBC used to expound the inspiring idea, which she had picked up in communist China, that domestic pets should not be allowed because their company prevented the elderly from becoming desperate enough to attend socially provided Day Centres where they could sit around (in a group) with other elderly people.

Tendentious pop psychology financed by taxpayers

The newspapers continue to be full of nonsense stories, some of them generated by the so-called university system. In Wednesday’s Daily Mail we have an expert on happiness, Dr Chris Boyce from Warwick University, described as an 'economic psychologist', telling us why the latest lottery winners are bound to be unhappy. Presumably his assertions are based on years of training, including studying other people’s 'research', which probably cost millions to carry out.

Boyce’s own research generated the conclusion that a course of psychological therapy costing £800 provides the same amount of 'happiness' as a £25,000 windfall.

Or, to put it another way, therapy is 31 times more cost-effective in making people happier than a lottery win. *

If I had done research which produced this apparent result, I would be highly dubious of it, and suspect that there was something flawed in my methodology. In Boyce’s case, he seems to have taken the result at face value.

Boyce has a number of theories about why large amounts of money ought to make people unhappy. It is not clear whether these theories have empirical support, or simply reflect his own prejudices. In any case, research which claims to be investigating 'happiness' is almost certain to be dodgy, because there is no good way of measuring such a thing. You cannot simply go by what people happen to answer on a particular day in response to a question which cannot itself avoid being biased in one way or another.

Boyce’s theories about what ought to make people happy, and what ought not, include the following:

(1) A lottery winner spending his money in a visible way will find that his neighbours will be 'consumed with envy'.

(2) If he moves to better premises, his old friends will be no less jealous, and his new milieu could 'well be less than welcoming'. 'How will he escape the sycophants and money-grubbers?'

(3) He will still be jealous of others with more status or money, even if there are now fewer of them.

(4) Salaried jobs appear to Boyce to be an essential part of every person’s life.

Now we don’t know if they particularly enjoyed those jobs, but we can be certain of this: in leaving them, they will lose yet another component of a joyful life: connection with other people ... Without the discipline and structure provided by their jobs, there is a very real danger than their lives will lack purpose; their sense of self-worth will plummet.

And it goes on in this way.

I have no wish to single out Dr Boyce for this type of inanity. No doubt there are plenty of others like him, who produce tendentious pop psychology built around a tiny nugget of low-grade 'research'. But if you added up all their salaries, and the cost of the associated institutional environment, you would arrive at a rather considerable annual budget. If even a quarter of this was instead used to finance my own research organisation, there could be some hard-edged criticism being produced of the kind of biased folk sociology which nowadays seems to qualify as 'economics'. Now would that not be a far more productive use of resources?

* Daily Mail, 17 February 2010, article ‘Sorry ... but that £56 million won’t make them happy’ by Dr Chris Boyce.

An 'expert' on genetics

Various people recently have been expressing opinions about whether or not intelligence is innate. It may be wondered why this would matter if it did not involve freedom being confiscated and destroyed, in order to provide people by force with the sort of ‘education’ that socially appointed agents of the collective think they ought to have. And it may also be wondered why it would matter if those agents did not, apparently, believe that all with advantages (genetic or otherwise) not provided by the collective should have those advantages ironed out and taken away by social intervention and manipulation – ‘social engineering’ as it is buzzily called.

When someone I know, as an alumnus of New College, Oxford, was invited to nominate a candidate for the Wardenship, he nominated me. Of course, modern society being what it is, I was not appointed, although I would have been a far more suitable person to hold the position than the outgoing Warden, Alan Ryan, who is among those recently sounding off as supposed ‘experts’ on this issue. He says:

All the evidence is that initial genetic endowment is pretty much random across social classes, and everything depends on a nurturing environment. [*] ... If you are born into a family with much better resources and an interest in learning you will do better than if you were born to incompetent and impoverished parents. ... The idea that you look for some genetic underpinning to go with it seems crazy. (Daily Mail, 13 May 2009)

This is actually an absurd thing to say. It does not even reflect the state of opinion among socially accredited ‘academics’ with the greatest knowledge of the ‘research’ in this area, i.e. those at the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford.

I have known people at the Psychology Department throughout my fifty-odd years of living in exile. Fifty years ago the lecturers there told undergraduates that although it was all wrong and very regrettable, the evidence supported the idea that ability was predominantly inherited. Even 15 years ago it was still regarded as a debatable issue on which different views were expressed.

At that time several Oxford lecturers, who were among those who still held the view that ability was largely inherited, believed in positive discrimination in favour of those from the social class which was most likely to have low IQs, as well as most likely to have gone to ‘bad’ schools which were predominantly attended by those with low IQs.

What Alan Ryan is quoted as saying is a ludicrous thing for a leading academic to say and an indication of just how far ‘universities’ have declined since a time, fifty years ago, when such tendentious assertions would never have been made in public.

I am not recognised as an ‘expert’ and my views are not requested, in fact they are suppressed. If I wrote to Alan Ryan and asked him to contribute half of his income to supporting me so that I could publish my views on this and other areas, or to obtain a grant to support me from any source with which he had influence, I dare say he would not reply.

* I know of some striking counter-examples to this – people with low IQs in otherwise distinguished families, whose lack of innate ability was later evident in their relatively lacklustre careers, in spite of any amount of 'nurturing'.

Bullying

When I was describing to a colleague the goings-on in Somerville, he commented that bullies always attack the weak. I thought: in Somerville that meant the vulnerable. If you have motivation or aspirations you are vulnerable; many of the young women arriving at Somerville were ambitious and maybe needed to make up for past deprivations, so they were vulnerable to Dame Janet’s[1], bullying by threat and intimidation. The only undergraduates safe from being bullied were the people who were not needy in any way, such as ___ (daughter of ___ ) who, even if sent down from Oxford, would have suffered little setback in her pursuit of wealthy upper-class men as suitable husbands.

The ‘bullying’ issue is interesting because I think the psychodynamics that produce bullying are closely related to those that produce the socialist ideology; i.e. a sense of inadequacy and impotence leading to a compensatory reaction against it in the form of a drive to have a strong effect on other people.

[1] Dame Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, 1945-1967.

'Trained' - to support the ideology

copy of a letter to an academic philosopher

As usual, I was not shortlisted for the Cambridge Professorship in philosophy, which would have given me a small part of the income and social status that I need for my suppressed philosophy department to start publishing its very relevant and much-needed contributions to academic philosophy.

I know it is your opinion that no contributions from me or other members of my department are ‘needed’ because, as you said, ‘Philosophers are criticising one another.’ And I know also that because you have socially conferred status as an academic your opinion is supposed to be authoritative and meaningful, whereas mine is not. However, I do not actually accept that my opinion is of less value than yours, although I do not have the social recognition as an academic which I should have.

It is very definitely my opinion that all areas of philosophy which are perceived as having a bearing on the theory and practice of socialist ideology (which is nearly all of them) are virtually worthless. In fact, their only raison d’etre is to provide tendentious support towards the downfall of Western civilisation and the reversion to a barbaric tribalism.

A ‘trained’ philosopher is one who has learned to take seriously what other ‘philosophers’ say; and to argue about, or write descriptions of, the situation within the parameters which are defined by never questioning certain basic and all-important assumptions. The fact that these assumptions are not questioned usually means that what is written can be readily exposed as incoherent and inconsistent, often even without direct reference to the underlying assumptions that are implicitly being made. However, this is something that socially appointed philosophers do not do – it is what they have been ‘trained’ not to do (nor, even outside the system, is it being done by anyone at present), but it is what we would do.

So I do think that the contributions which my philosophy department has been being prevented from making in the last 50 years should be regarded as being of sufficient value to justify the financial support which would make them possible. Although, of course, my opinion of what is worth doing is socially regarded as automatically discredited compared with, for example, yours, since you have a statusful and salaried academic position, whereas I do not.

Incidentally, all modern philosophers evidently feel justified in rejecting my writings as ‘not proper philosophy’, and hence in believing that it is right and proper for me to be prevented from making any contribution to academic philosophy or any other area by being starved of money and social status. However, nothing I have published has been intended as ‘philosophy’ in the sense of being intended to contribute to academic philosophy or having anything to do with my claims on a salaried and statusful appointment as a philosopher. I have written nothing while holding a salaried appointment as a philosopher, and if I had done, what I would have written would have been quite different and consisted of exposing the weakness and inconsistency of what is produced in great quantities by ‘philosophers’ with salaried appointments.

Cleverness and success

It is starting to be admitted that a high proportion of the cleverest do not make it, in the sense of becoming members of the immensely expanded ‘university’ population. We suppose that ‘cleverest’ has at least some correlation with ‘having the highest IQs in the old-fashioned sense’. IQ was defined originally as a predictor of academic success in the system that prevailed at the time.

It is not difficult (one might say, it has not been difficult) to devise an ‘educational’ system which favours certain personality types rather than others, and favours specific levels of IQ, which may be far below the highest occurring. But then, of course, the personality types which are discriminated against are to be described as defective in some way; it cannot be that the system has treated them with particular hostility. Bruce Charlton* refers to ‘awkward, abrasive and wildly creative’ individuals, as well as to ‘clever crazies’ and ‘idiot savants’.

I might infer from my own experience that when an obvious anomaly occurs, in that someone with obviously exceptional ability is being cast out, as I was, it is regarded as a justification for slandering them with psychological interpretations of any kind, which do not have to bear any relation to factual reality, except perhaps as an inversion of it.

Nor is it necessary for the various slanders to be consistent with one another. When I was at school I was supposed to be both a reluctant mediocrity driven by an ambitious father, as well as (in other contexts) greedy, selfish and ambitious in wishing to acquire qualifications as fast as possible and much younger than other people, so as to sneer at and score off those who were not able to do so.

On being thrown out of college, I am pretty sure (from what came back to me) that I was widely credited with being both reclusive and wildly creative. Both being reasons for assuming that I did not want to return to an academic career, and that my attempts to do so should be opposed.

In a recent blog piece, Fabian Tassano comments on the possibility that his ideas may have had some influence on what is expressed by some journalists, but always without any acknowledgement which might draw attention to his existence or make his books slightly more saleable.

A journalist may wish to adorn his work with references to Harvard economists or Booker-winning novelists, but what incentive does he have to cite someone with no significant social status? Only a moral one. In other words, none.

Actually I would put the case more strongly. In the case of a statusless person who has been unfairly deprived of their rightful position in society, all and sundry behave as if they had a moral obligation to keep him down and out.

* 'Why are scientists so dull?', Oxford Magazine, Issue 281.

Academic training

To revert to the question of why everyone has always opposed me. Well, unfortunately, as it seems, I represent a number of things that the modern ideology wants to obliterate.

Socialism (or reversion to tribalism) is aimed at the elimination of individual freedom (= money = territory of decision). Hence, in academic contexts, it leads to a great increase in ‘supervised’ intellectual activity, and allowing/forcing people to do things ‘under supervision’.

In my teens I visited Cambridge with my parents; I remember feeling very miserable at the time. Perhaps this was the visit on which I struggled to obtain physics entrance papers in Heffers when my father had finishing buying maths ones for me.

However that may be, we met a young man out walking a dog and my parents chatted to him after getting directions from him. He was a research student, I was told, living in lodgings in a nearby house. He had taken his degree and that was what he was doing now. I became even more depressed. I had not taken a single degree yet and I was being forced to attend a school against my will.

Actually doing research, or living in any way I could get anything out of, was even further off in a gloomy future.

I think that the concept of a research student became much more dominant in post-war academia; as an undergraduate I was told that a D.Phil had not formerly been regarded as a necessary first stage in an academic career; in many subjects people who got Firsts could proceed straight away to appointments. To have a D.Phil had been an indication that you had probably got a Second, and needed to strengthen your claim by a further qualification.

Professor Richard Oldfield, at that time Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, had allegedly taken a degree in French and then gone along to the Department of Experimental Psychology, said he would like to do research in psychology, and started to do so. However, as with some other people who had been permitted academic status on what would nowadays be regarded as inadequate grounds, it may be observed that his outlook was thoroughly compatible with the modern ideology and in no way out of place in the modern world.

Wittgenstein provides another, even more eminent, example of a person who was allowed to proceed to academic status and distinction without prior ‘training’, as the following extract illustrates. It is highly unlikely that he would nowadays be allowed to do so.

Wittgenstein’s published output was tiny. In his lifetime, he published just one book, one article and one book review ... [The book review] was published in 1913 in a Cambridge undergraduate magazine called the Cambridge Review, and was his very first publication. Wittgenstein was then a student of philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, halfway through his second year of study. In many ways, though, it would be misleading to picture him at this time as an undergraduate student, or, in any case, it would be misleading to think of him as, in any sense, an ‘ordinary’ undergraduate student. For one thing, at twenty-four, he was a few years older than the usual second-year undergraduate, having spent three years before he went to Cambridge as an engineering student in Manchester. For another thing, he was already regarded by two of the most influential philosophers of the day, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, as a significant philosopher in his own right ...

... Wittgenstein was not following a conventional undergraduate course in philosophy ... there is nothing to indicate that he ever seriously considered sitting any examinations. His formal status was that of an undergraduate, but he regarded himself, and, more remarkably, was regarded by others, not as a student of philosophy, but as an original philosopher, attempting to find solutions to problems that were at the very cutting edge of the discipline.

It is possible, I think, that Cambridge is the only university in the world that would have accepted Wittgenstein on these terms. Had he broken off his engineering studies in order to study philosophy at ... any other leading university of the time, he would have fallen at the first hurdle, most likely rejected because of his almost complete ignorance of the works of any philosophers other than Frege and Russell. And, even if he had overcome this hurdle, he would have been obliged to do what, in fact, he never did throughout his entire life, namely study the works of the great philosophers of the past. Only after he had shown some understanding of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, etc. would he have been allowed, as a graduate student, to devote himself to his own research.

At Cambridge, to its great credit, all that was required of Wittgenstein in order to reach this last stage – the stage at which he spent his time trying to solve philosophical problems rather than learning how previous philosophers had tried to solve them – was that he arouse the interest and admiration of Bertrand Russell. (Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, Granta Books 2005, pp5-6.)

Attitudes to academic appointments

I think that the academics at the Society for Psychical Research were more uninhibited and less rationalised about what went on in connection with academic appointments than they would probably have been even in their own Senior Common Rooms.

For example, it was said that H.H. Price became Wykeham Professor of Logic by being the least brilliant but also the least controversial of three candidates. The other two had definite original opinions which aroused strong opposition from some of the electors. Price had bland and middle-of-the-road views which were offensive to no one; hence he got the Professorship. (*)

They brought in an American ‘professor’ of zoology for the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology at Edinburgh (‘professor’, of course, only means ‘lecturer’ in America ), treating American academic appointments as equivalent to English ones. But when American professors visited the SPR office, it was freely said (although not of course in their hearing) that an American PhD was about the equivalent of a 3rd class Oxbridge degree.

That, of course, was what was being said when I was at the SPR in the late fifties. Since then academic standards have declined apace in this country and, from all I hear, are likely to have declined in America about as fast (on account of their also wishing to apply ‘egalitarian’ principles and to deny the existence of innate ability — as evidenced by their throwing money at Professor Anders Ericsson, the academic whose research purports to show that there is no such thing as innate ability).

So it is possible that the relative rankings have shifted a bit as both American and British degrees are worth a lot less than they used to be.

But of course there is no reason anyway why degree classes should be precisely correlated with ability to fulfil the requirements of an academic position, as was much more realistically recognised, and occasionally acted upon, in the early decades of the last century. (There were anecdotes at Somerville about Professors who had got 4th class degrees but been allowed to proceed with their careers.)

* I have no opinion about the accuracy of this view of Price’s appointment, but I think it illustrates the fact that, before about 1945, there was much more recognition of the disjunction between a person’s merit and ability to fulfil a certain social role, and their possession or otherwise of that socially conferred role. Nowadays there is a stronger and almost dogmatic belief that a person who has been unable to get social status is automatically inferior to those who have it.

Leaders are socially constructed

Copy of a letter to someone I got to talk to for a couple of hours (rare occurrence!)

I have not previously encountered this alleged experimental finding which you quoted from anthropology textbooks, that if you put 20 people in a room, one ‘leader’ will always emerge with a couple of sub-leaders. If it is in anthropology textbooks I am sure that tendentious conclusions are expected to be drawn from it.

As, for example, that leadership does not depend on any individual attributes or qualities, genetic or otherwise, but may be imposed or constructed upon any individual by environmental circumstances. It is social constructionism again, depending on a profound underlying belief (or wish to believe) that there are no innate characteristics and that society can turn any sheep into a shepherd if it chooses and, even more delightfully, force any former shepherd into the position of a sheep.

So — the family court business arises, with low-IQ doctors and social workers ruling the lives of high-IQ professional people, and prescribing for how many hours per week they may see their children under supervision, etc.

It is now openly admitted that medical schools exercise positive discrimination in favour of the ‘underprivileged’, which means of course discriminating against people from successful middle-class backgrounds, and that really means discriminating against those with higher IQs and/or aristocratic ancestry.

Hindrances to the progress of research (part 2)

continuing from part one:

The pressures discussed previously are at work within medicine. The fact that, on a certain level, much can be achieved by the application of well-established medical knowledge in relatively underdeveloped parts of the world may help to distract attention from areas of neglect in more innovative fields of research. Much that is obviously useful can be achieved by applying to very large populations simple pieces of knowledge resulting from what was once pioneering research. Because of this, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it is new advances in knowledge, the significance of which cannot be assessed in advance, that may have the greatest effect on the potentialities open to the human race.

Actually, the consequences of the present trends appear to be somewhat different from what is usually supposed. A very small fraction of research work done in universities is "useful" in any sense, and the standards of it are quite possibly declining, for two reasons. One of these is that what serves to advance a scientist's career is the number of papers he has published, and scientists are thus under pressure to maximize this number with little regard for their content or quality; and the second is that papers that produce socially acceptable results are likely to meet with more social reward than those that do not, regardless of their technical qualities as pieces of work.

The expectation that things will be done well and effectively if they are done by large numbers of people acting together with a minimum of independence depends on somewhat uncynical assumptions about human motivation. If people are put into positions of social authority, their motivation is unquestionable; they are there to do good. If people are socially authorized scientists they are there to do science, and they are supposed to be additive: several scientists will do more science than one scientist. A statistician once remarked to me, attempting to reconcile me to the tedium of discussing a piece of work with a committee, "Discussion is always a good thing. Many heads are sure to be better than one."

In fact, the state may be disposing of colossal funds and resources for research, and deploying millions of people, but it does not follow that what is being done is necessarily advancing knowledge at a greater rate than would be achieved by even a small number of individuals who had some peculiarity of motivation that made them wish to find things out, and who also happened to dispose of financial resources that, while infinitesimal compared with the totality of those wielded by the state, were still large in relation to the capital which it is at all easy for a single individual to acquire in modern circumstances. Nor does it follow that a committee consisting of a dozen people with an average IQ of 150 will wield an effective IQ of 1,800.

What, in fact, are the motives of professional, state-supported scientists and members of directing committees likely to be, and are such people likely to interact constructively or destructively? It is an easy guess that they will be predominantly interested in their own social advancement; they will want to make decisions that will impress other people as the right kind of decisions, and they will want to do or see done the kind of research that other people will reward with higher degrees and similar marks of social favor. If young scientists are too strongly motivated in any other way — by intellectual curiosity, say, or by a desire to seek out fundamental paradoxes in the nature of things — they may well find themselves unable to stay the educational course that leads to life as a socially accredited and salaried research worker.

Some years ago a course of lectures on scientific research was given in Oxford, intended to provide information and preparation for those who might be considering proceeding to do research in the form of a higher degree. As reported to me at the time, the general tenor of these lectures was as follows: "Young people have an idea that when they start doing scientific research they will be breaking new ground and dealing with issues of burning interest. This is not so; they have to realize that research is not like this. What people do in the course of working for a D.Phil. is of practically no interest to anybody. The average number of people who read a scientific doctoral thesis, other than the author's relatives and supervisor, is estimated to be 1.8."

But even if the greater part of modern research really is uninteresting, in every possible sense, a very great deal of it is being done. As already mentioned, what advances someone's career in social terms is the production of papers. Broad and Wade have observed, "The preoccupation with publications has resulted in a veritable ocean of journals and papers. Today, there are at least 6,000 journals in medicine alone. An additional reason for the number of journals is the tremendous increase in the ranks of scientists themselves. It has been estimated that 90 percent of all scientists who ever lived are alive today." (1)

Estimates have been made of what fraction of the research being done is useful, at least in the sense that it is referred to in papers by other scientists. This is not a very high standard of usefulness, and, of course, work that is of poor quality but is ideologically attractive may well be cited frequently; it, then, will qualify as contributing to progress on this criterion. However, even estimates of this kind show that only a tiny fraction of the research papers produced have any influence on the work of other scientists and can thus be regarded as contributing to progress. According to Broad and Wade, "The available evidence indicates that the great majority of research responsible for the advances of science is produced by a small number of scientists. This small elite depends overwhelmingly on the research of other members of the elite, not on that of the wider majority. The pace of scientific advance would not obviously be slowed if this majority did not exist. It might even be enhanced if pursued by a leaner and fitter community of researchers. Perhaps there are too many scientists. Perhaps basic scientific research would be more appropriately supported by private patrons, as economist Milton Friedman has suggested, instead of by the government" (2).

One line of defence that might well be adopted by a proponent of the modern orthodoxy would be to inquire earnestly what scientific or medical research one thought was being neglected, and to require a statement of exactly what beneficial developments might be forthcoming if things were done differently. But, it is essentially the case that what is being neglected is invisible; all that can be done is to point out the presence of a very strong ideology in a position of dominance. From the requirements of the ideology one can, perhaps, indicate certain areas in which it is unlikely that research of a progressive nature will be done, but it is possible only to adumbrate vaguely some of the potentialities that might begin to emerge if it were.

The modern ideology is certainly operative within medicine — including particularly strong ideas on the nature of human beings and in what relationship they should be to society, and these ideas undoubtedly have their effect on the way medicine regards those to whom it is ministering.

It may appear that little is lost by the non-pursuit of research in some of the neglected areas; the findings, if any, could surely not be of great fundamental significance. But it is characteristic of research that one cannot be sure how interesting or significant the findings may be until one has made them, and any ideological restraint upon the extension of knowledge is a serious matter.

In conclusion, let me point out another consequence of a dominant orthodoxy which may also be overlooked. It is that it inhibits research even if the orthodox opinion is actually correct. Only research that may be expected to support it in the crudest and most obvious way is likely to be encouraged; areas that could lead to heresy must be ignored. Now it might sometimes be that research in "heretical" areas leads to an expansion of knowledge and that once it is obtained, it is observed to be compatible with the desired view of the matter after all. But, in general, there is little tendency for researchers to risk being placed under pressure to refine or develop the ideas accepted as correct, and areas of weakness, incoherence, or paradox are passed over in a discreet silence, rather than regarded as promising fields for enlightening investigation.

1. William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of the Truth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p.53.
2. ibid, pp.222-223.