Dualistic theories in the modern world

Dualistic theories are extremely unpopular in the modern world. We may remember that dualism, in which the mind may be regarded as to some extent separable from matter, permitted spiritualistic theories and various forms of survivalist religion. Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, they could be interpreted as compatible with a high evaluation of individuality. It was always a problem for theistic religions that it might occur to their members to claim that they had some direct information from God and that they set more store by this than by the authority of the Church. However, in a sense this was not much of a problem, as the Church always seemed willing to wipe out deviancy with the utmost physical cruelty.

This, perhaps, provides us with a clue to the great preference for materialism shown by modern leaders of thought. It has always been by means of the physical that people acting on behalf of the collective have exercised their greatest and most inexorable force on other people as individuals. So, whatever the evidence either way may be said to be, and whether or not anything could be considered as having any real bearing on the question, modern thought rigorously hunts down and rejects any lingering vestiges of dualistic thought.

In one respect this might seem confusing to an outside observer, because it seems clear that the collective wishes individuals to be subordinated to it, and it also wishes to promote egalitarianism. Egalitarianism might seem easier to justify on the assumption that each individual has a non-material component called a soul, and that this is of great importance for reasons which do not depend on social consensus. If you allow for existence of souls, it is perhaps less remarkable that individuals should be regarded as equal in value, without consideration of any other attributes they may have. However, in practice it does not seem to work like that.

Leaders of modern thought are keen on regarding all aspects of the human being as derived from the evolutionary process. This is not surprising, as the theory of evolution is attractive, and it becomes possible to relate the characteristics of living organisms to the coded genetic material with ever-increasing completeness. But justifiable as this concern with evolutionary processes may seem to be, and difficult as it may be to see any justification for entertaining ideas of any non-materialistic elements in the situation, I nevertheless have the impression that the drive towards materialistic explanation is motivated. There is, I think, a positive desire to eliminate any possible remaining vestige of dualism.

Many modern philosophers would not admit that consciousness was a meaningful concept, but among those who do you will easily hear it said that the puzzle of consciousness is: what evolutionary reason can be given for its presence? It would seem that all the functions of a human being could be carried out equally well by a sufficiently complex but unconscious computer. But all features of human beings, it is argued, must have arisen from evolutionary procedures and from nothing else.

Dualists, who may entertain beliefs in a supernaturalist religion, might wish to maintain that consciousness was there because a human being had a soul, or some such thing, but the leaders of modern thought not only reject such ideas, I think one may say that they wish to reject them. A totally materialistic viewpoint is sought after, this being a part of the modern religion.

What is desired to arrive at is a certain psychological, and even political, position which is, however, not quite as much justified by the facts as it is emotionally taken to be. However thoroughly materialistic and reductionist you are, this really tells you nothing about how human beings 'should' conduct their affairs.

Language teaching: plus ca change

This is a piece I wrote in 1978 about a BBC language course. Apart from the fact that there is no longer an "East Germany", it could apply equally well today.

Listening to the BBC's Sixth Form German broadcasts, or trying to find something one can bear to listen to, may or may not improve one's German, but certainly gives an insight into the modern mind.

In a programme on the educational adventures of a German girl, great contempt was expressed for old-fashioned language teaching based on unrealistic literary narratives and grammatical rules. (The same programme, incidentally, in which we were given to understand that the offspring of the workers are at a great disadvantage in the West German educational system, but much better treated in East Germany.)

So, plainly, modern language teachers think they have a vastly superior product to purvey. It probably does have the advantage that it repels even the most colossal linguistic voraciousness, unless combined with a devotion to collectivism. Parking meters in West Germany, visits to a sewage farm and an old people's home, town and country planning, social security and the examination system, immigrant workers and juvenile delinquents.

Next term a passage for comprehension is to be broadcast, after which we will be privileged to answer the following questions:
- What have the employers tried to communicate to their work force?
- What are the first three reasons that the employee lists, which make him sad about the state of affairs?

Personally, I'd settle for Goethe any time.

IQ as an ideological football

Another book to which I am unable to publish a riposte, on a topic on which I have been prevented for decades from expressing my views: IQ: The Brilliant Idea That Failed by Stephen Murdoch (Duckworth, London, 2007).

As usual, this book utilises criticism of IQ tests as an attack on the concept of IQ and other innate intellectual and psychological factors per se, all based on the assumption that the tests will be used by immoral governments, and that we have egalitarian views on the way in which governments should and should not interfere in the lives of individuals, instead of considering the possibility that they should not interfere at all, in which case the accuracy and relevance of IQ tests or other assessments would be, as it should be, beside the point.

It is analogous to the way in which Richard Dawkins considers himself able to eliminate the possibility of anything outside the range of the current human conceptual system having any reality by pointing out that the concept of God held by large populations of people did not prevent them from doing various things to one another of which modern politically correct academics disapprove.

Similarly, also, his new series (The Enemies of Reason) on frauds and deceptions associated with the possibility of conceptual extensions of scientific understanding associated with the ‘paranormal’, to which I could also very well write and publish a book in reply (if I had time – my lack of time arises from lack of status, money and manpower) will actually have no effect at all on the possibilities which he is seeking to discredit.

In fact I have no inclination to ‘believe in’ any of his targets, such as astrology, homeopathy or the Tarot. But I do not rule out, as he does, the possibility that there may sometimes be factors involved which are not known about or understood.

I do not regard most of these things as more than a possible aid to the surfacing of subconscious intuitions, but as that they may sometimes work. Not that I set any great store by subconscious intuitions either; there were plenty of people at the SPR who consulted their higher selves or divine subconsciouses all the time and (apart from anything else) their higher selves never suggested to them that they might help me as a person very much in need of help, instead of hindering and obstructing me as everyone else did, whether they considered themselves to be ‘spiritually advanced’ or ‘socialist atheist intellectual’.

Nevertheless, I do not see any reason to suppose that their openness to the promptings of their own minds had any effects worse than those which arise from openness to the suggestions of counsellors, psychiatrists, educational experts, etc.

Modern ideology and A Little Princess

The system of interpretations and evaluations that forms the modern anti-individualistic ideology is now apparently universally understood and applied, so it may be difficult to realise that it is a quite recent development.

I was shocked by it when I first started to encounter it at 13 or 14. There was really no hint of it in what I had read up to that time. ‘Socialist’ writers such as H G Wells and Bernard Shaw took a pretty detached view of the goings-on of human society and suggestions that it might be nice if all people lived in larger, cleaner houses, or lived in a cleaner, healthier and more aesthetic way, did not draw attention to the erosion of liberty that would be necessary even to attempt to bring this about.

My ideas of human society were based primarily on books written in Victorian or Edwardian times, with a bit of influence from such things as cynical Aesop’s Fables. I always took note of ideas about motivation and reflected upon them.

Consider, for example, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The message of this book, to me at any rate, was that no one will do anything for anyone unless they are paid with money for doing so. In the story, Sara is left by her father at a select boarding-school. She is a parlour boarder and treated as a show pupil by the headmistress, who nevertheless resents her cleverness and self-possession, until her father dies and she is left penniless. Then she is made to sleep in an attic, where a scullery-maid also sleeps, and to work for her keep as a drudge and errand runner in all weathers, and assistant teacher of elementary French.

It is only if you have a parent who will pay for things for you that you have them, and what you have will be in accordance with how much the parent has to spend. Otherwise you will be reduced to the state of the servant girls and beggars in the streets.

Of course, people other than parents may give other people things; when Sara was well off she used to buy items of food for one of the scullery maids, and when she is poor she gives some buns to a starving beggar girl. This attracts the attention of the lady who runs the bun-shop, and she (the lady) takes in the beggar girl and feeds and clothes her from then on — in effect, adopts her, but without having to account for what she is doing to any agents of the collective.

In those days there was no compulsory education and adoption was a matter for individuals to undertake if they chose with no need to seek permission.

That was the way the world was; the way people treated you depended entirely on whether you could pay for what you wanted, or needed.

Eventually Sara is found and rescued by a wealthy friend of her father’s, who has been looking for her. While he is looking for her he is made aware of how many children are living in poverty. He is sorry for them, and harrowed to think that Sara may be in a similar state, but his friend tells him that his resources are limited. He could not provide for all the destitute children, but must concentrate on finding and helping Sara, whose father was his friend.

In the world as depicted in the books that I read there was no disapproval of ambition. The respectable bourgeois worked hard and rose in the world if he could; his children lived in well-built houses with a few servants and might have Mary Poppins as a nanny.

My father had been a very poor boy, and the great efforts he had made to rise in the world had not got him very far; he was headmaster of a primary school at the London docks. My parents were respectable but still very far from rich. Nevertheless, their efforts had resulted in their being able to give their child a better start in life than they had had themselves; they had delayed having me until they had saved enough money to be sure that they would be able to pay for a professional training for me.

When I came top of the grammar school scholarship exam at the age of ten, very soon after the 1945 Labour landslide election, egalitarian ideas were bubbling invisibly below the surface, but nothing I had read had prepared me for the idea that I should not want to take exams as fast and as hard as possible, and that I should be prevented from doing so because not everyone could. To take more exams than other people and at an earlier age was apparently viewed as reprehensible; it was an attempt to score off other people. Having social interactions with other people should be one’s sole aim in life. One should not want to do scientific research just because it was what one wanted to do and what would enable one to feel most alive. One should, apparently, only want to spend one’s life doing good to other people, in some shape or form, and interacting with them socially.

These ideas may not seem strange or surprising to a modern reader, but it was the first time I had encountered them and I found that they were being used to obstruct and hinder me.

By the time I was 13 my worldview was essentially formed; none of the books I had read had depicted, or appeared to advocate, an egalitarian society in the modern sense. Practically all societies of the past, as described, had contained some large households which provided a hotel environment for those living in them (sometimes even called ‘hotels’, at least in France and Italy), and it had never been regarded as reprehensible to attempt to rise in the world by any activities regarded as legal.

In retrospect, as a recipient of a grammar school scholarship, I was in the position of Sara in A Little Princess. With my fees not being paid by my father but by the state, I was exposed to the tender mercies of the local education authority and community generally, as Sara was exposed to those of Miss Minchin — who could no longer be bothered to provide her with a formal education, but allowed her to read the schoolbooks in the empty schoolroom when she had run her errands for the day. And she did this, not because she felt any concern for Sara’s need to rise in the world to a position that might suit her, but so that Sara might become useful to Miss Minchin as an inexpensive teacher when she was a few years older.

Similarly, my tormentors did not mind how seriously they blocked my attempts to establish my claim on the sort of university career I needed to have; my acquisition of skills and qualifications was reduced to a snail’s pace, but I was allowed to proceed with heavily handicapped supervised ‘courses’ which might eventually lead to my being useful, not to myself, but to society, in a lowly capacity as a teacher of maths.

Then I was thrown out into a society where all my efforts to recover from a bad position and regain an academic career of a suitable kind were blocked by the continued advance of the modern ideology, according to which, as I found, it is criminal to go on trying to get a career that society has shown it does not want one to have.

Sleuth

I just saw part of the film Sleuth, with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, and thought how it expresses a (the most?) fundamental motivation of human psychology.

People think they cannot do anything about their position as finite and mortal in relation to physical reality so, to find some way of asserting themselves, they turn to other people as a source of significance, especially as those others seem to be conscious beings like themselves.

So, having accepted that you can’t do anything about your own physical limitations, you can assert yourself best by having a real effect on the consciousness of someone else, and the most powerful way of doing this is by making him have experiences which he does not want to have.

So Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine mislead one another into experiences of fear and anxiety, in which they become decentralised; i.e. they stop referring to their own internal psychological criteria and distort themselves in any way that may placate other people and avert the threat of what other people may do to them.

The fact that this is associated with lying and deception satisfactorily places the person doing the decentralising in a position of superiority to both objective reality and to the decentralised person who is anguished by his uncertainty of the real state of affairs.

This is the fundamental strategy of the modern religion of collectivism.

We may note also the theme of class warfare; one is supposed to sympathise with the ‘ordinary’ Michael Caine as against the ‘superior’, snobbish and elitist Laurence Olivier, who complains of the damage done to the lives of people like him by the modern world.

Conclusion? The objective of modern society is to make everyone decentralised, especially those who formerly had some vestige of centralisation.

The Man in the Iron Mask

I just saw a film, a recent version of The Man in the Iron Mask, which seemed rather unusual for a recently made film, and reminded one of the way in which so many psychological dimensions are ironed out in the modern world.

I don’t really know modern actors, but somebody called Leonardo di Caprio was the young king and also his twin brother.

The film permitted itself to be rather glorifying of heroism and idealism, instead of insisting on prosaicness and physical degradation, as is usual these days. The Four Musketeers are in this film ("one for all, all for one") .

When d’Artagnan is trying to persuade the king’s brother, Philippe, whom they have just released from prison, to take his place because Louis is not making a good job of being the sort of ideal king they have always wanted to serve, Philippe demurs, saying he would rather just be free and live in the country tending lambs. Why should he take on this demanding and arduous role? D’Artagnan says, in effect, that one cannot go by what seems pleasant or attractive.

"We are all instruments of God", he says, "and sometimes it is very difficult but one has to keep faith."

I wonder what the affiliations of the producer and director of this film are. The modern view is so much that there cannot be any factors to be taken into account beyond what any social worker or counsellor would advise.

Charles Morgan, forgotten novelist

I think Charles Morgan’s life must have gone wrong somehow, although he was a literary prize winning author. He was a classicist and (I guess, from the social class with which he is familiar) an aristocrat.

In spite of the elation of Sparkenbroke, he seems to have been more identified with the tone of defeated ordinariness characteristic of his other books.

Nevertheless, Sparkenbroke came as a breath of fresh air to me at 14, when I was sinking under the oppression of Woodford High School and both my present wellbeing and future prospects were severely threatened. Here was someone who was getting something out of life, in a hotel environment and free to use his ability. How wonderful. It reminded one that life could be worth living, but provided no solution to getting it back in bad circumstances.

The only other writer I got anything out of was Nietzsche. But he, too, reminded me of an emotional intensity that was desirable, with no suggestion as to how it was to be re-accessed.

I remember a poem out of Sparkenbroke, I suppose written by Morgan himself, which seems a bit more meaningful now than it did then.

Man is a king in exile;
All his greatness
Consists in knowledge
of that kingdom lost,
Which, in degree of quickness,
Is his fate and character on earth.