Seminar

I am giving a seminar in Oxford on the 29th, entitled
"Existential psychology and early Christianity".

Details here.

Reading is "not natural"

It seems that 2008 is National Reading Year: I wonder whether this is because the disfavouring of the ‘middle class’ that has proceeded apace since the inception of the Welfare State in 1945 has by now had a noticeable effect on the literacy of the population as a whole.

From a review of Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf (Financial Times Magazine 5 April 2008):

“Reading is not natural,” writes Wolf, a professor of child development: only a few thousand years old, reading is too new to be encoded into our genes. Which means we have to learn it the hard way.

I do not see that you can assume that. The human mind seems to have abilities for dealing with things that cannot in any obvious way have developed by evolution, that is, by natural selection in favour of aptitude for dealing with specific things of that kind.

It is acceptable for writers on child development to write about factors which may have an influence without mentioning innate intellectual ability, correlated with measurable IQ. But this is associated with the fact that it is acceptable, in a particular case, for people to interpret the situation in terms of the only factors which are explicitly taken into account.

As they did in my case. Whether or not reading was ‘encoded in my genes’, whatever was necessary for learning to read, very rapidly and without apparent effort, evidently was. As it was acceptable to interpret this as my parents ‘pushing’ me, it was interpreted in that way and this was considered justification for frustrating and opposing me and for persecuting my parents. This was several decades ago and I am sure that the tendency to adopt such interpretations, and to act on them in interfering in people’s lives, is no less, but almost certainly greater, than it was then.

To quote further from this review,

For some, their problems are a product of their word-poor upbringing: middle-class children have on average heard 32 million more words by the age of five than their less advantaged peers. This makes a difference: the best predictor of how easily a child will learn to read is how often they are read to as a toddler.

Perhaps for some, but for how many? I have known people who, living in the most middle-class and highly educated households, with a constant coming and going of influential and articulate people, remained unable to read until a relatively advanced age and would have been very unlikely to get grammar school scholarships. On the other hand, I have also known people who were deprived of attention as young children in unfavourable circumstances, but learnt to read at an early age and were, or would have been, highly placed in grammar school scholarship exams.

“The best predictor of how easily a child will learn to read is how often they are read to as a toddler.” But the majority of people with high IQs have attentive middle-class mothers, themselves with high IQs, who are likely to read to young children. It is not necessarily true that high IQ children who are read to frequently will learn to read much more easily, or earlier, than children with equally high IQs who are not read to at all.

Engineering students

According to the Daily Mail (28 March), over the last 8 years 10 billion pounds of taxpayers’ money has been spent on a campaign of working towards the Government’s target of having 50% of the population between the ages of 18 and 30 in universities, which includes of course ex-polytechnics.

The recruitment campaign is regarded as having failed because the population of university entrants is only 0.6 of a percentage point higher than in 1999.

Ministers had set a 2010 target of 50 per cent of young people entering higher education by the time they are 30. Official figures yesterday revealed that the proportion in 2006/7 was 39.8 per cent – down from 42 per cent in the previous year and only 0.6 percentage points higher than in 1999. …

Conservative universities spokesman David Willetts said: ‘At this pathetic rate of progress it will take a further 118 years to hit the Government’s target. We need to do far better to spread the opportunities for young people. Under this Government we are completely flat-lining.’

Of course, at the same time as encouraging the sections of the population with the lowest IQs and least academic aptitude to go to university, those with above average IQs (referred to as the ‘middle class’) have been increasingly discouraged, and are becoming disillusioned with the prospect of burdening themselves with debt for the sake of worthless ‘degrees’ which employers, including me, do not regard as any guarantee of competence in anything.

So, while the overall number of university entrants has scarcely risen, the proportion of lower IQs to higher IQs almost certainly has, and further attempts to promote ideas such as those expressed by David Willetts may well result in a complete exclusion of those with IQs above 140, or even 130, from university life.

Meanwhile, people with exceptionally high IQs, such as Charles McCreery, Fabian Tassano or I, cannot get even minimal salaries to enable us to contribute to the philosophical ‘discussions’ which go on, let alone pay for the institutional environment that we need to work in.

Even if we had a one-person salary apiece for working in our (socially unrecognised) independent university, it would not pay for the institutional environment that we need to work in, as well as the extra people (the equivalent of research students) to write papers on issues related to our own which we could also make very good use of.

An academic gets a lot out of his residential college with dining hall facilities etc which we have to pay for and work on maintaining for ourselves, so even with salaries we would not be as free to be productive as if we had a socially recognised residential college to live in.

Hooked on excellence

Joan Bakewell on her grammar school (Stockport High School for Girls):

The school was relentlessly competitive and selective. ... The six houses [named after "significant women of achievement”] competed for a silver cup awarded to "the most deserving house", the winner arrived at by compiling exam results with netball and tennis tournaments, house drama competitions and musical achievements. There were even awards for deportment — for virtually anything that could be marked. We got hooked: it became a way of life. ...

The rules were remorseless, dragooning us in every particular of behaviour. Uniform even meant the same indoor shoes for every pupil; hair-ribbons had to be navy blue. The school hat had to be worn at all times to and from school; girls caught without were in trouble. The heaviest burden was the no-talking rule: no talking on the stairs, in the classroom, in the corridors, in assembly — anywhere, in fact, except the playground. We were a silent school, shuffling noiselessly from class to class, to our lunch, to the cloakroom. ...

Among this welter of disapproval — conduct marks, detentions and, finally, a severe talking-to by Miss Lambrick [the headmistress] — physical chastisement was unnecessary. We were cowed long before things became that bad. The cane in the headmistress’s room was redundant. When a girl got pregnant — the worst conceivable crime — she was expelled without fuss before she could contaminate the rest of us. (quoted in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, Bloomsbury 2007, pp. 566-567)

But, as Joan Bakewell says, ‘We got hooked: it became a way of life.’ And, as I observed it at my convent school, it did not seem too bad a way of life. I did not get the impression that most of the girls were suffering very much; children and young people do, I think, quite easily get ‘hooked’ on sets of rules and standards of excellence to apply to every aspect of their lives. Trying to keep all the rules as well as possible even produces a sort of centralisation (to use my own psychological term).

At least so far as my convent was concerned I do not think that ‘disapproval’ was the predominant attitude conveyed, or that the girls were ‘cowed’ in trying to avoid it. I got the impression that they got hooked on ‘being good’ and they felt ashamed and disgraced if they slipped up, but not in such a way that they became identified with being disgraced and gave up on trying to be an admirable rule-keeper.

Joan Bakewell is implicitly critical of her competitive and highly-organised school life, implying that there is some obvious ideal of which it falls short, or which it actively violates. This, I suppose, is an acceptable attitude, probably the only acceptable attitude at present towards any school that makes possible any kind of centralisation.

It may well be that fear of disapproval and punishment was a stronger feature of Joan Bakewell’s situation than it was at my convent, which was originally a fee-paying school, and had become a direct grant school which accepted a certain proportion of pupils with grammar school scholarships. Parents are more likely to pay for their children to attend schools that allow them to feel good about themselves than are agents of the collective acting through ‘education’ authorities.

Centralised psychology depends on distinguishing between what is under your own control and what is not. The reactions and evaluations of other people are not under your control, and it may be helpful in later life to be aware that people can be hostile and will make nasty things happen to you if they can catch you out in breaking one of their rules, which they will be motivated to do. So you need to concentrate on what you can do to help yourself by taking whatever opportunities you can to improve your position.

Schools which convey that anything goes, and that the worst that can be done to you is to be sent home and provided with a tutor at the expense of the taxpayers, may be a bad preparation for adult life.

One frequently hears of people who ruin their lives by incurring terrible penalties, such as imprisonment and the breakdown of their livelihood, as a result of attempting to break the law in flagrant ways with little apparent sense of danger; for example, the hapless couple John and Anne Darwin, who recently attempted to start a new and prosperous life in Panama on the proceeds of the life insurance payments resulting from the husband having pretended to be dead, while really living in a house adjoining his own, in which his wife was still living openly.

Dalziel and Pascoe

Watching modern television while I use my exercise machine is certainly giving me a feeling for the contemporary landscape. It is no wonder that I feel excluded from it, and that there is no sympathy with my position. It is a very closed world, with few ideas, but those implicitly dogmatic. It is, effectively, a new religion.

As in other series, the characters in the police series Dalziel and Pascoe are role models for ‘getting by’ in ‘real’ life. Clearly you never get identified with being purposeful or intense; you fulfil the requirements of your job, which are often unpleasant and inconvenient, but interspersed with frequent breaks for eating, drinking and sex. Such things are the opium of the people, evidently. You do your own household chores, which also helps to ensure that your mind will never have to pay attention to what it is thinking about for very long at a time.

Dalziel is a senior and very experienced policeman, but still has to do his own fetching and carrying. At one stage, he asks his younger assistant Pascoe where some documents are. ‘In the car,’ says Pascoe. Dalziel looks as if he might like them brought in, but Pascoe says, ‘When did your last slave die?’ Dalziel goes and gets his documentation from the car for himself.

This reminds me of the George Damper cartoon in the Daily Mail in which Mrs Damper refuses to get a refill of George’s glass of water after it has been fouled by a bird. ‘If you want a refill, you will have to get it yourself,’ she says.

If any television character shows signs of minding about anything, other characters, maybe including doctors and psychiatrists, ‘help’ him not to think about it. If some specific reminder of the vulnerability of the finite situation affects him psychologically, e.g. being attacked produces agoraphobia, he is told that it is normal to react to such a specific nasty event. He is only reacting ‘normally’ and should not think he is important or different enough for it to matter whether he is suffering from it, and he should not try to find a solution for himself.

Something unquestionably unacceptable is dismissed as ‘part of life’. Put it behind you, don’t let your feelings get to you, and get back to the normal round of filling in the paperwork for the boss, followed by beer and pot noodles.

Doctors, psychiatrists and hospitals are unquestionably ‘helpful’ and never to be feared for the harm they might do you. A ‘friend’ who is a psychiatrist finds it hurtful that her friend with a problem does not rush to tell her all. ‘But I am trained and certificated and thoroughly qualified in every way!’ she says reproachfully.

Binge Britain

Daily Mail 14 February 2008:

Another man has been beaten and left for dead after politely asking a gang to stop urinating into his garden. ... Gareth Avery, 48, suffered a broken jaw and cheekbone and deep cuts after being punched and kicked by at least two men and a woman ... [He] was left for dead outside his home in Weston-super-Mare when he tried to protect his house from a gang.

In the last few days alone, 17-year-old Joe Dinsdale was stabbed to death on an estate plagued by drunken youths and Nick Baty, 48, died after a month in a coma following an assault. ... As the toll grew, a police chief urged Britain to "wake up" to the full horrors of binge-drinking.

Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, hit out at the drinks trade for making profits "on the back of this misery". ... Mr Jones castigated parents who are responsible for handing over alcohol to more than half of underage drinkers, and warned it was time for Britain to "wake up" to the grim realities of the binge-drinking epidemic.

As usual, parents and commercial interests are blamed for the consequences of the Oppressive State, including the oppressive educational system. A headline inside the paper reads ‘The real price of booze’. No, this is the real price of socialism. The parents are to a large extent themselves the victims of an educational system that left them with no purpose in life, and no way of getting a ‘buzz’ out of life other than getting drunk and/or beating somebody up.

People in Russian forced labour camps set great store by knocking their minds out with drinks of highly concentrated tea, and many drunks lying in the streets of communist Russian froze to death. Alcoholism was an inevitable side effect of communism in Russia, as it is of egalitarian socialism in Britain.

Reflection of the month

Compassion

It is alleged that a wicked judge, sentencing a man who had stolen a loaf, replied to his explanation that he had to live, ‘Je n'en vois pas la nécessité.’ More recently, it is alleged that an ex-servant has said that there would be no servant problem if people stopped wanting servants.

Both remarks, if true, demonstrate the psychological verity (which there are, quite independently of these particular remarks, no grounds whatever for doubting) that human beings have no noticeable awareness of one another’s needs. Not, that is to say, any awareness that expresses itself in a tendency to supply those needs. In a certain sense, however, they may be said to have an awareness. If you should ever find yourself hanging from a precipice by your fingertips and a fellow human being happens by, be careful what you say. If he realised your position he might tread on your fingers.

(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

More about the punishment of fathers

With further reference to the case of the father jailed for helping his pregnant wife to leave the country:

The sentence of 16 months in prison may seem excessive, but observe how efficiently it fulfils the function of opposing rebellion against the absolute powers of decision and prescription possessed by agents of the collective.

Rebellion (or assertion of independence) against arrangements made by the collective depends on the freedom of action (money) possessed by the individual. The father in this case could afford to transport his wife to the continent. He is described as a ‘businessman’ so presumably he would have been able to send her money to support her. The prison sentence has probably effectively destroyed his livelihood, and it could well be permanently. So perhaps his wife will find herself with no means of support in a foreign country with a very young baby and an 8-year-old child to look after. She might think of seeking part-time work, but she will need a baby-sitter if she does, which might have been fairly easy to arrange if her mother and other relatives and friends were living nearby. But she cannot return to this country without jeopardising her liberty and that of her children.

So everything possible is being done to drive her back into dependence on the British state with the complete loss of liberty and of her children’s liberty which that could entail.

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’, and my plans for acquiring qualifications with which to return to a career in a university were strenuously opposed, I hoped for support and help from my parents, if from no-one else. My father was blamed for any vestige of sympathy towards my plans and, as his health broke down under persecution, he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance. My mother’s life was reduced to that of looking after an invalid.

Destroying my father’s income and health was the best possible means of removing my only likely support in working towards re-entry to a university career. I had hoped to persuade my parents to move to Oxford and to continue living at home with them, which would have provided me with a college/hotel environment within which to carry on with my independent but, at least for the time being, unsalaried academic career.

Society had decreed that I should be classified as a non-academic person, and any help which might be given to me in attempting to return to a suitable university career was rebellion against authority and to be treated as criminal, as I was myself for making such attempts at all.

There is method in the madness of the witch-hunting carried out by modern society in this country, irrational though it may appear to be.

Incidentally, in a subsequent article in the Daily Mail (9 February 2008) about the case of the exiled mother, she is described as ‘an articulate and educated woman from a middle-class professional background’. So this may very well be another example of the way modern ideology facilitates class warfare, and the rule of the working-class or those with lower IQs, in oppression and persecution of those with some admixture of aristocratic genes or above-average IQs.

Punished for caring about your child

A father is in jail and his wife is in hiding abroad with her children after he helped them flee the country to escape social services, it emerged yesterday. The businessman’s wife was heavily pregnant with their first child – and was terrified the baby would be taken at birth by social workers – when he drove his family to Dover, and then on to Paris. She had a second reason for fleeing – she believed her eight-year-old son from a previous marriage was to be adopted against her wishes.

Her 56-year-old husband was arrested on his return to Britain, and later jailed for 16 months for abducting the eight-year-old, known as Child S. [The case] raises further disturbing questions about the secret family courts which only last week were in the spotlight when social workers illegally snatched a newborn baby from its mother.

Such cases are shrouded in the heaviest secrecy – with families threatened with jail if they discuss their fears that their children are being removed unjustly. But the story of the father and his family in hiding can be revealed for the first time because he appealed in a criminal case – which can be reported – begging for his 16-month jail sentence to be reduced. His plea to the High Court was dismissed and the father, who has never seen his baby daughter, was led away in tears. ...

The three appeal judges were told yesterday how Child S’s parents had separated in 2004 after a volatile and violent marriage. The mother claims she was told the boy would be taken into temporary foster care until she ‘sorted her life out’. But when she asked for his return, social services refused. After months of legal battles, a family court judge sided with the council’s plan to put the boy up for enforced adoption. By this time, the mother was pregnant. A friend said; ‘She was led to believe by social services she would have no chance of keeping the child she was carrying, which is outrageous. She was in despair.’ ...

Dismissing the appeal, Mr Justice Bennett acknowledged the ‘powerful emotions’ involved, but said: ‘Such proceedings taken by a local authority must be respected by parents. Those who act must expect a prison sentence because a real punishment is called for and to deter others who might be subject to the same pressures.’ ...

The father – who has adult children from a previous marriage – is being destroyed by prison, a friend said outside court. (Daily Mail, 7 February 2008.)

The quotation from the judge in the above case reminds me of a remark made last year by Chris Woodhead (former Inspector of Schools): ‘Parents who condone truancy should be punished.’

When the Welfare State (better called the Oppressive State) was introduced in 1945, it was said that education, medicine and helpful benefits of all kind were to be provided free (i.e. out of taxation). At that time I think many people would have been shocked at the idea that someone might be fined and punished with imprisonment for failure to take advantage of the goodies on offer.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if the State makes itself responsible as the ultimate provider (out of taxpayers’ money) of every recognised need, then it also owns its beneficiaries body and soul, and, as the provider of liberty, may take it away or decree how it is to be used, as it sees fit.

Only a capitalist society can provide its citizens with a territory within which they are free to make decisions; these territories vary in size but may be enlarged by individual effort. A communist/socialist society provides its citizens with no freedom. The freedom which they seem to enjoy is illusory, since it may be removed at any time if they fail to comply with the draconian edicts of the State. You are punishable if you fail to force your child to attend school, whether or not it is being bullied, physically or psychologically, by other pupils or by the teachers, and whether or not it is learning anything that will ever be of any use to it. It is not up to you to decide whether your child may live with you, even if you are supporting him or her completely, and receiving no ‘benefits’ from the State.

Incidentally, is not a prison sentence of 16 months excessively harsh in comparison with penalties for actions which are clearly harming their victims, such as grievous bodily harm, arson, burglary, etc? This gentleman had done no more than assist his wife in leaving the country, accompanied by her own child as a willing companion.

All shall have nurses

David Cameron suggests a home nurse for every mother producing a baby, paid for by confiscation of freedom from taxpayers, of course, even those who have been ruined by exposure to social hostility during their ‘education’ and left (as I have been) with no qualification with which to earn money or eligibility for the so-called ‘social support’ when unable to derive an income from society.

How about, ‘Cameron wants a hotel environment for every intellectual’? That would be a lot more original than ‘Cameron wants a home nurse for every mum’ (Daily Mail, 4 February 2008).

Cameron, I gather, is what is called a ‘conservative’, and the proposal is supposed to help ‘middle-class’ parents. But parents with above-average IQs are (as I plausibly surmise) under-represented among those who can tolerate having families in the captivity of modern society.

And of course, getting a nurse into every new mum’s household will enable the nurses to report to the social workers (also paid out of taxation) about which mothers should be regarded as “unfit” and have their babies taken away to be brought up at the taxpayer’s expense. How many mothers will have the sense to realise how dangerous this is and say “No, thank you” to the nurses?

The Conservative leader will today publish a blueprint for changing attitudes to childhood, which calls for a ‘profound cultural change’ in the way Britain treats its children. ... Success in raising rounded children [whatever they are] is not just about intensive supervision, it’s about enabling children to discover the world for themselves. (Ibid.)

Well, you could say that, i.e. children might be allowed to make their own decisions about arrangements for themselves. Abolishing compulsory ‘education’ and incarceration in state schools would be a good start.