Two footnotes

notes on photos of my parents

1. My father missed getting a First by one mark. There was an easy explanation of a shortfall in his marks, but the examiners made no allowance for it, and awarded him second class honours. There was no oral examination for borderline cases at London University in those days, as there was at Oxford and Cambridge.

In fact he had arrived 40 minutes late for the practical exam, to which he had to travel on an unaccustomed Tube route. He was working too hard in the Gas Works to try out the route in advance, and missed a connection on the day of the exam.

2. Classes taught by my mother were getting such good results that she was expected to become a headmistress almost immediately, in spite of some resentful grumbling among other teachers to the effect that she must be ‘pushing’ her pupils.

Photos of my parents

My parents were great people (‘great’ in the old-fashioned sense) who had terrible lives. Like me, they were models of what the modern world most wishes to destroy, having aristocratic genes and high IQs. They were very idealistic, honest and responsible, perhaps too much so for their own good (or for mine). Here are a few photographs which may convey more than is easy to verbalise.

William Alfred Green, aged 15

The first is of my father (William Alfred Green) at the age of 15. He must have left the East Ham Grammar School by then, since the school-leaving age was 14, and his ostensible father did not want to support him for a moment longer than was necessary. So he left school and home, as his ostensible father (an engine-driver) had taken a mistress and did not want to have any children from his former family living at home after their ‘mother’ had died.
My father was the youngest and the only one still living at home. His ‘mother’ (who may have been an aunt) died when my father was 12. From the age of 14 onwards, my father supported himself by working very long hours as a junior (hack) chemist at the Beckton Gas Works, preparing at night school for the equivalent of the exams taken at 16 and 18. He did his homework on the Tube train which he took to get to the night school.
Then, also from night school, he took an Honours degree in chemistry, externally from London University. As he was very tired from his day’s work at the gas works, he found this difficult, in spite of his high IQ, and did not take the degree until he was 24. [1]
He disliked the working-class environment in which he grew up, and felt a strong need to rise in the world. His ‘mother’ was an invalid until she died, so she cannot have contributed much in the way of emotional support.
He read very few books while he was living at home, in fact I do not think he can ever have had time to read many. Nevertheless he came top of the borough in the grammar school scholarship.
He was fortunate to meet my mother (Dorothy Elizabeth Green, née Cleare), when they were both 14, at the East Ham Grammar School. She was precocious and brilliantly maternal, and must have supplied at least some of the deficits which resulted from the insecurities of his early life.

William Green and Dorothy Green (on left)

The second photograph shows them together, in their late teens, on a seaside holiday, or more likely weekend break. They both look older than I was told they were, which sometimes results from high IQs. In my father’s case the discrepancy with his chronological age is particularly marked, which probably results from the hardships of his early life, and from his continuing to work hard in his determination to rise in the world by taking a degree, in the first instance. At the time this photo was taken my mother was probably at the teacher training college, and the third person in the photograph (on the right) was at the college with her. This person later became a teacher at the primary school at the docks of which my father was then headmaster.

William Green at East Ham Grammar School

The third photo shows my father with other teachers at the East Ham Grammar School (middle of back row). He would now have been in his late twenties, having completed his degree but found no prospects open to him. With my mother’s support, he had hastily qualified as a teacher in the last year that this was possible without attending a two-year residential course, as my mother had done.
His hopes of rising to an adequate position in society had, however, been destroyed, and my mother married him when they were both about 24, recognising, I think, his need for support in living out his ruined life. This was damaging to her own prospects of a successful teaching career, although she continued to work as a supply teacher until I was born. [2]

Hitting the high-IQs (as usual)

There are complaints that George Osborne’s ‘Austerity Budget’ fails to provide sufficient protection for ‘the most vulnerable’ sections of the population. Populations regarded as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘deserving of protection’ are highly correlated with ‘populations with the lowest average IQ’.

Confirming that most benefits will rise in line with inflation, Mr Osborne insisted the move was ‘fair and affordable’ and would protect the most vulnerable in society.

The Chancellor is understood to have stuck to plans to uprate benefits after seeing polling which confirms that capping or freezing benefits for the unemployed or other groups – such as the disabled – would be very unpopular. (Daily Mail, 30th November 2011)

Pensioners have always been a useful target for cuts in benefits and increases in taxation as, whatever modifications are made in living circumstances, the population which reaches pensionable age continues to have an average IQ which is higher than that of the population as a whole.

The result of such cuts is that this population will have less money with which to provide support and assistance for its offspring, and reduced assets to leave to them. And, if there is a genetic component to IQ and associated characteristics, reducing the advantages of this population will tend in the direction of reducing the proportion of the population as a whole which has above-average IQs.

Similarly, a population which has its income reduced by the austerity budget is that of those earning over a certain amount (£40,000 p.a. or in some cases £26,000) who will no longer be eligible for child benefit. Those with lower incomes will continue to receive child benefit, in fact it will be increased by the full rate of inflation as measured by the CPI.

Thus those who ‘need’ it most will continue to receive it. Those who have incomes above a certain level will no longer do so, but they are supposed to ‘need’ it less.

It may be noted that this achieves a further shift of resources from a population with a higher average IQ to one with a lower one, and (if there should happen to be an inherited element in IQ) this will, as usual, tend in the direction of discouraging those with above-average IQs from having large, or perhaps any, families.

So the rate at which the proportion of low IQs in the population is rising will once more be increased.

The age at which pensions become payable is of course to increase, and we may expect that it will be progressively increased in the future, thus penalising those who have successfully survived to a certain age (albeit in some cases with expensive assistance from the NHS), and who are therefore likely to constitute a population with above-average IQ.

Mr Osborne insisted the changes were vital as life expectancy continues to increase. He said that standing still was not an option, warning that the cost of paying the state pension is going to become ‘more and more unaffordable.’

What is meant by ‘affordable’? Apparently something cannot be afforded if it can only be paid out of money left over when other, supposedly ‘ring-fenced’ obligations have been met. Does the rise in life expectancy have a great deal to do with the ever-rising costs of the NHS, schools and universities, and other ‘social services’? Every child that is added to the population is an immense potential burden on the taxpaying population; those which are genetically dysfunctional the most.

The cost of the dependent population, which includes those who are dysfunctional by reason of low IQ, is certainly increasing much faster than the cost of supporting pensioners is increasing by reason of a lengthening lifespan.

Once again the (relatively high-IQ) population of pensioners is a convenient scapegoat, and is penalised to offset the massively increasing costs per generation of the dependent population, which on average seems likely to have a lower average IQ than that of the pensioners.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources. 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.

Morals or money?

Melanie Phillips complains of the loss of moral principles in modern society.

Two ... incidents happened recently. A 79-year-old woman has died from head injuries after trying to fight off teenage muggers who robbed her of the bag containing her husband’s ashes.

This attack followed hard on the heels of a story about a teenage burglar who, asked to write a letter of apology to his victims, wrote instead that he wasn’t bothered or sorry at all, and that the burglary was all their fault for leaving their window open.

Such incidents suggest that we are dealing with something beyond merely ruthless acquisitiveness and contempt for the law. They suggest a total absence of empathy for another person, which is the basic requirement of morality and, in turn, of a civilised society. They illustrate a brutalisation of humanity. (Daily Mail, 28 November 2011)

Describing a speech by Phillip Blond (credited as a key architect of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea), she writes:

He [Blond] condemned the doctrine of ‘moral relativism’ according to which no values or way of life can be said to be better than any other.

Melanie Phillips concludes her article thus:

For if we really want to stop Britain’s terrifying drift into brutalisation, where a widow is robbed of her husband’s ashes and the young become strangers to remorse or reason — not to mention the summer’s riots and the economic crash — we surely have to accept that the moral vacuum into which we are staring is one that Britain’s bedrock faith must once again fill.

In 1945, with the onset of the Oppressive State, the link between the individual and reality was broken. Henceforth what determined the well-being or otherwise of yourself and your children would not be whether you could pay for what you and they needed, but whether other people would accept your needs as deserving of support with the money confiscated from other people in taxation.

This achieved a progressive shift in the ownership of resources from the middle class and aristocracy (the elite) to the least functional sections of society.

Nearly 70 years on from 1945, we read of the reduction in the size of families of the middle class, and of the deterioration in the quality of the upbringing which they are able to provide for their offspring. At the same time we read of reduction of benefits available to pensioners, and of unemployed fathers of large numbers of children, many of whom are living on benefits and all of whom, presumably, are receiving an expensive state education.

Attempts may be made to tweak the situation and to ‘kick-start’ the economy by further taxation of the above-average in order to provide ‘help’ for individuals or projects considered socially acceptable, but can such attempts ever work?

Over any considerable period of time it appears to be impossible that policies of this kind could prevent the continuous decline of civilisation. This is because the real causes of the ever-increasing drains on ‘public money’ are never mentioned. Among them is the geometrically increasing cost of supporting the population of those who are not, and never can be, productive members of society (even if interfering in other people’s lives as a doctor, teacher or social worker is considered as a positive contribution to society).

If you do everything possible to multiply the population with the lowest IQs, you will soon have an immense and growing burden on the resources which can be provided by taxpayers.

Oh, but that is only if the factors that influence IQ are at least to some extent hereditary, you may exclaim, and this is something that we find quite unacceptable and will on no account consider.

Nevertheless if, as I strongly suspect, the size of the dysfunctional population, and the expense of providing for it, continues to increase with every generation, it is a matter of indifference how far the factors which lead to this outcome are hereditary or otherwise. This population becomes a burden on the economy which outweighs any efforts which may be made to increase its income by productive activity.

The behavioural standards of a society with this characteristic are likely to decline inexorably towards brutal levels, whatever ostensible morality is being urged on the population.

Brief analyses such as these should be being expanded into research papers. We call on those who recognise the pro-collectivist bias in current academic research to support Oxford Forum.

Letter to a Polish reader

Thank you for writing, and saying

I think Celia Green is one of the great modern British writers – in the perfect world she would be a household name.

It is nice that you get something out of my books, even if I do not get much out of modern British writers.

The reason I have produced so few books, and none of recent years, is that the publication of the books did nothing to relieve the frustration of my position as an exiled academic.

Debarred as I was from any academic career to which I was suited, I needed the books not only to generate income to replace that which I should have had as an academic, but also to build up capital towards the establishment of an independent academic organisation to provide me with living conditions compatible with intellectual productivity.

Unfortunately the books did not in any way generate opportunity. Writing, publishing and distributing them remains a heavy burden on our limited manpower and resources.

We need more people to come and live nearby, to do voluntary or paid part-time or full-time work. This should seem attractive to those approaching retirement, but apparently does not in this country, as nobody of that age group comes.

This is apparently because there is such a taboo in helping anyone who complains of their bad social position and attempts to remedy it. Possibly the taboo is less strong in Poland, where everyone is less cushioned by the welfare state.

Would you be able to come for a short break in Cuddesdon? We are too overworked to spend unlimited time with you, but could meet enough to give you some information about our needs and about the advantages there might be for those working here.

Then perhaps you could tell other people in Poland who might be interested, and this could eventually help us to write more of the books we are currently prevented from writing and publishing by the constriction of our position as well as our lack of academic status.

Pro-capitalism

I am amazed at the antagonism to capitalism that is expressed in sympathy with the anti-capitalism protesters.

Capitalism is the only thing that has given me any advantages in life with which to repair the damage of a socialist environment, which ruined my life and the lives of my parents when I was exposed to a state-financed education.

Having been born as the offspring of two socially displaced families, I had no capital of my own and was dependent on the educational system to get into the sort of academic career which I needed to have. However, in practice my education was run by people who had no interest in my well-being or that of my parents, at the time or in the future, to put it mildly.

When I attempted to stake a claim on re-entry to a university career by doing research outside of a university, the only significant financial support was from a newspaper tycoon, Cecil Harmsworth King. Before being turned against me by those who thought that research should only be done inside universities, he provided just enough financial support for me to do the preliminary work to open up at least two new fields of research.

No further financial support from any quarter was forthcoming to enable Dr Charles McCreery and me to carry on with the development of these fields of research, which were taken over (at least nominally) by people who already had academic salaries and status.

The only further improvement in our position came from ownership of a house in which we lived for many years with no heating and scarcely any furniture.

I am certain that opportunity in life depends only upon capitalism, and is damaged by socialism, although the latter purports to provide it for those who are ‘poor’ enough.

Much sympathy is evinced for those who protest against capitalism. My protests against socialism receive no sympathy.

The anti-authoritarian syndrome

Once when I was at Miss Maughfling’s (the preparatory school I attended) I got sent to write lines instead of going out to break. I was in the kitchen (a large room) with the other children, and the kettles were on to make the drinks that Miss Maughfling handed out. You could have milk, cold or warm, or hot orange juice made from concentrate, which was what the kettles were for.

The steam was coming out of the spouts of the kettles and I knew, from prior experimentation at home, that it was not actually very hot. Some other child sounded afraid of it, and I said ‘But it is not very hot really’, and passed my hand through one of the jets of steam, amused at the shock of the nearby children.

Just at this point Miss Maughfling came into the kitchen and was horrified. I was not to go out to break, she said, but must write lines – ‘I must not touch steam from boiling kettles.’

I did not think she was exactly in the right, and I did not think there had been anything wrong with what I had done. Nor did I mind about missing the break on the lawn at the back of the house, which was of little interest to me.

So I went up to the classroom and dutifully wrote out the lines, neatly and well-spaced as I wrote everything else.

It was just a thing to do, so I did it as well as possible.

By the end of the break I had covered quite a few of the pages I had been given (loose lined sheets of paper) and Miss Maughfling looked surprised as she inspected them.

‘You must have worked very hard,’ she said, nonplussed, as if she would have expected something different.

The fact was that I did not have an anti-authoritarian syndrome, as so many do. I had read too much, for one thing, to think of adults as unmotivated paragons or purveyors of wisdom.

But the important thing is that I always did things in the best possible way; if they were boring this seemed to me the way to make them least boring. In effect, this was centralised and later made it possible for me to get some intensity out of fairly dull work in the early years at the convent.

Many people have learnt a disidentification with what they are doing and this can be extremely difficult to overcome. They can’t, even if they want to, do things in an error-free way. They can only find them ‘interesting’ if done in a rush at the last moment. There are several variants of this, but they all more or less preclude any more advanced form of centralisation.

Aged one

Celia Green, aged one

copy of a letter
Thank you very much for finding and sending the scan of the photograph of me aged one. We still have not found the original (all this moving around while being so short-staffed) and I would have been sorry to lose it altogether.
I think my mother realised it showed how precocious I was and kept it hidden, so that we only found it after her death. It was in a box-file in which she had kept other mementos of my precocity, such as the first book which I was found to be able to read, and the introduction which I wrote at age 5 for my arithmetic textbook. I know that she gave the little book away when I was thrown out at the end of the ruined education, and I expect she thought she should accept that I had come to nothing after all, as she had always been told was likely. At the same time she dismantled my cupboard full of chemicals, which was symbolic of my wanting to take a degree in chemistry (externally from London, when I was 14).
We looked for the introduction to the arithmetic textbook, and Charles was disappointed not to be able to see it, but it was not in the box so she must have thrown that away as well, in acknowledgement of the ruin of my life.
Looking back, I am afraid that the tragedy of my life and of my parents’ lives was determined very early on by my father’s willingness to be influenced by educational experts.
My mother said there was one who visited me ‘to see how precocious a child could be’, and in fact I remember someone who sat in the corner of the room when I was about four and asked my father guardedly when I had learnt to read. To which my father replied ‘She could read anything by the time she was four. ’
This ‘expert’ was probably one of those who promoted the view that precocity was meaningless, just an anomaly in early development.

Accommodation wanted

copy of a post to our Facebook group:

There are some people who express enthusiasm for such books and research as we have been able to produce. In fact we have produced only a very small fraction of what should have been possible if we had been less rigorously deprived of support.

If anyone’s enthusiasm for our books and research extends to wishing to see more of either produced, we would appreciate it if they would think how they could give us some financial or practical support, or encourage others to do so.

One way in which people could help would be by buying or renting properties near to us in Cuddesdon (on the outskirts of Oxford with an Oxford postcode).

We are very cramped for space and extra space would be used either for offices or for accommodating visiting voluntary workers or potential supporters.

If a house or apartment were bought outright rather than rented it could either remain in the buyer’s name or be donated to one or more of us.

Currently the following large house is on the market, which is sufficiently close to us to be very useful: The Mill, Cuddesdon, guide price £1,650,000.

There are currently two other, smaller, houses in Cuddesdon on the market for renting, at £1200 per calendar month and £800 p.c.m. respectively. The former is more spacious and would come close to significantly relieving our problems.

Another way in which people can help us is by coming as visiting workers or supporters, but in this case the problem of accommodation arises, and it would be desirable for them to be able to pay for this during their visit, also to be running a car if possible, as the accommodation might not be very near to us.

Geniuses should be reclusive

‘And there are other things. I couldn’t go to discos to meet girls because my ears are very sensitive to noise and they hurt.’ (Low tolerance of noise, along with several other of Simon’s idiosyncrasies, are symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome – a mild form of autism – but he has never been diagnosed.) [Daily Mail]

There is a wish to believe – and hence, in effect, a belief – that a high IQ, and the sort of interest in reality that may go with it, are pathological and arise from some sort of personality disorder.

Simon Norton admitted to various characteristics regarded as symptomatic of this. Perhaps that is why journalists are willing to interview him and are not willing to interview me; I would not fit so well the preferred image of the genius with serious deficits in non-intellectual areas.

Perhaps the characteristics regarded as symptomatic of Asperger’s syndrome might result from the demoralising effects of a modern education on a person with a high IQ (and hence precocious).

The attempt to get by in life without thinking about basic practical essentials (rather than trying to become rich enough to have a housekeeper and other ancillary staff) is encouraged by Oxford University and, presumably, other universities as well. Academic rejects are not encouraged to attempt to remedy their position in any way, but to ‘follow their interests’ while living in a cheap bedsit.

Perhaps the inattention to hygiene etc. has something to do with the lack of a suitable identity as a socially accepted intellectual.

It has often been assumed that I must be, for example, reclusive. When I was living without an income any side effects of that were interpreted as indicating my identification with the dropout position.

Lady Hardy, wife of Professor Hardy, met two associates of mine in Oxford when all my plans to obtain finance for my independent research institute had been defeated. ‘I saw that Celia the other day,’ said Lady Hardy, with distaste, ‘she was looking very scruffy.’

Did she expect me to buy a new raincoat at the expense of such savings as I could make? In fact my raincoat then was of very good quality, a Burberry, and although showing the effects of age, perfectly functional for its intended purposes.