The Romany Rye

George Borrow (1803-1881) was an English author who was contemporary with novelists such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Well-known in his day, and celebrated for several decades after his death, he is now somewhat neglected.

Borrow is best known for two semi-autobiographical novels (Lavengro and its sequel The Romany Rye) which feature, among many encounters with colourful characters, his relationships with members of the Romany folk, whose language he learnt. I read these two books when I was eight and was very struck by them.

The passage below, taken from the Appendix to The Romany Rye and written by Borrow, may convey some of the flavour of the books.

Lavengro is the history up to a certain period of one of rather a peculiar mind and system of nerves, with an exterior shy and cold, under which lurk much curiosity, especially with regard to what is wild and extraordinary, a considerable quantity of energy and industry, and an unconquerable love of independence.

It narrates [the hero’s] earliest dreams and feelings [...] his successive struggles, after his family and himself have settled down in a small local capital, to obtain knowledge of every kind, but more particularly philological lore; his visits to the tent of the Romany chat and the parlour of the Anglo-German philosopher; the effect produced upon his character by his flinging himself into contact with people all widely differing from each other, but all extraordinary; his reluctance to settle down to the ordinary pursuits of life; his struggles after moral truth; his glimpses of God and the obscuration of the Divine Being to his mind’s eye; and his being cast upon the world of London, by the death of his father, at the age of nineteen. [...]

In the country it shows him leading a life of roving adventure, becoming tinker, gypsy, postillion, ostler; associating with various kinds of people, chiefly of the lower classes, whose ways and habits are described; but, though leading this erratic life, we gather from the book that his habits are neither vulgar nor vicious, that he still follows to a certain extent his favourite pursuits — hunting after strange characters, or analyzing strange words and names.

Illustration from Lavengro
(by E.J. Sullivan)

Those who read this book with attention — and the author begs to observe that it would be of little utility to read it hurriedly — may derive much information with respect to matters of philology and literature [... The book] is particularly minute with regard to the ways, manners, and speech of the English section of the most extraordinary and mysterious clan or tribe of people to be found in the whole world — the children of Roma.

Beethoven’s housekeeper

Beethoven had a housekeeper.* She did the cooking and housekeeping while he composed music. I am sure the modern view of the matter is that Beethoven did not need a housekeeper, or, if he did, he should not have done. Plainly, they should both have composed music, and both have cooked their own meals. The fact that Beethoven composed music better than the housekeeper could have done is beside the point. It is the business of society to iron out these unfair advantages of endowment, not to enhance them. Why should the housekeeper not have had just as much chance to practise creative self-fulfilment?

It is interesting to observe that the housekeeper could probably have composed music just as well in the intervals of her cooking and housekeeping as she could have done if she had had all day free to devote to thinking about music. Beethoven, on the other hand, probably could not have composed nearly as well as he did if he had had to do so part-time. This proves that the housekeeper had a better social adjustment than Beethoven, and is all the more reason why Beethoven should not have received preferential treatment.

* The housekeeper’s name was Sali.

(Extract from The Corpse and the Kingdom, due for publication in 2022.)

G.I. Gurdjieff

G.I. Gurdjieff

George Gurdjieff (d. 1947) was a mystic who believed in the possibility of a higher state of consciousness, and who tried to convey a method for reaching that state. Although he published several books, his ideas are best approached via the work of his pupils, particularly that of Peter Ouspensky. In his book In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky tells of his meeting Gurdjieff in Saint Petersburg in 1915 and of how he spent several years trying to learn from him techniques for overcoming ‘mechanical’ psychology.

Central to the teaching of Gurdjieff is the idea that the normal human personality is largely mechanical, and that the ego falsely imagines itself to be in control, and able to make choices, while in reality it is merely reacting predictably to impulses. In order to make genuine choices, Gurdjieff held, it is necessary to develop radically different psychology, which requires first overcoming the delusion that you are already in control.

I asked G. what a man had to do to assimilate this teaching.
   ‘What to do?’ asked G. as though surprised. ‘It is impossible to do anything. A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before.’
   ‘How can one get rid of false ideas?’ I asked. ‘We depend on the forms of our perception. False ideas are produced by the forms of our perception.’
G. shook his head.
   ‘Again you speak of something different,’ he said. ‘You speak of errors arising from perceptions but I am not speaking of these. Within the limits of given perceptions man can err more or err less. As I have said before, man’s chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, all people want to do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood.
   Everything happens. All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him — all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.
   Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels — all this happens. Man cannot discover anything, invent anything.
   It all happens.
   To establish this fact for oneself, to understand it, to be convinced of its truth, means getting rid of a thousand illusions about man, about his being creative and consciously organizing his own life, and so on. There is nothing of this kind.
   Everything happens — popular movements, wars, revolutions, changes of government, all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as everything happens in the life of individual man. Man is born, lives, dies, builds houses, writes books, not as he wants to, but as it happens. Everything happens. Man does not love, hate, desire — all this happens.
   But no one will ever believe you if you tell him he can do nothing. This is the most offensive and the most unpleasant thing you can tell people. It is particularly unpleasant and offensive because it is the truth, and nobody wants to know the truth.
   When you understand this it will be easier for us to talk. But it is one thing to understand with the mind and another thing to feel it with one’s “whole mass,” to be really convinced that it is so and never forget it.’

P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, Harvest Books, 2001, pp.20-21.

Richard Church’s levitation experience

Richard Church (1893-1972)

Richard Church was a poet and novelist who was particularly active during the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps his best known work of prose is the semi-autobiographical trilogy consisting of the novels The Porch, The Stronghold and The Room Within.

Church became better known in later life for his childhood autobiography, Over the Bridge. In this, he recounts two phenomena which he experienced while spending time in a convalescent home (he was prone to poor health as a child).

The first experience involved the perception of time.

One heavy morning, when the outside world was iron-bound with frost, I stood at a long french window in the play-room waiting to go down to breakfast. The sun was just risen beyond the ground, and stood above the lawns, his great red disk etched with naked twigs of the bushes. Under these bushes a gardener was chopping down a dead tree. I watched him. The axe flashed red, and fell. It rose again. The movement, steady and sure, fascinated me. Suddenly I realised that the sound of the blows did not synchronise with what I saw. The thud came when the axe was on an upstroke, ready for the next blow.

I disbelieved the evidence of my eyes. Then I thought my spectacles (those miracle workers) must have betrayed me; or that my illness had begun to affect my vision. I stared intently, screwing up the eye-muscles against any possible intrusion of light or irrelevant image. But the picture I saw and the sound I heard remained disparate. Then, while I stared, knowledge came to me; the knowledge that follows a recognition of fact, of concrete experience, bringing with it a widening both of the universe and of the individual's understanding of it. [...] I had found that time and space are not absolute. Their power was not law. They were not even unanimous; they quarrelled with each other; and through their schism the human imagination, the hope, the faith, could slip, to further exploration where intuition had formerly hinted, but where logic and fatal common sense had denied.

Church continues by describing a second experience, involving him apparently levitating.

Since time and space were deceivers, openly contradicting each other, and at best offering a compromise in place of a law, I was at liberty to doubt further, to carry on my exploration of the horizons of freedom. Still conscious of the warm blood whispering in my veins, I looked down at my wrist and saw the transparent flesh, the bird-bones, the channels of blue beneath the skin. All this was substance as fragile as a plant. It could not possibly outweigh the solid earth under my feet, where I and the rest of duped mankind walked with such docility. [...] I sensed, with a benignancy deeper and more assured than reason, that my limbs and trunk were lighter than they seemed, and that I had only to reduce them by an act of will, perhaps by a mere change of physical mechanics, to command them off the ground, out of the tyranny of gravitation.

I exerted that will, visualising my hands and feet pressing downwards upon the centre of the earth. It was no surprise to me that I left the ground, and glided about the room (which was empty) some twelve or eighteen inches above the parquet floor. At first I was afraid of collapsing, of tumbling and hurting myself. But I had only to draw in a deep breath, and to command the air through the heavy portions of my anatomy, watching it flow and dilute the solid bone and flesh through the helpful chemistry of the blood, this new, released and knowledgeable blood, and I soared higher, half-way to the ceiling. This thoroughly frightened me, and I allowed myself to subside, coming to ground with a gentleness that was itself a sensuous delight.

I could not leave the matter there. I must put my discovery to the test again, and accordingly I drew in a deep breath and was just about to visualise that downward pressure of will upon body, when the door opened, and a nurse came in.

'Why, little boy?' she said. 'Haven't you heard the breakfast bell?'

Then she took a second glance at me, stooped and peered into my face. 'Is anything wrong? Are you feeling poorly this morning?'

I was almost indignant, and disclaimed the suggestion that I might have a temperature, for that would mean going to bed in the large ward where a pail stood conspicuously in the middle, on a sheet of mackintosh; an improvisation which disgusted me.

I hurried away without replying, leaving the nurse looking after me with some inquiry in her manner. The corridor and staircase were empty, for everybody was at breakfast in the vast dining-room below. Here was another opportunity! I drew my breath again, I scorned the liars of time and space, I took the presence of Christ into my hollow, featherweight bones, and I floated down the staircase without touching either tread or baluster. Alighting outside the dining-room door, I entered and took my seat, content now to live incognito amongst these wingless mortals.

Extracts taken from Richard Church, Over the Bridge, London: Heinemann, 1970, pp.170-173.

Mary Somerville, Scottish polymath

Mary Somerville, born Mary Fairfax in 1780, was a Scottish scientist, known particularly for her books on astronomy and other physical sciences. Somerville College in Oxford is named after her. However, when I was at Somerville there was little sign of her in the college. I came across no portraits of her, and none of the undergraduates I knew seemed aware of who the college was named after.

In spite of the limited availability of education for girls at the time, Somerville seems to have seized her opportunities whenever they arose. For example, when she heard a teacher advising another (male) student to read Euclid’s Elements, she decided that she should do so too, as it would help her understand a textbook on navigational theory.

Her inheritance from the death of her first husband gave Somerville the freedom to pursue intellectual interests. She started to make a name for herself in 1811 when she was awarded a medal for solving a mathematical problem.

In 1827 Somerville was hired to translate Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste. She produced an expanded version of the first two volumes which was published as The Mechanism of the Heavens. This book made her famous, and remained a textbook for undergraduates until the 1880s. Somerville’s second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, sold over 10,000 copies and consolidated her reputation in physical science.

When Mary Somerville died in 1872, she was described in an obituary as the ‘queen of science’.

A shortage of domestic servants in 1909

Extract from pamphlet Canada wants domestic servants, issued by Canada’s Minister of the Interior in 1909:

The domestic servant problem is to-day one of the most serious questions which the Canadian ladies have to deal with, and it would be beneficial alike to the employer and employee if a large number of female domestics should decide at once to emigrate to the Dominion.

[In the four years 1904-1907] the number of domestics arriving in Canada from the British Isles has been [over fifteen thousand] but this number would not have a noticeable effect in decreasing the demand even if all had remained in service, while as a matter of fact a very large percentage enter the matrimonial state shortly after their arrival and in turn become themselves mistresses requiring help in their household duties.

Extract from section ‘Letters from satisfied domestics’:

Dear Sir:
   Just a line or two to let you know how I am getting on since I came out to Virden in the spring. I like Canada very much, and can’t write too highly about the people in the district, they are all so kind to us strangers. There are fifteen of the girls who came out on the “Corinthian” round about Virden, and all liking it well. Virden is a fine clean little town and one man or woman is considered as good as another.
   It is about the way I was treated lately when I was ill that I wish to tell you particularly. I was in a situation and took typhoid fever and I don’t know who was the kindest to me. I was sent to the hospital at Brandon by the St. Andrew’s Society of Virden, who got a semi-private ward for me and when I was better they paid off the hospital and doctors’ expenses and the Government paid the rest, so I was not out one cent. It was almost good to be ill to see people so kind, for although the doctor would not allow visitors, the Brandon ladies sent in the most lovely flowers to me and nearly every day some one was telephoning and enquiring for me. I am all right again and able for work.
   There are far more people wanting help than there are girls for. I would like so much for my two sisters to come in the spring. Three of the Edinburgh girls who came out with me are in Brandon. I got my baggage all right and we had a nice trip out. I have been long in writing to tell you how I am getting on, but time passes so quickly. Believe me,
   Yours truly,
   Annie Cameron

Lawrence of Arabia

Extract from Advice to Clever Children, about the modern obsession with qualifications.

T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)

In the University of Oxford there used to be more understanding than there is now of the fact that there were a lot of ways in which a person of very high ability could get disconnected from his education, but that this ability might still be too good to waste. T.E. Lawrence, as he approached his final examinations in history, regarded himself as unprepared for them; and it may be doubted whether he would have got a First if a tutor, sympathetic to his evident ability, had not drawn to his attention the possibility of offering a thesis on a subject of special interest to him to supplement the usual papers, and been instrumental in arranging finance for an expedition necessary for the proposed thesis.

There was always a certain tradition that colleges could, and sometimes did, if they knew a person had very high ability, disregard his examination results and make it possible for him to continue his academic career. When I was an undergraduate there was a story about a certain Professor who had got a Fourth, but had still gone on with his academic career and arrived at his present eminence.

Even while I was at college a case occurred of a girl who got a Third, but the dons liked her and thought she was suited to doing research, so she duly got a research scholarship. Of course, with the advance of socialism and the increased dependence of the colleges (or, strictly speaking, the university) on state finance, the tendency is for nothing to matter except exam results, regardless of how they have been brought about.

‘Man should become God’

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, a key idea is that man should become God, and that the universe will become deified with him.

Here are some quotations from Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church* which illustrate this idea.

Man, according to St. Basil, is a creature who has received a commandment to become God.

Man was created last, according to the Greek Fathers, in order that he might be introduced into the universe like a king into his palace.

God became man in order that man might become god, to use the words of Ireneus and Athanasius, echoed by the Fathers and theologians of every age.

---

* Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, James Clarke 1957, reprinted 1968. Quotations are taken, respectively, from pages 124, 111 and 134.

Bishop Berkeley: is there an external world?

George Berkeley (1685-1753)

George Berkeley, born in 1685 at Dysart Castle in County Kilkenny, and Bishop of Cloyne from 1734 to 1753, wrote a philosophical analysis of materialism which has been the subject of controversy since its publication.

Berkeley attacked the belief in material objects that underlay the prevailing scientific model of the world. He argued that there was no basis for a belief in physical objects or an external world, and that we should think of all objects as being mental.

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? And what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived? *

Modern philosophers have tended to marginalise Berkeley because his views appear to be radically at odds with the conventional scientific worldview. Bertrand Russell, for example, took Berkeley’s arguments seriously but felt justified in dismissing them.

In one sense it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences. No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy. [...] There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations.

The way in which simplicity comes in from supposing that there really are physical objects is easily seen. If the cat appears at one moment in one part of the room, and at another in another part, it is natural to suppose that it has moved from the one to the other, passing over a series of intermediate positions. But if it is merely a set of sense-data, it cannot have ever been in any place where I did not see it; thus we shall have to suppose that it did not exist at all while I was not looking, but suddenly sprang into being in a new place. **

In these extracts from his book The Problems of Philosophy, Russell mentions some of the apparent problems of Berkeley’s thesis. It seems natural to one to suppose that, during the time between seeing the cat the first time and seeing it the second time, something exists which one can label as ‘the cat’, even if no one is having sensory experiences involving this inferred cat. However, the fact that positing such an independent entity may seem natural, or convenient, does not constitute philosophical proof.

* George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in A.J. Ayer & R. Winch (Eds.), British Empirical Philosophers, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1952, p.179.
** Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Williams & Norgate 1912, pp.30-36.

guest post: Christine Fulcher on schools

Below is a post by my colleague Christine Fulcher, giving some of her views on education.

The headmaster of my primary school made great play of the fact that he was in loco parentis. He told us that this was how his legal position vis-à-vis the pupils of the school was described, and that this was Latin for ‘in place of the parent’. In other words, he was acting as a substitute parent during the hours we were attending that school. Well, if parents were responsible people, they would not be willing to let other people act in loco parentis in this way.

The fact that education is compulsory is an indictment of parents who want an easy life for themselves with their children out of their hair, rather than what is best for their children. If so-called education were not compulsory and supposedly ‘free’ at point of delivery (but not really free, being paid for out of taxation) then people might be more cautious about bringing children into the world.

As for the so-called ‘right’ of children to be educated: those who create ‘rights’ have their own agendas, which are not necessarily in the interests of those to whom they are giving these ‘rights’. The fact that it is generally in the interests of people to be able to read, write and do basic arithmetic is expanded into the idea of compulsory education, then forced upon children, who have no choice.

If education were not compulsory, a certain number of people might grow up unable to read, write or do basic arithmetic. But this is a lesser evil than that created by making ‘education’ compulsory. Much of modern education does not consist of ‘stuffing children’s minds with facts’, but of stuffing their minds with propaganda. This is not a modern phenomenon. Those who wish to spread any sort of propaganda, religious or atheist, have always been interested in using compulsory education of the young as a means of doing this.

Christine Fulcher

Metachoric experiences

metachoric experience = experience in which the whole of a subject’s visual field is replaced by a hallucinatory one

Our research on lucid dreams, false awakenings and out-of-the-body experiences highlighted the capacity of the brain to generate experiences which provide a convincing replica of normal perceptual experience.

In lucid dreams, the subject appears to be relatively ‘normal’ in terms of cognitive faculties, as evidenced by the fact that he has awareness of his actual state, i.e. that he is asleep and that the experiences he is having are hallucinatory. In false awakenings, the subject appears to ‘see’ a convincing replica of his normal bedroom environment. He may then see monsters or other figures of various kinds, apparently superimposed on this otherwise faithful replica, although in fact the whole of the visual field is of course hallucinatory. In out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) the subject is typically awake but appears to be seeing his environment from the wrong perspective — often as if from a point of view above his head. Again, the brain appears to be generating a highly convincing replica of the normal environment, visually speaking.

In the case of OBEs, there is also the observation that the hallucinatory state can apparently be entered with little or no awareness that a discontinuity has taken place from (a) actually seeing the environment to (b) hallucinating the same environment, albeit from a different perspective.

These experiences suggested a departure from the previous idea of a hallucination as an isolated area of the visual field which was generated erroneously by the brain, and then somehow superimposed on the rest of the visual field which was generated from actual input in the normal way.

Certain features of our research on apparitional cases — cases where an apparitional figure or object is seen against the background of the normal environment — led us to the possibility that many apparitional experiences, and possibly all of them, were analogous to lucid dreams and OBEs in being totally hallucinatory. That is to say, rather than the experience consisting of normal perception plus a finite hallucinatory element (the two elements being integrated in some way), the perceptual environment is entirely replaced by a hallucinatory one, at least as long as the apparitional figure is being perceived.

In our 1975 book Apparitions we proposed the term metachoric to designate such experiences in which the normal perceptual environment is entirely replaced by a hallucinatory one.

Celia Green
Charles McCreery

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Tribalism and ethics

The essential feature of ethics — that is to say, respect for the right of the individual to have what he wants and to decide for himself what is of importance to him, so long as it is not interfering with the rights of others to pursue what they consider important for them — arose in association with capitalism. It was an ethic that could only arise when individuals had at least the potentiality of paying for what they wanted within the structure of the society they lived in.

This ethic has been nominally taken over by the modern trend towards tribalism. We will retain the great advances in knowledge and control of our environment which were made when collective control was somewhat weakened, but we will not consider it moral for individuals to pursue whatever goals they consider conducive to whatever sort of wellbeing they choose for themselves, unless we happen to agree with them. (‘We’ is a vague collective entity consisting of social agreement about what is right and proper.)

We aim to remove freedom, so far as we can, but we sweeten the pill by confirming our belief in the ‘individual’. Indeed, we respect the ‘individual’ more than ever before and complain that the previous state of society had too little of this respect. But when the nature of this ‘respect’ is formulated, it does not come out to anything so simple and absolute as respect for other people’s power to decide; it comes out as a concern for their well-being, based on some sort of ‘balanced’ assessment of their total wants and needs. By implication this is an assessment that we will make, not them, and ‘balance’ provides a lot of scope for overriding a person’s strongest inclinations if our respect for them is ‘balanced’ by our respect for something else that they should be inclined to want instead.

Extract from the forthcoming book by Celia Green, The Corpse and the Kingdom, due to be published in 2021.

Herbert Spencer and the welfare state

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

The philosopher Herbert Spencer, commenting in 1851 on the possible effects of welfare, a century before the inception of the modern welfare state:

We do not consider it true kindness in a mother to gratify her child with sweetmeats that are certain to make it ill. We should think it a very foolish sort of benevolence which led a surgeon to let his patient’s disease progress to a fatal issue, rather than inflict pain by an operation. Similarly, we must call those spurious philanthropists, who, to prevent present misery, would entail greater misery upon future generations. All defenders of a poor-law must, however, be classed amongst such. That rigorous necessity which, when allowed to act on them, becomes so sharp a spur to the lazy, and so strong a bridle to the random, these paupers’ friends would repeal, because of the wailings it here and there produces.

Spencer’s comments could be interpreted as implying that welfare may have negative effects on a society’s gene pool:

Blind to the fact, that under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation — absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision, and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the prospective difficulty of maintaining a family.

Spencer did not, however, condemn charitable actions in general:

To that charity which may be described as helping men to help themselves, [the foregoing argument] makes no objection — countenances it rather. And in helping men to help themselves, there remains abundant scope for the exercise of a people’s sympathies. Accidents will still supply victims on whom generosity may be legitimately expended. Men thrown upon their backs by unforeseen events, men who have failed for want of knowledge inaccessible to them, men ruined by the dishonesty of others, and men in whom hope long delayed has made the heart sick, may, with advantage to all parties, be assisted.

The above extracts are taken from: Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, chapter 25, available at Online Library of Liberty.

Zoroastrianism: End of the world

Zoroastrianism, which takes its name from the prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), is one of the world’s oldest surviving religions, and was the state religion of the Persian empire for over a thousand years. Its origins may go back to the 2nd millennium BC, though it was not originally called Zoroastrianism. The name Zarathustra may mean ‘driver of camels’.

The roots of Zoroastrianism are thought to have emerged from a common prehistoric Indo-Iranian religious system dating back to the early 2nd millennium BC. The prophet Zoroaster himself is thought by many modern historians to have been a reformer of the polytheistic Iranian religion who lived in the 10th century BC. [Wikipedia]

The central deity of Zoroastrianism is Ahura Mazda (‘Lord of Wisdom’). Ahura Mazda is in continuous conflict with his negative counterpart Angra Mainyu (‘Destructive Spirit’).

Although Zoroastrians do not consider Angra Mainyu* to be equivalent in strength to Ahura Mazda, the religion is sometimes regarded as dualistic because of this conflict between good and evil. A more obviously dualistic religion is Manichaeism, which for a time replaced Zoroastrianism as the dominant religion in Persia, and which adopted the figures of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu but posited them to be of roughly equal power. (A better word for what is meant may be ditheism rather than dualism.)

Zoroastrian belief includes the concept of an end of the world, or eschatology, although ‘end’ should be understood to mean radical transformation rather than complete cessation.

At the end, there will be a great battle between the forces of good and those of evil in which the good will triumph. On earth, the Saviour will bring about a resurrection of the dead. This is followed by a last judgment through ordeal. The forces of good will cause the metal in the mountains to melt, and to flow across the earth like a river. All mankind — both the living and the resurrected dead — will be required to wade through that river, but for the righteous it will seem to be a river of warm milk, while the wicked will be burned.

There will be a final act of worship involving the preparation of parahaoma, a sacred liquid used in Zoroastrian rituals. The righteous will partake of the parahaoma, which will confer immortality upon them. Thereafter, humankind will become divine entities, living without food, without hunger or thirst, and without possibility of bodily injury.

All humanity will speak a single language and belong to a single nation without borders. All will share a single purpose and goal, joining with the divine for a perpetual exaltation of God’s glory. [Wikipedia text, edited]

*  Angra Mainyu is also known as ‘Ahriman’.
**  Thumbnail is of a painting by Anuki Natsvlishvili, ‘Ahura Mazda & Ahriman’, viewable at saatchiart.com. It shows Ahura Mazda, on the left, in battle with Ahriman, on the right.

Cosmic Consciousness

Maurice Bucke was a Canadian psychiatrist and a contemporary of the American psychologist William James. In 1901, Bucke published a book about mystical experiences entitled Cosmic Consciousness. William James referred to Bucke, and to cosmic consciousness, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, published one year later.*

Bucke seems to have been inspired to write Cosmic Consciousness by a mystical experience he had in his thirties. In the book, he reviews the experiences of other individuals, including Walt Whitman, William Blake and Dante, as well as religious figures such as Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad.

The following is his description of his own experience, written in the third person.

It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment.

All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next, he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain.

He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.

The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew; neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind. There was no return, that night or at any other time, of the experience.**

* William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans Green & Co., 1902.
** R.M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, 1905 edition, Innes & Sons, pp.7-8.

Henley’s Invictus

W.E. Henley’s poem Invictus was written in 1875. Originally the poem was published untitled; the name ‘Invictus’ was added by anthologist Arthur Quiller-Couch when the poem was included in The Oxford Book of English Verse.

Invictus was for some decades considered to represent the epitome of the ‘stiff upper lip’ British spirit. Although stiff-upper-lipness fell out of favour during the second half of the twentieth century, the poem has remained influential, as shown by recurring twenty-first century cultural references to it. When singer Cher recently tweeted about US presidential candidate Joe Biden that ‘your head is bloodied, but unbowed’, she was invoking a line from the poem.

Below is the poem in full.

Out of the night that covers me,
   Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
   For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
   I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
   My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
   Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
   Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
   How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
   I am the captain of my soul.

For a further discussion of the psychological significance of Henley’s poem, see my book Advice to Clever Children, p.124.

Vladimir Horowitz and the psychology of kingship

Vladimir Horowitz
(1903 - 1989)

Pianist Vladimir Horowitz in a 1977 interview:

When I’m on the stage I’m one person, when I’m out of the stage I’m another person.

When I’m on the stage, I feel I am a king ... I’m a king ... yes, nobody has to interfere with him ... because I have something to do, I have to bring the best which is in me.

Horowitz was a Russian pianist who later became an American citizen. His performances tended to be intense and highly individual, impressing, among others, the composer Rachmaninov.

The psychology of kingship is not a fashionable concept these days. However, there are some references to it in Gnostic Christianity. It has some connection with the psychological state I discussed in Advice to Clever Children which I termed centralisation. See Chapter 29, ‘Royalty’.

The social contract

In the views of exponents of how society came to be constituted as it is (or was at the time, or should be) we note fairly constantly a willingness to ascribe untrammelled and overriding power to the legislators of the community, together with infallibility.

In early accounts some justification for society’s claim to possession of the individual is felt to be necessary. This is provided either by God, who bestows upon kings their divine right, or by a social contract, which is mythical, even if some writers lose sight of its historical implausibility. Desiring the advantages of an organised community, it is supposed that individuals freely choose to obey the government that shall be chosen by majority preference; hence minorities have nothing to complain of, as they have entered the situation of their own free will. So conflict is avoided.

I would have formulated the situation myself by supposing that, at a sufficiently primitive stage, when there was some realistic possibility of a dissident or disadvantaged individual choosing to fend for himself, there was a real balance of advantages and disadvantages for each individual which led, on the whole, to his preferring to remain, in fairly unstable equilibrium, in the settlement or compound occupied by his group. Fairly disharmonious associations of this kind gradually evolved social structures which reduced the squabbling and maximised the stability of the enterprise. At the time of, say, Hobbes, there was relatively little opportunity for any individual to dissociate himself from the pressures and demands of his society. By now there is even less.

We note that writers on political theory wish conflict between the individual and society to be an impossibility, or if not impossible, at least a clear aberration from a perfect underlying harmony.

Extract from the forthcoming book ‘The Corpse and the Kingdom’

Colin Wilson’s The Outsider

Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider, published in 1956, has been described as ‘the classic study of alienation, creativity and the modern mind’. Although the book is not usually associated with existentialism, it provides an introduction to a central theme of existentialism:

the awareness that one is existing, that one has finite capacities and a finite lifetime, and that one has no knowledge of what, if anything, is important.

Such awareness may make one feel sceptical about social conventions.

As The Outsider shows, the consequences of experiencing existential awareness have been portrayed in literature as varying from apathy at one extreme, to madness and violence at the other. There is a common notion that giving up one’s belief in the meaningfulness of society can lead to one wanting to indulge in violent behaviour, even murder.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, an important figure in The Outsider, may have contributed to this notion. Some of the central characters of his novels commit cold-blooded murder, and their lack of inhibition seems to be linked to their scepticism about society.

Dostoyevsky, who could be regarded as an Outsider himself, may have felt conflicted about his uneasy relationship with society and hence portrayed Outsiders with ambivalence. He is sympathetic to the scepticism and passion of Outsiders. However, he also partially takes society’s side in condemning them.

This ambivalence on the part of novelists and philosophers towards those who are like them is a recurring theme of The Outsider.

IQ and identical twins

The following extract is from: Peter Saunders, Social Mobility Myths, Civitas 2010, pp.56-58. (The full publication is available for download at civitas.org.uk.)

Given that intelligence is a function of both ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, and that these two factors are each themselves entailed in the other, it is obviously extremely difficult to partial out their respective influences. But it is not impossible. Hans Eysenck claims that heredity is twice as important as environment in explaining differences in intelligence, and he bases this estimate on the results of repeated experiments carried out over many years by many different researchers. These experiments compare variations in mental ability between people who are unrelated genetically but who share a common environment (e.g. children raised in children’s homes) with variations between people who are genetically related but raised in contrasting environments (e.g. twins raised by different sets of foster parents). Many attempts have been made to discredit this work, but [Eysenck’s] overall conclusion is compelling and incontrovertible.

The strongest experiments focus on the performance of identical (monozygotic) twins as compared with non‐identical (dizygotic) twins. MZ twins share all their genes in common while DZ twins share 50 per cent of their genes. Ignoring Cyril Burt’s disputed findings, and aggregating the results of other researchers whose integrity has never been questioned, Eysenck reports the following average correlations in intelligence test scores:

• MZ twins raised in the same environment = 0.87
• MZ twins reared in separate environments = 0.77
• DZ twins raised in the same environment = 0.53

These figures compare with an average correlation of 0.23 for biologically unrelated individuals who are raised in a common environment (e.g. adopted or foster children), and with a correlation of zero for unrelated children raised in different environments. [...]

If environment were more important than heredity, the relative strength of these correlations should be reversed. Identical twins raised separately should differ more in their scores than non‐identical twins raised together, for they have been subjected to greater environmental variation. The opposite, however, holds true. Even when brought up separately, identical twins score much more similarly on IQ tests than non‐identical twins who were kept together. [...] To the extent that anything is ever proven in social science, the undisputed fact that identical twins brought up separately correlate so much more highly on test scores than non‐identical twins raised together proves that intelligence is based to a substantial degree (perhaps 50 per cent, probably more) on a cluster of genes which we inherit from our parents.

According to Professor Saunders, research on intelligence ‘has clearly demonstrated that we are not all born equal, despite the wishes of egalitarian sociologists that we were.’

Image source: Raul Carabeo.

Ignoring the heritability of intelligence

Extract from a 2013 article by Ed West on the Spectator’s website:

I’m starting to get the impression that the Guardian isn’t very keen on Michael Gove [...] The latest offering was this, ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, which was presumably designed to infuriate teachers, about an essay written by Dominic Cummings. This was followed up by a Polly Toynbee piece denying the role of hereditary factors in intelligence [...]

What’s strange is that [Cummings] was saying nothing that isn’t widely accepted; the very significant influence of heritable factors on differences in IQ within a population has been well known for four decades, and yet for political reasons it is ignored in education policy, both here and in the US.

In October 2013, Dominic Cummings, at the time Special Adviser to the then Education Secretary Michael Gove, published a report on education policy, which made reference to the heritability of IQ. This prompted an article* in the Daily Telegraph by geneticist Steve Jones, attacking Cummings. However, it subsequently emerged** that Professor Jones had not actually read Cummings’ report and had based his views on press articles about the report.

* Steve Jones, ‘There’s much more to IQ than biology and DNA’, Daily Telegraph, 14 October 2013
** Dominic Cummings, ‘What I actually said about genes, IQ and heritability’, Daily Telegraph, 15 October 2013

Æthelflæd - Lady of the Mercians

England in 878 AD

Æthelflæd, the daughter of King Alfred, was a significant figure in early British history. From the time of her husband’s death in 911, until her own death in 918, she ruled the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Although her title was ‘Lady of the Mercians’, it seems her role was that of queen, an unusual position for a woman in early Britain. The name ‘Æthelflæd’ means ‘noble beauty’.

Æthelflæd showed herself to be an excellent military tactician. She expanded Mercia’s territories to the north, east and west. Even during her husband’s life, building projects and treaties were carried out in her name. After his death, the pace of activity seems to have accelerated: according to a BBC article, numerous towns like Bridgnorth, Tamworth and Stafford were fortified by her, to secure roads and rivers.

In the 9th century most of eastern England was ruled by Danish Vikings, in an area known as the Danelaw. In 917 Æthelflæd captured the Danelaw borough of Derby, and in 918 the Danelaw borough of Leicester. Also in 918, Viking-occupied York offered to accept her rule; however, she died before this could come to fruition.

According to some accounts, she actually led her armies into battle. If true, this would make her an even more remarkable figure, and one of only a handful of women from history who were military leaders.

Æthelflæd seems to have been unfairly neglected by historians. In Michael Wood’s popular book about Saxon Britain, In Search of the Dark Ages, she is mentioned only as being the aunt of King Æthelstan.

The 12th century historian Henry of Huntingdon celebrated Æthelflæd in a poem.*

O Elfleda potens, O terror virgo virorum,
Victrix naturae, nomine digna viri.
Te, quo splendidior fieres, natura puellam,
Te probita fecit nomen habere viri.

[Heroic Elflede! great in martial fame,
A man in valour, woman though in name;
Thee warlike hosts, thee, nature too obey’d,
Conqu’ror o’er both, though born by sex a maid.]

* Extract from poem in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum. Translation by Tom Arnold, 1879. Map of England courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The Abolition of Genius

This is a new, hardback edition of Charles McCreery’s book, The Abolition of Genius.

The book contains an analysis of the relationship between genius and money. It proposes the controversial thesis that the possession of a private income, either by the genius or by his or her patron, has been a necessary condition of the productivity of the great majority of geniuses throughout history.

McCreery’s analysis is illustrated with many instructive, and sometimes surprising, examples. Among the individuals whose financial circumstances are discussed in the book are those shown on the front cover: Wagner, Hume, Einstein, Galileo, Kant, Schopenhauer, Schubert and Nietzsche.

There is a Look-Inside function on the Amazon pages.
Amazon USA
Amazon UK

‘This is a courageous, well-argued and timely book’ – Professor H.J. Eysenck

Stephen Jay Gould and The Bell Curve

If ability is at least partly inherited, then it is likely that social classes will arise. If social class is partly explained by genes, then the theory that class is entirely due to ‘unfair’ advantages is false.

If it is not known how much social class is due to genetic and how much to other factors, then it cannot be assumed that intervention will move things towards a ‘fairer’ position. This may explain the reactions of writers such as Stephen Jay Gould to The Bell Curve.*

One of the central arguments of The Bell Curve is that America’s upper class is an elite with relatively high average IQ, which has arisen because intelligence is partly heritable. Gould asserts that this argument requires

the validity of four shaky premises, [i.e. intelligence] must be depictable as a single number, capable of ranking people in linear order, genetically based, and effectively immutable. If any of these premises are false, the entire argument collapses.**

The validity of The Bell Curve’s explanation of class does not depend on intelligence being ‘immutable’. Gould seems to be confusing questions of fact with questions of policy.

Nor does the explanation depend on intelligence being depictable as a single number. Whether intelligence, or ability in general, is heritable is a separate question from how well a single variable, such as IQ, is capable of measuring it.


* Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, Free Press 1994.
** Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Penguin 1997, p.368.

Financing special education

From Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man:

The difference between strict hereditarians and their opponents is not, as some caricatures suggest, the belief that a child’s performance is all inborn or all a function of environment and learning. [...] The differences are more a matter of social policy and educational practice.

Hereditarians view their measures of intelligence as markers of permanent, inborn limits. Children, so labelled, should be sorted, trained according to their inheritance and channelled into professions appropriate for their biology. Mental testing becomes a theory of limits.

Antihereditarians [...] test in order to identify and help. Without denying the evident fact that not all children, whatever their training, will enter the company of Newton and Einstein, they emphasize the power of creative education to increase the achievements of all children, often in extensive and unanticipated ways. [...]

A partially inherited low IQ might be subject to extensive improvement through proper education. And it might not. The mere fact of its heritability permits no conclusion. *

The debate about heritability of IQ has become less about the science of whether, and to what extent, intelligence is inherited; and more about the politics of whether resources should be devoted to helping those with a relatively low measured IQ to ‘catch up’.

What Gould, and others, tend to omit from their discussions is the question of whether ‘should’ in this context means voluntary or compulsory contributions.

It might mean that people should be encouraged to donate to voluntary organisations who would then provide what Gould refers to above as ‘proper education’. In practice, however, it usually means that the government should devote tax revenue to the problem, implying that the ‘contributions’ are to be collected coercively.

* Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Penguin 1997, pp.182-183, 186.

John Stuart Mill — blank-slate collectivist?

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

The following extract* from John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography is cited in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.

I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement.

This tendency [... is] so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure to be carried to an even greater length than is really justified by the more moderate forms of intuitional philosophy. [italics added]

Mill makes it clear that a reason for his dislike of the idea of innate characteristics is his associating it with ‘conservative interests’. Mill was presumably hostile to ‘conservative interests’ because he thought of himself as a ‘social reformer’.

It is not clear what Mill could have meant by ‘irresistible proofs’ that individual differences are predominantly due to environment. There was little statistical data on the issue of human heritability when he wrote this in the 1870s.

Nowadays prejudice against innate characteristics, on the grounds that belief in them is an obstacle to social reform, has become a common attitude.

* Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Penguin Books, 2003, p.18.

You cannot serve two masters

In the standard Gospels it is often necessary to make rather extreme substitutions for anything that makes sense to emerge. None of the Gospels appears to be much less than a century later than the life of the supposed person, and the suppression of anything interesting does not take anything like that long; it probably happens more or less immediately.

So consider:

No man can serve two masters ... You cannot serve God and Mammon.

What this may really mean is: You cannot serve both the individual/reality and society.

This was the fundamental conflict between the Gnostics and Pauline Christianity. The Gnostics devalued social goings-on. Pauline Christianity conflated God and society, which gave it much greater marketability. The concept of God was swallowed up in, and dissolved into, the much more dominant concept of society, or ‘other people’.

It may be observed that maintaining more than one source of significance is decentralising. The source of significance which normally obliterates all others is society. Society is not, however, a possible focus of centralisation, being fundamentally a decentralising influence.

So the fundamental conflict, for anyone proceeding in the direction of centralisation, is that between the individual and society, or objective reality and society.

Compulsory education and Prussia - part 2

Further to the previous post, there is another quotation from Murray Rothbard’s history of compulsory education* which makes it very clear that people were forced to do what was prescribed for them to do.

[...] under the absolute monarchy of Frederick William III [...] there were stringent laws obliging parents to send their children to the schools. Children must attend the schools between the ages of seven and fourteen, and no excuses were permitted except physical inability or absolute idiocy. Parents of truants were warned, and finally punished by fines, or by civil disabilities, and as a last resort, the child was taken from its parents and educated and reared by the local authorities. [p.26]

* Murray N. Rothbard, Education: Free and Compulsory, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999.

Compulsory education

Frederick William I
(1688 - 1740)

Compulsory education involves the transfer of the power to make decisions about a child’s education from the child’s parents to the state.

Compulsory education has been a feature of industrialised nations for a long time; it is rarely questioned nowadays. This does not mean it is justified, or acceptable.

The eighteenth century Germanic state Prussia was a pioneer in the development of compulsory education, as Murray Rothbard notes.*

It was King Frederick William I who inaugurated the Prussian compulsory school system, the first national system in Europe. In 1717, he ordered compulsory attendance of all children at the state schools, and, in later acts, he followed with the provision for the construction of more such schools. [...]

These beginnings were carried forward by his son Frederick the Great, who vigorously reasserted the principle of compulsory attendance in the state schools, and established the flourishing national system [...]

Under King Frederick William III, the absolute State was greatly strengthened. His famous minister, von Stein, began by abolishing the semi-religious private schools, and placing all education directly under the Minister of the Interior. In 1810, the ministry decreed the necessity of State examination and certification of all teachers. In 1812, the school graduation examination was revived as a necessary requirement for the child’s departure from the state school, and an elaborate system of bureaucrats to supervise the schools was established in the country and the towns.

These are what Rothbard believes to have been some of the effects of compulsory state education:

[...] since the State began to control education, its evident tendency has been more and more to act in such a manner as to promote repression and hindrance of education, rather than the true development of the individual. Its tendency has been for compulsion, for enforced equality at the lowest level, for the watering down of the subject and even the abandonment of all formal teaching, for the inculcation of obedience to the State and to the “group” rather than the development of self-independence, [and] for the deprecation of intellectual subjects.

* Murray N. Rothbard, Education: Free and Compulsory, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999.

Robert Nozick on ‘rights’

Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick on the individual’s rights versus the state’s rights:

Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state? [...]

Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified [...]*

When political philosophers discuss ‘rights’ they usually overlook the fact that ‘rights’ are an imaginary concept. The concept may be a convenience but it does not have objective reality and it cannot be proven.

It is possible to imagine a society in which each person knew what his possessions were, and knew that only he could make use of them. But in practice it would be difficult and complicated to protect each person's property ‘rights’ from everyone else. Discussions of how this might be done should not be confused with defining what a ‘right’ might be.

* Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Basic Books, 1974, p.ix.

Intelligence and intimidation

IQ (intelligence quotient) as a single measure of intelligence started to become prominent with the inception of compulsory education. Those in charge of schools and colleges wanted to be able to select those most likely to succeed academically.

The idea of IQ now seems to be considered dubious by the academic and educational establishments, and IQ tests are regarded with suspicion.

Also regarded with suspicion — particularly among those paid to intervene in other people’s lives — is the idea that intelligence has a significant heritable component.

For example, a Guardian editorial described recent research linking IQ to specific genes as ‘problematic’ and ‘troubling’. Apparently this is because the results might undermine demands for more intervention to iron out inequality.

The prejudice against the possibility of IQ heritability is not confined to left-wing journalists. The editorial refers to academics who argue that ‘the heritability of human traits is scientifically unsound’.

The editorial tries to imply guilt by association, conflating heritability with genetic testing and eugenics. The scientists responsible for the research are disparaged as ‘hereditarians’, and their arguments are described as ‘advocacy’.

Ironically, the editorial complains that the research has created ‘an intimidatory atmosphere’. In the area of IQ, it is those who try to make the idea of heritability seem morally unacceptable who are the real intimidators.

Churchill, America and socialism

The rise of Nationalsozialismus in Germany was only one element in the more or less continuous socialist onslaughts on European capitalist, or aristocracy-based, civilisation. Nationalsozialismus ruined the British Empire, which had to put all its resources into opposing it. Britain could not have done otherwise, because the insularity which had protected it from invasion was no longer effective against modern technology.

Churchill knew that America’s support was indispensable, but America, which was far enough removed to treat this as a European problem, initially held out against him.

Of course this was the way things always were; countries did not support one another against external threats unless it was in their own interests to do so. America, at this time, recognised no obligation to defend civilisation against socialism, nor of course has any country done so at any time.

America came into the war at a late stage when all seemed lost. At first, the plan seemed to be to make Britain pay for the aid it received. I remember a system called Lend-Lease under which food, to be paid for after the war, arrived from America. Powdered dried egg, dried milk, and so on. In practice, the envisaged repayment after the war never materialised.

While America recognised no generalised obligation to aid civilised countries against the onslaughts of socialism, it has no doubt made plenty of donations to uncivilised countries without expecting repayment. As, of course, Britain has also done; making loans in ‘aid’ to ‘developing’ countries and then writing them off altogether or ‘re-scheduling’ them when they were not repaid.

Trade protectionism is supposed to be a bad thing. However, it is probably necessary for a country that has started to fall to socialism, as Britain has. Employment laws and welfare benefits raise the production costs of British goods. British manufacturers are in no position to compete with the flood of imports from countries where workers still work to keep themselves alive, and where the cost of their work is largely determined by how much they are willing to do it for.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position.
I need people to provide moral support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Denis Compton: genius cricketer

Denis Compton CBE
(1918 - 1997)

Denis Compton, a cricketer who played in nearly eighty Test matches for England and who was a household name during the 1940s, is widely regarded as one of the top batsmen of all time.

By the late 1930s, Compton was one of England’s finest batsmen, and remained at the top of his profession for some twenty years. His dashing approach to batting and the sheer enjoyment he exuded endeared him to a generation of cricket lovers.

On the England tour of South Africa 1948–49 he scored 300 against North-Eastern Transvaal in just over three hours — still the fastest triple-century ever in first-class cricket.

Compton’s style of playing could be described as inspirational. He became known for inventing new ways of batting which would then be imitated by other players.

His performance could be erratic, and I remember finding it disappointing on occasion. He would sometimes raise one’s expectations, then dash them.

Compton also played professional football, representing England during wartime in a number of friendly matches against allied countries such as France.

Compton seems to have had an unusual personality.

Compton’s absent-mindedness was legendary. Cricketer Colin Cowdrey writes that Compton turned up for the Old Trafford Test of 1955 against South Africa without his kitbag. Undaunted, Compton sauntered into the Old Trafford museum and, borrowing an antique bat off the display, went on to score 158 and 71 runs in the first two innings.

Peter Parfitt, another England Test cricketer, was a speaker at a major celebration in London for Compton’s 70th birthday. He says that Compton was called to the telephone by a lady who had heard about the dinner: eventually he agreed to take the call. “Denis,” she said, “it’s me, your mother. You’re not 70, you’re only 69.”

Extracts are from Wikipedia article about Denis Compton.

Getting one’s eye in at cricket

50 years ago people used to talk about ‘getting one’s eye in’ when playing a game. This was associated with scoring more freely.

My father told me of something that happened to him once when he was playing cricket. Usually the ball came to him so fast that he could not see it at all. On this occasion he suddenly found that he saw the ball floating towards him so slowly that he could see the stitches on its binding, and he found it very easy to hit it with his bat.

I have never heard anyone describing a similar experience. The expression ‘getting one’s eye in’ used to be quite common, at least in cricket, and may sometimes have been used to refer to something similar. My father was not particularly good at games, but he did have a high IQ.

The risen Jesus: hard to recognise

Fresco by Giotto,
Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi

According to the Synoptic Gospels, the risen Jesus who was seen by his disciples was at first difficult to recognise. After the initial difficulty, however, the disciples seem to have had no doubt that it was indeed him.

Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying?’

‘They have taken my Lord away,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’ At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary’.

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means ‘Teacher’). Jesus said, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.’ (John 20:11-17)

Possibly parts of the Jesus story are apocryphal. However, as Richard Bauckham points out, this particular element seems an odd thing to have invented if there was no factual basis for it.

I think this pattern of non-recognition followed by identification of Jesus, which we find in several of the stories of his appearances after the resurrection, is one of the rather odd features that make these stories credible as genuine testimony from those who experienced them. Would they have made this feature up? Why should they?

Adopting male psychology

Most positions that disagree with feminism argue either that women are inferior, or that they are equal to, but different from, men.

A third possibility is rarely expressed: that women tend to adopt a certain kind of psychology which makes them less functional, in many areas, than men.

Two thousand years ago, somebody appears to have expressed the idea that women had the same potentialities as men, but could only realise them by adopting male psychology.

Simon Peter said to them: ‘Let Mary go out from among us, because women are not worthy of the Life.’

Jesus said: ‘See, I shall lead her, so that I will make her male, that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’
(Gospel of Thomas, saying 114)

Havelock Ellis: ability arouses hostility

Havelock Ellis
(1859 – 1939)

Every original worker in intellectual fields, every man who makes some new thing, is certain to arouse hostility where he does not meet with indifference [...]

It is practically impossible to estimate the amount of persecution to which this group of pre-eminent British persons has been subjected, for it has shown itself in innumerable forms, and varies between a mere passive refusal to have anything whatever to do with them or their work and the active infliction of physical torture and death.

Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius

For more on the topic of hostility to exceptional ability, see my colleague Charles McCreery's book The Abolition of Genius.

The Cloister and the Hearth

The Cloister and the Hearth is a nineteenth century novel written by Charles Reade. It was once considered a classic of literature but is nowadays not widely read.

The plot is a fictionalised account of the parents of Erasmus — Gerard and Margaret — and the many obstacles that stand in the way of their relationship.

The book made an impression on me when I read it as a child. The authority figures in it are presented as largely hostile and unreliable. The comprehensive cynicism about social authority, and about its supposed benevolence, distinguishes the book from other nineteenth century novels.

It is even more in contrast with current literature.

In modern fiction, even if some part of the establishment is behaving badly, there is almost always some part of it whose behaviour accords with the ideal, in which many people would no doubt like to believe.