Although my parents were atheist/agnostic socialists, I had much more contact with Catholicism than with any other ideology or religion when I was growing up. We lived in Ilford from the time I was 6 onwards, and there were quite a lot of Irish Catholics in that area. We lived next door to an Irish Catholic family and I was fairly familiar with their outlook even before I went to the convent.
I think the convent was a mistake on my parents’ part, because they did not want me to be pushed, i.e. given any opportunity, and they thought a convent school would be uninterested in academic achievement and probably pay more attention to social graces and moral uplift. However, in one respect they got it right. I remember my mother saying that it was a happier school than the State county high school nearby in Ilford.
In fact, I think everyone outside Catholicism has got it completely wrong, including those former Catholics (such as Karen Armstrong) who are scathingly critical from the point of view of the modern ideology, which is supposed to represent the ideal point of view.
People pick on aspects of it which can be seen as authoritarian, guilt-inducing, masochistic, or sacrificial. But as a matter of fact I think that what gives it its hold over people who are brought up in it, is that it provides people with a way of being happy in an elite society of happy people who know that, whatever their circumstances may be, everything is all right and their future is assured.
I have heard that Catholicism is abandoning its catechism, which is probably another indication that it is offering no real resistance to the modern ideology, and is losing or has lost such psychological advantages as it had.
Right at the beginning of the catechism as taught to young children, and as I heard it in the first year at the convent, you were provided with reassuring information about your place in the scheme of things. God made you and why did he make you? After a short sojourn in this world, ‘to be happy with him for ever in the next’.
So you see you have your happiness assured right from the start, and all you have to do to make sure of it is to keep a few simple rules while you get through the probationary period on earth. And even if you break the rules, don’t worry too much. You have only to confess and be absolved.
I am sure this is very effective if you were brought up in it from an early age, and what it produces, which I think is not found in other religions to the same extent, is a freedom from anxiety and capacity for enjoying the simple pleasures offered by existence which is actually a very faint imitation of post-higher level psychology.
On a higher level, of course, one is assured of one’s place in the scheme of things in a qualitatively different way, and it gives you a genuinely justified and far less fragile freedom from anxiety in the most adverse circumstances.
But a higher level is difficult to get, and people who have been brought up with this kind of social reinforcement of their happy confidence must have a very strong resistance to losing it.
The point of being a Catholic and believing in it all, is to know that you have reason to be supremely joyful. The hymn to the Virgin Mary which was sung to celebrate the end of the school year and the beginning of the happy holidays ended each verse with ‘O causa nostrae laetitiae’, meaning ‘O cause of our joy’, with the implication that the members of this religion were living in a state of joy as a result of the historical and cosmic events underlying it.
I remember, in a BBC Italian language series, a programme about a home for old people in Italy run by nuns. The old people were clearly at the end of their lives, often wheelchair-bound, and suffering from mental and physical infirmities. The Reverend Mother who was interviewed seemed very cheerful about it all, and said that they aimed to give the old people a life of peace, serenity, and ‘gioia’ or ‘joy’. This seemed to me a bit remarkable, and I think you would not have been likely to hear it from anyone but a Catholic in that position.
Actually I noticed a sort of delight in the existential situation occurring among the convent girls and was even sometimes affected by it myself. When I moved up into the lower Fifth I was sometimes walking past Lyons after school with the girls from the form, and invited to joint them in their post-school celebratory feast. They were far too nice to exclude me as insufficiently like themselves. There was a considerable sense of occasion as the available coins were produced, and it was worked out how much lemonade and cake could be obtained, which was then shared out with scrupulous fairness.
Recently I noticed a newspaper item about a party of convent girls jumping fully clothed into an outdoor swimming pool while visiting a stately home, and the nun in charge explaining that it was ‘just youthful high spirits’.
I don’t, of course, want to glorify this too much. It is essentially phoney, a way of getting some of the advantages of a higher level by repressing all the problems. But it probably makes possible a slight openness to the inconceivable possibilities of the existential situation, and one cannot think that socialist reductionism is an improvement.
Certainly, when I was at the convent, I was very critical of it although not on the normal grounds. It was, I thought, unrealistic and frivolous. It was unrealistic to overlook the overwhelming and shocking threat of the existential situation.
In my first year at the convent I had to learn a poem by Henry Charles Beeching which began,
God who created me
Nimble and light of limb,
In three elements free,
To run, to ride, to swim:
Not when the sense is dim,
But now from the heart of joy,
I would remember Him:
Take the thanks of a boy.
I found this incomprehensible. Life was real, life was terrible, life was earnest. How could you possibly take joy in temporary athletic entertainments – running and riding and swimming – that depended on being a certain age, when the later dimming of your senses was the least of what might threaten you in the future, meaning tomorrow? A far more aggressive and purposeful reaction had to be made.
However, the psychological grounds on which Catholicism is usually criticised are anti-realistic and anti-hierarchical, and effectively rule out any potentially higher level tendencies. (Reality is hierarchical. What is significant is more important than what is not, and waking life is more significant than dreaming.)
15 October 2006
14 October 2006
The socialist fallacy
[This piece was written in 1979 but is equally relevant today. The assumption, nowadays habitually made, that "caring" translates readily into "state action", relies on a particular theory of human motivation.]
There was in my father's view of human nature an inconsistency which might perhaps be regarded as the basic socialist fallacy.
When I was eleven or twelve I would sometimes see advertisements on the lines of ‘Let me win the pools for you’, or ‘Subscribe to my infallible horse-racing tips’, and would say, ‘Mightn't one at least try it?’ But my father would say, ‘What nonsense. If they really knew how to win anything they would keep the information to themselves, not sell it to you.’
I thought about this. I didn't see that it was entirely impossible that someone might have a generous motive. Perhaps they might feel that they preferred a steady, moderate income for themselves and would let other people have the chance of making more money in a more uncertain sort of way. My father's thesis evidently was that altruism and generosity were forces so feeble in human nature that you could rely on their not entering into any commercial situation even as partial motives.
But my father, I began to discover, was a great taker of advice. He would endeavour to implement the instructions of anyone with the smallest pretensions to a position of social authority even if this meant a complete disregard for his own perceptions about the situation. He was prepared to believe that people who had never met me could tell him how he should treat me. ‘But what does he suppose their motivation is?’ I came to wonder. ‘What incentive do they have to want me or him to be happy or successful?’ It was true that they had no financial interest in ruining my life. They would be made no richer by my failure, any more than by my success. But that merely left it a completely open question what their motivation might be. If altruism and generosity were totally absent in commercial situations we might surely suppose that these motives, at least, were not present in this uncommercial situation either.
There was in my father's view of human nature an inconsistency which might perhaps be regarded as the basic socialist fallacy.
When I was eleven or twelve I would sometimes see advertisements on the lines of ‘Let me win the pools for you’, or ‘Subscribe to my infallible horse-racing tips’, and would say, ‘Mightn't one at least try it?’ But my father would say, ‘What nonsense. If they really knew how to win anything they would keep the information to themselves, not sell it to you.’
I thought about this. I didn't see that it was entirely impossible that someone might have a generous motive. Perhaps they might feel that they preferred a steady, moderate income for themselves and would let other people have the chance of making more money in a more uncertain sort of way. My father's thesis evidently was that altruism and generosity were forces so feeble in human nature that you could rely on their not entering into any commercial situation even as partial motives.
But my father, I began to discover, was a great taker of advice. He would endeavour to implement the instructions of anyone with the smallest pretensions to a position of social authority even if this meant a complete disregard for his own perceptions about the situation. He was prepared to believe that people who had never met me could tell him how he should treat me. ‘But what does he suppose their motivation is?’ I came to wonder. ‘What incentive do they have to want me or him to be happy or successful?’ It was true that they had no financial interest in ruining my life. They would be made no richer by my failure, any more than by my success. But that merely left it a completely open question what their motivation might be. If altruism and generosity were totally absent in commercial situations we might surely suppose that these motives, at least, were not present in this uncommercial situation either.
11 October 2006
The high-IQ ghetto
(copy of a letter)
We here, the high IQ ghetto, are in a heavily disadvantaged position in modern society. We struggle against adversity as best we can, but it makes it almost impossible for people here to have any normal relations with their families and former or potential friends.
Everyone who believes in the modern ideology - which is everybody - knows that we are not to get the smallest particle of real help, but we may be subjected to gratuitous obstruction and slanders ad lib. But they want people here to continue to interact socially as if there was nothing to be made up for, and as if the people here accepted that they should be treated in the ways they are and have been.
When one is seriously up against it, one cannot do this. It is a very painful and depressing experience to interact with people who could be helping one in various ways and are not doing so.
So far as I am concerned, I found it too painful to meet any of my college ‘friends’ after I had been thrown out, because it was too painful to ask them for money and be refused, or to meet them and refrain from asking them for money. Only spontaneous offers on their part could have opened the way to social interaction.
Later (decades later) I had crawled up the side of the pit into which I had been thrown far enough to face the refusal that would result when I asked them for money or to come and work here. Then I started to invite them, but none of them were willing to meet me, except in noisy and protective social circumstances which would inhibit my expositions of my position, and where they would have potted palms readily available to hide behind as a means of escape.
We here, the high IQ ghetto, are in a heavily disadvantaged position in modern society. We struggle against adversity as best we can, but it makes it almost impossible for people here to have any normal relations with their families and former or potential friends.
Everyone who believes in the modern ideology - which is everybody - knows that we are not to get the smallest particle of real help, but we may be subjected to gratuitous obstruction and slanders ad lib. But they want people here to continue to interact socially as if there was nothing to be made up for, and as if the people here accepted that they should be treated in the ways they are and have been.
When one is seriously up against it, one cannot do this. It is a very painful and depressing experience to interact with people who could be helping one in various ways and are not doing so.
So far as I am concerned, I found it too painful to meet any of my college ‘friends’ after I had been thrown out, because it was too painful to ask them for money and be refused, or to meet them and refrain from asking them for money. Only spontaneous offers on their part could have opened the way to social interaction.
Later (decades later) I had crawled up the side of the pit into which I had been thrown far enough to face the refusal that would result when I asked them for money or to come and work here. Then I started to invite them, but none of them were willing to meet me, except in noisy and protective social circumstances which would inhibit my expositions of my position, and where they would have potted palms readily available to hide behind as a means of escape.
10 October 2006
Open-mindedness
I keep writing about the horrors of ‘normal’ psychology, so let me for once try to say something marginally ‘interesting’ about real psychology.
It makes a lot of difference whether or not one is open to all the possibilities of the fundamentally uncertain existential situation. I would never have called myself an atheist as Richard Dawkins is proud to do; the most realistic of all possible perceptions is the perceptions that one does not know anything.
The ability to derive a sense of significance from society/other people depends on losing sight of the fact that there may be factors to be taken into account in any situation which are not plausible or even imaginable. The fact that the existential uncertainty is not being borne in mind is usually implicit or accidental, but the modern ideology, as exemplified by Dawkins, would like it to be a deliberate and conscious rejection of the possibility that there could be anything other than what is accepted as forming part of the prevailing social worldview.
It may be difficult to say whether or not this is present in a certain person’s outlook; it may be, without having been explicitly formulated. This is an illustration of the difficulty that arises (or would arise, if one attempted it) in any attempt to communicate higher level psychology as an exoteric system.
I, at any rate, clearly did not adopt a disbelief in open-ended possibilities, and this aroused strong reactions from both Catholics at the convent (who considered me a materialistic and reductionist person) and from agnostics at Somerville who complained that when most people said they were agnostics they meant there was nothing to get emotional about, whereas I clearly did react emotionally to existence. And I did; I regarded myself as a scientist and a realist, and I found it extremely emotive to be alive, to be having experiences of unknown status.
I always concluded my analyses with a clause to the effect that, whatever the obvious possibilities might seem to be, something inconceivable might actually be the case. This probably affected my psychological development quite a lot, although it is not entirely obvious why it should have had all the side-effects which it did. Conversely, the fact that other people exclude possibilities so as to believe in society in the operative way, seems also to have quite definite effects on their psychology and motivation.
Curiously, and not obviously, open-mindedness appears to prevent the development of meanness and dishonesty, a predilection for which appears to be a part of the social belief system.
People who perceive the possibility of coming to work here/making a career here/helping us etc. and sometimes appear to be, at least to some extent, attracted by this, but then don’t come, seem to take refuge in some social evaluation system, which they prefer to considering the situation in an open-ended or open-minded way. According to this evaluation system, as we are social outsiders and outcasts, it is impossible that we should be in the right and society in the wrong. Social outsiders are always to be viewed with contempt; it is out of the question that they should be regarded otherwise.
It makes a lot of difference whether or not one is open to all the possibilities of the fundamentally uncertain existential situation. I would never have called myself an atheist as Richard Dawkins is proud to do; the most realistic of all possible perceptions is the perceptions that one does not know anything.
The ability to derive a sense of significance from society/other people depends on losing sight of the fact that there may be factors to be taken into account in any situation which are not plausible or even imaginable. The fact that the existential uncertainty is not being borne in mind is usually implicit or accidental, but the modern ideology, as exemplified by Dawkins, would like it to be a deliberate and conscious rejection of the possibility that there could be anything other than what is accepted as forming part of the prevailing social worldview.
It may be difficult to say whether or not this is present in a certain person’s outlook; it may be, without having been explicitly formulated. This is an illustration of the difficulty that arises (or would arise, if one attempted it) in any attempt to communicate higher level psychology as an exoteric system.
I, at any rate, clearly did not adopt a disbelief in open-ended possibilities, and this aroused strong reactions from both Catholics at the convent (who considered me a materialistic and reductionist person) and from agnostics at Somerville who complained that when most people said they were agnostics they meant there was nothing to get emotional about, whereas I clearly did react emotionally to existence. And I did; I regarded myself as a scientist and a realist, and I found it extremely emotive to be alive, to be having experiences of unknown status.
I always concluded my analyses with a clause to the effect that, whatever the obvious possibilities might seem to be, something inconceivable might actually be the case. This probably affected my psychological development quite a lot, although it is not entirely obvious why it should have had all the side-effects which it did. Conversely, the fact that other people exclude possibilities so as to believe in society in the operative way, seems also to have quite definite effects on their psychology and motivation.
Curiously, and not obviously, open-mindedness appears to prevent the development of meanness and dishonesty, a predilection for which appears to be a part of the social belief system.
People who perceive the possibility of coming to work here/making a career here/helping us etc. and sometimes appear to be, at least to some extent, attracted by this, but then don’t come, seem to take refuge in some social evaluation system, which they prefer to considering the situation in an open-ended or open-minded way. According to this evaluation system, as we are social outsiders and outcasts, it is impossible that we should be in the right and society in the wrong. Social outsiders are always to be viewed with contempt; it is out of the question that they should be regarded otherwise.
Why people didn't want me to do science
(copy of a letter)
You once asked why everyone was so opposed to my doing science (and also you might have asked why they were so opposed to my getting qualifications in several subjects as an earlier age than other people). Well, of course, the opposition was expressed by everyone talking as if it was a foregone conclusion that it was out of the question, I mean, never mentioning it as a possibility. I think this is approved technique for agents of the ideology. They are supposed to listen to what the victim has to say, reinforce whatever is in line with the approved interpretations, and then go on talking as if he had never said the unacceptable bits. This avoids ‘confrontation’, is not supposed to be ‘forcing’ the right attitudes upon him, but is expected to ‘help’ him (eventually) to adopt the right outlook on his position in society.
Well, one explanation of why everyone was so opposed to my doing science:
That wicked woman at the Glasgow University Department of Educational Studies, speaking about gifted children, said, ‘If they do everything easily, they are never challenged’. I did everything easily, and expected to go on doing so. This was a perfectly realistic expectation. I could see very easily what was needed for taking degrees in sciences, languages, and anything else except maths, where I was not provided with the right textbooks, which possibly did not exist.
Mother Mary Angela expressed an attitude very similar to that of the wicked woman at Glasgow. It was supposed to be bad for me that I could do everything I tried to do easily and without effort; at least without the sort of struggling effort that is needed to do things against the grain, in circumstances in which motivation is impossible.
Supposing it was considered essential that I should be ‘challenged’, and that the moral (or social) desirability of this overwhelmed any consideration of whether I might eventually be left with no usable qualification at all, there was only one way of bringing this about. I had to be made to do maths against my will on a ridiculously protracted timescale, in circumstances that I would never have chosen or continued to tolerate as a free agent, and prevented from getting qualifications in anything else to alleviate my position.
You seemed to agree that ‘you don’t have to be the greatest mathematician ever to do physics or chemistry’, so I suppose that is steering me in the direction of thinking that I am really inadequate at maths but I can still do physics or chemistry for my own ‘interest’, as an academic outcast living in constriction and degradation. Doing things for ‘interest’ is the socially approved compensation for an outcast. I do not accept that anything that happened shed the slightest light on how ‘good’ I was at maths, since it only shed light on how badly I could be made to perform, after several years of a war of attrition, at work set by hostile tutors with whom I did not wish to have anything to do. If I had been a free agent, even if only in that one respect, I would have preferred to dispense with tutorials and take my chance on preparing myself for the final degree examination.
You once asked why everyone was so opposed to my doing science (and also you might have asked why they were so opposed to my getting qualifications in several subjects as an earlier age than other people). Well, of course, the opposition was expressed by everyone talking as if it was a foregone conclusion that it was out of the question, I mean, never mentioning it as a possibility. I think this is approved technique for agents of the ideology. They are supposed to listen to what the victim has to say, reinforce whatever is in line with the approved interpretations, and then go on talking as if he had never said the unacceptable bits. This avoids ‘confrontation’, is not supposed to be ‘forcing’ the right attitudes upon him, but is expected to ‘help’ him (eventually) to adopt the right outlook on his position in society.
Well, one explanation of why everyone was so opposed to my doing science:
That wicked woman at the Glasgow University Department of Educational Studies, speaking about gifted children, said, ‘If they do everything easily, they are never challenged’. I did everything easily, and expected to go on doing so. This was a perfectly realistic expectation. I could see very easily what was needed for taking degrees in sciences, languages, and anything else except maths, where I was not provided with the right textbooks, which possibly did not exist.
Mother Mary Angela expressed an attitude very similar to that of the wicked woman at Glasgow. It was supposed to be bad for me that I could do everything I tried to do easily and without effort; at least without the sort of struggling effort that is needed to do things against the grain, in circumstances in which motivation is impossible.
Supposing it was considered essential that I should be ‘challenged’, and that the moral (or social) desirability of this overwhelmed any consideration of whether I might eventually be left with no usable qualification at all, there was only one way of bringing this about. I had to be made to do maths against my will on a ridiculously protracted timescale, in circumstances that I would never have chosen or continued to tolerate as a free agent, and prevented from getting qualifications in anything else to alleviate my position.
You seemed to agree that ‘you don’t have to be the greatest mathematician ever to do physics or chemistry’, so I suppose that is steering me in the direction of thinking that I am really inadequate at maths but I can still do physics or chemistry for my own ‘interest’, as an academic outcast living in constriction and degradation. Doing things for ‘interest’ is the socially approved compensation for an outcast. I do not accept that anything that happened shed the slightest light on how ‘good’ I was at maths, since it only shed light on how badly I could be made to perform, after several years of a war of attrition, at work set by hostile tutors with whom I did not wish to have anything to do. If I had been a free agent, even if only in that one respect, I would have preferred to dispense with tutorials and take my chance on preparing myself for the final degree examination.
Amish culture and medicine
"Locked 200 years in the past at the very centre of modern America, the tribe with a secret dark heart.Wisely? By getting the obvious physical advantage of some children possibly living longer if their socially appointed sadistic oppressor ('doctor') does not get it wrong, you get the psychological disadvantage of exposure to the immoral/criminal medical profession, in which every meeting with a ‘doctor’ is abusive, a ‘doctor’ who has the immoral power to make decisions on your behalf about things that concern you.
Can the Amish continue to survive? ... in the Fifties their children were the last victims of a polio epidemic because they refused the ‘modern’ science of inoculation. Wisely, they changed their ways on medicine when needed." (Daily Mail 4 Oct 06)
Exposing oneself to such abuse has serious psychological consequences which could easily have lethal side effects, at the time or later.
And, from an evolutionary point of view, you are facilitating the survival of those who are genetically less resistant to disease, and hence are more likely to be the ancestors of children with weak constitutions who will be more in need of being exposed to medical abuse to prolong their lives.
For more about my views on the medical profession, see
http://www.celiagreen.com/medical-profession.htm
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