Tribal versus territorial morality

Extract from my book Letters from Exile:

Essentially, there are two conflicting fields of morality or idealism. The first is old-fashioned territorial morality, of the kind promulgated in public schools and Catholic convents. Then there is neo-tribal morality, antagonistic both to high ability and to any possibilities of psychological development in a centralised or expansive direction. But even before starting to delineate these, I have to establish the extremely agnostic basis on which I operate.

The first stage in my awareness of the existential situation originated when I was about eleven. I had shocking perceptions of the unknowability of the existential situation in which one found oneself, and a realisation that the existential uncertainty was the final term in any enquiry, philosophical or scientific, into the nature of things. This provided me with an extremely strong drive to react to the existential situation in the most purposeful way possible. Although all ascriptions of purpose were arbitrary and ultimately futile, in one sense it was fairly clear how to react to the situation.

I applied this observation, which I came to call the uncertainty principle, to any evaluations which I encountered which seemed to pass without question. The human race had evolved in the way it had, and it ran its affairs in the way it did; it was understandable enough that social groups should favour some kinds of behaviour as desirable, and others not. It was also understandable that people reacted in the ways they did as the resultant outcome of psychological forces, which were determined by evolution as well as their own experience of life and deliberate attempts to act in certain ways. So I was (and still am) a moral relativist. (Modern dictionaries of ethics say you cannot be a moral relativist, because if you really were, you would start to commit crimes. So a moral relativist who does not commit crimes is insincere.)

I suppose that these elements in my position, along with my IQ, account for the exceptionally overt hostility which I aroused. I had a strong motivational drive which was not the result of social influence, and I was rigorously relativistic in my attitude to morality. In the same way that modern ethics denies the possibility of being a moral relativist, so modern psychology asserts that all motivation and personality attributes arise from rewards offered by the individual’s environment.

Incidentally, the fact that statements of this level of unanalytical naivety are made by philosophers and psychologists in an academic context reflects the decline in the average IQ of those holding university positions, and ensures that the decline will continue, since what is required for academic success is sufficient uncriticalness to reproduce and imitate assertions of this kind.

When I was at school I never expressed my morally relativistic views, apart from the most generalised expositions of the existential uncertainty to one of the nuns at my convent (my maths teacher). However, I suppose that people sensed the unacceptability of my psychological position from an absence of the cues which most people give that they are really hooked on social approval or get some sort of emotional feedback out of the prevailing collective evaluations, probably most clearly indicated by moral indignation against nonconformists. Modern social psychology asserts that people derive their values from the group in which they are living, and clearly this is what modern society would like to be the case.

Constant reflection on the existential situation prevented me from acquiring the sort of moral indignation which most people seem to feel about certain things. This was partly the reason why I was soon an object of opprobrium myself, and have remained so ever since. By attempting to provide myself with opportunities which society did not wish me to have, I qualified as a criminal.

Also I never acquired any idea of how society should ideally be. I thought that even if I could think of something that would be better, and provide me with better opportunities for doing research, I certainly did not have the resources to bring about political changes and then do research in one lifetime, so I had better concentrate on making the best use of the social structures as they were to get the necessary opportunities for doing research. Later I came to take a far more negative, and not merely agnostic, view of human psychology, and thought that it would be absolutely impossible to influence it in any positive direction. Its psycho-dynamics were such as to ensure negative outcomes whatever ideals it professed, as with the religion of love (Christianity) which had justified so much torturing and killing.

Another illustration of this was currently being provided by the modern society in which I lived, which called itself compassionate, and which was engaged on a programme designed to convince me of its absolute mercilessness towards me and my parents. When I was thrown out at the end of my education, I formulated this as, ‘There is nothing so bad but that people will make it happen to you, nothing so bad that people will give you any help in averting it.’

People who subscribe to the modern belief in society like to associate ‘ruthlessness’ with acquisitiveness, whether of land-space or money. You could call this projection, in the Freudian sense. There is nothing so ruthless as the agent of the collective who lives for no reward in life but the exercise of power over other people.

Evidently human psychology has a tremendously strong reaction against the potential independence of the individual mind. There is plenty of historical evidence of this in its constant persecution of heretics and nonconformists, both before and after Bruno was burnt to death for saying that the universe was infinite. Persecutory drives are not absent from modern society, but more discreetly expressed, which does not mean less destructively.

Neo-tribal morality is universally dominant in schools (only a bit less so in private schools), in universities, in virtually all published material, and on the television screen. It is almost impossible to meet anyone who does not soon demonstrate allegiance to some aspect of it.

Nietzsche recognised approximately the distinction between territorial and tribal morality in his master/slave moralities, but being influenced by his own social environment, he did not get it quite right. I think it is true to say that he accepted the dichotomy too much on the terms of the tribal (Christian) morality of his time, as that between the expansively selfish and the unassuming compassionate, which is much the way it is perceived by the modern neo-tribal collectivist.

Moral indignation is directed at independence and autonomy, but more overtly at any territory, mental or physical, within which an individual can act independently of social pressures. So of course it is directed at capitalism and commercialism, as representing the possibility of acquisition by an individual of territory which is larger than that which tribal society is prepared freely to grant him. Indignation is also directed at any exercise of individual judgement within that territory. Hence it was inevitable, if my parents insisted on seeking social advice, that I would be taken away from the convent. Convents are second only to parents as objects of anti-authoritarian hatred.

Language teaching: plus ca change

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

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

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

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

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

Personally, I'd settle for Goethe any time.

IQ as an ideological football

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawkins: more straw men

Headline and lead from a recent article in the Sunday Times by Peter Millar:

The gullible age
Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion sold a million copies. In a new and hilarious onslaught he pits hard science against astrology, tarot, psychics, homeopathy and other ‘gullibiligy'. The Enemies Of Reason starts on Channel 4 on August 13.

I would have liked to publish a reply to The God Delusion entitled The Social Delusion, but I do not have Richard Dawkins’s social status; in fact I have no salary or financial support apart from what I can make for myself. My book would probably not have been reviewed, and would have been lucky to sell any copies at all.

In ‘The Enemies of Reason’ Richard Dawkins is evidently embarking on attacking another series of straw men which will be taken as proof by many people that there is no possible competition for the worldview of the modern ideology as the sole source of reality. He will not be attacking, I think, anyone funded by public money (i.e. money obtained by the taxation of individuals) or anyone with socially conferred authority as an expert — although there are many in those categories who are as deserving of his strictures as fraudulent mediums, or as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, of whom Dawkins says (quoting Peter Medawar), “He can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he took great pains to deceive himself.”

I would think that latter remark applies to a good many purveyors of supposedly ‘hard-edged’ science in the modern world.

However, unless I get a financial supporter or a Professorship, I am not going to be in a position to reply to Dawkins’s new series in detail, any more than I was to reply to The God Delusion, although I may manage to get a few snippets of what I am thinking onto my blog. Meanwhile, I reproduce below a section from my book The Lost Cause (Introduction, pp.24-25).

The perceived advantage of anomalous monism

Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, pointing out that human evolution is explicable in terms of the survival of the genes of those who behave in the ways most likely to ensure the presence of their offspring in future societies, wishes nevertheless to ascribe some independent value to ideas about how human societies should be run, and how individual human beings should behave. So he proposes the concept of a 'meme': an idea which, if it is a good one, has a survival value of its own, presumably in the context of human society. The value of the meme is not supposed to depend on selection processes as they apply to biological evolution.

Somewhat similar advantages as a solution to the dilemma of reductionism as described above are probably perceived in the anomalous monism of Donald Davidson, which may account for its influential position in philosophy of mind over recent years. While the mental is always to be regarded as an aspect of the physical, which is primary, the relationship between the mental and the physical is not law-like (i.e. is anomalous). This supposedly permits us to regard ideals of egalitarianism and collectivism, for example, or Richard Dawkins's memes, as possessing an intrinsic value of their own, even though they arise in the minds of individuals as a result of neuronal events.

Thus it seems to be implicitly accepted that such theories as anomalous monism provide an acceptable framework within which ethics about social groups can be regarded as meaningful, while individualist ethics can not. Deterministic reductionism, i.e. the theory that mental events are caused by physical ones, need not in itself have been taken as devaluing mental events, which might include individualistic ethical principles. Nevertheless, I believe it is felt, and I have heard it asserted to be the case by academic philosophers, that anomalous monism permits us to continue to ascribe emotional value loadings to the mental, i.e. to certain psychological attitudes to human interrelationships, while rejecting the mental's claim to onotological status.

Philosophically, the issues concerning morality and determinism continue to be debated. When finality on these issues has been reached, we need not suppose that it will be clearly stated and widely publicised. It is more likely that philosophers will stop discussing such things, and write as if certain conclusions could be taken for granted, rather in the way that materialist monism is the common starting point in the great majority of up-to-date books on philosophy of mind.

In fact, it is not difficult to guess what the final conclusion may be, in fact already is. The individual can have no higher freedom than that of fusion with the collective.

... to be free, people must be able to employ the material resources which they need to give effect to their choices, and this is possible only through collective control over the productive powers of society. All of these suggestions call into question the idea with which we began, of a compromise; between the freedom of the individual and the power of society, since they imply that only as social beings are people capable of exercising freedom in the first place. ('Freedom, political', Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1991, p.292)

Only collective society retains a numinous soul, but nowadays we do not draw attention to it. We would not bother to give it grandiose names, as earlier writers did, such as sovereign or general will or Hegel's Geist.

What it means to be an exiled academic

A piece I wrote some years ago

Recently I was interviewed by an undergraduate for Cherwell [the Oxford University student newspaper]. He first told me what I thought, and then told me that, in the light of my other views, I shouldn't think it. I said he was quite right; I didn't think what he said I thought, I actually thought what he said I ought to think. But I have no reason to think he was listening.

When the Cherwell undergraduate came, he asked me how we considered ourselves different from normal academics. I didn't think he would publish the answer, even if I said it, so I didn't. But maybe I ought to write down these things that other people won't publish and publish them myself.

Well, of course, I don't think of myself as different from an academic.

From the time I was about eleven, when I realised that the academic world was where you did theoretical scientific research, I expected to spend my life in the academic world and thought of myself accordingly. The fact that my education was ruined so that I couldn't be a socially accredited academic doesn't change that. One still has the same standards that one would have if one were able to have one's career inside the academic world instead of outside it.

I don't think there is anything in my life that wouldn't be in it if I were having a career in the academic world.

Of course the difference is that as a non-socially accredited academic you are debarred from earning a living, from eligibility for research grants, and from use of laboratory facilities unless you can get enough money to set up a laboratory of your own.

Another difference is that a group of private sector academics is free to do research in areas which, although not explicitly ruled out by the. professed scientific ideal, actually are ruled out by the implicit adherence to a certain ideology of the socially accredited academic world.

If that sounds like an advantage, it may be pointed out that in practice it is likely to be cancelled out by the previously mentioned disadvantages. If you could get the money, you would be free to do research in areas that a socially accredited academic probably wouldn't feel free to work in. But you can't get the money, so everyone is pretty safe really from anything that doesn't support the ideology getting done.

Myths about grammar schools

The fiction continues that the grammar schools provided a way in which bright working class children could rise in the world. Thinking back over the lives of my parents’ families in East London, I suppose that the time at which the grammar schools were of most use to at least somebody was when my parents got scholarships, and that was before they were state grammar schools. There were 16 scholarships in the Borough, so only a relatively small proportion of the children had them, there were two separate departments for boys and girls, and the school still had the standards and ethos of a private school of that time.

The sort of people who most obviously benefitted from this situation to some extent were my parents’ families, socially displaced people with aristocratic genes and with high IQs. It enabled such people to rise into white-collar but strictly lower middle class jobs, which the upper class would not have touched with a bargepole. My aunts and uncles were as successful as was permitted by their bad start in life, but the ones I knew were nearly all frustrated and complaining of their lives. One uncle, branch manager of an accountancy firm in Chelmsford, groaned wearily to my mother, ‘It is just a case of finding people’s missing halfpennies for them.’

Another uncle became Head of a Department at the Local Authority and won a scholarship in a national competition (for local government employees) to go to university – any one that would take him, but he refused to take it up. My mother, perhaps unrealistically, thought him perverse for not taking it up, but where would it have got him? As he said, he could not be sure that he would get his job back at the Local Authority if he left it, and he had no assurance that he would be able to get any job better than that, however well he did. He would be a mature student and there was no guarantee of an academic career.

I know that the modern unrealistic ideology wishes you to ascribe value to ‘taking’ a degree per se, without considering what you are doing it for, but it seems that my uncle did not, or not sufficiently to set his predictable career at risk.

Quotation from review of a pernicious and tendentious modern book on IQ, to which I am prevented by lack of financial support from providing a riposte:

“The brains of our nation,” Galton proclaimed, “lie in the higher of our classes” – precisely the assumption the 11-plus was designed to challenge. (John Carey in the Sunday Times *)

If the idea of the grammar schools was to show that only poverty prevented the working class from competing on equal terms with the aristocracy, I don’t think they did that.

* from a review (Sunday Times Culture section, 8 July 2007) of IQ: The Brilliant Idea That Failed by Stephen Murdoch.

Myths about early development

copy of a letter

You once quoted to me the received view that very early indications of precocity are meaningless, because ‘there are all sorts of anomalies in early development’, and I replied, ‘That is what they like to say.’ I do not take any assertions by socially appointed experts on education, IQ, child development, etc. as anything but indications of what the agents of the modern oppressive ideology would like to believe is the case, and there is no reason why that should have anything to do with objective reality.

However, this particular opinion certainly does express what they would like to believe and it is what they already wanted to believe at the inception of the Welfare State and before it, so that all concerned in my education were primarily motivated to prevent any later indication of my real exceptionality arising. If that should happen to leave me with no usable qualification at all with which to earn a living they would be only too pleased; all that mattered was to prevent any evidence arising that my early precocity had not been a flash in the pan but simply a natural expression of my real IQ.

My parents, doing their best to play along with this, had suppressed information about my early life and kept me in a state of suspended animation from 6-11. The reason I nearly got a break and a chance in life at the convent was because one or two people there, unaware of my early history and the significance of my marks in the scholarship exam, were not fully in focus on the need to keep me suppressed. I was in a relatively downtrodden state, having been marking time for five years, and could not at first have appeared too pleased with my life or with myself, being constantly apprehensive of the hostility which I aroused among the girls.

I think the reason it is regarded as so important to reject very early precocity from consideration is that it is actually the most incontrovertible evidence of innate ability. If you are really exceptional at 1 or 2, then you are really exceptional and some explanation should be provided of what has gone wrong if you appear less exceptional at a later age when the environment has had more opportunity to interfere in your life. Of course, a person’s very early circumstances may be so bad that the most exceptional ability has little opportunity to show itself, although it is nonetheless there, but if it does show itself early there can be no doubt of its continuing presence.

I might not wish to have a Department of Education in my independent university if it were not that so much that is actively untrue and pernicious is being promoted, but as it is, it is deplorable that my Department is being suppressed and being prevented from criticising what is being produced by (all?) other Departments in this area.

The politics of Procrustes

In Antony Flew’s book The Politics of Procrustes (Temple Smith 1981, p.21), he defines some ideas of equality, that is, ‘proposed ideals of how things ought to be.’

Of the three ideals, or sorts of ideals, the first, the most ancient, and the most difficult to define, is sometimes seen as a secular version of something believed to be common to the three great traditions of Mosaic theism. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are popularly presented as teaching the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God, with the apparent consequence that all human souls are of equal value in the eyes of their Creator.

The second ideal is customarily called equality of opportunity, although it would be more apt to call it open competition for scarce opportunities: this was, in the French Revolution of 1789, ‘La carriere ouverte aux talents’.

The third ideal, and the one to which so many of our political intellectuals today profess allegiance, is best characterised as equality of outcome or equality of result.

I have put ‘open competition for scarce opportunities’ in bold to draw attention to it, because I do not think it receives much consideration these days, although it was what I imagined (in 1945), and was told by my father, the Welfare State was intended to bring in.

Consider next a major Harvard contribution to the sociology of education. Towards the end of an extended research report, simply entitled Inequality, Christopher Jencks remarks: ‘The reader should by now have gathered that our primary concern is with equalising the distribution of income’.

[He] insists: ‘Most educators and laymen evidently feel that an individual’s genes are his, and that they entitle him to whatever advantages he can get from them. ... For a thoroughgoing egalitarian, however, inequality that derives from biology ought to be as repulsive as inequality that derives from early socialisation’. (Ibid, pp. 22-23, quoting from C. Jencks et al., Inequality, Allen Lane 1973.)

The report quoted by Flew was written by an American in 1973. So far as this country is concerned, the ‘thoroughgoing egalitarian’ attitude has been practically universal as the religion of modern society from the inception of the Welfare State in 1945, although the underlying beliefs were at that time rarely expressed openly. Nevertheless, at the state school which I attended against my will in 1950, I was explicitly told, not only that advantages in life which resulted from environmental (parental) support and encouragement were unfair, but also that advantages arising from innate ability were unfair and should be prevented.

My father’s IQ was very high for the headmaster of a primary school and the IQ range at this school was below the average for schools in general, so that the difference in ability between himself and his pupils (and the parents of his pupils) was unusually great. No doubt this aroused resentment and a desire to explain it away. The situation was made even worse by the fact that his offspring (me) had a phenomenal IQ, considerably higher even than his own.

Hostility was aroused by the fact that I came top of the county in the grammar school scholarship at the earliest possible age (in the year before it became the 11 plus) with 100% on every paper. This led to agitation among people associated with my father’s school to sue him on the grounds that (as my mother quoted to me several decades later, long after my education had been ruined):

(a) I could not have done it on my own. So he had been killing me with overwork and should be sued for maltreating me.

(b) If he could do it for me, he could and should have done it for their children at his school as well.

These complaints, while not entirely consistent, both express a wish to believe that all differences in educational attainment result from environmental influences and should be eliminated. The wish to believe these things is very strong in modern society and it is clear that the psychological forces which have produced the modern ideology had already been set in motion.

They were no doubt present in the local education authority as well as in the headmistress and teachers of the state school to which I was sent, when it had come to light that the convent school which I had been attending had been too permissive towards me, and had been on the verge of allowing me to start taking public exams a few years before the average age for doing so.

I realise now that when my parents expressed opposition to the idea of my going to university, they were showing their willingness to go along with the plans of the local education authority and the local educational community generally. There must have been strong motivation to demonstrate that my early precocity was nothing but the result of my father’s ‘pushing’ me, and that I was no better suited to go to university than the children at his school. It was unlikely that any of them could be got to university (especially at that time, when ‘dumbing down’ had scarcely started), so equality of outcome would more easily be achieved by preventing me from doing so.

So having got me into a state school where the teachers were pre-warned against me and did their best to make my life a misery, my parents were only selling me the party line when they greeted my complaints about the school, and expressions of an urgent desire to leave it, with arguments on the lines of, ‘If you are so unhappy at school, I can’t think why you say you want to do research. If you were suited to academic pursuits you would not be so unhappy at school. And you say you want to go to university! Don’t think we mind if you don’t. It is perfectly all right by us if you don’t go at all.’

Or, in fact, ‘Despair and die.’ It always reminded me of the ghosts which appeared to Richard III in his dream in Shakespeare’s play.

‘Despair and die.’ This was in general the attitude towards me for many years. At Somerville it was, ‘It doesn’t matter if you can’t do well enough to get a research scholarship. There is no need to change your subject or allow you to improve your circumstances in any way. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to do research or have an academic career. Research is dull. Just don’t worry about it. Despair and die.’

Aphorism of the month (July)

I am not concerned that Society should try to do me good; I should only like it to try to do me less harm.

Einstein "didn't need an academic post"

Before, during and immediately after 1905, [Einstein] was incapable of securing an academic post. In fact, he didn’t need one. He was perfectly able to think while working as a patent clerk in Bern. (From Bryan Appleyard’s comments about Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, Sunday Times, 3 June 2007.)

This sort of attitude is widely held, in fact by now we may say it is the received wisdom. People often tell me that I cannot complain of my position because I have just expressed a criticism of some academic goings-on (which I could not prevent myself from making, with the most passing attention, however stultifying and exhausting my life was being). Therefore, although I have no status, salary or financial support, and have to spend nearly all my time working very hard at investment and administration, I am evidently free to think (they say). So I can’t say I am frustrated (they say). But I do say it, and I go on appealing for workers, money, status and support of every kind. Actually this attitude to Einstein, quoted above, demonstrates the hostility to ability which is the real driving force of the modern ‘egalitarian’ ideology.

I am reminded of a conversation between one of my colleagues and the Master of an Oxford college, which took place at a social gathering. He asked what my colleague was doing now and my colleague said he was writing a book about genius. ‘Oh, there have been a lot of books about that,’ the Master announced, as if there would be nothing more to be said. My colleague said that his book was about how intellectuals were disadvantaged in modern society by the reduction in the number of people with private incomes.

‘It is not a disadvantage to have to earn a living,’ the Master said. ‘It is not possible to do concentrated intellectual work for more than three hours a day. It was no disadvantage to Einstein to have to work in the Patent Office. It did not prevent him from producing Relativity.’

However, as my colleague pointed out, Einstein had complained of being reduced to near-breakdown by working on relativity at the Patent Office, and by the stress and guilt induced by having to shovel his papers away into a drawer whenever anyone entered the room.

The fact that a Master of an Oxford college expresses such views is a clear indication of the hostility of Oxford University, and of the educational and university system generally, to the idea of innate ability and the circumstances it may need to be fully productive.

’We appeal for £1m as initial funding for a social science department in our unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish analyses of the unexamined assumptions which currently protect from criticism utterances by academics such as those discussed above.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

The Office of "Fair Access"

Apparently there is now an Office of Fair Access (meaning to universities). As usual, ‘fair’ refers to some underlying and unquestionable assumptions, such as that all differences in ability or temperament are the result of environment, and that it is right to try to iron these out, so that equality of outcome is achieved.

How about an ‘Office of Fair Reparation and Reinstatement’ to rectify the positions of those (such as myself) who are left without a qualification with which to enter any career that is possible to them? This is using the word ‘fair’ in a different sense, referring to what is really the case, and not what people who believe in the modern ideology would like to think was the case.

As usual, it is necessary to emphasise what people like to overlook; that a person left without a single usable qualification (that is, of use to them as the sort of person they are) is even debarred from the minimal income that might be derived from so-called ‘social security’. Such a person cannot draw income support because he is not in a position to ‘seek work’ as he is not qualified for any work which he could actually do.

The ‘educational’ system does not admit to any responsibility for providing the individuals subjected to it with qualifications suitable to their career needs, or commensurate with their ability. It cannot do so because innate ability is not supposed to exist, and differences in attainment which arise from, or can be ascribed to, environmental influences are there to be ironed out, in pursuit of equality of outcome.

If differences of ability were admitted, it would not seem too difficult to understand that a person with the most exceptional academic ability might have an absolute need for the most high-flying type of academic career and, in reality, could not have any other.

As it is, this is not understood and it is rigorously excluded from consideration, because the educational system wants to be perfectly free to destroy the prospects in life of the most able.

Translation into Russian does me no good

The Human Evasion has been translated into Russian and now appears on some website. If my ideas are of ‘interest’ to people even to that extent, why don’t they want to come and find out more about them by working here, or send money commensurate with what is needed to write and publish more of what I have to say? As it is, all the use it will be is that I can improve my reading of Russian by reading it; usually I find it very difficult to find anything to read in Russian that is not as boring and rebarbative as most mediocratic writing being produced in all languages at the present time.

And what good will it do one to be able to read Russian better? No good at all, really. Improving my Russian is only a way of patienter (as the French would say).

Russia is not even an EU country, so that if any Russian speakers did want to come and augment our sadly inadequate workforce they couldn’t, and wealthy Russian-speaking businessmen who might (?) want to give us badly-needed money probably speak and read English anyway.

Egalitarianism and the female image

While I think that fundamentally what has been against me all my life has been the modern ideology of egalitarianism, with its hatred of innate ability, precocity, and individual autonomy in every form, it is certainly the case that being female and hence at the mercy of female teachers, tutors, headmistresses, college Principals and (at the SPR) Rosalind Heywood, has always made everything as bad as it could possibly be.

Women on the whole are unsympathetic to drive and ambition, especially in other women, and from the age of 14, if not earlier, I have always had at least one woman — and usually two — networking energetically against me.

A friend was saying recently how much this must have increased the opposition against me. ‘Well’, I said, ‘I thought the way was open. There had been one or two women scientists, Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. I did not realise there was anything against ambition. I had read about the lives of a lot of people and it was not illegal to want to work and use one’s ability to get into the right sort of position in life. If anything, it was approved of.’

‘But all the people in the past who had risen in the world by hard work were men. Were there any other women among the figures of the past that you had read about?’ I had to admit that there were not.

As my friend pointed out, women even more than men are expected to demonstrate uncritical submission to, and acceptance of, social evaluations. Although I did nothing to draw attention to it, I was radically sceptical and open-minded in all contexts, expecting it to be sufficient that I behaved as a respectable person in line to become a pillar of society as my parents were, although I would need to aim at a more prestigious level of society than that in which they had been forced to live out their lives as members of socially displaced high-IQ families.

I had not, at 12 or 13, acquired the belief in society that most people have, and I had never identified with the female image. I read boys’ books predominantly, thinking that reading books for girls was exposing one to becoming identified with pernicious psychological influences, even if it was difficult to work out what they were.

I suppose that my lack of identification with the female image also aroused hostility (as did my precocity and drive) although I do not know how it came across to people. I was wearing the same school uniform as the other girls and got on with doing the required work as well as possible. So what was wrong with that?

Tory tax breaks

Sweeping changes to the tax and benefits system worth more than £3000 a year to some families will be unveiled by the Conservatives today. In a decisive attempt to promote marriage, a transferable tax allowance for married couples would boost incomes by an immediate £1000 a year. This would be topped by additional benefits of up to £2058 for those eligible as part of far-reaching reforms designed to end discrimination against couples in the welfare system. The changes would help both families with children and childless couples caring for elderly relatives. The suggestions come from the Conservative Party’s social justice policy group, chaired by former leader Ian Duncan Smith. (Daily Mail, 10 July 2007)

Where is the justice in that? ('Social justice' = injustice.) The money to benefit couples would have to come from somewhere, so from those who remain single. That would include those who, like me, were left at the end of their ruined education with no usable qualification at all with which to make the sort of career to which they were extremely well suited and needed to have, and so certainly would not have got married until they had built up enough capital to finance an independent academic institution (in my own case) or whatever environment they needed to have in which to lead a functional and fulfilling life (in the case of people with high IQs or otherwise in a similar predicament).

"Standing up for God"

In an article in the Daily Mail (8 July) Peter Lewis, referring to the recent books The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, asks ‘Won’t anyone stand up for God?’

The fact is that modern society does not believe in the individual; it owns him body and soul. ‘Social constructionism’ tells us that the individual is what society sees fit to make him, and he is nothing else whatever. Any sort of God represents competition to society. There might be something else that evaluated things differently and might also exert some influence on the individual mind. Cognitive psychology forbid that such a thing might be!

And so the few remaining remnants of belief in anything outside the current belief system are attacked on grounds that are wildly irrelevant. For example: there cannot be a God of any kind, because a lot of people who said they believed in a God did a lot of torturing and killing of other people. (“Not, mind you, that we have anything against torturing and killing except when it is useful for blaming Christians, capitalists and other sorts of evil people, but in that case we mind about it a lot, especially when the numbers involved are very large. Christians and capitalists have caused a lot of suffering and death to enormous numbers of people.”)

Actually the resistance to the idea of God, or of some external influence with which an individual might make contact, is closely related to the fear of the individual having internal psychological determinants arising from his genetic constitution or, indeed, his early upbringing, unless they are easily overridden by social pressures, counselling, psychiatric ‘help’, etc.

I was always very sceptical from a philosophical point of view, and aware of the uncertainty inherent in all aspects of the existential situation; at the same time I found it quite easy and sensible to regard myself as a respectable bourgeois intellectual and had no inclination to deviate from the behaviour suitable to such a person.

At my Catholic convent school I was regarded as a materialist and atheist, because I did not believe in God, although I think what they really minded about was that I did not believe in society.

At Oxford I was surrounded by atheistic socialists who despised my drives to live purposefully and to do research, on the grounds that they arose from internal psychological determinants which I had not been told to have. So now I was accused of believing in God. ‘I know Celia,’ sneered a female senior executive at the BBC, atheist socialist and friend of the Principal of Somerville, ‘She doesn’t want to do research for any sensible reason, but because she thinks she is divinely suited to it.’

Belief in God became a widespread accusation against me, so much so that when I set up (if you can call it that) my first tiny apology for an academic institution, I was accused of intending to start a new religion, and letters for and against this view went to and fro among influential people. But the most supportive of them only went so far as to defend me against this allegation and neither gave me, nor suggested giving me, any actual help in my grim situation.

Addendum
Actually I had set up my incipient university research department and residential college in desperate response to being thrown out at the end of the ruined education with no research scholarship and no way of entering an academic career that could lead to a Professorship. To do that was to give precedence to my desperate needs as internally determined, even though they had not been recognised by society. So I was paying attention to considerations other than those prescribed by society — which is what it is feared a belief in God might lead to.

Double standards on child abuse

In a recent child abuse case a mother was jailed for standing by while her daughter was raped by members of a paedophile ring.

... it was the ‘grievous breach of trust’ on the part of [the mother] to her child that had stunned the High Court ... (Daily Mail, 23 June 2007)

The judge announced that the mother had had a duty of care, and he said of one of the perpetrators, jailing them as well, ‘You were prepared to take advantage of this young child to satisfy your deviant desires and it is clear from the reports you display no real remorse or understanding of the damage caused to her by your conduct.’

The attitude to abuse perpetrated by agents of the collective is very different. I think that my parents should have considered, and all parents should consider, that they have a duty of care to protect their children from abuse by agents of the collective, most obviously those in the educational system. The educational (including the university) system cannot fail to be abusive, since its agents (official and unofficial) wish to believe that there is no such thing as exceptional ability, so they are necessarily motivated to prevent it from expressing itself.

Of course, I do not wish to blame my parents for failing to protect my interests against an abusive system, since the ideology wishes to blame parents and exonerate the agents of the collective who are the real abusers. I blame the agents of the collective, who should have felt a ‘duty of care’ not to turn my parents against me.

By failing to protect me from the abusive age-limit on taking exams by letting me take the School Certificate when I was 13, my parents exposed me to years of abuse under the auspices of the ‘educational’ system which caused great suffering and the ruin of our lives to three people, i.e. myself and my parents.

None of the agents of the collective (official or unofficial) who contributed to the ruin of our lives has every shown any sign of ‘real remorse or understanding of the damage caused’ by their conduct.

However, people’s attitude to abuse by the educational system is quite different from their attitude to abuse by child rapists.

I arouse hostility if I ‘whinge’ and express my need for help (real help, not ‘help’) to retrieve my position, and there is no tendency at all to wish those who contributed to my ruin to ‘pay for’ their crimes, even by imprisonment let alone by doing anything that would help me work towards alleviation of my position.

Some more notes about pain

Copy of a letter, following on from this.

I think that the pain thing is complicated for most people by the fact that their ‘individualistic’ drives are repressed by their need to derive significance from social approval so that they think they are ‘really’ bad, inadequate, evil and deserving to suffer. I suppose this is one of the things that Christianity plays on. However, it really makes it more necessary to reject the belief in society and its evaluations, while no doubt making it even more difficult to do so (or even to start wanting to do so).

However, I can tell you what I was thinking about before I got the solution to pain, although I had really eliminated the inhibitory belief in society 18 months earlier (and at the time that had been experienced as an appalling and irrevocable loss).

Here you are, existing and threatened from all sides, especially threatened by mortality and the extinction of consciousness, and not knowing anything about anything. This gives you a tremendous drive to react against this claustrophobic situation, and a sense of immediacy and urgency because you could die at any time. This went into my urgency about exam-taking; however young I was, I might die the next day and I had to get on with it. Apart from any considerations about needing to do things at the right age for oneself in terms of one’s mental, rather than chronological, age.

So you have very strong drives to assert yourself against the threatening unknown that surrounds you, but you are afraid of failing and reminding yourself of how puny you are. So you try to find out what you can succeed in doing and to put your drives into things that won’t immediately bring you up against your finiteness.

People play on this and want to make you feel that if you are less good than some other person at doing a certain kind of thing, that is a permanent limitation that you must accept and live within, not think that circumstances might all be different on some other occasion.

So you get a fear of doing something in which you might fail. People who are academically successful usually have techniques for pretending, both to others and themselves, that they are not trying. E.g. Bill Gates playing bridge all day and only working for his degree at night, Kierkegaard putting in an appearance at theatres in the intervals, and then going home to swot up on the classics (or whatever it was he liked to show off about).

But, I had thought, this leaves you with very little of your emotional drive. If you want to try with 51%, and 49% is wanting to preserve itself from failure by not trying, you have 2% of your motivation left. But every failure, of whatever kind, is a horrifying reminder of finiteness and mortality and hence (if you are centralised enough) drives you back onto the point of ricochet and rebounds as the drive to infinity. Because in reality it is not any finite goal that you are aiming at; you want to be omniscient and omnipotent, and it is terrible that you are not. So everything can be made unconflicted if it is turned back into, or recognised as an expression of, the drive to infinity.

And in fact by applying this I had achieved freedom from conflict and certainly had the impression of deploying extremely strong emotional drives, even for someone who had always been uninhibited and regarded as ‘intense’.

But pain presented a serious problem. Any psychological thing, however bad, can be relatively easily ignored. Well, relatively, at least in comparison with pain. As you said, even if they tell you that you have cancer and will die soon, you are still alive. They may be wrong, it may not happen. Anyway, perhaps you can still enjoy yourself.

When Bill’s brother John actually was dying of cancer and Bill took this seriously, John said (as Bill told me), ‘Well, I feel bad about it sometimes, especially when I wake up in the night, but if I do something like going to dinner with your sister, I feel all right again.’ [names changed]

However, pain is difficult to ignore. It is there and you do not want it to be there. It is a proof that your will can be violated (something that you try to overlook as far as possible) and ultimately violated by death. So it is actually a proof of mortality and the ultimate horror of the situation.

It is difficult now to remember how desperate my situation was then. I had to get a solution to pain, if only because I abhorred anaesthetics. And so I set my emotional drive at the problem and determined that my subconscious should forthcome this solution, which I had to have.

This led to the most intolerable existential claustrophobia and nostalgia; I would be driven back onto the point of ricochet and get a violent recoil driving forward again at the problem which had to be solved.

In fact I suppose you can say one was being driven further and further away from any possibility of being related to ‘normal’ life on ‘normal’ terms, past the point of no return. And, of course, it is the great problem with higher level psychology that you lose everything, and lose it irrevocably, before you get everything. It is not a case of giving up on what you have got (or might have) because you see that something else will be better. You give up on it because it is not good enough, although you are still shut in and cannot see how to get anything else.

I have written elsewhere about the despair of finiteness; and it may sound like resignation. But actually it was very complex. I was extremely angry, claustrophobically appalled, and disgusted, that a consciousness should be in such a position, without knowing anything or having any way of finding anything out. It certainly was not resignation in any sense that made the situation tolerable; it made it seem more intolerable than ever, as I reassured myself, wondering whether to go along with it. I had a principle against resignation, which was unrealistic. But a despair so profound as this was dangerous. However, I said to myself, if it arises from a perception of reality that my psychology really reacts in this way to the situation, that is realistic, be the consequences what they may, and so I entertained the despair of finiteness.

Nietzsche, who did not get a higher level, said, ‘If there were God, how could I bear to be no God? Consequently there is no God.’ More precisely, ‘Whether there is God or not, I cannot bear to be no God. Consequently my life in finiteness is worthless and I have no interests worth defending.’

Open Letter to Paris Hilton

Dear Paris,

I read in a newsletter from America that many journalists have expressed pleasure at your being ‘taken down a peg or two’ or ‘getting your come-uppance’ in being imprisoned for driving under the influence of alcohol.

The modern world is dominated by the desire to degrade the successful and it is certainly unwise to break the law, which exposes a person to the hostility of other people. To the extent that there are clear-cut territories within which the individual is free to make his own decisions, he can protect himself from the destructive forces of modern society.

Unfortunately, those who are in a favourable position as a result of the successes of their forebears may be relatively protected from the hostility of the society around them and fail to realise how great it is. The Queen of England is an example of this; she appears to be genuinely uncritical of socialist and egalitarian ideology, and not merely as uncritical as she needs to be for purposes of public relations.

Regrettably, however realistic one’s own outlook may be, one is exposed to other people’s lack of realism at the ‘educational’ stage of one’s life and may not be able to prevent one’s life being ruined. This is what happened to me, at any rate.

We are an independent academic organisation which is as nearly as possible squeezed to death, and kept inactive and inconspicuous, by lack of salaries, status, financial support and even moral support in applying for funding or improving our position in any way. We have been widely slandered and networked against. Nevertheless we are extremely respectable in an old-fashioned bourgeois sense.

Any one supporter could make an immense difference to our ability to publish criticisms of modern academia and society generally (which are desperately in need of expression), perhaps even eventually to make some progress in neglected areas of research.

So although we may not seem to be the sort of people you usually find interesting, we warmly (but not hopefully) invite you, Paris Hilton, to visit us with a view to becoming a Patron and supporter of our enterprise, the last line of defence against anti-individualism.

I say ‘not hopefully’ because there is no indication that even the most right-wing have any sympathy at all with our position. There is apparently no ideal, principle or tradition of defending individuals against society at large.

With best wishes,
Celia Green

The basic moral principle

Modern society has lost sight of the only moral principle of any importance, so that the individual citizen is basically unprotected against unlimited oppression.

Since the ignored principle is never enunciated, it is difficult to express one's horror at what already goes on, and at even worse developments that might go on. If someone says, 'People ought to be heavily taxed in order to pay for state-administered medicine and education', I am shocked and horrified, but inhibited from replying, 'People ought to be taxed as little as possible, and certainly not at all to provide funding for organised crime.'

Usually I do not reply in this way, because I realise that prolonged explanation would be necessary. In reality, at least as much explanation should be required to make plausible the idea that individuals should be taxed to provide for greater oppression of individuals by the collective, but one realises that a high proportion of the population has learnt to proceed smoothly to this conclusion without examination, or even recognition, of the underlying assumptions being made.

If I say that people should be taxed as little as possible and least of all to finance collectively organised oppression, this depends on the basic moral principle that society should interfere as little as possible with the individual's freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit.

The basic moral principle applies between individuals as well, and everyone should respect the right of others to evaluate for themselves the weighting to be placed on the factors which enter into any given situation, since in reality the existential situation is one of total uncertainty.

However, it is only socially appointed agents of the collective, such as doctors, teachers, social workers etc, who are invested with legally conferred powers to impose their valuations on others, and who should be deprived of these (immoral) powers.

In fact, in the presence of the modern ideology, the deplorable practice has arisen of taking into account only factors which appear obvious to a large number of people, and assuming that any others should be ignored.

In place of the basic moral principle enunciated above, an alternative one is implicitly assumed. This is apparently an idea to the effect that what is ethical consists of what the majority of people agree to regard as ethical. Dissenting individuals can and should be forced to submit to the views accepted by the majority of people in their society.

As people are subjected to continuous indoctrination in modern society, from the educational system which increasingly regards indoctrination as a primary objective, and from the continuous stream of propaganda being put out by such media as television and newspapers, it is not surprising that nearly universal tendencies to prefer currently fashionable ways of evaluating things are to be observed.

We may suppose that similar unanimities of evaluation were usually found in primitive tribal societies, but a member of modern society under the influence of the prevailing ideology would regard some of the practices of primitive societies as immoral.

This does not present itself to the modern mind as a problem, since there is an implicit belief that the human race has recently arrived at the best possible way of evaluating things, and the way it thinks now is unquestionably right.

On the basic moral principle that the freedom of the individual to form his own evaluations is supremely important, even if in practice the majority of people will adopt the valuations suggested by the ideology which prevails in the culture of their place and time, the functions of society acting on a collective basis should be as limited as possible. As Herbert Spencer suggests, they should be limited to what is necessary to protect the liberty of individuals from encroachment by other individuals.

Basic moral principle, short form:
It is immoral to impose your interpretations and evaluations on anyone else.

Drinks party

Copy of a letter

Thank you for coming to our drinks party. As you said, it was a funny time of day, but this arose because we usually do such things in the function room at the Mitre, which is being refurbished. The rooms at Infinite Ideas which we hired instead are very suitable rooms, but unfortunately not available for evening times.

Just to amplify some things I said at the party. You seemed to find it difficult to understand what I meant by being ‘squeezed out’ without a single usable qualification at the end of the ruined ‘education’. Actually, I refer to that as being ‘thrown out’, and what I refer to as being ‘squeezed to death’ came later, and is still going on.

The reason I use the terminology in this way is that people like to assume or imply that I am a ‘drop-out’, and that I turned my back on normal careers voluntarily. Actually I was thrown out of an academic career very much against my will, and knew that I could not make a career or even earn money in any other way. I could not get any support for attempting in any way to get back into a university career, even moral support or the barest recognition of the fact that that was what I was trying to do.

And if you speak of my being thrown out (into the wilderness, onto the dungheap) as being squeezed out, that might seem to imply that the squeeze was a one-off thing. Actually the attempt to squeeze me to death was applied as soon as I set up my incipient academic institution in Oxford, within which I hoped to be able to do research with which to reclaim a position in the academic world. I lived more or less literally under siege and have done so ever since.

You asked what 'centralisation' was. It is a lot easier, of course, to say what decentralisation is, which prevents centralisation from arising. All modern psychology (which includes psychology of religion) is about decentralisation. It is promoted by people who are themselves decentralised, so it is not even a realistic account of how unrealistic psychology works.

I have put on my blogspot some comments on the film Sleuth which provides very clear illustrations of people being forced into decentralised positions. Under threat from other people, they have no attention free to consider their own internal psychological criteria or to become aware of the fact that they are in a shocking existential situation which they do not know anything about.

I don’t use words like 'supernatural' or 'transcendent', but I do use the word 'inconceivable' to apply to the qualitatively different mental contents of a higher level. That, however, is not present in any sort of pre-higher level centralised psychology.

Some notes about pain

Copy of a letter

Since I was talking to you about your latest experience at the dentist I thought I should write it down so there is a record of it. I have said it a lot before but not written about it much.

You have to aim through the experience as a reaction against finiteness, so that in effect you are putting your drive into making it happen rather than trying to minimise your awareness of it. Any recoil, trying to get away from it, is actually your worst enemy as the conflict caused by that is what makes a sensation painful, in the sense of hurting.

Doing it is actually, I think, centralising and I think this is why a technique so potentially useful remains unknown. Centralisation provides a point of psychological ricochet; if you perceive that finiteness is intolerable, you get the drive of the animal that turns at bay and fights for its life against hopeless odds. This is an exceedingly strong drive; by the time I did the thing with the teeth, I called it the drive to infinity because clearly no conceivable goal could satisfy it. I did not yet have any idea that there might be an inconceivable goal at which it might arrive.

Anyway, what preceded my getting the thing about pain right was that I had been having a long series of dental appointments doing fillings, the result of my having had so bad a time at Somerville that quarrelling and arguing with my parents, and them shouting me down and asserting the social line, had prevented my mother paying any attention to making appointments for me, and she tended to give me very bad sweets which she liked herself (she had had false teeth for a long time herself).

I had a fairly highly evolved sort of centralisation and I experimented with ways of viewing the pain as abstract sensation, which worked moderately well but clearly had a breakdown point so that I knew I would not be able to apply them to the impending extractions.

I had a solution to most things by then and I found it quite intolerable that my consciousness could be invaded by things to which I could not be reconciled. So I set about trying to make my subconscious forthcome, which led to the despair of finiteness, as I call it, which was really breaking through the final resistance to getting a higher level. But I was not on a higher level yet, and I thought I had failed in getting a solution to pain.

There was a final session of fillings before the extractions and I was using my fairly adequate methods when the dentist suddenly stuck his drill on a nerve. Quite likely he had left the worst filling to last. This presented itself as absolutely intolerable, my system broke down completely, this was just impossible. But quite unpremeditatedly I reacted with a spurt of absolute anger at this intolerable sensation, a sort of, ‘Go on, damn you’, and the sensation became quite neutral.

I realised at once that I had got the solution to pain after all, and that the impending extractions would be a great opportunity to try it out.

Probably the despair of finiteness had provided me with a more absolute sort of centralisation which made the ricochet from intolerable sensation to a head-on drive against it possible.

Even if you are not centralised enough for that to happen, anger is a much better attitude to cultivate than fear or emotional recoil from the situation. Anger and drive are on your side, timidity and apprehension are not, although apprehension may precede anger.

As you know, the extractions worked perfectly and there was no sense of a breakdown point in the system. It seemed as if the pain automatically set up an adequately strong feedback reaction to neutralise it.

One should not lose sight of the fact that although this all seems, and was, very dramatic, the sort of centralisation that made it possible did not arise until I had, in the operative sense, rejected society or other people as a source of significance (which I had done when I was 19, about eighteen months earlier). This, as should always be emphasised, has nothing to do with giving up on having a drive to get out of society all that it should provide in the way of status and opportunity (Professorship, hotel environment, research departments to run, recognition and saleability for one’s books). However difficult society makes it to get any of these things out of it.

Aphorism of the month (June)

The true object of aggression is the unknowability of existence.

Peddling propaganda

Yesterday's report on British education from the independent think-tank Civitas represents a dispatch from the battlefield describing a national catastrophe. It is no surprise that pupils learn so little, say its authors, because so much curriculum time has been hijacked for the peddling of propaganda about racism, gender awareness, environmentalism and suchlike.

The High Master of St Paul's, an outstanding independent school, warns of the "terrifying absence of proper science" in the new GCSE syllabus, which is all that a modern generation of 16-year-olds is deemed capable of learning -and all, indeed, that their teachers are thought capable of teaching. ... During a recent training day for English A-level teachers, a senior examiner asserted that it is necessary to "batter out of students" the idea that there is any "correct" way of speaking English. ...

In the adult world, the gulf between educated and uneducated people is widening relentlessly. As unskilled jobs are outsourced to Asia, the future grows ever bleaker for children of any nationality who lack meaningful qualifications. Yet not only are pupils learning less than they did a generation ago, the educational establishment is also committed to principles, entrenched behind a great wire entanglement of demented ideals, which ensure that things will get worse. ...

University lecturers today demand a boycott of Israel because it oppresses the Palestinians. Yet these same ringmasters of intolerance preside over an educational system close to collapse not for lack of cash, but for lack of sanity. ... The educationalists have committed a form of child abuse all the more pernicious because, though tried and convicted on the evidence of their actions, they will never face a court. Until they can be defeated and expelled from authority and influence over British schools, our children will never begin to learn the things which are indispensable to membership of an educated society. (from ‘Education today is a form of child abuse’ by Max Hastings, Daily Mail, 12 June 2007)

The ‘educational’ system is doing exactly what it is intended to do, destroying the lives of those with above average IQs who might contribute to the advancement of science, culture or individualistic ideals.

There is no point in criticising the state educational system for its failure to impart knowledge or skills. It is reducing the freedom of the more functional and moralised sections of the population by heavy taxation and ensuring that it disgorges a largely unemployable and criminal population to make the position of the former ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ classes still worse, since they will find it almost impossible to employ them as servants in capacities in which they might have been able to operate satisfactorily, while their property and persons are at ever-increasing risk from vandalism and mugging.

It is a complete fallacy to suppose that modern society has less need for ‘unskilled’ workers than in earlier centuries. Little of what was taught in old-fashioned schools was of much relevance to most of their pupils in their adult careers.

It is not that people now need special forms of expertise in order to be employable; this idea has been around for over a century and its real motivation was, and is, to deprive those with high IQs of ancillary support staff within their households. The objective is to provide people with pretentious ‘qualifications’ to that they will consider it beneath them to do anything that is actually useful for anybody else.

They are, of course, heavily indoctrinated with egalitarian and anti-individualistic ideology, which is all that the educational system is really there to impart.

There is no solution but the abolition of state education and of compulsory education altogether.

Sally Clark: a reminder

Sally Clark, the mother who was wrongly jailed for killing her two sons, has died. Her family said in a statement she was found dead at her home Friday morning. The cause of the 42-year-old's death has not been revealed. But relatives said she never recovered from the appalling miscarriage of justice she suffered.

Mrs Clark, was a solicitor from Wilmslow, Cheshire, when she was convicted of smothering 12-week-old Christopher in 1996 and eight-week-old Harry a year later, on the evidence of paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow. He told a court the odds against two cot deaths in the same family were 73million to one. ...

Her three years and three months in jail - she was given two life sentences at Chester Crown Court in October 1999 - saw her reviled and abused as the worst kind of criminal, although many inmates became convinced of her innocence. Her husband Stephen never accepted her guilt and fought tirelessly to clear her. At one point the couple's third son, now eight, was taken into care.

Mrs Clark died in the home at Hatfield Peverel, near Chelmsford, Essex,which her husband bought while she was in a local jail. Her family said they did not know what caused her death but added: 'She never fully recovered from the effects of this appalling miscarriage of justice. 'Sally, a qualified solicitor, was a loving and talented wife, mother, daughter and friend. She will be greatly missed by all who knew her.' Family friend Penny Mellor said: 'It is the most appalling tragedy heaped on other tragedies.’ (Daily Mail, 17 March 2007)

Clearly Sally Clark had an above-average IQ and would have been perceived as privileged, successful and middle-class, which made her a suitable target for hostility.

The principle of ‘innocent until proved guilty’ has been abandoned in modern society. Now you are likely to be considered guilty until proved innocent, or until judged to be innocent by a jury which will consider you thus only if there is what they believe to be convincing evidence for some alternative explanation of the ‘crime’. What is regarded as 'convincing' includes the opinions of doctors, that is, people appointed by society to have the power to make decisions on behalf of other people about things which concern them. Sally Clark was eventually acquitted, so it is possible to say she was innocent, but how many more are convicted and imprisoned on equally unsatisfactory grounds?

A civilised society might be defined as one in which the individual has a clearly defined territory within which he is free to evaluate his priorities for himself, and be free from interference so long as he does not break clearly defined laws of interaction with other individuals and their territories. We are not living in a civilised society. It is now possible for people living in perfectly respectable ways to find that they have quite inadvertently, as a result of some accident, come under suspicion of criminal acts and may be convicted.

Melanie Phillips on the UCU boycott

Anyone not yet convinced that Britain has somehow turned against its own most fundamental values, not to say departed altogether from reality, should look at the decision by the University and College Union (UCU) to urge a boycott of academic institutions in Israel.

This deplorable move destroys the most sacred role of a university - to act as the guardian of free speech and inquiry in order that knowledge, opinion and truth can flourish and grow. (From ‘A deplorable decision which shows that Britain’s academic elite has taken leave of its senses’ by Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, 4 June 2007.)

It is ridiculous to think of a university as having a ‘sacred role’. It is as ridiculous as saying that a doctor becomes a trustworthy person because she is given immoral power over other people by the oppressive socialist society in which we live.

Academics get into their positions by being appointed by other academics, and their prime motivation is to reinforce and promote the modern ideology, which includes the dogmatic belief that academics are experts and authorities on what is true, and on the right way of thinking, and that a person holding an academic appointment is qualitatively different from, and better than, someone who does not. Individuals who might express points of view which do not support or appear immediately to reinforce the modern belief system are viciously and slanderously opposed and suppressed.

Some early photos

In a recent post commenting on India Knight's false dichotomy between "intellectual stimulation" and "social life" I mentioned that I have photographs of myself "playing with children at the seaside who may have been twice my age and were certainly twice my size."

Here they are.



I am on the left in the one above.



Here I am on the right. The twin brother of the boy on the left is in the background.

Modern ideology and A Little Princess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bright student found dead

Edward Field, 20, was missing for ten days before police found his body. His family and friends had searched for the chemistry student at Bristol University and used Internet networking sites to try to find him.
...

Mr Field, whose family live in New Malden, Surrey, is understood to have been worried about his end of term exams, although a spokesman for Bristol University described him as ‘exceptionally’ clever.

Last night a close friend said: ‘Ed was a really bright boy with everything to live for. ‘Exam stress may have played a part in what happened but there are a lot of different pressures in student life and it is impossible to know.’ (from ‘Student worried over exams found hanged in woods’, Daily Mail, 29 May 2007)

Being ‘exceptionally clever’ is certainly no reason why an undergraduate should not be stressed about a university exam. He may have needed to do exceptionally well in order to proceed to the sort of exceptional and rarely obtainable career which he needed to have.

Those who are not exceptionally clever are much more likely to feel that, whatever their exam results, they will be able to get by in whatever sort of life is available to them in modern society.

It has been recognised by authorities other than me that the correlation of academic success with IQ breaks down at the highest levels of IQ. It is also recognised (but as far as I know only by me and other people here) that those with the highest IQs may have the greatest need for careers that can only be obtained by the highest academic success (and not necessarily even then).

It is also recognised (by me) that high IQ arouses hostility and it is easy for teachers and tutors to use their hostility in ways that are very effective in damaging a person’s prospects.

Why was this undergraduate, if really exceptional, at Bristol instead of Oxford or Cambridge, and taking his degree at so late an age? This suggests that his life may already have gone seriously wrong in the same way that mine did, although it is unlikely that he was so extreme a case.

He had been at Bedales public school, and we know that people from public schools are discriminated against. Perhaps that was why he was not at Oxford or Cambridge. And perhaps his tutors wanted to make him feel “challenged” (or, rather, undermined).

The fact that a “close friend” finds it “impossible to know” what he was stressed about is not particularly enlightening either way. My closest “friends” at Somerville had no insight whatever into my position when I was thrown out with a second-class degree. After that had happened their remarks were extremely misleading, if not positively slanderous.

The effects of a collectivist society

Adler said, what a person is motivated to do is shown best by the effects he actually brings about in his life, not by what he says he is aiming at. This may not apply too well to an individual with little control over his own circumstances, but applies a lot better to collectivist societies with massive resources derived from large numbers of individuals by taxation.

Two items in yesterday’s news show the onward march of the hidden agenda of modern society, to penalise and reduce the numbers of the formerly respectable and law-abiding population by favouring and enlarging the criminal population with, on average, lower IQs.

Extract 1

Up to 3,000 foreign criminals will be released from prison on to Britain's streets without any attempt to deport them, Government papers have revealed. A note sent to probation staff says as few as 250 convicts from European countries will face even preliminary deportation proceedings every year. It pins the blame on an EU directive which rules that committing a serious crime is no longer sufficient grounds for removal. … As a result, the vast bulk of the estimated 3,300 European criminals released from British jails each year - including burglars, thieves and muggers - will simply walk free.

The note to probation staff revealed that just "approximately 250-300" offenders will face even an attempt at removal - which could of course be unsuccessful. ... It emerged that Ministers are floundering on a second promise relating to foreign convicts - to send home foreign nationals imprisoned in Britain. Jails are at bursting point - with a record 80,812 inmates on Friday - so Labour is desperately trying to secure agreements to send 11,000 convicts back home to serve their sentences. But it is expected to take years for any significant number to be removed. (Daily Mail 28 May 2007)

Extract 2

Wrongly jailed after a woman cried rape, Warren Blackwell applied for compensation for his three wasted years in prison. Torn from his family and sent to languish in jail as a convicted sex attacker, the innocent father-of-two imagined he was due a hefty sum for the miscarriage of justice. Instead, he was flabbergasted to learn the Home Office now intends to charge him nearly £7,000 for "board and lodging". The money is for the cost of food and accommodation while he was behind bars, and will be deducted from whatever compensation he receives for wrong imprisonment.

Mr Blackwell, 37, said: “They accept they put me in prison wrongly and accept I’m due compensation. Then they say, ‘Thank you for your stay with us, hope you didn't miss your family too much during three years in the clanger, now off you go - oh, and here's your bill.’”

"I was jailed not just for a crime I didn't do, but for one that never even happened in the first place. She made the whole thing up, as was accepted by the High Court." Mr Blackwell's ordeal began when his accuser, now 39, claimed she had been seized with a knife outside a village club early on New Year's Day 1999, taken to an alley and indecently assaulted. She picked him out of an identity parade and a jury found him guilty, even though there was no forensic evidence and he had no previous convictions. ...

Eventually, the case was investigated by the Criminal Cases Review Commission which found his accuser had fabricated at least seven other allegations of sexual and physical assault. She frequently changed her name and police forces did not realise they were dealing with the same woman. (Daily Mail 28 May 2007)

In this case, as in many others, it is now possible to label the victim as innocent because a review board had declared him to be so, since some new evidence has come to light which affects the probabilistic weighting which they give to something being true. But suppose the woman in question had not had previous convictions for dishonesty, or this had not come to light, but she had nevertheless made her accusations against Mr Blackwell? This shows how easy it is for people to be convicted on probabilistic judgements based on purely circumstantial or unsupported evidence.

It is doubtful whether judges or juries take seriously the old-fashioned principle that a person is to be regarded as innocent until he is proved guilty. There appears to be more of an idea these days that a person is to be considered guilty unless and until a socially acceptable alternative explanation can be proposed.

"Making state schools fit for all children"

In the Mail on Sunday (27 May) David Cameron says he will ‘make state schools fit for all children – including mine.’

State schools can never be made fit for any children because it is fundamentally immoral to deprive an individual of the liberty to make his own evaluations of the uncertain existential situation and deploy his own resources to react to it in what seems to him the best way. (Basic Moral Principle.)

Now it is true that state education may appear to be very bad even to a person who takes into account only a few of the crudest principles. But even if on these very crude criteria (literacy, juvenile crime) it appeared to be ‘good’ it would still be morally wrong, and would be having bad consequences which were less quantifiable. Even if it could be ‘proved’ that it had no bad consequences of any kind it would remain morally wrong.

In fact, it is only on superficial and rationalised grounds that it is admitted to be ‘bad’. Actually it is doing precisely what it is really aimed at, making life as difficult as possible for the functional and formerly respectable high IQ individuals.

What could be more appropriate than that such an individual should be forced to pursue the aims of his highly-taxed life among an unemployable and criminal population?

‘We need ... schools ... that deliver the goal of a truly socially mobile society’ says Cameron. And what does that mean? Rapid descent for the high IQs, I suppose. But it has already happened quite a lot, and is still happening fast enough. There is really no need for any further acceleration.

More on the belief in society

copy of a letter

Further to yesterday’s comments about giving up on the belief in society, I should, as usual, insist on the importance of the hypothetical. People have a resistance to accepting the possibility that everyone may be against them, or that their lives may be irrevocably ruined, but it is not a matter of believing that those things are the case, it is only necessary to accept that these thing are possibilities and to stop distorting one’s mind in a decentralised way to avoid noticing the indications that they may, realistically, be the case.

In practice, however, I have certainly found that accepting these things (without giving up) has aroused hostility and opposition.

I had not realised that trying to recover from a bad position, once one has been thrown out by society, makes one a criminal. If you go on trying to do what society has decreed you are to be outcast from, this not only arouses no sympathy (except from the few very exceptional people who are here now) but actually arouses opposition, either covert or overt as vitriolic abuse.

As you know, I was quite identified from an early age with being a respectable and successful middleclass person and I saw no difficulty at all in living within the law and with a fair amount of respect for other people’s territories, physical and psychological. But I found this was not enough to prevent myself from being perceived as a criminal.

And, by the way, perhaps I should repeat that although when I regained my centralisation at the age of 19 I cried for three days for the loss of my destiny, I was not actually giving up and did not actually lose it (as everyone around me would have liked to believe at the time). But, of course, I was not any longer in the market for explaining myself to other people.

Giving up on the belief in society

copy of a letter

Although giving up on the belief in society is very traumatic, it is difficult to see what one is giving up on. One is breaking a taboo which puts one beyond the pale; one can never again feel any sense of supportive solidarity with the human race. They can all be against one; one cannot prevent this if they want to be; they are not under one’s control. One must be identified only with what is under one’s control, and that is very little.

One loses the possibility of glamour; glamour comes from social glorification, and you are stripping society of its power to glorify you. This seems, at the time, like a terrible loss. If you (say) get a Nobel Prize, it will not reinforce your sense of significance. But, you decide, you must give up on the glamour that you wanted to get from it, so that you will not be incapacitated from doing the work that may get you one, if ever you can get into a position to do such work.

And you accept that you have lost your destiny; you will spend your life asserting the significance of what should have been in loss and mourning; but you will never give up. You know that everyone would disapprove of this; ‘move on’, they would say, ‘give up’.

You must accept the discontinuity in your life in order to go on pursuing the same things as before, and mourning for their loss. More usually, people wish to retain an idea that they are still in the same life (I wished it myself); that it is continuous with their previous life, just modified.

Maybe they will get less of what they wanted out of society and in a different form, but they don’t want to think they have given up on it. This means that they will need to keep their minds distorted and decentralised.

It is (paradoxically) only by giving up that you are enabled not to give up, and pretending not to have given up means that you have really lost the essential thing.

You said how was it that, at the SPR, I could feel like a convicted criminal wearing broad arrows and be clearly aware of the implications of all their jibes and taunts, and yet really feel as much a Professor as ever, although not socially recognised as such, and regard those who taunted me, and those whose machinations had placed me in this position, as the real criminals, and as having acted badly by the standards which academics ought to have.

I think the positive part comes out of the centralisation; you don’t decide in advance that this is the position you are going to adopt. Any significantly centralising manoeuvre is, I think, experienced as negative, as loss and dangerous. You don’t know what may come of it, you may never be able to be motivated to try to get anything again. But in practice, if the effect is really centralising, positive and unforeseeable results ensue, and you find that you are confident and sure of yourself in a way that you never were before, even when your life seemed to be most successful and socially rewarded.

As for the risk of losing motivation, I found that I still had very strong motivation to get social recognition as a Professor as soon as possible, and a Nobel Prize. I also had very strong motivation to work on an adequate scale in any area where I had started to see what could be done and confidence that there would be significant progress which I would be able to make in the light of the perceptions which I already had in those areas.

This did not, of course, give me any motivation to fiddle around in those areas inconclusively or ‘theorise’ about them vaguely, as other people did. But there was a very strong drive to get into a position where I could work on them on an adequate scale. Such drives, if they could not be implemented, did not go away. But they would be less tormenting if I could be intellectually active and functional on an adequate scale in any area of work which had some realistic content, and which could be done in a way that was contributing either to my career advancement towards a Professorship or to my build-up of capital.