KEEPING THE PC BRIGADE HAPPY

The commitment of President Bush and his neoconservatives to upholding peecee feminazism was demonstrated as a bill was passed in the US Senate giving $15 billion providing for programmes in Africa "reducing sexual violence and coercion, including child marriage, widow inheritance and polygamy."

Such illiberal religiosity on the part of the neoimperialist Bushites showed that they had reached the same dynamic compromise made by Britain’s Tony Blair between free-market capitalism and gender feminism. Instead of replacing peecee piety with neofamily neoliberal realism – channelling health, education and welfare funding through well-constituted English-speaking families – the neocons remained unimaginatively content with the grisly compromise with fat old lesbians that they had made.

{It remained to be seen whether a new socio-nationalist opposition could be formed in either the USA or the UK without the encumbrance of the lies of multiculturalists, feminists and whingers in general. Certainly in Britain, Rev. Blair was being told that the trade unions were getting restive – and it was the unions who once provided the backbone support for nationalist Enoch Powell.}

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MEANWHILE


Superbabe Brigitte Bardot (see here) attracted predictable accusations of ‘racism’ with a mild remark that “I am against the Islamisation of France” (Daily Telegraph, 15 v).


Defying PeeCee, a top British cop (Chris Fox), the leader of Britain’s Police Federation, bravely announced that the present tidal wave of asylum seeking is not abating (contrary to protestations from Mr Blair) and that it is evidently responsible for much crime, and for clogging up health and education services in many areas. (Daily Telegraph, 19 v): “Immigrants bring increased crime, says police chief”.

Having failed to institute statutes of limitations on prosecution, the West found itself facing litigation initiated by an Irish lawyer in New York aiming to recoup £250 million from the ‘victims of apartheid’ in South Africa. The litigation targets investors (especially banks) and firms that allegedly helped maintain apartheid practices. The move was not being encouraged by South Africa itself and originated entirely from the usual merchants of White guilt.

The U.S. Supreme Court slapped down a peecee school which had banned its pupils from displaying the Confederate flag and redneck jokes on their tee-shirts.

As the US Supreme Court debated the merits of campus ‘diversity’ at the University of Michigan, it transpired that this Loony Uni was being singularly secretive about the data which it purported to justify its affirmative racism. Using the Freedom of Information Act, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Chetly Zarko (16 v), unearthed 1994 material, only to find it said Michigan's racial preference programs actually "stigmatized" African-Americans and "increasingly polarized" the campus; that "self-segregation" was common; that "diversity of skin color" is not equivalent to "diversity of ideas" (financial disparities were more telling); and that diversity "quite simply . . . does not, in itself, lead to a more informed, educated population."

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Some history.

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OPPORTUNISTIC RAPE ALLEGATIONS

The accusation that right-wing ex-MP Neil Hamilton and his wife jointly raped a trainee college lecturer in Grimsby, Nadine Milroy-Sloan, was rejected when an Old Bailey jury found Milroy-Sloan guilty of perverting the course of justice. With the help of the top London professional publicist, Max Clifford, gold-digger Milroy- Sloan had been given £50,000 by a Sunday newspaper for her ‘story’ – which she now admits could have been a case of mistaken identity.

The prosecution invited the jury to believe Milroy-Sloan had a personality disorder; and the jury was told she had four previous convictions (one for fighting, but none of a sexual nature). The judge said he would pass a custodial sentence.

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Even this slight satisfaction was unlikely to be experienced by Edinburgh TV presenter and playboy John Leslie, 37. Police decided not to proceed with charges that he had raped three women in London TV studios (and horrified 26 others by his lewd advances), but his reputation will remain badly damaged unless he can sue Channel V (where his name was mentioned ‘accidentally’ in a programme discussing a rape allegation by blonde bombshell TV announcer Ulrika Jonsson – who, to her apparent credit, steadfastly refused to name Leslie).

Thankfully Leslie’s current girlfriend, the delightful and diminutive Abby Titmuss, 28, stood by the gigantic (positively Handelian) Leslie throughout his nine-month ordeal.

Leslie claimed he taught Catherine Zeta-Jones everything she knows about sex, and joked that Michael Douglas ‘owes him one.’ The remaining question was whether Ulrike Jonsson had declined to name Leslie not out of decency but because she had never in fact been ‘raped’ by him except in some loose-gartered feminist sense. Perhaps her fame and some alcohol had led her to think she could get away with such an accusation on TV in feminazie days.

According to the Sun (17 v), millionaire Leslie was determined to take High Court action against Channel V, with Ulrike as the star witness, and believes he can prove that Ulrike was a satisfied girl who went on maintaining a good relationship with him long after her alleged rape took place.

{Whether about rape, paedophilia or child abuse, it is too easy for damaging but insubstantial allegations to be made by people who have all to gain and little to lose. It is high time for celebrity men to fight back against the femishrews who have created this dangerous situation in which most men can be brought down to suit the convenience of their political or other enemies. What is needed is something like a War Against Whingeing (WAW) – targeting and providing help against allegations which are merely probabilistic, involve misdeeds resulting in no objective harm, were not made timeously, or concern events of more than five years ago.}

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Some history.

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SEX DIFFERENCES

While behaviourism held sway in psychology, sex differences were ignored -- like most other biological influences that contribute to human nature and human variety. According to classical behaviourism, people's 'histories of reinforcement' were all that was needed to explain their psychological differences. Thus no special study of sex differences was required. With the publication of Eleanor Maccoby's The Development of Sex Differences in 1966, this neglect ended; but disagreement would persist as to the malleability of the differences.

The 1970s witnessed attempts to link sex differences in cognition and psychopathology to hemispheres, handedness, hormones and much else (e.g. Flor-Henry, 1983, The Cerebral Basis of Psychopathology). However, through the 1980's there was less confidence in neuropsychological stories and more development of the various competing strands of modern 'feminist' thought. Today it has still to be considered that some sex differences are of social origin, even if a 'patriarchal' social structure itself emerges as a likely development in most imaginable sociobiological circumstances.

The are five broad (but inter-linked) questions which give rise to argument in psychology and social science.

1. How do people acquire their sex-assignation as male or female?
2. How do people come by their sexual orientation of desire?
3. How do people come to differ in masculinity vs femininity of interests and personal style?

{In recent years it has been fashionable to view all such sex differences in personality and in 'what sex you feel you are' as matters of 'gender identity' (see below, c. p.70, P.J.Burke,). Yet this terminology would seem to beg the question of whether 'identity' is the issue. - Is an interest in flower-arranging actually an identity-assertion, or might it just be an interest tout court? Anyhow, in extending the term 'gender' to people from its natural use in linguistics to classify nouns, the terminology of 'gender' is strangely coy about using the word 'sex'.}

4. How and why do people arrive at their sexual opinionation concerning such matters as 'the opposite sex', 'the battle of the sexes', and the social, political and religious arrangements that should be made if the sexes are to live and procreate harmoniously?

5. Who is right about about the sexual prospects in the modern West? For example: will the sexes live increasingly disharmoniously? - Is the nuclear family finished? Will women support themselves and their children chiefly from some mixture of their own careers and state benefits? Could male labour and reproductive capacity be suffering steadily reducing demand? And what could males be expected to do with their time if their chief involvements with children were by means of the taxation system and the requirements of the divorce courts?

The more familiar feminist package of arguments contests the importance of sex differences; and attributes such differences as really must be admitted (in 'spatial abilities', 'aggression', 'dominance', 'criminality', 'tough-mindedness', 'analyticity', attentional styles, emotionality, logical reasoning, genius, sexual perversion, promiscuity, stark insensitivity, or whatever) to the influence of the local social environment. This little-real-difference package holds out the future prospect of reductions in such differences as are found; and enthusiasts for Women's Liberation may accordingly assert that there are no inherent obstacles to women occupying positions of industrial, political and religious leadership in the same proportions as do men.

A second, equally 'liberated' point of view has proved increasingly popular with feminists. This big-real-difference package of arguments actually stresses the male's physical potency and borderline-inhumanity as a biological aggressor who is conspicuously responsible for rape, child abuse, war and ethnic cleansing. This view is that the aboriginal qualities of the male must tend to disqualify him from Western civilisation; and it might be added that the modern technologies of nuclear deterrence, women police and judges, semi-automatic weapons and in vitro fertilization have anyhow rendered largely obsolete the traditional male's special capacity for hand-to-hand combat and allied forms of coercion.

Feminist respect for biological and evolutionary factors may even go beyond postulating 'big differences'. It may taken a step further to embrace a third view, that there must be differences between the sexes -- even if the male does not strictly need to be aggressive or sex-crazed. According to this package (e.g. Ruth Bleier, 1984, Science and Gender ) feminists accept what is a fairly plausible evolutionary tale to account for male over-representation in social leadership.

The story begins with human bipedalism: this enabled carrying and thus hunting over considerable distances. Once hunting for food took the human male away from the home base for longer periods, men's uncertainty about the paternity of women's children was simply bound to make them invent forms of 'patriarchy'; for patriarchy invariably serves to control female sexuality and to reduce the chance of men being cuckolded or made to support women's children by other men. Until recent times, it was only via some kind of sexual indoctrination and policing (usually provided by religion) that men could know in which children they should invest time, effort, cash and affection: female sexual fidelity was quite simply the cornerstone of male investment in children. (If, under other social arrangements, men were to have serious uncertainty as to which children were their own, the sociobiological expectation would be that they would reduce their efforts to improve the quality and life-chances of any particular children and concentrate on having in quantity children for whom others-viz. women or the state-are left to provide the bulk of the welfare.)

An advantage of the 'innate patriarchy' package is that it seems to explain three time-honoured puzzles:

(i) why male jealousy tends particularly to concern female sexuality (whereas female anxieties about their partners seem more often to concern how the man spends his time and money-e.g. Buss, 1991, Ann.Rev.Psychol.);

(ii) why so many cultures seem to operate the often-derided 'double standard' of sexual morality; and

(iii) why the world's longer-running religions and polities have been organized by men.

{Of course, the twentieth century -- with the Pill, easy abortion, AIDS, the welfare state, incubator-mix-ups, genetic figerprinting and genetic engineering -- poses quite new problems (and opportunities) requiring quite new responses by both sexes. Yet the male 'offer' [as it might be called] of either 'assured paternity of females' children' or 'disinvestment' seems likely to stand-at least until some 'marvel' of implant surgery makes it possible for men to bear their own children.}

These three psychological theses of feminism, in their very diversity, explain some of the problems of the Women's Movement today. Do women naturally constitute a cohesive force that could achieve political unity in support of traditional family values and in opposition to crime, warfare and sexual promiscuity? Or will women's natural affection, ready sympathy and need for security (in pregnancy and beyond) achieve fulfilment more naturally in the championing of the job-creative and benefit-providing welfare state sector of modern economies? Are women well advised to compete with men in engineering, architecture, computing, politics and the priesthood? Or is there simply no proper objective for women but to slough off discredited stereotypes and shibboleths -- as they certainly have in the West in recent years?

The psychological understanding of sex differences will bear on all these as-yet-undecided questions. To answer at least the last of them affirmatively may seem easy enough in its tolerant individualism. Yet an unvarnished approval of 'de-stereotyping' will not satisfy politically conscious feminists who urge precisely that women should indeed assert their distinct interests as a natural biosocial group. Nor will it satisfy biological realists: a young woman who plans her future life merely in response to own current stereotype-free 'gender identity' will arguably be neglecting the ennobling maternal energies and sensitivities that would come on stream for her at the birth of her first child.

More here.

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Some history.

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CONFUSED TORIES

Tory leader Iain Duncan Cough just didn’t seem to realize that, as top politics professor John Gray put it, “The Prime Minister is now a fully-fledged neoconservative” (New Statesman, 19 v) and that if the Tories couldn’t link up with him (hopefully agreeing on the neofamily as a replacement for PeeCee in matters of morals), they would need to go down the socio-nationalist route – explaining to Labour’s left-wing that its own only hope of power would be to introduce a stiffening ingredient of nationalism and opposition to mass dullard immigration.

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MORE ZIMBABWE LUNACY

The lunatic government of Black Zimbabwe (mean IQ 66 according to Richard Lynn & Tatu [genius name!] Vanhanen, IQ and the Wealth of Nations) decided to alienate even its last good British friends by throwing out the longstanding correspondent of the Guardian newspaper (Daily Telegraph, 17 v, ‘Defiant journalist kicked out by Mugabe’).

As American citizen Andrew Meldrum, 51, was deported amidst commotion at Harare airport, he shouted as six Black police goons wrestled with him, “This is not the action of a legitimate government.” {Strong words from a representative of the Grauniad! What a pity that newspaper ignored the protestations of the McDougall NewsLetter and the Times about Mugabe as early as November, 1997!}

More excerpts:

He shouted to the media, many of whom were personal friends: "This is not the action of a legitimate government. It is afraid of a free press. It is afraid of independent and critical reporting." Infuriated police grabbed him around the neck, pulled at his jacket and eventually overpowered him and pushed him into a back passenger seat of their saloon.

Mr Meldrum is the latest in a long line of journalists targeted by President Robert Mugabe. The work permit of The Daily Telegraph's David Blair was withdrawn two years ago, that of the BBC's Joseph Winter at about the same time, and others back to the 1980s. More than 60 media workers have been arrested in the past year, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa.

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, said: "The authorities have been persecuting Andrew for 12 months and their clear determination to deport him can only be interpreted as a concerted effort to stifle any free press."

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, described Zimbabwe's action as "petty and vindictive".

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Some history.

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WHITES ARE GUILTY WHEN BLACKS FAIL!

An education experiment by one of Tony's Cronies, half-Black Trevor Phillips, failed when a Black boy, Ryan Bell, 15, sent to Britain's oldest and ultra-top-notch Catholic school, Downside - paid for by Philips' TV company, Pepper Productions - was thrown out after an orgy of petty derelictions culminating in a drinking bout (Sunday Telegraph, 11 v). Excerpt:

Ryan attended Downside, Britain's oldest Roman Catholic school, for almost two years. He seemed to adapt well. He made friends, excelled at rugby and showed a talent for Latin and biology. The experiment, however, began to turn sour when he was suspended twice for spraying graffiti and for stealing a classmate's phone, although this was described by the school as a prank. Last week, Ryan was expelled after a Sunday afternoon drinking binge with five fellow pupils which resulted in his hospitalisation

So did Phillips decide to abandon such foolish experimentation? No way! Instead, from his lofty position as Chairman of the government-oiled Campaign for Racial Equality, he announced he would campaign to name, shame and sue schools where Black children did not do as well as Whites! Excerpt:

The CRE and the Office for Standards in Education are drawing up guidelines for inspectors to judge schools on their race records. Mr Phillips said he would be zealous in enforcing them. "I'm talking about naming and shaming schools and that's only going to be the beginning," he said. "People used to say the most dangerous thing in the world was a nigger with a gun. Well, a black man with the power of law and the ability to put schools in the High Court is a pretty dangerous thing."

{The ghost of Lysenko - who wrecked Soviet agriculture with his Lamarckist ideas - must be looking on amiably as British teachers prepare to desert schools containing any but the brightest Black children, and local authorities draw up plans for racial segregation.}

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TONY BLAIR AND POLITICAL COMPROMISE

A political analyst working for the Times noted the merits of 'dynamic compromise' (long held by me to provide the backbone of any major political party -- THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICS, SOCIAL ATTITUDES AND POLITICAL EXTREMISM). Said Daniel Finkelstein (13 v):

"Tony Blair realized early in his leadership that voters have complex, sometimes contradictory views. He attempts to represent them by bringing together ideas that - at least in political rhetoric - have usually been kept apart: tough crime policies and an anti-poverty strategy, for example."

But while Mr Blair had moved on to the even greater dynamic combination of hedonistic free-enterprise global capitalism with the new religion of PeeCee, the world waited in vain for UK Conservatives to put intelligent nationalism together with an expansion of trade training and state investment in small business ventures by young people. Instead, UK Conservatives promised only to abolish Labour's planned top-up university fees - a fine left-wing idea (to be funded by cutting university expansion) but -- not giving the needed boost to recruitment of plumbers and electricians -- unlikely to be seen as fulfilling even the latest boring Conservative slogan of 'a fair deal for everyone.'

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Some history.

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TATU

Defying paedohysteria at the BBC and Kidscape about paedophilic pop, a packed house of Cambridge undergraduates heard with rapt attention and applause a lecture detailing with stunning visual aids the Russian teen girls, feisty brunette Julia and soulful redhead Lena, whose pop act, under the name t.a.T.u. [tatu is Russian for tattoo], had them kissing in the rain in revealing drenched shirts and singing as they bathed nude in the bath. Previously the chicas had themselves filmed outside Tate Modern art gallery, London, surrounded by hundreds of teen fans dressed in school uniforms and knee-high socks, previously having been moved on by police when they tried to film opposite the Houses of Parliament. Two UK gigs had been cancelled, supposedly for lack of interest but actually after it had been rumoured that the girls (and perhaps some fans as young as 14) would undress in public as well as engaging in their sexy hugging and kissing -- orgies have reputedly occurred at some of their performances.

{The girls reputedly began their career as underage lesbian lovers. Now, at 17 and 18, they are topping charts all round the world and are about to take on paedohysterical USA. They claim to have sex with each other three times a day and that this is better than the sex they also have with men.

In April, Julia was snapped having an intimate dinner with a Russian male popstar who claimed she was part of a threesome with himself and another man. The gossip has been that Julia and Lena are not really lesbians but actually prefer boys -- especially boys in their 50 and 60s!

Another option for them is even to promote a clean and normal image hence calling themselves by the initials of the pious US organization Teens Against Tobacco use. Perhaps in order to maintain an air of mystery, interviews with Julia and Lena are never allowed by their Svengali-esque manager and psychologist Ivan Shapovalov (who has also been called the Lou Pearlman of Russia. Shapovalov once admitted that Tatu are what he called an "underage sex project" designed to appeal to men in search of underage entertainment. Typical lyric as the girls crotch-thrustingly canoodle: Show me Love, Show me Love, give me all that I want / Show me Love, Show me Love, till I'm screaming for more. -- more}.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AGEING

Though the differences between the young and the old border on being matters of both banality and delicacy, they have a particular interest. Differences between people in sex, class and race have all proved relatively contentious even in recent times; by contrast, little is heard today of 'the generation gap.' How age differences are handled may thus provide a model of how to treat other, less obvious and still more sensitive differences between major, visible human groups.

Three considerations help keep temperatures down as age differences are discussed.

(1) Age differences are pretty clearly dimensional, and not absolute; and they are not all 'negative'. There are few 'black-and-white' differences, for all that some proportion of the problems of the elderly obviously arise from particular devastating afflictions like Alzheimer's disease. Health, vigour, looks and intelligence are admittedly at their peak (in the average person) in youth; and ageing sees a decline which, though barely perceptible at first, is marked after 55. However, compensation is normally thought to be provided by increased caution, wisdom, moral rectitude, good-naturedness and by deep and fulfilling experiences of prolonged affectionate relationships with family and friends.

(2) Equally agreeably, temptations to 'label' and criticise people of another age group are held in check by: (a) the sympathy that the elderly sometimes have for the young-through recall of their own youth and realization that grandchildren are their only way to continued genetic investment; (b) the elderly often needing the support of the young (especially in social security contributions); (c) young people recognizing that they, too, will one day be old in their turn.

(3) Modern advanced economies mediate between the young and the old: they provide funds and welfare personnel intended to cope both with the youthful problems of ignorance, crime, promiscuity and illegitimacy and with the needs of the elderly for home helps, sheltered accommodation and spare part surgery.
In these congenial circumstances, it should be relatively easy to be 'objective' about the major psychological differences that distinguish the old from the young-even about the gf level of the typical 80-year-old adult, which approximates that of a normal 8-year-old child.

Yet many psychologists have been reluctant to admit such 'realities' without much qualification. Psychometricians have blamed apparent age differences on possible 'cohort effects' between generations-arguing that today's sixty-year-olds grew up without the welfare state and modern agriculture, whereas today's thirty-year-olds enjoyed, from the cradle, welfare and a good diet that will still be serving them well by the time when they, too, reach sixty.

Experimental psychologists, on the other hand are more accepting of the evidence that age-declines are indeed seen in cohort and longitudinal studies. Yet they see age differences partly as artefacts of coarse psychometric testing procedures; and partly as resulting from specific quirks and maladaptive strategies on the part of the elderly that might remain untriggered if only tasks were re-designed and the elderly re-trained by experimentalists.

Rather in contrast with such speculations, the 1980's witnessed the arrival on the scene of measures of speed-of-intake (for simple perceptual information) that make it hard to attribute age-declines to problems of decision-making, strategy-organization, lack of interest, or unfamiliarity with the psychological laboratory. Piagetian measures, too, showed the elderly to be at just as marked a disadvantage as they are on traditional mental tests.

None of this means that society should not ascribe special rights to the elderly and the middle-aged-even the right to continued employment. Yet- as when other groups are considered for privileged treatment- the adage should be recalled that 'Rights without duties are not worth having'. If the middle-aged and the elderly are to be shown 'positive discrimination' (perhaps starting with employers not being allowed to advertise specifically for employees from younger age groups), what are their special duties? Human societies may perhaps have to be admitted as incapable of a realistic handling of human abilities that treats everyone-of whatever age, sex, class-of-origin or race-quite simply by exactly similar standards, as individuals. However, if rights and privileges are to be accorded to particular groups, beneficiaries themselves would probably feel more secure if the positive discrimination in their favour were premissed on something more than charitable whimsy.

Most naturally, the elderly would play a special role in the nurture and education of young children. Yet this is hardly possible on any scale when 'teachers' in state schools require a sympathy with youth 'culture' and black belts in judo; and when even progress in the English language (with which the elderly are best equipped to assist) is not used as a basis for promoting children to more advanced classes. So far, the problem of increasingly large proportions of elerly people has been addressed by the empty rhetoric of similitarian wishful thinking. Unless there is increasing realism about the contribution that the elderly can make to the economy and society, the elderly may find the young increasingly keen to relieve them of their expensive welfare rights and benefits-at first by some kind of purchase, but eventually by robbery (already a familiar tower-block sport).

More here

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DIVERSITY AT WORK

The diversity-loving and affirmatively active New York Times had egg all over its face when it found it had to fire Black ‘investigative reporter’ Jayson Blair after he had been discovered to have partly made up or plagiarized scores of stories he had contributed to the paper. In fact, senior management at the paper had known of the problem for several years but had continued to retain and promote Blair so as to maintain the paper’s multicultural image. Grimly, NYTwit readers were told that:

“Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not. And he used these techniques to write falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history, from the deadly sniper attacks in suburban Washington to the anguish of families grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq.”

Evidently, Blair was helped not only by affirmative racism but by it being so easy to see what lefty, White-guilt-ridden NYTwit readers wanted to hear.

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WELSH RACISM OK?

Discriminating against people without ‘local’ connections, the Housing Department of rural Gwynned, north Wales, turned out to have banned for three years the sale of an ex-council house which had come into private hands (Sunday Telegraph, 11 v).

Faced with accusations of racism (against English would-be purchasers and settlers), the Council claimed it was acting within its powers under the 1985 Housing Act.

(Last month, Sir Iain Noble was hoisted by the media and peecee politicos for saying he wanted Skye to limit immigration from the mainland so as remain a primarily Gaelic island).

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PHOTOS NOW INCORRECT

The editor of the Daily Californian bravely stood up to fifty hysterical Berkeley campus students wailing that the paper had published “racist” pictures – a photo of a Black footballer arrested for fighting and a cartoon of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il. Excerpt:

In the past two days we've received a large response to two items The Daily Californian has published recently: an editorial cartoon depicting North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il and a news story on a Cal football player's arrest.
More than 50 students met with two editors and myself yesterday, angry about yesterday's story, "Cal Football Player Arrested in Assault," a story about how Cal football player Michael Gray was arrested following a fight outside a fraternity involving as many as 50 people over the weekend.

Students were upset about a number of issues with the story. Publishing Gray's photograph drew attention to the fact that an African American was connected with an assault, which the students said perpetuated a negative, stereotypical image of African Americans.

The editor, Rong-Gong Lin II, had the advantage of being Asian and thus did not suffer from the sickening White guilt with which the left has infected public life in the West .

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MORE ON THE U.K. UNIVERSITY RANKINGS

Edinburgh University’s position in research assessments was a pretty dismal 17th, along with the University of Essex; and its rank for teaching quality was a terrible 27th – behind all the main Scottish universities (St Andrews 4th, Glasgow 10th, Stirling 13th and Aberdeen 20th). (For two hundred years, Edinburgh was among the top six universities in the UK, retaining that position in government figures till 1997.)

Nor did Edinburgh do much good by way of putting its students into occupations where a degree was necessary: on this yardstick, Edinburgh came only a disastrous 34th. Edinburgh’s overall ranking of 14th was achieved with the help of getting credit for its high research income, 6th in the UK; but it will not hang on to the big bucks once its awful record of the past six years comes to be realized.

Unsurprisingly for Britain’s most shockably peecee university, Edinburgh achieved the highest rankings in the gruesome triad of Sociology, Social Work and Social Policy. Any other top marks? Yes, the Loony Uni came top for Veterinary Medicine. So what do these four subject areas have in common? Pretty Plainly, E.L.U. aims to thrive on compassion for dumb animals – and on the state monies readily available from NuLabour to those who parade such concern. (By contrast, HM Government’s new Education Minister announced he would like to stop funding Mediaeval History – presumably fearing anything that might reveal that England was never a very multicultural society (even banning the Jews for 400 mediaeval years).)

E.LU.’s censorious Psychology Department did even worse than the LUni as a whole, ranking at only 25th in overall quality despite having students whose entry results (A Levels etc.) were exceeded only by those of students entering Oxford. Thus Edinburgh Psychology is now the weakest link in its new administrative/academic linkage with Linguistics (9th) and Philosophy (22nd).

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U.K. UNIVERSITY RANKINGS

May 2003 might have brought the tiniest moment of consolation to the LUniversity of Edinburgh in that it came 14th in the Times’ assessment of overall UK quality. However, that ranking still placed the LUni behind Loughborough and was anyhow due principally to Edinburgh dishing out First and Upper Second Class degrees at a rate that placed its students as the 5th best in Britain. By contrast, the LUni’s position in research assessments was a pretty dismal 17th=, along with the University of Essex. (For two hundred years, Edinburgh was among the top six universities in the UK.) E.LU.’s censorious Psychology Department did even worse than the LUni as a whole, ranking at only 25th in overall quality despite having students whose entry results (A Levels etc.) were exceeded only by those of students entering Oxford. (The Times ratings were even more sensible than normal this year, placing Oxford at No. 1, ahead of Cambridge for the second year in succession.)

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A REVIEW OF: Intelligence, Race and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen. (Boulder, CO : Westview. Pp. xi + 236. ISBN 0-8133-4008-X) by Frank Miele.

Excerpts from the full review published in Heredity 90, 5, 346-7 (May, 2003):

In 1969, Arthur Jensen (today Emeritus Professor at Berkeley) began his career of martyrdom with his Harvard Educational Review article saying that educability, IQ and race were probably genetically linked. Through the ensuing 33 years of the West's tenured intellectuals suppressing the 'Jensenist Heresy', IQ became unmentionable in the media (except when excusing some poor wretch in America from capital punishment); and race, too, became unmentionable except when asserting that it was 'meaningless as a scientific concept'. Books by hereditarian psychologists, including Jensen himself, became unpublishable, except by mail order houses. Meanwhile, Britain's New Labour governments of 1997-2002 sensibly adopted the Jensenist idea of providing specialized academies for gifted children yet gave no word of thanks to the vilified scholar.

Scrupulously aiming to avoid controversy, the man who first so sensationally attracted it now disdains any interesting propositions about the human condition. Jensen even says he does not feel "inclined or properly qualified" to think through the political implications of his work.

Miele's e-mailed conversations with Jensen provide a polite trot around familiar psychogenetic territory – or several trots, because Miele feels obliged to introduce each conversation by summarizing it, and then repeating himself in his direct questions; and Jensen – himself no stranger to repetition – then rehearses the arguments once more, but without the precise quantification for which he is rightly famous. Certainly, Miele attempts a little fast bowling. But how can you really bowl fast and catch someone off their guard in e-mail? Sadly, this whole exercise is misconceived. Fans of the mighty Jensen should tell students to read instead his own fine popularization of his ideas in Straight Talk About Mental Tests – though students will have to use libraries because the book is out of print thanks to Jensen, with his high scholarship, having failed to orchestrate opposition to domination of social science and the media by believers in 'the blank slate.'

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HEREDITY COP-OUT

Top scientist James Watson produced a new eulogy for DNA, the complex molecule of inheritance which plays a central role in shaping our destiny (DNA: the Secret of Life). IQ is heritable OK; but heritability is very complex etc., etc. What about race? Here, as with Steven Pinker, Watson’s nerve failed him entirely and he wrote merely: “The idea of measurable variation in average intelligence among ethnic groups is not one, I admit, I want to live with.”

Likewise, psychologist Steve Pinker himself once more copped out of fully fledged hereditarianism when interviewed by BBC 2 TV (7 v). Asked about human racial differences, Pinker admitted he had pulled material from his book The Blank Slate, and said ‘If there are any racial differences, they are probably environmental.’ (Pinker’s book will be reviewed in Heredity in June.)

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KIDDIEPORN

As another UK pop star was given a police caution for downloading kiddieporn, a substantial article appeared in the Laissez-Faire Electronic Times deploring paedohysteria and saying the size of the kiddieporn industry was grossly over-rated by femnists and leftists so as to argue for the appointment of more social workers and thought police. In particular, by changing the definition of a ‘child’ to below 18, by ceasing to demand that ‘pornographic’ pictures be obscene, and by criminalizing mere possession (rather than sale or purchase), the USA of the 1990s allowed its own moral panic to spin out of any reasonable control.

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MEANWHILE ....

A UK parliamentary committee gave a stern warning to the NuLabour government that asylum seeking, which had increased 26-fold in the previous twenty years, “could overwhelm the country” (Times, 8 v). The Home Office Select Affairs Committee particularly pointed to recent electoral victories in Burnley by the British National Party and said a continuation of mass asylum seeking could spark “social unrest.” In Burnley itself, the Times reported that the BNP had dropped their skinhead image for the wearing of Burberry hats; and that there was widespread disaffection at privileged treatment of Muslim immigrants and at their pressures for concessions regarding school meals and uniform.

Leftists and peaceniks were at last advised by a top columnist of the left-of-centre and anti-Crusade Independent (7 v) that America, Australia and Britain had done a good job in Iraq: ‘Rejoice, rejoice – there has been an explosion of democracy in Iraq’, Johann Hari.

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Some history.

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..
MORE PAEDOPHILE PRIESTS

Paedohysteria received a new boost when the Roman Catholic diocese of Phoenix, Arizona, was found to have had one or more paedophile priests in almost half of its parishes for some period in the past thirty years. Specifically, the analysis found: Priests accused of sexual misconduct at some point during their careers were assigned to at least 42 of the 88 parishes in the Phoenix Diocese from 1970 to 2002.

{It is high time for the RCs to realize that they need to do some research on whether paedophile priests do more harm than good, renounce priestly celibacy, and replace Catholicism with Carpocratianism – i.e. recognizing that human sexuality and love are great gifts and were never intended to be suppressed, certainly not by Jesus and his girlfriend Mary Magdalene….}

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AFFIRMATIVE RACISM EXPLAINED

As the US Supreme Court debated whether to scrap affirmative action in the universities (verdict expected in July) peecee Ronald Dworkin explained matters for liberal-leftists in the New York Review of Books (15 v). Today, the main arguments for affirmative racism are apparently (i) to have more Black people educated for leadership positions in the future and (ii) to give university students the enjoyable wonders of ‘diversity’ as part of their studies. Even the White House shares these objectives (as do many big firms, so they have told the Court) – though President Bush wants to pursue affirmative racism only in an indirect and ‘colourblind’ way, pretending that all state schools deserve to have their top 10% of pupils accepted by state universities. However, a colourblind dog could see what is wrong with Dworkin’s arguments:

1). What’s the point of aiming increasingly to fill top jobs with people of inadequate IQ? Indeed, it is surely dangerous – as Linda Gottfredson’s studies of the police have shown.

2). If the brighter Blacks are shifted by affirmative racism into the professions, civil service, management or wherever, that will remove their happy diversifying influence from other parts of the economy where they would arguably have more success and self-esteem.

3). There is no evidence that people like diversity or benefit from it. Indeed, all the evidence from the housing market is that Whites and Blacks mainly avoid each other when they have the choice. And, internationally, it is the ‘diverse’ countries of the West (UK, USA, Russia) which have the highest rates of crime and imprisonment.

4). If diversity is so jolly nice, why is only racial diversity at isssue? Surely, universities should also have proportional numbers of prostitutes, drug addicts and indeed the mentally defective. Hardest of all for them, diversity-believing universities should at least be obliged to have representative numbers of political conservatives on their staff.

As to Mr Bush’s colourblind compromise:

1). What’s the point of exchanging one lie (that Blacks can benefit from academic education as much as Whites) for another (that all schools are of similar quality even when, as so often, they are segregated along Black-White lines)?
2). The Bush proposal would soon be rendered worthless (even to ‘antiracists’) because dull Whites would shift their children into Black schools for a year or two so as to give their children more of a chance of a university place.

There is of course one sensible way of getting more Black students into unversities – providing popular courses on drugs, rap music, fashions and netball which they would like to take. A few courses in soccer, sex, plumbing, electrical engineering and kitchen upgrading would also be a good idea – aiming to attract the poor White males who are today as under-represented in universities as the Blacks. Such dumbing down is essentially what liberal-left intellectuals have been wanting for a generation. Now that the universities are run ovwhelmingly by liberal-leftists and feminazies, it is time to let them have it with both barrels.

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EXCLUSIVE!

The phrase ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, hilariously used to describe the French and their stance during the Iraq Crusade, probably hails back to the Marlon Brando movie ‘On the Waterfront’, where cowardly ‘bums’ are described as “cheese-eaters”.

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Some history.

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THE CURSE OF BRAND

Readers may recall that I wrote a rather disparaging review of The Educated Child, by US Republican former Education Secretary, William Bennett. Excerpt:

"Children and their teachers must be constantly monitored, hectored, rewarded and punished - the children by TV-deprivation and school principals by protests and demonstrations from angry parents. Repeatedly, ambitious parents are advised to 'spend a few minutes each day' reading to their child, listening to their child, talking with their child, improving diction, visiting public libraries, mastering computing, going out on the Net, revising drafts of the child's homework, sitting in on classes, harrying teachers, writing to the school principal or organizing parent groups. Altogether, the book offers some 1,000 advices to anxious parents as to how to fill gaps in their days, and some 500 ways of detecting failures in their children's schools. The "minutes" add up to a massive investment: apparently not a single day can develop under its own logic or with much input from the child."

So child-harasser Bennett got all his friends to go along to Amazon Books and rubbish my review. Well, the Times carried a story (5 v, 'Moral crusader loses $8 million in casinos') that Bennett, who is well known for his moralistic views about gambling as well as about education, had been exposed (in Washington Monthly) as having clocked up $8million in casino losses over the previous ten years.

Apparently, Bennett's speciality was high-stakes video poker on machines which accept bets up to $500. The revelation was bound to amaze his conservative friends (Jack Kemp, Jeanne Kirkpatrick) to whom he had previously admitted only playing for small stakes while socializing with members of the US Supreme Court. So the Curse of Brand seems to be working well....

Also, a very senior and highly reputed academic at the LUniversity of Edinburgh told me that the university is now a "bureaucratic shambles" and will certainly go further downhill in league table ratings once the current staff in their sixties retire. This was the third very senior figure to make such remarks to me in the past year. Additionally, technicians particularly reported a grim atmosphere of failure and backbiting in the Psychology Department. Revenge is sweet.

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Some history.

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PSYCHO-SOCIAL ENGINEERING

There are two main packages of attitudes with regard to altering human nature in general and individual personality features in particular:

One -- the improvement-seeking, 'Utopian' package -- involves believing that psychological change is possible and desirable and even that it should be pursued urgently with all the means at the disposal of society and its taxpayers.

The other -- the rights-maintaining, 'Legitimist' package-involves believing that many of the changes favoured by psychological experts (in the direction of, for example, 'adjustment', 'creativity', 'equality' or 'openness') are mercifully impossible but should be firmly resisted just in case.

Until recently, psychologists (and allied members of the self-styled 'caring' professions) tended to subscribe to the Utopian package. Yet they were moderate both as to the extent of their own beneficent objectives and as to the likelihood of attaining them. The aim of most applied psychologists was limited to relieving people (or helping doctors and teachers to relieve people) of the best agreed and most conspicuous personal handicaps. (Though the early psychoanalysts and behaviourists expressed wider enthusiasms, cost-benefit analyses were never persuasive.)

Thus it was left to political figures (notably to Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot -- but also, some might say, to Jesse Jackson and Mrs Thatcher) to urge transformations of society and human nature as they found it. Meanwhile, Western psychologists contented themselves with the modest practices of 'treatment' and 'training'

Today, however, many professional psychologists appear -- like politicians -- to entertain larger objectives of eliminating racism, sexism, elitism, difference and deference. These objectives are commonly held to require considerable 'social change'.

Reflection on all these four main types of 'improving' endeavour -- as perhaps on other schemes offered by dieticians, sociology's 'labelling theorists', social workers and economists will certainly lead some to a largely unalloyed 'legitimism'.

Perhaps utopian reformers should be firmly discouraged from meddling with that variety in human nature that results from genetic differences and from the further processes of niche-selection, milieu-creation and self-individuation that naturally characterise human development and family life? Yet to others it will still occur that, if they are to earn their keep, psychologists really should discover agreeable ways of changing at least those people who themselves clearly want to change.

Many quotes relevant to the above issues can be found here.

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Some history.

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THE LANGUAGE POLICE

The full extent of PeeCee’s grip on American schools was revealed in a new book by education professor, Diane Ravitch (Sunday Telegraph, 4 v, p.28). Called The Language Police, the book documented how education lobbyists and state authorities had been busy excising all ‘racial stereotyping’ even from such classics as John Steinbeck’s Mice and Men and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Even Jane Austen and Charles Dickens had been excoriated – in these cases for ‘perpetuating gender stereotypes.’ Excerpt:

MICKEY Mouse is a scary rodent. Harry Potter is anti-family. Christmas should be avoided. Dinosaurs are banned. In the wacky world of US education, the language police are out of control.

After 25 years of creeping censorship of school textbooks, the full scale of political correctness has been exposed in a startling new survey of official meddling in education.

In a book acclaimed as the first comprehensive expose of a national scandal, former US government official Diane Ravitch argues that a laudable attempt to rid US schools of racial bias and sexual discrimination has been taken to ridiculous extremes.

"Some of this censorship is trivial, some is ludicrous and some is breathtaking in its power to dumb down what children learn in school," said Ravitch, an educational historian who has worked with both Republican and Democrat administrations.

Her astounding glossary of words and topics that have been banned by individual state agencies or voluntarily suppressed by educational publishers has sparked a national row over an epidemic of what The New York Times described as "bowdlerising texts, whitewashing history and eviscerating prose".

States like California hardly needed to bother to tell publishers to alter references to smiling Blacks, dumb blondes, fat misfits, suburban Whites with nice families, girls watching boys play ball, or mothers taking sandwiches to their husbands while they mended the roof: most of this work had come to be undertaken by the craven ‘publishers’ themselves – as when Wiley DePublisher tried to get me to backtrack about race and IQ before finally withdrawing The g Factor.

Publishers co-operation had freed states like California to concentrate on the newer tasks of eliminating references in children’s books to french fries, coffee, bacon, butter, ketchup and mayonnaise. Such nonsense was tolerated by the American right in return for its own slice of the action – elimination of favourable references to Charles Darwin and evolution.

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BRITISH NATIONALISM

In Britain’s local elections, the only big developments were that the British National Party increased its council seats by some 200% (to 16) – especially and interestingly finding support in middle class areas, a new development

By contrast, the world’s worst nationalist party, the Scottish Nationalist Party, which spends all its time advertising its socialism, welfarism and pacifism, lost 25% of its seats in the Scottish ‘Parliament’.

And the British National Party, fresh from its electoral breakthrough in Burnley, stressed that its primary interest was not in repatriating asylumswindlers and immigrants who failed to master English language and British history but rather in the classically socialist objective of spending more taxpayers’ monies on poor White trash.

That the future of Western politics may involve such new dynamic compromises as NeoLiberal Imperialism (the new right – easily led by Mr Blair now he favours health privatization, the American alliance against towelheads, fast track learning, university top-up fees etc.) and Socio-Nationalism [NeoNational Socialism to the less picky] (the new left) has long been my guess.

(For the evidence of successful parties involving dynamic compromises between psychological extremes, see Psychology of Politics.)

Just which new coalition will end up nursing the greedy PeeCee baby is an interesting question, though hopefully at least any NeoLiberal-Imperial coalition would eventually see the advantage of dropping the new mini-religion in favour either of traditional Christianity (plus the more tolerable bits of Judaism) or in favour of support for the neofamily}

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BRITISH ANTISEMITISM

The growing togetherness of leftists and anti-Semites achieved publicity as Labour MP Tam Dalyell (the longest-serving MP, thus titled ‘Father of the House of Commons’) slammed into Messrs Blair and Bush for being too influenced by “Jewish cabals.” (Mr Blair was specially influenced by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, ex-Minister Peter Mandelson, speechwriter Peter Hymen and Blair’s personal envoy to the Middle East, Lord Levy, Dalyell told Vanity Fair over perhaps a liquid lunch.)

At the same time, the Association of University Teachers announced it had agreed to put to the vote a keenly supported proposition that British academics should limit their contacts with Israel so as to express their anti-Zionism (Sunday Telegraph, 4 v).

Making things easier for budding anti-Semitic socialists, an American researcher announced that Friedrich Nietzsche (of heroic transformational tendencies) had died not of syphilis (with its moral overtones) but simply of cancer – the syphilis story only appeared in 1947 as part of Allied anti-Nazi propaganda.

As suicide bombers in Israel turned out to have struck from Londonistan, Britain -- using their British passports to cross borders -- the UK’s failure to monitor and check its Muslim militants was squarely blamed on peecee multiculturalism by Theodore Dalrymple in the Times (2 v) and by Alasdair Palmer in the Sunday Telegraph (4 v). Matters had probably been especially worsened by the 1990s appointment of a woman, Stella Rimington, as head of MI5.

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EUGENICS WORKS

A article about Cyprus titled ‘Choosing eugenics’ appeared recently in Chronicles of Higher Education. Refuting all those who fear that eugenic programmes are bound to generate inhumanity and to have little efficacy, the two sides of the island of Cyprus have both had an agreed eugenic programme for the last twenty years, designed to reduce the incidence of the horrible blood disorder of thalassemia. Applicants for marriage licenses on the island must consent to genetic screening; subsequently, if carriers marry the state pays for any abortion the couple request.

Only two thalassemic babies have been born on Cyprus in the past twenty years, compared with the expected figure of 1,400; and no-one locally criticizes the programme, not even the Orthodox or Muslim clerics or the adult victims of thalassemia.

Worldwide there are 7.6 million babies born annually suffering genetic diseases, and the World Health Organization estimates that genetic screening and voluntary abortion could cut this figure by 70%. Only old leftists like ‘genetics professor’ Steve Jones (perversely holding a Chair funded by Sir Francis Galton’s legacy) and neurobabbling Steven Rose stand in the way of such genetics realism.

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“ASIANS”

I wrote to the Guardian as follows:

I note with alarm that, among the 55% of British people who think crime is linked to race, 39% blame 'Asians' as "the ethnic group most likely to commit crime" (Guardian Unlimited, 'The uncovered poll', 27 April). By contrast, 34% blame 'Black Caribbeans', 19% blame 'White British' and only 8% blame 'Orientals'.

There could be no clearer demonstration that the term 'Asian' is now meaningless and misleading. Used by the British press over the past decade to refer principally to people from the Indian sub-continent, it has now apparently become understood as covering the Middle East with its supply of terrorists, suicide bombers, crazed dictators, illegal immigrants to the West and so forth. Chinese, Japanese and Indian people in Britain are thus grossly abused when labelled as 'Asian' in the modern British sense.

In recent years, Americans have increasinly referred to people from the east of the Himalayas as East Asians; but this, too, is far from ideal since it implies that Indians are West Asians when, racially, most of them are not Asian but Caucasian.

It is time for the British press to adopt a more helpful terminology. It should acknowledge the world's three main racial groups -- Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid (recognized by the great social anthropologist Franz Boas a century ago) -- but perhaps add Indianoid if generic reference needs to be made to the peoples of the Indian subcontinent.

Otherwise, why not use the names of the countries from which people actually come? Why should we in Britain sow confusion about ethnicity and its behavioural links when we ourselves hope the rest of the world might manage to use with passable accuracy the terms British, English, Scots and Welsh (and perhaps also, in view of recent events, distinguish suicide bombers who have been rather casually awarded British *citizenship* from people who are truly British by *origin*)?

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NEOLIBERALISM REARS ITS HEAD IN SCOTLAND

I sent the following letter to The Scotsman, which had surprisingly committed itself to a quite neoliberal ‘manifesto’ for the May 1 election (of the Scottish ‘Parliament’ -- a supernumerary collection of second-raters orchestrating a Scottish whinge to have still more subsidy from England):

TO
The Editor
The Scotsman
Edinburgh EH8 8AS

FROM
Mr C. R. Brand, M. A. (Oxon.), Fellow of the Galton Institute
Edinburgh EH8 9PP
E-mail: crispian@chris-brand.co.uk
URL: http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk

28 April, 2003

Dear Sir,
Congratulations on your Holyrood Manifesto (28 April)! Your policies of cutting standard-rate income tax by 9%, downsizing the bureaucratic monstrosity of Scottish Enterprise, repealing the Land Reform Act (which has eroded property rights), letting funding follow NHS patients, repatriating our fishing waters, introducing a Scottish House of Lords and limiting the influence of the party machines are all conveniently on offer from the Scottish People’s Alliance. It is good to see the plans of the radical SPA (which wants binding citizen-initiated referenda) receiving attention after much media neglect during the otherwise dull 2003 election campaign. And your conversion to ending mixed-ability teaching suggests you may also -- just as commendably -- have been reading 'The g Factor' (withdrawn for political incorrectness in 1996 but available free at http://www.douance.org/qi/brandtgf.htm).
Yours sincerely, -- Chris Brand.

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Some history.

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DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY: about Freud, psychoanalysis etc

There are four broad ways of explaining how people differ psychologically.

(i) A behaviourist would try to reduce the superficial complexities of personal achievement, deviance and psychopathology to learned habits of association.

(ii) Humanistic (and phenomenological) psychologists prefer to invoke people's own conscious ideas (or 'perceptions', fancies and 'construct systems').

(iii) Conventional trait psychologists look to underlying ability-differences for explanations of surface differences in behaviour and preferences. [Such ability-differences will typically be envisaged as being underpinned by physical (brain-based and/or gene-based) differences.]

(iv) Appeal can be made to instincts-to fundamental 'drives', basic motivations, propensities and proclivities. Such appeals will often be linked to a modifying developmental account-whether of individual, or of the race or species. This account will spell out how patterns of behaviour that are easily-triggered or self-energizing come gradually to be re-directed or restricted -whether through biological evolution or childhood socialization. Psychoanalytic theory is of the fourth type-while stressing chiefly the modifying influence of childhood on the primal forces of love and hate. However, it also contains elements of humanistic and trait-psychological thinking. In particular, it proposes two personality components, the ego and the superego, that both interface with the world and play distinct enabling roles in harnessing the instinctive forces of the id.

In the 1920's, the 'instinct psychology' of William McDougall and others postulated a score of different human instincts-just as the early-nineteenth-century phrenologists had envisaged some three dozen brain-localized 'faculties'. In the 1930's, however, instinct psychology gave way in academic circles to what seemed the simpler, less nativistic, more economic and more investigable behaviourist explanations that were being offered of the response-repertoires and achievements of lower animals. (Animal learning in the experimental laboratory was to become, for a generation, psychology's main proving ground; and learning was to be studied largely by the manipulation of only the two drive-systems of hunger and thirst.)

As this move towards a tighter, experimental science of (animal) behaviour and learning occurred, psychoanalysts were left as the only psychologists who had much to say about those powerful, omnipresent human motivations that cannot be easily manipulated in the laboratory or even assessed by self-report. (Researchers of personality face not only ethical problems but also problems of the limits of self-knowledge and of willingness to reveal treasured hopes or embarrassing internal conflicts.) In particular, psychoanalysts were for many years alone in being willing to explain individual differences by reference to:

(A) sexual (hedonic, pleasure-expectant, stimulus-increasing) and aggressive (agonistic, conflict-expectant, stimulus-reducing) drives, modes or styles; and

(B) defences by which people learn to cope with (and shield themselves and others from recurrent awareness of) what are, at some level, our real feelings. (In particular, psychoanalysis allowed that we spare ourselves the more literal memories of:
(i) our limited success-rates-especially in the 'family romance' of childhood; and
(ii) the more inconvenient, unassimilable and bruising experiences that we have already suffered, and whose repetition we may still rather fear.)

By the 1970's it was clear that a major revival of comparative psychology had begun-now under the names of 'ethology', 'sociobiology' and 'evolutionary psychology'. Freudians were no longer alone in their concerns with 'drive' systems and the selective attention, environmental search, cue-sensitivity, appetitive behaviour, culminatory behaviour, tension discharge, re-direction of energy and occasional self-deception that may all be involved in real life.

Yet, by this time, having had the field to itself for a generation, psychoanalysis had a momentum all of its own. Hoping to come to better grips with psychosis and personality disorder, some psychoanalysts (following Melanie Klein) had, over the years, extended their concern with childish drives from the already debatable childhood 'sexuality' (of 'the family romance') back to the still more elusive drive-systems of 'aggression' (dating putatively from the earliest days of infant feeding with its occasional frustrations). Other psychoanalysts, by contrast (the ego psychologists), had moved to assert the importance of autonomous ego mechanisms rather than the surging (or even the repressed) forces of the id. (Unfortunately, ego psychologists were never very frank about the value of intelligence in achieving the ego's objectives.)

Thus neo-Freudians provided no welcome committee for hard-nosed psychological nativists as they sought to return to the fold of instinct doctrine; and modern cognitive psychologists would have to pursue their interests in mental structures without any general theory of motivation and emotion. Whether any reconciliation will be achieved between these great camps remains to be seen. Interestingly, both cognitivists and psychoanalysts can be tempted into phrenological speculation about the roles of the cerebral hemispheres.

More immediately, Badcock (e.g. 1994, PsychoDarwinism) has urged that many of the more central Freudian propositions make good evolutionary sense; and some reconciliation between psychoanalysis and trait psychology might be attempted. [The biggest problem for all such unifying possibilities is that of individual differences. Many interesting-sounding drives and defences may seem a good idea for a species, or even for one of the two sexes. - For example, perhaps 'bipedalism', 'concealed ovulation', 'non-nutritive sucking' or 'penis envy' can be shown to be biologically adaptive for the species in general or for women in particular. But can individual differences be at all functional-or can they be little but chance departures from basic adaptive patterns? To demonstrate that many human variations are viable when in combination with other environmental or personality features is the challenge. And whether to consider evolutionary or present-day 'viability' is the first awesome choice for the enthusiast.]

Essentially, psychoanalysis involves four main special ingredients or strands of speculation.

(1) DEPTH-MOTIVATION. Central to psychoanalysis is the idea that substantial, continuing, and unconscious mental work is necessary. This mental effort may maintain a 'repression' of unresolved motivations (especially of the primitive desires of childhood that elicited seemingly world-threatening parental displeasure) or a 'life-style' developed in the earliest years (especially for coping with sibling rivalry). Repression largely prevents forbidden, manifestly immature or otherwise unwelcome wishes from intruding unduly into consciousness in adult life; but such wishes may achieve a certain limited and disguised expression in dreams, slips of the tongue, social attitudes, art-work and so on.

(2) PERSONALITY STRUCTURE. Psychoanalysis involves notions of how the mind, and indeed the entire personality are composed-especially in terms of allegedly irrational and deeply unconscious processes. Freud came to recognize three chief conflicting homuncular entities. These were the id (the 'It'-housing the passions, especially love and hate), the ego (the 'I') and the superego (the 'Over-I'). (The British clinical psychologist, Donald Bannister-no admirer of the determinism and reductionism of Freudian theory-used to say that the Freudian saw the human mind (or person) as 'a darkened cellar in which a struggle goes on between a sex-crazed chimpanzee [the id] and a Victorian spinster [the superego], with a nervous Swiss bank clerk [the ego] serving as referee'.)

(3) PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES. Developmental hypotheses are offered by psychoanalysis as to:

(a) the typical life-courses of individuals (especially in the early years, through what are thought to be the 'oral', 'anal' and 'phallic' periods);

(b) the supremacy of attachments (first to the (breast-feeding) mother, then to faecal pleasures, and later, romantically, to the opposite-sexed parent);

(c) the imposition upon children's 'primary' (id) processes of socialization-of prescribed outlets for sex and aggression that progressively restrict these initially diffuse and inchoate urges to the usual adult genital and verbal forms; and

(d) the growth and differentiation of the ego and superego in response, as registers of reality's requirements-perhaps somewhat over-dramatically in the case of the superego.

(4) PSYCHOTHERAPY. Ideas are offered as to how people can become, first, aware of, and subsequently free of their own deep biological and environmental origins with the help of a psychoanalytically trained therapist. Therapy will involve a modern version of confession, the techniques of free association and dream recall, the analysis of 'the psychopathology of everyday life' (of one's slips of the tongue, etc.), and, in practice, the learning of psychoanalytic terminology by analysands.

[One way of linking Freudian concepts to today's psychometric dimensions of personality would be to trace affection to oral dependence, will to oral aggression, conscience to anal fixation, and energy/extraversion to modest victories in the Oedipus/Electra stakes. An alternative would be to nominate extraversion as deriving from sexual energy (and eros), lack of affection as reflecting hostility (and thanatos), will the manifestation of strong ego functions, and concscientiousness as indicating relatively strong superego; the combined force of basic instincts would manifest itself in general neuroticism/emotionality. ]

Freud's own special emphasis (until 1920) was on the importance of eros, the sexual/bonding instinct which motivates the search for erotic pleasure and erogenous stimulation (of the lips, anus, genitalia or other body zones such as perhaps the ear lobes and the base of the spine) and which leads occasionally and delightfully to temporary libidinal satiation or drive reduction. According to Freud, a person's core history of feeling and involvement with others would be a substantially inaccessible tale of childhood satisfactions and frustrations, together with distortions of the formal, conscious record of experience so as to produce a more agreeable (less anxiety-provoking) understanding of what had been going on.

The process of re-writing the conscious record has been memorably compared by Freud (and also by Margaret Donaldson, 1992, Human Minds) to the process of making successive improved drafts of an original piece of writing. Normally-as in writing or word-processing-people end up working with the latest re-draft of a document. (E.g., in adolescence, a boy's "I love (or 'fancy') Bill" might be altered to "I hate Bill" if homosexual impulses were the subject of an especially demanding socialization; or a girl's real dislike of her acquaintance, Sally, might be rendered more acceptably as a belief that she is hated by Sally. Such 'denial' and 'projection' are just two of the many 'defence mechanisms' that a person may use, more or less irrationally, according to psychoanalysts.) However, if a re-draft runs into its own problems-of undue complexity, or of newly discovered unsuitability, damage or loss-the writer may revert to working from the initial draft. This may happen unconsciously, in psychopathology; or more consciously, in the course of successful psychotherapy. As the ego [cf. the writer] tries to rewrite the demands of the id [the original story] to conform with the real world, it is assisted (in some ways, at least) by the splitting off from it of a superego [cf. quotes from other writers!]. The superego internalizes and makes especially immediate the demands of others (especially of the same-sex parent, the child's major rival in 'the family romance') for the curtailment of erotic excesses. Importantly, since the superego is an internalized image of a controlling agent, it is often more simple-minded and tyrannical than the real-life figure that it represents.

Lastly, Freud believed the Unconscious (in which realm most of the crucial struggles of id, ego and superego are supposed to occur) was largely inaccessible without professional help. Because of the ego's many 'defences', analysis could only expect to use the mind's by-products (rather as in refuse-sifting detective-work by a 'garbologist') to infer both a person's motivational imperatives and the partly protective forces controlling them and preventing them from intruding upon consciousness. [Thus arises the major problem in testing Freudian ideas. How can we decide whether some particular, surface behaviour (X-vigorous heterosexuality, say) indicates similar underlying proclivities (i.e. that X was 'part of the script' in the earliest drafts)? After all, surface behaviour could equally arise as an 'over-compensation' designed to disguise quite different underlying inclinations (Y -vigorous homosexuality)!]

After 1900, when one of Freud's patients had helped arrange a Chair for him in Vienna, Freud's views were widely discussed. By 1908, the main line of internal criticism from psychoanalytic sympathizers was already apparent. Freud was thought (first by Alfred Adler, and soon by Carl Jung), to have over-rated the role of sexual drive and the id-especially as opposed to aggressive (power-seeking and/or destructive) drive and the (intelligent, rational) ego. Non-psychoanalysts (first the Viennese satirist, Karl Kraus) also derided Freud for what seemed a simple-minded, rigid determinism-especially when Freudian 'psychohistories' were ventured for Moses and Leonardo. {One shudders to think what Kraus would have made of the rest of twentieth-century psychology-though the 'anti-psychiatrist', Thomas Szasz (e.g. The Myth of Mental Illness) provides something of a guide.}

By 1920, Freud was impressed by the frequency of hysteria in shell-shocked troops of the First World War. This was presumably not traceable to psychosexual conflicts (Freud eventually admitted). Freud now hypothesized a second major drive, a 'death wish', thanatos, that motivated people to concern themselves with and reduce (painful) stimulation-just as eros tended to involve what might today be called 'sensation-seeking'. In any case, it became widely agreed among non-psychoanalysts that the hysterias resulting from artillery bombardment ('post-traumatic stress disorders', as they would be called today) were indeed 'defences' against overwhelming stress that could often be obviated once patients were induced to re-live ('re-work') the original stressful event (in catharsis) and discover how to cope with the memory of it by conscious and rational means. This in turn gave a fillip to the idea that even 'stresses' first arising in adult life were sometimes handled by 'defence mechanisms'; and so there came about increased psychoanalytic involvement in medicine and psychiatry-even though the 'stresses' inducing the wartime hysterias had admittedly nothing to do with the repressed infantile sexuality that remained the cornerstone of Freudian theory.

Until his death in London in 1939 (after many years of jaw cancer, repeated operations, and final ransoming from Hitler by Princess Marie Bonaparte, an aunt of Prince Philip) Freud sought to increase understanding of the 'defence mechanisms' (against anxiety). These many (and none-too-carefully enumerated) hypothetical mechanisms (e.g. denial, projection, sublimation and displacement of one's wishes and feelings) were to prove an abidingly popular range of psychoanalytic concepts, even if not always used in their original sense of providing defences against the psychosexual wishes of infancy. [In particular, to project one's sexual and aggressive inclinations on to others would seem a quite sensible attributional bias: for our loves and hates are indeed not uncommonly reciprocated by others-since affection itself elicits affection while animosity elicits animosity. Perhaps for this reason, projection has sometimes been thought to occur sufficiently widely to enable it actually to be used as a means of personality testing-viz. in 'projective tests' which assume that testees will usually 'project themselves' into pictured characters about whom they are invited to make up stories.] However, despite the growing popularity of his ideas, Freud seems to have become relatively pessimistic about the capacity of psychoanalysis to alter either people's motives or the particular ways in which their motives had been channelled, repressed or defended against during childhood development; and, in line with what some of his followers themselves find an upsetting penchant for 'the medical model' of psychological illness, Freud actually welcomed the prospective arrival of psychotropic medications.

The failure of psychoanalytic therapy to do any better with mental patients than behaviour therapy or attendance at divine worship has been the biggest problem for psychoanalysis. (Like all therapists, analysts would maintain their treatments work 'with selected patients'-perhaps especially with bright young women whose parents or husbands can afford the bills; but psychoanalytic theory does not itself stipulate with which patients beneficial effects of therapy will more readily be found.)

A second big problem is the prediction that since young girls do not have castration anxiety (having been deprived of a penis already-by their mothers, they are supposed to believe), they will have less to fear from their same-sex parent and so will show weaker superego development. Sex differences for crime and delinquency would seem to provide outright falsification of this claim. (Though crime is perhaps more tempting to men. Young women wishing for more cash-in-hand can always change their sexual partner, marry, or prostitute themselves to make money on a scale that is seldom possible for men; and most older women have quite lucrative divorce options so long as their ex-husband remains detectably employed.)

However, unlike the rest of psychology today, psychoanalysis does at least offer a theory specifying important drives, personological components, developmental stages and psychodynamic processes; and its giving sexual assignation, sexual identity and sexual orientation a central place in psychological theorizing seems only realistic to many psychologists, as does its capacity to handle the major changes in rates of conspicuous hysteria and homosexuality that seem to have occurred over the past century (see Brand, 1993, Behav. Res. & Therapy).

By contrast with Freud himself, some 'neo-Freudians' have hoped to trace psychopathology back beyond even the Oedipus/Electra phase (of romantic attachment to the opposite-sexed parent at around age four-that Freud thought so crucial) to putative traumas associated with the handling of aggressive impulses in response to infant frustration at the breast. To greater acclaim, other neo-Freudians have played down the more simple (sexual) Freudian dogmas and stressed the continuing use of characteristic (yet analytically remediable) defence mechanisms by the ego in response to the main anxieties of adult life.

The followers of C. G. Jung differ again. They believe that unconscious mental life is relatively elaborately structured innately in ways that translate into symbol use; and, more prosaically, that there are four main dimensions of perceptuo-cognitive style that distinguish individuals' different ways of coping with reality: extraversion vs introversion; thinking vs feeling; judging vs perceiving; and sensing vs intuition (see Quotes III). Jungians tend to suppose that the unconscious mind and the conscious mind should ideally work complementarily to build up gradually, throughout adult life, a person's personal strengths at all the eight contrasted poles, and especially to allow development and expression of people's 'masculine' and 'feminine' aspects (animus and anima). [Just as the four Jungian dimensions of personality resemble, respectively, those of e, w, c and a, the Jungian idea that all personality variations require intelligent development and harnessing is perhaps not too far removed from conceptions of the need for g to complement n -- cf. Brand, 1984, Psychol. Survey 5]

Can the embarrassing taunts that psychoanalysis occasionally suffers (not unlike religions) at the hands of academic psychologists, historians and philosophers ever divert its followers from their faith? Psychoanalysis has certainly proved more robust than most forms of psychology (with the notable exceptions of psychometry and psychogenetics); and it has weathered some hard knocks- as when liberated women of 1970's New York began to reject its 'chauvinist' and 'homophobic' tenets and threatened to withdraw their trade from psychoanalytic couches.

Moreover, there may be a way forward for broadly psychoanalytic conceptions of the person in the 1990's if psychoanalysts can re-address the fundamentally biological nature of human personhood- avoiding the more conspicuous limitations of soulless cognitive psychology, traditional religious piety, unduly prosaic psychometry, and the reluctance of modern social psychologists to admit the existence of any form of 'human nature' whatsoever. In particular, finding such a way forward could be easier if psychoanalytic conceptions made more room for genuine individual differences: rather than try to find partly unresolved infantile complexes, repressed erotic attachments and primitive/irrational 'defence mechanisms' (etc.) in almost all of us-and most inquirers seek hints of submerged Freudian conflicts within themselves and their friends-it might be better to admit much bigger individual differences in drive strengths, abilities and coping strategies behind the phenomena with which (qua chronic psychopathology) psychoanalysis was originally hoped to deal.

Individual differences in emotionality are perhaps especially important here. Lower-emotionality (lower-neuroticism, higher-sensibility) people often seem to resolve problems and then genuinely forget them as they move through life. By contrast, higher-emotionality people seem to retain stronger feelings and memories from the past. Such material often involves conflicting and 'negative' matters. It may offer higher-n people a rich source of data to re-explore and use productively so long as its confusions and contradictions are not so great as to overburden information-processing capacity [cf. 'intelligence', or the ego plus superego].

The idea that some particular, identifiable individuals may be especially prone to use repression of their more disturbing thoughts has been studied empirically in recent years by Michael Eysenck -- the son of Hans Eysenck (the best-known critic of psychoanalysis from within the ranks of mainstream differential psychology). Michael Eysenck (e.g. 1992 in A.Gale & M.W.Eysenck, Handbook of Individual Differences) has tended to find that there are indeed some 'repressors'-seekers of social desirability who report higher levels of personal confidence and equanimity than seem likely in their cases (to judge by indicators of psychophysiological arousal).

Again, mainstream differential psychologists have been generally much concerned with levels of arousal, arousal preference, and arousability (and to a lesser extent with what might be deemed arousal-prevention and arousal-reduction); and this suggests that some reconciliation might be achieved between experimental approaches to personality and the broader-brush Freudian suggestions of two main human drives, eros and thanatos, that yield, respectively, increases and decreases in levels of stimulation and arousal (cf. R. L. Solomon, 1980, Amer.Psychologist 35).

Psychoanalysis has been popular (especially in the world of the humanities); it is capable of being firmly Darwinian as modern writers such as Christopher Badcock and David Buss point out); it has proved tirelessly capable of regeneration and entrenchment into welfare-state operations; and it may even prove reconcilable with 'London School' and 'Big 5/6' ideas. Yet there is one hurdle psychoanalysis has never looked likely to leap. Even in New York and Johannesburg, those citadels of psychoanalysis, the homuncular psychoanalytic 'components of personhood'-the id, the ego and the superego -have never come near to superseding the rich lay language of 'folk psychology' in which we easily talk of people as having 'hearts', 'minds', 'souls' and 'spirits'. Deeply embedded in our language, and having their own unique qualifiers and descriptive uses [you can't have a "tidy soul", a "well-stocked heart" or an "open spirit", etc.], these folk components of 'personhood' still provide, today, after almost a century of psychoanalysis, stiff competition for Freud's homunculi -- in everyday language, if not in academic psychology.

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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In Houston, Texas, Black educators were taking to the ideas of fast track learning and streaming advocated in THE g FACTOR. Excerpts:

Black readers in general have responded positively and in droves to the call for a black education movement along the lines of our historic civil rights movement. They have said they agree that this movement must demand rigorous academic standards and a high level of parental responsibility and community involvement to ensure black children's success.

In a comment typical of many I've received, a reader wrote, "We as black people must begin to create a culture of valuing education ... if we are to ever pull our children out of the river of underachievement in which they find themselves. I believe that this can be done, but it will require a new and different determination on the part of the black community, and every black parent in particular, before it will be achieved."

Another reader wrote, "I am just frustrated at our community's complacency towards education and the willingness of so many parents to allow their children to waste their young years on activities that do not help them become competitive in academia. ... I'm making the effort to convert as many [people] as I can. I think I successfully turned my husband around. He was wiling to buy his children-to-be their first car but would not fund their college education. Now THAT had to change."

But I've heard little from Houston's black leadership.

Of course, many people are doing interesting and important work to promote high standards in black education.

Helen M. Berger runs Houston Preparatory Academy's U-Prep model in which academically promising students from poor northeast neighborhoods are provided four weeks of intensive instruction in reading, writing and math. Afterward, a select few students who meet the high admission and academic standards of some of Houston's best private schools enter those schools with scholarships and the social and academic support of U-Prep to ensure their success.

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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