PAEDOHYSTERIA
The American press (Mobile Register) discovered a 14-year-old boy newly married to a 42-year old woman. The couple married in Alabama which allows marriage from 14, as do Kansas and Texas. (Some other states allow youthful marriages if a pregnancy is involved or if a judge personally agrees. In the Alabama case, the boy is educationally gifted and mature for his years; and the woman, a dental hygienist, took to acting young when left on her own with her own children (aged 14 and 9) after divorce. The pair had both suffered problems and bereavements in their own previous families.
--------------------------------------------
DOUBLE RAPIST
TheTimes (5 iv) reported: “A cinema worker was found guilty of trying to rape a 22-year-old woman. After the verdicts were delivered, the Leeds Crown Court jury was told that Martin Luther King, of Oakwood, Leeds, had already been convicted in London of raping a woman at gunpoint. Sentencing was postponed.” More here
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PSYCHOTICISM OF THE LEFT: RACE REALIST OUTSPEAKER MURDERED BY LEFTIST
After a year of press neglect of the motives of the murderer of Holland’s neoliberal Pym Fortuyn, VDare columnist Steve Sailer discovered that the murderer – far from being easily dismissed as an animal rights loon – was in fact a left-wing lawyer whose main objection was to Fortuyn’s anti-immigration views. At the same time, the more general vindictiveness of leftists went on display as Western crowds bayed for the prosecution of Messrs Bush and Blair even as Iraqi Shi-ites could be seen on TV welcoming Americanglish troops (and one had repeatedly risked his own life to enable 11 US troops to be snatched from an Iraqi hospital where Madman’s thugs had begun to assault them).
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SARS and PeeCee
As Chinese (and China-disguised) flu (which should be called Urbani’s Syndrome after its brave discoverer, now dead from the disease) loomed in early April, the West did not even begin to discuss closing its borders. Such containment can only work in the earliest phase of an infectious disease, but peecee considerations forbade discussion. The disease was likely to kill one in five of its victims – for there would clearly not be enough hospital respirators for all sufferers once the numbers affected began to mount. A particular anxiety was that there would be a mass exodus from southern China to relatives in Canada and the USA – immediately, infecting large communities because of high-density living and unhygienic habits of eating from the same dish.
{On 7 April, Australia took powers to isolate suspected victims and to seal its borders; but PeeCee reigned supreme in Downing Street and the White House.}
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
SEX AND THE 21st CENTURY: Forgotten sex
The traditional Western arrangement had been essentially that sex, marriage, family and well-being were virtually co-terminous for all but the landed gentry and victorious soldiers in time of war. Sex and its joys and prospects were only available to ordinary males in marriage -- except perhaps with girls who were likely to be pregnant by someone else already (usually the girl's boss or the boss's son). Was there a cost to breaking the links which Christianity had tried to maintain?
Remarkably, perhaps, the immediate costs to individuals were slight -- even if there were fears of how people living alone (without the loyal spouse of a lifetime) would cope with alcohol-fuelled old age. Men, at least, seemed to accept the deal whereby women earned more, the state spent more of people's earnings, and men themselves had more sexual freedom. With 'protected sex' or 'dry [extra-orifice] sex' a matter of course by 1985 (because of the risk of AIDS) women, too, embarked on hedonistic sex -- increasingly with well-equipped young male prostitutes who, in Vienna, advertised their services in magazines and visited ladies in discrete vans equipped inside with cocktail cabinets and boudoirs. The only serious discontents occurred when men found themselves paying, under divorce settlements, for ex-wives who had plainly set up with another man -- for both governments and women preferred to continue the arrangements of Christian marriage that required men to provide a meal ticket for life.
Otherwise, the only general problem was a curious one. Women reported their male partners to be 'uncommunicative' and even pre-occupied with soccer. Some women even developed an interest in soccer, hoping to discover the secret of that game's allure. Increasingly, however, women voiced suspicions that men might be 'insensitive' if not downright unfeeling as when -- largely banned from men-only evenings at a pub -- they drank himself into a stupor in front of the TV. Once upon a time, a man who escaped to his garden shed had been generously interpreted as working on his family's vegetables or on his children's toys. It was less easy to justify a late-20th-century male slumped on the couch surrounded by beer cans.
Accusations of that men were callous, barbaric and 'not in touch with their emotions' arose chiefly from a misunderstanding of male sexuality -- one that men themselves invariably declined to correct. Simply, men seldom communicate their sexual jealousy of their women. A man's propensity is to welcome all tokens that his woman's pregnancy will have been his own unaided work. Biologically, the assurance that he needs is given by the single-minded devotion of his female, her warmth in his company, her surrendering orgasmicity, and the simple absence of other males from her daily scene. For a male to voice jealousy once he has teamed up with a sexual playmate is to exhibit a lack of confidence; and women do not generally admire signs of weakness in men. Thus the man who expresses anxiety can easily find his last fate worse than his first. Not only will his wife be resentful -- as classically; but if she is genuinely loyal she may give up her job -- a disaster for the family. The man experiences old-as-evolution jealousy; but in modern conditions he reckons it dangerously uncool to be 'in touch' with such a feeling.
Faced with his working wife, just returned from a late-running office party, asking what was on his mind, the only correct response was therefore -- with his gaze never wavering from the TV's Match of the Day -- 'Just this **** referee, dear.' Inarticulate grumping about his wife's career-girl outings was only a new expression of the problem that is inherent in the male condition of not being the baby-bearer. No male company is welcome for a nubile wife apart from that of conspicuous eunuchs. In former times, the husband might even have silently resented his wife spending too long with the vicar.
Thanks to DNA testing, any man who doubted the paternity of his woman's children was actually able to set his mind at rest if he would just take a swab to the children's inside cheeks. By the 1990's, such testing was privately available -- even advertised on airport billboards in the USA. However, the state would not allow the male to slough off a faithless wife and her children at all cheaply. (Among the British, the law made no acknowledgment of the biology of parenting: legally, a mother was the person who provided a foetus with a womb, not the woman who gave a child 50% of its genes.) Thus the best solution for men was to make no effort to marry in the first place. Since few but the lowest-IQ girls now fell pregnant by accident, a historic male preference was thus realized. By the 1990's in the West, sex -- especially for the male -- began before age 16 and culminated in the shackles of marriage only at an average age of 28. Men were achieving an historic objective, even if marriage without their having patriarchal authority was a bruising and costly business as and when it did finally occur.
Nor did women themselves have to toil under any overall deterrrent costs of the new arrangements. Once, a jealous and uncommunicative husband might have seemed a strain. But life can have compensating pleasures -- including the modern state's willingness to command and attach male income to a mother. Moreover, sexual liberation had brought to light aspects of female motivation that had eluded Freud himself -- who, in the 1930's, had famously said he could not answer the question 'What does a woman really want?'
First, it had turned out that women did not in general want children -- at least, not in advance of actually being delivered of a baby. Confirming what feminists had long intuited, women were generally content with contraception and abortion. Just like the many who had lost their fiancés in the 1914-18 Great War, childless women could settle well to a life of good works. It is single men who turn to alcohol, fast cars, faster sex and suicide -- not single women. Thus, in late-twentieth-century 'relationships', it was the women who would take more contraceptive effort than men. It was men who declined to undergo the simple (and often reversible) vasectomies that could have freed both marital partners from the burdens of unwanted children.
So contented were women with their careers (often in state employment as doctors, teachers, nurses, social workers, secretaries and school dinner ladies) that European birth-rates dropped well below replacement rates even in largely Catholic countries which frowned on contraception. By the 1990's, completed family sizes even in Italy and Spain had dropped to 1.2 children. (Birth rates stayed a little higher in Britain and the USA because of generous welfare allowances for single-parent mothers which discouraged abortion and because of the failure of duller girls to master contraceptive technology. The English-speaking peoples had never talked much about sex, for their elite had historically solved its major problems by keeping wives in the countryside and by sending children off to single-sex boarding schools from an early age. Thus they had a problem providing explicit sex education for teenagers -- especially since teenagers weren't supposed to be having sex till 16 and the apparent victors of 1945 understandably retained their historic respect for law.)
This negative aspect of female motivation, the lack of drive to have children, had a positive counterpart. The second discovery about women was that, though most of them did not feel any lack of children in advance of having them, they were far more devoted to such children as they acquired them than Freud or most other psychological theorists had ever realized. By 1930, the Harvard psychology professor, William McDougall -- a philosopher-scientist who kept the flag flying for 'instincts' while American behaviourists were coming to assert the paramountcy of 'conditioning' -- was announcing the answer. Laboratory experiments elsewhere in the USA had shown the remarkable degree of electric shock that female rats would endure to regain access to their young: such deprived mother rats would put up with more pain than any other experimental animals. Freud had thought eros and thanatos [the death wish] major drives; but maternos was plainly stronger -- once the female mammal was equipped with her progeny and associated hormonal changes.
Perhaps because most psychologists were men (or spinsters, like the leading female analysts -- Freud's daughter, Anna, and Karen Horney), the strength of maternal attachment remained unappreciated in psychology textbooks. Certainly behaviourists, with their faith in the importance of training, were ill-at-ease with deep and powerful drives of any kind -- including even sex and aggression. By the end of the century, however, the pattern was clear. Far from immature girls breeding promiscuously with the help of state welfare benefits -- a scenario which excited the tabloid newspapers and some conservatives -- a teenager who became pregnant and who had left abortion too late (often out of fear of parental or priestly wrath) would take her baby off to the flat provided by her local council, and that would often -- despite fears of her louche personality -- be the end of the matter. Just as filmstars and career women were content with the one 'designer baby' which they allowed themselves in their thirties, so 17-year-old mothers of out-of-wedlock children, or 25-year-old victims of early divorce, would settle down for life with their one child. It is only when a woman has been hormonally triggered into maternal attachment that she may steal a child; and adoptive homes are typically perfectly loving and satisfactory -- though the adoptive mother has often gone in for adoption after the experience of a lost pregnancy that has awakened her interest in cuddly infants. The fabled 'maternal instinct' that Christianity wisely placed at the centre of its religious system, is not for a woman to have children. Rather, it is for her to love the children she has. It is a supremely powerful drive that can be experienced and indeed enjoyed without a husband and without any more than a single child.
Evolutionarily, this makes sense. The woman who has a child can have few more babies without risk to her health and ability to provide resources for the first child. She is well advised to concentrate principally on nurturing the child she already has. By contrast, a man can be cavalier about the loss of children claimed as his. He has invested little in them by the time of birth, and he has just shown that he can easily have more.
Infants, for their part, reciprocate and encourage maternal attachment in a way that goes far beyond their need for food and immediate shelter. This discovery, too, belongs to the late twentieth century -- though Freud anticipated it when holding that an infant's desire for its mother and her breast was essentially sexual, and the married female analyst, Melanie Klein, captured in her theorizing the full intensity of the mother-child relationship (especially of the infant's voracity at the breast). What became clear was that, via hormonal mechanisms, an infant's non-nutritive sucking has a suppressant effect on maternal fertility. The breast-loving infant will typically manage to delay the arrival of a new sibling by some eighteen months -- and further delay could be achieved in conditions of one-room living by the child becoming distressed at its parents preparing to make love (what Freudians called the child's horror at 'the primal scene').
Fertility-suppressant suckling may not seem of great importance -- except perhaps to aristocrats eager to have sons. However, in third world conditions, such as prevailed for much of humanity until the twentieth century, the strongest predictor of an infant's dying before age five is that its mother has produced a subsequent sibling. Closely spaced births would have mattered little to an infant born into a high class home of eighteenth-century England. There, a wet-nurse would have been hired to provide the child with its birthright -- allowing the mother to become pregnant again while she was still young. In more normal human conditions, however, the arrival of siblings is a disaster for a child; so children are evolutionarily selected for the high level of sucking and allied 'loving' (clinging) that will prevent this outcome. It is small wonder the mother-infant bond is so strong and so rewarding to both parties. The gentry and aristocrats of previous eras realized this bond had to be weakened so as to achieve reasonable numbers of children from a selected wife. Today, however, our secure scientific knowledge of the phenomenon has a wider and politically devastating corollary.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
The traditional Western arrangement had been essentially that sex, marriage, family and well-being were virtually co-terminous for all but the landed gentry and victorious soldiers in time of war. Sex and its joys and prospects were only available to ordinary males in marriage -- except perhaps with girls who were likely to be pregnant by someone else already (usually the girl's boss or the boss's son). Was there a cost to breaking the links which Christianity had tried to maintain?
Remarkably, perhaps, the immediate costs to individuals were slight -- even if there were fears of how people living alone (without the loyal spouse of a lifetime) would cope with alcohol-fuelled old age. Men, at least, seemed to accept the deal whereby women earned more, the state spent more of people's earnings, and men themselves had more sexual freedom. With 'protected sex' or 'dry [extra-orifice] sex' a matter of course by 1985 (because of the risk of AIDS) women, too, embarked on hedonistic sex -- increasingly with well-equipped young male prostitutes who, in Vienna, advertised their services in magazines and visited ladies in discrete vans equipped inside with cocktail cabinets and boudoirs. The only serious discontents occurred when men found themselves paying, under divorce settlements, for ex-wives who had plainly set up with another man -- for both governments and women preferred to continue the arrangements of Christian marriage that required men to provide a meal ticket for life.
Otherwise, the only general problem was a curious one. Women reported their male partners to be 'uncommunicative' and even pre-occupied with soccer. Some women even developed an interest in soccer, hoping to discover the secret of that game's allure. Increasingly, however, women voiced suspicions that men might be 'insensitive' if not downright unfeeling as when -- largely banned from men-only evenings at a pub -- they drank himself into a stupor in front of the TV. Once upon a time, a man who escaped to his garden shed had been generously interpreted as working on his family's vegetables or on his children's toys. It was less easy to justify a late-20th-century male slumped on the couch surrounded by beer cans.
Accusations of that men were callous, barbaric and 'not in touch with their emotions' arose chiefly from a misunderstanding of male sexuality -- one that men themselves invariably declined to correct. Simply, men seldom communicate their sexual jealousy of their women. A man's propensity is to welcome all tokens that his woman's pregnancy will have been his own unaided work. Biologically, the assurance that he needs is given by the single-minded devotion of his female, her warmth in his company, her surrendering orgasmicity, and the simple absence of other males from her daily scene. For a male to voice jealousy once he has teamed up with a sexual playmate is to exhibit a lack of confidence; and women do not generally admire signs of weakness in men. Thus the man who expresses anxiety can easily find his last fate worse than his first. Not only will his wife be resentful -- as classically; but if she is genuinely loyal she may give up her job -- a disaster for the family. The man experiences old-as-evolution jealousy; but in modern conditions he reckons it dangerously uncool to be 'in touch' with such a feeling.
Faced with his working wife, just returned from a late-running office party, asking what was on his mind, the only correct response was therefore -- with his gaze never wavering from the TV's Match of the Day -- 'Just this **** referee, dear.' Inarticulate grumping about his wife's career-girl outings was only a new expression of the problem that is inherent in the male condition of not being the baby-bearer. No male company is welcome for a nubile wife apart from that of conspicuous eunuchs. In former times, the husband might even have silently resented his wife spending too long with the vicar.
Thanks to DNA testing, any man who doubted the paternity of his woman's children was actually able to set his mind at rest if he would just take a swab to the children's inside cheeks. By the 1990's, such testing was privately available -- even advertised on airport billboards in the USA. However, the state would not allow the male to slough off a faithless wife and her children at all cheaply. (Among the British, the law made no acknowledgment of the biology of parenting: legally, a mother was the person who provided a foetus with a womb, not the woman who gave a child 50% of its genes.) Thus the best solution for men was to make no effort to marry in the first place. Since few but the lowest-IQ girls now fell pregnant by accident, a historic male preference was thus realized. By the 1990's in the West, sex -- especially for the male -- began before age 16 and culminated in the shackles of marriage only at an average age of 28. Men were achieving an historic objective, even if marriage without their having patriarchal authority was a bruising and costly business as and when it did finally occur.
Nor did women themselves have to toil under any overall deterrrent costs of the new arrangements. Once, a jealous and uncommunicative husband might have seemed a strain. But life can have compensating pleasures -- including the modern state's willingness to command and attach male income to a mother. Moreover, sexual liberation had brought to light aspects of female motivation that had eluded Freud himself -- who, in the 1930's, had famously said he could not answer the question 'What does a woman really want?'
First, it had turned out that women did not in general want children -- at least, not in advance of actually being delivered of a baby. Confirming what feminists had long intuited, women were generally content with contraception and abortion. Just like the many who had lost their fiancés in the 1914-18 Great War, childless women could settle well to a life of good works. It is single men who turn to alcohol, fast cars, faster sex and suicide -- not single women. Thus, in late-twentieth-century 'relationships', it was the women who would take more contraceptive effort than men. It was men who declined to undergo the simple (and often reversible) vasectomies that could have freed both marital partners from the burdens of unwanted children.
So contented were women with their careers (often in state employment as doctors, teachers, nurses, social workers, secretaries and school dinner ladies) that European birth-rates dropped well below replacement rates even in largely Catholic countries which frowned on contraception. By the 1990's, completed family sizes even in Italy and Spain had dropped to 1.2 children. (Birth rates stayed a little higher in Britain and the USA because of generous welfare allowances for single-parent mothers which discouraged abortion and because of the failure of duller girls to master contraceptive technology. The English-speaking peoples had never talked much about sex, for their elite had historically solved its major problems by keeping wives in the countryside and by sending children off to single-sex boarding schools from an early age. Thus they had a problem providing explicit sex education for teenagers -- especially since teenagers weren't supposed to be having sex till 16 and the apparent victors of 1945 understandably retained their historic respect for law.)
This negative aspect of female motivation, the lack of drive to have children, had a positive counterpart. The second discovery about women was that, though most of them did not feel any lack of children in advance of having them, they were far more devoted to such children as they acquired them than Freud or most other psychological theorists had ever realized. By 1930, the Harvard psychology professor, William McDougall -- a philosopher-scientist who kept the flag flying for 'instincts' while American behaviourists were coming to assert the paramountcy of 'conditioning' -- was announcing the answer. Laboratory experiments elsewhere in the USA had shown the remarkable degree of electric shock that female rats would endure to regain access to their young: such deprived mother rats would put up with more pain than any other experimental animals. Freud had thought eros and thanatos [the death wish] major drives; but maternos was plainly stronger -- once the female mammal was equipped with her progeny and associated hormonal changes.
Perhaps because most psychologists were men (or spinsters, like the leading female analysts -- Freud's daughter, Anna, and Karen Horney), the strength of maternal attachment remained unappreciated in psychology textbooks. Certainly behaviourists, with their faith in the importance of training, were ill-at-ease with deep and powerful drives of any kind -- including even sex and aggression. By the end of the century, however, the pattern was clear. Far from immature girls breeding promiscuously with the help of state welfare benefits -- a scenario which excited the tabloid newspapers and some conservatives -- a teenager who became pregnant and who had left abortion too late (often out of fear of parental or priestly wrath) would take her baby off to the flat provided by her local council, and that would often -- despite fears of her louche personality -- be the end of the matter. Just as filmstars and career women were content with the one 'designer baby' which they allowed themselves in their thirties, so 17-year-old mothers of out-of-wedlock children, or 25-year-old victims of early divorce, would settle down for life with their one child. It is only when a woman has been hormonally triggered into maternal attachment that she may steal a child; and adoptive homes are typically perfectly loving and satisfactory -- though the adoptive mother has often gone in for adoption after the experience of a lost pregnancy that has awakened her interest in cuddly infants. The fabled 'maternal instinct' that Christianity wisely placed at the centre of its religious system, is not for a woman to have children. Rather, it is for her to love the children she has. It is a supremely powerful drive that can be experienced and indeed enjoyed without a husband and without any more than a single child.
Evolutionarily, this makes sense. The woman who has a child can have few more babies without risk to her health and ability to provide resources for the first child. She is well advised to concentrate principally on nurturing the child she already has. By contrast, a man can be cavalier about the loss of children claimed as his. He has invested little in them by the time of birth, and he has just shown that he can easily have more.
Infants, for their part, reciprocate and encourage maternal attachment in a way that goes far beyond their need for food and immediate shelter. This discovery, too, belongs to the late twentieth century -- though Freud anticipated it when holding that an infant's desire for its mother and her breast was essentially sexual, and the married female analyst, Melanie Klein, captured in her theorizing the full intensity of the mother-child relationship (especially of the infant's voracity at the breast). What became clear was that, via hormonal mechanisms, an infant's non-nutritive sucking has a suppressant effect on maternal fertility. The breast-loving infant will typically manage to delay the arrival of a new sibling by some eighteen months -- and further delay could be achieved in conditions of one-room living by the child becoming distressed at its parents preparing to make love (what Freudians called the child's horror at 'the primal scene').
Fertility-suppressant suckling may not seem of great importance -- except perhaps to aristocrats eager to have sons. However, in third world conditions, such as prevailed for much of humanity until the twentieth century, the strongest predictor of an infant's dying before age five is that its mother has produced a subsequent sibling. Closely spaced births would have mattered little to an infant born into a high class home of eighteenth-century England. There, a wet-nurse would have been hired to provide the child with its birthright -- allowing the mother to become pregnant again while she was still young. In more normal human conditions, however, the arrival of siblings is a disaster for a child; so children are evolutionarily selected for the high level of sucking and allied 'loving' (clinging) that will prevent this outcome. It is small wonder the mother-infant bond is so strong and so rewarding to both parties. The gentry and aristocrats of previous eras realized this bond had to be weakened so as to achieve reasonable numbers of children from a selected wife. Today, however, our secure scientific knowledge of the phenomenon has a wider and politically devastating corollary.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Monday, April 07, 2003
SEX AND THE 21st CENTURY: Sex and revolution
What was on offer from Russia's 1917 Revolution? Selling out to Prussia and Austria? Nationalizing the public services? Not likely! Sex was what it was about. In the 1920's, nudist gatherings were a popular participator-sport for Russians. No town or hamlet was without its vodka-assisted frolics in the woods -- though better known for its frozen winters, Russia also gets hot in summer. In the Kremlin, Lenin kept his stunning French-born mistress, the chestnut-haired Ineva, as well as his wife, Krupskaya. In Kharkov of 1932, in the middle of the second great Ukraine famine, the young communist, Arthur Koestler, recorded the shops as being empty of everything but postage stamps, fly paper and the latest fashion accessories, contraceptives.
How so sex-obsessed? It is simple. Outside still-rural Russia, communism had little appeal for the sophisticated urban dwellers of Berlin, London, Paris and Vienna. Marx had thus been mistaken. It was not factory workers who wanted to be freed from the shackles of capitalism. Instead, revolution was a Wow in the West's largely mediaeval outback. So it would remain through the twentieth century. China, Cuba, Angola, Chile, Nicaragua: in such places, revolution was more fun than traditional society and its staple of organized religion. Of largely rural countries having literate capitals, only India proved immune to communism -- because of the emergence within its own traditional caste system of an English-speaking middle class, because the Hindu sexual code was already relaxed (especially for men), and because, by the 1950's, Russia was content with India as an ally against Red China so did little to foment unrest. After the Soviet Empire fell, it was its outlying regions (including Slavic brothers in Serbia) who clung most tenaciously to communism's liberation from the strict sexual codes of Orthodoxy and Islam. Under Soviet communism (especially after the carnage of 1914 to 1921), there was a young woman for every man; and pregnancy need no longer result in a child.
Until 1917, Russian Orthodoxy had remained, in Europe, the most repressive form of Christianity on offer. After the Revolution, divorce and abortion were a liberation for Russians -- a lusty lot at the most depressed of times. President Brezhnev's daughter, Galina, exemplified the pace in her involvements with circus strongmen, trapeze artists and lion tamers which led on (with the help of her bisexual lover, the Bolshoi dancer, Boris the Gipsy) to regular orgies in Moscow -- according to her 1998 obituary in London's Guardian newspaper. By the 1980's, the average Russian woman had undergone seven abortions -- a woman's 'right to choose' having been allowed even during most of Joseph Stalin's 30-year reign of terror. The Russian international reputation and self-image may be of people whose chief art form is massive inebriation; but a 1996 survey by the magazine Cosmopolitan of its readers in 29 countries found Moscow's women made love daily: they were twice as 'sexy' as world averages -- both in frequency of sexual congress and in the number of coital positions which they used. By 1999, Moscow was a notoriously delightful sex capital where high-powered graduettes in philosophy and medicine could be rented for extended periods -- or just for one decorously dirty night. Even after Secretary General Gorbachev's exposure to the world that communism had been a flop, a third of Russians continued to vote communist. Marxist-Leninism provided an affordable and, through those Russian winters, a well-heated room for the man between women. – By contrast, seduction of a new woman remained a problem for a man in the West. There, restrictions on abortions till the 1970's made women cautious about affairs with men having only a hotel room to offer, and couples often had to stay together for the sake of the mortgage.
Despite occasional hang-ups, the twentieth-century story outside Russia was similar. Sexual change occurred quickly while neoliberal economic change was glacial. Politicians and economists argued about the role of the state in the economy; but Western governments of all political colours steadily took around 35% of Gross National Product from 1914 onwards. Whether Britain's Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey, was 'squeezing the rich till the pips squeak' or Mrs Thatcher was denying the existence of 'society', the British Government spent 40% of its people's incomes for them. (Tax rates were lower in non-Western countries where men still provided 100% financial support for their wives.) Yet people had vastly increased freedom in sex and marriage. By 1928, the Church of England no longer required 'obedience' in a wife. After 1968 -- by which time the young had grown tired of standard-issue left-wing politics, as instantiated in the trade unions -- 'trial marriage' and 'living in sin' became commonplace in Europe. In the USA of 1998, despite the competing attractions of the Internet, strip shows grossed more than all other live entertainments together (including rock concerts and Broadway theatre) in what was by then the West's most religious country (rivalling Northern Ireland in the quantity and quality of new church buildings per caput); and in London of 1999 the West's liberation of Kosovo quickly produced hundreds of ethnic Albanian prostitutes for Soho. Around the world, sex tourism and migration broke all former taboos. Planeloads of Japanese businessmen would arrive in Manila to barter in packed theatres for girls for the night; Bangkok, Colombo and Havana each became as much a legend for 'paedophilia' as had San Francisco for sodomy; Asian girls streamed to the West to find the tall (and reasonably prosperous) men of their dreams. Victorian ladies would have swooned clean away had they contemplated the depictions of hunky musclemen and spread-eagled lovelies that would be purchasable from any station bookshop by the end of the twentieth century; and Victorian clubmen would have been [as is now said] gobsmacked to learn that a 1990's annual dinner at a Scottish mansion for 350 directors and top sales staff of a top UK company would involve comedians discussing 'whether size mattered' for the bedroom performance of the dinner-jacketed businessmen with their sometimes tattooed wives. For the millennial year 2000, BBC television was to begin showing South American 'dirty dancing' in which girls drape deliciously back over the lowered arm of the swain, leaving little of their crotchless panties and even pudenda to the imagination. Even the problems of sexual disease that prophets of doom predicted were largely overcome by Western state-funded medicine -- though vigorous, unlubricated, 'hot & dry' intercourse took a toll in undernourished Africa. The age of a typical British girl's first intercourse dropped from 22 to 15; thirteen-year-old mothers ceased to attract newspaper headlines and one eleven-year-old produced her baby on her parents' bathroom floor to the surprise of all parties. The twentieth century was about sex. By the 1990's, virtually all young adult Catholics in Spain, Italy and Ireland defied the special Roman doctrine, against contraception, on which successive Popes had insisted. The Christian Church had lost to Nietzsche and Darwin in the nineteenth century; and it lost to Marie Stopes and Alfred Kinsey in the twentieth. Yet worse was to follow for attempts to hold traditional moral lines about the sacramental relationship of marriage.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Sunday, April 06, 2003
IGNORANCE ABOUT AUTISM
A review of:
Peter HOBSON, 2002, The Cradle of Thought. London : Macmillan.
pp. xviii + 296. UKP 20-00.
The lofty purpose of this book is to suggest how humans develop thought, self-awareness and language – whereas other primates do not; and its idea is that thought arises in mother-baby interaction as the infant realizes, after some eighteen months of life, that the world is populated with human agents who have feelings, perspectives and thus their own thoughts and beliefs. On the practical side, the book's implication is that such understanding of child development will prove therapeutic for infants who are currently deprived of proper handling and thus end up autistic. Unfortunately, the book is a flop, both in failing to realize its two main objectives and in lacking any kind of entertainment value.
The author, Peter Hobson, is actually an expert on autism – the sad disorder first identified fifty-five years ago in which child victims fail to make a range of social contacts (e. g. eye contact), regard people primarily as physical objects, suffer a wide range of upsetting symptomatology (insisting on endless presumably comforting rituals – e.g. switching lights on and off) and have disastrous scores on IQ-type tests. With all the time available to the well-funded developmental psychologists who have for thirty years made infancy their playground, Hobson lovingly recounts his many experiments detailing the social handicaps of autistic children. For example, autists can see no similarities between different faces showing the same emotion (e.g. happiness, sadness or surprise) whereas they perform almost normally in identifying merely physical similarities (in nose size, eye colour etc.). Some of Hobson's studies show ingenuity: in blacked-out rooms, human adults with some twenty lights attached to their extremities engage in such actions as 'sobbing' and 'climbing' – and, again, autistic children especially fail to recognize the emotional enactments.
The problem with such affecting work is simple. Though the researches provide occupation for developmental psychologists and win them students who believe they are on the path to understanding babies (psychology is now a 75% female subject), they do not in fact address the issue of cause and effect in a scientific manner. Such explorations would be a useful *prelude* to a science that went on to show that mothers must do such things as make eye contact with babies and look where the baby points. Presumably, normal human mothers would not be thus attentive to babies if, in evolution, they had found one can get just as good a result by providing the soulless conditions of an orphanage in Communist Romania of the 1980's. Yet the fact is that we already know that autism is largely genetic – though perhaps on the increase because of overuse of antibiotics (allowing infant candida [thrush] to flourish). It is thus that mothers of autists have lately been spared the burdens of guilt which psychiatrists typically heaped upon them around 1960. No doubt some level of intersubjective gurgling is important for an infant to master intersubjectivity – just as it will not learn English if it never hears English. But it is probably as Noam Chomsky observed for language: a low and corrupted level of exposure to subjectiburbling stimulation will be quite sufficient for most infants to extract what is necessary.
Just why Hobson should want to worry his readers back into primitive environmentalist anxieties is a mystery. He once studied with the autism expert (and top British psychiatrist), Sir Michael Rutter; and he acknowledges the likelihood of genetic influences on autism, IQ and much else. His contrasts between the social abilities of autistic and normal children wisely control for IQ so as to highlight the special autistic deficits. Hobson is no raving social anthropologist who would entirely dismiss biological realities. Yet somehow, apparently quite recently, for reasons obscure, Hobson decided that genetics were not enough and that his work gave him something else to say. One might think he had learned something from studying the mothers of autists but, astonishingly, Hobson's book includes no such study. Instead, mothers suffering 'personality disorders' and depression are wheeled in to exemplify just how naughty mothers can be (even while videoed) – hectoring their babies or ignoring what their infants try to say. This is very wise of Hobson, for considered opinion long ago became that the mothers of actual autists had *no* need for shame. (Far from their being 'refrigerator mothers', it was eventually appreciated that it was their bookishness and high IQ's that had led to them realizing something was wrong with their babies long before the experts spotted anything.) Hobson finishes his book with some nice demonstrations that young non-human primates function a bit like autistic children – lacking key ingredients of humanity such as gesturing shared with particular partners. But Hobson has no novel overall case about causation. He is baffled, but just doesn't care to think about biological factors.
Sometimes it is as if Hobson prefers research grants to reading. He has certainly not read America's top autism expert, Bernie Rimland (who has stood up to the social environmentalists for a generation on behalf of autists' parents); he has not read the American educator John T. Bruer, who in 1999 admitted that the early social environments supplied for children by their parents are *unimportant*in causing lasting differences in personality or intellect -- except when the parents are cruel (The Myth of the First Three Years, New York:Free Press); and Hobson's repetitious meanderings about why humans possess thought and other primates don't would have been usefully sharpened by reading Elaine Morgan – the student of Sir Alister Hardy's who believed that man once spent a long time escaping predation by standing in seas, swamps and rivers, thus elevating the human female's breasts and requiring adults to develop ways of referring to things unseen below water level. Certainly, Hobson should carefully consider his former teacher's latest pronouncement (M. Rutter, Times Higher, 29 March, 2002): "The independent importance of genetic effects has the strongest factual basis. Evidence concerning both schizophrenia and autism, for example, indicates that the genetic risks for these disorders are not dependent on the children encountering environmental hazards." Genes beat environment – and developmental psychologists.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Saturday, April 05, 2003
THE WAR
Top British libertarian Sean Gabb came out as an anti-Crusader and intemperate Blair-basher. (It was becoming fashionable to doubt the Prime Minister’s sanity, following the lead of top gay columnist Matthew Parris in the Times.). He wrote:
I replied to Sean Gabb and other ‘radical conservatives’ as follows:
Sean Gabb should not be so disappointed. Rev. Blair is now solving the problem of how to provide a new conservatism. Like Emperor Constantine (with Christianity), Blair sees how to use the new religion (this time PeeCee) in the imperial cause. Why, he even now has 25% of young Black men in jail (Observer, 30 March) and is socking it to the 'firefighters'.
The big question is whether socialists and nationalists will be able to make dynamic compromises and link up with each other to provide a credible opposition – presumably favouring welfarism rather than warfarism, but agreeing to halt all asylumswindling and ease out coloured criminals and fanatics and their relatives and helpers (rather than fight them all round the Middle East while pretending we are not embarked on a Crusade). (An interesting question is which side – liberal imperialists or socio-nationalists -- will be the first to propose a Humanitarian Army for Africa. – Such an arrangement would empty our jails and oblige all new asylumswindling arrivals to fight for Britain for a few years before they earn any right of residence.)
Don't hold your breath. I give Rev Blair a long time in office (assuming Britain can perform gloriously and fairly painlessly against the Axes of Evils and Weasels). We have far more firepower than Hitler at Stalingrad, and Baghdad has nice wide streets that won't get blocked as we blast our way through.
OK, there's not much of a role for Sean Gabb's libertarianism in this new political future. But then libertarianism never managed much in the past except helping conservatives and capitalists protect their backsides. Certainly libertarians have been entirely incapable of halting the rise of censorious PeeCee on the left. They have not even managed to control feminism which is now replacing men in the teaching professions via its hideous technique of paedohysteria. When my book about intelligence was withdrawn and my academic job came under threat, 'libertarians' did precisely nothing.
What libertarians will now have to decide is whether they prefer liberal imperialism to a (presumably modernized and anglicized) national socialism which at least gives people the real countries that they prefer (a not unimportant freedom -- pardon the Majorism). It will not be an easy choice -- any more than for the rest of us. Both the new alternatives will seem pretty reasonable from time to time, as in the good old days of Whigs and Tories. I suspect the future will lie with which side can do the best job of re-inventing the family; but libertarians have never been much interested in how to re-introduce ideas of community. Perhaps they will come round as they consider that the greatest freedom that the world can convey to a child is to grow up respected as an individual, secured by loved ones, and offered genuine choices with which intelligent, personality-respecting advice is available. Yet, as Ferdinand Mount once explained (The Subversive Family), no politicians like the genetic family much -- that natural and powerful force, as our German ancestors were the first to realize (by contrast, the Romans never realized the importance of genes).
Personally, I guess there is more chance of getting people like President Bush and Rev. Blair to recognize and install the family as a key social decision-making unit than of getting much action from the likes of Clinton, Brown, Kennedy, Cook, Benn, Galloway and many of the other lefties. Indeed, as the liberal-imperialist bandwagon sweeps on -- hopefully with the Saudis losing their oil next -- it might be persuaded to drop what will increasingly be its hypocritical reverence for PeeCee and allow people to achieve a sense (and reality) of community via new types of extended (though still genetically based) families (see my website).
Of course, these are momentous times and I would like to say that I fully respect the contribution that people like Gabb and Cook make in our democracy. Who knows when they will be needed? Never say never!
Best to all, -- Chris Brand.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Top British libertarian Sean Gabb came out as an anti-Crusader and intemperate Blair-basher. (It was becoming fashionable to doubt the Prime Minister’s sanity, following the lead of top gay columnist Matthew Parris in the Times.). He wrote:
Patriotism and the War: Two Weeks On :
Two weeks on, and this war is not going as planned. The plan was for a combination of heavy but precise bombing, to "shock and awe" the Iraqi people into quiescence, combined with a rapid march on Baghdad. Saddam Hussein would fall, and the Allies be welcomed into Baghdad as liberators. This has not happened. Instead, the Iraqis are fighting back, and the conquest has slowed while vast reinforcements can be brought out from America. According to Lieutenant General William Wallace, the most senior American ground commander in Iraq, "the enemy we're fighting is not the enemy we war-gamed against" So far as the capture of Baghdad is concerned, the choice may be now between various kinds of long and bloody siege. I hope the newspaper reports are wrong, and that the main fighting will soon be over. But if not, we appear to be committed to a bigger war than was promised.
Together with many other patriots, I was against going to war. We could see no evidence of an Iraqi threat to this country. No weapons of mass destruction had been found. More importantly, no means of delivery against the United Kingdom had been explained. Though repeatedly made, the claims of a link with Islamic terrorism did not stand up to scrutiny. Nor did the misgovernment of Iraq by Saddam Hussein give any reason for us to interfere. Bearing in mind the proceedings - or their lack - in the United Nations, there was not even the usual excuse of upholding "international law". It was plain to anyone not drunk on the advertising claims of the armaments industry that the war would be longer than expected; and it was plain that any eventual victory would be attended by a legacy of hatred nearly as disastrous as actual defeat. There was talk of incidental benefits for us from going to war beside the Americans - but these were not shown to be otherwise unachievable, or worth the probable costs.
But while it was wrong to go to war, we are now at war; and the question to be asked is what we ought to do next. If we cannot call back and cancel what has been done this past fortnight, we can ask how to minimise its costs It is necessary to keep ridiculing the cases for war given to us, and to keep tally of the lies and atrocities that have attended the Allied war effort. But it is also necessary to ask how we can most effectively - or least damagingly - get our country out of this American crusade….
I replied to Sean Gabb and other ‘radical conservatives’ as follows:
Sean Gabb should not be so disappointed. Rev. Blair is now solving the problem of how to provide a new conservatism. Like Emperor Constantine (with Christianity), Blair sees how to use the new religion (this time PeeCee) in the imperial cause. Why, he even now has 25% of young Black men in jail (Observer, 30 March) and is socking it to the 'firefighters'.
The big question is whether socialists and nationalists will be able to make dynamic compromises and link up with each other to provide a credible opposition – presumably favouring welfarism rather than warfarism, but agreeing to halt all asylumswindling and ease out coloured criminals and fanatics and their relatives and helpers (rather than fight them all round the Middle East while pretending we are not embarked on a Crusade). (An interesting question is which side – liberal imperialists or socio-nationalists -- will be the first to propose a Humanitarian Army for Africa. – Such an arrangement would empty our jails and oblige all new asylumswindling arrivals to fight for Britain for a few years before they earn any right of residence.)
Don't hold your breath. I give Rev Blair a long time in office (assuming Britain can perform gloriously and fairly painlessly against the Axes of Evils and Weasels). We have far more firepower than Hitler at Stalingrad, and Baghdad has nice wide streets that won't get blocked as we blast our way through.
OK, there's not much of a role for Sean Gabb's libertarianism in this new political future. But then libertarianism never managed much in the past except helping conservatives and capitalists protect their backsides. Certainly libertarians have been entirely incapable of halting the rise of censorious PeeCee on the left. They have not even managed to control feminism which is now replacing men in the teaching professions via its hideous technique of paedohysteria. When my book about intelligence was withdrawn and my academic job came under threat, 'libertarians' did precisely nothing.
What libertarians will now have to decide is whether they prefer liberal imperialism to a (presumably modernized and anglicized) national socialism which at least gives people the real countries that they prefer (a not unimportant freedom -- pardon the Majorism). It will not be an easy choice -- any more than for the rest of us. Both the new alternatives will seem pretty reasonable from time to time, as in the good old days of Whigs and Tories. I suspect the future will lie with which side can do the best job of re-inventing the family; but libertarians have never been much interested in how to re-introduce ideas of community. Perhaps they will come round as they consider that the greatest freedom that the world can convey to a child is to grow up respected as an individual, secured by loved ones, and offered genuine choices with which intelligent, personality-respecting advice is available. Yet, as Ferdinand Mount once explained (The Subversive Family), no politicians like the genetic family much -- that natural and powerful force, as our German ancestors were the first to realize (by contrast, the Romans never realized the importance of genes).
Personally, I guess there is more chance of getting people like President Bush and Rev. Blair to recognize and install the family as a key social decision-making unit than of getting much action from the likes of Clinton, Brown, Kennedy, Cook, Benn, Galloway and many of the other lefties. Indeed, as the liberal-imperialist bandwagon sweeps on -- hopefully with the Saudis losing their oil next -- it might be persuaded to drop what will increasingly be its hypocritical reverence for PeeCee and allow people to achieve a sense (and reality) of community via new types of extended (though still genetically based) families (see my website).
Of course, these are momentous times and I would like to say that I fully respect the contribution that people like Gabb and Cook make in our democracy. Who knows when they will be needed? Never say never!
Best to all, -- Chris Brand.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Friday, April 04, 2003
What went wrong with conservatism?
(A review of:
José Ortega y Gasset, 1932, The Revolt of the Masses. New York : W. W. Norton. Reissued as a Norton paperback 1993. (The Spanish original, Le Rebelion de las Masas was published in 1930.)
Conservative philosophizing had a pretty lean time in the twentieth century. After centuries in which philosophers had offered support for the Church (Aquinas), for monarchs (Hobbes), for capitalism (Adam Smith) and the Napoleonic post-revolutionary state (Hegel), the twentieth century was dominated by sceptical liberals (Russell), outright egalitarian theorizing (Rawls) and shamelessly relativistic existentialism (Sartre) and 'constructivism' (Derrida). Though, in America, Camille Paglia put up a quirky lesbian fight against feminism, only the equally quirky foxhunter, England's Roger Scruton, offered a defence of conservative causes across the board. Subdued by the decline in religious faith and by the conversion of much of the Church to welfarism, homosexualism and feminazism, none could articulate a coherent conservatism identifying central elements of Western achievements and culture that must be defended. In Britain, the Conservative Party largely accepted that it was 'the stupid party', and even 'the nasty party', having no ideas to speak of except those laissez-faire principles it stole from nineteenth-century Liberals. Conservatives were electable only when there were conspicuous threats of taxation, inflation and strikes posed by socialists.
Conservatives might thus be wise to be grateful for the thoughtful and historically informed work of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). A fully modern thinker who introduced the writers Proust and Joyce to Catholic Spain, Ortega at the same time bridled against both the tired Spanish aristocracy and the vulgar masses which, after 1918, seemed all too likely to complete the work of pre-1914 European 'diplomats' in polishing off European civilization. Ortega unashamedly urged the masses to accept "the direction of the superior minorities" – while doubting their capacity to do so since "they are from birth deficient in the faculty of giving attention to what is outside themselves." Unlike the cowards who pass for conservatives these days, he deplored those who "despise intelligence and avoid paying it any tribute." Eschewing today's piety about 'social disadvantage, Ortega held it "false to say that in life 'circumstances decide.'" "On the contrary," he continued, "circumstances are the dilemma constantly renewed, in the presence of which we have to make our decision; what actually decides is our character. ….If the atmosphere did not press on me, I should feel my body as something vague, flabby, unsubstantial. So in the 'aristocratic' heir {with his charmed life}, his whole individuality grows vague, for lack of use and vital effort."
Surprisingly, perhaps, Ortega was at pains to distance his philosophy from Fascism as well as Syndicalism (i.e. socialism). Both these doctrines manifested "the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so….The average man finds himself with 'ideas' in his head, but he lacks the faculty of ideation." "Under Fascism," he wrote, "there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the "reason of unreason." Here I see the most palpable manifestation of the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so." With disgust equal to percipience, Ortega noted that "the 'new thing' in Europe is 'to have done with discussion', and detestation is expressed for all forms of intercommunion which imply acceptance of objective standards, ranging from conversation to Parliament, and taking in science." Instead, said Ortega, "the political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavour towards common life is liberal democracy. …Both Bolshevism and Fascism are two false dawns….they are mere primitivism." Ortega was way ahead of his times in his anti-statism, believing: "This is the greatest danger that today threatens civilisation: State intervention – the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State…" The time might soon come, he feared (correctly) when "The mass says to itself, 'L'état, c'est moi' which is a complete mistake." "Can we help feeling," he asked, "that under the rule of the masses the State will endeavour to crush the independence of the individual and the group, and thus definitely spoil the harvest of the future?"
Many conservative readers of today will admittedly be less impressed by Ortega's insistence on the importance of creating a "United States of Europe" that would take a stand against the vulgarity and mass tyranny which he feared. Though "in a way, the idea and sentiment of nationality have been [Europe's] most characteristic invention", Europe of 1930 was "obliged to exceed herself" or die like other civilisations unable to adopt substitutes for their traditional ideas of the state." Despite wars and rumours of wars, "the souls of French and English and Spanish….possess the same psychological architecture; and, above all, they are gradually becoming similar in content." Ortega even estimated that, for the typical European, "four-fifths of his spiritual wealth is the common property of Europe." Looking out from Spain of 1930, Ortega saw in a wider "union of Europe" only a benign protection from the forces that would soon – after he helped bring down the Spanish monarchy in 1931 – rip his country apart. He wanted conservatives to oppose the "decadence" of the times and "enable Europe to be really, literally Europe" not because of the natural racial unity of White people but because Communism would otherwise fill the void in the European heart. Far from thinking that effective states depended on their citizens having a common race, language, religion or 'natural', defensible territory, Ortega's belief was that a people must be embarked on a collaborative enterprise without end – for a state is "a work of imagination" and "a plan of existence", and "a nation is never formed." "Life is a task," he often stressed, presaging existentialism in playing down any notion that a coherent and viable individual or group will have an essence. Ortega especially feared that if the herculean Soviet Five Year Plan succeeded, Europe would be attracted by this "new and flaming constellation." "If Europe, in the meantime, persists in the ignoble vegetative existence of these last years, its muscles flabby for want of exercise, without any plan of a new life, how will it be able to resist the contaminating influence of such an astounding enterprise? It is simply a misunderstanding of the European to expect that he can hear unmoved that call to new action when he has no standard of a cause as great to unfurl in opposition."
As things turned out, it would be Europe's Fascists who would first unfurl their flags and, eventually with the help of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, subdue continental Europe even if they did not manage to inspire it. Ortega himself fled from the abominations of the Spanish civil war – first to France, then on to a successful teaching career in Argentina (for he refused Franco's offer to be gloriously re-installed in Madrid). In 1930, Ortega could not foresee that the eventual European Union that would arise would be an organization concerned far less with glorious ideals, high culture and great debates than with pork barrel politics and political correctness – even ostracizing the one of its members which, in 2000, voted to stop what was by then the steady invasion of Western Europe organized by a billion-dollar industry bringing 'asylum seekers' from as far away as south-east China. Though more versed in European history than some, Ortega could not see that it is rarely some high purpose that forges a nation but rather the low and messy task of repelling boarders – as England, for example, was forged in the sixteenth-century by the heat from mighty Spain which already had continental Europe by the throat.
Yet it is not such mistakes that should be held against a philosopher, let alone a thinker professing liberalism, democracy, elitism and realism. Rather, the problem with Ortega is precisely the one which conservatives went on failing to solve for the rest of the twentieth century. The surprise is that Ortega came so near to saying what Europe needed to do after the horrors of 1914-18 yet did not pursue his own analysis of Europe's "decadence" to its natural conclusion. For by "decadence" Ortega was not referring to any falling away from traditional Christian sexual mores. At one point The Revolt of the Masses touches on the importance of primitive energies, saying "the reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality, in what there is in man of cosmic energy, not identical with, but related to, the energy which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine." Indeed, Ortega positively admired the spirit of the Russian Revolution thanks to which (though the details were perhaps unknown to him) the restrictions of the Orthodox Church were overthrown and people were free to make love, abort, divorce and re-marry. By the 1920's, even nudism was a popular sport in Russia as people celebrated the one great gain that the Revolution was to make for them. Reporting from virtually empty shops in the Ukraine of 1930, the young Arthur Koestler noted that the one item still readily available under Communism was the male contraceptive sheath.
No, the problem that faced Europe after Darwin, and after religion, was what to do about sex and the family. Eventually – no thanks to conservatives – a degree of sexual liberation was pushed through in the 1960's. Yet this was not sufficient to allow people to choose the kinds of marriages they wished to have: 'one size fits all' lifelong monogamy remained the only legal option (even though the West's gods in Hollywood could ring the changes on this by prenuptial contracts) and further liberation looked impossible after 1980 because the sexual revolution had proved pretty disastrous for the low-IQ and their increasing numbers of fatherless progeny. By the end of the twentieth century, Ortega would have been even more shocked than he was in 1930 by the lack of forward thrust in Europe, dramatically instantiated in the awesomely small numbers of White children being born to intelligent parents. By the new millennium, conservatives would have achieved their selected mission of the previous fifty years to establish economic competition and low taxes as the key features of modern economies. Yet they would have proved unable to defend and extol the great Renaissance discoveries of romantic love and the female orgasm and to say that a culture which had thus built so practically on the New Testament value of love was one that now deserved a high degree of serious traditionalism in its defence. Specially surprising was the case of Britain, the first country where the idea of love had once spread far outside courtly bounds – as seen in Shakespeare's plays (however ironically sometimes). Though British adolescents were frankly at it like bunnies, society declined to steer their loves into any kind of marriage; and girls' pregnancies were typically matters of shame since no responsible man could ever have been the father. It fell to Japan to become the first country to award prizes (of £3,000) for childbirth (though Hungary provided eugenic tax breaks for mothers producing three or more children, thus wisely encouraging women to start breeding early rather than pursue careers that would risk leaving them childless).
Instead of being as realistic about eros as they are about thanatos, conservatives in the West have opted to be parties of frumpish women and 'family values' drawn from the wilder shores of religious mania. Instead of being known to delight in Donatello's 'David' and Canova's 'The Three Graces', conservatives have preferred to associate themselves even with dismal churches that were increasingly pursuing socialist and feminist agendas. While the twentieth century saw a magnificent eruption of love songs, oral sex, increasingly beautiful and wasp-waisted women, and fashions to die for, American conservatives positively raced to imprison women who declined to continue with unwanted pregnancies. While twelve-year-olds experimented with sex (usually most responsibly when IQ was adequate), conservatives insisted on trying to control under-age sexuality by such crude methods as withdrawing free contraception, banning sex education and consigning even the most harmless paedophiles to long jail sentences. Ortega was not perhaps the right man to break the dreary association between conservatism and prohibitionistic prudery – for he was small, finely strung and intensely private. Yet it is strange that he could not see the need for a range of entirely new marital and family contracts and sex practices to harness awakened Western sensuality and love of beauty and provide the backbone of a seriously anti-statist Europe. Given his intelligence and idealism, Ortega's defence can only be that later conservatives have done no better.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Thursday, April 03, 2003
Alfred Adler's individual psychology
Alfred Adler (1870-1937), the first heretic of psychoanalysis, barely scraped through childhood. The second of six children of a Viennese grain merchant, he suffered from rickets and spasms of the glottis. He almost died on several occasions from pneumonia and street accidents. In the cot alongside him when he was three, his nearest younger brother did actually die of diphtheria. Undaunted, however, by his diminutive stature (5' 2") or by his maths' teacher's pessimistic forecasts, Adler succeeded in medical school, in ophthalmology, in family life and eventually -- despite Freud's preferring to advance the established Gentile psychiatrist, Carl Jung -- in popularising a form of psychoanalysis. True to his own history, Adler would see competition between peers for resources as much more important than incestuous infantile sexuality.
Today, some of Adler's proposals are admittedly a little creaky. Adler tended to maintain that 'lifestyle' crystallizes by one's first birthday. He held intelligence testing to be "unreliable" (unlike Moffitt, Caspi, Harkness & Silva, 1993); and genetic inheritance of intelligence (or of anything else psychological) was a "superstition". Adler feared 'labelling' effects by which he believed he himself had almost been held back. Homosexuality involved a rift with the opposite-sex parent. Educational streaming was unhelpful. Smaller classes would improve educational standards. And full employment would reduce the crime problem until teachers trained in Adlerian theory solved it in perpetuity.
More alarming to likely readers of his books will be several deviations from Adler's general utopian idealism and political correctness. Adler favours free society's notorious 'division of labour' and the provision of relevant specialist education: he is even content to educate girls differently from boys, in view of girls' forthcoming life-tasks. Monogamy-plus-children is the only marital arrangement worth considering, and wicked old European psychiatrists were wrong to recommend that their patients take lovers. Pre-marital intercourse is discouraged. And 'pampering' is ceaselessly denounced by Adler as yielding later 'whingeing' and 'whining' "neurotics, criminals, drunkards and perverts."
Nevertheless, there are three main propositions of Adler's that are, with qualification, especially consonant with modern understandings and researches.
(1) Individuality. Twin and adoption studies of the 1980's showed people are indeed 'radically individual', as Adler maintained. Only for general intelligence do biological relatives other than identical twins much resemble each other; and unrelated adoptees who grow up together show virtually no psychological similarities at all by adulthood. 50% of eminent people (U.S.Presidents, British Prime Ministers, first-rank world-class philosophers, eminences of English literature, and top British businessmen) turn out to have experienced major horrors in childhood such as serious medical conditions and parental death and bankruptcy, so compensation is as likely as capitulation providing intelligence is adequate. However, to rule out the imposed environment and to admit only a limited role for inheritance on personality is not to rule out genes. Indeed, genes -- in particular, 'gene packages' and the multiplier effects between different genes that cannot be simply passed on to children because genes segregate independently -- now come into their own as a way of explaining otherwise paradoxical human diversity (Lykken, McGue, Tellegen & Bouchard Jr, 1992).
(2) The unconscious. Adler's view of the unconscious was non-mysterious and non-dynamic. The unconscious-to-conscious relation is as "photo-to-negative": by just one lie to oneself, the unconscious can realize the master plan arrived at by consciousness. ('I have been rejected'; 'I am really superior'; or 'I have an excuse'.) Once such simple re-drafts of the story (or 'document') of one's life occur (cf. Margaret Donaldson, 1992), the 'lifestyle' derived from the 'guiding fiction' takes over whether one is awake or asleep. In dreams, the Adlerian unconscious can sometimes be caught engaged in the very same problem-solving work as goes on in daily life, yet without the constraints of reality. This view of dreams as a continuation of daytime speculations, anxieties and re-organising of accounts is more plausible than Freud's view that dreams provide disguised fulfilment of forbidden wishes.
(3) Competition and co-operation. At least by 1918, when he added the concept of 'social interest' (altruism) to his first personality process of 'personal interest' (egoism), Adler was arguably on the right track.
(i) Despite having lost both Adler and Jung over 'the doctrine of sexuality', Freud himself, by 1922, came to the view that eros was not in fact enough -- even when id was considered in harness with superego. Belatedly, room had to be made for thanatos, the omnipresent death-wish that would help explain masochism, the horrors and hysterias of war, the mind's 'repetition compulsion' to dwell on painful stimulation and memories, and perhaps the aggressive elimination of pain and competitors.
(ii) When Adler broke with Freud, his conception of 'personal interest' (or superiority- striving) was along the lines of Nietzsche's 'will-to-power' and he viewed it somewhat negatively: 'neurotic' compensations for perceived inferiority were held to yield anger, boasting, melancholia, agoraphobia, whining, migraine, prejudice, perversions, frigidity and suicide. Later, however, superiority-striving itself was admitted by Adler to be 'normal' and, indeed, "the cause of all improvements in the human condition (e.g. of scientific progress)".
(iii) Just as Freud held that the id and the superego were not opposed, but complementary, so Adler's writing, properly considered, allows the more sensible forms of competition and cooperation -- or of egoism and altruism -- to flourish together. H.L.Ansbacher (1985) summarizes Adler's final position: "....developed social interest becomes a general attitude and proficiency, and conflicts as little with personal interest as other attitudes or proficiencies do. It is not a matter of altruism pitted against egoism."
Was Adler right? Well, in making personal interest and social interest not opposed to, but independent of each other, he can certainly be said to have anticipated the relations obtaining between today's 'Big' personality dimensions of 'Independence' (will, disagreeableness) and 'Tender- mindedness' (affection, and g-free openness) (Deary & Matthews, 1993; Brand, Egan & Deary, 1993). Just like extraversion and conscientiousness, these two 'egoistic' and 'altruistic' factorial dimensions seem largely uncorrelated in testees of good intelligence even if they sometimes fuse into a single general dimension, of will versus affection (rather like Osgood's Potency dimension or crude 'masculinity vs femininity'), in simpler testees answering undetailed questions. Busy setting up child guidance clinics in Austria, and then with extricating most of his family to the U.S.A. as Hitler's shadow lengthened, Adler was in no great position to back his hunches with systematic evidence. Admirers of the great behaviourist J.B.Watson 's antipathy to 'infantile sexuality', pampering and inherited abilities will generously acknowledge Adler's own development of similar unevidenced theoretical aversions. However, Adler's more lasting contribution to psychology will prove to have been in insisting on radical individuality, on developmental stories that merit careful testing, and on addressing aspects of human personality that Freud gloomily packaged as thanatos and then left in an eerie limbo. Adler granted others the possibility of what he might without immodesty have observed in himself: will, achievement-striving, a strong sense of responsibility, assertiveness, self-help and 'personal interest' alongside soul, sympathy, tender-mindedness, idealism and 'social interest'. If they can grasp the importance of genes and the general intelligence factor, Adlerians might still help face down the crudely determinist -- mainly environmentalist -- psychologies of the past.
REFERENCES:
ANSBACHER, H.L. (1985). The significance of Alfred Adler for the concept of narcissism. American Journal of Psychiatry 142, 2, 203 - 206.
BRAND, C.R., EGAN, V.G. & DEARY, I.J. (1993). 'Personality and general intelligence.' In G.L.Van Heck, P.Bonaiuto, I.J.Deary & W. Nowack (eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe 4, 203-228. Tilburg University Press.
DEARY, I.J. & MATTHEWS, G. (1993). 'Personality traits are alive and well.' The Psychologist 6, 299-311.
DONALDSON, Margaret (1992). Human Minds. London : Allen Lane.
LYKKEN, D.T., McGUE, M., TELLEGEN, A.T., & BOUCHARD, T.J.(Jr) (1992). Emergenesis: traits that do not run in families. American Psychologist 47, 1565 - 1577.
MOFFITT, T.E., CASPI, A., HARKNESS, A.R. & SILVA, P.A. (1993). The natural history of change in intellectual performance. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 34, 4, 455 - 506.
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Wednesday, April 02, 2003
THE BLACK- WHITE IQ GAP
I published another review, ‘Steam-age sociologizing fails to deliver’ (reviewing Christopher JENCKS & Meredith PHILLIPS (Editors), 1998, The Black-White Test Score Gap) in Heredity 90, Number 3, 204-205. The review challenged the latest environmentalist scholarship from Harvard and concluded:
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MULTICULTURALISM
Britain’s model-multicultural city of Leicester has just had two of its Muslims jailed for eleven years for their services to international terrorism. The two men had organized credit card fraud allowing the funding of bomb-making in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Holland.
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In Iraq, the military announced it would be dressing suicide bombers in plain clothes, thus derogating from the Geneva Convention and allowing British and American troops to fire on suspicious civilians as well as uniformed loons.
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
I published another review, ‘Steam-age sociologizing fails to deliver’ (reviewing Christopher JENCKS & Meredith PHILLIPS (Editors), 1998, The Black-White Test Score Gap) in Heredity 90, Number 3, 204-205. The review challenged the latest environmentalist scholarship from Harvard and concluded:
This book can be commended for trying to maintain a moderate and academic tone. Jencks' own chapter on test bias is quite a model – and largely exonerates the tests, though concluding rather vainly that features other than intelligence should also have been measured. The authors even mention Arthur Jensen's name five times – though they have not bothered to read Richard Lynn, Phil Rushton, Glayde Whitney or myself. Nevertheless, their 500 pages of scholasticism will not fool any serious reader. The truth is that these authors have nothing serious which they can demonstrate. Let Jencks and Phillips speak for themselves: "We recognize that few readers will find our sketchy agenda for reducing the black-white test score gap entirely persuasive."
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MULTICULTURALISM
Britain’s model-multicultural city of Leicester has just had two of its Muslims jailed for eleven years for their services to international terrorism. The two men had organized credit card fraud allowing the funding of bomb-making in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Holland.
-------------------------------------
In Iraq, the military announced it would be dressing suicide bombers in plain clothes, thus derogating from the Geneva Convention and allowing British and American troops to fire on suspicious civilians as well as uniformed loons.
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
EVEN WITHOUT "RACIAL PROFILING" .....
Under the cover of the McPherson Report, the police having agreed to publicly beat their breasts about their institutional racism, there was a welcome surge in imprisonment of Black "youf". By November 2002, there were 11,700 Black people in UK jails, compared to 7,600 in June 1997. By 2002, one Black male in four of ages 21-26 was imprisoned - a similar rate to that which obtained in the USA. Reporting this news, the Observer (30 iii, p. 20, 'One in 100 black adults now in jail') naturally blamed police for concentrating arrests on street crime rather than international business fraud; but the newspaper admitted 16% drops in muggings in areas targeted by police. Excerpts:
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COMMUNIST ORIGINS OF PC
Political Correctness (PeeCee) insists that there is no meaningful behavioural or ability difference between men and women; that no meaningful distinction can be made between people on the grounds of race or cultural difference; that all conscious human behaviour is culturally determined; that homosexuality is as normal a state as heterosexuality; that the physically and mentally handicapped are not handicapped but "differently abled"; and that any important genetic differences between people must certainly not be mentioned.
PeeCee actually dates back to the Soviet Union of the 1920s (politicheskaya pravil'nost in Russian), and was the Communist extension of political control to education, psychiatry, ethics, and behaviour. PeeCee was then, as now, intended to boost ethnic minorities against the dominant Russian majority; but historian G. A. Hosking records that "the system actually exacerbated ethnic animosity instead of healing" and was replaced by demands for integration in 1932 (The Russian Problem, 2002). Also, I mention Chinese use of the term under Mao in my essay in the first isssue of Occidental Quarterly:
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Under the cover of the McPherson Report, the police having agreed to publicly beat their breasts about their institutional racism, there was a welcome surge in imprisonment of Black "youf". By November 2002, there were 11,700 Black people in UK jails, compared to 7,600 in June 1997. By 2002, one Black male in four of ages 21-26 was imprisoned - a similar rate to that which obtained in the USA. Reporting this news, the Observer (30 iii, p. 20, 'One in 100 black adults now in jail') naturally blamed police for concentrating arrests on street crime rather than international business fraud; but the newspaper admitted 16% drops in muggings in areas targeted by police. Excerpts:
One in every 100 black British adults is now in prison, according to the latest Home Office figures. A recent crackdown on guns, drugs and street crime has led to an explosion in the number of prisoners from an Afro-Caribbean background, who now account for one in six of all inmates. The figures have sparked fears of an American-style penal system, where black men are 10 times more likely to go to prison than whites and one in 20 over the age of 18 is in jail. The number of black prisoners in Britain's jails has risen 54% from 7,585 to 11,710 since Labour came to power.
The figures are likely to reopen the debate about violence and crime in black street culture. Prison reform organisations last night warned the police and the courts not to target young black men in the battle against street crime. At 16% of all those in jail, the number of black prisoners is hugely disproportionate to the general population, where African and Caribbean people make up just 2% of the total. ....
Last year's rise coincides with a street crime initiative launched in March by Home Secretary David Blunkett, which focused on the 10 police areas that accounted for more than 80% of street crime. The Government claimed the initiative led to a 16% drop in offences in the target areas - but it also led to a 10% rise in the number of people remanded in custody.
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COMMUNIST ORIGINS OF PC
Political Correctness (PeeCee) insists that there is no meaningful behavioural or ability difference between men and women; that no meaningful distinction can be made between people on the grounds of race or cultural difference; that all conscious human behaviour is culturally determined; that homosexuality is as normal a state as heterosexuality; that the physically and mentally handicapped are not handicapped but "differently abled"; and that any important genetic differences between people must certainly not be mentioned.
PeeCee actually dates back to the Soviet Union of the 1920s (politicheskaya pravil'nost in Russian), and was the Communist extension of political control to education, psychiatry, ethics, and behaviour. PeeCee was then, as now, intended to boost ethnic minorities against the dominant Russian majority; but historian G. A. Hosking records that "the system actually exacerbated ethnic animosity instead of healing" and was replaced by demands for integration in 1932 (The Russian Problem, 2002). Also, I mention Chinese use of the term under Mao in my essay in the first isssue of Occidental Quarterly:
Under the brutal reign of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese Communist imposed one of the first codes of "Political Correctness" (PC) prior to the Great Leap Forward and long before the Cultural Revolution. The Communist Party faithful were to avoid mentioning inconvenient truths about China's devastated economy, not to mention by the 1950s its millions of martyrs to ideology
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Monday, March 31, 2003
THE POLITICS OF PSYCHOLOGISTS AND ALLIED CO-WORKERS
In 1967, Britain's witty clinical psychologist, Donald Bannister (an enthusiast for George Kelly's quasi-phenomenological Personal Construct Theory), suggested that psychology was in fact a branch of politics. This was a prescient suggestion, and one that was being articulated for psychiatry by 'anti-psychiatrists' Ronnie Laing and Thomas Szasz.
At the time, there was admittedly almost audible resistance to Bannister's proposal. Scientific psychologists in those days were still prepared to assert the objective nature of their researches and ambitions; and to maintain that any notable coincidence between their conclusions (if any) and their socio-political outlooks reflected chiefly the influence of the former on the latter. However, those were the days of innocence-preceding the victimization in the 1970's of Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck for their alleged racism, elitism and eugenicism (or at least for unwelcome pessimism about psychotherapy and Head Start programmes).
As the academic martyrdom of Jensen and Eysenck proceeded, many 'experimental psychologists' (as they were then called) learned to keep their heads down, to seek their funding from medical and computer-science sources, and to draw a veil over their personal recognition of the importance of intellectual difference as a prime causal variable in human affairs. Soon 'cognitive' psychologists would come to accept 'discourse analysis' as a legitimate pastime for psychology students -- not a high price to pay once truthful realism about the human condition had been abandoned.
In fact, psychologists have often had agendas that were pretty plainly influenced by ideological considerations. Like most Victorian intellectuals (including Marx and Engels), Francis Galton had decidedly politically incorrect views about women, Jews and Negroes. Though he sought equality of opportunity for the sexes in education, he easily came to believe that his observations (in his South Kensington laboratory) had demonstrated the intellectual inferiority of women.
The Frankfurt School and their many 'critical theory' descendants among social psychologists were concerned to explain what they took to be the surprising decision against Communism by German voters in the early 1930's -- a decision that they first held to require a 'depth' psychodynamic account involving undue deference to authority, and which they later found to require analysis in terms of 'social' (no longer individual) psychopathology.
The foremost behaviourist, B.F.Skinner, was an early 'Green': he liked the idea of psychologists exercising authority in a brave new world that would turn people off nuclear weapons, cigarettes, gas-guzzling and salted peanuts. The main difference in the past was that psychologists once felt the need to prove their points empirically: e.g. to prove, using adequate methodologies, that lack of mother love was bad for personality, that being brought up without professional psychological help was bad for mental health, that nurseries made children more sociable, that comprehensive schools made children happier, less snobbish and more sensible about the opposite sex, and that unemployment had nothing to do with having a low IQ.
Today, by contrast, many professional psychologists would freely acknowledge the dominating influence of political attitudes in deciding what kind of psychological work is done. The idea that twin- and adoption-studies can resolve disputes about human nature (and its modifiability) is rarely encountered outside differential psychology and the world of medicine. Political beliefs are readily agreed by correspondents of the British Psychological Society (itself an agent of 'non-sexist language' and of the form of racial discrimination known as 'affirmative action') to decide the outlooks of humanistic and 'radical' psychologists and, less properly, of their opponents.
Moreover, broadly political influences decide what psychological research achieves public funding. After the worlds of education and social science in Britain were abandoned by most politicians as unreformably egalitarian, no personological research was funded into sex differences in logical reasoning, into Britain's relatively low rate of post-War IQ-type gain, into the influence of intelligence on intergenerational social mobility, or even into the notorious failure of the British educational system to turn children out with marketable job skills at their own ability levels. The influence on British psychology of the egalitarian socio-political nostrums today's Establishment (in city bureaucracies as much as in Whitehall) is now stronger than that of elected politicians.
The profession of psychology has come to see itself as a branch of welfare endeavour that must necessarily side with the 'under-privileged' (despite 'social class of origin', at least, having had a rather slight connection with human outcomes in empirical researches over the past decade). Such continuing dedication to traditional welfarism may seem a surprise: for the wider political community of the West has tried a little in recent years to limit crudely corporatist, social-engineering, egalitarian and utopian fancifulness. Yet such constraining efforts of 'libertarians' often seem -- in sociologist Robert Nisbet's phrase -- those of 'chipmunks scurrying to bring down a giant redwood'. Certainly, such efforts have barely affected today's psychological establishment in Britain, or the minimally reconstructed expansionist aspirations for social science that are predominant in Britain's constantly expanding universities. (The Anglo-American impetus is to fund and to teach psychology degrees by rote learning if necessary, even though few of the recipients will find their 'qualifications' of distinctive use in any conceivable job-market.)
More here.
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Sunday, March 30, 2003
OUR ISLAMIC BRETHREN
As widespread Muslim hostility to America and Britain became glaringly obvious (e.g. from a top Muslim writing in the Times’ ‘Thunderer’ column, 25 iii), proposals for deporting a wide-ish range of immigrants and asylum seekers gained currency (e.g. top columnist Max Hastings in the Sunday Telegraph, 23 iii).
(Especially amazing was the revelation that an unstable Black US soldier who converted to Islam had been allowed to go with his unit to Kuwait; only there did his superiors smell a rat and tell him they would not take him on the trip to Baghdad – triggering him thus to roll grenades at his colleagues, killing one and injuring ten.)
However, I doubt there's a practical way forward to draconian solutions to the problem of ‘the enemy within’; and anyhow the risk of civil strife would be too great.
What could feasibly be done, however, would be to remove to their (or to their parents') place of origin any immigrants/asylumswindlers who are found guilty of serious crimes or have been dependent on state funds for more than a year. Further, it could become a serious crime to have given support to anyone convicted within five years of terrorist offences -- e.g. by housing them, employing them, renting them accommodation, arranging state welfare handouts for them or teaching them. (Such a move would rid us of quite a few undesirable Whites as well!) Needless to say, such new legislation would require people to be allowed once more to discriminate according to their own judgments -- it's only in the last generation that 'discrimination' became a dirty word.
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“THE JEW THING”
A fine and fair review of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique – anti-Semitism for intellectuals – was provided by John Derbyshire (VDare, 10 iii).
Excerpt:
More here
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
As widespread Muslim hostility to America and Britain became glaringly obvious (e.g. from a top Muslim writing in the Times’ ‘Thunderer’ column, 25 iii), proposals for deporting a wide-ish range of immigrants and asylum seekers gained currency (e.g. top columnist Max Hastings in the Sunday Telegraph, 23 iii).
(Especially amazing was the revelation that an unstable Black US soldier who converted to Islam had been allowed to go with his unit to Kuwait; only there did his superiors smell a rat and tell him they would not take him on the trip to Baghdad – triggering him thus to roll grenades at his colleagues, killing one and injuring ten.)
However, I doubt there's a practical way forward to draconian solutions to the problem of ‘the enemy within’; and anyhow the risk of civil strife would be too great.
What could feasibly be done, however, would be to remove to their (or to their parents') place of origin any immigrants/asylumswindlers who are found guilty of serious crimes or have been dependent on state funds for more than a year. Further, it could become a serious crime to have given support to anyone convicted within five years of terrorist offences -- e.g. by housing them, employing them, renting them accommodation, arranging state welfare handouts for them or teaching them. (Such a move would rid us of quite a few undesirable Whites as well!) Needless to say, such new legislation would require people to be allowed once more to discriminate according to their own judgments -- it's only in the last generation that 'discrimination' became a dirty word.
-----------------------------------------
“THE JEW THING”
A fine and fair review of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique – anti-Semitism for intellectuals – was provided by John Derbyshire (VDare, 10 iii).
Excerpt:
One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist in the USA, I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types standing around in groups and gossiping. Because I was new to the scene, many of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me, so I could not take much part in the conversation. Then I caught one name that I recognized. I had just recently read and admired a piece published in Chronicles under that name. I gathered from the conversation that the owner of the name had once been a regular contributor to much more widely read conservative publications, the kind that have salaried congressional correspondents and full-service LexisNexis accounts, but that he was welcome at those august portals no longer. In all innocence, I asked why this was so. “Oh,” explained one of my companions, “he got the Jew thing.” The others in our group all nodded their understanding. Apparently no further explanation was required. The Jew thing. It was said in the kind of tone you might use of an automobile with a cracked engine block, or a house with subsiding foundations. Nothing to be done with him, poor fellow. No use to anybody now. Got the Jew thing. They shoot horses, don’t they?
Plainly, getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational hazard of conservative journalism in the United States, an exceptionally lethal one, which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid. I resolved that I would do my best, so far as personal integrity allowed, not to get the Jew thing. I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of writing, I have not yet got the Jew thing—that I am in fact a philoSemite and a well-wisher of Israel, for reasons I have explained in various places, none of them difficult for the nimble web surfer to find.
If, however, you have got the Jew thing, or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it, Kevin MacDonald is your man........
More here
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Saturday, March 29, 2003
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICS, SOCIAL ATTITUDES AND POLITICAL EXTREMISM
Particular political parties seldom attract the sustained curiosity of psychologists-or of other people who deny any hunger for power. Promote themselves as they might, Conservatives, Christian Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Democrats, Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Socialists, Greens, Nationalists and the many warring factions of the 'National Front' and 'Class War' movements provoke ridicule-and even claims of revulsion-as much as serious study. Still, many political developments fascinate and even terrify: e.g. the sudden collapse of Soviet communism, Reagan-Thatcher conservatism, and the European exchange-rate mechanism (the intended precursor of European monetary and political union).
Likewise, the rise of nationalism (with 'ethnic cleansing') in ex-Communist Europe, of the urban cardboard-city 'underclass' in the West, of nearly-nuclear-armed dictatorships in Asia, and of genocide in central Africa provide forceful reminders that the world of political problems and nostrums offers plenty to study. Perhaps psychologists should heed the call. Aristotle assumed that, under reasonably democratic institutions, politics would be one of the higher expressions of human nature; and it is often tempting to see political differences as providing reflections, extensions or even compensatory and pretended forms of conventional personality traits. Perhaps politics can sometimes complete personality development-even if they as often substitute for it.
The central tendency for political debate in the West to have been carried on since 1789 is in terms of Left vs Right. This general dimension has proved acceptable enough to psychologists. However, psychologists have still to demonstrate that the dimension's roots and motivational bases are to be found-as many psychologists would prefer-in 'liberalism / humanitarianism vs ethnocentrism / authoritarianism'. Thus their own interest has been especially in those packages of political belief that they do find at once coherently demonizable and indicative of underlying psychological or social pathology. In particular, Western psychologists have been interested in-and critical of- 'right-wing authoritarianism' and its local corollary of (White) racism
Any psychology of politics which tries to come to terms with actual political parties is bound to be a little complicated for the following three reasons.
(1) There are often considerable differences among people who support the same political party. Politicians of the Left quite often disagree with each other about the value of traditional family life, deterrent sentencing, military alliance with other Western nations, formal economic co-operation and linkage as in the European Union, and the technique of nuclear deterrence. On the Right, disagreements occur about hanging, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, Sunday observance, free trade and, once more, the European Union.
(2) Parties change their views over time on important matters. In the nineteenth century, the British Liberal Party was a party of free trade and laissez-faire capitalism; but in the twentieth century, under its charismatic leader Lloyd George, it pioneered the 'welfare state' (beginning with free medical provision in the Highlands of Scotland) and favoured European economic union. Over the same period, British Conservatives moved from trade protectionism (especially in agriculture) to championing free trade (in particular, under Mrs Thatcher, protesting about the European Common Agricultural Policy); and, after Suez (1957), they moved from championing Britain's Empire and Commonwealth to indifference (reacting against the preference of the 'New' Commonwealth for socialism and subsidies). It is widely presumed that any British Labour Government in the near future would be unlikely to reflect many Labour Party members' emotional commitments to
(re-)nationalization of industry, technology, key services and natural resources, to de-nuclearization of Britain's armed forces and, above all, to the outlawing altogether of private education (i.e. of Britain's 'public' schools).
(3) Perhaps true 'conservatives' wish to preserve some kind of status quo, or to return to bygone and halcyon arrangements that they always preferred. Similarly, 'the Left' might wish to be conspicuously 'radical', 'reformist', 'progressive' and even revolutionary-as the Left itself invariably implies. Yet there are paradoxes for even this agreeably simple antithesis. In recent years, in British politics at least, the Left itself has been concerned precisely to preserve the Welfare State, a substantial ongoing redistribution of wealth and income by means of taxation, the legal immunities of trade unions, the Council housing schemes, existing nationalized industries, and the non-selective, largely unstreamed state-funded comprehensive schools. Each of these institutions and practices has been represented as a British inheritance from a relatively golden age of previous liberal/left reforms-though it was in fact a Conservative Prime Minister, Disraeli, who first began the process of privileging the trade unions at law.
Can such apparent incoherence be explained? One possibility is to draw attention to the distinctive types of coalition that are involved by the Left and the Right respectively. The Left, at its broadest and most successful, is perhaps concerned to provide a 'balanced ticket' of order (especially, of economic organization) and welfare (especially targeted on the less well-off, so putatively reducing 'inequalities'). Comparably, the modern Right might be understood as backing (rather nervously) a balanced mixture of liberty (especially, of economic freedom to dispose of one's own wealth and income) and justice (professing more respect for human rights, property contracts and a stable currency). The Left's package will usually be defended by reference to its conspicuous UTILITY and its promise for a country's future; while the Right's 'backward-looking' arguments, at their loftiest, will concern LEGITIMACY - i.e. how it is proper to treat people, almost regardless of actual results.
These broad hypotheses about the Left-Right difference as involving different types of coalition have the merit of indicating why psychologists have had trouble explaining party-political preferences. For the more commonly recovered dimensions of social attitudes (in studies of the general public) involve marked contrasts precisely between the values which the parties themselves quite often harness together. Individually, people tend to favour:
More here.
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Some history.
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Friday, March 28, 2003
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RACIAL, ETHNIC, NATIONAL AND REGIONAL DIFFERENCES
Of all the controversies in and around differential psychology, those connected with geography are the most fierce and the least resoluble. Since national statistics furnish big sample sizes for researchers, averaged scores from human groups on many social and economic variables can easily be shown to differ significantly. But are such differences substantial? And do the widely seen racial (etc.) differences in abilities, aspirations, arrangements and achievements have any deep-seated basis in genetic or culturally inherent features?
In the 1970's, the answers of psychologists Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen to this question led to physical attacks on them in universities; and, in the 1990's, Phil Rushton, at the University of Western Ontario, was widely denounced for his "r-K" work and theorizing both in academic and political circles (e.g. Nature, 1992, viii, ix; Personality & Individual Differences, 1995/6). A book on general intelligence that had been relatively well advertised, The g Factor (Brand, 1996), was actually withdrawn peremptorily from publication by its 'publisher', John Wiley & Sons, after the author freely admitted to being a 'race realist', or what 'anti-racists' had long called a 'scientific racist'; and student representatives demanded Brand be sacked (see
There are probably eight main reasons for the intractability of disputes about group differences, as follows.
(i) In the twentieth century, Germans sent millions of Jews to the gas chambers, Japanese massacred millions of Chinese, the Cambodians lost 40% of their population in two years to the murderous, anti-urban Khmer Rouge, the inhabitants of Rwanda and Burundi slaughtered millions of each other in repeated frenzies, and Soviet citizens starved and executed their own millions in the name of Communism. Hence it may seem unwise to claim a monopoly of wisdom or virtue for any one race or nation - however successful some nation-states may be in the short term. Peace and harmony themselves may only be purchased at the expense of a less than admirable neutrality.
(ii) The modern world has brought different groups of people into closer proximity across what were once great obstacles to geographical mobility. In response, the humanitarian and capitalist imperatives alike have been to decry ancient stereotypes and to urge such newly commingled groups to make the best of their new situation.
(iii) The Second World War is considered in the West to have been a 'just war' - waged for humanity against a rampant (mass-genocidal, as was finally learned) type of nationalism, racism and cultural hegemonizing. It certainly succeeded in bringing to a halt the German (and indeed the British) variety of imperialism; and it ushered in a Western world of relatively free-market capitalism in which people were to be rewarded according to their efficiency as individual producers (and not primarily according to state protection of jobs against international free trade). Similarly, in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, one-time national and ethnic rivalries were thought to have been reduced by Communism (and even by Stalin's massive population shifts). Thus the continuance and resurgence of locality-based rivalries and ethnic elitism comes as a disagreeable surprise.
(iv) Race, culture and religion-often linked-continue to provide visible forms of differentiation and identity in which many group members take pride, whatever other groups may think and however social scientists may wish to adjudicate.
(v) There is no entirely secure methodology (within ethical limits) that is capable of deciding whether presently observed racial/ethnic differences are genetically coded. (Cross-breeding between the races at present is far from random and often involves unusually well-educated participants who are more confident in challenging the relevance of classic stereotypes and parental advice.)
(vi) In any case, 'observable' racial/ethnic differences are sometimes thought to be an illusion-a reflection of unworthy subjective prejudices (including the prejudices of psychometricians). According to this view, research is pointless-except perhaps into the prejudices of would-be researchers.
(vii) To admit the existence of genetically based group differences might seem to place limits on human progress and perfectibility. (Genetic engineering might eventually change that; but such engineering, too, would be alarming to those whose own belief systems and livelihoods centre on the prospects of 'social' types of improvement)
(viii) Racial (etc.) pride and prejudice are more visibly experienced and even enjoyed by people of lower levels of education in the liberal arts and social sciences. This naturally invites the suspicion that ethnic elitism may simply be a mistake that is corrigible by provision of more education and psychological help.
Among reflections on racial/ethnic differences, it is those about IQ-type differences in general intelligence (g) that have been centre-stage for psychologists. There are three reasons, as follows.
(i) Differences in g are the only differences of any general importance that can be measured with satisfactory reliability and apparent fairness.
(ii) Since measurement was first made (around 1920) there has appeared to be an abiding one-standard-deviation Black-White ('American Negroid-Caucasoid') difference in g (e.g. Jensen and commentators, 1985, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 8). The problem has been to vindicate an environmentalist account of this difference-upsetting as it is to most psychologists (except in so far as it is taken as providing an insight into the processes of White, Western, and especially Anglo-American racism).
(iii) Since 1980, there has appeared to be a challenge to most environmentalist theorising about the Black-White difference, in that the Asian peoples of Japan and North America have demonstrably overtaken quite a few Caucasoid groups in their general levels of economic and educational attainment (e.g. P.E.Vernon, 1983, The Abilities and Achievements of Orientals in North America). Asians seem to have made this progress 'fairly': they have, since 1945, and outwith Communist China, respected a wide range of human rights; and they have maintained what appears to be-by Western standards-an impressively low crime rate. The advance of the Japanese, in particular, is sometimes argued by Western psychologists (first by R. Lynn, e.g. 1982, Nature 297) to have resulted from their higher intelligence-now liberated as it is from feudalism, militarism, imperialism, cousin marriage and the aptly named Noh theatre into the life-style of the West.
To what must be the embarrassment of most Western psychologists, the advance for Japanese people in Japan and North America has occurred despite
(a) military defeat and nuclear destruction in Japan itself;
(b) the original quasi-enslavement of the North American Japanese (as 'bonded labour'); and
(c) the breaking up of Japanese homes, families and businesses in California (after Pearl Harbour, 1941).
Most especially, there has been widespread prejudice against Japanese people and criticism of them for their systematic cannibalism while fighting Allied forces in New Guinea, for other 'war crimes' (notably the 'Rape of Nanking'), for their failure to apologize for their war record, and for their legendary 'racism' and largely unreconstructed attitudes re the emancipation of women.
The more familiar questions of the differences between Western groups (and indeed between the regions of the British Isles) are probably more congenial (e.g. Lynn, 1971, Personality and National Character; Lynn, 1979, Brit.J.Soc. & Clin.Psychology). However, the problems of explaining Oriental successes and Black African political and economic 'failures' (e.g. P.T.Bauer, 1981, Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion) are now very pressing and are dealt with at length. To many social scientists it must be attractive to attribute the economic and educational progress of Asia to 'systemic' features. (These might include capitalism, the uniquely 'communal' capitalism of 'Japan Incorporated', or, in other countries, the budgetary disciplines for politicians insisted on by the International Monetary Fund as a condition of loans). Yet could such systemic arrangements ever be sustained in countries that were themselves low-g? Perhaps climate, religion and medical factors also play a part? -The ways in which AIDS is spread and is dealt with are likely to impact substantially on populations and their political ruling classes in the years to come.
Quotes relevant to the above questions are to be found here
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Thursday, March 27, 2003
SOCIAL CLASS [alias SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS (SES)]
In recent years, social scientists have grown chary of offering 'explanations' of social phenomena. When so many social-scientific theories, prophecies and recipes failed in the past, 'explanation' has seemed too precise an aspiration . Instead, social scientists have increasingly inclined to refer merely to people's own 'understandings' of the social world; to their own 'perceptions'; to their 'communication of meaning'; to their 'symbolic interactions'; to their 'identities'-often 'self-constructed'; and to their '(false) consciousness'.
Purveyors of such mixtures of common sense and post-modern sociology therefore decry attempts to trace human psychological differences to age, gender, or race. Just as suspect as such disagreeable group differences are biologically-based dimensions of difference (such as g) that might be offered by a differential psychologist as causal stand-ins.
Yet in fact, lurking not far behind this intellectual smoke-screen is the best-known simplificatory variable of the whole lot: social class-or 'socio-economic status' (SES) for the faint-hearted. It is this 130-year-old variable, first popularized by Marx and Engels, that will still be summoned up by sociologists if it is insisted that they distinguish themselves from experts in literature, or when they wish to rouse an audience to revolutionary fervour. In particular, SES is commonly held by sociology's less-postmodernized sympathizers to be capable of most of the explanatory work to which IQ is usually assigned by the London School of differential psychology. Indeed, most labourers in sociology and allied trades would frankly hold the SES of one's parents during one's youth to be the important causal factor influencing one's measured IQ itself, as well as influencing one's finally achieved, adult levels of educational attainment, occupational status and affluence. Social class is the one real group difference that is allowed by sociologists to social science.
How to resolve arguments about the causal importance of parental SES has never been particularly obvious. For example, high-SES foster parents tend additionally to have above-average IQ's: so the 'rich' environment that they provide for their children will consist partly of intellectual stimulation and support that derive less from the father's professional occupation and income and more from the sheer intelligence of his wife and himself. Matters are further complicated for the researcher by the fact that -- just as many psychologists are edgy about g -- some sociologists will not commit themselves to any particular measure of SES. However great their faith in the existence of a hated over-class and a cheated under-class that awaits their leadership to the barricades, 'non-positivist' sociologists can be as reluctant to measure SES as those political conservatives who abjure the socially divisive 'class' concept as helpful only to revolutionaries.
Lately, important new evidence became available from a natural experiment in France -- collected by a team that was appalled to find that the English-speaking world had not itself managed to put down the abominable heresies of Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen. Involving separated pairs of half-siblings in homes that were very different in SES, the study found surprisingly modest effects of class-of-rearing on the children's later IQ's (and especially on fluid g as measured by non-verbal tests). Again, modern evidence from both the USA and Ireland (both North and South) is that the SES of parents quite simply shows only a slight correlation (around r = .22) with the educational attainments of children by their early twenties.
Yet it must be doubted whether the West will witness 'the end of class-ism' as quickly as some hereditarian and libertarian thinkers have envisaged (Biology & Society 4, pp. 104-109). The collapse of Eastern-European Communism in ignominy may have sounded the death-knell for the idea that human life is mainly structured by SES and that political endeavour must aim to eliminate class differences; but sociologists normally have a soft spot for Thomas Kuhn's view that discredited ideas can enjoy a long half-life within tenured bureaucracies.
(This is a preface to a wide range of quotes on the subject that can be found here).
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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