RACE REALISM ALIVE AMONG ORDINARY BRITS

The left-wing Observer (27 iv) admitted to its readers that polls show Britons today to be a pretty tough-minded lot. After five years of New Labour and its peecee attitudes, 78% thought asylum seekers lead to higher crime rates; and 55% thought ‘some ethnic groups’ more likely to be involved in crime than others. Which groups? ‘Black Caribbeans’ were named by 34%, ‘White British’ by 19% and ‘Orientals’ by only 8% -- quite a coup for race-realistic Professor Phil Rushton with his Negroid-Caucasoid-Mongoloid dimension of law-abidingness. (However, the water was muddied by the hopeless term ‘Asian’ attracting 39% of respondents – ‘Asian’ is possibly understood by Joe Soap since 9/11 to embrace Arab terrorists, suicide bombers, torturers and vendetta merchants). Excerpt:

Nearly half of all britons have been a victim of crime.
67 per cent support the death penalty.
Nearly a quarter of us would be tempted to carry a gun if the law allowed it.
55 per cent believe certain ethnic groups are more likely to commit crime.
This special Observer poll reveals a nation eager to get tough

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EDUCATIONAL REALISM WORKS

Using academic assessment that makes allowances for the quality of a school’s intake, Scotland’s top value-adding school turned out to be St Paul’s, Glasgow. The main distinction of this school (in a run-down area) was that it had hit the headlines in 2002 after piloting a return to the practice of streaming children according to perceived ability (Scotsman, 28 iv). Excerpts:

A SCHOOL where almost two-thirds of pupils are entitled to free school meals emerges as the best state school in Scotland in a new exam league table which takes account of local deprivation.

Despite acute poverty in its catchment area, St Paul’s in Glasgow sees 9 per cent of its fourth-year pupils reach the standard benchmark of passing three or more Highers.

St Paul’s hit the headlines last year after piloting a return to the controversial practice of streaming children according to perceived general ability.

The pioneer pupils in this system, which the school hopes will create a culture of achievement to combat peer pressure to underachieve, have not yet sat Standard Grades or Highers.

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Some history.

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“CHURCHGOING” PROSTITUTES

One of my Birmingham correspondents will hear nothing of ‘two innocent Black girls gunned down as they celebrated New Year.’ Apparently the girls who died in the much publicized drive-by shooting outside a hairdresser’s shop were prostitutes who were working additionally+ as drug couriers for their Black pimp. They were to be given a ‘warning’ by another Black drug trader on whose patch they had been trespassing; but this rival trader was not much of a shot with his Uzi submachine gun, so both girls died. Necessarily, the story was too much for Britain’s cowardly media – perennially terrified to carry news of race realism.

Note the way the case was reported at the time:

The murder of two teenage girls in a drive-by shooting in Birmingham has shocked Britain and highlighted an emerging poor black culture involving cocaine, guns and gang violence across the United Kingdom.

Police, politicians and black community leaders in Britain are expressing fears that an explosion of "black-on-black" drug-related shootings in London and regional cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool indicates the rapid growth of US-style gang violence in Britain.

Charlene Ellis, 18, and her 17-year-old cousin Latisha Shakespear died on the street after they were mown down by at least 30 shots of automatic gunfire outside a party in Aston, a predominantly poor, black area in Birmingham, early on Thursday.

The girls had stepped outside the party at 4am when they were caught in the shooting between two established drug gangs, the Burger Boys and the Johnson Crew.
Two other teenagers, including Charlene's twin sister Sophie, were also injured. Police say the girls were law-abiding and church-going members of the community with no links to either of the gangs, whose members had clashed at the party earlier.

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Some history.

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PSYCHOTICISM, PSYCHOSIS and PSYCHOPATHY

In the questioning 1960's, anxieties were often expressed that even the well-established diagnostic category of schizophrenia might need to be broken up. Schizophrenia might be just a 'label' imposed by insensitive clinicians on departures from conventional behaviour that were related only in being at once incapacitating and beyond the grasp of medicine. 'Simple' schizophrenics are withdrawn, anxious, inadequate and lacking in initiative; whereas 'paranoid' schizophrenics often seem entirely different-assertive, dogmatic, hostile, and exhibiting a strange yet impressive independence of mind. In manic-depressive psychosis-the other major psychotic illness affecting young adults-the condition itself is actually defined by a tendency to swing between the disorder's two named extremes.

At the same time, the less clear-cut diagnoses of psychopathy (mainly affecting men) and hysterical personality disorder (mainly affecting women) were similarly attacked as involving undue subscription to 'the medical model.' Instead, might they not index psychosocial distress or-if g was high-healthy rebellion against authority? Although commonly feckless and impulsive, 'psychopaths' are also admitted to differ very markedly amongst themselves-being e.g. 'inadequate', 'aggressive', or 'creative' (according to the classic British model of Sir David Henderson); and individual volatility and diversity of symptomatology is plainly expected of 'hysterics' (whose disorders may be imitations, exaggerations or prolongations of any other ailments known to medicine). Again, the wider category of personality disorders is commonly held by textbook writers to embrace the 'antisocial', the 'paranoid', the 'histrionic', the 'narcissistic', the 'avoidant', the 'dependent', the 'obsessive-compulsive', the 'passive-aggressive', the 'schizoid', the 'schizotypal' and the 'borderline' (e.g. D.L.Rosenhan & M.E.P.Seligman, 1989, Abnormal Psychology): the unity amongst such variations is hard to detect-except in putative sequelae such as joblessness and unmarriageability.

Today the climate of psychiatric opinion is different, even if many uncertainties remain. For it turned out as follows.

1. Manic-depressive psychosis could be impressively alleviated, in about a third of sufferers, by chemical means (lithium carbonate); and no treatments other than those of a physical nature (especially ECT, chlorpromazine, MAO-inhibitors and imipramine) had any marked effect on psychotic disorders.

2. Manic-depressive psychosis and schizophrenic psychosis seemed to run together in the same family lines, suggesting the conditions might indeed have something in common-at least in terms of genetic factors. (See e.g. Eysenck, 1995, Genius, Cambridge University Press; but also Van Kampen, 1996, Europ. J. Person.)

3. Hysteria and psychopathy also ran in the same family lines as each other; and showed a degree of familial linkage to psychosis.

4. Hans and Sybil Eysenck were able to develop a questionnaire measure on which both psychotic and psychopathic (as also criminal, illicit-drug-using, and sexually promiscuous and sado-masochistic) people had elevated scores. To judge from its items, the measure seemed to reflect personal disillusionment, bitterness, cynicism, idiosyncrasy and a disregard for convention; and the Eysencks christened it Psychoticism (P).

5. The Eysencks' scale had a rather frosty reception initially, and it proved hard to pinpoint the psychological essence of P; but, by 1990, other workers, too, in psychiatric research, accepted some version of the Eysencks' idea that some of the above links did really exist-and that there were few such corresponding links to 'neurotic' disorders. [The modest frequencies of neurosis in the families of schizophrenics ruled out the idea that P was simply a factor of 'unhappiness' or of being thought 'deviant'; or that P differences come about merely because the deviant tend to end up having to marry the deviant.]

However, though Eysenck and others repeatedly found that MZ twins were more similar to each other in P than were DZ twins, the story of the origins of P differences still leaves other explanatory options half-open. To be sure, no-one has found any environmental factor that will precipitate schizophrenia in anyone without schizophrenic relatives. Yet the DZ correlations for P (as for many other personality variables) are very low (around .15) and suggest that the higher MZ correlation (around .45) must arise partly because of genetic-genetic multiplicative interactions (epistasis) that can only occur in people carrying virtually identical genes (see Quotes V); and that, even then, there must be environmental factors that push twins apart phenotypically (so as to explain the remarkably low concordance between DZ's reared together).

Psychometrician-psychologists themselves have not been as sympathetic to Eysenck's position as might have been expected. This is principally because Eysenck's P dimension has a strongly positively skewed distribution of scores and does not so readily emerge as a major dimension in typical questionnaire work with normal subjects-usually, admittedly, of above-average educational and intellectual levels). Thus it is often suggested that Eysenck's P reflects a mixture of 'low conscientiousness' (c-), 'low tender-mindedness / affection' (a-) and 'low agreeableness / high will (wilfulness)' (w+) -perhaps together with multiplicative interaction effects between such traits, or between them and extremes of extraversion-introversion (e+, e-).

By way of a psychological model, Eysenck and co-workers have stressed in recent years that acute schizophrenics and high-P scorers are especially good at avoiding 'latent inhibition'-i.e. good at disregarding that a word which is now succeeded by a paired associate did not have that associate previously, and thus learning the new pair relatively quickly (e.g. De La Casa et al., 1993, Brit.J.Psychiat.). This finding is important in being the first-ever well-replicated discovery of a task at which schizophrenics reliably do better than normals; and the finding looks compatible with the notion that there is some link between psychoticism and 'creativity' (which arguably requires easy 'disinhibition' of former and conventional respones).

Still, it is hard to believe that such a link of a laboratory ability (which itself looks like c-) to psychosis and psychopathy will prove more than one part of a larger story. A fuller account might stress the bizarre and largely inappropriate emotions seen in schizophrenia, manic-depression, psychopathy and hysterical personality disorder. At the extreme, in some cases (rare today) patients will 'switch off' emotion (as in schizophrenic thought blocking); but such blocking phenomena probably only occur after extreme and distressing emotion has been experienced. More commonly, all these conditions seem better characterized by suggesting that, while the 'neurotic' recruits crystallised personality features to control emotion {see Quotes XIV}, high-P people tend to switch into other emotions to try to handle problems that have arisen for them because of an initially negative and persistent primary emotion. Thus psychopaths switch from anxiety at reminders of their inadequacies into incandescent hostility and aggressive retaliation; and from proper depression at their repeated incarcerations into reckless and explosive activity and sensation-seeking.

As an overall impression, schizophrenic patients, whatever their starting point in c-, tend to present as either simple (w-) or paranoid (a-); and manic-depressive patients range between the hyperactivity of c- to the behavioural dampening of e-. While psychopaths may actually have the more chronic dysphoric mood states-and thus be tempted to use illicit drugs or to seek mind-altering sensations-psychotic patients are more noticeably peculiar. In the low-w and low-a of schizophrenia, the patient's attentional system collapses. Instead of shifting between the narrow attention of high-w and the broad attention of high-a, the patient has diminished capacity for both types of perceptual intake--like a car driver lacking both daylight or headlights. Likewise, the depressive psychotic, instead of swinging easily, as most people normally do, between speed and accuracy of behavioural output, is capable of neither the speed of e+ nor the alertness of c+: such a patient resembles a car driver who is having a simultaneous problem with both engine and brakes.

More here

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Some history.

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BRITISH ACADEMIA DECLINING

Once upon a time, UK academics were selected for their intelligence, initiative, scholarship, organization and promise; and then they were allowed to get on with the job. Today they are selected for liberal-leftist peecee piety and feminism and need the closest monitoring to make sure they stay that way and don’t drift ‘off message.’ It is no accident that Britain’s top historians – Norman Stone, Simon Schama, David Starkey, Paul Johnson, Eric Hobsbawm, Hugh Thomas and Niall Fergusson – all work largely outside UK academia (only Starkey maintains some ties, occasionally undertaking examining).

Britain’s best-known psychologists (see 2002 ‘Hall of Fame’ survey) are Oliver Sacks, Edward de Bono, John Marshall, Simon Baron-Cohen, Richard Gregory and Adrian Furnham: of these six, only Boring-Cohen and Furnham work in UK academia (and the latter is frequently away in Hong Kong) .

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REJECTING THE U.N.

The idea of involving the United Nations – or the rest of the axis of weevils – in rebuilding Iraq was roundly comdemned in the Spectator (26 iv) by star Crusade correspondent, Mark Steyn – though even Steyn showed no appreciation of the need for race realism in separating Iraq’s low-IQ and high-P ethnic groups. Excerpt:

Now the issue is the UN, France, Germany and Russia, and whether they can get away with hijacking the Anglo-American victory. You don’t have to agree (though, as it happens, I do) with my distinguished compatriot George Jonas that the UN is a fully-fledged member of the axis of evil to recognise that there’s little point in going to war to install yet another branch office of UNSCAM. If the problem is America’s image in the Arab world, in what way does it help to confine the Stars and Stripes brand to unpleasant things like bombs, while insisting all the nice postwar reconstructive stuff be clearly labelled with the UN flag? If the answer is that that’s the price you pay for healing the rift with Old Europe, that presupposes Old Europe is interested in healing it. Tony Blair may be keen, but the Continentals have different agendas. Will the Belgian government approve the complaint of ‘genocide’ against Tommy Franks? The petition accuses the general of ‘inaction in the face of hospital pillaging’, which apparently meets the Belgian definition of genocide. Unlike the deaths of more than three million people, which is the lowball figure for those who’ve died in the civil war in the Congo — or, as I still like to think of it, the Belgian Congo.

The Congo’s civil war is everything George Mohammed al-Galloway claimed Bush’s war would be: there were more civilian deaths in a few hours in Ituri province last week than in the entire Iraq campaign; while the blowhards at Oxfam and co. — the Big Consciences lobby — insist on pretending that Iraq is a humanitarian disaster, there’s an actual humanitarian disaster going on in the Congo, complete with millions of children dead from disease and malnutrition. While the lefties warned that Ariel Sharon would use the cover of the Iraq war to slaughter the Palestinians, the Congolese are being slaughtered, and you don’t need any cover. Because nobody cares. Because no Americans or ‘Zionists’ are involved.

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IRAQ FOLLIES

America announced its continuing egalitarianism and political correctness, telling Iraqis ‘the blood in your veins is the blood that produced civilization’ and saying that just a little American tinkering would be enough to transform the country into a law-abiding, property-respecting parliamentary democracy (BBC Radio IV UK, 24 iv, 10:00).

Such piety indicated that at least the speechmaker, ex-General Jay Garner (appointed by Washington to run Iraq pro tem.), had not read (in Lynn & Vanhanen’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations) that the average IQ in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Jordan is only 87.

Additionally, the Americans did not seem to have considered the case for believing that Arabs are pretty high in Eysenckian ‘Psychoticism’ and thus ill-suited to the tea-room ceremonies of the House of Commons.

{Washington could scarcely be blamed for choosing peecee rhetoric. Not a single big-time commentator advocated breaking Iraq up along the lines of its three main ethnic groups. Instead, Mr G. Dubya Bush seemed to have been taken in by Rev. Blair’s windy nonsense (during the pair’s meeting in Belfast’s Hillsborough Castle, shielded from the mob by stun-gun-carrying police) to the effect that Bliar had solved the Irish Question by multi-million-dollar multicultural appointments of murderers to run Northern Ireland (where every tenth IRA supporter was a government-paid ‘community activist.’}

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MEANWHILE

In South Africa, the Black liberation artiste, Saint Winnie Mandela, was found guilty on dozens of charges of graft, corruption, theft and fraud. Winnie had previously starred as the kidnappers and likely organizer of the murder of a Black youth. She is said to be an embittered woman who thinks life and her ‘liberated’ South Africa owe her a living. {Saint Nelson Mandela dumped her as soon as he got out of prison and found what she had been up to for twenty years.}

A fine article condemning modern British academia as a “bungling bureaucratic nightmare” appeared in the Times (‘Thunderer’) from Emeritus Professor Philip Stott of London University.

DNA unraveller James Watson condemned socialists and religious bigots alike for hampering genetic research (Times, 24 iv: ‘Political correctness is ‘stifling genetic advancement’’). Watson was speaking at a gala banquet in London’s Guildhall, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the breakthrough as to DNA double-helix structure.

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Some history.

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FEMINISM AND MOTHERHOOD

Feminism was suggested to have come to the end of its natural life – by an Australian ex-femiloon. Some excerpts:

It's about trying to untangle some of the "mis-messaging" feminism has allowed to linger, and is now partly responsible for getting us into the miserable fix in which many women find themselves: independent, successful, solid careers, nearing 40, childless, many partnerless and wondering what went wrong.

Woven into the fabric of this wave of feminism was a very strong anti-motherhood message: it was a "handicap", a "hindrance" and potentially a major obstacle to any girl reaching her full potential. It was a man's world we had to take on and that was to be done in a manly way. Definitely not with a bulge in the stomach or baby on the breast.

Where's feminism now? And it's a fair question. How is feminism helping women sort through the enormous load of expectation it has created for women to succeed beyond being "just mothers"? And for those of us who heard the bugle cry to go forth and conquer, have we taken the notion of equality to ridiculous extremes? Have we turned down the sound of our biological clocks?

At the WomenSpeak 2003 conference in Canberra, a former Telstra young businesswoman of the year, Gabrielle Molnar, lowered her voice when I asked if she described herself as a feminist. "No." "Why not?" "I don't think it serves or supports my cause." Molnar has a high-profile job as a company executive. She's 33. "And when you're managing a corporate career," she apologetically whispered, "you also manage the perception around that, and you don't want to get pigeonholed". While she fully endorses the sentiment of promoting women and improving access to opportunity, feminism as a movement has lost her. And probably thousands like her.

Many young women erroneously think they can postpone having children well into the second decade of their busy careers; and that an increasing number choose not to have children at all, leads to some big questions for feminism.

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MEANWHILE

The Mayor of Toronto, apparently an elderly quadroon, went ape on TV when the World Health Organization advised against travel to Toronto. The Mayor had over previous weeks failed to realize that multicultural cities are especially at risk in epidemics – in this case from Chinese people streaming in to have a holiday with their relatives and hoping to escape SARS, but in fact bringing the disease with them. {Doubtless many other Western politicians will fail in their duty to introduce quarantine arrangements, thinking such stern measures politically incorrect.}

The idea that ‘institutional racism’ characterizes London’s Metropolitan Police was denounced as barmy by brave Detective Sergeant Brennan (of London’s Transport Police) on BBC Radio 4 (22 iv, c. 22:30). Brennan specially mentioned an incident in which some ten neighbouring householders had their car tyres slashed, but only a Black householder attributed the attack to ‘racism’.

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RISE IN NATIONALIST SUPPORT

In the Observer (20 iv), Amelia Hill announced in her report on the British National Party: “The BNP is fast becoming part of the mainstream opposition.”

{Apparently in Sunderland, the asylum-swindling capital of the North, one person in 300 is now an asylum seeker; and natives resent the hand-outs of welfare, accommodation and even mobile phones. The BNP has cleaned up its act by recruiting more graduates – apparently only 13 of its top 28 people now have criminal records – and some of these will have been for infringements of the Race Relations Act and kindred peecee creations. But the party probably remains staunchly if most covertly anti-Semitic.}

Excerpt from The Observer:

Out on its own campaign trail last week, the Tyne and Wear Anti-Fascist Association (Twafa) was trying to rescue votes from the BNP. One shame-faced first-time voter admitted to having already voted for the party 'for a laugh'. His seven neighbours drank beer on their sunloungers and cheerfully identified themselves as firm BNP supporters.

In a 90-minute canvassing offensive around a relatively affluent area of the city, the only constituents who promised to vote Labour said they were doing so with reluctance. The others - the majority, it seemed - had ticked the BNP's box on their ballot sheets, many for the first time. When asked why, myths and lies, endlessly embroidered and repeated by the BNP, came spilling out in pre-packaged tabloid-speak. The asylum-seekers were stealing local jobs and being given free housing, driving lessons and mobile phones. 'Our daughters have to get pregnant to get a council house,' said one man. 'These people are getting everything for nothing.'
'I think we have to accept that we've lost the asylum argument,' said one Twafa campaigner. 'The beliefs are just too ingrained now and too complex for us to unravel in the course of a doorstep conversation.'

Back on his own campaign trail, an ebullient Scott knocked on another door. 'Hello, sir,' he said with a chummy smile, as Peter, a young man, appeared. 'We're concerned about the number of asylum-seekers coming into the community. We think Labour's let you down; they're raising taxes and spending it on the asylum-seekers.'

The man opened his door a little wider. 'I'm here on behalf of the BNP,' Scott added. 'Did you get your postal ballot this morning? Would you consider voting for us?'
The young man hesitated. 'I don't like telling people how I voted,' he said. 'Fair enough,' Scott teased. 'Did your choice begin with a B, by any chance?'
Increasingly certain he's among friends, Peter, 26, revealed that it did indeed. 'I've never voted BNP - I've been a Labour man - but they're just everywhere now, getting everything for free,' he explained.

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MEANWHILE...

The folly of allowing ‘learning disabled’ (i.e. low-IQ) parents to have babies was grimly illustrated when a New York divorcée on welfare, herself also neurotic and obsessional (and in psychiatric treatment), killed her 4-year old daughter who suffered from ‘learning disability’ and hyperactivity (New York Times, 22 iv). The mother freely confessed to police whom she summoned to the scene that she just could not cope with the child even with the help of the infant being prescribed Ritalin, so had blasted it with a rifle. State ‘caseworkers’ had previously visited the home at the mother’s request but, finding it spotless, concluded nothing was amiss.

Leftnik celebrities such as Susan Sarandon decided that the handmade Churchillian V-sign was now a Peace Sign, meaning in particular ‘No War on Iraq’. {Hopefully the Serbian W-sign – signifying the Trinity but also resistance to Albanian gypsies – will become used as a standard reply.}

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POLITICAL REALIGNMENTS?

As President Dubya Bush and Rev. Tony Blair continued to talk of the wonders of Shi-ite religiosity ( ‘freed’ from Saddam’s suppression, allowing million-men marches….), of the Eurodollar, and even of Blair becoming President of the European Union, it looked increasingly likely that their Empire Party was going to clutch PeeCee to its bosom – combining this religiosity (and outright hypocrisy) with the healthy capitalism that led coalition forces to protect Iraqi oilfields rather than hospitals from thieving Arabs. Such dynamic mixing of moralism with the individualistic pleasure principle was always the basis of true conservatism, as when brewers once funded churches.

The question thus arose of who would, in reply, span the other dimension of psychological difference, the nationalist/authoritarian vs humanitarian divide, to produce an electable neo-Nationalist-Socialist Party. In America, the unions began to get restive at the takeover of California, Arizona and New Mexico by cheap Mexican labour, and at the rapid export of American jobs to India; and, in France, M. Le Pen pulled in 30% of the vote in areas infected by dull but high-Psychoticism North African immigrants. However, there remained no sign in the West of these socialist and nationalist forces having sufficient prescience to make common cause. The fact that Holland’s neoliberal Pim Fortuyn had been murdered by a leftist who rejoiced in court in his achievements – seeking and winning judicial sympathy – remained largely unremarked, certainly by the BBC which consistently failed to note the increasing hostility of leftists to Jewry, neo-Empire and even PeeCee (for the left showed no inclination to liberate Iraqi women from gross chauvinism).

It was amusing to see so little appreciation of the psychology of politics. {The typical dynamic compromises of practical politicians (along two major psychological dimensions) are indicated here.}

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SEXCELLENT NEWS AT EASTER!

According to the Times (20 iv), a new book (by an authoress known for spectacular historical speculation) confirms long-standing suspicions (publicly aired in the film "The Last Temptations of Christ") that Jesus had a girlfriend. Mary Magdalene, who apparently was no prostitute and came from a nice family in Ethiopia, may even have been given the mission of carrying on Christianity after Peter's betrayal of Jesus ("denying Him thrice"). Excerpt:

MARY MAGDALENE was not a prostitute but a black Ethiopian priestess who was Jesus’s lover and may have borne his children, according to a book published today. In Mary Magdalene, Christianity’s Hidden Goddess, the author Lynn Picknett says the Church of Rome may have deliberately excised references to Mary from the Gospels because she was a threat to its patriarchal powers. She claims that passages in other ex-canonical texts, such as the so-called Gnostic Gospels, prove that Mary Magdalene may not only have been Jesus’s sexual companion but was also intended to be his successor.

There are certainly many sculptures that are arguably of a Black Mary Magdalene (often swaddling a baby), but the Roman Church has always insisted these were instead "Black Madonnas" and denied stories that Jesus had a child by a girlfriend. Even if only partly true, the story will give Christianity the chance of a second Reformation allowing it to place sex, love and the (neo)family in the central position they deserve. Such a positive approach, obliging the Church to acknowledge the West's major discoveries since the days of Abelard and Eloise will surely be more productive than that of the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, which is preparing missionaries to be sent to Iraq and whose Jerry Vines, the group's former president, has denounced Muhammad, the founder of Islam, as "a demon-possessed paedophile who had 12 wives". (Times, 20 iv).

Rather than perpetuating guilt about sexual matters, the Church should concentrate on pointing out that Jesus's message was one of divine forgiveness -- definitely for adultery and surely for literally harmless and voluntary sexual activities, since Confucius, Saint Augustine, John Knox and Rev. Martin Luther King also had under-age sexual relationships and Jesus himself is recorded (in the 1973 discoveries of fragments from the original Secret Gospel of Mark) as having spent at least one night with a scantily (or possibly not-at-all) clad "young man". ["the young man went to him, dressed only in a linen cloth"]

It is time for the Church to recall that even St Paul allowed freedom in sexual matters so long as the conduct was not harmful or [as is said today] obsessive: “"Everything is permissible for me"– but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"–but I will not be mastered by anything.” (I Corinthians vi 12). This a key permission that the Fathers of the Roman Church forgot to excise from the New Testament. Bachelor St Paul went on to add (I Corinthians vii 7): “I wish that all men were as I am {i.e. celibate}. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.”}


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BIOLOGY GETS A GUERNSEY IN THE GUARDIAN!

A new admission of biologically based sex differences came from Simon Baron-Cohen, University of Cambridge. Men are better at Systemizing and women at Empathizing. Wow, what a surprise! No validities or reliabilities or factor structures were offered by the Guardian for Boring-Cohen’s questionnaires; but the S and E measures look passable approximations to measures of will and affection (which form part of the Edinburgh Psychometrics Group’s “Big Six” personality dimensions -- which add intelligence, neuroticism, extraversion and conscience. See e.g. Brand in H. Nyborg, The Scientific Study of Human Nature, Oxford, Pergamon, 1997); and the overall S-E contrast would probably map equally well on to the classic Eysenckian distinction between Tough- and Tender-mindedness (itself found to be highly heritable -- Eaves & Eysenck, 1974, Nature 249, 288-289). It is sad to see psychologists wasting their time re-inventing the wheel, though nice to gather that the Guardian‘s “blank slate” feminism may be on the verge of crumbling.

Excerpt from the article:

Are there essential differences between the male and female brain? My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. I call it the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory. Empathising is the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. The empathiser intuitively figures out how people are feeling, and how to treat people with care and sensitivity. Systemising is the drive to analyse and explore a system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and the drive to construct systems. The systemiser intuitively figures out how things work, or what the underlying rules are controlling a system. Systems can be as varied as a pond, a vehicle, a computer, a maths equation, or even an army unit. They all operate on inputs and deliver outputs, using rules.

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Meanwhile

Seven years after publication of THE g FACTOR, British teachers at last began to demand that special needs children be taught in separate classes or schools.

Femiloons were dealt a new blow as a computer scientist accused of paedophilic downloadings established in court that the charges against him were the purest fantasy -- resulting from virus-type attacks on his computer.

{Femiloons work hard to destroy the West and its classical structure of family life, while doing little to denounce the rabid antifeminism of many Muslim countries.}

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ERICH FROMM ON SEX

Erich Fromm was a famous German-Jewish-American psychoanalyst. His determination to play down the contribution of man's biology to the gift of love has at least ten peculiar features, as follows.

1) Pair bonding in animals
Fromm is determined to distance the phenomenon of love from the bestial aspects of human nature. Yet many pairs of human lovers would actually be impressed if they could maintain the substantial lifelong monogamous fidelity and co-operation that is typical in species like songbirds and gibbons. To be sure, recent years have seen empirical discoveries of 10% rates of 'bastardy' in songbirds' offspring. Yet such rates of infidelity are no different from what obtains in human families (according to UK and US blood group studies of the 1990's); and, properly speaking, such occasional 'adultery' makes the long-term pair-bonding in such avian species still more remarkable.

2) Sexual influence on culture
Fromm thinks that only a post-materialist culture can do much to improve the chances for would-be lovers; but he neglects the degree to which sex itself shapes culture. Recently, it has been observed that humpback whales change their mating songs to mimic those of sexually successful immigrant whales of previous breeding seasons (New Scientist, 2001); and many artistic innovations in Western music (whether classical or popular) are likewise the result of deviant males producing new performances that have appeal primarily to audiences of sexually excited young females who determine which new variations are finally accepted. Likewise, Western religions have long had appeal primarily to females - to judge by the make-up of church congregations; and, Fromm might be shocked to find, the West's late-twentieth-century enthusiasm for capitalism has been driven not least by females' preferences for the careers that might provide them with the economic security that is so legendarily in demand by the fair sex. Fromm's attempt to view love as dependent on culture, rather than on animalistic biology, must seem strained in days when evolutionary psychology - stressing the Darwinian bases of human culture -- is enjoying as much success as did 'instinct psychology' in the 1920's.

3) *Falling* in love
Fromm's volitional conception of love makes too little room for love's often-remarked mysteries. Some 40% of happily married couples readily declare they 'fell' in love in ways that continue to defy the kind of reasonable explanation which Fromm would prefer. Recently, research has suggested that partners are actually much concerned at the beginning of a relationship to assay the state of each other's hormones - hence the enthusiasm for removing each other's clothes that is so characteristic of early courtship. In particular, a woman (at least when she is in the fertile part of her menstrual cycle) will prefer a man whose pheromonal state indicates an immune system possessing strengths *complementary* to those which her own immune system already possesses. Studies in Germany and Scotland have ascertained that people emit chemical signals so as to communicate their own immunogenetic make-up (Farrar, 2001): people having the gene HLA-A2 prefer the perfumes which they use to contain the ingredients musk and ambergris, whereas people having other genes prefer to use perfumes containing bergemot. That olfaction should play a considerable part in 'falling in love' need surprise no student of the cosmetics industry which today manages to sell its products even to men. It will probably not be long before researchers discover that true lovers like each other's own natural body odours along with many other quirky physical features. (Small, tight buttocks on men are much preferred by females - possibly because they reassure a girl that her partner is not a female or otherwise feminized.) Already, research on voles has found that the concentrated copulation of a new mating pair produces a surge of oxytocin from the female's pituitary gland, and that oxytocin injected into female voles will stimulate sexual bonding (Times 8 ix 2001, p. 1). Apparently the same phenomenon occurs in humans: according to the Wall Street Journal (Meghan Cox Gurdon, 26/27 x 2001): "Scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently found that during sexual intimacy a woman's brain releases a chemical "love potion" that alters her brain's hormonal reactions. Not only does the release of the chemical, oxytocin, create for her a bond with her mate but it appears that the more sex the couple has, the deeper her sense of commitment and love will be. Men's brain's - surprise! - do not work the same way." A woman's sense of smell has been found to be most acute at just the point in her menstrual cycle when she is most easily made pregnant (Times 26 x 2001, p. 1, reporting work by Professor Salvatore Caruso at the University of Catania, Sicily). Fromm seems to have forgotten the psychological (indeed, spiritual changes) that may commence at the very first bodily contact between a man and a young woman. Tolstoy described them delightfully in War and Peace where (Pt. III, Chap. 16), where, at a grand ball, Prince Andrew dances a waltz with the unknown debutante Natasha, her 'bosom scarcely defined':

"she was the first pretty girl who caught his eye; but scarcely had he embraced that slender, supple figure, and felt her stirring so close to him and smiling so near him, than the wine of her charm rose to his head, and he felt himself revived and rejuvenated."

Delightfully, again, a year later (Pt. V, Chap. 10), at the opera, the deserted Natasha falls for the rake, Anatole Kuragin:

"She did not know how it was that within five minutes she had come to feel herself terribly near to this man. When she turned away she feared he might seize her from behind by her bare arm and kiss her on the neck. They spoke of most ordinary things,yet she felt that they were closer to one another than she had ever been to any man. Natasha kept turning to H and to her father, as if asking what it all meant."

By contrast, with all the 'will' in the world, men and women who meet via dating agencies seldom fall in love. Notoriously, despite intense selection of partners by rational criteria, the UK television programme 'The Mating Game' struggled even to have its 'lucky' couples say they enjoyed their free week together in a hotel; and marriages seldom resulted.

4) Love's evolution-based triggers
Fromm's disparaging attitude to the possibility of learning sexual techniques and thus improving a romantic/marital relationship can hardly be blamed on him. After all, passably effective 'sex therapy' (a creative branch of 'behaviour therapy') arrived only in the 1960's. However, it is strange that Fromm was so unwilling to consider the very serious contribution that can be made to love and marriage by such simple things as a trim female appearance and a bulging male bank balance. Men need to see regular signals giving reassurance as to their partner's fidelity - signals that are not easy to arrange convincingly in a world where women go out to work. For their part, women need the feeling of security that comes not from occasional massive expenditures on mortgages but from a more constant supply of attention, kindness and tokens of continued affection. (Evolutionarily, the cave-dwelling human female did much better to seek many *small* gifts rather than occasional large donations for which, after all, she had no refrigerator.) To forget such practical contributions to the art of loving is especially strange in a psychoanalyst who is quite frank that love needs to be *practised* and prepared for by 'disciplined exercise.'

5) Physical beauty
Even the sombre Plato maintained that good looks would be a natural part of "authentic love" - though the "disciplined and cultured" lover would admittedly not go beyond kissing and fondling his young boyfriend (Republic 403a). In recent years, Scottish psychologists have shown that beauty is not an individual matter as Fromm likes to believe: rather, men possess absolute Platonic standards of beauty which allow the creation (by computer) of female images agreed to be more beautiful (on averaged ratings) than any they have yet seen. Perrett et al., 1994, record of their overlaid photos of young females: "attractive composites can be made more attractive by exaggerating the shape differences from the sample mean." The pursuit of the idea of physical beauty naturally leads on to the love of moral beauty, as Plato's Socrates explained (in The Symposium). About men, especially, John Updike (2000) has his character Gertrude declare (in his Gertrude and Claudius) "love is part of their ruthless quest for beauty" (p. 186).

6) Sex first -- Love and Happiness later
Fromm's view is:

"Sexual attraction creates, for the moment, the illusion of union; but without love this "union" leaves strangers as far apart as they were before - sometimes it makes them feel ashamed of each other, or even makes them hate each other, because when the illusion has gone they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before" (pp. 54-5).

This claim comes as near to being a testable proposition as Fromm's ideas ever do. Yet research has not been supportive. Sexually liberal couples who told American psychologists they did *not* regard love as a prerequisite for sexual intercourse were actually just as happy and stable over the subsequent two years as were couples holding more conventional views (Peplau et al., 1977): in both cases, some 35% of couples were still dating and 20% had married.

7) The barely detectable work of the will
Fromm was understandably concerned to talk up the long-term nature of love - in line with mankind's deepest aspirations if not with the sorry realities of divorce in the late-twentieth-century West. Yet it is far from clear that an emphasis on the volitional aspect of love is helpful to Fromm's endeavour. Notoriously, the work of the human will is exceptionally hard to pin down. By contrast, there is substantial determination of people by their personalities and by their previous histories of choice. By talking of love as 'an act of will', Fromm might have been thinking of the commitment of young people in 'arranged' Hindu marriages. Here, the hope is that the act of promising between comparative strangers may be followed by the growth of love. Doubtless this *can* happen, just as love *may* follow a Western pair's decision to live together; but such a development of sincere affection and erotic attraction is surely based far more often on the good sense exercised by the Hindu parents when selecting the partners and arranging the terms of the marriage. Notoriously, people can relatively easily fall in love with a partner who has a similar level of attractiveness to third parties. The happy Hindu couple's performative acts of will are only a small part of a much larger pattern of causation.

What actually is the 'will' of which Fromm expects so much? 'Will' seems to exist *necessarily* when processes of reason and intelligence furnish adumbrations of the passions and suggest possible strategies for achieving one's objectives. Volition is what emerges from weighing competing passions, reasons and arguments. What a person finally decides to do is a question of which way the balance tips. One cannot 'decide' to want anything; one can only *want* something (more or less 'passionately'), and then find oneself selecting the most reasonable means of achieving it. 'Will' may perhaps *keep* the scales tipped, in preference to resuming the process of reflection; but such 'obstinacy' will itself be either a reasoned or a passionate alternative to re-opening the matter that had been temporarily concluded.

So elusive (if sometimes crucial) is the work of the human will that -- unlike the mind, the heart, the soul and the spirit -- 'the will' does not receive much mention in the Bible. It was actually first introduced by St Augustine as a way of explaining how, despite supposed divine omnipotence, we are all somehow free either to accept God's revelation or to reject it. For Fromm to think the human will capable of producing love is largely mistaken. It is also dangerous, for it may lead Fromm's readers to make vain commitments in their quest for love. Fromm should have remembered Oscar Wilde:

"[Fidelity] has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say" (in The Picture of Dorian Gray).

The only way to make the will responsible for love would be to define 'the will' as something other than it is. An example would be when the philosopher Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) decided that 'The soul is the will, properly speaking' and asked 'Whether Identity of Person consists not in the Will' (quoted in Warnock, 1987). Again, the twentieth-century Surrealists, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud and Max Ernst, thought of the will as energy which could be liberated through destruction; and they believed - with Adolf Hitler, in fact -- that intellect had become a 'cancer of life' which would be replaced by a new age which was based on Will (Bowden, 1992). However, while to interpret the will as 'soul' or 'energy' would make it more capable of causing love, Fromm the rationalist could never himself have agreed to see will as in any way *opposed* to intellect.

8) Man's dark side
Fromm was concerned to stress man's rational nature and its potential for good. As elsewhere in his work, he believed human reason could yield 'productive love' and triumph over the 'sick' and imperfect social systems under which people find themselves living. The problem for such pleasing optimism and for Fromm's trite homilies is that they do little to explain how human nature worked itself into such a dreadful mess in the first place. Fromm's idealism would be more convincing if it looked as if it were successfully addressing the dark and disagreeable aspects of human nature that have created the necessity for Fromm's spiritualistic moralising. As things stand, Fromm often seems as out-of-touch as is the Polonius of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

9) Instinct according to Fromm
Actually, Fromm himself was far from being resolutely averse to attributing importance to biological factors as decreed by evolutionary history. Around 1950, Fromm made a sally into speculation about necrophilia, concluding that humans have an 'anal-olfactory-hating orientation' -- supposedly characteristic of four-legged mammals and apparently demanding an obsessive sniffing of each other's bottoms. No doubt Fromm wished to pay proper homage to Freud's appreciation that there are deep-seated destructive (thanatic) as well as constructive (erotic) tendencies in human nature. Yet man is intrinsically a bipedal animal built for carrying food over long distances. The whole history of male arrangements to ensure female fidelity (notably by means of religion) probably dates back to the hunting males of northern latitudes who had to be absent from their females for days so as to provision them and their offspring. Fromm's foolish attempt to link man's nature to that of grazing quadrupeds serves only to highlight a remarkable point: even though Fromm was prepared to postulate deep, indeed animalistic bases for disgust and hate, he was not prepared to envisage a strong biological basis for love.

10) Penis envy
Fromm's 'Trotskyite' revisionism, like that of Karen Horney, focused particularly on denying Freud's claims that the human female experiences 'penis envy' and blames her 'missing penis' on her mother. Yet the idea of penis envy arguably expresses a very serious biological reality: that women want to have boy children who will for the first time 'give them a penis' by which they can breed in quantity and not just for quality. More prosaically, little girls may be well advised to envy their penis-equipped brothers - for that is indeed where any surplus maternal resources are likely to be wasted (see Badcock, 1994). In drawing her mother's attention to such wasteful expenditure on her brothers (i.e. by 'telling tales'), a little girl may have her best chance of diverting maternal resources from her brother(s) to herself. It is strange that Fromm should have been reluctant to acknowledge the specially powerful bond that exists in most cultures between mothers and their sons - at least when the son does well in early Oedipal jousting and seems worthy of maternal investment. Again, Fromm's railing against Freud's notion of the 'castration complex' needs a modern corrective. Since, in blood group studies, 10% of Western children are *not* the biological offspring of the man they call 'Daddy', many boys are indeed at risk of a serious lack of co-operation from, and indeed aggression from their local adult male as they move into adolescence. The fear which male homosexuals not uncommonly have for the vagina may be, for them, a vital part of a strategy that will steer relatively unprotected boys through adolescence without dangerous male-male conflicts over females.


More on Fromm and his ideas here

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PINKER’S WOBBLES CRITIQUED

A splendidly damning critique-from-the-right of Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate, appeared in Occidental Quarterly. By American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor, the review especially castigated Pinker’s effort to maintain liberalism, anti-racism and anti-sexism while otherwise converting to a healthy denial of all doctrines of the equality of man. Here is one of Jared Taylor’s especially good points:

Prof. Pinker recites the mantra about how closely related the races are, and although he has told us that in the animal kingdom “small differences in the genes can lead to large differences in behavior,” he fails to apply this insight to humans. He trots out another standby—that there is more genetic variation within races than between them—and tells us “these are reassuring findings.” Reassuring? Scientific data are “reassuring” only for those who cannot approach them objectively and whose prejudices ride on the outcome. In any case the “variation” argument is a con job. The difference in arm strength between the weakest and the strongest man is much greater than the difference in arm strength between the average man and the average woman. This does not change the fact that men on average are considerably stronger than women, and all societies take this for granted. As evidence against racial differences, the “variation” argument is almost deliberately obtuse.

{Another pretty damning indictment of Pinker’s lack of race- and sex-realism was scheduled to appear in Heredity.}

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MEANWHILE

Psychology’s ‘memory wars’ (about whether ‘recovered memories’ [of childhood abuse etc.] are actually ‘false’) remain pitifully unconcluded despite a decade of work. However, after reviewing eight new books on the subject, James Ost (2003, British J. Psychology 94) concluded with Bartlett that “reconstructing our past may be as much aboput inferring ‘probable constituents’ as it is about actually ‘remembering’.” – Hardly a basis for criminal prosecutions for alleged abuse dating back ten, twenty or thirty years!

Late in the day, a left-wing voice piped up to urge some “serious action” against Zimbabwe’s crazy dictator, Robert Mugabe. Mrs Glenys Kinnock, the wife of the British Labour Party’s former leader, wrote to the Times (16 iv) saying that Zimbabwe was a “failed state” and that, after independence, “liberation [had] been converted into tyranny.”

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RACE REALISM IN THE TIMES

Maybe things are changing following our victory in the war .... ooops “conflict situation”. I just got a mention of 'race realism' into the [London] Times -- albeit defending Gaelic culture from the 'Sassenachs' (Saxons).... The letter was a slightly expurgated version of that given here on 17th.

There was also another race realist letter from an English publisher married to a Welsh wife and hoping to keep the riff-raff out of lovely Caernarvon ('Gwynedd', home to Mount Snowdon). His letter:

I DON’T believe Sir Iain is out of order in the slightest. I am an Englishman who has lived in the most Welsh part of North Wales for almost 20 years, yet it seems clear to me that if unrestricted freedom continues to be given to the English — and anyone else — to settle in Wales, the unique nature of the Welsh ambience will simply disappear. It is a sad commentary on the freedom of speech in this country that Sir Iain cannot make his remarks without being branded a racist and a fascist. Immigration, like anything else, should be a valid topic for debate.

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RACIST TO BE GAELIC?

Scotland’s Sir Iain Noble, a top businessman, was indicted by the media and kindred bigmouths (including ‘Liberal’ leader Charles Kennedy) for racism, having said he wanted his beloved Isle of Skye to retain its historic Gaelic culture. I wrote to the Times as follows.

What is it about the press and ‘racism’ (‘Landowner calls for Scotland to be kept racially pure’, Times, 14 April)? Why don’t journalists and politicians listen to what race realists actually say?

When I told British newspapers in 1996 that there were some deep-seated race differences, they went ape even though I had Black friends, said many Black people were likeable, and proposed no discrimination at all. Fighting back against self-styled ‘anti-racists’, I was kicked out of my Edinburgh University lectureship in psychology. (The University subsequently paid me £12,000 rather than face a charge of unfair dismissal).

Now Sir Iain Noble finds himself likewise condemned, for wanting to preserve the remarkable Gaelic culture of beautiful Skye (where my wife and I – an Englishman -- honeymooned in 2001). Like myself, Sir Iain stressed his sympathy for people of other ethnicities; and it was surely right for him to err on the side of caution about whether Skye could ever be preserved if it had a substantial population of English, let alone African immigrants. Skye’s most famous visitor, Doctor Samuel Johnson would have agreed with Sir Iain: Doctor Johnson freely admitted differences between races as well as within them, even telling early ‘anti-racists’ in his inimitable style “Don’t cant in defence of savages.” It is time for British journalists and politicians like Charles Kennedy to grow up and admit the truth that most people prefer to live with people of their own ethnicity and suspect that much will be cast away if local cultures and languages are not vigorously protected.

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Meanwhile

Without any assistance from the UK and USA, a thousand Congolese died in the latest phase of a Black-on-Black civil war that has lasted four years and cost 4.7 million lives (Sunday Times, 13 iv, p. 21).

The war against Madman Insane saw the left tear itself apart as never before, with more-leftist-than-thou, red-in-tooth-and-claw enthusiasts behaving in ways so unpatriotic and treacherous as to make them incapable of being serious political colleagues for social democrats and kindred pinkoes in the future.

In a visit to meet Rev. Blair in Belfast, President Bush was obliged to say he would ‘work night and day to involve the United Nations in reconstructing Iraq’; and Rev. Blair resumed his barrage of promises that he would try to make Britain join the Euro currency. {However, the United Nations looked likely to shoot itself in the foot once more by declining to pay for reconstruction; UK Chancellor Grumpy Gordon Brown remained hostile to the Euro; and the 30-year multicultural extravagance of Concorde was announced to be coming to an end.}

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NEW ACADEMIC PUBLICATION

A new summary of the g factor's importance in psychology (by Harrison Kane and myself) has now been published in the latest issue of Occidental Quarterly. Direct link HERE. This is my third academic publication this year, and three more 'contributions' to the bizarre sport of the left-dominated 'looneyversities' will soon follow.

Naturally, the left-dominated British media (including such frankly cowardly organs as the Economist, the Telegraph and Spectator) will try to avoid hearing the rumblings of the explosion that is coming their way.

However, I'm glad to tell you that 'The Wealth of Nations' (by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen) will be favourably reviewed in the Nature-stable journal Heredity.

The 2000 edition of The g Factor is available FREE here.

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SEX IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Sex by tyranny -- or by contract?

The ending of patriarchal control of sex by means of Christian marriage might be no unmitigated disaster. As far as modern science teaches, women have always had around a third of their children by someone other than their husband of any one time. Even among the children a husband calls his own, about one in seven is not his by the blood group criteria used in household medical surveys both in modern Liverpool and in the well-stockbrokered 'Garden of England', Kent. What happens is that women are readily attracted by high-status males who make females feel good about their immediate security and longer-term prospects. Can ordinary wives really find the opportunity for so much adultery? No: the impressive male lover simply triggers female orgasm much more easily than the nondescript husband, thus yielding a high rate of pregnancy even though husbands perform 99 out of 100 copulations. Such spontaneous response to the alpha-male lover may seem a far cry from taking sperm from the freezer and bringing it to the right temperature; but the principle is the same. The important difference consists in today's lack of illusion -- for the male, for the female, and for public discussants.

Many women will doubtless make as sensible a choice of sperm as they did in the past. Moreover, given Europe's contribution to civilization, virtually anything that results in Western girls having larger families is to be welcomed. Yet one European creation will meet its end. As girls make their pregnancies a matter of rational calculation and public announcement, they will increasingly have their babies by the sperm of their favourite pop stars or composers. Moreover, as cloning becomes available -- already the Texas A & M University has undertaken to try to clone a dog for a pet loving millionaire -- it is inevitable that successful career women will be tempted to clone themselves. The trade-off is simple: cloning will give them a procreate having 100% of their genes instead of the mere 50% carried by an old-fashioned child. Nor will they have needed to down tools for nine months to bear the infant. Further, it is especially easy to love someone who has the same genes as oneself. -- Identical twins commonly discover such a bond.

As all this begins to happen, the cases for traditional Christian monogamy and for the social support of occasional deviations from it must simply collapse. Ordinary men will have no interest in traditional marriage or the payment of taxes in a scheme where women have abandoned even the pretence of wanting their children. Women themselves will not want to pay taxes to support other women who are conspicuously forging ahead in the quality or quantity of the children (or clones) which they produce. For both sexes, the new technological possibilities will reveal the future as plainly dependent on very practical choices of the present. People's interest in supporting by taxes the progeny of women who have chosen to clone themselves will be zero. The humanitarian imperatives that once fuelled socialized medicine will go into reverse If anything, it will be argued that there should be state disincentives to such 'unnatural' breeding, especially since the progeny will have only one parent figure instead of the two of the past and thus especially likely to become dependent upon the state.

In response to successful women visibly seeking 'superman' sperm or 'superwomen' clones of themselves, it would be open to men to equalize the score by cloning themselves. At present, it would only be a matter of guesswork whether men could feel the same love for a 'son'-clone-infant as could a woman for her 'daughter'-clone. Yet one thing is certain. The accidents of infatuation, impulse and opportunity will have gone out of the process of breeding. Nowhere in such scenarios can the state be called upon by even the most besotted welfare-ideologue to help 'a woman in her hour of need when her man has deserted her.' Plainly breeding will be something for which people themselves will have to take responsibility. Just as the drug companies will be working to improve erections, orgasms and the sexual attractiveness of people who prefer sex and breeding in the old-fashioned way, sperm banks and cloning will mean that people will have to be required to pay (or insure themselves for paying) the educational, medical and corrective costs of their own children (or 'child'-clones). No-one else is going to want to pay -- even though modern states will doubtless try to perpetuate (and promise to control) the more familiar human proclivities.

Barring tyranny, states will surely fail to orchestrate or reverse the arrival of babies who will now literally lack fathers -- just as politicians cannot manage to stop people relying for their old age on the presumed 'national insurance' contributions of a declining number of young people. So long as wombs can effectively be rented, as at present, people could, without any physical exhaustion, have as many clones as the 888 children credited to the Moroccan emperor, Moulay Ismal the Bloodthirsty. Only a tyranny run by elitists could provide state support for such breeding -- which itself would have to be done only by select men and women. Only a helot class of sterilized devotees of such an elite could provide the wombs and the labour that their tyrants would require.

The welfare state, which always had a problem in circumscribing elite activities, has now met its match. There can be so serious role for a state that makes up for people's unhappy 'accidents' when matters of health and fertility have become demonstrably non-accidental. Such states will either have to become true organizing tyrannies that seek the perpetuation of themselves and their elites; or they will have to hand choice back to people themselves -- insisting, as they do so, on future contracted provision for the young by real-time insurance.

Today, the emergence of maternal attachment as what a normal woman really enjoys is completing a Freudian century in which male eros and the sexuality of infants ceased to be under-the-counter matters. Just as the last turn-of-the-century found Freud's articulation of the importance of sex accompanied by technological advances in contraception (the rubber contraceptives), so today's emergence of maternos is accompanied by the arrival of the means to its large-scale realization. Last time round, the state stepped into the sexual arena where the church had failed. (It was the post-1870 urbanization of Europe, as North American wheat undercut farm prices, that had driven people from the land and their churches.) Twentieth-century Western states eventually liberated sexual behaviour of almost all kinds (except paedophilia -- for this reminded people of how much, and of how sexually they loved their own children) and required payment for sex by mass taxation.

This time, though there will doubtless be enormous controversy, and some states will hold out longer than others for 'Nature's way', the Western state will find no alternative to letting women have the children and clones of their choice. Already, this argument has been rehearsed and resolved in debates on abortion, with the upshot that Western states have ultimately backed a woman's 'right to choose' the contents of her womb.

Further, since subsidies from taxpayers for father-free (and sometimes mother-free) procreation will be unacceptable under the new understanding, governments will find themselves obliged to locate the costs of breeding securely with the choosers. Necessarily, in view of the many new forms of procreation, this will involve a multiplicity of types of family contract -- some between a man and a woman, but others between two women and a sperm donor, four women and a man who can support them, an adolescent girl and a rich married lover, or just one woman and her bank manager. Christian monogamy -- latterly a feeble restraint on sex and a disincentive to the making of serious family contracts that take individual wishes into account -- will be swept away as state authorities realize they will have to ensure due payment over decades ahead for twenty-first-century children. Along with state-backed monogamy (often very debased) will disappear people's current liberty to multiply 'needs' that have to be met from the public purse. Both the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of the individual will have to go.

Today, Russia is once more in the melting pot -- with a likely outcome that the Mafia will become the prime enforcer of contracts in much of Europe. Thanks to the politicians' lack of imagination as to what the state should be doing, such elemental free market forces will move in. Apparently, all that Russia has left after nearly a century of communism is a legal system that has been little used as politicians have preferred to beg and borrow the country's way to economic development. As Harvard's Emeritus Professor Richard Pipes has explained, Russia's history of needing to defend against Mongol invaders has left her with a hankering for authoritarian rule and with little respect for property rights (Property & Freedom, 1999). The route of selling land and of making proper, binding contracts has hardly been tried. It may be that this country -- so renowned for the vigour and patriotism of its people -- will develop ways of funding its family units for the future by a variety of tailor-made contracts, perhaps involving Western firms and cutting out the defunct political class of Moscow. Russia is better placed to break the statist mould than are many Western countries where so many jobs are now within the state-welfare sector of the economy and depend on the present recognition of 'needs.' The Russia that once produced nudist colonies in celebration of socialism now has the opportunity to let a thousand forms of sexual and acquisitive contract bloom -- some even involving polyandry, since Russian men will for a while be so poor and Russian women are so lusty. So long as basic justice -- the honouring of contracts -- prevails and allows long-term choices by individuals, the failed uniformitarianism of communism could yield to exciting experiments in true (self-chosen) community.

If so, it will be Russia that shows how people can live by loyalty to contracts that are made in elemental human trust -- or at least the hope of sex -- and realism. No matter which country provides most initiative, however, a century of European welfare will at last be over and a century of choice will begin. Sex and love and justice will assert their paramountcy in ways anticipated by few of society's current experts in economics, psychology or politics -- most of whom continue to think in terms of formulaic solutions to human problems that make no more allowance for individuals than that made by international capitalism. Notoriously, sex is a highly individual matter where twentieth century experts have totally failed to account even for why some people are hetero- and others homo-sexual in their orientations -- forget about what the beloved has to wear, in whatever precise bondage gear, and with whatever commitments to household garbage disposal and nappy changing. It may be hard for people to ditch the idea that there is some simple utopia for everyone (Renaissance Florence; Calvinist Scotland; Austria-Hungary; Tahiti; 1930's Berlin; Thatcher's London; Blair's Chester); but, freed once again to respond to their own true, passionate imperatives within binding unions of their own choice, people of the twenty-first-century will probably enjoy the best sex yet.

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Some history.

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SEX IN THE 21st CENTURY: The new sex threat

The cost of twentieth-century sexual liberation was not in fact to be paid by the adults who had taken their freedom from Christian marriage; or even by their children who were understandably content with the new arrangements of smaller families -- except when a divorce made them shorter in parental resources. Both men and women proved happy enough with the West's version of the quintessentially West African arrangement whereby reasonably prosperous men are as promiscuous as possible (typically maintaining several 'secretaries' in their firm whom they will trade with other businessmen in afternoon sessions at beer halls) and women look after their babies with more help from their own parents and siblings than from their child's father. The emerging Western pattern differed from its African ancestor only in involving wine bars rather than beer halls, evenings rather than whole afternoons, and support from a welfare state using about a quarter of national income. It is now becoming clear that it is the welfare state which is going to crack under the strain.

It is not just that the welfare state is producing too few young workers to support the many elderly and divorced people living alone without spouses or children to help them. That strain is beginning -- as social-democratic politicians like British Labour's Mr Frank Field have tried to recognize. Following Field's analysis, the realities were too painful to be faced by his UK Cabinet colleagues and so, a year after Mr Blair's government had taken office, Field had to resign. Most politicians stay silent and hope that the affluent young, even if they have suffered from their parents' divorces, will be too embarrassed to see relatives end their days in squalor.

Nor is there overt anxiety about the cost to the Caucasian peoples or humanity -- despite White males having provided virtually the entire stock of the world's science, technology, music, painting, historical research and ideas of justice, liberty and democracy. On the issue of the future colour of the human race, the hope is apparently that what biologists call 'hybrid vigour' will result from the blending of the Caucasian, Asian and African races -- a result of which there is some chance so long as the crucial genes for Western creativity are not delicate 'recessives' that will simply be smothered by out-breeding. However, there is one very definite and serious challenge that arises from the West's sexual progress. This challenge is to the very idealism that has characterized Anglo-American world-wide empire since the victories over Germany in 1945 and the USSR in 1989.

For all their own unprecedented sexual freedoms and aspirations to socialism, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did not become welfare states. Whatever their limitations, they had a purpose and did not nanny their own people. Vigorous young men had been given more opportunity for sex than ever before. (Not least with each other -- for homosexuality and pederasty were encouraged among the Nazis, particularly because they gave a handle with which to discipline wayward party members.) And intelligent young women could easily become doctors -- even if Soviet wages for doctors were beneath those for factory workers. But there was little welfare: Hitler threw wave on wave of young Germans into suicidal combat; and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev finally revealed in the 1980's that a third of Russian 'hospitals' had no running water.

In contrast, post-1945 Britain and post-1965 USA targeted means-tested welfare on their society's poorest members. By 1998, Britain spent £333 billion annually on 'social security' -- more than on health, education and defence combined. (In Continental Europe, 'socialism' treated citizens more even-handedly and never abandoned social-disciplinary functions -- like identity cards, the registration of all citizens' addresses and, in Scandinavia, the maintenance of records of alcohol consumption.) Implicit in the Anglo-American liberal-left's effort was the assumption that it was proper to meet sheer 'need', i.e. to pay Danegeld to the bottom ten per cent of the population. -- And where could 'need' be found more conspicuously than in a fatherless baby?

While Western Continental Europe discouraged the growth of any underclass, the USA and the UK handed over many inner-city areas to low-cost or subsidized housing -- helped in this by the ancient Anglo-Saxon preference for semi-rural family life involving, if not a farm, then a house with a sizeable garden in the suburbs, enabling families to be kept away from urban unpleasantness (and wives from the attention of other men).

Over the past generation, despite greatly increased all-round affluence, welfare states have expanded to provide not only treatment for sickness but cheap housing, education (or at least 'edutainment') till 21, long-term nursing care, cosmetic surgery, replacement surgery and artificial insemination. For children, state provision now includes, bouncy castles, safari holidays for delinquents and subsidized 'college' places for any child who can answer multiple-choice questions. (The only conspicuously unsolved problem is that of people who fall out with others in the council accommodation which they have been assigned -- for the free market in rented accommodation declined as so much housing provision was made by local authorities and universities. Currently, such stubborn victims of their own or others' mental illnesses and drinking become street beggars until officialdom relents and allows them access to the many deserted flats on vandalized council estates.)

Yet, through all this provision, the assumptions have been that marriage is the normal condition from which single-parenting was a deviation; and that children are at least the product of citizens who had been sufficiently attractive to each other for sexual congress to have occurred. -- If the father was a foreigner, there had at least been available the substantial funds for his immigration that tourism once required. Moreover, when targeting resources on needy single mothers, Britain and America have at least reckoned that they were helping the children of men who had served their countries well in 1914-18 and 1939-45.

Today, all those assumptions are standardly violated. As happened in the first big sexual liberation of the 1920's, Hollywood filmstars and similarly well-remunerated people are showing the way. The top actress, Jodie Foster, has a baby with the help of a sperm bank; two of the Spice Girls have become pregnant without troubling to marry; and no female TV newscaster, despite her £UK80,000 annual salary, is complete without her list of demands for crèche facilities at her workplace so she can be ever-present for her out-of-wedlock child.

At a humbler level, in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, two young British women have similarly pointed the way to the future. They used sperm brought to them in a pickle jar to conceive a child that would adorn their lesbian relationship -- though their union, which had been blessed by a Church of England minister, ended in tears and drunkenness in 1998, just six months after the child's birth. At the time of the conception, in 1997, the women, neither of whom worked, enjoyed council housing benefit which paid for their cosy-enough, £270-a-month terrace house; the mother-to-be drew £56.85 a week in disability allowance for a slipped disc and income support; and her lesbian partner received a weekly £69.01 income support and £11.05 single-parent support for her own child.

By 1998, in the hospitals of Dundee (Scotland's third largest city), the majority of births were to unmarried women -- not far behind the 70% rate of out-of-wedlock births to Black women that had come about in the USA by 1975. What is happening here? Is a positive maternal drive to have children actually emerging at last?

Hardly! There can be no good biological vibrations associated with pumping sperm with a kitchen syringe. Anyway, such a drive, if it existed, would not stop at producing just the one child. No, what is shown here is that unmarried mothers manage well. They even enjoy the 'challenge' of single-parenting -- and indeed love their babies to bits. In this matter, the standard doctrine of 'women's liberation' has turned out to be seriously mistaken. Babies-in-the-hand are wonderful -- to women. Orgasmic breast-feeding will convince any doubters. Mothers do not like to tell men just how satisfactory a baby is. This is their secret, that they love their baby more than their husband -- just as the man's sexual jealousy is his.

The new single-parenting is assertive. It is not an accidental deviation from any path of virtue. The woman has not been a victim of male domination for which sympathy could be appropriate. What has arrived is positive choice to dispense with manageable contraceptive restraint and the search for a satisfactory husband. Instead, the woman thinks she can succeed by state-environmental means in the classical game of getting ahead of the woman down the road. Among human beings, as in prairie dogs, the standard female prefers a female-exclusive life with her own offspring, and perhaps other relatives; but she is visited occasionally by a sleek and well-groomed male bearing gifts. No wonder homo sapiens comes top of biologists' rankings of species for lack of co-operation between females!

What is happening is that pregnancy, which once involved unfakeable male enthusiasm for a female, is now becoming a matter of female calculation and fashion indulgence. Males merely top up occasionally the income that the female has from the state or from her (typically) state-funded career. What women really want has been discovered. The Christian role of the male is at an end. The real world is now that of women and welfarism -- yet for how long? Can welfarism survive the growing appreciation that babies are as much the loci of female choices as they are the loci of needs? In particular, can it survive what is the now visible next step -- the elimination of the male altogether from procreation?

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Some history.

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THE LEFT HAS LOST THE PLOT

An exquisite piece here by John Lloyd, former columnist with the New Statesman: Some excerpts:

By defending sovereignty in the name of anti-imperialism, opponents of war undermine their claim to champion the oppressed.

A large part of the British left - and the left elsewhere - has made a fundamental mistake. In opposing the invasion of Iraq, it has shown itself incapable of thinking through not only the nature of the world as it is today, but also its own claims to be the leading force in making the world better.

The crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime - its support for terrorism, its aggression toward its neighbours and its brutality against its own people - are dismissed

The argument about this war cannot be readily squeezed into left-right categories. It is best conducted on the basis of truths, which should be self-evident and held in common: ·that Saddam Hussein has run a state unparalleled (as far as we know) in sadistic cruelty, perpetrated by a Ba'ath party and security apparatus licensed to slaughter, torture and rape

So John Lloyd now becomes another major New Statesman editor to see the light – the most notable previously was the fine historian and Americanophile Paul Johnson (one of my few heroes of the past 20 years).

Anyway, hopefully the damage done to the further-out left is incalculable. Not that Edinburgh shows much sign of this, one has to say -- the Scots being far gone in resignation in public to welfarism and low-key anti-English nationalism. A few miserable windows have tawdry handwritten signs saying 'no war'/'not in my name' etc. This despite Scotland's notoriously excellent Black Watch Regiment having performed especially bravely and also successfully while freely shooting Saddamites, suicidalists, lynchers and looters. Fortunately, the UK and USA do not run themselves by opinion polls. I was delighted to see Congress insisting 412-12 that the State Department rap the French over the knuckles.

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Some history.

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THE REALITY OF RACE

A compilation of surprising recent references to the reality of race in the New York Times was made by Steve Sailer, principally using quotations from articles by top science journalist Nicholas Wade. {Steve also congratulated Steven Pinker on the latter’s promotion from MIT to Harvard – though Pinker, while gamely hereditarian, is actually rather far from biting the race realism bullet, as will be explained soon in the journal Heredity.}

Excerpts from Steve Sailer’s article:

While many journalists write about race, I'm widely considered beyond the pale because I frequently write about it from a scientific perspective. My approach is seen as prima facie evidence of my extremism. Last year, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and David Frum both announced that they were shocked, shocked that I often "concentrate on genetic questions," as Jonah put it.

Neither has taken up my offer to publicly debate the topic. But that seems to be their point: some entire subjects are just so far beyond the boundaries of polite discussion that all a dignified pundit need do is point and squeal in horror.
After all, who else besides me reports on the genetics of race?
Well, the New York Times is who.

For several years now, the newspaper of record's distinguished correspondent Nicholas Wade has been making the case for the biological reality of race. Wade is a veteran science journalist who worked at the most prestigious British science journal, Nature, then moved to the top American scholarly periodical, Science, before going to the NYT. He is the author of Life Script: How the Human Genome Discoveries Will Transform Medicine and Enhance Your Health and the editor of a long series of New York Times Books on Genetics, The Brain, Archaeology, Language and Linguistics, Fossils and Evolution, and the like. He is clearly the most important genetics reporter in the United States.

Below are excerpts from a dozen of his NYT articles. I hope calling attention to this major aspect of Wade's work doesn't get him fired. But he definitely has the science on his side.

Much of Wade’s work is clearly driven by a concern for improving humanity's health. He fears that the "Race Does Not Exist" crowd will condemn sick people to death by keeping doctors from learning what treatments are appropriate for each patient’s genes.

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KURDS LET DOWN BY PC

No sooner were Baghdad and Basra happily taken by American and British troops than PeeCee/Multiculturalism resumed its doleful chant. Though it was clear to a blind dog that Iraq should be broken up into three parts – for the Kurds, Shi-ites and Sunnis respectively – pious politicians and mediafolk talked of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and of Iraqis running ‘their own country’; and Turkey – which had been as treacherous as France to America – was allowed to send ‘military observers’ to ensure itself that the Kurds were not winning the tribal homeland they so wished.

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Some history.

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'POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION'

It increasingly appeared that the Bush administration (in the Michigan University case) was preparing to shore up affirmative racism - always so long as it was not blatant, but worked covertly (e.g. by the Bush-favoured method of guaranteeing that every school - however bad - is entitled to have its top 10% of graduates get into the local state universities).

Excerpt from Vdare follows:

The Administration briefs argue that Michigan's racial admissions quotas are unconstitutional, citing the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The briefs also assert, incontrovertibly, that Michigan's admissions procedures violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For those who favor race-neutral admissions, the good news ends there.

The briefs do no more than ask the Court to reaffirm its confused 1978 Bakke ruling. Bakke is the root of the current muddle. In it, Justice Lewis Powell, in a majority opinion no other Justice joined, said that numerical racial quotas for university admissions were unconstitutional. But Powell also accepted the argument that student racial diversity was so important that government has a compelling interest in achieving it.

Powell's position in essence: racial discrimination in the service of social engineering is acceptable, just don't explicitly quantify it. Powell obligingly offered the social engineers a blueprint. He quoted extensively from Harvard College's explanation of how in the mid-1970s it was rigging admissions to generate a diverse student body without explicit quotas. According to Powell, race could be a factor; it just couldn't be the "deciding" factor. There is no accurate test, of course, to determine when admissions officials cross that imaginary line.

The Bush Administration briefs do not even ask for one. Its Grutter brief says

"In the final analysis, this case does not require this Court to break any new ground to hold that [the University of Michigan's] race-based admissions policy is unconstitutional."

The Bush Administration is happy with Bakke because it fully accepts the diversity rationale that led Michigan to discriminate in the first place. Its Grutter brief concedes:

"Ensuring that public institutions, especially educational institutions, are open and accessible to a broad and diverse array of individuals, including individuals of all races and ethnicities, is an important and entirely legitimate government objective. Measures that ensure diversity, accessibility and opportunity are important components of government's responsibility to its citizens."

The Bush briefs implicitly assume, typical of affirmative action defenses, that adequate "accessibility" and "opportunity" can only exist when ethnic groups are present in numbers roughly proportional to their percentage of the population. That truly equal accessibility and opportunity might mean lower percentages of black and Hispanic students_or higher percentages of Asians and Jews_are unacceptable. So it is never considered.

The effect: de facto racial preference _10% of the graduates of Texas' worst high schools, often overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, are guaranteed places, while better qualified applicants from more demanding schools are denied. Black and Hispanic numbers at the University of Texas, which fell after the Fifth Circuit's ruling, were largely restored after the 10% Plan became law. The Bush briefs celebrate this result_even though, viewed objectively, it is a clear indication that race is once again trumping merit. The only difference is that the University of Texas can't even discriminate in favor of the best black and Hispanic candidates, who may very well be in demanding schools where they don't make the top 10%.

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

An exciting new popular book explaining evolutionary psychology was published in Belgium and on the Internet by Philippe Gouillou (previously best known for his work on gifted children):

"Pourquoi les femmes des riches sont belles" - Gouillou, Ph (2003)
Ed. Duculot Louvain (Belgique). Details here

What the book is about:

Why Rich Men Bag Beautiful Women: Genetic Programming and Sexual Selection

This book is a popular exposition of the ideas of evolutionary psychology. It explains the main concepts of 'evopsych' clearly and entertainingly (especially the idea of selection by sexual preferences) and gives the layman the necessary bases for understanding today's discoveries (especially about the genetics of behaviour) and their impact on social questions (e.g. cloning, eugenics). The hope is that readers will be more easily able to understand the latest scientific advances and specialist books or press articles if they have some grounding in key evopsych principles. Thus the book is at once for students, journalist and the general reader.

An outgrowth of sociobiology in the 1980s, evopsych brings together findings from very different disciplines -- e.g. anthropology, archaeology, biology, cognitive science, ethology, genetics and zoology -- and subjects them to compelling Darwinian interpretations (stressing natural and sexual selection). Though little known (and much caricatured) in France, evopsych is currently the most promising line of theorizing in psychology and sociology. Thanks to a worldwide effort by thousands of researchers, real progress has been made in explaining both universal human features and human differences. Above all, it explains what beauty is -- and beauty turns to exist not just 'in the eye of the beholder'; it explains who people fancy and why; and it even offers predictions as to where wars will most likely break out.

Why/Pourquoi is fully referenced, has a glossary and a history of psychology, and is complemented by a website (www.evopsy.org). The title is drawn from Voyage to the End of Time (Louis-Ferdinand Celine, 1932) -- a book cited in Why's Epilogue. A translation into English is planned.

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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