LUKE O’FARRELL: g, Mr Brand! What is it and why is it so important?
CHRIS BRAND: What is g? Probably the ability to handle (e.g. speed of handling, esp. taking in) symbolic information – words, numbers, musical notation, pictographs, graphics. (For more, see Chapters 1 and 2 of my book, which is available free at The g Factor.) Sex and Love and God are of course the most important things. But nobody seems much able to measure them – to detect their existence in ways that make for scientific advance. (Even the most prosaic of them, sex, is today little better understood in its psychological aspects than in Freud’s time: for example, the causes of sexual orientation remain largely unknown and sexual perversions remain largely untreatable.) God is Love is God no doubt; but the equation doesn’t so far crack into anything else.
Strangely, last century (c. 1905), general intelligence became measurable (in France from Binet, in Britain from Spearman and Burt). Though post-1945 red-socialists hated this, having by then decided their big and oh-so-convenient cause was anti-Hitlerism (which it never had been in the 1930s), g remained the deciding factor in all empirical social-scientific research, routinely accounting for three times as much variance as did “social class”. g is as near as we are going to get to important features of the human condition by scientific/rational means. If I may quote myself (1987): “g is to psychology what carbon is to chemistry.” Without taking g into account, education (as distinct from rote learning) is impossible – as under socialism today (see Chapter 4 of The g Factor).
Please describe how you g’d up Edinburgh University. Who turned off the Scottish Enlightenment?
Because Maggie Thatcher had let the left march through the institutions,* including universities, while she concentrated on the economy (and smashing the union robber barons), no one could ever get state grants for work on IQ and heredity – me included. So I was never “flavour of the month” with E.U. Then Wiley came, late in the day, to realize my book was dynamite and de-published it (April, 1996). I fought my corner, thinking fans of free speech would have to join me; but few turned up for the fight. Eventually, Edinburgh University’s left-wing Chaplain (who had joined in Anti-Nazi League protests) noticed I had defended a Nobel Prize winner who faced jail in Maryland for modest paedophilia with one or two of his 48 adoptive children (brought in from Papua New Guinea with full consent of their biological parents). As the red-tops bayed for my blood (October, 1996), the University decided it had had enough of me.
*Being educated as a scientist, and not a historian, and perhaps also because she was a woman, Mags never seemed to have proper appreciation of the vast and unprecedented scale of her parliamentary majorities. Thus by 1983 we got from her, very sadly, “The National Health Service is safe in our hands.”
The Scottish Enlightenment never had much to do with Edinburgh University – a Presbyterean institution bullied by local dominies and their flocks which couldn’t even bring itself to give David Hume a job (he worked as librarian at the High Court’s Faculty of Advocates). In my case, the University tried various wheezes to help me – as shown by the fact I wasn’t sacked till August, 1997. First there were “inquiries” which cleared me. Then the Principal called in favours from Oxford University Press to get my book republished. (It was at this point the Chaplain and other lefties got frenziedly busy scouring my emails and website to see how to bring me down.) Then the University negotiated early retirement (with a suitable pension) for me – but a mole leaked the plan to the press before it could be put to me. Even then, the University’s Tribunal, over three months, only found me guilty of the University’s charges (disruption, disrespect, damage etc.) in five of its nine judgments.
Basically, I don’t know how much the Uni did to maintain Enlightenment values. Funnily, it never just told me to shut up (the successful policy used more recently by Macquarie U. against Andrew Frazer, by Leeds U. against Frank Ellis, by Imperial College against Armand Leroi and by Chicago U. against Bruce Lahn); but we were all pretty naïve about how to deal with leftist terror in 1996/7. Whether I would actually have agreed to shut up if talked to seriously, I can’t say. I’m something of an optimist; and, in 1996, having my own “website” and arguing with the left was quite exciting. (My only previous politicking had been as Edinburgh Secretary for “Peace through Nato” – fighting the Cold War for the Ministry of Defence against the likes of Alastair Darling and Glenys Kinnock.) What I can say definitely is that the University and its academics did nothing publicly to support me: Principal Dame Stewart Sutherland (today in the House of Lords) continued to insist to journalists that he had never read The g Factor (even though my Faculty boss, Provost Neil McCormick, told the Principal and me privately that the book was rather good).
A particular problem emerged during my Appeal in 1998 before a Scottish High Court judge. The University argued it had no more duty to support free speech by its employees than did a biscuit factory (a case involving United Biscuits was expressly cited), and Justice Gordon Coutts QC deemed the University to be right. Mrs Thatcher’s efforts to ensure free speech in Britain’s increasingly “liberal”-left-leaning universities had apparently been worthless, at least once the lawyers got seriously to work.
Full details of the Tribunal and Appeal and my finally eliciting £12K from E.U. coffers are at my archives.
Who is William McDougall and why is he important?
William McDougall was British psychology’s greatest scholar – born to a Scottish industrialist father in Oldham. After holding posts in Cambridge, London and Oxford, he took the Chair of Psychology at Harvard in the 1920s. There he embarked on a great battle for hearts and minds with behaviourist John Watson – busy telling eager mums-to-be that they could improve their babies by “conditioning.” McDougall, an instinct theorist, hereditarian and race realist, lost the battle in the media and retired till his death in 1938 to lick his wounds at Duke University – where he multiplied his image problems with the left of those days by supporting research into parapsychology. The discovery of Auschwitz etc. and the American and Russian WWII victory spelled the suppression of eugenic ideas, the arrival of behaviourism* big-time and the end of McD’s reputation – despite his (devoted, English) wife being assured by psychologists in 1938 that he would never be forgotten.
For more, see my summary of McD’s life and times.
*Russia had been developing Pavlovian “classical conditioning” while America developed Watsonian-Skinnerian “operant conditioning.” By 1945, psychologists in both countries believed a utopia of social improvement based on conditioning was just around the corner.
Hans Eysenck once dedicated a book to his children “in the hope that reversion to the mean has not dealt too harshly with them”. Please explain the joke and describe Eysenck’s personality and importance as a psychologist. Why do you think he pretended he had no Jewish ancestry?
Let’s say IQ is 50% heritable. Thus my wife and I will pass on genetically only 50% of our difference in IQ from the population mean. We may provide a bit more to our children via a stimulating, nurturing, well-arranged, high-IQ environment. But even so, most bright parents are doomed to be a bit disappointed in the majority of their children. Conversely, dull parents will tend to be impressed by their kids, modern schooling etc.
Hans was above all a great realist after exposure when young to every kind of human folly. He deplored his mama’s divorce and remarriage and thought adults frankly ludicrous; he had a teacher in Germany who tried to force him to sing, so Hans actually bit him; he stood silent and mocking among the fevered crowds at Hitler rallies; he found London University demanding that he have Latin if he was to study physics, thus leading him to convert to psychology; he found 1930s London full of pacifists, and the RAF wouldn’t train him to fly; and, after the War, social psychology was disgracefully taken over by the left (which Hans knew from Berlin to be quite as horrible as the right).
In becoming, as he called himself in the title of his autobiography, Rebel with a Cause, Hans was doubtless assisted by the quiet confidence arising from his being handsome and sportive (he was German Junior Tennis Champion c. 1932) – qualities which allowed popularity and improvement even on the works of the mighty London School leader and scholar who preceded him, Sir Cyril Burt. By 1954, Hans was denouncing “authoritarianism of the left”; in 1969 he stood by his former student, the heroic Arthur Jensen, on race and IQ; and by 1973, he wrote – while Penguin’s best-selling author – The Inequality of Man. Hans was a brave intellectual who sacrificed quite a lot using his showmanship and factor-analytic and verbal gifts for the sake of differential psychology. (He had his house daubed as a “vivisectionist”; and one of his children needed a name change to get her the “A” Grade at A-Level predicted by her school rather than the Fail awarded previously by an Irishman apparently disgruntled at Hans accepting IQ in Éire to be below par.) Hans was also charming, ultra-civilized and an astonishingly good listener; and he stayed extremely fit – playing tennis most days (allowing the Maudsley Hospital to stay well ahead of the pack in inter-hospital competitions).
Despite his hereditarianism and eugenicism, Hans kept on wanting to help people by more conventional psychological means. But he admitted the complete failure of behaviour therapy with sexual problems; and his hopes in his last years that diet would improve IQ proved wildly over-optimistic (except of course for people who are actually iodine-deprived [suffering goitre etc.]). Still, he did not, like the London School’s founder, Sir Francis Galton, turn in old age to smoking cannabis and scouring the works of Shakespeare for anti-democratic quotations. This may in part have been because he had been lucky in love with his delightful second wife, Sybil, the daughter of an Austrian concert violinist.
Anyhow, Hans proved irreplaceable as a leader of the London School: Charles Murray [of The Bell Curve] is essentially an economist, so unable to offer wide-ranging psychological leadership; thus the best-known and most-fêted hereditarian psychologist of recent years has been Harvard’s Steven Pinker – a late convert (at least in public) who, though recently admitting Jewish genetic superiority in IQ (as he easily can, as a Jew himself), has still to “come out” on the major Black-White question (and he never mentions Hans).
Hans had a Jewish grandmother on his mother’s side and a Jewish stepfather (whom he surely hated). Thus he was not Jewish according to Jewish criteria – whatever the Nazis may have said. (More about Hans.) Funnily enough, it emerged only recently that the other mighty London School scholar and hero, Arthur Jensen, also had partly Jewish ancestry.
Eysenck was very hostile to Freud and it’s surprising to discover that you aren’t. Why not?
When it got to the 1990s without a single sexual perversion explained or treated and I came across a methodologically excellent London study of twins showing low heritability (17%) for homosexuality, I concluded that a century of mainstream academic psychology had been a flop re sex, and thus that Freud was probably right to trace our sex lives and problems back to “the family romance” – the key Freudian concept with which I’d always had sympathy, recalling my early Oedipal jousts with my own (adoptive) papa.
I had no sooner announced my conversion (in a book review) when an ancient mystery was solved. The biggest simple objection to Freudianism had alway been the criminality of men – who, according to Fredian theory, should have stronger consciences due to wanting to ensure against castration (whereas girls believe they have lost their willies already...). But c. 1991 it turned out (in blood group studies in Liverpool and Kent) that one child in ten is not the biological offspring of the man in the house it calls daddy. At the same time, the greater orgasmicity of women with their lovers became known to be associated with getting pregnant. Bingo! – Men were perhaps indeed the more conscientious sex, as Kingsley Amis always maintained.
It was as I made such non-feminist points that I acquired in Edinburgh the main body of enemies, the feminasties (led by two Jewish women, since you ask, a Beloff and a Cohen – both of whom had attended parties in my home), who would eventually work hard to pull me down over what I said about race, IQ and paedophilia’s usual harmlessness.
Feminists continually proclaim that “Biology is not destiny”. Do you think their own biology contradicts them?
Of course. It was Eysenck who first put his finger on the big (one standard deviation) sex difference in tender-mindedness vs psychoticism. In December [2006], I saw in the Torygraph that 75% of men like to look at pornography sometimes, whereas 75% of women are simply horrified by the thought of their man doing that and have no interest in porn (magazines intended to provide porn for women in the 1990’s ended up selling mainly to gays). The famous “double standard” is also a human universal, I believe, since a man’s infidelities were (at least pre-AIDS) much less disastrous for a family than a woman’s.
I think current research in genetics and neurology will confirm my politics, but I also think it will give huge power to authoritarian governments. Are you worried too?
I fear you cannot have a lot of different-natured people living together without using discipline and kindred tricks – as Rev Dubya Bush and Rev Bliar have been learning in the aftermath of their overthrow of Madman Insane.
My sense is that, since Thatcher, the pressure on unions has been maintained by the import of modern slave (i.e. immigrant) labour. I guess this is unstoppable (at least without ending welfarism and forcing people back into having children to help in their old age). So authoritarianism will inevitably increase – not least against race realists and others who question the religion of PeeCee-MultiCulturalism. As it becomes tainted and indefensible, Multi-Culturalism may transmogrify into Integrationism to try to buy off criticism from what remains of the right. But the left will soon interpret Integrationism to mean that school busing should be used get Black kids into White schools; and one Black Harvard sociologist, Orlando Patterson (in his book, Rituals of Blood), already proposes that efforts be made to find/compel White spouses for Blacks (so as to expand Blacks’ “social networks,” useful to employment prospects as these networks could supposedly be....). So authoritarianism will rise unless perchance the whole lying PeeCee, low-IQ-worshipping house of cards is swept away – perhaps starting with the pathetically self-enfeebled Christians at last insisting they should not be obliged positively to help homosexuals [e.g. in “gay” adoption]. (But don’t bet on these sexless non-breeding twerps who have been more concerned to supply their “churches” with cheap gay & lesbian “ministers” than to back the God of Love or even the Love of God.)
Which slave empire will win? Answer: presumably China because the Chinese have so many genes for the orderliness needed for rice-growing. (The rice grower’s water comes principally from the sides, from rivers flooding, not from above; so he needs neighbours to cooperate by keeping their drainage channels clear.)
Where do political correctness, anti-racism and feminism come from? Why have white societies fallen prey to them so easily?
They are all forms of advancing or at least appeasing underdogs – which is why they are still thought of as being of the left even though they do nothing for the basic working class (to which 53% of Brits still say they belong – BBC 24 News, 25 i 2007). Previously, White (and all other) societies provided smooth hierarchy maintenance by means of religion. PeeCee – speaking gently about minorities – was introduced by Lenin and Mao years before it arrived in the West.
Why have hierarchies? We are Homo hierarchicus and all our most successful large-scale operations (armies, newspapers, hospitals) are firmly hierarchical, with IQ providing the backbone of the hierarchy.
What is strange is that Christianity does not revive in the West even though it has proved the only religion to be genuinely popular world-wide – even in China (which sports both official and unofficial Catholic churches). (Islam has most appeal to sex maniacs, male chauvinists, women who hate drunkenness, and others who are not, like so many touchingly guilt-prone Whites, usually two drinks under par.) Maybe Orthodoxy will revive as Russia lifts off on the strength of its oil and gas revenues? – It deserves to, after its brave resistance to Communisim (Stalin tore down 90% of its churches).
Stephen Jay Gould, who wasn’t a psychologist or a geneticist, became hugely famous and influential as a preacher of “Race Does Not Exist” and “IQ Tests Measure Nothing But Evil White Male Prejudice”. He gets 119 hits on the Guardian ’s website, while Chris Brand gets two, one of which is for an article attacking him. Any comments?
“It’s the economy, stupid!” No-one wants to question the liberal-left post-1945 settlement when the economy is burbling along quite nicely. In particular, those people who do dislike the semi-socialist state are hardly likely to want to allow state eugenics. Hence my own longstanding support for Family and Freedom. But even backing the family is hard when liberal-leftism has left some 50% of kids without a traditional family, and when 2.7 million Brits are supported in their “disability” by the nanny state rather than needing to make themselves useful and agreeable to those around them.
Funny, I thought people would read The g Factor and wake up; and when the book got favourable reviews in Nature and New Scientist (in May, 1996) I thought I was home and dry – which is one big reason I got cocky enough to stand up the E.LU., the Anti-Nazi League, Esther Rantzen and most of my colleagues. But once a book has been dropped in the toilet, few are personally keen to get it out. Like, I confess, I have never read Mein Kampf – chiefly for the simple reason I wouldn’t have wanted some nice young lady librarian to see me borrowing it. Again, I had never read Harvard Marxite Stephen Jay Gould until I came to write my own book – I contented myself with the negative reviews of The Mismeasure of Man by Art Jensen and Sandra Scarr and just hoped Gould would soon prove to have somehow sunk without trace...
Of course, I blame the the right and “liberals” for doing little to stand up for free speech or for me in particular. But, as you see in Bush, Cameron, Merkele [sic] and Sarkozy, the right hardly exists any more. And nationalists and liberals have failed to make as yet that common cause which could alone resist neosocialism.
In your review of David Duke’s My Awakening you correctly note that Jews have contributed strongly to both sides of the debate about race and intelligence. But is it not clear that Jews like Marx, Boas, Gould et al have been vastly more influential and received vastly more help from other Jews than Hans Eysenck, Michael Levin and Arthur Jensen?
I’d have thought Freud, Einstein and Milton Friedman did a lot for the West in the C20 – as Disraeli had countered egalitarianism in the nineteenth. The late Alfred Sherman, Bernard Levin and Sir Keith Joseph were “sine qua nons” of Thatcherism. And if anyone solved “the problem of induction” which had dogged Western philosophy, it was surely Sir Karl Popper (a most enjoyable philosopher to read, I found in my leisure time after being sacked).
Anyhow, after the Holocaust the Jews seem understandably to adopt the twin track policy of racism/nationalism in Israel and multiculturalism in the West – and the latter proved more saleable than they could ever have envisaged as Blacks, Muslims and Mexicans streamed in. One expects intellectuals to be over-represented at the cutting edge as new ideas sweep in, wouldn’t you think?
You also write in the review that the “over-involvement of Jewish intellectuals in revolutionary and welfarist politics was triggered by the pogroms of late-nineteenth-century eastern Europe which even saw all Jews banished from Moscow in 1890.” Isn’t your failure to discuss what “triggered” the pogroms an example of your weakness as a historian of Jewish-gentile relations?
I’m happy to accept Niall Ferguson’s interesting, detailed and fair-minded presentation of ethnic tensions in Eastern Europe of the past in his 2006 The War of the World. (Isaac Bashevis Singer is also a great read – I have never seen his sweet picture of Polish Jewry criticized.) Jews were forbidden from so many areas of life that they necessarily took to commerce and money-lending, with all the unpopularity these things can bring in hard times (and times were hard in late C19 Eastern Europe as cheap American and Canadian wheat poured in). The Romans were admirers of the Jews, you know – at least once they’d suppressed the Josephus AD70 revolt.
You praise the huge Jewish contribution to Thatcherism in your review. Margaret Thatcher’s government was a spivocracy that strengthened the race laws, accepted huge sums in secret from foreign criminals, laid the foundations of Blairism by (inter alia) importing advertising into politics, and gave Rupert Murdoch licence to lay waste to our culture. Would it not be better to hush up the Jewish role in all that?
I think you'll find the “spivs” came under Mr Major. The key anti-racist legislation was surely Labour’s of 1967 and 1976. Huge sums? Blairism, i.e. NuLabour, was surely the product of the ingenious brain of Mandy Mandelson. I still have my Times golf umbrella from the days of Murdoch standing up to the print unions at Wapping. Anyhow, I never heard of Murdoch being Jewish or being much influenced by anyone but his nice young East Asian wife. Evidently a young tearaway like you does not remember the pre-Thatcher days of Britain being “The Sick Man of Europe”! – By 1978, I was perfectly happy to think of emigrating to the (then still un-Thatcherized and poor) city of Dublin.
I would advise you to think of the Jews as just like the French and Americans: great nations with a deficient interest in cricket.
I have an essay about Hitler and the Jews, called “Liberating the Past from the Future? Or the Future from the Past?” which I will gladly send as an attachment to anyone interested.
For my diary/blog over the crucial months when Edinburgh LUniversity decided to proceed against me, Sep.-Dec. 1996, see Brand news (which ends with a summary till that time of “the affair of The g Factor”). I especially enjoyed re-reading this bit:
William McDougall (1906, Sociological Papers) was surely among the first to suggest granting family allowances in proportion to family income in view of the urgent need for intelligent leadership in every walk of public life; and in the 1930’s he lived in hope that versions of his scheme were being implemented (e.g. by Sir William Beveridge who introduced family allowances for his distinguished staff of academics at the London School of Economics – if not with the proportionality to their own salary differences that McDougall wished). However, the idea did not catch on; and child allowances for university teachers were ended in Britain (by the Labour Party) in (I seem to recall) 1969. [Recently, a similar proposal – for generous proportional tax reductions for each dependent child – has been made by Stanley Burnham, 1993, “America’s BiModal Crisis: Black Intelligence in White Society”, 3rd edition, Foundation for Human Understanding, Athens, Georgia. However, the history of the “poll tax” in Britain is not encouraging: this flat-rate tax led to the end of Mrs Thatcher’s government because it was insufficiently re-distributive for demotic tastes.]
Any last words for our readers?
A parting word for would-be race realists? Yes, don’t rely on “liberals” until they offer a definite deal. And read the original European racists, Kant, Hume and Darwin (and the modern ones, McDougall, Eysenck, Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, Levin and myself) and still be prepared to be a “modern atheist” whose every word will be greeted with illiteracy, innumeracy and amazement far worse than David Hume had to endure.
Never fear: the future lies with the race realism and hierarchicalism of the Chinese and Indians.* The hereditarianism and love of Western classical music of these groups (you will virtually never see a Black, Paki or Mexican in the concert hall) may inspire them to preserve at least some small breeding population of Whites as a genetic pool of creativity....
*My book estimates the IQ of the Chinese as above 110; and the Indians, though having low average IQ, have many millions of people above IQ 110 thanks to the assortative mating dictated by the Hindu caste system providing an especially wide range of IQs.
Note: Chris Brand’s intellectual autobiography, covering his development and advancement of hereditarian ideas during his 35 years at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, can be found at Brand for the Burning.