A Stupid Question I'd like to know the answer to

A question has occured to me, probably an egregious, that is to say, a stupid question, but it is a question to which I am not certain of the answer. Why do governments tax at all? Do they need to tax? In the modern world, where money is what governments define it to be, not just the money supply but the existence of money, where they pay in credit notes and not in gold or hard cash of any kind, in a system and a society where there is sufficient confidence to do this, is it actually necessary to impose taxes at all? Could they not simply define the money to exist in an account of their own, and then pass it to the accounts of the people they wish to pay? In theory I don't see why not. In practice it would cause inflation, I expect, but governments are good enough at that anyway. Would it actually destabilize the economy in such a way as to be impractible? Is it not, to some extent, what they do anyway? It would mean the destruction of a vast number of bureacratic systems and the resources they consume uselessly, it would  solve a lot of problems artificially imposed upon the normal working man and would make businesses much more productive, to the advantage of absolutely everyone.

I know I have the odd economically literate reader, so if there is an answer worth giving I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, feel free to cough politely, avoid eye contact, and talk amongst yourselves.

The Guardian on Anthropology

In the Guardian today there is an article about the Yanomami, and how one of the greatest experts on them, Napoleon Chagnon, iscriticised for describing some of the more violent aspects of their society. Some of the criticisms are from anthropologists who have also worked with them, and who dispute some of his descriptions, but the majority seems to be from people who complain thathe  is not playing the proper progressive role of the social anthropolgist, which apparently is to ignore the observed facts and describe them within the terms of the required narrative, as exploited by modern capitalism, living in harmony with nature,  having a great deal to teach, and a moral right to exclusive ownership of the land they live on, etc. The truth does not appear to matter much and this is a great shame.

The early ethnographers of the 19th and 20th centuries were concerned with learning about the societies they studied. They lived within them, not beside them, learning the language and the way they saw the world, to better understand not only what they did but why they did it. These observatiuons were framed within a number of reference paradigms, rather than being indiscriminately assessed in terms of the ethnographers own culture. The purpose of this was the purpose of all science, to allow the truth about a particular society to be discovered. One of my heroes, Bronislaw Malinowski, in the introduction to 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific', sets it out very clearly.

In the article, Chagnon is quoted as saying the following:

"In the past 20 or so years the field of cultural anthropology in the United States has come precipitously close to abandoning the very notion of science,"

"Those departments of anthropology whose members adhere to the scientific method will endure and again come to be the 'standard approach' to the study of Homo sapiens, while those that are non-scientific will become less and less numerous or eventually be absorbed into disciplines that are non-anthropological, like comparative literature, gender studies, philosophy and others,"

I shoul d say that the article is surprisingly good, and even the comments are, on the whole, worth looking at, if only to get a feel for the terms of the argument. This one, for example, describes what was once the goal of anthropology quite well.

A few months ago Anthropoly.net, a blog that I used to read regularly (when it was updated regularly) published this article lamenting the fact that Anthropology is the lowest paid and least prestigious of sciences in the US. The comments demonstrated perfectly why this is so. I left the following comment which is very similar to the Chagnon quote above:

The fact that you think anthropology can prove the superiority of big government probably goes a long way towards explaining why it is so little respected. What was once (and in part still is, I imagine) a rigorous observational science has become, to the public eye, and apparently to the academic one too, conflated with sociology, cultural studies, lit crit and generalized hokum.

I suspect that is largely the fault of those who have been doing anthropology over the last decades. They have made the public face of anthropology political rather than scientific.

Press Freedom and all that

The press like to think they are special, that they safeguard democracy, that they have specific rights and freedoms that set them apart from ‘ordinary people.’ The government is looking for ways to control the press, and ‘abuse’ is a good excuse to do it. They could just the laws they’ve already made, but apparently that isn’t enough.

That they are so looking is clear, I think. The Internet frightens them because it gives enormous power to people who are not themselves.

The freedom of the press is the freedom of all of us. Not because they use it well, in the interests of public freedom. They do nothing of the kind. Newspapers and broadcasters are large, often international corporations who want to make money, like anyone else. Journalists have a living to earn and frequently an ego to stoke. The way to make money from journalism is, as with any other business, to find a market and give it what it wants. This may mean sex and celebrities, turgid book reviews, fluffy tales of the columnists daily life pretending to be news, ill-informed ranting disguised as background or comment, support for one or other powerful interest, pictures of the footy, or even intelligent, well-researched stuff about things that actually matter. The point is that the customer does not demand truth, and so the seller has no interest in providing it.

There is a myth that the practice of journalism in the US is protected by the First Amendment. This is a myth that Hollywood is quite happy to perpetuate. (In Hollywood land journalists are always good and brave, while pharmaceutical companies are always evil. I wonder why this might be.) At the time that Amendment was passed the press as we know it did not exist. The text was intended to specifically extend the protection of speech to the printed word. It does not make journalists special.

It’s important to the rest of us that journalists, the press in general, have no more nor  less freedom than the rest of us, because they are the rest of us. We are all free to write about the world and the people around us, or anything else we choose. In Britain and other civilized countries we still are free to do it. A journalist is surely nothing more than someone who thinks of himself as one. There are plenty of people who call themselves journalists but only ever give their own opinions, or restrict their output to material that is not, by any definition, news. Likewise, many people who provide genuine, researched news stories, many bloggers, for example, do not think of themselves as journalists, and are not recognised as such by others.

A journalist, I suspect, is someone who is paid by a (large) media company to produce content for it. This has nothing to do with the public interest, freedom or anything else. The fact that the government would rather like to control them (and Cameron’s spokesmen are denying it, which tells you all you need to know), combined with the fact that they themselves would like to control those who are not them, suggests that this is just more power games, politicians and big business arm wrestling over who gets what part of our money.

The danger is not from a mild regulation of the press, but from the inevitable trade-off, the distinction between what ‘licensed’ journalists are allowed to do, and what the plebs are permitted.* The freedom of the press is our freedom, not because they defend us, but because it allows us to defend ourselves.

*There seems to be some semi-legal protection for ‘official’ journalists who refuse to disclose the sources of their information. The rest of us do not have that privilege. We don’t want the gulf to widen.

Lit Crit as the New Jazz

I have written before about a group of people who infest the world of literary and cultural appreciation. In University arts departments around the richer and freer world, there are parasites on the world of real understanding and discovery.

People like Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Susan Gubar, Sandra Gilbert, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, K.K. Ruthven, Henry Louis Gates, Judith Butler, and many more, and the ones who started it all- Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida… et al., as well as other, minor figures, some of whom I know personally because they have them in our University here, too.

This is not a phallus

I also know, personally and through their writings, many people whose knowledge and study of literature and other arts genuinely illuminate the works they discuss, clarify the background and context, and seek the deeper meanings and motivations of the writer/artist, adding to our understanding and enjoyment of them. I’m not knocking the arts or those who study them, but those who disseminate their own nasty, ignorant opinions by prostituting the object of study, and ignoring truth entirely.

These academics and soi-disant intellectuals who make their living, and who largely craft their own identity, by producing tendentious, prejudiced, under- or un-researched, barely coherent tracts about literature criticism, post-colonialism, anti-racism, equality theory, feminism or whatever happens to be their gig (any ground sufficiently fertile to allow them to be applauded by their brethren for calling other people names), make the mistake of comparing themselves with scientific researchers, and their opinions with rational truth. Others make the mistake of taking them seriously, which is what they want, of course.*

The people who produce this kind of rubbish have no conception of the gulf that separates them from real thinking, real analysis, real reasoning, real logic, real thought, real results, real truth. They genuinely believe that what they do is comparable to real academic work, and think that the contempt they receive from people who know how to think is due to ignorance or prejudice. They cannot understand the truth, and they could not accept it if they did understand it.

They themselves would not accept what I am about to say, because it detracts from their importance, but it is probably a better way of interpreting the stuff they produce:

It is not truth, in the sense of being a representation of reality. It is an expression of how they perceive something at a particular time, and words, distributed in accordance with the way they feel their idea must be expressed, are their medium. To search for truth or reason in the result is to misunderstand the work.

We do not expect a painted portrait to tell us anything much about human facial anatomy or even precisely what the subject looked like unless we are fairly certain that the painter had both the intention to produce a near-perfect likeness and the technical competence to carry out the intention. Very frequently neither of these things is true, and so we interpret the painting in accordance with other criteria, and are happy to do so. It makes sense to do so. But when we see what looks superficially like a reasoned argument, and is presented as one, supposedly containing premises, facts and logic and arriving at conclusions that may be thus identified in some way as true, we treat it on these terms, and are baffled by the fact that patent nonsense, lacking any form of reason or analysis, is treated as truth. We dismiss it.

We do not see this as a kind of riff on the writer’s feelings, which is what it is. Even so it may well have little or no value, but at least we could understand why it exists. But those who produce this stuff lie to themselves and to us about what it is, because they want to be taken seriously. And so no one knows what’s going on.

Picasso and Lucien Freud, for example, would not insist, in the face of the most manifest evidence, that what you are looking at would be useful to the police in their search if the subject went missing. But that is what lit critters do.

Their disconnected witterings are art. Good art, bad art, every man his own critic, of course. They are a form of self-expression, no more, no less. They satisfy the artist’s urge to say something in a particular manner. They are not a search for truth.

*Anyone who thinks I exaggerate should Google some of those names. Unless you've had to deal with them, as I have, you would not believe such rantings could exist in serious universities. Because these are among the star names, they are not selected outliers. Their business, as you will see, is not truth but indoctrination, the very opposite of what higher education is supposed to be for,

What is an Opinion Worth?

What someone thinks it is. You can no more decree the 'value' of an opinion than you can decree the value of a sack of potatoes. It's worth whatever value someone is prepared to give it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/19/david-mitchell-internet-trolls-graffiti

We assume that the wisdom of crowds will ensure that a fair impression is given overall – that the uncensored self-expression of hundreds of millions will tend towards the truth. Half the time it just regresses to the mean.

I wonder if he understands any of the ideas he has introduced there. I suspect not. In any case we assume no such thing. Under certain conditions to have greater confidence in the pooled thought of a group than in any one individual from that group, but most of the time all you get is a collection of opinions.

The article is about how important he is and how much more seriously he should be taken than people who just write anonymous comments. He says an internet troll’s opinion should carry no more weight than graffiti. That ‘should’ is a bit of a giveaway. He doesn’t like being criticised and is flailing around for a way to stop it happening that doesn’t sound excessively totalitarian. Inevitably there are calls, above and below the line, for some kind of control on what people can say without providing a name. Prohibition is some people’s answer to everything, sadly.

Although he writes under the name David Mitchell, I have no idea who he is, or whether that is his real name. To me he is anonymous as I am to him. I have no idea whether his opinion is based on any kind of expert knowledge that might give it a little weight. Internal evidence in the text suggests not. He just objects to people saying bad things about him.

So do we all, but the answer, I’m afraid, is not to set yourself up as an opinion-former in a major national newspaper. Anyone who has any kind of public profile, from this little blog to the comment pages of the Guardian, from Westminster to Old Trafford, passing through Hollywood on route to Hello magazine, is open to personal criticism. Communication works both ways. You tell me what you think, and I’ll tell you if I think you’re wrong. Some people will get nasty. Not everyone is nice. Not everyone cares who you think you are. Some will snipe quietly without leaving a trace. If they aren’t doing it on line they’ll be doing it in the pub, or just to themselves. The only difference is that you don’t get to find out. You delete them. You live with it, if you want people to hear your ideas.

The alternative is to shut people up by force, and that is not a good idea. In any case, you can’t stop people disagreeing with you, or thinking bad things about you. Not everyone likes you, and not everyone thinks you’re wonderful. You can’t change that, however Draconian the laws you pass.

An opinion is worth the value we attribute to it. No more, no less. I attribute little or no value to the opinion of David Mitchell because it’s clear he’s writing from a personal perspective, motivated by the chip on his shoulder. He knows little of his subject and is not interested in informing or promoting the interests of the reader. A journalist’s worthless opinion is obviously worth nothing. A priori, any journalist’s opinion is worth nothing. As a graffiti artist or a troll’s opinion is worth nothing unless it creates value for itself.

The whole article, and many of the comments, and the assumption behind it- that many people will agree with him- is no more than a self-conscious plea to be taken as seriously as he takes himself. Not an attractive posture.

In part two, I shall rant about groups who think they are special and try to protect their imagined status by making rules to exclude those who are ‘not like them.’

On Sacking Bad Teachers

I see that the idea of sacking bad teachers has come up again. It won’t happen, it never does. The unions won’t have it and the government isn’t going to pick a fight when they’ll get the blame for the resulting trouble. So I confidently predict, anyway. I would love to be proved wrong.

The fact that it is controversial to suggest not placing our children’s education in the hands of proven incompetents is quite astonishing in itself. There are many jobs that require little more than punctuality, responsibility, personal hygiene and the ability to interact socially (not that it’s necessarily easy to find that combination of skills), and there are invented public sector jobs that could be done by a performing monkey, but teaching is not one of them. In the private sector the lazy, incompetent or unnecessary are very quickly removed, and even in the public sector there is some kind of attempt to make sure that doctors, nurses, policemen and judges (for example) are capable of doing what they’re paid for, but apparently anyone can be put in a classroom and told to get on with it, and no one cares what happens.

The ability to teach schoolchildren is not really a matter of having an extensive knowledge of a subject. It helps to be familiar with and understand it to some extent, and it’s more important at the higher levels, but the real skill of teaching lies in a combination of closely related communication skills, self-confidence, preparation, knowledge of the people you have in front of you and the ability to recognise and respond to their reactions instantly. It’s a complicated process of communication, and part of that process is respect, including making it clear why you are trespassing so heavily on their time and patience. They need to understand the process they are part of.

No, it’s not rocket science, but it’s beyond the scope of quite a lot of people, and unfortunately many of them seem to be teachers.

In Spain, about whose situation I can speak with much greater knowledge, the state education system is full of incompetent teachers. There are two reasons for this, both of which would be utterly indefensible, indeed, inconceivable, if the system were actually designed for the benefit of children. The first is that state teachers are civil servants, and as such have jobs for life. It is almost impossible to remove a teacher who is not buggering boys in the bike shed. There is almost never enough will among the people who could, in theory, move to have a teacher sacked, to follow through the tedious, dense and lengthy administrative and legal rituals to get it done. No will and no interest. They would become extremely unpopular among their colleagues, not to mention in the Union.

The second reason is that the process by which they are chosen to be given that job and pension for life is not intended to assess the candidate’s competence as a teacher. For some years I ran the English department of an Academy that prepared people for the public exams that distributed these lifelong positions; not a diploma which entitled you to apply for a job, but the job itself. I got to know the system very well. I even wrote books about it. It's a terrible mess.

There are two parts to this exam- in the first a subject title, vaguely related to the study of English, is drawn from a list of 75 such subjects and you have to write about it. This is then read to a jury of more experienced teachers who mark it accordingly to a series of criteria which were not even made public until a few years ago (I would have to use my contacts to get some ideas of what they were actually looking for). The second part is to produce and explain a year plan for a specific group, including a detailed description of at least one set of lesson plans. This is also performed in front of the jury.

Guess who wrote the lesson programmes for them? And the first part is divided into sections on grammar, history, literature, didactics, socio-linguistics, and so on, with a number of subject titles in each one. If you got a subject you happened to be able to write well about you could do a good exam, otherwise you’d have to wait another couple of years. Once you’ve passed that exam and got a post there is a notional period of practice/probation, but it’s almost impossible to fail it even if you spend most of it off sick with stress.

In short, the system is not designed to find good teachers and keep them good. It doesn’t care whether teachers can teach or not. The point of the system is to be able to tick boxes in such a way that no one can be blamed when something goes wrong. I know there are lot of incompetent teachers in state schools, not only because in another existence I get paid to do what they are unable to do, but also because I put quite a few of them there.

Any country that lets its government employ bad teachers will get the youth it deserves. And that youth will grow up and let the same thing happen.

Tyrants and Witchcraft

Would be dictators know that if they can give their followers permission to kill the people they don’t like, revolution will follow by itself.

Witchhunts are always with us. They are the means by which those who secretly know they are worthless get to feel superior to the people around them who make them feel that way. Being a witch, keeping a cat, not going to church, going to the wrong church, getting out of bed with the wrong foot, smoking, condemning homosexuality, not condemning homosexuality, having eyes the wrong colour, calling a black person coloured or a disabled person crippled, not believing in global warming or whatever the orthodoxy is.

Finding reasons to declare others to belong to some category of non-person has a number of important functions. It allows those who have a deep sense of their own inadequacy and worthlessness to feel that someone else is worth less than they are. It provides a sense of identity, and divides in-groups from out-groups, which is essential to our psychology. Most people are made very anxious by not having a set of external identities to impose upon themselves.

This is why the orthodoxy that serves to separate, in their own minds, the good from the ungood, is completely arbitrary. It doesn’t have to respond to any logic, or be consonant with any underlying morality, or even be internally coherent. All it needs is to sound right at a particular moment, and then it can be used to dehumanise those we dislike. Aside from the arbitrariness of what is right and wrong, another important characteristic is that the manifestation (or suspicion) of unorthodoxy trumps any virtue or strength that the person might otherwise possess, however many and however great.

People who are not unintelligent and think themselves rational can (for example) condemn democracy/capitalism/freedom because democratic/capitalist/free societies are not perfect, while excusing the abject economic and social failure of their favourite totalitarians as minor blemishes. I don’t know where I read the story of Giuseppe the Cocksucker, but it serves as a parable:

Said Giuseppe, “I built a factory here when the mines closed. I’ve employed half the village for fifty years. I rebuilt the church and dedicated a shrine to the local Virgin. I built a high school, a library, a clinic, a sports hall. I sponsor the football club. I take out advertising on every hoarding that’s unsold, and in every edition of the town newspaper. I run a fund that pays for young people to go to university in the city. I give every couple a car and a down payment on a house when they marry. I have nurses to look after the old people when they retire. Once I sucked a cock. Ask them who I am, go on, ask them. They’ll tell you, he’s Giuseppe the cocksucker.”

So who defines the witches of the moment? The subset of those who want to have control of others by dividing them who are able to make their particular hatred popular.

It is not unusual to see pacifists display murderous fury when their ideas are challenged. And the recent fashion for the end of the world by global warming has produced a particular virulent strain of misanthropic Malthusian, be it the world government fanatics, the advocates of stone age living, or the totalitarians who would dictate every mouthful we are allowed to consume and every step we are permitted to take. Prominent politicians and journalists on national newspapers are making comparisons with paedophiles and Nazis because not everyone is convinced that we’re all going to die in the next five minutes. The UAF, with the excuse of opposing the crude and sometimes thuggish racism of the EDL and the more genteel racism of the BNP, resort to every kind of mindless brutality. They are ‘right’, so they have permission to kill and destroy. It is a very common mentality, though not always expressed in the same fashion..

I suspect that a peculiar set of circumstances make these things easier to do in England. I visit about once a year and I am always struck by new things which NORMAL DECENT PEOPLE have discovered that NORMAL DECENT PEOPLE DON’T DO.  A television programme or newspaper gives prominence to a particular point of view, or political initiative, is sufficient to start people spying reporting their neighbours, shouting at strangers in the street, and pinning medals on themselves, for something which no one would have bothered about a short while before. We (I am English in case anyone was wondering) seem to be particularly malleable, especially susceptible to taking at face value some random commentators division of people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and constructing new beliefs about ourselves and others, a new ‘them’ and ‘us’, as though they were truths cast in stone from the dawn of time.

The number of apparently unexceptionable opinions that people feel entitled to shout abuse at you, or attack you, for expressing, or just for being suspected of holding, is disturbing. The number of things it is impossible to discuss rationally appears to be growing. I wonder where it will end.

On Darwin

Having just re-read (I had sort of flicked through them both before, years ago) Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, I have a much clearer idea of what he was actually saying. There is a tendency, even among experts, to conflate ‘Darwinism’ with the theory of evolution in general, and even with the whole field of genetics. This is useful shorthand, but it can hide the differences in a way that becomes important in a subject which is often discussed more from the perspective of religion and politics than from that of science. So let’s look at what Darwin actually did.

A Disclaimer: I remind readers once more that I am not a geneticist or evolutionary biologist, any more than I am a linguistician, historian, palaeoanthropologist, indologist or any of the other things I like to chat about so breezily here. I was once a mathematician, but that was a long time ago. I state the facts as far as I know them, and quote from people who seem to know what they’re talking about the rest of the time.

Anyhow, Darwin didn’t invent the theory of evolution. Plenty of people had proposed such a theory before him. What he did that was revolutionary, and the reason his name is so closely associated with the concept, was to collate thousands of detailed and precise observations on form and behaviour of life of all kinds from all over the world, including skeletal structure, internal organs, body covering, colour, predatory, defensive and sexual behaviour, dimorphism, and history. Much of this information was his own, gathered in the course of long and difficult voyages by sea to just about everywhere- he was in Australia, Tierra del Fuego, the Pacific Islands, the Phillipines and the Galapagos, as well as many more places closer to home- and where the data are second hand he is careful to establish the competence of his informant and the extent to which the information can be trusted.

His inescapable conclusion from analysing all of these data was that all life forms change with time, that many have once been very different from how we see them now, that some have derived from an earlier common form, and that this occurs in nature because of pressure of two kinds- forms better adapted to the specific circumstances they live in tend to live longer and leave more offspring, and forms better suited to defeating rival males and attracting females tend also to leave more offspring.

That organisms can change over the generations was already well known, from experiments on short-lived insects which can be observed through hundreds of generations over a period of years, and from breeding of domesticated animals, detailed records of which exist going back hundreds or even thousands of years, but that the same thing happened in nature, without the intervention of man, was the subject of considerable doubt. Darwin effectively dispelled that doubt. And by applying the same observations to primates, he showed the very high probability that man shared a common ancestor with the extant apes, and these with the primates in general.

However, although he described clearly the behavioural and environmental pressures which bring about change in organisms, what he did not do was identify the biological mechanism by which this process occurs. He had no idea what a gene was, as they were not discovered until many decades later. Nor did he postulate anything remotely like them. He speaks of passing on individual characteristics from parent to offspring, but the nearest he comes to conceiving of genes is when he speaks of ‘gemmules’, which are poorly defined and are in any case a very long way from being genes. The theory of gemmules is not his, and when he mentions them he doesn’t sound very happy about the idea. It’s just that he had nothing else.

He also had very limited information about man. With the exception of the Neanderthals, no early hominid remains had been clearly identified at that time. All he had to go on was morphology. Nevertheless, in placing the origin of modern man in Africa he was almost certainly right.

He was wrong about certain things. I’m sure there were errors, minor ones, in some of the observations. It would be extraordinary if there were not. But his main error is perhaps the residual Lamarckism. He often refers to the inheritance of acquired characteristics, along with chance variations at birth. He had no reason at that time to imagine that only variations brought about in a particular way could be transmitted to offspring, again because he had no conception of the mechanisms involved.

The real genius of Darwin was not his foresight, nor his conceptual brilliance, but his ability to gather and analyse data on such an enormous scale, and with such attention to detail.

Apes and Humans

Back in November I posted about the monumental stupidity a group of WPians seemed determined to display when arguing whether it should be clarified when the term 'ape' was being used to include humans and when not. Most were not only shocked at the very idea that the word ape could ever be used exclusively, they treated anyone who suggested otherwise as a dangerous, ignorant heretic unfit to be considered human or to grace the ideologically pure pages of the Wikipedia. Most of it was caused, I think, by a superstitious horror of creationism, and by being too much within their own bubble. The result was, and probably still is, an article that refuses to tell you what it's about. I was not foolish enough to get involved in that debate, I just commented on it in the spirit of an anthropologist who sees behaviour that excited his urge to understanding.

I pointed out then that many palaeoanthropologists and other specialists in the field of human origins are quite happy to use the word 'ape' in an exclusive or ambiguous fashion when speaking informally, even in academic papers, and clarify, 'apes and humans', etc, when there is a need for rigour. I have plenty of example among the papers I download and try to make sense of, and I was prepared to produce them if challenged, which I never was.

One of the people on my blogroll did get involved in that argument, attempted to inject some basic common sense and a regard for the truth and the principles of research, was insulted, declared anathema and banned. I don't suppose it bothered him very much, but it was odd to watch, strangely similar to what can happen on some left-wing sites, where a calm, measured, brief and truthful remark is denounced as hate speech by some spittle-filled, radish-eyed loon who announces his desire to rip out your innards unless you freely recognise his moral superiority.

Now another chap I read every day, John Hawks, who has taught me, or at least directed me to, most of the little I know about the subject, has casually stated 'humans are not apes'. The world continues to turn. The taxonomy of Homo sapiens continues to be a subject of considerable debate, but not because a word that has no technical sense in the field is sometimes used ambiguously. We may all breathe deeply, and consider more important matters, such as how Australopithecus sediba changes things.

On Intelligence

Reading over at David Thompson’s place I find another article by someone who believes that everyone is equally intelligent. This is an idea I come across quite often, and it is worth addressing.

There are many things wrong with the idea, the first being that no one involved in the discussion, and certainly not Nina Power*, the woman who seems to have started David off, takes the trouble to explain what they mean by intelligence. It seems to mean whatever she wants it to mean. Joseph Kugelmass talks about how people (what people?) “reify” IQ tests, which is not even a straw man, but he doesn’t offer a definition himself. He offers instead a blustering, don’t worry your inferior little heads about it, line: “We’ll have to start out by getting a bit technical. The adjectival form, “intelligent” (or “brilliant” or “smart” or etc.), has its uses. Intelligence, as we use the word, refers to the ability to do a good job at complex tasks that require a high degree of abstraction. Thus, a given piece of work can be intelligent if it successfully addresses a complex problem.”

Defensive and confused, and intended to be shot down. He does at least mention abstraction, which is more than the others do. Intelligence, to me, is the ability to reason in the abstract.

I’ve known a few socialists who genuinely believe that the young mind is a tabula rasa waiting for the state’s education agents to write on it, and that it’s somehow the fault of capitalists/private schools/the Conservative party that some children turn out better than others. But the people in question were not academics pretending to be experts, and they were prepared to listen when I explained that it was rather more complex (nuanced?) than that.

The remarks and opinions of Nina Power, Lana Guinier and Joseph Kugelmass are politically derived, they are not part of a search for truth, and in the case of the first two particularly, they are culpably, deliberately ignorant. Things are not so simply because one wants them to be, and saying something doesn’t make it true. It is almost unbelievable that there are people in academic positions at prestigious institutions who need to have this explained to them.

There is a continuum of intellectual ability. Having spent 20 years teaching children, teenagers and young adults of all ages and abilities I can state this categorically, as can many others who have done the same. And 20 years of daily experience are more than anecdote, but see below.

There are not two groups, the normal who are all the same, and the subnormal who have degrees of not being like the rest of us. The Powers of this world would, I imagine, recognise that some people are so limited in their intellectual ability that they cannot understand the simplest ideas and cannot function in the world without a great deal of help. Do they think that the subnormal are damaged in some way that the normal are not, and that’s why they show variation in intelligence? Possibly they do. I will say it again: there is a continuum of intellectual ability, as there is in just about every quality associated with man. And you don’t have to take my word for it.

It will come as a surprise to the levellers but there are scientists whose research consists of more than just spouting dogma; they actually study the development of the brain in the foetus and the very young child, observing how the formation of connections among the neural pathways and synapses is related to genetic and environment factors, the nutritional and cultural context of early life, and, of course, the later ability to perform a range of mental tasks. Guess what they have found. Go on, guess. Very good, well done. The people who spend their lives studying these matters know more about them than Power and co, and Power and co are demonstrably wrong. Stimulus may well be important in the early development of the child’s brain, just as good diet can increase height, and training makes you a better footballer, but we do not all start from the same place.

This may be unfair, for some sense of fair; it may well bring about problems for the less able which others should, from common humanity, help to solve, but it’s still true.

Dr. Konczak, could, for all I know, be a socialist, desperate to  believe the same as Nina Power; he could be a racist or a crashing snob who in private life believes in the innate superiority of whites, men, or ‘people like him’ in general; he could have a child who is not up to his own intellectual level and would lie to be sure that it isn’t his fault, but none of this has influenced his work or his conclusions. It’s quite simple once you understand the principle of it.

The original thrust of David Thompson’s post was directed at the particularly ludicrous remark that Nina Power borrowed approvingly from Peter Hallward- “Everyone has the same intelligence, and differences in knowledge are simply a matter of opportunity and motivation. On the basis of this assumption, superior knowledge ceases to be a necessary qualification of the teacher, just as the process of explanation… ceases to be an integral part of teaching.”

Superior knowledge is an essential quality in a teacher, as is the ability to share that knowledge. Teaching is not some arcane art, open only to the enlightened and omniscient- I have often argued that it is a very practical business, all too easily ruined by an excess of theory- but you do have to know how to do it, and you have to possess the knowledge you are trying to impart. I imagine she is thinking of a very particular kind of ‘teaching’, which is not teaching at all, but more a kind of brainstorming. Useful at times in certain circumstances, but not to be confused with the real thing.

Intelligence is useful to a teacher, though it depends very much on the level. Training and experience are more important to a primary school teacher than intelligence, for example. At higher levels intelligence is necessary. Superior intelligence, fortunately, is not. There is no need for the teacher to be the most intelligent person in the class. If this were so, not only would I, and probably Nina Power, be out of a job, but it would be impossible for anyone to learn anything new.

 And a final note to Joseph Kugelmass and Nina Power: the Greeks did not quote Homer by heart, and Plato did not demonstrate that the uneducated could learn understand anything at all. (He found a clever slave who grasped the concept he explained. It’s called learning. We all started knowing nothing, and learnt what we were interested in or needed to know and were capable of understanding.) Educated Greeks did, at times, quote Homerjust as educated people today quote the writers they consider great, or apposite, but the mass of classical Athenians did not sit around a table of an evening with a cold beer in its hand reeling off great chunks of the Iliad. It’s dropping in stupid remarks like that without bothering about the truth, and expecting the reader to swallow them whole, as though they backed up the argument, which characterises the type of thinking criticised here. It is based on ignorance and falsehood. It is not a search for truth, it’s more a desire to convince oneself of something.

*She also believes in smashing up other people's property when she disagrees with them. You would never have imagined that, would you?

Auto da Fé

A court in Barcelona has ordered that a number of books be burnt, apparently for being written by Hitler and his henchmen. The symbolism of this would seem to have escaped them.

There is more background to this case than I can dig up, and all the links I have found are in Spanish, but the essentials of the case are these: a man called Pedro Varela who runs a bookshop in Barcelona has been jailed for selling Mein Kampf. He is not a pleasant character. The world would be a better place if he took a more relaxed attitude to diversity in his fellow man (and if he learnt a bit more history) but to lock him up for it seems a bit much. He doesn't appear to have practised or incited violence, and he is convicted only of spreading genocidal ideas, which refers again to the selling of books.

One important point in this is that the Supreme Court declared that Holocaust denial was not a criminal offence, though they took years to make the decision. On the other hand, the Law of Historic Memory brought out by Zapatero's government is a blatant attempt to legislate the truth, which is not a good sign in a democracy.

The exact reason for the destruction of the books is not clear from the article. There is a possiblility of some other motive than they themselves are illegal (there is a reference to his 'haber editado y distribuido en España sin autorización de sus titulares' which I find opaque- specifically the last two words), but the order for destruction only applies to the books related to the case, and the case is about spreading hate, not copyright or anything like that.

I don't defend Nazi ideas, neo or palaeo, as I don't defend communist ideas and the exaltation of leftwing tyrants, and I don't defend the spokesmen of the Basque terrorist movement. But I do defend the right of the people who hold them to exist, to think and speak, for the entirely selfish reason that if their right to do so is not respected, how long will mine be? And also because I like arguing with them. If it weren't for such stupid, unpleasant peoplr, how would I get to think that I'm good and clever?

(More for my own reference than the readers, I link also to this short article with a very long comments thread in which the 'home team' defends its heroes by shouting abuse and threats at those who disagree with them. Despite a few intelligent contributions, it descends into a slanging match between totalitarians who have made no attempt to listen to each other, and would just love to have the power to switch the other side off.)

Education and David Willets

It appears that David Willets, a well-educated man who is generally held to be intelligent, has said that universities should mentally knock a few points off the exam results of middle class applicants, in some kind of levelling exercise to get (yet) more state school pupils doing degrees. He talks about ‘balance’, and picking students on ‘potential’ rather than ‘performance’. He doesn’t use the expression ‘social justice’, though he might as well. He is, of course, talking nonsense, but then, he is a politician, a member of a highly unstable government that isn’t at all certain that it has real support among the electorate. (The electorate isn’t too sure, either).

Good universities did choose students on a variety of criteria, including what Willets presumably means by potential, as much as on exam results. They held interviews and entrance exams which were intended to tell them much more than what A Level results alone could. Then they made specific, personal offers of places to students. They were more or less prevented from doing this by Labour governments who thought it benefitted the wrong sort of people. Now we have a government that wants them to start doing it again, but only if it benefits the right people, who are, broadly speaking, the sort of people whose votes they can’t count on but think they might win over. Why is he wrong?

Is it a good thing that all those capable of getting a degree in a serious academic subject, and thus increasing their options in life and having a chance of being more successful, which in turn will be good for the country as a whole, should not be prevented from doing so by their parents’ lack of money? Most certainly it is. You don’t have to be a socialist to recognise that.

But reducing inequality by shooting the rich doesn’t work. As Willets obviously realizes, state education is, in general, very poor. There is much variation, and some good schools but large numbers of children in Britain with the potential to do well have to more or less educate themselves as best they can, forced as they are to put up with classmates who don’t want to learn, teachers who can’t teach and an education system that structured and operated for the benefit of politicians and trade unions rather than for the children (or the taxpayer who foots the bill).

It’s a mess, it leaves millions of children with empty heads and no hope of anything but drudgery or crime and it needs to be completely recreated from scratch. Denying any kind of decent education and opportunity in life to generations of children, deliberately condemning the poor and unfulfilled to remain that way for ever, purely for reasons of ideology, is one of the highest crimes of British socialism against the people it claims to represent. But pretending that young people who do not know things and have not demonstrated a particular competence have in fact done so is not the solution.

And David Willets is well aware of this. He simply wishes to shift the blame onto the universities, which the great majority of people haven’t attended and treat with distrust, and to avoid having to do anything meaningful, which would be difficult or, worse still, ‘brave’.

The whole idea of education needs to be completely dismantled, depoliticised and rebuilt. What it is for, how it should be paid for, what forms it should take, now and in the future, who should do it, and how to deal with the problems caused by people who don’t want it.

To be continued...

Quote of the Day- from George Steiner

“Bullshit, Profesore. The old Party-line blood-libel on human nature and on America. About which… you and I know very little. To me it sounds like the society which says to every man and woman: ‘Be what you want to be. Be yourself. The world was not made only for geniuses and neurotics, for the obsessed and the inspired. It was made for you and you and you. If you choose to try and be an artist or a thinker or a scholar, that’s fine. We will neither inhibit you nor put you on a pedestal. If you prefer to be a couch-potato, an auto-mechanic, a break-dancer, mile-runner, a broker, if you prefer to be a truck-driver or even a drifter, that’s fine too. Perhaps even better. Because it so happens that ideological passions and ascetic illumination, that dogma and sacrifice, have not brought only light and aid to this approximate world of ours. [America] is not saying, ‘Do not better yourself.’ It is saying: ‘Go after… what fires your soul… Move up the ladder, if you can… because the desire to live decently, to give your family a comfortable home, to send your children to schools better than those you attended yourself… is not some capitalist vice, but a universal desire.’ …America is just about the first nation and society to encourage common, fallible, frightened humanity to feel at home in its skin.”

I had never read George Steiner, because I had always assumed him to be one of those idiot lefties, like Shaw or Saramago, for whom the writing of fiction is not an attempt to create something worth reading, some new character or motive or image that has not existed before, an object of some aesthetic value that might give pleasure or intellectual stimulus to others, and satisfaction to the creator, but an exercise is repeating beneath a ham-fisted veil the things they think that, if we hear them often enough, we might start to believe.

It turns out I was wrong. Maybe I had him mixed up with someone else. In any case he is actually a genuine writer, in that he writes because he has something to say, and he knows how to say it. I read ‘Proof and Three Parables’, an admittedly pretentious title for a small collection of short stories, each of which takes an idea, in itself worth expressing, and writes a story around it. This matters, because ideas, clever images, are not themselves stories, and more people know how to come up with a clever image than know how to use it in a story, or any other medium.

Steiner does, and I am delighted to prove myself wrong. I’ll be digging up some more of his stuff.

Australians: The Observer Speaks

Via The Englishman I was pointed to this article in the Observer, which is a long, ignorant stream of nonsense about Australian aborigines. It's really not worth reading. Among other things, he asks this question, which led me to leave the following comment, and I thought it was worth making into a post.

It's difficult to believe that anything can pass down unchanged, though, for a thousand generations. Is that really possible?

No, it isn't.

These stories, fascinating as they undoubtedly are, are no more a description of anything real than the book of Genesis or the Works and Days or the Mahabharata. Over a very few generations the stories change out of all recognition, at least with regard to any useful details. They serve a religious function, justifying certain behaviours and outlawing others; an identifying function, giving people a sense of themselves and their history and importance; an entertainment function, the evenings can be very long and tedious there; a political function, giving a natural and unanswerable rightness to the customs of the group, which is very useful to those who want to control it.

Every change in the leadership, every battle won or lost, every time a part of the group fought with another and left to make it's own way, every migration, every alteration of the accepted circumstance, needs a new set of foundation myths, which some- call them shamans, call them politicians- will be happy to provide. No, these stories, myths, customs, laws etc have not survived intact through 1,000 generations.

I know it's a bit much to expect a journalist to consult someone who knows something about the subject before writing an article, but a bit of input from an anthropologist would have stopped him making an idiot of himself. Or, indeed, a bit of thought.

There have been humans in Australia for at least 40,000 years, that much is true, but linguistic and other evidence suggests very strongly that for much of that time they were concentrated in the northwest, close to the coast. A thousand generations ago the ancestors of 'John', who, despite being an adult Australian educated by missionaries speaks English like a Hollywood Indian of the 1950's (not the only example of casual racism in the article), certainly did not live anywhere near Alice Springs. It is highly unlikely that anyone did.

Why does he think that 'no other humans can claim this'? As I have said, 'John''s tribe can't claim it anyway, but people have lived in East Africa since there have been people, and in Southern Africa for far longer than they have lived in Australia.

Better told, it would have made a good story, but no more than that. There is nothing it can tell us.

Willy Toledo: We Have Them Over Here, Too

You won't have heard of Willy Toledo. I hadn't either until last week. He turns out to be both a B-list actor and a communist, so you would expect anything he says to be nasty narcissistic twaddle. And you would not be disappointed.

Following the death of the Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata after a hunger strike, this paragon of virtue and clear thinking declared that Zapata was just a common criminal, that the so-called political prisoners in that paradise island were nothing more than terrorists and traitors and that Cuba is a model to be followed by other countries (perhaps if N Korea were to follow the Cuban model the sum of human happiness might be increased slightly, but I would advise other countries to leave it well alone).

The press reported these ramblings (he's a celebrity, after all, so what he says is important) and he was, not surprisingly, criticised. Rather than reflect on the rightness of his words, or even defend them properly, he started whining about the press ganging up on him and denying him the right to free speech. Yes, indeed, a man who has the national media hanging on his every word complains that his right to free speech is being compromised because some people (including me) have dared to disagree with him and this in the context of a discussion about a country which uses brutal force against those try to speak freely, and a man who starved himself to death rather than recognise that Fidel could tell him what to think. Toledo also thinks that comparable human rights abuses take place in Spain every day, which I take to mean that not taking people like him seriously is broadly similar to murdering thousands, imprisoning many more for daring to stand up to you, and condemning your entire country to 50 years of poverty, misery and effective slavery. Given the egos these people have that is probably what he does mean.

The official press in Cuba quickly started planting articles like this one, which creates a criminal past for Zapata, and a touching tale of how he was given the best medical care in an attempt to save him from himself. That's probably what Toledo was quoting, but it's quite obviously made up, in the same way that the figures for longevity and literacy, which place Cuba among the top half-dozen countries in the world, are simply invented by Fidel. Who's going to question them?

For better reflections on Cuba, including comments on the life and death of Orlando Zapata, see this and this.

The Spanish Communist Party has defended Toledo, of course, and complained that he is quiet right and its very beastly and repressive of us to tell him he's wrong. Amazing how liberal these tyrants can become when it's their freedom that's in question (not that anyone is trying to stop him speaking, they are just pointing out that he talks cobblers).

The English Wikipedia page on Willy Toledo consists at the moment of a very brief biography, a filmography and this rather splendid paragraph, which I reproduce in full because I'm sure it'll soon be removed (rightly, as it's not encyclopaedic). I didn't write it, but I have said similar things before about people like him:

"Mr. Toledo is a supporter of the communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, which he considers "a model to follow". Surprisingly he never considered moving to the politically oppressed and economically ruined island. Instead he enjoys the luxuries of capitalism and democracy in Spain, where he has become a wealthy actor and is free to express his opinions without fear of being imprisoned, tortured or killed.

According to some of his critics[,][1] he is just a vulgar example of a hypocritical scum, which would never accept living under the oppression of the communist Cuban regime he so outspokenly defends.

In March 2010, in a round table in support of Sahara independence groups, celebrated in Madrid Spain, Mr. Toledo declared that Orlando Zapata Tamayo was merely a common criminal and not a dissident. He added that "all political prisoners in Cuba were not dissidents but people who had committed terrorist acts against the Cuban Government, acts that constitute treason against the Homeland and a bunch of crimes". He also declared in the same meeting that "the Cuban Government is a victim of a sort of paranoid persecution" by the Western democracies and the international community.^[1] He then opined about the Castro regime by saying that «with its defects and virtues, it is a model to be followed in many aspects"."

Sorry most of the links are in Spanish, but those of you who can read them will find it very rewarding.

Education is for Children; Is it hard to Understand?

A few remarks about schools, mostly things I have said before, but a bit more succinctly, and inspired by this, and this, as well as my general daily experience of idiots who think they know how education should work.

Education is supposed to benefit the children. The fact that teachers make a living from it is great for them, but it-s not the point of it.

Education should not be compulsory. Offer it to those who want it. If this causes other problems then so be it; they are better addressed outside of the schools.

Education is a fairly simple process at its most basic. It consists of instilling a number of skills and a certain amount of essential knowledge. There-sª a lot more if time and circumstance allows, but that-s more than most people get.

Education is not well-entrusted to left-wing pseudo-intellectuals who neither know nor care about the reality of teaching nor the value of education.

I also offer you this, in which Natasha Walter is astounded to discover that teenaged boys are interested in sex; a brilliant example of how to build a thesis from a couple of anecdotes about something which has nothing to do with the point of the story, and a few ideas cobbled together from what people are saying down at the wine bar.

This is great: I can see why some are arguing that the way forward really rests on creating more opportunities for women in pornography.

I-m almost tempted to agree with her, but I don-t think that was the idea.

ªMy keyboard has just changed all the symbols around and I can-t find the apostrophe. I have no idea how this can happen.

Bullfighting at the Times

The Times has an article about a young bullfighter who is going to fight six bulls on his own in his hometown this spring. It’s not very well informed, but at least it seems to recognise this, and it tries to quote sources it thinks are sound. It isn’t particularly successful, but it doesn’t talk opinionated rubbish from a position of complete ignorance.

The article itself seems to think it’s more significant than it is. A five-year-old in the ring is a circus, a 16-year-old, if he’s any good, is a bullfight. He is a full matador, although he took the ‘alternativa’ in Mexico so he isn’t really considered as such in Spain. Many bullfighters have been far more successful than Jairo at that age, it’s not something particularly notable, although it’s less common now.

And it’s not so unusual for a bullfighter to kill six bulls on his own. It’s true that it is usually done by matadors at the height of their popularity but he is doing it now for a very simple reason- he can’t get contracts and so his father has bought him the bulls to generate publicity.

Many of the commenters, on the other hand, are quite happy to reveal their stupidity in public. Many who understand bullfighting don’t like it, a perfectly respectable position, but if you don’t know anything about it keep your opinion to yourself. Not only because I don’t want to hear you, but mainly because you look like an idiot.

Several of them call it a sport, only so they can then say that it isn't. Well, they're quite right, but no one who knows bullfighting would claim that it was. It's not even a sport in the sense that hunting is. The bullfight is a spectacle, an art. To call it a sport is to show that you don't understand it.

We are told that if the tourists stopped going the whole thing would grind to a halt. Fortunately this is wishful thinking on the part of the antis. The fiesta is as healthy as it's ever been. Yes, there is some opposition, but most people in England don't like football and many would like to see the back of it because of the chaos it generates in their neighbourhoods every Saturday and the poor example it sets to the young, but football is not about to disappear.

Another thing they like to believe is that it does not require courage to stand in front of a bull. It does. It isn't supposed to be a fair fight, the point of it is to kill the bull. To kill a bull from the front with a sword you have to tire its neck muscles to keep its head down, and temper and control its charge and horn movements. Every part of the bullfight has this as its end. No part of it has the purpose of torture, humilliation or causing suffering. If it's done properly the bull does not suffer, though it dies of course.

I quite understand that there are people who don't like bullfighting, and some genuinely think it should be banned to protect the bulls (which would immediately cease to exist, but there you are). But you can't argue with the higher ignorance, so I haven't commented over at the Times.