Monday, December 06, 2010

 

Brand for the Burning!

Or: How I Became a ‘Scientific Racist’, a ‘Sex Realist’ and ‘The Paedophile’s Friend’ — and was thus censored by virtually everybody, suspended from teaching by edinburgh university and witch-hunted for 14 months by the ‘liberal’-left

— The Bumper Book of Brandiana, including an intellectual history and key battles, 1st edition, 1997

BY CHRIS (‘Mine’s a peach brandy’) BRAND, M.A. (oxon.), [a.k.a. ‘Congo Chris’]

INDEX

1. It started with a dream — my war

2. Oxford Psychology, 1962-65 — behaviourism versus nativism

3. I become a hereditarian, 1965-68 — the criminal mind

4. I return to the dreaming spires, 1968-69 — ‘On Aggression’

5. I see my first bull-fight, 1969-70 — Arthur Jensen is psychology

6. The Burt disaster, 1970-80 — Kamin, Gillie and Dorfman

7. I meet the mighty, 1976-79 — NATO Conference on Intelligence and Learning

8. Fame at last! 1980-82 — reviewed in ‘Nature’ (News & Views)

9. Snuffing my way to San Diego, 1983 — ‘Expert Adviser’ to US Navy

10. Where do I belong? 1984 — ‘The Galton’ or the British Psychological Society?

11. Dimensions of personality, 1983-94 — the ‘Big Five-or-Six’

12. The needs of youth, 1983-90 — The Structural Psychometrics Group

13. Sniper Brand, 1980-95 — vs Billig, Bruner, Lewontin, Schiff, R. Sternberg et al.

14. The Quotes, 1984-96 — ‘Personality, Biology & Society’

15. Race is back, 1982-95 — Richard Lynn and Phil Rushton turn the screw

16. The Irish poet, 1988-9 — battling with Piaget

17. Eugenics is back, 1990 — The Pioneers

18. Sex is back, 1990-1995 — giving Freud my little finger

19. The nigger in the woodpile, 1992 — how I (first) upset the whole school

20. Realism is back, 1992-1995 — ‘g’ as the answer to behaviourism, constructivism and the comprehensive ‘schools’

21. Basic Instincts are back, 1993-1995 — ‘eros’, more sex, and ‘maternos’

22. ‘Repellent and obnoxious’, 1996-7 — de-publication, suspension and witch-hunting

23. Gunfight at OK Corral, 1996- — the unconcluded battle with PC for my academic life

24. epilogue — Did it have to be me?






1. It started with a dream

As a fresher at Oxford University, I didn’t know much about sex. It was 1962, after all. As the English sex-realist poet, Philip Larkin, wrote:

Sex was invented in 1963

A little bit too late for me.

Anyway, though only 19, I was married and the experimental approach was thus not open to me. I had made my somewhat premature bed — fortunately with a leggy lovely who had been her school’s dux in her year, so it all felt OK — and I would have to lie in it.

However, a fellow Oxford student (a classicist, not a psychologist) told me that boys’ dreams about guns said a lot about their personalities; and life eventually taught me that he was — as I had immediately suspected — correct.

My moderately recurrent dream was this. Actually, it was more often a daydream — I am not a big dreamer. I have been left behind as a sniper in a French village as the Brits temporarily withdraw. My job is simple: to wait for the Nazis’ ‘top brass’ to appear and to take out a few of them before beating my own retreat. To sustain myself until that moment comes, I can work for the Nazis — though not of course giving anything away. I must master personal survival skills for that time when I must live in a road-side dug-out waiting for the cavalcade of the Big Noises to appear. Then I will do my Sarajevo-1914-style bit.

Why am I a sniper? I am proud of my long rifle and my skill with it. I love my country. I hate the FatCat with the medals who has misled his countrymen — our Saxon blood brothers who were supposed to help us fight the likes of French emperors and Russian czars, just as they had long ago helped cut the Pope down to size by taking over the ‘Holy Roman Empire’. Yet, chiefly, I am seizing a remote option on glory. Naturally a puny boy, I welcome the chance to show I can still make a contribution [as the modern phrase puts it].

And do I succeed? Well, yes, I shoot a few from a gutted flat I occupy, and another bemedalled grey-suit at long range down a street (strangely running past the church hall where I simmered up, in East Barnet....). My chief problem is re-entering British lines, where some suspicious RSMs think I went AWOL and others do not believe my ‘fisherman’s tales’ of the generals I had ‘taken out.’ My colleagues actually regard me as having been a perfect nuisance in so far as they had occasionally been obliged to think about whether they might need to try to rescue me.


2. Oxford Psychology, 1962-65

At the time, I had few criteria by which to judge whether that (day-)dream would indeed have the significance which my informant maintained. True, I had been a combative schoolboy — though in the realm of ideas rather than in the rugby scrum. I had championed fundamentalist Christianity — a novelty to me, brought up as a Church of England choirboy, but I had adopted it in my pursuit of the frizzle-haired and freckled but absolutely divine Captain of the nearby Girls’ Grammar School. Eventually I settled for her lissom and kissable younger sister — all girls were wonderful in those days, of course, fresh and fragrant in their blue-and-white chequered school blouses, I can still smell them today.... I became the Secretary, i.e. Führer, of my grammar school’s ‘Christian Union’, and that had its moments. — “Brand: meat for the missionaries’ pot,” one of my teachers had commented to the whole Fourth Form. (Today this excellent teacher and scholar — always smelling nicely of snuff — would doubtless be sacked for ‘insensitivity.’) However, I had given up religion as soon as a girl’s hand had got inside my flies — and within six weeks had persuaded this formerly devout young lady to adopt my dystheism too. Atheism seemed to have all the dogma of religion without any of the benefits; and agnosticism implied lack of judgment. Dystheism by contrast meant I would argue with God if I met him — especially about his failure to provide proper sex education. Yet, even freed from religious constraints, I was too slow a learner. Within a year there was the inevitable pregnancy scare and my fiancée and I married. I was pretty happy with this for I was quite bowled over by the girl and she was a great catch; but she was understandably not so wild about a penniless student husband — especially since she had given up her own Oxford place while we had believed she was pregnant.

At University I espoused no specially daring cause. In those days, psychology was ‘rat-ology’; but I didn’t mind since anything was preferable to London suburbia and its preoccupations with gardening, wallpapering and, increasingly, the motor car. Moreover, I was actually Secretary for the then very popular undergraduate society, ‘Crime — A Challenge.’ This outfit was broadly in favour of every liberal cause of the day. I was pretty naïve: I posted a notice saying ‘Sir John Wolfenden will talk about Homosexuality in All Souls College....’ not realizing that the Head of that elite college, John Sparrow, was widely reputed to be homosexual himself; so all the notices for that week had to be re-worded and re-issued. Nor did I notice that Sir John Wolfenden’s brilliant son had been a raging queen at All Souls (till his suicide) and that this too helped explain All Souls’ strong interest in a student society that supported liberal reforms to the law.

Thus I thought little more of my dream for several years. I knew that my own tutor — brain-stimulator and pre-sociobiologist, David Vowles — was sceptical about behaviourism. I was taught about instincts by white-haired, gull-loving Nobel prizewinner, Niko Tinbergen. And I heard that one Noam Chomsky was supposed to have destroyed Skinner’s theory of ‘verbal behaviour.’ Yet I had not the imagination or connections to realize how important this all was, and I did not ‘take sides.’ (If anything, I found behaviourism pretty easy to like: its apostles in Oxford were younger and heavier-drinking, and above all offered what every psychology student wants — the promise that, with mastery of just a few small tricks, the world will be at the student’s feet and the student will be paid for running it.) Hans Eysenck came to talk to a packed house at the Psychology Society and I enjoyed that and bought and read his book Crime and Personality; but I had little conception that many behaviourists and social psychologists were really opposed to him. In those days, Eysenck used to concentrate his critical fire largely on Freudians — not realizing that he would eventually have to take on much of the rest of psychology as well. Moreover, in my naïveté (and satisfaction to be at Oxford) I assumed academics and many of their students were interested in the truth. It never occurred to me that Hans Eysenck would have sworn and bitter enemies. (Such is a happy childhood — polished off by a history master who thought inquiry and empiricism and science and freedom would normally win [I was devoted to him].) Lastly, since Oxford philosophers plainly had no more time for ‘genes’ than for ‘conditioning’, Eysenck seemed to me well within the psychology club that I was trying to join. (Though I liked and admired the philosophers, I certainly had no idea of what was their overall agenda and just staggered from one weekly philosophy essay to another. Again, I had serious doubts about a subject that could regard the boring, disorganized, non-marrying and suicidal Wittgenstein as one of its leading lights.)

Quite simply, my career (as the young would call it today) was developing quite normally. Psychology seemed a well-meaning endeavour promising human improvement and jobs for its students if we wanted; Eysenckianism offered a sensible way of respecting both nature and nurture; and I didn’t complain too vociferously about ‘practicals’ where we had to tear up Michael Argyle’s reprints to see whether we later became less aggressive to him. A natural culmination of my spare-time involvement with criminological topics was to land a plum job in the English Prison Service — at H. M. Prison Grendon, in Buckinghamshire — which enabled me to stay living in Oxford, where my wife was by then herself a very successful Psychology undergraduate. (I would commute the twenty mile distance on country roads both in idyllic summers and slippery winters — fortunately someone had by then invented ‘crash bars’ for motorbikes.) At Grendon, too, I had no marked ‘attitude’: I hadn’t joined the Prison Service because I was particularly pro- or anti-authority. I was married and needed a job and it seemed as if psychology was ‘the coming thing’ in prisons. That was all. My intellectual life had still not begun.



the story so far:

Chris brand’s dream of being a sniper with a special mission behind enemy lines remained unrealized while he was a student at oxford. exposed to behaviourist and nativist views, he actually preferred hans eysenck as a balanced psychologist who had a foot in both camps.

now read on



3. I become a hereditarian

It was only as a psychologist in the Prison Service that I came to reject with deliberation and feeling the environmentalism that I had been required to debate academically as an Oxford undergraduate — in essays about the nature or nurture of nest-building in guinea pigs etc. In the pay of Her Majesty the Queen, I was able to interview British prisoners at length and to collect full sets of test results from them. I would sometimes spend three days on a single prisoner — a real luxury compared to the more harassed experiences of many of my young colleagues in prisons and hospitals.

It was a tremendous learning opportunity. What I chiefly learned was this: prisoners unfailingly blamed their own misfortunes on their families. — Father was an authoritarian and sometimes violent drunk; and Mother was a pill-swallowing inadequate who could not stand up to Father. How could the (now repeatedly convicted) prisoner have survived such a non-start in life?

Yet, when my questioning turned to the siblings of the prisoner, cons would recount that, say, one brother was a bank clerk, one brother ran a launderette — after minor juvenile convictions — and that his sister was happily married to a salesman in Australia. What I was learning here was that the children had turned out very differently from each other — despite having nigh-on 100% of their ‘between-family environment’ in common. What could account for the siblings’ differences? — What siblings do not share is twofold. (1) They do not share around 50% of their genes. (Or, strictly speaking, ‘50% of the allelic variations from the basic condition of homo sapiens.’) (2) Siblings do not share the same ‘within-family environment’: indeed, they are each creating different mini-environments for each other and themselves daily as they compete with each other to fill niches and to create entirely new opportunities for their own .

Neither of these types of difference allows ‘the environment’ or ‘the family’ to be blamed for final phenotypic differences between the siblings. True; a person might try to blame his own outcome on some sibling having been ‘always brighter than me’ and thus favoured by the parents. Yet such blame is transparently absurd: the other sibling could not help being brighter; the parents may have been simply quite right to invest differentially in a child who would make better use of the investment; and, in any case, we all have to learn how to deal with people brighter than ourselves — whether by learning from them, or making more use of our looks — so the very child in question has had a perfectly valuable opportunity, one that was by the same token actually denied to the brighter sibling. If he has made nothing of his special opportunity, that is his own look-out.

Such speculation may not seem much to go on; and I certainly never succeeded in persuading a single prisoner to stop blaming his family for his troubles. To me, however, it was like one of Descartes’ ‘clear and distinct ideas’: it seemed astonishingly obvious and of enormous consequence. I did have a little empirical support too. Follow-up from our model psychotherapeutic prison repeatedly showed that our men did no better on average than matched controls who received little more than pills from their Medical Officers in ordinary prisons. Our very expensive efforts at Grendon were not changing the personalities of our prisoner-patients, whatever the men told us politely on questionnaires before they left. The problems of the men were deep-seated and not attributable to an unstimulating, impoverished or misunderstanding environment: at Grendon we had provided a cornucopia of psychotherapeutic, vocational and educational ministrations to no general avail.^{Over the years after I left, follow-up researches continued to find this dampening result, though the brighter cons and boys -- we had a youth wing too -- did better than the duller ones.} Incidentally, I also became aware that, despite pretensions to open-mindedness, psychiatrists are no more enthusiastic than laymen about being told by researchers that their work does no general or conspicuous good. In particular, I realized that the psychiatrist who was the Governor of H. M. Prison Grendon would seldom discuss the psychologists’ follow-up research results with the many visitors to our showcase prison, or with journalists. There was plenty of fun to be had for a young professional, not least in Wakefield (Yorkshire) where the Prison Service had its Staff Training College for Panama parties, and where the transvestite stars of ‘The Dolphin’ tavern nightly provided examples of within-limits deviance of which our prisoners had not been capable. Also, having a 650cc ‘Beezer’ motor-bike proved quite a way to impress young lady psychologists while my wife received the attentions of Oxford dons. Still, not being able to accept core dogmas of humanitarian endeavour was obviously a problem. It was one thing to pile toilet rolls on a table at a conference sessions to discuss ‘The role of the prison psychologist’ — an interminable question that no amount of conference attendance would ever resolve; but there was a serious side to this. I was discovering that quite a few of my colleagues — and not just the lady psychologists! — had no clothes.



4. I return to the dreaming spires, 1968-69 — ‘On Aggression’

As Freud used to say, life is over-determined. Anyhow, I didn’t leave the Prison Service just because I became increasingly restive with the basic assumptions of social workers and quite a few psychologists and psychiatrists that ‘the environment’ and even ‘society’ were to blame for crime, which could thus be cured by psychotherapy or counselling. My Oxford friends wanted me to do one of those Ph.D.’s under which they themselves seemed to groan for years. I was easily put off by figures showing that Ph.D.’s earned less than M.A.’s, and anyhow by my wife falling pregnant — genuinely, this time. However, my friends persisted with urgings that I could make up the financial shortfall by winning for myself a junior fellowship at one of the several colleges that were now eager to take a psychologist on board. So, to shut my friends up, I put in — and to my amazement landed the second fellowship for which I applied, a two-year position at the ‘new’ social science, all-postgraduate Nuffield College.

Two things are certain: I didn’t squeeze back into Oxford either by my IQ or by the quality of my proposed project. I am a rather dull plodder when it comes to IQ tests. (Having an unsuitable preference for analysis and accuracy rather than speed, I think myself lucky if a test ever registers me as high as 125.) And my project was off the wall: I had read Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression (published 1963 in UK) and become intrigued with the possibility that aggression might after all be a drive that had to be harnessed or channelled, and not denied. (This idea was quite contrary to the accounts of aggression in terms of ‘trigger-stimuli’ alone that were popular with eminent behaviouristic social psychologists such as Len Berkowitz — on sabbatical around that time in Oxford and said to me by friends to be some kind of ‘whizz.’) My idea was to show, as Lorenz had for greylag geese, that, in normal people, aggression was ‘harnessed’ usefully into social skills of assertion, entertainment, bonding, leadership etc. In turn, this would allow me to pinpoint what had gone wrong in the development of the criminal mind.... Oh well, perhaps it doesn’t sound so bad today....; but it was heresy in 1968, and hard to work on. Nor could I back it up with any personal experience: I never myself experienced the rising, blinding tension and wish to hit out, smash up or rape that were complained of by some of the Grendon prisoners. (I had seldom come to blows with anyone; and my only real ‘stand for justice’ had been to decline a Prefectship at school which would have required me — contrary to my own high-minded pre-libertarianism — to enforce the wearing of school caps, even at weekends.) Nor did I think of linking to Freudian ideas: although suicide fascinated me, despite myself never experiencing suicidal thoughts, I had been too busy with rats, crime and empiricism as an undergraduate to learn how Freud had eventually admitted, from 1920, that he needed to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ and to talk of thanatos as well as eros.

No! Why Nuffield took me was simply because one of their senior dons, Nigel Walker (soon to be Professor of Criminology in Cambridge), had backed me as an undergraduate. He had always kindly tried to let me put forward my presumptuous two-pennorth contributions to his seminars on crime and jurisprudence (attended chiefly by American postgrads); and he now saw the opportunity of making for Nuffield College one of those real-world connections that it was that college’s business to forge. Just as Nuffield liked to have workaday trade unionists as temporary fellows, so it also welcomed civil servants.

Unfortunately, Nigel hadn’t explained the master plan to me. As I settled into the freedom of academic life, I had to learn to type — for secretarial service was just about the only thing not provided by a generous College for its young dons. And what could be more natural than for my first self-typed paper to provide a personal, warts-and-all account of my time at Grendon. Within no time I had burned my boats with Grendon Prison by circulating to my fellow psychologists in the Prison Service my doubts as to Grendon’s efficacy and the Governor’s interest in research. The Governor’s reaction (at one stage threatening a libel action) left me in no doubt that if I resumed employment with the Prison Service it would need to be at a different prison. Not that I minded much: I was enjoying my first academic ‘mistresses’ — two redheads, one a curvaceous and athletic girl from Vermont, the other a slim and skittish middle-aged historian whom I shared with at least two very senior members of the University. Oxford is a very charmed environment that can properly distract people from their master-plans or boyhood dreams, and indeed from their marital contracts. However, I would soon see the intellectual equivalents of blood and gore within the ‘ivory towers.’

the story so far:

Chris brand took his first steps towards hereditarianism after graduating from oxford. at h. m. prison grendon, he observed that many of the siblings of 'psychopathic', recidivist prisoners had turned out pretty well despite having the same supposedly cruel or inadequate parents as the prisoners themselves. even so, on brand’s return to academia as a junior research fellow, oxford had no plan for him except to throw its women at his feet.

now read on



5. I see my first bull-fight

I arrived in Nuffield College in 1968/9 — just after the students had tried to push Mr James Callaghan, the Prime Minister, and a Visiting Fellow at Nuffield, into the college duck pond. (Mr Callaghan was a right-wing Labour man who would not allow any more Asian migrants into Britain where they sought refuge in large numbers from Black prejudice and violence in Kenya and Uganda.)

My own immediate opponent was to be Roy Carr-Hill, a bright, energetic, stocky and hirsute expert on government statistics who didn’t believe in genes a bit. As was to become fashionable, Roy thought crime was largely the invention of job-creative minds in authoritarian police forces. Though both somewhat married, we were rivals of a kind for the hand of Nuffield’s daintiest postgraduette — who herself communicated our successes and failures to her own boyfriend in London by means of parapsychology....

However, no sooner had I boned up on twin studies in order to confront my rival in public jousts than the Jensen affair broke in the Harvard Educational Review. From the States came news of an academic under siege for his attempt to explain why the Head Start programmes weren't delivering educational gains for the inner-city children, often Black, on whom they had been targeted. The full paraphernalia of modern 'anti-racism' was produced. This ranged from hate mail, death threats, and chanted and loud-speakered comparisons of Jensen to Hitler, through demands that Jensen be fired for his "frightening" theories, to claims that Jensen's work was riddled with errors^{One academic claimed there were no less than seventeen "erroneous statements, misinterpretations and misunderstandings" in Jensen's target article, but when challenged was able to produce only three misprints (A. R. Jensen, 1972, Genetics and Education, London, Methuen, p. 4). Jensen observed: "The attempts to discredit the main substance of my article have been most intemperate in some circles, ultimately to the discredit and embarrassment of the critics."} and to conspicuous lack of public support from colleagues who privately agreed with Jensen. Ultra-bright students in Nuffield, the bastion of 'social science' in Oxford, now wanted their local psychologist to declare his hand re Jensen.

So I read a few things — chiefly James Shields, John Horn and Cyril Burt. (I already knew of Arthur Jensen and his whacky mid-1960’s idea that there were two different [though correlated] types of intelligence — Level I [short-term rote memory] and Level II [reasoning].) At least, I read enough to convince me that the case for heritable IQ differences was more solid than anything I had to that time seen in psychology for any remotely interesting proposition. ^{Of course, I was ignorant. Psychology’s claim that was at once the most interesting and the best established was that males and females have equal intelligence — something that had not been widely believed before 1914. It was Cyril Burt who had first noticed this around 1910 in early data from Alfred Binet’s testing in Paris.} To me it seemed that any major race differences would most likely be genetic too, though Jensen himself always tolerated academic quibbles that some special environmental 'Factor X' might produce the differences between yet not within the races. — ‘Prejudice’ might indeed be such a factor; yet prejudice against Polish, Jewish, and Irish^{ "Low- browed and savage, grovelling, lazy, and sensual -- such were the adjectives used by many native-born Americans to describe the Catholic Irish 'race' in the years before the Civil War.” Quoted at .} Americans did not seem to have lowered their IQ’s

Thus I was introduced to the greatest bull-fight of mid-twentieth-century psychology — between Berkeley’s Jensen and the many picadors and would-be matadors who would try to bring him down. I did not know Jensen personally — though I had corresponded (a little cheekily) with Hans Eysenck at the Maudsley Hospital in London. There existed in those days neither of the intellectual ‘clubs’ that the journals Personality and Individual Differences and Intelligence would later provide; and my ignorance of psychogenetic formulae was almost complete. But I knew that the issue of the heritability of crime was essentially politicized — with leftists of the 1960’s being environmentalistic, contrary to the liberal-left position of around 1930; and I could sense I would at some point have to join Jensen and Eysenck at the barricades. After all, what would be the point of my soldiering away to provide evidence linking crime to heritable personality features if social scientists could not accept the already compelling case for heritable differences in intelligence?

If I could gain academic tenure, I would see what I could do. However, I was not exactly fired by the idea, for my elitist education made people who weren’t from Oxford seem a bit dubious. Certainly I did not know who these people were who stood out bravely against the modish consensus; and I had few roots in their soil. Anyhow, they were not looking to a pip-squeak newcomer like me for support. I had been glad to mobilize local psychologists for a back-garden hock-and-strawberries party to welcome top psychometrician-psychologist Raymond Cattell when he was in Oxford attending a conference. But Eysenck had no interest in using me — perhaps because he knew Oxford physiological psychologist Jeffrey Gray was already moving in his direction. Hans and Art probably had their hands full with the media; and their new assignments to write books on IQ would have beckoned, and subsequently their Australia tour. More simply, they were both scholarly introverts: this was their very strength, but it meant that ‘leadership’ was not to be the London School’s strong point.

There wasn’t even much to lead in my case: my marriage was cracking up and my two-year Fellowship at Nuffield would leave me without either a D. Phil. or a serious prospect of returning to my plum Prison Service job. Fortunately for me, however, my former main Oxford psychology tutor, from my undergraduate days, now had a Chair and was needing staff for the more ‘human’ and ‘social’ side of his Department — in Edinburgh.

posted by JR 11:39 PM

Sunday, December 05, 2010

 

6. The Burt disaster, 1970-80 — Kamin, Gillie and Dorfman

‘Crime’, not intelligence, was what others quite properly expected me to know about; as also ‘psychopathology’, my major teaching commitment when David Milton Vowles appointed me at Edinburgh. ^(David, though short of stature and having a high-pitched voice, was a highly intelligent man who bore his burden with excellent humour and was a front-line brain researcher of wide reading. A biologist himself, he had arranged for Niko Tinbergen to teach in Psychology at Oxford, thus providing some counterweight to behaviourist ideas of the all-importance of learning. Despite his administrative skill in setting up the 'Institute of Psychology's' new building, an ungrateful Oxford did not give him a Chair so he was eager to prove himself in Edinburgh. However, without Oxford and cricket he was a fish out of water, especially after the departure of Michael Swann, the far-sighted Edinburgh Principal who had been determined to encourage the development of tough-minded, biological psychology in the Psychology Department and of tender-minded, social-psychological exercises in the Department of Education (under ex-Cambridge newboy Liam Hudson). Eventually David found a kind mistress and died happy. Sometimes, at retirement parties, he would show in his rhymed send-ups of his fellow academics that he possessed some of the poetic gifts of his illustrious ancestor.) The University was trying to develop an interdisciplinary ‘School of Forensic and Criminological Studies’ in which I was expected be something of a linchpin. I grew a moustache, took another academic’s sensational, chestnut-haired, cunnilingus-loving wife as a mistress, and started bringing home Scotch regularly in the basket of my bicycle.^{In those far-from-green days, bicycles were a rarity in Edinburgh and I was sometimes teased for riding one. In fact I had two -- one my ex-wife's. I rode them for ten years till they were stolen -- for which I was quite grateful, for riding my second wife's bike in Dublin had given me a healthy traffic-phobia.} I taught undergraduates that heredity was important, but I always had a full house. In the smoke-filled lecture rooms of the 1970’s, I could always go on well beyond the allotted hour. Students rated me ‘dynamic’ and I regularly gave up whole evenings to taking them out to mental hospitals (and off drinking afterwards). (No, I don’t think I ever actually screwed a girl I was teaching — well, not while I was teaching her. I did memorably discover a heavenly pussy; but I was a bit critical of its student owner’s ‘neuroticism’ (as psychologists unkindly call ‘emotionality’ — undoubtedly one of Eysenck’s few mistakes) so the young lady understandably linked up with another member of university staff instead — for years of suicide bids and infertility for all parties.)

Although some people hadn’t liked Hans Eysenck writing Race, Intelligence and Education, the atmosphere was generally friendly. When the early British ‘anti-racists’ in psychology, Ken Richardson and David Spears (helped by Martin Richards at Cambridge), published an anti-IQ tract (Race, Culture and Intelligence, Penguin), the left-ish Halla Beloff and I unusually co-authored a short review^(1973, Brit. J. soc. clin. Psychol. 11, p. 418) deploring the book’s “solipsism” and “nihilism” and concluding that the authors’ endeavours “do not advance the cause of the serious environmentalist.” I offered the occasional defence of Jensen when I could^(Times Higher, 21 vi ‘74, p. 18; New Behaviour, 15 v ‘75) but it was not obvious what to do — especially since there was no money to pay for normal adult subjects, and my 'situationist' and 'labelling-theory' colleagues in criminology were not interested in any research avenue that ended up with anything about personality or heritability. I even took off quite a few weekends to write up the story of how Jesus had escaped crucifixion (thanks to Judas selecting another wandering prophet for the Cross) and had thus appeared as ‘the risen Christ’ to followers before fleeing Jerusalem. (My first wife and I had thought this up after a lively Oxford sherry party.) For better or worse, the London Sunday Times dismissed my own version of the theory as too boring, speculative or possibly both — though it does a good job of explaining why the normally articulate Jesus was so astonishingly quiet at his various trials.^{Perhaps Jesus was just sworn to confidentiality and unable to issue a Press Release?...{ I thought I was probably doing more good as a journal reviewer than as anything else — chiefly keeping down environmentalist tosh at Brit. J. soc. & clin. Psychol. (where Halla Beloff was Editor) and helping Richard Lynn to publish his stuff on national differences (1975, 223-240). I certainly had no conception of how little these ‘contributions’ mattered. A delusion that one’s work will matter in the end is a sine qua non of an academic career.

Then came the most momentous publication in psychology since Niko Tinbergen’s (1951, The Study of Instinct) revival of McDougall-style instinct doctrines and Noam Chomsky’s (1957, in Language) devastating critique of Skinnerian behaviourism. Through 1973/4, there were rumours from US-connected colleagues of Leon Kamin’s attack on Cyril Burt’s IQ figures on reared-apart identical twins. As it dawned on me that, for some of my colleagues, this was actually the kind of thing for which they had long been waiting, I decided to seize the bull by the horns. I arranged a confrontation between the farouche Tom Bower and myself before the 1975/6 Psychology Honours students. Tom’s position was essentially Chomskyan: he was a nativist about what people have in common; but by inclination, if not by scholarship, he was a 100% environmentalist about human psychological differences. Married to a geneticist, Tom invariably knew the latest cop-outs from psychogenetic argumentation by geneticists who wished to proceed to genetic engineering first and only then to answer questions for the public about natural genetic determination of trait levels. A father of DZ twins himself, Tom was fond of the argument that DZs were less similar than MZs only because they were quite often the result of separate conceptions involving different fathers.

Fearing the worst before what would be a high turn-out of Honours students, I prepared a roneoed 36-page summary of material to the effect that Piaget had been at least as mistaken as Burt and probably more so. Subscriber as I was in those days to Brit. J. Psychology, I had especially noticed a paper (February, 1996) from Adelaide which reported a correlation of -·92 between Wechsler Performance IQ and ‘inspection time’ (IT) (duration of stimulus-exposure required to achieve recognition) in ten subjects of IQs ranging from 47 to 119 around a median of 81. I imagine I ‘lost’ the debate with Tom {foretaste of things to come....}. However, my paper was a more impressive academic document than anything I had previously written. Over the next few years it attracted several undergraduates to check out in their Final Honours projects both Ted Nettelbeck’s finding and my own interpretation of its significance.

Such was to be my chief consolation as the Burt Affair went from bad to worse. Up in Edinburgh, without substantial connections with Eysenck or Jensen, and having had no personal familiarity with Burt, I still didn’t see what I could do. I vigorously but unavailingly opposed the break-up of Brit. J. social & clinical Psychol. into its ‘component parts’ — for I feared (correctly) that the resulting two journals would neither of them allow much room for differential psychology (which had accounted for about half the papers in the original journal). I could see that the British Psychological Society had embarked on nothing less than the expulsion of differential psychology. Yet the gentle and scholarly Boris Semeonoff and I could supply nothing beyond lists of signatures of people who saw the matter as we did. Fortunately, Hans Eysenck himself eventually dealt with the problem by setting up his own journal, Personality & Individual Differences, though this journal would long remain unrefereed.^{Reviewing the new journal for Nature (1 x 1981, 'Trait psychology fights back), I wrote as follows. "So far, after some six high-quality issues of scholarly, empirical reports....the evidence is that, despite a decade of environmentalism and situationism in psychology, trait approaches to human differences are still alive and kicking. ....In general, the sound empiricism of the journal allows one to tolerate some peculiar "findings" — can London's IQ really be lower than Warsaw's? — that have perhaps slipped through the refereeing net in these early days."}

In 1976 came another blow. The Sunday Times (London) carried the claims of Oliver Gillie that Burt’s lady ‘research assistants’ had been, like some of his MZ correlation coefficients, figments of Burt’s imagination. (Gillie had studied Genetics at Edinburgh University and was sired academically by Professor Geoffrey Beale who himself used to doubt whether even human height differences were known to be heritable. I had turned out one cold and misty night in Edinburgh to oppose this nonsense when Beale addressed the E. U. Psychology Society. But Beale was a charming silver-haired gent, and people like hearing experts who deride their own subjects as mere vanity — a trick at which London University’s Professor ‘Steve’ Jones was also to become adept in the 1990's.) Fortunately for me, a good Australian drinking partner and a long off-and-on relationship leading to my re-marriage kept me from despair at being able to do so little in reply.

I submitted to Science an article defending Burt’s estimation of the ‘narrow’ (parent-to-child-transmissible) heritability of IQ as being around .45^{This means that parents pass on to their children, by genetic means, 45% of their own deviation from the population mean IQ of 100. Many other genetic features contribute to 'broad' heritability, notably multiplicative interactions between genes and between genes and environment.}; but that journal was then as anti-hereditarian as Nature was to become in the 1980’s and anyhow was on the brink of publishing Donald Dorfman’s (1978, Science) damning claim that Burt’s normal distributions for IQ had been more perfectly bell-shaped than the distribution reported for the heights of 67,000 soldiers in the American Civil War). Knowing little of Burt myself, and having had my effort rejected by Science, all I could think of doing while the criticism of Burt persisted was to write a jokey letter to the New Statesman (15 xii ‘78) saying that Burt’s environmentalist claims (as to the importance of the school and the school psychologist) were just as flawed as his claims for the importance of heredity. I followed that up with a piece on the reality and nature of intelligence differences (1979, Bull. Brit. Psychol. Socy., 386-389) which had just as little impact. The Burt Affair was a disaster about which I was powerless to do anything. Research-wise, I moved into handedness and hemispherology for a while, hoping to pick up something there about why rather mixed-handed people like myself and star former E. U. Psychology student, Jurek Kirakowski, and a lively, wasp-waisted blonde babe on whom we were both fixated should be so high-verbal yet hopeless at spatial tasks like paper form-boards. I just could not see what to do about IQ — except hang around it and keep smiling.^{As to the Verbal-Performance difference, all three of us over-the-top V>P types turned out to have quite unusually large left-hemisphere / right-visual-field superiorities for word recognition in a tachistoscope — but three subjects do not make a paper.} Halla Beloff never even told me she was spearheading a seminar on Burt for the British Psychological Society in 1979 which would ‘accept’ — without seeking contrary evidence — the hurried conclusions of Burt’s biographer, Leslie Hearnshaw, and consign Burt, bag and baggage, to the flames.

the story so far

rescued from oxford and the prison service by edinburgh university, chris brand found a climate that was negative about hereditarian ideas. as the burt affair developed, brand watched aghast and found he could do little. though cut off, however, he did his reading and set his conclusions out in samizdat, thus encouraging edinburgh students to research ‘inspection time’ (IT) and its relation to IQ.

now read on

7. I meet the mighty, 1976-79 — NATO Conference on Intelligence and Learning

As the ghastly Burt Affair unfolded, at least my very first IT/IQ research student provided what would be for me a turning point. Carrot-haired, argumentative, left-ish, drink-prone and — as it turned out — very loyal, Edinburgh-born Mike Anderson (of an English father) came equipped with friends who played soccer. Thus were brought in to the Department the first subjects of IQ 95 that it had ever seen; and I supplemented Mike’s soccer pals with three subjects of borderline subnormal IQ who had recently been released from Edinburgh’s major mental deficiency hospital, Gogarburn (which was trying to be very ‘enlightened’ — heralding what would be its own closure in the 1990’s). To the astonishment of both of us — Mike because of his left-ism, me because I was on the verge of doubting that there were any effects in psychology that were at once strong, replicable and interesting^{I kept on forgetting the apparent equality of the sexes in IQ.} — Mike replicated the Adelaide result. His own IT/IQ correlation was -·87 on 13 testees, and still -·83 after controlling for visual acuity.

Swiftly we wrote a short follow-up to Nettelbeck’s paper for the British Journal of Psychology. Our effort was equally swiftly rejected — almost certainly by a well-known British cognitive psychologist who had privately come to believe me to be a 'fascist' menace to civilized society. (At least he had taken the trouble to write to tell me. Himself used to displaying a certain crustiness, he had had to soften up his act so as to attract a new wife. By contrast, I had selected an experienced Africa hand as my own second wife — a girl of refreshing realism, except that, alas, she eventually proved so egocentrically realistic that she wanted nothing to do with my son from my former marriage.) I was incensed with Brit. J. Psychol. — though mollified by Mike’s gaining admission as a postgraduate to Queen’s, my own first Oxford college. There, Mike would drink, fight and play soccer with the finest minds of his generation, and eventually, with his Oxford D.Phil. in hand, bring a book out on intelligence (Intelligence and Development, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992) well before I did.

Fortunately, students continued to come to my rescue — still with critical, left-ish students in the lead, seeking very properly to show the IT/IQ correlations were really low or non-existent or had no wider meaning. Thus, by 1979, there were four Edinburgh IT/IQ studies that I could present on the ‘international’ stage at a conference on ‘Intelligence and Learning’ being run for NATO by the British mental subnormality expert, Neil O’Connor, and others in the bijou city of York.

All the four student studies that I had supervised showed high negative correlations between IT and IQ, especially in the lower half of the IQ range, so I was in bouncy form and enjoyed myself arguing with environmentalists, interactionists, solipsists, relativists and allied no-hopers such as the ecology-conscious E.U. product John Berry (himself not the biology-realist heir that I had wished for Hy Witkin’s field independence empire) . In truth, I don’t remember much about the conference apart from the bright, engaging auburn-haired waif to whom I proposed bigamy and many other things. (I assured her she was ‘my real sister’ as seen once in a dream wearing a green satin dress in a telephone booth near New Barnet station — on a route I often took to meet Joan, my first wife-to-be. This dreamworld ‘real sister’ was at once preferable as a soul-mate both to my own real-life younger sister and to Joan (who surely hadn’t loved me though I’m pretty certain I had loved her).) Yes, I managed to persuade the bony but lively waif to come up to Edinburgh. However, to my horror she invited several American friends to keep us company too. Fortunately I was able to contrive to fall out with her — as to whether the spelling ‘Katherine’ was allowable for her daughter’s name^{Classically, the Irish spelling is ‘Katharine’ [as used for my own eldest daughter] and the English spelling is ‘Catherine.’} — so I was let off the hook in the end.

But, yes, I did meet Art Jensen. I recall four things. (a) My hero looked like a Boston cop. (b) He was much interested in the special spatial memory that chess players have — which I found surprising in one known for his dedication to g, though perhaps he was just trying to be diplomatic at a mixed international gathering with ladies present. (c) He was still inclined to go on about memory (digit span) being pretty distinct from intelligence — not apparently taking Hans Eysenck’s point that digit span is a perfectly good measure of g so long as it is lengthened by repeated administration to make it a more reliable sub-test. (d) Art professed to like English cider; so, when buying him a round, I slipped in a double vodka to cheer him up (his own work on IQ and reaction time was plainly not delivering anything very much). “My,” he shortly was heard to declare, “that cider’s really got sump’n!” I came away impressed by his sincerity, openness and reasonableness, and with much relief that he hadn’t gone into alcoholic coma. I have only rarely attended ‘international conferences’ — partly because no-one offered to pay my fare to the States (and I always wanted to abjure begging from E.U.), but mainly because there are just about no good looking girls who are prepared to take g or heredity seriously. (Well, there’s Sandra Scarr — but she seemed very taken by the unctuous, bumptious R. J. Sternberg [soon to run American psychology, so ‘all things to all men’ was he]; and' anyway, Sandra is probably a bit big for me and has always been rather wet about ‘race.’) The truth is that girls don’t go in for IQ stuff any more than they do for Formula One motor sport: when life gets dangerous, girls prefer to spectate and just enjoy the eventual winners.

Yes, I also had a personal chat in York with Hans, too, for the first time. But Hans is always a model T-group counsellor when on outings. He apparently takes the view that he has his own say in his books and lectures and that, when socializing, he will just listen to what other people have to say. — An opportunity to which I respond all too positively, I am a little ashamed to say, so I have never learned anything about Hans apart from what I have read in books. I imagine he is a marvellous grandparent — as one psychology student recently maintained of me, to my amusement.

8. Into ‘Nature’

Because Hans had clued Art in to the possible importance of the IT/IQ work, I entered an optimistic phase. My second marriage (involving an exotic Dublin connection) was good fun. (My wife’s no-’stepson’-realism was only just beginning and I couldn’t believe it would escalate as it eventually did after the birth of our daughters.) I had a big new barn of a flat (full of lodgers because I couldn’t sell my old one [due to subsidence]); E.U. Psychology had moved from filthy Pleasance to leafy George Square; and I had at last cut the Department’s useless ties with the environmentalism of E.U. Criminology. Best of all, however, was a new undergraduate research student.

Ian Deary was a medical student in his mid-twenties who was taking the ‘intercalated’ year that enables students of Medicine in E.U. to receive classified degrees in Psychology with just eight months of study (whereas Edinburgh’s other students take three-and-a-half years). When Ian first came to see me to discuss a possible project, the nails of his left hand were painted black and he was spending his spare time gumming stickers on to lamp-posts to advertise his pop group. (Unusually, Ian's group went round removing their stickers after the Edinburgh Festival was over.) Ian had probably come to me because I was a known Eysenckian and, as a medic., Eysenck was naturally the only living academic psychologist of whom he had heard. Quickly, I found he had a mind like a vacuum cleaner: within two minutes of chatter in my room he would have pieced together my last week’s work — or lack of work as I felt he more often deemed it. (By 1980, British medical students were far more engaging and intelligent than psychology students — it was all a far cry from how things had been when I myself was simmering up in the 1950’s and medics were rugby-playing oafs modelled on ‘Doctor in the House’ films.)

Though I feared I had lost Ian at one point [in fact he had just got understandably anxious about the apparently massive workload that lay ahead], he stuck to the planned IT/IQ research. With the help of the chief electronics technician in the Department, with whom Ian maintained a singularly diplomatic relationship, the novelty of ‘auditory IT’ was soon underway. By the Spring, E.U. Psychology had an IT/IQ correlation of around -·70 on its hands using a quite novel procedure. By the Autumn, Psychology News and the E. U. Bulletin carried the story and the ripples reached Nature (289, 529-530; 290, 82) and London's Sunday newspapers early in 1981. Ian himself had netted the best First I had seen in my fifteen years in E.U. Psychology and had gone back into Medicine — from which he would progress to psychiatry. However, the ideas of the London School and the five-fold replication and extension in Edinburgh of the Adelaide result^{The IT/IQ correlation was soon being replicated in Adelaide and Hobart, Tasmania — though with weaker effects due to more subjects of above-average IQ being used.} would remain both for Ian and for me a central pre-occupation. Moreover, perhaps as a second-born [I am a firstborn], Ian would be prepared to be more assiduously professional about the research and to trouble to cultivate peers by attending conferences and inviting people to Edinburgh even if they had little to say. Important to ‘the cause’ of understanding the g factor, it was Ian’s work that really drove the five studies into the Eysenck-edited volume, A Model for Intelligence (Springer, 1982). Moving on from the Eysenck/Jensen idea that intelligence was speed of decision-making, we had put down a marker that intelligence was in fact especially concerned with rapid intake of the most elementary perceptual/symbolic information.

the story so far

though almost despairing as the burt affair went from bad to worse, chris brand persuaded his students to follow up research in adelaide that seemed to him to show intelligence as closely linked to mental intake speed — 'inspection time' (IT). soon the work of mike anderson, ian deary and other students got brand to the top table — meeting hans eysenck and art jensen and having the edinburgh IQ/IT research presented in nature.

now read on

9. Snuffing my way to San Diego, 1983 — ‘Expert Adviser’ to the US Navy

I thought I had struck lucky. Not only had Ian Deary’s work gone well but, from Oxford, I gathered that Mike Anderson was growing restive with ‘cognitive’ reaction-timer Patrick Rabbitt. Pat had been a pal of mine for a while after he became the ‘Psychology Fellow’ at Queen’s; but in fact he harboured the usual behaviourist — now also Oxbridge — prejudices against the London School. Despite dropping the names ‘Psychology Laboratory’ (Cambridge) and ‘Institute of Experimental Psychology’ (Oxford), both institutions continued to rely on ‘the experimental method’ to distinguish their activities from those of philosophers and social scientists. They preferred to forget that left-ish social psychologists were increasingly demanding that any interesting experiments on people or even animals should be deemed unethical — lest the realities of male sexuality and aggression and female conformity and post-partum maternal drive be made plain for all to see. Against this background, for experimentalists to dissociate themselves from the London School was a way of throwing a sop to the social psychologists and to the youngsters whom they needed to attract to become research assistants. But Mike knew enough to see through all that and was determined to persist with IQ/IT research -- even though he wasn't happy with the link to racial questions.

In Edinburgh, too, business was booming. Because of the publicity for IT/IQ, I was able to draw an audience of about a hundred to an E. U. Psychology Departmental research seminar — an all-time record for an ‘in house’ show. This was encouraging. Despite the Brit. J. Psychol. rejection, I had no serious idea of the forces that would be ranged against the IT/IQ correlation; nor did I realize that the chief strategy of its opponents would not be that of study, further research and devastating critique, but mainly one of feigned indifference and hope that the work would die the natural death of most ‘findings’ in modern psychology. I thought critics of IQ would have to fight. I was incapable of understanding their studied disinterest in empirical work when the results didn't suit them. Dismissive of their ideas myself, I did not fully take on board that it was they who were being fawned upon by the media (e.g. in the case of Stephen Jay Gould’s grossly misleading book, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981) and thus felt themselves immune to any merely academic barrage. I just could not believe that anyone would take Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind seriously. It was a nicely written and pleasantly biographical book, but it contained hardly a single relevant correlation — and none of the zero correlations between reliable mental tests that Gardner needed to establish his disunitarian thesis. Surely Gardner would be a laughing stock once people read the review by Sandra Scarr in New Ideas in Psychology?^{Here is an extract from Sandra Scarr's spirited critique of Gardner's book.

"The implicit theme of this book [H.Gardner's Frames of Mind] is that some socially significant talents are not sufficiently recognized and rewarded; ergo, call them intelligence, and everyone will salute the flag. One senses the Red Queen speaking in Alice in Wonderland when one reads Gardner's proposal to call movement, musical talent, and interpersonal skills 'intelligence'....[Gardner's] list of intelligences is also less than I want, if I am to play his game. Gardner forgot some evolutionarily important kinds of knowledge or intelligence, if you wish, many of which pertain particularly to women.... When to pinch a snapdragon, fertilize tomatoes, replant lettuce; when to discipline a child, permit what kinds of independence, encourage achievement, or nurture personality; what season to snare geese, shoot ducks, breed chickens; which goats to select for breeding? ....How about attracting mates with [variously] gracefulness, cool dress, carriage, swagger, coquettishness?...

For liberals, the elitism implied by intellectual assessment, which results in some pigs being appraised more highly than others, evokes guilt about their own lofty achievements. Perhaps, if the standards of achievement by which they have been judged were not so narrow, so ethnocentric, then others would deserve similar recognition. Such liberals of distinction are inclined to throw sops to the other pigs. Gardner seems susceptible to this form of intellectual noblesse oblige."}

Of course, I was living in cloud-cuckoo land.

Sparing me from reality for a while, a towering, genial giant appeared on my scene. The US Navy — with proper regard for its worldwide responsibilities — has always been keen to support hard-headed and serviceable forms of psychology. Whatever finding would help train a seal to play the kamikaze pilot was music to its ears.... Anyhow, up from London came one of those man-mountains seldom seen except when occupying two seats on jumbos flying to the States. To this day, I can’t think how I managed to squeeze him into the tiny room that was then my office in George Square. He was approaching retirement in a merry spirit and nothing could cramp his style. His chief hobby in Yukay was following local snuff championships, and he was able to see that I had the best snuffs that money could buy (Fribourg & Tryers’, of course): superfine, explosive ‘High Dry Toast’ (of Irish origin, after a fire in a tobacco warehouse) after breakfast; the charming sandalwood-scented 'French Carotte' through the day; then the rich, dark, violet-scented, romantic and deeply satisfying ‘Santo Domingo’ after dinner). Thus the US Navy and I soon had a deal. I would be given digs and a chauffeur in San Diego. (I do not drive cars. After my years of ton-up motor-cycling, I would be lethally impatient.) Over a month, I would test any sailors (and sailorettes and intersexes) whom I could get to sign consent forms at Point Loma (the US Navy’s equivalent of Portsmouth).

Out I went! I was especially welcomed by the kindly Bernie Rimland, boss of psychology at Naval Personnel Research & Development out in the Bay, on Point Loma. Bernie had an ‘autistic’ son whose problems had initially been blamed on the Rimlands themselves by US psychiatrists and kindred social-environmentalistic social workers of the 1960’s. Like Art Jensen — who had experienced a comparable problem for a while — Bernie had fought his way through to a hereditarian understanding of his own case. By 1980, Bernie had become well known in the US for his work on autism and his Presidency of the US Autism Association. He had his own private office (near his San Diego home) from which he organized world-wide research into the most detailed symptoms of autism (e.g. endless fascination with lights and repetitively moving objects such as electric fans). I spent four happy weeks rising at 06:30, testing in a congenial atmosphere, and making friends with a scrumptiously slim, petite, pretty and fragrant US-Japanese chauffeuse who one evening almost let me undo the top button of her shirt....

10. Where do I belong? 1984 — ‘The Galton’ or the British Psychological Society?

Returned to Yukay, I first did my patriotic and let the Royal Air Force^{Given the expense of training fighter pilots, the RAF was interested in IT-testing from a very practical point of view. Even gains of 1 or 2% in selection efficiency were of real interest to them.} have my US results just as soon as I had gone through Heathrow. Next, I arranged to take my findings along to the Eugenic Society’s conference on ‘The Biology of Human Intelligence’ where Hans Eysenck was giving the ‘keynote address', the annual Galton Lecture. Soon I had special reason to be glad to have found such an academic shelter. By the mid-1980’s, the British Psychological Society was plainly becoming committed to the insane asylum of ‘multiculturalism’, ‘affirmative action’, anti-nuclear protest and, of course, opposition to ‘sexist language.’ In particular, the Society started running advertisements of positions that were stated to be for Black applicants only. I wrote in to the BPS Bulletin to say that I would be interested to learn when the first advertisements would appear for ‘Whites only’ psychology jobs in London’s [notoriously racist] East End. The BPS would not publish my jocular missive, and all I received, together with my returned letter, was a scruffy, illegible compliment slip from one ‘Ray Bull’. That decided me: the BPS would not hear me, but the Eugenics Society would, so I resigned my twenty-year Membership of the BPS and signed up for eugenics. The Galton Institute, as the Eugenics Society soon became, was attentive to my case and kindly made me a Fellow. It took me a while to find out how little interest it still had in anything that looked too straightforwardly like eugenics: basically it is sitting on a million pounds deriving from Sir Francis Galton’s legacy and does not know what to do with the money. Eventually, in 1995, I fell out with its Council after it had declined to fund (or even pump-prime) research to replicate The Bell Curve in Britain and topped this off by short-changing me on promised expenses incurred helping organize the (most successful) conference at London Zoo on ‘Biological and Social Aspects of Intelligence.’ But I will always bless ‘the Galton’ for having given me the confidence to cut the umbilical cord with the BPS — and for enabling my 1995 meeting in London's Hampstead^{Yes, we made a merry pilgrimage to Burt's Elsworthy Road house which backs on to lovely Primrose Hill. However, the experience had its chastening side. Not only was there no plaque — the BPS had doubtless seen to that. But no-one in the vicinity recalled Burt, not even at St Mary's Church just a stone's throw from his front gate. Sic transit gloria mundi.} with Tom Bouchard, James Flynn, Nick Mackintosh, Bob Plomin, Pat Rabbitt, Phil Rushton, Michael Rutter and other internationally known luminaries of research on IQ and heredity — and a very svelte and dashing leopardess of a girl whose name now escapes me. I am sure the Galton will call on me again in due course; and that I will try to oblige.

the story so far

though scorned by mainstream psychologists, chris brand's IQ/IT research appealed to the US NAVY and the ROYAL AIR FORCE. seeing his marginalisation from the likes of the british psychological society and massing peecee hordes, brand opted instead for membership of the galton institute from 1985. (he was 'bad boy brand' there too, but at least they didn't mount a tribunal....)

now read on

11. Dimensions of Personality, 1983-84 — the ‘Big Six’

In 1983, I was given a new opportunity by my senior colleague, social psychologist and culture vulture Halla Beloff. The offer was to have my say in a matter that had always been central to my psychological concerns, the question of ‘How many personality dimensions are there?’ Finding such objective differences between people had long been hoped by many psychometrician-psychologists to substitute for describing, locating and talking about ‘the heart’, ‘the mind’, ‘the soul’ and ‘the spirit.’ I was to write a review for psychology students of the ‘state of the art’ in this modern field of factor-analytic endeavour; and I felt sure my thoughtful, witty and informed advocacy of the answer ‘SIX’ would compel assent and receive acclaim.... (An academic is someone who still thinks someone other than his mother will ever read what he has written.) I had come to the answer ‘6’ in the early 1980’s (as Eysenckian psychological theorizing began to peter out and I returned to Cattell for the factor-analytic basics). I had discussed the problem at some length over Sunday lunches with Ian Deary, and was increasingly convinced that ‘6’ integrated and synthesized quite a wide range of competing personological schemes. (Of course, I was always disappointed that no personality dimension ever seemed to predict with whom people would fall in love. — Only in the 1990s did it become clear that even monozygotic twins relatively seldom fall in love with the same person, even though they prefer the same type of partner: love, at least, is partly ‘constructed’ — as well as having a substantial natural basis.)

For better or worse, my six-dimensional theoretical initiative would make little progress — at least for the next ten years.^{In 1996, my pal Richard Lynn would kindly announce me as a "leading personality theorist" (in his book Dysgenics, Praeger, p. 147)....} The British Psychological Society’s Psychology Survey series proved entirely uninfluential — whereas I had fondly imagined in 1983 that every psychology teacher worth his salt would have a desk copy. Hans Eysenck continued to call for his 'gigantic three' (or four or five) dimensions; Cattell called for c. fifty-seven varieties; and, most challengingly of all, American researchers materialized who had a big and supposedly normal (c. IQ 100) adult subject pool and called for five dimensions. I had a fair amount of ammunition with which to have a go at my competitors and I eventually used it in the 1990’s (in European J. Personality, in Psychologica Belgica and in the second ‘Festschrift’ for Hans, The Scientific Study of Human Nature [London, Elsevier, 1997, edited by Helmuth Nyborg, the Continent’s only fighting-fit differential psychologist]). Yet what intrigued me throughout this entirely academic ding-dong was the vanishingly slight interest that it attracted. To me, the question of ‘How many dimensions?’ is a bigger question — because it is posed at a more abstract level — than the question of ‘What is g and does it matter?’ In fact, however, the larger question is a sport for only a few dozen people worldwide.

In fairness, the Big Six (and equally the Big Five) have hardly been presented in a riveting fashion by psychometrician-psychologists. My own attempt in the 1990’s to link the Big Six to Freudian theorizing — and to intelligence differences (which did not interest Freud) — is, I believe, the kind of move that is necessary; and I have explained how Hans Eysenck might be counted in this regard as an ‘accidental’, or honorary proto-Freudian. In the twentieth century, one might say that it was Freud who had the best psychological theories and Eysenck who had the best evidence. Basically, I suspect that Freudian principles (with some help from originally Adlerian ideas about the importance of birth order) do provide major explanations of human differences; but that Eysenck and Cattell have articulated best what has to be explained and done most to encourage the (now very successful) exploration of the psychogenetic roots of personality differences. However, few of my sage and sober colleagues seem likely to agree to such a package. Like the great and grand psychologist, William McDougall, whose life has come to intrigue me, many of my colleagues draw the line at the Oedipal conflict. Though my own memory for my childhood is generally weak, I can remember, at age four, feigning or exaggerating illness in order to get my mother into bed with me at night. I can remember my father’s annoyance — “Not again!” I once heard him growl in my parents’ adjoining room as my mama left their bed. And I can remember, on one dark and stormy evening, in 1947, when my father was delayed from returning home by a power cut on the London Underground, my own steady resolve as the lightning flashed and the heavens rumbled that my mother and I would get along just fine.^{.... (I’m not so sure where my newly arrived young sister was meant to fit in.... This is what makes me think there is something in Adler’s stress on sibling rivalry as the origin of people’s competitive and, equally, co-operative styles.} Perhaps McDougall and my colleagues were just not blessed with mothers who provided the 100% maternal love that made everything so plain? — Or with a sister so much younger as to allow them to attempt the role of unchallengeable firstborn?

I regret the rather abstract tone of some of the above. Back in 1983, I suppose I did think about personality in a rather bloodless way — as is becoming to young academics. Today, with the confidence of years filled with scholarly endeavour...., I do think ‘sex’ and ‘death’ (Freud’s eros and thanatos) are ‘what it’s all about' (mainly) — plus maternal instinct (maternos?) and sibling sentiment (fraternos?). And, yes, I have learned something from the wymmin in my life. Still, the merit of the dispassionate approach of psychometric psychology will hopefully become clear as the Big Five or Six or (presumably it will come, but look rather messy) Seven or Eight provide a settled agenda for twenty-first century differential psychology. The Six-or-So furnish the objective variations to which classic conceptions (e.g. the heart, mind, soul, spirit, will and conscience) will need to be linked up — unless the unlikely view is taken that people do not differ from each other in such classic chambers of personhood.^{My own attempt to provide such linkage can be found in Quotes VII at .}

12. The needs of youth, 1983-90 — The Structural Psychometrics Group

Fortunately, in view of my peers’ preference for ignoring what I wrote, I did not need to rely on my fellow factor-analytic psychologists for recognition of my scientific grip. By 1983, the appearance of the Edinburgh IT/IQ work in the popular science magazine, Omni, had won me my first postgraduate student — a late-starter who was putting ‘community’ life-styles behind him while retaining a keen dress sense and not going much further right politically than buying the new Independent newspaper.^{The Indie is more centrist than the left-leaning Guardian that is so favoured in psychology circles that it is quite the major vehicle for psychology job advertising in Britain.} The handsome and amusing Vincent Egan would do his best to keep me somewhere near the straight and narrow over the next eight years, for he continued in Edinburgh as an AIDS researcher till going to Leicester for training in clinical psychology. In particular, Vincent did most of my computing and word-processing work for me until he managed, by persuading me to undertake a little lonely-hearts advertising, to kit myself out with a nice new girlfriend, a lady doctor who taught me how to word-process for myself. Just as important, one of Vincent‘s own girlfriends worked at a Youth Training Centre in Edinburgh and helped him recruit unemployed youths who had mediocre or low IQs. Having a good range of IQs among his subjects helped Vincent deliver more correlations between IQ and information-processing speed, and some substantial (negative) correlations between IQ and liberalism of social attitudes. As word got out that the Edinburgh IT/IQ show was still on the road, I was able to attract my first postgraduette, the drop-dead-gorgeous, vivacious and top-drawer Claudia Pagliari — the spitting image of Kristin Scott Thomas in the film ‘The English Patient.’ Claudia should have been playing cello somewhere but had instead told her public school, Gordonstoun [once attended by Prince Charles], that she would seek enlightenment and a maternal, counselling role in psychology. She was just what I needed! Between Vincent and Claudia and my dear Australian friend, Trish Connolly, the ‘Patroness’ of the Edinburgh Structural Psychometrics Group^[authority had decreed that all E.U. academics had to be part of a ‘group’], I never lacked for a drinking partner in Edinburgh as I staggered from marital breakdown through doomed romantic quest [I even sucked my Bloody Mary’s toes to no avail] to final divorce.

Hopefully I was sufficient of a father-figure — or whatever they needed — to Vincent and Claudia.... In fact, Vincent found in Ian Deary (returned to psychology in the mid-1980’s from psychiatry) more of a strictly professional role model; and Claudia found she could relate more easily to the practical [and temporarily love-struck?] Mike Anderson (for he too was back in town, filling a temporary lectureship). Probably I was more of a ‘grandfather figure’ (as another student would call me later) — a figure with whom a certain arcane fun could be had but whom one didn’t take entirely seriously. A particular problem I presented for them was that, as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament eclipsed the Labour Party as the chief opposition in Britain to Mrs Thatcher, I felt obliged to do my bit to get NATO’s message re the Soviet “Evil Empire” (as President Reagan had called it) across to the young. In this sentiment was encouraged by pocket money from the Ministry of Defence.

Probably I was not the best person to be Secretary for ‘Peace through NATO’ in Edinburgh. Yet I at least I was presumed capable of writing the necessary propaganda for the converted. Here is a sample, published, together with a youthful, if rather serious photo of me, in the Conservative Edinburgh West Review for Spring, 1985.

The year 1984 marked the 700th anniversary of the mysterious vanishing act by the adolescent children of Hamlin town in Brunswick. No more moving testimony to parental folly was ever recorded than Browning’s ‘Pied Piper’; yet the crusading rallies, pop concerts and affecting idealism of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) should remind us today that our society cannot afford to ignore Browning’s warning of the awful consequences of adult tight-fistedness and faithlessness. Unless we can both maintain and explain British and NATO defence commitments, it will be our own children who will end up living in what most of us would regard as a foreign land.....

President John F. Kennedy once put the challenge to us very well when he said that we were just about the first generation to have to defend freedom rather than to have to win it. It is this message that we must get across to our fellow citizens: our freedom was won in 1949 by the Western resistance to Soviet attempts to starve a further 2½ million Berliners into Communism; and it must now continue to be defended — however unglamorous such defence may be. We have inherited a remarkable historic trust. Let us not break faith. Instead of being indoctrinated to the effect that our own countries are distinctively racist, imperialistic, sexist, jingoistic and so forth, the youth of the West must be taught about the Berlin Wall and the mass murders of the intelligentsia that took place in Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s brave new socialist Cambodia. Wouldn’t we rather be Red than dead? Connor Cruise O’Brien, that remarkable modern Irishman and admirer of Edmund Burke, recently put the stark truth so well in The Observer: “You could be Red first and dead later!”

At least, I could write well enough to get half-a-dozen letters into The Scotsman — and one into The Times.^{The Times selects for publication only one in every five hundred letters submitted to it. Unlike other newspapers, it declines to 'improve' readers' spelling and grammar, or to shorten letters — so correspondents have to get everything right.} More importantly, I had a big old barn of a flat in which to hold the anticipated drinks parties. A willing victim in my working life of the illusion that differential psychology was making waves, I was equally capable in my private life of believing that such exercises as the above would make the slightest difference to anything. (The Soviet collapse was in fact far closer than anyone remotely suspected and was triggered by Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme. No-one of any intelligence in the West believed in this costly programme; but the Soviets did, and presumed they could never match the expense that would be involved in mounting their own counter-defensive.) Certainly I enjoyed 'taking a stand' that I knew could only clarify and provide a label for the difference between most of my social-scientific colleagues and myself. It especially amused me to see so many psychologists wrong-foot themselves into actually opposing NATO — clearly the greatest Western success story of the post-1945 years.

I was happy, also, to accept opportunities to provide a little psychology for the Right (especially the relatively libertarian 'new right'). Here’s how I defended in the Daily Telegraph (18 vi ‘88) a piece I had written explaining that environmentalism had run out of steam in developmental psychology. The article had been published, with other revisionist chapters from other new-right-ish social scientists, in Full Circle, a volume produced by the London think-tank, the Social Affairs Unit [prop. Rev. Digby Anderson].

....the central theme of my own contribution was that families do not and cannot have much influence on children unless they take individual abilities and propensities into account. ....some social scientists and present-day experts in child development may find the book hard to take — perhaps even for personal and ideological reasons. I hope they will read the volume and perhaps look up some of the primary research that it cites. I am not without scholarly company when I argue that, in view of recent studies [notably Sandra Scarr’s] present early-childhood education and allied interventions need to be re-thought.

But it was all rather less fun for Vincent and Claudia who obviously felt and found themselves tarred with my brush despite their best efforts to remain more politically correct. In fact, to my great satisfaction, they both ended by netting psychology jobs — unlike many Edinburgh Psychology postgraduates; but I shudder to think what my supervisorship did for their love lives.

the story so far

although increasingly involved in the IQ business, chris brand also served in the london school's other big campaign to establish what were the main dimensions of human personality variation. unsurprisingly, he came up with a different answer from all of his colleagues: not 1, 2, 4½, 5, 42 or 57 dimensions, but just 6. naturally, his postgraduate students were wary, and especially when he became involved with the ultimate heresy for social scientists: supporting nato.

now read on

13. Sniper Brand, 1980-95 — versus Billig, Bruner, Lewontin, Schiff, R. Sternberg et al.

I was a supporter of Mrs Thatcher at least until she turned to the doomed Poll Tax and dreary Europhobia. With her at the height of her powers, and with postgraduates of my own to carry out all the researches I could dream up, I was not at this juncture going to bite the bullet and join my beggar-bowling colleagues in applying for research grants from the British taxpayer. I never had any sustained motivation to seek a Golden Fleece Award: I had done plenty of begging as an adolescent hitch-hiker around Europe, but was glad to put dependency behind me once I had a job and had no wish to see the demeaning of academic posts that took place as academics scrambled for money, personal secretaries and state-funded mistresses. A colleague once confided to me that it felt grim, at age forty-five, to come in to the Department daily and not to be able to tell a single person what to do. In contrast, I did not mind that a bit: I wanted only volunteers, not pressed men. Anyhow, back in the early 1970’s I had found there was no interest on the part of the Social Science Research Council in setting up a proper adult subject pool for psychology (or the other social sciences) in Edinburgh.^{Most psychologists are only too happy to study special groups — like the upper-middle-class infants in E.U. Psychology Department’s nursery — which provide no threat to egalitarian assumptions that everyone is the same [apart from a few cases of Down’s syndrome in separate research empires]. Differential psychology, however, needs differences to the extent they occur in the normal population. Thus it needs proper subject pools.} Moreover, I knew from experience with student projects that to undertake useful work on IQ in state schools was virtually impossible unless lies were told to heads and bureaucrats about the true nature of the project. As to doing work on IQ in twins or adoptees or on the efficacy of streaming in schools, my pessimism was well founded: not a single programme of useful research of these types has been undertaken in the UK in the past thirty years. (The one big Edinburgh report on 10,000 testees uses children tested in Dublin by Tom Kellaghan and colleagues at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra.^{Deary, Egan, Gibson, Austin, Brand & Kellaghan, 1996, Intelligence 23, 105-132.})

Under-employed in conventional ways, I thus gladly took up the increasingly frequent opportunities offered me to review articles submitted to learned journals and to write book reviews — especially for those prestigious organs, Nature and Times Higher Educational Supplement (the latter being the weekly newspaper and comic for academics in the UK). The great things about such exercises are as follows.

à You see some result for your efforts within a couple of months — quite unlike the bizarre two-year conception-to-publication time-lag that afflicts most academic writing.

à Your article is short, so you can justify photocopying it to all your friends.

à Nobody has much possibility of come-back on what you say. When a publisher has invited a review, he has little possibility of redress for what is written, so the reviewer can go to town. (Feminazies sometimes tried to persuade editors to drop me, but without success — until I agreed I was what was standardly called by lefties a “scientific racist” in 1996, and was promptly dropped like the proverbial hot potato without any complaint being necessary!)

à At Nature and Times Higher, you are paid — about £100 per review in 1997 money.

à If you had boyhood dreams of being a sniper, you are in your element as your dreams are realized and you feel you know exactly what to do.

How I enjoyed putting the boot in while confronting the madding hordes of egalitarian, environmentalist and, more lately, ‘constructivist’ psychologists with unwelcome reference to the work of my hereditarian pals! Over the years I was able to have my say on more than one occasion about the work of academic opponents Mick Billig (constructivist), Jerry Bruner (relativist), Nick Mackintosh (class-ist) and Robert Sternberg (‘there must be more than g’); and also of academic buddies Hans Eysenck, Richard Lynn, Paul Kline and Philip Vernon. Nature also called me in to provide ‘News & Views’ pieces on the work of Jim Flynn — which led on to research of my own which cast doubt on the reality of the embarrassing “massive worldwide IQ rise” which Flynn had observed (Brand et al., 1990, Irish J. Psychol. 10). The review I did for Nature (325, pp. 767-8, 1987) of Michel Schiff & Richard Lewontin’s Education and Class: the Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies was a special joy. Nature gave me two full pages (and a dignified, if severe picture of Spearman) with which to have a go at this major French adoption study in which (I pointed out) professional adoptive homes had achieved no more of an IQ-boost for the children of unskilled-manual homes than Burt, Eysenck and Jensen had always predicted if such a sizeable environmental manipulation were made. Plainly, Schiff and Lewontin could never have read the theories of Eysenck and Jensen which they were so eager to condemn. Moreover, I received personal encouragement for my reviews — a rare event in academia. Art Jensen once wrote sweetly to say I must have ‘a genetic gift for book reviewing.’ After reflecting ruefully on the various things for which I plainly had no genetic gift (teaching, research, administration, wymmin, politics....) I settled for accepting this intriguing observation from the master-craftsman of my trade.

Furthermore, my own thinking was often stimulated by having access to some of the very best and most recent work arriving on the scholarly scene (as is only available to ‘buddies’ and reviewers). It was thus I realized early the message of modern psychogenetic work: that Marx was wrong about the environment and that Adler was right — that social class effects on personality are vanishingly slight [IQ is something of an exception] whereas birth order and epistatic [gene x gene interaction effects] are, after additive genetic effects, the next most important influences on personality. This message took a while to be accepted by the London School, as I had to point out to friends in 1989 (Nature 341, p. 29). Even at the time of writing (1997), a substantial review by me of two of Adler’s re-published works remains unpublished by London School outlets despite mollifying assurances in 1994 that Behaviour Research & Therapy would carry it. (Of course, it was unexpected that I would offer any support for the ‘wet’, anti-hereditarian Adler. But I had come to the view that there were birth-order effects that would be demonstrable if only the (largely inherited) IQ’s of children were matched. My point was that brighter later-borns can sometimes overtake first-borns both in self-esteem and in actual achievement, and thus develop first-born ways themselves. Adler himself had never realized the need to allow for intelligence, chiefly because (as a later-born?!) he so abhorred the whole inegalitarian concept of IQ. In 1996, F. J. Sulloway (Born to Rebel, Little Brown) achieved the requisite matching accidentally by studying very eminent people who had all participated in intellectual and political controversies: among such highly intelligent and educated people, Sulloway was able to report definite, if modest, tendencies for first-borns to be more ‘conservative’ and for later-borns to be more ‘radical.’)

Alas, there is also a downside to critical work which it took me somewhat longer to appreciate.

à Critics make more enemies than friends.

à Paid critics make even more enemies, since all their colleagues are green with envy.

à Most psychologists never read Nature or Times Higher — so my efforts went largely unobserved by the masses.

à One is at the whim of shadowy forces over which one has no control. I had no sooner got my feet under the table at Nature as a credible, fair-minded, sufficiently witty hereditarian voice than Nature began a long march towards environmentalism (thereby swapping roles with its American counterpart, Science, which moved over the same decade in the opposite direction). (In 1997, this divergence would culminate in Nature rejecting research on 80-year-old identical twins which would actually be used by Science as its cover story (6 vi 1997).^{I would run this as my first EXCLUSIVE story in the TgF NewsLetter — but no-one took any notice.})

à Most scientific book reviewing is so bad — so boring — that hardly anyone ever thinks of citing a review as source of authority for an idea or argument. Many scientific reviewers provide hopelessly dull chapter summaries and criticize books only for being over-priced. Thus, although my own rate of scientific citation has long exceeded that of most of my colleagues, the forty or so acerbic oops analytic book reviews that I have written in ten years remain largely unrecognized. Is this just personal sour grapes? No! The reviews of Skinner by Chomsky (1957), of Douglas by Burt (1969), of Kamin by Mackintosh (1976), of Farber by Bouchard (1982), and of Gardner by Scarr (1985) are, to me, star events in academic psychology — but these great pieces achieve nothing approaching the recognition that they deserve.

Thus, while I liked to fancy I had ‘arrived’ at the UK High Table for psychological science, my arrival was only as an informed skivvy. It was nice to have reprint requests from professors of engineering and psychiatry in far-off lands; but these never led to anything — any more than did the by-now steady trickle of requests from psychologists in Spain, Croatia, Slovakia and Estonia. When The g Factor was de-published by Wiley, an eminent German professor of physics took a kindly interest. But what can such interested outsiders do for a subject like psychology that is intent on destroying itself with its support for feminism just as sociology gave in to ‘anti-numeracy’ and anthropology to ‘anti-racism.’


14. The Quotes, 1984-96 — ‘Personality, Biology & Society’

In the 1980’s, the future for differential psychology was far from clear — even though I myself thought the IT/IQ researches in Edinburgh had surely dislodged the enemy from important ground. Burt’s reputation had been smashed; no new psychogenetic work was being conducted in the UK (except with the Maudsley twins where, because the twins were volunteers, there may well have been a bias towards those identical-twin pairs showing unusually high similarity and thus their special interest in twinning which had led them to volunteer for twin research); Art Jensen was bogged down in reaction-time work which was going nowhere (see Jensen, 1987, in P. A. Vernon, Speed of Information Processing and Intelligence); Hans Eysenck’s ‘scientific approach’ to personality was sadly faltering (Brand, 1983, Behav. Res. & Ther.; Brand, 1986, Nature 319, 799) and his new psychometric dimension, Psychoticism, lacked appeal to me, at least, since, in view of its skewed distribution, it plainly represented some kind of interaction effect between more basic variables (probably between some two or three of the Big Six); and what I thought to have been the Edinburgh breakthrough re IT and IQ was stirring very few people actually to replicate it — let alone to check or report the reliability of their IT measures when they did so.

Whatever my hopes of my students and my reviewing, I had just about enough sense to see that I should not try to rely on these to render me at last, in the eye of posterity, a justified sinner. I was being as naughty as I could, but I needed to demonstrate the academic ‘bottom’ for my views. Always inclined to amusement at the sheer folly of the opponents of realism, hereditarianism, individualism, libertarianism, streaming and eugenics, I nevertheless wanted to demonstrate my familiarity with opposing views — and not to be dismissed for the very mistakes of which I accused opponents of the London School. Thus, in the 1980’s, I acquired the habit of collecting quotations to illustrate the claims of opposing camps and also to help provide a jollier-than-usual reference list for students.^{Compiling this was easier for me than it would have been for many psychologists of my generation. Having been used to express typing services in the Prison Service [though the strainingly busty but rural and conventionally modest secretary, Phyllis, often typed ‘six’ for ‘sex’] I went into shock when I joined academia and discovered its pathetic lack of such facilities [not to mention Phyllis]. Thus I quickly learned to type — after a fashion, but at least using ten fingers unlike many perennially two-fingered academic typists.}

Soon, I received a little encouragement from colleagues — especially from Art Jensen, who found my juxtapositions of sense and nonsense much to his own comic taste. By the late-1980’s, I had begun to organize this material in thirty sections that increasingly seemed to me to exhaust the central topics of differential psychology. The coverage ranged all the way from the philosophical to the psychometric, from the Eysenckian to the Freudian, from the scientific to the political, from the theoretical to the applied and from academic to ‘folk’ psychology. Of course, the topics included ‘intelligence’, ‘personality’ and ‘politics’ and there were four key sections on the ‘group differences’ of age, sex, class and race. Gradually, I came to believe that I was providing a ‘resource manual’ [that title being suggested kindly by Mike Anderson] or even a proto-textbook for modern differential psychology. I began writing ‘introductions’ to each set of quotes and thus to set out more expressly my own organization of, and views on key controversies. In due course, the four sections 8-11 on ‘questions about intelligence’ (psychometric, psychological, psychogenetic and psychotelic questions) would provide the starting points for the four chapters of The g Factor.

It was not long before the Quotes were getting me into trouble. They could only be understood by the brighter students. They took up too much of the time of the Department’s secretaries. (No matter that the secretaries were working from my pretty neat, typed first drafts or that this was the first serious use I had ever made of the secretaries’ time in fifteen years in the Department.) They took up too much of my time — which should have been spent preparing ‘visual aids’ and begging letters to research councils. Who was going to publish them? — Eventually I found a small publisher; but at that precise moment the Departmental secretaries were instructed to withdraw their support entirely and it turned out that their floppy disks were on some word-processing package so antiquated that I would have to pay through the nose to have the material converted to a modern system. Yes, my Department, under new management, behaved as if it sought to see the back of me.

Mercifully, by 1991, I myself was at last beginning to word-process thanks to the patient instruction of my then girlfriend — a lady doctor who had Wordstar 6 at her country cottage in Stirlingshire. Romantic upheavals I had been through (losing my trim, semi-lesbian Irish girlfriend) meant that I was quite glad of mind-numbing typing work with just The Doc’s sleek tabby-cat brothers for company in her loft. In short, I persisted — through to the point when, in 1995, a young colleague pointed out that ‘the Quotes’ should surely go up on the Net as the easiest way of supplying them to students and winning the enterprise some international recognition. I myself had none of the expertise to attempt this. (A helpful Psychology postgraduate made a stab, using the quotations about sex differences.) But 1996 would change everything. After de-publication of my ‘racist’ book, The g Factor, I needed to make the biggest mark that I could on the Net; and I had knowledgeable right-libertarian pals who were eager to help. Despite blackouts, firewalls and ostracization imposed on me by Edinburgh University,^ {It was only in 1997 that I was to learn that my successive Heads of Department in the late-1980’s continued to hold me guilty of ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ insensitivities of which students had complained and into which the Heads had made inquiries and on which the file had been closed on both occasions.} all 30 sections of quotes, jointly called Personality, Biology and Society, were up and running at private websites by the December — providing what a kind observer might deem a virtual ‘University of the Internet’ in the field of differential psychology. Thanks to the Net, life is not so bad for the modern heretic

Will anybody read, let alone like ‘the Quotes’ / PB&S ? As I write this [June, 1997] I am still on tenterhooks. Any psychology student worldwide who searches for ‘+psychology +intelligence +race’ is now bound to come across my stuff. Ditto a student who looks via a Net Search procedure like Alta Vista for ‘+personality +crime +sex.’ Yet do students search? Or do they just read what they’re told?^{When myself a student at Oxford, I would have regarded it as unthinkable to search beyond the substantial reading list that I would already have been given. The Internet now makes searching easier, but the process is still painfully slow for students competing for access to servers in public laboratories.} And even if they do search, will they just avoid my stuff if they come across it? After all, many of them are quite content to treat me as virtually a non-person on campus.

Still, it would be no novelty for an academic production to go unread; and meanwhile I have the satisfaction of having performed a service for differential psychology which may help make up for the fact that no-one in recent years has been able to seize the subject by the throat and write panoramically about it as Hans Eysenck once did. The Quotes set out the main themes of modern differential psychology, even if they are more ‘academic’ than some readers would like. The ‘introductions’ to the thirty sections provide something of a text to which the Quotes themselves may be regarded as organized though very copious footnotes. Whatever may be their merits, the Quotes can hardly hope to rival the last great textbook of differential psychology — by the late Lee Willerman^{1979, The Psychology of Individual and Group Differences, San Francisco, Freeman.} — nor what is to arrive soon re personality from Ian Deary and Gerry Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 1997/8.) Yet they may serve to introduce brighter students to the many controversies with which serious psychology is fraught despite the disappearance of many tenured staff into specialist bolt-holes.

the story so far

as unofficial sniper for the london school, chris brand subjected social environmentalists, egalitarians, feminists and constructivists to damaging fire — though few were watching the show because psychologists seldom read nature and times higher. trying to be 'positive' as well, brand started issuing his anthologies of quotations on any and every topic in differential psychology — but they were only intelligible to the brighter students and to people who knew quite a bit about intelligence and personality already.

now read on

15. Race is back, 1982-1995 — Richard Lynn and Phil Rushton turn the screw

Through the 1980’s, the London School seemed to me to be making steady progress. The ‘fairness’ of IQ-testing and the reality of the g factor became still better established — first by Art Jensen (Bias in Mental Testing) and eventually, in the 1990’s, by the arrival of John Carroll’s massive survey, Human Cognitive Abilities (see Brand, 1993, Times Higher, 22 x, p. 22). The substantial links between g and speed of information processing, average evoked potentials and sheer brain volume were increasingly recognized by all but Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin — both of whom resorted to the ostrich-like stratagem of not reading, or at least of not commenting in public on what was written. Most notably of all, Tom Bouchard et al. (1990, Science 250), in their Minnesota study of monozygotic twins who had been separated for an average of thirty years, confirmed Burt’s high estimate of the IQ correlation (c. ·77) and showed that these twin similarities could not be attributed either to selective placement or to the time the twins had spent together (whether before or after their separation at an average age of 5 months, range 0-49). Moreover, the Minnesota team’s findings were backed up by adoption studies which found on average no similarity in IQ between unrelated co-adopted children by late adolescence; by Scandinavian work showing forty-five 65-year-old MZ-apart pairs to be far more similar (r = ·78) than were eighty-eight DZ-apart pairs (r = ·32); and by a spate of defences of Sir Cyril Burt (with three books finding the case against him essentially ‘not proven’ on the main charges — see Brand, 1990, Person. & Indiv. Diffs. 11; Brand, 1995, Nature 377). Yet little of all this excellent work would prove of as much general interest to the newspapers as the propositions of Richard Lynn, Phil Rushton and, eventually, myself on the increasingly suppressed topic of racial differences.

In 1981, a paper of Richard’s came to me from Nature for reviewing. It contained data licensing talk of native Japanese being ahead of Americans in IQ; and I calculated also that there was also a correlation of +·76 between IQ and year of birth of the sample tested. With Richard’s paper (published in 1982), differential psychology was to move into a new phase. Despite environmentalist meanderings, the future would involve sustained attention to racial differences, secular trends and eugenic implications.

Soon, the ‘grand old man’ of psychometric psychology, Philip Vernon, took up the Asian (i.e. Mongoloid, or East Asian) question and produced a definitive survey in what was to be the last book of his distinguished career (which had included a spell in Scotland). Though they had endured disadvantages like racism and even compulsory ‘re-location’ (into camps in the Eastern Californian desert, after Pearl Harbour), the Japanese and Chinese immigrants to the Pacific coast of North America had tested high and made good. Here is how I summarized their early test performance in my review (1984, Person. & Indiv. Diffs.5).

“North American Orientals have never had any great difficulty in impressing mental testers. As early as 1921, Chinese children coming from manual-working-class parentage and speaking Chinese at home were found to have an average Stanford-Binet IQ of 96. By 1926, Californian Japanese children were known to perform at Caucasian levels on the non-verbal Army Beta; those in Vancouver had been identified as “the most intelligent group in British Columbia” — achieving an average IQ of 114.2 on the Pintner-Paterson performance tests; and those in Hawaii had been identified by Porteous Mazes as “likely to become the leading group in their community.””

The discovery of Asian equality or superiority on the tests was a crucial development, for it at once helped vindicate the fairness of the tests across even linguistic cultural barriers (which US Orientals had maintained, far more than US Blacks) and to make it plain that the London School’s cause was not one of White supremacism — at least, not with regard to IQ. Above all, the results of East Asians^{Current usage refers to Mongoloids as East Asians to distinguish them from the peoples of the Indian sub-continent. The latter are Caucasian but have unfortunately become known in Britain as 'Asian.' Such Indopakeshis have been happy enough to be described as 'Asian' because at least it is better than being considered Black. (Indopakeshis have considerable reservations about Black people and are very unhappy at the idea of their children marrying with a Black person.) Ignoracism is now running deep and generating all kinds of unhelpful confusion.} showed that their virtual enslavement^{Under schemes of 'bonded labour', East Asians were quite often kept as virtual slaves for longer periods than obtained for Black slaves on the plantations.} and racial prejudice did not lower IQ.

At the University of Western Ontario, Phil Rushton would develop this option by expressly contrasting Black and Asian lifestyles as two extremes on the biologists’ r-K spectrum (which ranges species from relative production of quantity (r) to relative production of quality (K) in the next generation). Phil maintained^{e.g. 1985, Person. & Indiv. Diffs. 6; 1995, Race, Evolution & Behavior} that there was a broad racial spectrum contrasting more exuberant and low-IQ Africans with more restrained and higher-IQ Asians — with Caucasians falling rather boringly in between. Nevertheless, Phil was rapidly in trouble. I was one of some sixty academics internationally who put in pleas to save his job at the University of Western Ontario. I did so very gladly: on scholarly grounds alone, Phil’s publications and citations plainly entitled him to the D.Sc. which he would eventually receive; and, in ‘political’ terms, his substantial case would surely unsettle critics of the London School as Phil (to use the words of one such critic, Barry Mehler) “rode shotgun for the new eugenics movement.”

At the time, the exercise of defending Phil seemed to me just a case of having to deal in a passably normal academic way with ignorant babies clutching at an empty environmentalist idealism. In the late 1980’s, I could hardly bring myself to see that, in common or garden terms, the ‘multicultural’, ‘anti-racist’ movement was actually winning — that it was succeeding in making ‘minorities’ (including even women!) the new underdogs who could replace the now barely existent ‘working class’ in the affections and aspirations of enlightened power-seekers. Having long declined to watch TV in protest against its perennial sub-intellectualism, I had no idea that even soap operas were beginning to preach ‘anti-racism’, ‘gay rights’ and the long-exposed incoherence of modern ‘feminism’ [see Quotes XXII at ]. Especially once Phil’s job was saved, I even felt quite free to have a go at him myself (Person. & Indiv. Diffs. 19, 1995). Primarily, I wanted to demonstrate that serious academic debate about psychology and race was now plainly a within-house affair for the grown-ups of the London School; and that we handled matters with far greater erudition and objectivity than the increasingly ludicrous ‘anti-racists’ who were now combining the wish for ‘positive discrimination’ with the idea that there are no ‘races’ anyhow. Secondly, I wanted to assert the primacy of the ‘Big Six’ over race itself as an explanatory construct.

Such subtleties are all very well.^{Of course, to an academic they are insufficiently subtle. I certainly want to acknowledge the possibility that different races create whole packages of inter-linked effects that might defy analysis solely in terms of IQ or other major dimensions. Phil has an intriguing idea even if he has not yet been able to develop it much beyond what IQ-theorizing alone would predict.} But none of this interests the pathetic ‘media’ of the West — torn, like the once-great universities between a legitimate role as a ‘Fourth Estate’ concerned with truth and a money-spinning role as a branch of the entertainment industry. The idea that race realists had their act together yet pursued among themselves the most interesting discussions in town would totally fail to interest the media and their tragic public — both busy developing a bizarre modern piety and a grotesquely simplified demonology of ‘anti-racism’ to make up for their lack of religion. Rather than examine the scholarly literature on race and psychology, the media preferred soundbite journalism — and race realists in psychology over-cautiously demurred from providing anything that could possibly be ‘misinterpreted’. Just as the populist politics of mid-twentieth-century had been to the effect that the ills of the less privileged could be blamed on ‘greedy capitalists’, now the idea was that the ills of ‘minorities’ (all of whom had for many years enjoyed the vote) could be blamed on sexism, patriarchy, racism and imperialism (despite most of Britain’s coloured immigrants having arrived only after their own native countries had been granted independence). ‘White guilt’ had now been cultivated on a massive scale. Despite the West having lived down its own fearsome civil wars and provided an economic model to Asian countries, its media and increasingly its fast-proliferating 'universities' were run by its second-rate outcasts who now bit the hand that fed them.


16. The Irish poet, 1988-89 — battling with Piaget

There is not much that can draw an intellectual snob like me to Ireland — except a boat, a bird and a bottle. Irish universities (especially those in the South) maintain a very low standard in most (not, of course, all) subjects, doubtless due in part to chronic under-funding. (It costs Éire effectively a 50% rate of income tax to maintain for itself a National Health Service which even then is free for only the bottom 50% of wage-earners.) In psychology, the universities are particularly clueless — not liking behaviourism because it is anti-Catholic, psychoanalysis because it is anti-Catholic and the London School because it is both anti-Catholic (in its eugenic tendency) and also offends the egalitarianism that is intrinsic to Éirish, anti-British nationalism.

However, Dublin has neon-light advertising, Henry VIII’s Trinity College, Bewley’s Café/Restaurant, The Bailey Bar and a largely friendly atmosphere so long as one doesn’t actually get out the Union Jack or read The Loyal Toast (to Protestant William of Orange). Moreover, I had made a second marriage to a Dublin girl, from an anti-IRA, ‘Castle Catholic’ family. She was a sociologist and Africa-hand with a strand of realism that long proved a match for her other strand of male-mistrusting feminism. We were to have two bright and engaging Anglo-Irish daughters — entirely divergent from each other in personality, yet happy with their choices and able to get on famously. Later, I would also have a boyish colleen as a romantic hope (well, infatuation). Thus I often spent whole Christmas and Easter vacations across the Irish Sea. My chief academic exercise was to try to write a psychologist’s ‘history of philosophy’ from Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. It was to have been entitled ‘From Wonder to Whirlwind’ and to have followed the general lines of what would emerge more promptly from a Scandinavian author as the best-selling Sophie’s World.... (The triumph of Apollonic reason and science over Dyonisic feminism and superstition would have been my theme — with whatever nod at the end to the temporary mystifications of ‘post-modernism’ and ‘constructivism.’)

Fortunately, my Irish connections also brought me some tangible intellectual gains. One of the very first ‘Edinburgh’ IT/IQ studies was in fact run in Dublin (by the delectable Susan Hartnoll, with help from Ireland’s leading psychometrician, Tom Kellaghan, at the college of education where my wife taught, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra). Also, since I had given up Brit. J. Psychol. (both as a dead loss in its own right and in revenge for their not publishing the Anderson & Brand paper), I was glad to have Irish J. Psychol. (a refereed journal, unlike Hans Eysenck’s PAID at that time) take my evidence showing very little IQ-type rise in Scottish children on the Wechsler scales from 1961 to 1983/4 (Brand, Freshwater & Dockrell, 1989). However, it was my introduction to the grossly cerebrally palsied young Irish poet, Davoren Hanna, that was the most important to me intellectually. It was learning Davoren's remarkable story (e.g. The g Factor, Chapter 2, p. 65) and meeting him that convinced me that the Edinburgh IT/IQ work was indeed touching on the essential nature of human intelligence.

Ever since I had heard the word ‘interaction’ around 1970, I had known I was up against a hydra-headed monster, all of whose heads I would at some time have to remove. It was as with Goering: “When I hear the word ‘civilization’, I reach for my revolver.” ‘Interaction’ effects — especially ‘complex interaction effects’ — were becoming what psychologists would invoke when covering up the fact that they did not really know or care to know what were the causes of the phenomena that they supposedly wished to explain.

Once upon a time, the sorry practitioners of ‘applied psychology’^{By 1970, 'applied psychology' was unfailingly the sub-intellectual rump of psychology. It involved those who broadly believed in g but had neither the courage nor the ability to defend their belief against the rising tides of behaviourism and Piagetianism.} had been allowed to talk among themselves, at least, of ‘multivariate causation.’ This term usually cloaked frank ignorance about causation with a mantle of piety: ‘multiple regression analysis’ might show many statistical factors ‘contributing to’ a dependent variable, but most such ‘contributions’ were vanishingly small and unlikely to be replicated in further research. (Any single statistical multiple regression analysis necessarily capitalizes on chance.) Almost as often, espousal of ‘multivariate causation’ concealed a reluctance to acknowledge the star role of the g factor in educational and vocational achievement.

In the 1970’s, the fast-growing special interest group of 'developmental' psychology would allow itself and its students to sing choruses to themselves about ‘interaction’ — meaning thereby to banish equally the two demons of behaviourism and hereditarianism. The ideology was that development occurred by ‘interaction’, and thus that any currently backward child would surely catch up once enough opportunities for interaction were provided. It was a cunning deceit — a cross between old-fashioned social environmentalism on the one hand and the psychogeneticists’ idea of ‘genetic-environmental covariation’ on the other.^{Genes and environment can be correlated because parents supply both, because parents adapt the environment to a child's nature or, most importantly, because growing children increasingly select and fashion their own micro-environments — by choice of friends, TV programmes, etc. according to their own pre-existing personalities, including genetic propensities. Robert Plomin and Sandra Scarr would soon begin spelling out and providing evidence for such entirely non-mysterious causes of final psychological differences between people — for a full exposition, see Brand, 1988, in D.Anderson, Full Circle.}

Not that this was the whole of the story. Genetic-environmental ‘interaction’ is additionally a technical term in psychogenetics: it refers to such possibilities as that a child who is finally to excel at music may need to have had both certain genes (perhaps for ‘musical ability’ or ‘persistence’) and a certain type of environment (involving perhaps presence of musical instruments and encouragement to use them). Yet again, outside psychogenetics, social psychologists use ‘interaction’ to refer generically to person-to-person contacts, conversation and correspondence. Finally, philosophers take ‘interaction’ to refer to the relation between mind and body that is envisaged by dualist philosophers who admit the existence of both realities but need somehow to connect them.

In short, Piagetians could have a field day with their favoured term: ‘interaction’ had made agreeable references to many possibilities that were all perfectly nice and reasonably likely to occur some of the time. Yet, while allowing happy confusion, Piagetians were actually to use the term in none of the above ways. ('Interaction' would indeed prove to be all things to all men.) The Piagetians' claim was that the growing child had to interact with the even the physical world, and to observe the results, in order for its intelligence to develop. It was not that particular interactions led to particular consequences that experimenters could test. Rather, the claim was that all of a child’s own ‘interactions with the environment’ were constitutive of the growth of intelligence, failures of which could therefore be rectified by prescribing more ‘interaction’ — under the stimulating and sensitive supervision of well-paid psychology graduates....

Obviously, the Piagetian idea is perfectly plausible — with whatever help from its being confused with the other versions of ‘interaction.’ Yet how can it actually be demonstrated that Piagetian interaction really is necessary to normal or superior development? The strength of populist Piagetianism was undoubtedly that it seemed so appalling actually to deny that children needed to play, whether with physical objects, words or people. Whatever the innate capacity for language indicated by Noam Chomsky, did children not learn English by growing up in, and ‘interacting’ with an English-speaking community?

This was where Davoren came in. Born grossly palsied to a Dublin journalist, a graduate in philosophy, and his schoolteacher wife, Davoren had, until he was six years old, not a single controlled, voluntary movement by means of which he could ‘interact’ with the world. Even Davoren’s eye-blinks were so random as to offer no hope of using them to signal ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘come’ or ‘go.’ Speechless, in a wheelchair and requiring total (but total....) nursing care, Davoren was consistently recommended by paediatric experts to be consigned to an institution. The expert judgment in Dublin of 1975 was that Davoren must be profoundly handicapped mentally as well as motorically. It was only his parents’ hope, and perhaps faith, that kept Davoren with them until, when he was six, they began to notice that, when he was seated in their laps, he could apparently manage to fall forward with some deliberation and determined direction, towards a toy on the floor, say. Soon they established that Davoren could project himself when requested towards either an apple or an orange on the floor at his mother’s feet. Next, letters of the alphabet were introduced, and Davoren soon went on to an enlarged QWERTY keyboard. The astonishing result was that Davoren not only communicated with humour but that his poetry won him four poetry awards and acclaim from literary experts. His home had always been a very sociable place in which the radio played constantly (often tuned to the up-market BBC Radio III). By age twelve, Davoren knew a lot about the world (including that adolescent boys were entitled to a lively interest in sex). Here is his poem at that age about the fall of the Berlin wall in November, 1989.

THE DANCING BEAR^{The bear is symbolic of Berlin — as the bulldog was once of Britain (alas now replaced by the Pit Bull Terrier).}
Festivities will never stop at Berlin’s wall.
Streets that were once lugubrious grey
now entangle as lovers do through
the long-limbed summer nights.
Seeking admission to the nuptial feast,
flesh once striped by searchlight-beams
now dances arm in arm with comrades
on the other side of freedom’s wall.
Slow caravans of eager immigrants
bring knapsacked hopes in their hearts.
Light kindles the naked callous stones
and luminous dreams mutate the skies.

Sadly, Davoren’s mother, Brighid, died at age 44 (apparently of exhaustion) when Davoren was 15; and Davoren plunged into depression and did not long outlive her. Thus there may never be a 100%-convincing answer to critics who suggested that Davoren’s jokes and poems were the work of his mother herself. However, there are several answers to such criticism.

à Davoren was seen widely by curious literati in Dublin as he came to prominence.

à My own daughters and I saw Davoren produce engaging answers to our questions while he was in Edinburgh, without his mother, and seated in the lap of a female carer whose educational attainments were modest.

à Poetry, wit and risqué jokes are not female fortes. Had Davoren’s mother intended to cheat, it is much more likely she would have set out to make Davoren a writer of pleasant short stories.

à Davoren was seen on many occasions by computer expert Dr David Vernon of Trinity College, Dublin. Though Davoren was suspicious of ‘experts’, he and the family co-operated with Dr Vernon and Davoren was learning to use his gaze direction to select letters when his mother died. The Dublin Tribune reported of the system (20 ix ‘90, ‘Giving creativity a voice’): “It is painstakingly slow, but it works.”

Thus it was that I thrice described Davoren’s case to colleagues in Edinburgh (with the help of a video of the film of him appearing on BBC Wales TV to receive his poetry prize). None of our resident healthy sceptics could come up with a plausible account of Davoren’s performances in terms of outright deception; and all that our Piagetians could say was that Davoren must all along have been interacting with his mother ‘at some emotional level’ — an entirely unconvincing idea that ignored the conspicuous randomness of Davoren’s movements, noises, glances and facial expressions. Davoren doubtless ‘got through to’ his mother in some way, but the point is that his capacity for interaction with her was grossly restricted — without any diminishing effect on Davoren’s intelligence. Plainly, Davoren’s limitations of ‘interaction’ had been startling; but his intelligence was nevertheless superior. At around this time, I also learned that, behind the scenes, away from the lecture halls, Piagetians had for some while been baffled by many other cases of children lacking arms and legs who had nevertheless developed good intelligence.

What with the Edinburgh IT/IQ work and Tom Bouchard’s demonstration of high (Burt-level!) similarities in IQ between separated identical twins, I was beginning to feel there was a revamped story about IQ which I could tell. — Admittedly, it was a little naughty of me to try out Davoren’s story and my own conclusions at a private conference of the Pioneer Foundation that was meant to focus on race. But I had to try out the Pioneers: Were they really interested in IQ?

the story so far

race returned to the agenda of differential psychology in the 1980's and chris brand was able to help richard lynn's work on asian IQ into nature, to help puff philip vernon's review of oriental intelligence, and to help save phil rushton's job in western ontario. however, brand's battle at home was with piagetians who had by then won the battle of sound-bites and got it accepted that the development of intelligence was a 'complex interaction effect' from which genetic factors could and should never be isolated. not for the first or last time, brand's irish connections came into their own.

now read on

17. Eugenics is back, 1990 — The Pioneers

Invited to New York to address the ‘far right’ Pioneer Foundation in the marbled magnificence of the Metropolitan Club (just off Fifth Avenue, near the Sherman Monument), I had very little to discuss apart from the perfectly bright yet minimally 'interactive' Davoren Hanna. Nothing new was happening about IT and IQ, and anyway I had become more interested in philosophical problems. (I felt I had to begin to address the by-then fashionable post-Marxist intellectual disease of ‘constructivism’ — of which more later.) To be frank, I had also become besotted by a lissom, lickable and hoydenish Irish colleen. She was ‘Moggie’ at first, for she considered herself the Cat, and myself the Scholar in the eleventh-century Irish poem, ‘The Scholar and his Cat’; but eventually she would become ‘Bloody Mary’.... I once had an embarrassing dream of the Psychology Department servitors [i.e. guards / porters] coming into my room to deliver mail and finding me penning yet another love letter on the pink paper I had bought in celebration of Mary’s flirtations with lesbianism and resulting expertise with the sustained ecstasy of tribadistic sex.

Thus the keen eugenicists, elitists and (to Stephen J. Gould and the ‘liberal’-left) “scientific racists” assembled in New York to back the hereditarian cause about race had to sit through my exposition of the interest-value of grossly handicapped children.... Still, it was the only new work on IQ that I had; and it suited me to give these hereditarians -- most of them new to me -- a little test of their patience with a talk that I knew went down OK with Edinburgh developmentalists. As a result, I came away impressed with the Pioneers’ decency and felt well able to discount British press criticisms of Hans Eysenck and Richard Lynn for having accepted Pioneer funding.^{I never applied for Pioneer funds myself. Partly, my Edinburgh student protégés were all doing well enough and there was no-one whom I was keen to employ. Partly I knew full well that Pioneer funding would be used to rubbish any resulting research or its citation. This happened for Tom Bouchard's study of separated MZ's which had been pump-primed by the Pioneers before conventional state funding could be obtained. Likewise, one of the main criticisms of The Bell Curve in New York ABC TV's attempt to dismiss the book in 1994 was that some of the research quoted in The Bell had been funded by the Pioneers (viz. the research by Richard Lynn and Phil Rushton. Lastly, I did not want to be linked via others to the state-eugenic and Nordic-race thinking of the 1930's (when the Pioneer Fund came into being). Democratic elitist and race realist I may be, but (i) I am no more in favour of state planning and organization of breeding than of large-scale state intervention in the economy in general; (ii) the eugenic move I favour is to introduce advance delinquency insurance (for people who wish to remain within the welfare state), not compulsory sterilisation (see e.g. my review of Richard Lynn's book Dysgenics in the July issue of the Internet magazine PINC at .} At the same time, I felt I did now really have ‘a line’ that worked well with both ‘wet’ and ‘far right’ audiences. I felt happy that I had ‘touched bottom’ -- and bought the deeply introverted Mogs a delicate bangle from Fifth Avenue on the strength of that. Intelligence was a 'given', not an interaction effect: it was something that one person did or did not bring to another.

Still, conferences are not about one’s own paper — let alone about one’s left-behind girlfriend (awoken in her Carrickmacross bed as she sometimes was by my late-night calls from the Big Apple). Undoubtedly the most stunning person in attendance was the delightful Mrs Barbara Jensen — a leading Republican lady who was properly concerned at the idea that she should take a walk through crime-prone Central Park with slummy intellectuals like me in ill-fitting suits. (She did it, however, after ensuring that we academics knew to be alert for fast moving Black thieves who would rush past, tearing out ladies’ diamond ear-rings as they went.) Better conversational value than most of the psychologists put together, Barbara was willing to field my questions about what it was like to be married to a really rich and successful psychobabbler like Art. ‘Well, yes,’ she replied, ‘we had indeed hoped that Bias in Mental Testing {Art’s magnum opus} would sell.’ ‘So didn’t it?’ I questioned in astonishment. ‘After five years of poor sales,’ she said, ‘we did a survey of 100 university psychology libraries and found that only seven of them had purchased the volume.’ I was staggered. This was my first glimpse of what was coming to pass: the opposition in psychology to the London School was so overwhelming that critics of IQ no longer bothered to purchase even the magnum opus of the School’s leading scholar for the libraries of their 'universities.' The pretence of open-minded scholarly discussion was evidently no longer necessary -- and might even get a professor into trouble with increasingly ‘sensitive’ students who had come to look to ‘political correctness’ as an answer to President Reagan while he and NATO were gloriously winning the Cold War.

Equally enjoyable was meeting Phil Rushton again. I had once asked Phil round for drinks at my flat in Edinburgh while he was attending a sociobiology conference; and I had been impressed that he was a decent and committed hereditarian with a good sense of humour. I wasn’t so sure of his grasp of psychogenetics — well, no more than of my own. Phil linked the Black-White difference to rates of dizygotic twinning. Now, DZ twinning is more common in Black populations — supposedly because the Negroid peoples are geared in general to go for ‘quantity’ of births more than for immediate ‘quality.’ What I could not understand was why Phil would not therefore predict that Caucasoid dizygotic twins would also have a relatively high crime rate — which I felt pretty sure from my ‘crime’ days was not so. Still, Phil had managed to ‘hang in there’ at Western Ontario despite even the President of his State trying to winkle him out for race-thought-crime, and had plainly become the leading exponent of the London School’s view on race — even appearing with a ‘target article’^{A 'target article' is one on which other researchers are invited to publish comments, often in the same issue of the journal in which the target article appears.} in the prestigious organ, Behavioural & Brain Sciences.

Phil bent my ear to his latest thesis, that nationalism and xenophobia along racial and ethnic lines were the up-and-coming thing in a troubled world and that politicians would have to go with the flow. Already the USSR was crumbling; we could both see that the European Union and the USA were remaining manageable only by advantaging ‘minorities’ and women voters in the job market in ways that must increasingly undermine the commitment of White males to these empires; and (though then unknown to us) ‘ethnic cleansing’ was about to be invented in polyglot ex-Yugoslavia.

Phil’s thesis cut me guiltily to the quick — not least because I had just finished reading Hugh Thomas’ brilliant An Unfinished History of the World, a largely anti-statist, anti-empire, anti-corporatist volume which made the impositions on human nature of grandiose politicians look futile and even foolhardy. Still, I knew I could not go along with a thesis that ended in old-fashioned nationalism — that horror of horrors for any European. Thus I resolved to try to refine Phil’s thesis as best I could. In particular, I would watch out for racial classifications by hierarchical cluster analysis -- allowing people’s broad racial classifications (Black, Aboriginal, Asian and White [including Indian sub-continent]) to be recognized together with the many sub-groups to which they also belong (Nordic, Alpinic, Mediterranean, Semitic, Indo-Iranian, etc.). Before predicting the break-up of the political world into nations on general race-genetic grounds, it seemed to me better to examine and present what were the major empirical similarities — in terms of both shared phenotype and shared genotype. Perhaps, empirically, it would turn out that the differences between the broader racial groupings were much bigger than the average difference between sub-groups within each broad grouping. In short, I resolved to remain alert and sympathetic to the possibility that ‘the West’ could ‘hold’ and — with NATO no longer the sworn enemy of Russia (only of Moscow’s rampant Mafia) — stand for the music, the wit, and the love of liberty and justice that are so much the hallmarks of White civilization.

All this is very boring in that racial classification still remains a matter of argument in 1997. Some ninety-five per cent of the world’s population are certainly well described as being Caucasian, Mongoloid or Negroid (or some cross between these three groups); but the question of whether Blacks and Whites differ more, genetically, than, say, Irish and Iranians, has yet to be answered empirically. However, multivariate methods are at last beginning to be used — with both phenotypic and genotypic data; I still think I am right to seek to recognize broad as much as narrow racial groupings — as Phil himself might agree, especially since he himself has done so much to provide a psychology of the broader differences; and I live in hope that racial realities and political aspirations will eventually seem quite easy to connect — with one proving a guide to the other. The idea that White men might one day fight each other again in yet a third ‘European Civil War’ is appalling, and I will hope against hope that nothing less than biological truth itself can be invoked to prevent such mad competition from arising once more. Instead, the West must prepare itself for economic competition with China (joined perhaps by the Caucasian sub-groups of the Arab world and South America — the other ‘anti-status-quo powers’ of today). It is in its ever-increasing rejection of superstition, tyranny, corruption and arbitrariness in government that the West has revealed its own nature in history. Hopefully that rejection will continue even if it involves people having to be encouraged to be ‘good Europeans’ first and capitalists, socialists, libertarians or churchgoers second. The fact that the European Union is mildly oligarchic since most members of its governing Council of Ministers do not need to be re-elected within the next year or two is helpful. This prevents the worst excesses of democracy — especially the latter’s tendency to over-spending and inflation of the currency. Anyhow, chatting things over with Phil clarified my position sufficiently that later, when Mrs Thatcher crashed, I became an idiosyncratic Eurobore — hoping some version of Thatcherism (especially the privatization of state welfare into personal insurance schemes) could be resurrected eventually in Strasbourg, Brussels and Berlin. (Little did I realize that Frank Field and Tony Blair were thinking along the same lines!)

In truth, I didn’t reckon with the problems of converting Krauts and Frogs to roast beef, horseradish sauce, Beamish Red and Vaughan Williams — let alone of persuading them to read or interest themselves in the ‘incorrect’ and banned ‘race pornography’ of The g Factor.^{In particular, I set aside what has always seemed to me the attractive idea of the UK joining the USA. These two countries have so much more in common culturally than does either with the Continent; but for them to link up would have no striking psychological or racial rationale.} Perhaps Phil was right: perhaps only irrationally racist people like the Celts will ever harbour the likes of me for long.... (The serious women in my life have never so far been more than 50% English by birth.) However, the West faces, in China, a rising economic super-power whose own nationalism admits no multicultural ingredient whatsoever. Faced with overwhelming Chinese superiority in numbers and discipline, the West will have to work out soon whether it is happy to see the White race phased out — with perhaps beneficial effects for individual families (from inter-breeding yielding hybrid vigour) as this happens; or whether it will be wiser to preserve White enclaves — perhaps in the Rocky Mountains, Ireland, Denmark and Russia. The fate of Hong Kong from July, 1997, will show the answer. The very acceptance of Red Chinese dictatorship by most Hong Kong Chinese suggests what the answer will have to be.

Equally thought-provoking should have been meeting Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in New York. The gossip at the conference was that this pair had something ‘really big’ afoot; and Murray seemed to me a welcome convert from economics to psychology — even if his recognition of the importance of intelligence didn’t seem any advance on Sir Cyril Burt’s, and even if he was unwilling in New York (as later in The Bell Curve) to put much stress on the g factor or its heritability....

Of course, it is inexcusable to have failed to spot a best-seller in the making. All I can do now is confess. Perhaps Herrnstein and Murray simply didn’t actually say at the conference that they would soon have data from 13,000 representative young American adults, first tested at age17 and then followed till about age 33? Or perhaps I didn’t like being bounced into admiring people who hadn’t actually gone beyond Burt and were in several ways in retreat from the positions he had held. Or perhaps I was just hung-over, thinking about my tantalizingly trim and fuckably fragrant Bloody Mary, or worrying about my own paper?

No, most likely I thought — as I already taught undergraduates — that Frank Schmidt and Rhoda Hunter were already doing a great job of showing the importance of g to occupational success and income by middle age. An ivory-tower academic, I had a lot to learn about what the general public was ready to hear about IQ, especially given the growth of multiculturalist propaganda on TV. (I always assumed that scientific journalists would mediate to the public such stunning work as that of Hunter and Schmidt. How wrong I would prove to be! Today’s scientific journalists^{There is one spectacular exception, but I must say no more.} are largely creatures of the Zeitgeist, not the encyclopédistes of eighteenth-century France who changed their own times.) I bought the statutory tee-shirts for my daughters [‘My Dad was in New York and all I got was this lousy tee-shirt’] and flew out knowing it was somehow odd for half the London School’s leading scholars and hangers-on to have met in private. Yet, ever the optimist, I presumed our day would come as the research results in our favour steadily mounted.


18. Sex is back, 1990-1995 — giving Freud my little finger

In 1990, with lissom ‘Mogs’ purring quietly in my Edinburgh drawing room, adjoining my study (and still-manual typewriter), I had put the finishing touches to papers co-authored with Ian Deary and Vincent Egan that drew together my thoughts on a way of linking intelligence to personality development using a ‘conic’ or branching model that had been an abiding icon with me since age twelve. (I had previously used the analogy between personality development and a branching tree to win my Junior Research Fellowship at Nuffield. But I had set it aside as I became involved in mainstream dimensional approaches to differences. It was only much later that I learned that a ‘branching tree’ analogy had been very important to Darwin as he mused over his barnacles and finches and carrier pigeons to arrive at his evidence for natural selection.) — Essentially, intelligence was to assist with the ‘crystallization’ and ‘differentiation’ of all aspects of personality. Allowing equally for the play of emotionality (‘neuroticism’) in producing variability, I announced to the world the ‘Double Cone’ of personality that had long seemed a way of summarizing my thinking in this area. Reckoning that I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, I linked the scheme expressly to that of the Anglo-Irish poet, W. B. Yeats, in his mystical book A Vision (1938). (Yeats had especially impressed me that it was the life of the emotions that created the pressure for the human personality to cope with and use the dimension of Time — so I linked neuroticism to the use of Time and g to the mastery of Space and the present.) Of course, I was ‘away with the fairies’ and the scheme fell still-born from the presses just like my earlier summarizing sally about personality in 1984. Personality researchers, too, were creatures of the Zeitgeist: they preferred to have nothing to do with intelligence because it was so dangerous. They would need more than a few chapters and articles from me to begin even to consider the hypothesis that, in the bottom half of the IQ range, IQ accounts for a sizeable fraction of the observable psychological differences between people. On my part, I did what I was invited to do — which was normally to write with brevity, and hence with the density that invariably makes my prose incomprehensible to foreigners.

Insensible from long experience to my colleagues’ fears, I teased the Big Five theorists for cowardice about intelligence (Europ.J.Person.8, 1994). However, I found I was now more concerned with the question of why the ‘Big Six’ dimensions (plus whatever crystallizations) still seemed so trivial and meaningless — empirically convincing as they were. In particular, it disturbed me that, over the years, these major dimensions resulting from psychometric endeavour had shown rather little connection with the three things that surely matter most to people themselves (at least when not starving or being ‘ethnically cleansed’): their sex, their sexual orientation and their preferred sexual style (dominant/submissive, butch/femme, etc.). At Oxford, I had been suspicious of the prurience of one Frank Beach (who studied lordosis [sexual presentation of the hind quarters] in female guinea pigs) and even of the blessed Alfred Kinsey (whose interest in children’s sexuality and orgasms, together with the non-randomness of his sampling suggested he used whatever people came to hand — however sex-crazed). But now I was approaching age 50 with my first really painful affair behind me — for I had not managed to detach Bloody Mary from her lesbian preferences (especially those for my wife). I had lived a life of scientific probity, sticking pretty closely to empirical evidence. Now it was surely time to address reality itself — even if empirical evidence was far from concluding every question that any proper psychologist must at some time ask. My academic credentials of restraint and analyticity were surely impeccable. I should now, at last, ‘tell it how it (probably) was’?...

Yet what was there to tell? My new lady-GP girlfriend was more sympathetic to talk of ‘repression’ and hypnosis than are most of today’s psychologists. But it didn’t require me to be regressed to kick thirty years of smoking: realization of ‘nipple fixation’, or lack of it, played no part at all in this quick-and-dirty battle in which The Doc and Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking (Penguin) triumphed in their predicted three weeks over what I had feared might be a lifetime addiction. [I had always meant to stop at 40 since I thought the evidence suggested that smoking helped already-developing cancers to grow — hence the relative immunity of the young to smoking-caused cancers. But I needed extra inducements and failures of incentives to make me stop. Especially, going against my general personological view of most things, I had to come to appreciate that no-one ‘needs’ to smoke — that there is in fact no special personality type (whether ‘psychotic’, ‘neurotic’ or whatever) that derives any genuine benefit from smoking (apart from the gratification of the addiction itself once that has been allowed to set in and the merciful dampening of sex drive in institutionalized males). Fortunately, researches of students with me across 15 years had never shown anything more than that high-’Psychoticism’ scorers, the mixed handed and the low-IQ smoked more than others. Although I am only 70% right-handed by conventional criteria, this had worn pretty thin as a justification for smoking since I could never link mixed-handedness to anything psychological apart from psychoticism and I myself always score very low on ‘psychoticism’ (and neuroticism) inventories.]

No, it was not exactly my own experiences that turned me to Freud. Nor was it just that I had been sent Hans Eysenck’s Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire to review and felt that Hans’ own position about the unconscious mind and the major human drives bordered on the uninteresting and perhaps the incoherent (Brand, 1993, Behav. Res. & Therapy 31). Rather, it was the powerful jealousy of my youngest daughter, Emily, for my new girlfriend that intrigued me. [Emily and Kate did not know about Bloody Mary till later.] Although, rationally, both my daughters agreed with me that The Doc (with her cottage, car, cats, computer and cooking skills) was an ‘excellent girlfriend’ (soon fiancée) for me, Emily could simply not stick by that rational judgment. Instead, she would make the most touchingly childish attempts to monopolize me — even on the street, where it proved simply impossible for The Doc and the Girls and myself to walk anywhere in any sensible fashion.

Now, this may all seem perfectly normal and natural to plenty of people who wouldn’t want to be seen dead holding Freud’s hand. Surely little girls can be allowed to love their daddies without Freudians scoring points? Yet my eldest daughter, Kate, was quite unconcerned — except in so far as she herself frowned discretely on all ‘immorality’ and departure from routine. And there was what seemed to me a relevant difference between the Girls. By the time Emily was born, Kate had already largely got over what little of a ‘family romance’ she would have with me. From early days, Kate was ‘Mummy’s girl’ and reliable helper — though with the twist that Kate for a while fantasized herself as a boy (and was experienced by my wife as reminding her very much of her own father). Emily, by contrast, having made what she reckoned a successful emotional bee-line for her papa, never had any subsequent reason to ‘resolve’ what Freudians would consider her Oedipal crush on me. For my wife and I had drifted apart; I had no serious girlfriend till Mary — and Mary was a secret. Thus, until The Doc came along, Emily had good reason to think that I had eyes for no-one but her; so my liaison with The Doc bothered her while ‘mummy’s girl’ Kate was emotionally unaffected.

Thus it was that I concluded that only Freud came anywhere near to explaining the fascinating developments that I was seeing before my own eyes. And, as I bit the bullet, I was rewarded by flashbacks to my own childhood. At around age 4, I would feign illness to get my mother into bed with me at night, and feel a quiet determination to cope if ever my father appeared to have been struck down by lightning on the stormy nights (of 1947) that sometimes delayed his homeward progress on the London Tube — always at the mercy of frequent post-war power cuts in any case.

A year or so later, my proto-Freudianism took a big step forward as I was sent for review PsychoDarwinism, the latest of several pro-Freud works by Christopher Badcock {^^later too}, a sociologist at the London School of Economics who had seen the light in the early-1980s, had been analysed pedagogically by Anna Freud shortly before her death, and had begun to connect Freud’s ideas with those of Darwin and modern ‘evolutionary psychology.’ I already knew the story that infants love the breast because plenty of non-nutritional sucking suppresses their mother’s fertility (perhaps for two years) and thus furnishes a crucial and helpful delay in the arrival of subsequent children. (To this day, in the Third World, the strongest predictor of infant death is the arrival of a younger sibling.) I was impressed that Badcock knew this story too — and many more. For example, in blue-gill sunfish, pretending to be female can help a male avoid the aggression of senior males who have monopolized the females: the pretender can then slip past other males’ mate- or daughter-guarding and inseminate the otherwise captive females — cf. the violin teacher in one of Shakespeare's plays. Again, human females seem more likely to invest in sons who test out, in the Oedipal jousts, as ‘sexy’ (especially: confident and assertive) and thus likely to impress other females in adult life.

I had always been rather cautious about evolutionary theorizing — fearing (as Karl Popper sometimes did) that evolutionary fables, especially about behaviour, may be none too testable. Of course, I had once enjoyed Desmond Morris — and been to one of his Oxford parties where the film rights to The Naked Ape were being discussed. Later, I had been impressed by Sir Alastair Hardy’s story (excellently relayed by one of his students, Elaine Morgan) that homo sapiens had spent a lot of time in the water — escaping from ferocious mammals, elevating the female breasts, and developing language to refer to the invisible underwater goings-on of fishy prey and predators. (Unlike all other primates, our hair goes down our backs not up — arguably an adaptation assisting swimming.) Yet I had always felt unhappy with evolutionary explanations of behaviour that involved no specifiable psychology. It was this psychology that Badcock called on Freud to provide: the little girl rightly feels jealous of the penis and all the unfair advantages that come with it — maternal investment in boys which a sister can sometimes re-direct to herself by ‘telling tales’ on her brothers^{Christopher Badcock and I are not alone in feeling scholarly sympathy for Freud's doctrine of 'penis' envy. Here is the eminent Ancient Greek scholar, Kenneth Dover, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1989, Greek Homosexuality, Harvard University Press): "[As represented by Plutarch and Pseudo-Longinus,] Sappho....feels towards her male rival not a malice which would express itself in depreciation, but the hopeless envy which a mortal feels towards a god.... Devereux's reference to 'phallic awe' is treated by Marcovich as 'pushing' the hypothesis of Sappho's jealousy 'ad absurdum'; but there is an important difference between statements which are absurd because they are irreconcilable with facts and facts which are absurd but are the subject of truthful statements. Experience has compelled me to believe that some elements in Freud's psychodynamics are true and the common-sense assumptions which conflict with them untrue. On the subject of 'phallic awe' and 'penis envy' I am not in a position to contribute an opinion of my own, but I beg the reader to distinguish (a) the truth or falsity of a statement, (b) the goodness or badness of the fact, or the hypothetical goodness or badness of the factoid, communicated by the statement, and (c) the goodness or badness of the consequences of believing the statement. 'Earthquakes are common in Turkey' suffices to illustrate the differences between (a) and (b), and the difference between (a) and (c) is thrust upon us by developments in 'genetic engineering.'"}; 50% of the boys who will later become homosexual love nothing better at around age 5 than dressing up in their mother’s clothes — a sign of a feminine identification that may prove as protective for them through childhood and adolescence as for any blue-gill sunfish; and all young children are horrified by the ‘primal scene’ and tend to disrupt it by bawling and defecation^{Even in adult life, most people I meet say they just cannot bring themselves to imagine their own parents making love} — strategies that would long have proved efficacious in distracting the happy couple in the cave or one-bed household from persisting that night with baby-making.

Thus it was that a little academic desperation, plus what I could see in my nearest and dearest at close quarters, plus some bright neo-neo-Darwinian ideas, plus some residual sense of fun despite thirty years in psychology led me to take Freud’s little finger. I had always had a soft spot for Freud from having read his Introductory Lectures on my pre-marital ‘honeymoon’ (at Linz, on the Rhine, before going up to Oxford); and my liking for Freud’s boyish scientism had been increased in the late-1980s by my dear Australian friend, Trish Connolly (the Patroness of the E. U. Structural Psychometrics Group), giving me the Freud-Fliess correspondence of the 1890’s as a birthday present. Far from worrying about Freud’s sometimes dotty ideas [the orgasmic function of sneezing] and therapeutic failures [suicides], I rather liked the manic element in Freud — persisting through thick and thin with his (to my view) quite correct stress on the centrality of sex for psychology. (Darwin, too, had thought sexual selection quite as important as death as an influence on evolving human nature — notably because some men had many more children than others under pre-contraception conditions.)

Anyhow, I needed another academic ‘father.’ Hans Eysenck was clearly sticking with his “Gigantic Three” [or Four] dimensions of personality — which I found entirely admirable but, unfortunately, just wrong. By contrast, Freud offered the two great motivations of ‘sex’ (well, eros) and ‘something to do with death’ (thanatos). Alone among psychologists, Freud (with whatever assistance in later life from his own protracted cancer of the jaw) leads one to believe that at least some people, sometimes, will crave, or at least not fear death. (Just as sexual drive is usually re-targeted during childhood, away from the opposite-sex parent, so the death wish is usually re-targeted away from the self; but at least the drive was allowed by Freud to exist.) Having spent my career failing to explain self-destructive tendencies, I found it a relief at last to side with the a psychologist who at least expected suicide sometimes to occur. (As a medical man, Freud had understood before others the significance of the biological phenomenon of ‘apoptosis’, or programmed cell death: many body cells have ‘self-destruct’ codes that become operational unless contrary messages are received from other cells.^{An account of apoptosis can be found at . A summary is offered there by H. Robert Horvitz, an expert on apoptosis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as follows. "In short, the question of why programmed cell death occurs should be subdivided into two related questions: 'Why are cells that die by programmed cell death generated?' and 'Why do these cells die instead of surviving?' The answer to the first of these questions depends on the cell being considered. For example, some cells are generated in excess and only those that become properly functional survive (as happens in parts of the nervous system). In some cases, the mechanism that generates cells that are needed also fortuitously generates unneeded ones as well (as happens in the immune system). And some cells that die are needed, but only transiently. Cells die either because they are harmful or because it takes less energy to kill them than to maintain them. At present, programmed cell death--as it is described based on the morphology of apoptosis and the biochemistry that involves a specific family of protein-cleaving enzymes--has been demonstrated to occur only in animals, although it remains possible that bacteria, fungi and plants use similar processes to eliminate unwanted cells." }) No, I have never been remotely suicidal myself — though I know the precise strip of railway line in Oxford where I would do the deed if the time came. My interest in thanatos is ‘purely intellectual.’ Of course, there are many who, as the affair of The g Factor has turned out, have liked to accuse me of having a ‘death wish’ that made me too much of the proverbial ‘loose cannon’ on the deck of the tightly rigged 12-gun frigate of race realism.... Myself, I would generally say my thanatos is perhaps tightly re-directed towards aspiring peers who seem to me too big for their boots: patience with pretension is not my strong suit. However, through the 14-month witch-hunt against me over The g Factor, I have felt at times such contempt for, and indifference to my opponents that I could imagine mounting a scaffold and putting my head on a block with dignity — well, at least after a half bottle of Highland Park 100% and having managed to bite off the ear of my executioner.


the story so far

invited to new york to join an organized hereditarian act, chris brand couldn't get his boots on. distracted by some irish waif, brand didn't even notice 'the bell curve' in the making and argued with phil rushton that nato would always be superior to nationalism. on his return to blighty, once his irish lesbian deserted him, brand started bringing eros into everything and saying he had freud and darwin to back him up; but other people thought he was only into freudianism to annoy everyone else and indulge his thanatos.

now read on


19. The nigger in the woodpile, 1992 — how I (first) upset the whole school

The Doc tried sincerely to nurse me away from Bloody Mary and into the world of word-processing, Filmhouse-going, gardening, even a little TV, my first camera since boyhood, a stereo radio to receive Classic FM (to prove a great consolation after we parted) and other modernity. A singleton herself, The Doc treated me as a cross between her beloved, yet himself mildly idiosyncratic, jewelry-sporting papa and the delinquent younger brother that she had never had. This worked well enough except that every time the front gate of her isolated cottage clicked I thought it was Bloody Mary. I was deemed to be making progress (except for snatches of in vino veritas) and was sometimes risked on The Doc’s liberal-left friends.

After eighteen months together, what could be more natural than for the two of us to sign in for my first public international conference since 1979? For years I had avoided conferences since there was no one I especially wanted to meet — apart from the very few girls at London School conferences whom I shouldn’t have been trying to meet in any case. Moreover, the standard academic practice of taking holidays at the taxpayers’ expense was one for which I wished to show Thatcherite disdain. I was fond of saying that academics should be judged by a ‘Thatcher Index’ involving

Citations / (Taxpayers’ Cash Spent Achieving Citations)

— so avoiding conferences might even be positively virtuous. Now, however, my daydream had materialized: Berlin’s prestigious Dahlem Konferenz would pay — and not my fellow countrymen; in attendance were to be the promised top stars of intelligence and psychogenetics (Howard Gardner, Tom Bouchard, Richard Haier, Nick Martin, David Fulker) as well as old friends and psychology colleagues (neuropsychologist Marcel Kinsbourne, psychometrician Paul Kline and aspiring belle dame Dorothy Rabbitt); and The Doc — the wittiest girl I had ever known — would mingle fine with the tenured intellectuals on their nights off.

For a while, the Konferenz was stand-offish about The Doc coming along — apparently feeling the Konferenzers should content themselves with each other’s company and stimulation. However, once I said I’d pull out they gave in. So, in the spring of 1992, The Doc and I settled in to a most agreeable hotel just off the ‘Ku’damm’ where the TV worked and carried several far from tasteless pornographic channels at any time to day or night. This was quite unlike being in a British hotel. In my not inconsiderable experience of £100-per-night hotels in London: (a) the TV set will usually not work; (b) the only interesting bits anyway are the advertisements, for substantially more thought has been put into them than into the programmes. UK audiences cannot apparently be allowed such a diet of even the mildest pornography for fear of how our many low-IQ people might respond.

Nothing had prepared me for the sheer scale of Berlin, especially its large, well-kept rivers, canals and lochs. It was quite as smart as I had envisaged — with the most stunning prostitutes I have ever seen^{The most exciting prostitute I ever saw was, however, in Yukay. Funnily enough, this trim, leather-booted, wasp-waisted, raven-haired and dark-aureolaed dreamboat made her appearance while I was taking the Girls to the seaside at rural King’s Lynn together with my pal the Reverend Roger Holmes. Roger would later serve as Chaplain to The g Factor NewsLetter and achieve tabloid fame as the disgraced ‘Knicker Vicar’ of ‘Unholy Helmsley’ who had become the passionate lover of his own churchwarden’s wife. (Eventually the churchwarden had the News of the World video Roger holding aloft the knickers of his sensational mistress and proclaiming ‘I’m the knicker vicar’....) If only Roger could have satisfied his extra-marital urges with the likes of the professional young lady in King’s Lynn — as Church of Scotland ministers are widely reputed to do on their visits to Edinburgh....} and the best-behaved soccer hooligans. ^{Berlin’s thousands of visiting skinhead soccer fans admittedly sipped their beers under the beady eyes of German Shepherd dogs straining at the thick leads that barely retained them to their Polizei minders.} But the frisson of the Führerbunker and Reichskanzlerei — or, rather, of the square half mile of muddy wasteland which was all that remained of them in Berlin’s very centre — was palpable enough when I hurried along to pay my respects to history in the first coffee break of the conference (itself held nearby at the refurbished Japanese Embassy of the NaziZeit). It was impressive to think we were all assembled in central Berlin to talk about twins — and thus to symbolize the laying of demons and the beginning of a respect for the West’s future that was at once freedom-loving, realistic, responsible and eugenic; and that Hitler and Eva Braun had taken their own lives just a quarter of a mile away. If only Britain had stayed out of the First World War and let Germany (then Europe’s most advanced country) have its own empire in Eastern Europe! That way the horrors of the Somme, of the Holocaust and of Stalinism would have been averted.

The Konferenz itself, however, was less to my satisfaction than the city — though in a rather amusing way. Apparently the great principles of the Dahlem conferences are twofold: (a) all those who attend are supposed to read the key papers in advance; (b) the conference sessions then involve attempts to find a middle ground between divergent views — or perhaps constructive suggestions for future work. All very saintly and new-German! Even German conscientiousness, however, could hardly be expected to effect an intellectual reconciliation between the likes of Howard Gardner and myself — and especially when Howard had not actually been invited to submit a paper and when most of the laid-back Anglo-Saxon conferencers had not read most of ‘keynote papers’, including my own. The result was that, instead of hearing people’s considered views and criticizing them in proper academic detail while they were fresh in the memory, conference sessions involved little more than bar talk about what people knew vaguely of each other’s ideas — and bar talk without alcohol can be pretty dull. Helpfully, Howard Gardner saw a way forward by penning a 4-page critique of my own paper. However, the Konferenz authorities ruled this out for discussion or presentation in the final conference report. The polite German organizers found Howard’s effort too rude! In this, the organizers were quite unlike myself: I was positively eager to do battle with Gardner in public!

For a couple of days, this failure to allow proper debate did not matter. We conferencers could all enjoy our Eis-mit-Sahne and outings to the boating paradise of the Wannsee. Yet something had to happen. The Dahlem Konferenz formula demanded as its final act the reconciliation of all parties on paper and a pleasant acknowledgment of ‘useful discussions’ and a good time had by all. Alas, thanks to the overall Konferenz format, Gardner and I and most of the other conferencers had learned no more of each other’s views than we had known at the beginning. Well, on my part, I had perhaps developed a little. I had firmed up on my provisional conclusion that Gardner had no more evidence for his famed ‘multiple intelligences’ than when he had first come out with them in 1983 (Frames of Mind, Heinemann). Moreover, I had established that Gardner knew simply nothing of the great US psychometrician, Louis Thurstone — the original disunitarian about g whose life’s work should have been Gardner’s constant study. ^{The ‘multiple intelligences’ of Thurstone culminated in the pro-g oeuvre of Thurstone’s own star student, John Carroll (1993, Human Cognitive Abilities, CUP).} Thus the job of contriving smooth words as a cushion against drawn daggers fell to the conference chairmen, recorders, administrators and secretaries. Soon the wailing and gnashing of teeth was audible — notably from some of the girls when they linked up in the powder-rooms. I was just not willing to fudge the over-riding importance of the g factor, which is usually at least six times the size of any other independent mental ability factor. I repeated that I would be perfectly happy for HG’s paper to go on file as a minority deviation — which is what it was among the experts selected to assemble in Berlin; but that was not the Dahlem way. Thus I upset, as it were, the whole school — or at least those who were female, German or themselves expected the Germans to be given the compromises for which the Konferenz had paid so handsomely.... Yes....the whole school. (Well, no: Nick Martin, The Doc and a few others were grand.)

A weird feature of the main argument between Gardner and myself was that I had for ten years been working on a way of resolving it. As was finally to appear in 1996,^{Brand, Journal of Biosocial Science 28; Deary et al., Intelligence 23} the Edinburgh Structural Psychometrics Group had found evidence (in Dublin, from Tom Kellaghan) that Gardner’s multivariate ideas had at least a little more validity in the upper part of the IQ range. By contrast, Galton’s stress on the importance of general intelligence fitted better in the lower-IQ range — as Spearman himself had come to believe by 1923. However, the possibility of realistic compromise between Gardner and myself was thrown away at the Dahlem Konferenz by the refusal to let either of us have a proper innings in front of a good crowd. Fearing controversy, and seeking premature compromise out of pacifistic idealism, the German conference-organizers could not trust the Anglo-Saxon process of good-humoured, vigorous, law-governed argument of which I could easily see that HG (like myself) was capable. Thus, in the end, the Konferenz got the explosion that it feared — though some Germans might argue that the final, terminally dull conference report^{T. J. Bouchard & P. Propping, 1993, Twins as a Tool of Behaviour Genetics. Chichester : Wiley De-Publisher.} put the English-speaking bovver-boys back in their places.

Funnily enough, I had quite liked Gardner himself — a good-natured, Woody-Allen-ish figure who posed no threat to anybody who had done any reading in psychology. With Gardner, I felt as I had when reviewing Schiff and Lewontin for Nature: I was confident that modern arguments about g would soon have a very happy outcome for the London School. I reflected that opponents of the g factor like Schiff (a physicist), Lewontin (a palaeontologist) and Gardner (essentially an educationalist) could not possibly bring the depth of knowledge to the debate that had been brought by opponents of g such as Godfrey Thomson, Louis Thurstone, Otto Klineberg and Skeels & Skodak in the inter-war years. Just as g had obliged all but the most skilful critics (Thurstone and J. P. Guilford) to retreat into fudge and repression, so it was only a matter of time before Gardner would be looking for some shallow Sternbergian form of words to help his readers forget how little progress his disunitarian ideas had actually made.

What I reckoned without — indeed, in my own way repressed — was this. Gardner and Stephen Jay Gould (biologist) had written books against g that had proved massively popular. ^{In my Internet NewsLetter, starting in 1997, I occasionally try to calculate how famous are various psychologists, ancient and modern. In this ‘Hall of Fame’ [the precise method of calculation is a closely guarded secret], Howard Gardner comes just about at the top of living psychologists — with only Noam Chomsky being better known for his work.} The idealism and utopianism of a few US academic psychologists of the 1930’s believing in uncorrelated types of intelligence was now being transferred way outside psychology itself by the rising forces of ‘anti-racism’ and political correctness which were replacing (with a vengeance) the mild egalitarianism in Western thought that Christianity had long provided. Many nice people welcomed the new anti-elitist politeness, just as had American psychologists of the 1930’s — not least because PC claimed to tolerate hereditarian beliefs and only required that such antiquated and pessimistic ideas should never expressed publicly in front of the ‘minority’ groups that needed ‘protection’ from such ‘insensitivity’.... The London School’s arguments within psychology had concerned relatively resoluble problems: Were the tests fair to minorities? How much population variance in mental abilities did the g factor explain? Was g substantially, or at best weakly heritable? By contrast, in the public domain, the success of Gould and Gardner had been to assert merely that ‘There must be a lot more than g’ — an unfalsifiable and essentially religious proposition, as Gardner’s twenty-year programme of unavailing but continuing anti-g expenditures now testifies. Surely, Gardner implied, it was not too much to ask psychologists to find something nice to say about most low-IQ people — whether White or, as relatively more often, Black or Aboriginal? Couldn’t the world’s more primitive peoples be allowed a bigger ration of ‘navigational skills’, or expertise in the kinaesthetic arts required for prolonged tribal dancing? And why was there actually any need to mention IQ? After all, it was already agreed (at least in the USA and the UK) that all children in state schools were to be educated according to their chronological ages. They could not be treated according to their mental ages — which would allow some to advance conspicuously ahead of others. Life would bring enough inequality between adults — often recreating mere inequalities of birth, according to social environmentalists. So at least let every effort be made to put away talk of lasting differences in general educability that might be detectable by gloomy IQ experts in childhood! My own naughtiness had been to spell out that such idealism was a foolish evasion of the facts and of truths which alone could allow all children the types of education that they needed. Rather than patronize Black and Aboriginal people by conferring upon them abilities that would count for little in modern circumstances, it seemed to me preferable to urge that people — including children — be treated and taught realistically, in response to their own levels of g (cf. The g Factor, Chapter 4). Little did I realize that I would soon antagonize a school much bigger than that of the charmed Dahlem konferenzers enjoying a spring away-break in re-united Berlin.



20. Realism is back, 1992-1995 — ‘g’ as the answer to behaviourism, constructivism and the comprehensive ‘schools’

The next trip that The Doc and I made was to Oxford (as part of a UK round tour, meeting my son’s fiancée’s parents and introducing The Doc to my own London relatives). My old college friend, Peter Hacker, now one of Oxford’s top philosophers, made us welcome in his lovely St John’s College home and tried as always to persuade me of both the merits of Wittgenstein and the demerits and outright confusion of much ‘cognitive science.’

With talk of such demerits, Peter rightly presumed he could whet my appetite for solutions to big problems. He knew I could be made reasonably unhappy with talk of bits of the brain being said to ‘feel’, ‘remember’, ‘recall’ or ‘represent’ anything. Plainly, such activities are those of whole organisms or at least whole beings — and their minds. It is only by analogy that we say that machines (or perhaps bits of the brain) ‘calculate.’ Machines certainly produce excellent calculations; but there is no more reason to say they themselves calculate than to say that a tape-recorder that delivers a Beethoven violin concerto ‘plays the violin.’ Likewise with ‘feeling’, ‘remembering’ and even the fashionable ‘representing.’ That I can ‘represent’ a colleague to my students as a devious, drink-sodden, ideologically motivated fraud may seem to suggest that my mind ‘represents’ that colleague to itself in such a cardboard way. Hence machines that can deliver from their own ‘memories’ the information that the colleague is a fraud (etc.) are deemed by some to have ‘represented’ the colleague as a fraud — just as I do. Yet virtually none of such argumentation is correct. We all know that the machine has no concept of ‘fraud’ or even of a ‘colleague’. There is nothing going on in the machine (or in the bowels of the central nervous system) that provides any parallel at all for ‘thinking about something’ — though doubtless thought is sustained and underpinned by nervous system activity (as by the self-propulsion of animals through their surrounding environments).

However, though mind will never be reduced to matter — not least because mentality is the stuff of interaction between sentient beings and reality itself (or remembered reality) — I am equally not inclined to accept Wittgenstein’s behaviourist thesis that mentality is just a language game. Just as mind is not matter (even nervous system activity), nor is it to be identified with the symbols that allow thoughts, memories, intentions etc. to be transmitted and recorded. To the Wittgensteinian behaviourist, I can be said to ‘have dreams’ as long as my linguistic usage of the word ‘dream’ conforms to conventional requirements (e.g. that I don’t expect others to know my dreams unless I tell them). To me, however, it seems that the experience of a dream could be perfectly real even if I could never make much progress in persuading others that I had a particular dream. In short, like Sir Karl Popper (if I understand him some his last writing correctly), there are three types of reality: matter, mental activity and knowledge. These worlds have many connections: symbols (even numbers) mediate between and assist both mentality and knowledge — and much human thinking doubtless occurs ‘in’ or with the help of symbols (especially language). Likewise practical activity links, changes and enriches both mind and matter. Yet each world could exist without at least one of the others existing. I am thus not a traditional ‘dualist’: I do not think that mind would exist in a void free of both matter and knowledge. I am rather a troilist.^{I trust my ‘troilist’ position will not be confused with that Seventies’ hippies who liked three-in-a-bed scenarios. I only did this once in the Seventies (in Springfield, MA, with a bright and lefty Jewess and a delightful but IRA-supporting colleen) — though admittedly it felt good at the time.} I believe in three distinct but interdependent realms of reality — as, I expect, do most people unless they have been got at by philosophical cranks. According to the inventor of Oxford ‘linguistic philosophy’, Gilbert Ryle, there is no such ‘thing’ as intelligence — behaviour may be qualified at ‘intelligent’ or ‘stupid’, but not apparently because any such thing as intelligence informed the behaviour. That attitude seemed to me simply to scorn the quantification of the faculty of intelligence that twentieth-century science had plainly made possible. It denied the need to find an answer to the question of why — in virtue of what property — so many mental abilities turn out to be positively correlated. More generally, differential psychology’s progress in identifying and measuring dimensions seemed to me to require the abandonment of behaviourist and materialist metaphysics. Likewise, it seemed to me obvious to say that libraries exist not primarily to store books but rather to preserve the experience and knowledge to which books and their symbols provide access.

Arguing with Peter is hard work, especially because he believes his Wittgensteinianism does not require him to put forward any theses about the world, but only to correct the linguistic gaffes of others. Like Wittgenstein, he wants only ‘to let the fly out of the fly bottle’ — an infuriating objective as this must seem to a zoologist! A few years later, I prised from Peter the grudging concession that the philosophical school that came nearest to setting sensible parameters for what psychology could achieve as a science was probably the eighteenth-century Scottish School (of ‘faculty’ fame). I was thrilled at this concession to the needs of workaday journeymen psychologists — even though I knew that J. J. Gibson (who always bored me) would probably (if Peter read Gibson) come a close second in Peter’s rank-ordering of useful and sensible ways of approaching the mind oops behaviour.^{Of course, Peter had still to come to terms with the covariation of all mental abilities that the London School first discovered and articulated — thus enabling talk of g factor.} Still, apparently I did well enough on my visit to Oxford: though Edinburgh Psychology students sometimes profess to find me hard to follow, Peter soon put my name forward to write a book for a small but very up-market London publishing house. The book was to be about intelligence.

For a while, breaking up with The Doc took up my time. Getting further together had just proved beyond us given her feminism, her devotion to her retired Papa, her (splendid but countrified and vole-addicted) cats, and my own disputatiousness, penury and drinking — though there was an in vino veritas element in our arguments. Eventually, however, after recovering from the shingles that were my own medical aftermath of our ‘crashing’, I began to work on the book — now settling in to life in the ‘public computer labs’ of the University since my Department had not got around to letting me have a computer for my office. I enjoyed the work, especially the planning of how to address such minefield topics as eugenics and of how to maintain and conclude the book on a properly positive note; and it was nice to feel I was mastering some of the historical developments (especially re Spearman) about which I had formerly been rather hazy.

However, it was not long before the nice series editor at Duckworth, a distinguished retired Oxford linguist, began to ask why I was writing so much about IQ. In truth, my writings of that period probably fell between the two stools of psychology and philosophy. I really did not have enough to say about that ‘human intelligence’ which we virtually all possess and which distinguishes us from tree shrews — and this was what the editor, as a linguist, had probably wanted the book to be about. I was rather inclined to agree with him that it was symbol use rather than speed of nervous system functioning that gave man the edge over the beasts. Still, it had seemed to me obvious that I had to write the story of human intelligence as I knew it — with measurable individual differences to the forefront. This was not least because IQ and the g factor were surely the rock and the hard place that had long awaited philosophical speculators who preferred to gloss over the connections of intelligence to biology as well as to symbol use.

I had never been markedly tolerant of rejection by publishers. Indeed, I had first been furious at, and then scorned British psychology’s feigned lack of interest in the early IT/IQ studies. Indeed, I may well have delayed scholarly uptake of the work by contenting myself with getting it discussed in Nature in 1981 and not persisting with placing it in the usual boring, vast-time-lag-to-publication journals of British psychology. Yet this time I resolved to try a few other outlets. — I had perhaps been a little desensitized to the process of begging to publishers by having to hawk my Quotes around some 33 firms before an acceptance (which my own Department promptly undermined by withdrawing secretarial and computing facilities). Happily, this time, I was quite soon rewarded by interest from a really big psychology publisher, John Wiley & Sons of Chichester, UK. At Wiley, the psychology section was still in the hands of a nice Anglo-Indian chap with whom I had had dealings in Edinburgh back in the seventies. Over subsequent years, I had supplied him with reviews of book proposals in return for complimentaries from Wiley’s psychology list — usually advising Wiley against the sacrifice of trees that would be involved in publication.

Being signed up by Wiley early in 1995 was quite a relief. The year 1994 had been bleak for me. My Edinburgh flat had been invaded by dry rot from an empty property next door and my insurance company declined to pay up; I was without The Doc; and, after the three years’ of three-day-a-week excursions to the countryside, I had few drinking pals left in Edinburgh — especially since my postgrads had by then moved on into employment.^{By this time it was unsual even for postgraduates, let alone undergraduates, to move on to careers in psychology, so I was well pleased with my own three as they had moved into academic and clinical psychology.} I had never lived so closely and continuously with anyone as with The Doc, so the subsequent loneliness was the more striking. Moreover, my two daughters had involved themselves increasingly with Eirishness (living in the Holy Republic as they did); and my son was busy with his marriage and career in London. Of course, like my friends, my children all thought I should have kept things going with The Doc; and they were appalled to find I still hankered for toe-sucking and two-in-the-shower scenes with Bloody Mary. (Little could they know that a singleton like The Doc has just no idea how to provide the devotion that a firstborn like myself needs.... After all, it had taken me three years to find that out for myself.) Thus the book contract was something of a breakthrough back to normality.

All the normal things happened. I learned how endlessly I could improve my writing by re-reading it after letting a few weeks elapse. I learned word-processing the hard way — though I will always bless Peter Coughlin (a senior E. U. technician) and Tim X, an all-boyish science student, for the patient and invaluable help they gave me in the public labs until a young colleague in Psychology took pity on me and kindly arranged an officer computer for me in August, 1995. (Subsequently, the libertarian and biology-realist ex-Psychology-student who was to become known worldwide as MCW [My Computer Whizzkid] took over as the main rectifier of disasters in my man-machine relationships.) Still better for me, I faced up to the anti-London-School arguments more fully than ever before: I even read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and was delighted to find that Gould's arguments were as phoney as I had always concluded from cursory inspection when preparing lectures. My book-in-the-making also helped to impress the new girl in my life who, after 18 months of keeping me waiting, responded to a drunken night-time call from my son and I in June, 1995 and started coming through to Edinburgh every weekend. Thus, even though this relationship had been fraught from the start and would continue uncertain, I had the first real physical beauty in my life — for ‘Magic’, despite her 29+ years, was the legs model for a leading hosiery firm and remained a perfectly proportioned early-adolescent girl of beautiful fragrance and excitement.

Nevertheless, 1995 also brought the first peculiar experience about the book with Wiley. The difficulty concerned the title. In the spring, it turned out that my Editor was very keen to have the book called ‘Intelligence and Ability — What Makes the Difference?’ Now, this might be a very good title, especially for a book that was going to pooh-pooh IQ and say that other factors were more important thing in yielding quite a range of ‘abilities’ ^{It is perhaps worth noting that in English in England today, ‘ability’ is an entirely positive term — as in ‘a person of the highest ability’. By contrast, as observers of England have often noted, to call someone ‘intelligent’ or ‘clever’ is to bring them under something of a cloud, whether as to their practicality, morals or sense of humour.} ; but it bore no relation at all to what my own book was about. I have never felt quite so anxious over a sustained period in my entire life. Here I was with a largely completed book accepted by a leading academic publishing house; yet now I was finding that my Editor either could not understand it or had never read it. It was terrifying to think what could be the outcome of such a non-meeting of minds — especially since the book had been turned down once already for being ‘too much about IQ.’

Resorting to the empirical method, I floated a few possible titles around Edinburgh students and staff in Psychology and Education. Soon, I had evidence for the comprehensibility and popularity of what had become easily my own personal favourite ‘The ‘g’ Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications.’ Even then, my Editor at Wiley held out and only abandoned his resistance as he found the book met with the approval of the Professor of Psychology at Cambridge. ^{The Professor of Psychology at Cambridge was by then Nick Mackintosh, one of my tutors at Oxford in the mid-1960’s. For some time, Nick had been putting behaviourism behind him and showing more interest in intelligence. This was to culminate in his own book about intelligence [due out from Cambridge University Press in 1997].} I had begun to discover the overwhelming disdain of publishers for the academics who write for them. However, my new Editor’s healthy respect for the British academic élite had come to my aid.

the story so far

at last came chris brand's opportunity to confront the most successful opponent of the london school: in berlin, 1992, brand stepped into the ring with harvard’s howard gardner. to brand’s astonishment, however, the german referee stopped the fight after brand bit a chunk out of gardner's ear. going next to oxford, brand was shocked to find that a philosophy pal had remained a lifelong wittgensteinian and had no interest in IQ at all. incensed, brand seized the opportunity to write a book about ‘g’ only to find that his thinking was boring and incomprehensible even to the people who wanted to publish him.

now read on


21. Basic Instincts are back, 1993-1995 — ‘eros’, more sex, and ‘maternos’

As I took up sporadically — first of all on the phone — with my leggy and sensationally ‘verbal’ lovely, the histrionic ‘Magic’, an accident of academic life further focused my mind on the importance of sex and Freud. Sent to me by Times Higher in 1994 was the latest book by Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics who, having turned to Freud because of his own Oedipal-theme dream life, had made progress towards establishing some of Freud’s ideas as compatible with modern ‘evolutionary psychology’ — concerned as this was to stress psychological mechanisms that would have evolved in man’s pre-history according to strictly Darwinian principles. Badcock’s ideas were, for example, that the infant’s love of the mother and the breast would have evolved because of the suppressant effect of sucking on maternal fertility (an effect that has only become widely known in quite recent years); that infants would have evolved powerful reactions of shock/horror (including defecation) to witnessing ‘the primal scene’ — thus again delaying the arrival of competing siblings; and that little girls would have ‘penis envy’ that would infallibly guide them to where maternal resources were being invested unfairly and allow them some degree of reclaim (e.g. by telling tales to mother of their brothers’ naughtiness).

All this appealed to me. I had somewhat parted company with Eysenck as to how many personality dimensions to recognize [his ‘Gigantic 3’ or my own ‘Comprehensive 6’ — for both of us were sure the answer was not the ‘Famous 5’]. I felt the need of a new academic father figure. Naturally, Freud’s paradoxical position as the most famous twentieth-century psychologist appealed to me. Usually ahead of Jung if not Aristotle in my ‘Hall of Fame’ indices, Freud is nevertheless spurned by most modern psychologists. On the basis of little or no reading of his work, today’s cognitive, developmental, social and differential psychologists can mainly be relied upon to deplore Freud’s inadequacies, as of course can feminists and sociologists. It seemed obvious to pretend to at least a little proto-Freudianism — to agree that I accepted Freud’s original and basic ideas, and especially his stress on the importance and omnipresence of sexuality.

‘Sex’, of course, had been becoming unmentionable in psychology. In feminist and allied rhetoric, it had to be replaced by ‘gender’ — thus implicitly asserting that sex was a ‘social construction’, just the result of human language games. So in talking of sex, let alone of ‘penis envy’, I was on a collision course with feminists. I couldn’t have been happier: by the 1990’s, feminism had deteriorated from being an important movement advancing women’s rights to an incoherent set of notions that women were variously the same as or generally superior to men and were lesbians at heart but because of their ‘conditioning’ suffered from the same ‘false consciousness’ as had once been theorized to be keeping the working class in its place. Above all, feminism was clearly the main re-incarnation within psychology of the social environmentalism and egalitarianism that had taken such an academic pasting from the twin and fostering studies of the 1980s. To take Father Freud’s big stick to naughty feminist bottoms seemed like fun — especially since ‘evolutionary psychology’ now provided reasonable academic back-up. Freud had once told Princess Marie-Bonaparte in response to her inquiry as to the size of his penis that ‘No,’ it was ‘not so very big’; but I thought it would prove big enough for my purposes.

Yet there was a serious side to all this too. First, I was still concerned to vindicate Freud’s idea of the ‘death wish’ — not because I had one, but precisely because I apparently did not have one. Depression and suicidal ideation have spared me, touch wood, and yet.... I had become impressed by my own ability to put unhappy thoughts and experiences ‘down the tubes’; and I increasingly acknowledged what others said, that I could be ‘aggressive’, ‘bombastic’ and ‘insensitive’ and even ‘had a death wish.’^{I lost count of the number of occasions during the affair of The g Factor when I was told ‘If you’re in a hole, stop digging.’ Few could accept that intelligent exhibitionism was simply my last resort in the battle to save my book....} Increasingly, it seemed obvious that ‘racism’ was the major human killer bug — defining certain human qualities as ‘not part of the self’ just as body cells die off (by apoptosis) unless they receive support messages from other cells. Perhaps it was rather like infant language: infants are born with the sounds of the whole world’s languages in their vocal repertoires, but most of the sounds die out as the child becomes a member of just one speech community. Eventually, even real disgust may be felt — whether for the strange sounds of others’ dialects or for the smells of their bodies. In development, just as the superego arguably restricts and harnesses sexual drive (eros), perhaps the primary process of identity-finding occurs as the ego makes the best of the raw material provided by the death wish (thanatos). Certainly it is notorious how much of the political process of many countries is driven by sheer revulsion for and wish to be free of people of other races, nationalities, classes and religions: voting is often more ‘negative’ than ‘positive’ (as was presumably noted in Britain by such nice Prime Ministers as Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, and John Major). To say this kind of thing in 1966 was obviously a heresy within the pacifistic portals of psychology; but, in 1996, to assert native human aggression was to recognize nothing less than the literal historical truth. Happy as the years since 1945 had been in the West, elsewhere violence and variants of racial discrimination were plainly endemic.

Secondly, I was seriously concerned wilth yet another instinct. I had a fast-growing collection of reasons for noting the power of a drive that, in the case of most women, is certainly stronger than eros and may quite often replace eros altogether. I speak, of course, of maternal instinct — maternos. It was some years before 1993 that I had realized that, as the feminists themselves say, it is a relatively rare virgin or even sexually experienced teenager who has strong maternos. If nature supplied maternos at levels akin to a typical male’s interest in plain sex, girls would all be pregnant within a few months of reaching menarche. Instead, the arrangement is that maternos kicks in during pregnancy and at birth — hence the shocking but sad tales of baby-snatching, usually by women who have recently lost a pregnancy.

What I had not appreciated, however, was the power of the drive. It may sound idiotic to say this — and if some university lecturer had tried to explain to me when I was age twenty that maternos was the strongest and deepest drive in the world, I would probably have yawned and said I thought psychology should be about more than ‘old wives’ tales.’ Still, despite being a psychologist in my fifties and three times a father, I still had to learn this lesson.

How it happened was like this. After eighteen months of telephone eroticism and long periods of ‘cooling it’, Magic broke up with her husband — with the help of their splendid Glasgow home being re-possessed by their building society and they themselves being in the then-not-uncommon situation of ‘negative equity.’ Magic sent some of her classy furniture across to my capacious flat (cleared by 1995 of its dry rot) and started coming across to screw every Saturday — always arriving with enormous food hampers and sometimes without knickers. In short (and at length, thinking of The Legs) she was a total dream and seemed to falsify my long-running guesses as to why she hadn’t broken with her pretty successful but supposedly ‘violent’ husband sooner. (Alcoholism, chocoholism, bulimia, Catholicism, exhibitionistic personality disorder and ‘having a romantic holiday from a grotty marriage’ were some of the explanations of Magic’s telephone liaison with me that had been proferred in the early days by solicitous friends and colleagues. — I had offered a crate of wine to anyone who turned out to be correct.)

Of course, there were problems. How could Magic shake off the burden of debt arising from her being a co-signatory for the marital mortgage? Her anticipated contribution had been premissed on a high estimate of her model-girl earnings which ceased as soon as she bore a physically strong and beautiful, but severely mentally handicapped boy, and decided to stay at home and devote herself to curing him. Five years later, she had an uncured child, no house and a large debt that her husband’s family was not inclined to discharge. Anyway, how could I ever live with a child who had euphemistically-titled ‘learning difficulties’, when patience even with university undergraduates was not my middle name?

Yet it was not this golden-haired young autistic boy who eventually broke up Magic and myself, but his older brother, an absolutely sweet-natured and bright lad, a house-slave of my beloved’s who yet treasured his few rights. With all her nubility, fragrant charms and teasing humour, Magic was tyrannical and obsessional in equal measure and kept her seventeen-year-old son in line. However, he was still allowed to enter her bedroom and bathroom just whenever he wanted, including even the small hours of the morning. In short, he had ‘lover’s rights’ that I could not bring myself to tolerate — not least because I was sure that the younger boy would eventually pose similar but far worse problems. (The latter’s having been spoiled by Magic was even thought by the father to have been a big factor contributing to the youngster's many behavioural problems.) So Magic and I fell out — with her attacking me physically one day at New Year 1995/6 in the way I had become sure had actually been the pattern with her husband. I waited to be told I drank too much, that I was patronizing, that I was monomaniacal about g, that I had too small an organ (though Magic had been complimentary re this department of endeavour), that my flat had moths (Magic was as fastidious as Marlene Dietrich about cleanliness and hygiene) etc. Yet nothing happened. I booked a cruise up the Nile with French girls to make her jealous — but when I met her in Glasgow, three months after our boy-in-the-bedroom row, to attend an afternoon of Bette Davis films [this ultra-aggressive actress who ‘screwed like a mink’ being Magic’s personal favourite], I wasn’t even granted a peck on the cheek.

Presumably I had been a morale-boosting convenience for Magic through a difficult time. Certainly she had been a godsend for me: the time of endless dry rot clearance, with plaster dust eventually in my bed, would have been far worse without Magic on the phone, and I suppose I had always somewhat discounted her welcome idea that ours was the Love of the Century. Yet what had ended our prolonged, lascivious romance and honeymoon was precisely the same as had ended her eighteen-year marriage: maternos that easily superseded any other motivation or commitment.^{Magic had promised to help her husband with the top-of-the-range mortgage; and she had claimed a genuine interest in me to my eighty-five-year-old mother whom she had met for the first time just six weeks before breaking with me.} Magic was the first real physical beauty I had in my life; she was funny; she was sexy (though modestly preferring the lights low); she claimed to have been in love with me for fifteen years (from the time when she had been an M.Ed. student in Edinburgh); and I liked both her boys. We ‘got on’ -- once staying on the phone for an almost uninterrupted twelve hours. I would have done a lot to keep all that. But the fact that I had asked her seventeen-year-old to leave our bedroom (in Edinburgh) and repeated the stipulation ten minutes later when he had re-appeared needed, as far as Magic was concerned, no more discussion. For her, the bond with her boys could not be brought into the slightest question. ‘Obvious’, dear reader? I hope you never have to learn it yourself.

It was as I pondered how Magic had wrecked both her eighteen-year marriage and her only ‘affair’ through maternos that I saw the pattern. (a) My first wife had thrown in the towel after seven years of marriage as soon as our son came along. At the time of the break-up, I had assumed it was vaguely, at least 50%, ‘my fault’ and that I would soon be upstaged by the fine, top-drawer intellectual who would surely become my wife’s next husband. I braced myself for the shame I would feel at having lost her. Yet quite simply nothing ‘happened.’ Over the years since 1970, I had never taken this astonishing fact fully on board; but by 1996 it was obvious my ex-wife was beyond any prospect of serious re-marriage. Despite her looks, intelligence and charm, she had lived much of her fertile life doing nothing more than devote herself to our son. (b) My second wife, Carmel, too, had rapidly lost interest in me and marriage — and certainly in sex — after the births (1978, 1980) of our two daughters. Supposedly deeply unhappy at the prospect of helping host my teenage son in Edinburgh for a single day, she turned out to be quite content to live with our own two adolescent girls as her chief preoccupation — whereas I had naïvely thought that, after I pulled out of the marriage, she would quickly take up with a colleague who had long shown a kindly interest in her and Les Girls. (c) Once surveyed with maternos in mind, the lives of old friends delivered the goods unfailingly. Time and again, the emergence of a ‘sexy son’ (i.e. confident boy, enjoying maternal favour) in a marriage spelt the beginning of the end — though daughters too could sometimes trigger marital break-up, especially if a daughter had grown especially close to the mother. Still worse, the lives of ‘girls I had known’ and their pets now flickered up on my mental screen. Could I think of a single childless woman who was not animal-mad? I could not (apart from semi-lesbian Mary who had been into short hair cuts and fast driving and identified with her Gaelic speaking police-inspector father). One dear lady friend had actually sent me a Christmas card bearing a photo of herself embracing her Scottish terrier; and the intelligent wife of a close academic friend, when I popped in for a lemonade one sunny afternoon, spent 50 minutes out of an hour in her garden extolling the merits of ‘Pussy’ (or ‘Apollo’ as he was more formally known) — a cat [having certainly the most beautiful coat I have ever seen] which had entirely displaced her husband’s friend, her husband and even her 18-year-old son (by then emotionally independent of her) from her mind. (d) Of course, the media brings relevant stories too. In 1997, the Sunday Mirror [London] (25 v, p. 23) reported that a well known ex-TV-news-reader, age 45, was still breast-feeding her three-and-a-half-year-old son and saying: “I’ve always had this primitive feeling that it’s right for both of us.” Some might find it hard to decide the status of such an ‘insight’; but I do not. In the liberal-left Guardian (11 vi), columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown reported how she had sat on her son's bed and wept when the young man had left to come to Edinburgh University. It had taken Yasmin fully nine months to begin to find "a new way of parenting which [did] not make me feel useless and irrelevant." These are just single instances of what can sometimes be seen en masse, like the mothers — not fathers — “in floods of tears” (BBC World Service, 16 vi ‘97, 01:00) as Colombian guerillas spread out the release of their sons (who had been taken as hostages) to make a day-long spectacle in June, 1997. Always pretty happy with the idea that most men are penises with brains (if they are lucky), I now found no problem in accepting maternos — not as an old wives’ tale but as a formidable reality that I, along with most psychologists and virtually all feminists, had gravely overlooked. Even as I write, the papers bring news of a proud mother who breastfed her boy till he was five years old (see TgF NewsLetter, 23 vi ‘97).^{There was nothing to distract her, for the father was an unknown (but eminent) computer scientist who had donated his seed to the late Bob Graham’s ‘Repository for Germinal Choice’ in California. Whether because of his genes or his breastfeeding, the mother’s now adolescent boy apparently has an IQ of 180 and comes at the top of most classes at the school for gifted children which he attends in New Hampshire.}

Clearly I was on a collision course with feminism over my support for Freud in general and for maternos in particular. Problems with yet other idealists were bound to arise from my acceptance of thanatos, ‘innate aggression’ and the centrality of sibling rivalry to personality development. If I had chosen Carl Jung as my favourite psychologist, I might perhaps have enjoyed a little popularity — for Jung’s anti-Semitism and race theorizing have remained so incomprehensible that he is known chiefly for the four Platonic dimensions extracted from his work in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [lately the world’s best-selling questionnaire] and for his once feminist-gratifying idea that we all have male and female ‘sides’ to our personalities. To be talking up Freudian id and Adlerian sibling competition was not what was required by Psychology’s many aspirants to a utopia of ‘community’ and happy-clappy co-operation. By AY 1995/6, I was a standing provocation to quite a few psychology students — perhaps especially to those from abroad. These girls would have swooned if they had been capable of reading and understanding Darwin, whose ideas on his key concept of intra-specific competition came to him chiefly from the arch-pessimist Malthus. American students were used by 1995 to the US universities’ ‘culture of comfort’ that discourages ‘insensitive’ references by staff to anything that might upset feminists. Such references would include the venerable Freudian hypothesis of penis envy and equally the modern research discovery that ten per cent of women have children by lovers whom they pass off as children of their own husband. Add to this my more conventional subscription to the view that dysgenic procreation should be reduced and high intelligence respected, and it is easy to see that my psychology classes would be restive. Even a mention of the mass mutilation of girls by clitoridectomy that is practised in Africa and the Arab world would be eagerly interpreted as ‘insensitive’ and ‘racist’ rather than ‘pro-feminist’; and praise from me for the stability of Britain’s Asian families would be interpreted as anti-feminist rather than as pro-immigrant. It was doubtless a mercy that I was suspended from teaching by the time when, in the autumn of 1996, I had become interested in the great Anglo-Scottish psychologist, William McDougall (1871-1938). Like myself, McDougall venerated Aristotle and Freud (in that order), believed in basic instincts, called himself a ‘democratic elitist’ and thought that the independent-minded ‘Nordic’ peoples of Europe (and especially perhaps the Saxons and the Scots) had contributed most to the scientific progress and political liberties — if not to the aesthetic sense or culinary abilities — of the modern West. (For what I saw in the brave and tireless of scholarship of McDougall, see the July 1996 issue of the Internet magazine PINC or my homepage .)

I should not move on from ‘basic instincts’ without a disclaimer. I am not saying that the business of instincts is all wrapped up — as McDougall and many others doubtless hoped it was by their famous lists of around 1930. Eros, maternos, thanatos and fraternos are doubtless not the only instincts — only the main ones. And each needs far more understanding than it has received from psychologists. — Of course, some women experience maternos before pregnancy: the most lissome and sexy girl to greet me and sometimes share my bed when I arrived in Edinburgh was eventually to die by throwing herself under a train because of her infertility (and the unwillingness of her much-loved husband to co-operate with her in adoption). Nor do I think people are or need be ‘slaves to the passions’: weird human lives often materialize as quite rational once key secrets are known. What I am saying is that behaviourism, environmentalism and, most recently, ‘constructivism’ have all led psychology astray from what — even as a pretty complacent undergraduate — I had sensed should be key themes. In truth, the egalitarian mania of the twentieth century, striving to find some sense of community with which to replace what went missing as the West abandoned Christianity, has impoverished psychology by its insistence on denial of psychological realities and key human differences. As intellectuals have known since Adam Smith, advanced civilization requires division of labour. Thus we need basic human differences in drives and abilities. A proper search for ‘community’ must accept differences and use them — not deny them or, more generally, the role of biology in personality and society.



22. ‘Repellent and obnoxious’, 1996- — de-publication, suspension and witch-hunting

As AY 1995/6 progressed, it was to contain more shocks than students absenting themselves from my personality lectures. ‘Realist’ I might be in my politics, philosophy and psychology, but I was impractical at — as well as somewhat indifferent to — the humdrum business of recognizing and relating deferentially to the perspectives held by others. Especially, I had little patience with perspectives that I knew to be drawn ignorantly and with little but malice aforethought from the box of distorting lenses proferred by PC.

As my pending book came to be anticipated and discussed, an American gentleman sent me complimentary copies of a book by a friend of his who was based partly in South Africa.... Called America’s Bimodal Crisis: Black Intelligence in White Society, the book contained a reasonable popular summary of the facts of life about IQ and the Black-White difference but also detailed the bloodthirsty antics of several Black African tribal chiefs of the past, notably one King Chaka of the Zulu whose savagery was legendary, as follows (ABC, pp. 51-2, using the nineteenth-century diaries of explorer H. F. Fynn).

On the first day of Fynn’s arrival at the court, ten men were carried off to death, and he soon learnt that executions occurred daily. One one occasion, Fynn witnessed the dispatch of sixty boys under the age of twelve years before Chaka had breakfasted....On [another] occasion, between four and five hundred women were massacred because they were believed to have knowledge of witchcraft....One of Chaka’s concubines was executed for taking a pinch of snuff from his snuff-box. A group of cowherd boys was put to death for having sucked the nipples of cattle. Apparently the excesses of Chaka’s murderous cruelty were brought to their pinnacle upon the death of his mother, Nandi:

Universal mourning was immediately ordered. The chiefs and people began to assemble in a crowd estimated at eight thousand....Those who could not force tears from their eyes — those who who were found near the river panting for water — were beaten to death by others who were mad with excitement. Toward the afternoon I calculated that not fewer than 7,000 people had fallen in this frightful indiscriminate massacre....Whilst the masses were thus employing themselves, Chaka and his chiefs, the latter surrounding him, were tumbling and throwing themselves about, each trying to excel in their demonstrations of grief by alternate fits of howling....On his first appearance after the massacre, Chaka ordered the execution of one of his aunts, who had been unfriendly to Nandi, and of all her attendants (some twelve or fourteen girls). Parties were sent out to execute those who had not come to express sorrow. During a period of one year after Nandi’s death, all women found to be pregnant were executed by their husbands.

Intrigued by this and similar novelties, I passed the book on to my two postgraduates — men of ages 23 and 33 from Germany and the USA respectively — warning them as I did so that this was a ‘naughty’ book that would be unlikely to feature in the reference lists of US differential psychologists, no matter how race-realistic. Soon I had a riot on my hands: both postgrads defected, calling me a ‘racist’ and, for good measure, a ‘sexist.’ The German signed up with Ian Deary for three months before finally deciding anything even bordering on IQ was not for him; the American, after having six months' difficulty finding a congenial supervisor, then settled with Ian Deary — though not without criticizing Ian for displaying a dustjacket for The Bell Curve as a framed picture in his office. Still, my name was mud — though I had only exposed these students to my sympathies informally (not as part of their supervisions) so as to play straight with them and warn them of what excitements the future of differential psychology might hold.^{It was my policy to take on postgraduate applicants even if they had little familiarity with London School views. However, in fairness to them, I tried to communicate as soon as possible what some would call my ‘biases’ — not to make converts but rather to ensure the students could make an informed choice of me as a supervisor. The postgraduate supervisor-student relationship is necessarily a very personal one on which students need to feel able to depend, not least for eventual job references. I did not want students from outwith Edinburgh complaining much later that I had misled them down paths that would cut them off from their peers and that might not be the most natural routes to psychology careers in increasingly peecee days.}

As the defection of these two postgraduates unfolded, I took consolation from Magic’s having come independently to her own conclusion that the one of the two postgraduates whom she had met was a troubled man of whom little could be expected until his problems were resolved. Yet soon, over the Christmas and New Year, Magic herself was gone. Not too daunted — for, at her wish, she and I had always lived hand-to-mouth, with no serious plan for the future — I soon cultivated an e-mail friendship with a French woman who was researching Sir Walter Scott. By Valentine's Day, 1996, this hero-worshipping lady had impressed me by regularly e-mailing bises and grandes bises; and she seemed impressively honest in admitting to being (a) very désagréable, (b) as bald as an egg, and (c) a longstanding member of the French Communist Party. Presented with this information on February 14, I agreed enthusiastically to keep her company on a trip up the Nile — to help with which I would take a psychology student to France who (for a consideration from the researcher) would ‘cat sit’ for the lady’s three precious beasts.

What could I have been thinking of? It all seemed very simple (though, in fairness to myself, I did have the Scott-lover marked down as plainly ‘neurotic’ and unreliable). The lady-researcher’s ‘disagreeableness’ was surely just her own modest and honest and intellectual way of saying that she was independent-minded and, by all means, occasionally argumentative about philosophical or literary topics. Now, these were traits of which I could hardly complain; indeed, they might serve to excuse my own not dissimilar characteristics and even, in combination with the Scott-lover’s undoubted intelligence, assist toleration of my own hereditarian idiosyncrasy as a legitimate variation in a grey world. Anyway, surely no-one would admit to ‘disagreeability’ unless knowing that they could quite readily sweeten that pill. Ditto with the question of her baldness. (Her hair had fallen out suddenly in adolescence after a very unhappy childhood in which her student parents had farmed her out to grandparents at birth, and during which she had lost her sibling wars to her younger sister.) The researcher would surely only be telling me of her baldness if she was in fact an attractive and incredibly sexy woman who was not ashamed of herself in general and just wanted to desensitize me to the baldness thingy before we embarked on the Nile — in a cabin for two, we readily agreed. Yes, she would be rather like a Sinéad O’Connor — if a little older (she was 44).... And the communism? Well, The Doc had got me used to the idea that I had no trouble enjoying leftists, whether in the sack or out it, so long as they were bright and prepared to read The Spectator. And my side had won the Cold War, so I wouldn’t need to be aggressive or even defensive.

Well, the researcher had indeed told me the truth; and, not having lied about her age or weight or fitness or property, presented me with no cause for complaint. Merely, however, all my ratiocination was idle. The Scott-lover turned out within one second of our meeting at her chic flat to be the kind of almost studiously grumpy, dismissive and disagreeable person who can be met not uncommonly in France; and her baldness was entirely uncompensated for by other features I had dreamed up — and certainly not by her jowls. Within five minutes, my student and I were in stitches: we could do nothing right, the Scott-lover spurning every present we had brought (including even perfume, for she claimed to have no sense of smell); so my effort to infuriate Magic was going to require all my sang-froid.

Thanks to the distractions of the cruise itself, including other French girls (hirsute and hot-for-it on the dance floor) and my mini-adventures with an Aswan buggy-driver (getting out to see the utter squalor, high birth rate and beautiful girls of the Aswan suburbs), I survived. But writing postcards to Magic from the ultra-luxury of Cairo’s Hôtel Parc des Pyramides^{The Hôtel Parc des Pyramides is reputedly to have the largest swimming pool in Africa; and it certainly has the most courteous and efficient hotel service I have ever experienced.} was a rather more serious, nay desperate business than I had intended. As with Magic herself, I had taken myself in with fancifulness and was having to pay the usual price (while rehearsing ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’). Still, things didn’t feel too bad. It is always pleasant to be in Paris where every window and doorway hints of secrets and every café is an entertainment in itself; and visiting and reading about the Great Pyramids impressed me that there had indeed been a dysgenic fall from grace in that part of the world (where Cairo, though far more agreeable than I had expected — a place for early retirement [if also early death] — seemed to have hardly a single bookshop). In fact, I would return to France in the August — as recorded in the TgF NewsLetter for August, 1996. This was yet another doomed quasi-romantic mission to a high-verbal, trim and athletic Hampstead mother of three who invited me to holiday in Savoy. There, the wonders of the still snow-capped mountains and the surprisingly warm and welcoming Lake Geneva would provide the backdrop to my new friend’s demonstration of her own 100% maternos.... Anyway, up the Nile for Easter in 1996, I could forgive myself almost any mistakes. After all, I would be returning to the UK for my first-ever Press Conference in London — organized by the PR department of John Wiley & Sons.

In fact, Wiley, too, had provided something of a surprise to my way of thinking. I had still to learn that the relationship between an author and a publisher is one of slave to master. Through 1995 — once the matter of my book’s title had been settled — I had occasionally quipped to my Wiley Editor that perhaps my book could enjoy the same success as The Bell Curve. ‘What is The Bell Curve?’ would come the reply. I would explain the succès de scandale and the 200,000 copies sold in the USA within the first three months of publication of The Bell in the autumn of 1994. I presumed that even the sloths as Chichester Wiley would have been moved by such talk.

Yet not even the possibility of making big money would interest Wiley. They were quite happy to regard my book merely as something that would keep their presses turning over until something more promising came along. Anyhow, in January, 1996, I explained that I would like my Endnotes collected together under page numbers at the end of the book, “as in The Bell Curve”, I added after several attempts to explain myself had failed. “And what is The Bell Curve?” came the reply. This great academic publisher of psychology did not even have knowledge of, let alone copy of the most sensational publishing event in psychology since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams almost a century beforehand. Eventually, I had to send Wiley photocopies of pages from The Bell to show how its Endnotes were arranged and referenced. It was not just postgraduates and women that I did not understand. I was equally out of touch with the lords and masters of the publishing trade.

Still worse misunderstanding was to surface. Probably like most authors, I was none too impressed as publication approached (through early 1996) with Wiley’s efforts to provide advance publicity for The g Factor. With regard to the UK promotion, colleagues held me back — saying they thought I was actually doing pretty well by conventional standards. But it was the total lack of reported advertising in the USA that disturbed me. Moreover, US Wiley were most uncommunicative — while insisting that I would be impressed by their effort when they swung into action in April (prior to a late April launch). I was far from pacified by this, especially since US Wiley never betrayed the slightest knowledge of the product they professed to be ready to market.

My suspicions were sharpened by the visit of a nice young Wiley PR rep. to Edinburgh in February. As she settled in to my office and asked what the book was about, I swung into lecture mode and replied. But soon I was asking myself: ‘Why does this girl need to be told?’ Her company had just flown her to Edinburgh. Could she not have dipped into the book on the plane? Subsequently, still mystified by Wiley’s approach, I encouraged friends to contact Wiley, both in the UK and the US, and place orders and try to ask questions. Little did I realize that Wiley were already, unknown to me, having discussions about whether and how to withdraw the book.^{In February, a left-wing Essex University psychology lecturer, Maxwell Davies, who had received an advance copy of The g Factor was outraged by the book and realized its danger to the causes he favoured. He wrote to Wiley to complain and, to his satisfaction, learned that Wiley HQ was worried about the book and was holding discussions to which he would be welcome to contribute his ideas.}

At the very end of February, I gave a one-hour talk to the Cambridge University Scientific Society on ‘The importance of intelligence’ {i.e. Chapter IV of The g Factor}. I had declined to lecture on ‘Race and IQ’, telling the young lady organizer that it would be ‘irresponsible’ to attempt that for a general audience in a single session.^{Instead, I had offered that Richard Lynn and I would provide a day-long seminar programme on race and IQ if desired. Little did I think that, within a year, I would be back in Cambridge battling for my academic life and willing to talk about ‘Race and IQ’ for even fifteen minutes!} On February 27, 1996, it was a cold, damp and misty evening in Cambridge, and only a couple of dozen students turned up. Yet eight copies of my book wre on the shelves at Heffer’s university bookship, and before catching the train from Edinburgh I had acertained there was similar provisioning at James Thin’s. I had invited two young friends (one Black, one White) to stay with me in college for the night; I had a bottle of Talisker with me; and so, after a session in ye olde boozer with the undergraduates, the three of us drank the small hours away and things didn’t seem at all bad. I couldn’t persuade my handsome Black friend, a biological scientist of considerable realism, to tour the States with me to promote polygamy. His own experience of growing up in a polygamous family in Ghana had simply not been a happy one, even though he had been a very loyal son to his hard-drinking father. However, it would be better for me to be accompanied by a Black psychologist -- preferably female -- and I knew the very girl for the job if her (White) husband could spare her charm and energy for a few weeks. Moreover, I would be off to Egypt soon with my lady-researcher. And the Wiley PR girl had fixed up a mid-April London Press Conference.... I had done enough bullying at Wiley’s and must now settle into the role of genial, witty and attractive author....

Wiley’s axe fell immediately on my return from Egypt. The London Press Conference was cancelled — supposedly because of ‘lack of interest.’ Instead, I would give two phone interviews from my E.U. office. I am not good at breaking down in tears — a routine which my system reserves for such as Bloody Mary and Magic. So I swallowed my pride and asked for any advice that Wiley PR might have. “Yes,” replied young Julia, the one who had needed me to explain to her what TgF was about, “just be yourself!” I have seldom been so astonished. Plainly PR people just got paid for saying nothing but what people wanted to hear. Still, that was what I did want to hear, so I could hardly complain. It was good to understand that Julia, having seen me strut my stuff, was right behind me....

Faced with my only chance of making propaganda for the book, I gave my time (well, the University’s) generously — around an hour each for Times Educational Supplement and The Independent on Sunday. I never found out what happened to the first of the two interviews; but the second was to make history. Of course, I remarked nothing much at the time. I had felt under some pressure to discuss race and eugenics, when what my book was mainly about was individuals and education. But it was a long interview and I thought it quite reasonable of the lady journalist, Ros Wynne-Jones, to explore especially points that were sensitive and which she would need to get right.... Thus, since the interview seemed to be going well, I freely explained that, yes, I was what the arch-critics of IQ called a scientific racist: yes, I did think there were deep-seated race differences in intelligence and that these were especially well demonstrated as between North American Blacks and Whites (who could be tested against pretty much the same cultural and linguistic backdrop). Likewise, I tried to explain at Ros’s request an argument of my Chapter III: that most imaginable ‘eugenic’ measures should be supported as much by social environmentalists as by hereditarians — for environmentalists should not want children to have to grow up in the unstimulating, incompetent and violent homes that are all too commonly provided by low-IQ mothers (as detailed in The Bell Curve). The journalist was preparing a ‘feature’ article on me, after all, so I owed it to her to clarify matters of concern.

The solids hit the fan.... But that, dear reader, is another story for another document at another date. I will indicate below some key existing documents and passages in my TgF NewsLetters that may serve to provide an outline and to indicate episodes in my battles of 1996/7; and I will give the websites for my own account of my de-publication (by Wiley), witch-hunting (by E.U.’s Inquiry), suspension from teaching and administration (Nov. 8, 1996) and preparation for my formal trial by E. U. Tribunal (1997). But most of that is a story which I, at least, will not be able to see with much perspective until the Tribunal’s verdict and sentence are declared at the end of July, 1997, and when I learn whether contingency-fee law firms (or late-entry millionaires!) think it worth their while joining me in taking on Wiley for breach of contract. Thus these ‘intellectual memoirs’ must begin to draw to a close. One matter should, however, be revealed. A few weeks after my being declared to the world as a ‘scientific racist’, or sometimes just ‘racist’ tout court, the SIndie journalist whose article had begun the furore appeared in Edinburgh to re-interview me. Ros Wynne-Jones is a perfectly nice girl and, as we sipped our wine en bel air at Négociants, I asked what had happened. The answer, she said, was simple: I had been too boring to justify a feature article, but the Indie’s News Editor had seen material from her report that he could use as a news item....

As the outcry erupted, was there anything I could or should have done?

à To Wiley, who demanded (c. April 16, 1996) a guarantee I would make no more statements to the media, I asked what they intended to do to market the book now we had publicity beyond all previous expectations. They had no new proposition to make, so I hung up on them till they stopped phoning my home. Instead of seizing their opportunity to puff the book, they instead (April 17) denounced my views ‘as expressed to the press and in my book’ as “repellent.”

à With the media, I concentrated at first on trying to re-direct their attention to what I considered the real news — to the censorship of a British academic author from New York. This proved totally unavailing. Perhaps because Scotland is a far-off country of which the New York Times knows nothing, or perhaps because the de-publication of perfectly decent and well-argued hereditarian views was plainly an embarrassment to PC, the US media did not lift a finger. (The story was carried one day in California's Valley Times and in Chronicles of Higher Education [the US equivalent of Times Higher] — and that was it!) For their part, the Scottish media also did precisely nothing to move the spotlight to Wiley’s fatcat CEO, Charles Ellis, in New York.

à Plainly, my accepting that I was what scientific lefties called a “scientific racist” was a joke beyond the comprehension of most of the TV-watching goons propagandized over the past decade into believing that global warming, Mrs Thatcher’s Poll Tax and paedophilia were the world’s top evils; and the Scottish journalists had no intention of clarifying the matter. Clearly, those of us who tended to hereditarianism about race differences needed our own term to describe themselves. So I provided one, ‘race realism.’ Yet, by the end of 1996, only three other people (Professors Richard Lynn, Philippe Rushton and Glayde Whitney) had agreed to accept it. By then, the media had anyhow lost interest in me — except as ‘the paedophile’s friend’ for my urging clemency in the case of paedophile adoptive-father-of-56 [sic] Nobellist Carleton Gajdusek.^{On October 16, I had criticized the Gajdusek’s arrest as unlikely to be in the public interest. Although the friend of mine who was providing the site for the NewsLetter decided not to carry the piece for fear of the site being closed down, an e-mail version of the NL draft was sent by someone to the Scottish press, which carried the story on November 8. Subsequently, in February, 1997, the Maryland court that was trying Gajdusek did in fact show him leniency — at least by the standards of the often savage sentences awarded even for consensual paedophile sexual activity: Gajdusek received a plea-bargained sentence to jail of just one year.}

à Shouldn’t I have done more after de-publication to put my own case across? Well, I had just written a whole book to do just that, so I urged academics and journalists to read it. — There were three copies in E.U. libraries; and I issued free disked copies to people who brought in other readers with them. I made photocopies — cautiously, since Wiley insisted they retained copyright. Quite simply, however, few people were interested — and certainly not the journalists. Most of those who wanted to play politics probably realized that the book would vindicate me and spoil their fun. Soon, I thought, review articles would be appearing in London newspapers and magazines. That would force the studiously ignorant to change their tune. However, to my horror, Wiley had managed to bully the rest of the ‘publishing’ trade into either binning the book or returning copies dutifully to Chichester. To this day, I know nothing of how Wiley retrieved the c. 75 copies which they told me they had despatched to London reviewers. Perhaps the February 'discussions' at Wiley's Chichester HQ had reached a conclusion in the nick of time?

à Should I not have made sure my Head of Department and University Principal understood my position? Before I had gone to Egypt, I had let Professor Robert Grieve, then Head of Psychology, have my chapter summaries and the conclusion to my final chapter as a matter of courtesy and in case any questions arose. I don’t know whether the Principal asked Professor Grieve’s opinion before preparing his own Press Release and meeting the newsies in late April. What I do know is that the Principal’s reported condemnation of my views as “false and personally obnoxious” was a body blow from which I have essentially been trying to recover ever since. Immediately, on seeing the Guardian’s report (May 1, 1996), I demanded an interview; but the Principal wasn’t interested. When I finally met him in June (he wanted me to agree to use more visual aids in my lectures....), it turned out that he had not read the book; and he happily declared this himself later in his letter to The Scotsman (November 4). There, the Principal used the fact that he had not read the book as a way of explaining that he had not and could not have condemned me or my book. The idea was for the University to begin to assist me and this required the Principal’s April Press Conference to be remembered in a new way. Unfortunately for us, as soon as journalists saw what was being attempted they released on November 8 their sound bites of what I had written about Nobelist Carleton Gajdusek and paedophilia for the NewsLetter on October 16. Throughout, the Principal (himself a considerable scholar and a stylish author) behaved as if my views in print were the very last thing that concerned him. — He properly denounced Wiley’s withdrawal of the book as “abominable” but did precisely nothing to back up his condemnation. By contrast, his publicly reported condemnation of me was followed up by an intimidating Inquiry (run by an embarrassed Provost Neil MacCormick) at which anybody and everybody could give ‘evidence’ against me quite anonymously on whatever charges they fancied (providing a foretaste of the 1997 Tribunal). Quite honestly, I don’t know what more I could have done to keep my seniors informed or whether any such efforts would have mattered. Professor MacCormick had read the book (and thought it rather good); but except for a flicker of sense around November 4, the University was determined to be seen to dissociate itself from someone who had worked for them with many citations and without incident for a quarter of a century.

23. Gunfight at OK Corral, 1996- — the unconcluded battle with PC for my academic life

With the battle still in progress as I write (June, 1997), it would be pointless to do more here than to indicate the key episodes and explanations at least from my own point of view. In particular, I am not at liberty to discuss the three full days' of Tribunal hearings into my case. Full details of the first year of battle with Wiley and the Anti-Nazi League, including press coverage, are available in the TgF NewsLetters at the Internet websites:



.

In particular, my ‘general’ and ‘specific’ defences of myself against the University's 'gross misconduct' charges appear in the NewsLetters in January and February, 1997. Whether anything very much will ever be revealed about the Tribunal charges, documents, witnesses and proceeedings remains to be seen. For the University’s own account of what happened and is happening, see their ‘Information relating to Mr Chris Brand’ at .

¨ SUMMARY OF KEY EVENTS

¨ 14 iv ‘96. Initial ‘bad press’ in Independent on Sunday: I have said the unsayable: that I am what Professors Stephen Jay Gould, Steve Jones and Steven Rose standardly call a ‘scientific racist.’

¨ 17 iv. Wiley announce withdrawl of The g Factor for its “repellent” views.

¨ 1 v. E.U.Principal Sutherland reported in The Guardian [London] as calling my views “false and personally obnoxious.”

¨ 5 vii. E.U. Inquiry announces I will be supervised to improve my teaching style. They explain this action is "managerial", not "disciplinary."

¨ vii. Wiley reject Arthur Jensen’s proposed book on intelligence.

¨ 22 viii. Anti-Nazi League prevents Cyberia debate in central Edinburgh (left-wing journalist and writer Marek Kohn vs CRB).

¨ 13 ix. Regius Professor Gordon Graham (King’s College, Aberdeen) defends CRB in The Scotsman (13 ix ‘96, ‘Critics of university psychologist guilty of prejudice’).

¨ c. 8 x. CRB appointed to be Convener of Ethics Committee.

¨ 11 x. “Uproar As Race Row Writer Lands Top Job” (Evening News). The Scotsman, 11 x 1996, p. 1. 'Race-row lecturer appointed to head students' ethics committee' "Mr. Brand, whose book 'The 'g' Factor' was dropped by his publishers earlier this year, had his comments on the intelligence of black people branded "false and obnoxious" by the principal of Edinburgh University, Sir Stewart Sutherland, after scores of honours students began boycotting his lectures in April.”

¨ 12 x. CRB agrees to stand down from Convenership of the Department of Psychology’s Ethics Committee. Daily Express, 12 x 1996, ''Scientific Racist' Given Ethics Post. -- Probe over Controversial Academic's Prestigious Role.' (Picture caption: BRAND: Publishers Abandoned Book.) "The controversial appointment of self-proclaimed "scientific racist" Chris Brand as head of an ethics committee is under investigation at a Scottish university. Psychology lecturer Mr. Brand whose theory that black people are less intelligent than whites has been widely condemned has taken over as head of Edinburgh University psychology department's ethics committee. ....Mr. Brand's book 'The 'g' Factor' was dropped by his publishers earlier this year, but not before its contents — which included linking Afro-Caribbeans with IQ deficiencies — had angered a wide range of organisations. His views on single mothers also caused outrage when he said that one of the chief ingredients of the single parent problem was the low IQ of the mothers. ....Asked if he was surprised to get the appointment in succession to Dr. Peter Caryl, Mr. Brand said: "There's a touching possibility that it is a nice act of faith in me after all these difficult times." He admitted he was totally amazed by the public reaction to this development as it was based on "bog ignorance" by people who had never seen his book and who had been invited to comment by the media.”

¨ 15 x. The Scotsman. 'Race-book lecturer deposed as ethics committee head.' "Chris Brand, the controversial lecturer and self-styled "scientific racist", announced last night that he had been deposed as convener of a students' ethics committee — but that he now intends to fight on for the republication of his banned book. "Far be it from me to question managerial decisions," Mr. Brand said yesterday. "The position was better described as a departmental chore than a top job in any case.... The university has made a pragmatic decision in the hope that media interest in me will die away —but the only real end to this can be the republication of my book. It must be published so that people can see for themselves that I'm not a racist in any common-or-garden sense." Colleagues had agreed to help him to fight the publisher's decision on the basis of breach of contract, he said. But he refused to say exactly who would be behind the renewed attempt.” Scottish Television News, 15 x 1996, c. 6.30p.m. "Professor Neil MacCormick....said the appointment had been made "under extreme pressure of work".... [He] appeared to have some sympathy towards [reversing the decision of Wiley & Sons to drop the book]. "Withdrawal of the book from publication has deprived the scholarly and wider communities of the opportunity to make their own evaluations on the basis of the text rather than sound-bites," he said."

¨ 16 x. In my e-mailed TgF NewsLetter, I urged moderation in the case of Carleton Gajdusek and similar consensual paedophilia. (This message would not be widely noticed until 8 xi).

¨ 22 x. The Scotsman, p. 3. 'Demand to sack race row lecturer.' (Alison Gray) "....Beth Greenhill, a fourth-year psychology student said...."He is totally unrepentant about what he has said." Mr Brand said: "They really are getting their knickers in a twist over this....If they want me sacked they have a total lack of appreciation of what academics are here for.""

¨ 1 xi. Daily Mail (Scotland), 'Students Silence Race-Row Lecturer. Demonstration Brings Disruption to Classes' Picture captions: 1. 'On the bawl: Protestors outside the Edinburgh hall.' 2.'Target: Chris Brand' "....Although the university strengthened security and police monitored the demonstration, protesters still managed to halt the lecture. Around 100 campaigners noisily demanded Mr Brand be removed from the university staff. Demonstrators were kept at bay outside the building as students were allowed access. After 20 minutes the seminar was abandoned because of shouting and other disruptions in the lecture hall. A university spokesman said:"....Security staff did not remove anyone from the building." One of Mr Brand's students, who refused to be named, said: "Most of these people are not psychology students and do not know about Chris Brand or his work. They are trying to tell us what we can and cannot study and hear about. We may or may not agree with what he is saying but surely everyone has the right to express their own academic views. There are a lot more who feel the same as I do but who are frankly afraid to speak out because they fear violent reprisals.""

¨ 28 x - 3 xi. The Big Issue [England & Wales], No. 205, p.13. 'Academic Dubbed 'Racist' Speaks Out’ ''Dr Chris Brand claims he has been hounded by fellow academics following the withdrawal of his controversial book.” By David Milne.' Picture caption: 'Chris Brand: "Anti-racists are wrong." QUOTE from "leading left-wing anti-racist Marek Kohn": "IF SALMAN RUSHDIE IS TO BE ALLOWED HIS VIEWS, SO SHOULD CHRIS BRAND. LET THERE BE NO DOUBLE STANDARD." The Scotsman, 1 xi 1996, 'Brand lecture abandoned after protest' (Alison Gray). Picture caption: 'Shouted down: Anti-Nazi League supporters protest about psychologist Chris Brand's views at Edinburgh University yesterday.’ "Nicola Owen, a third-year linguistics student and a member of the Anti-Nazi League, said: "We were in there for ten minutes and we got the lecture stopped. We refused to discuss the issue with him because we refuse to give his ideas any kind of platform." A petition....demanding his sacking has now been signed by more than 700 students. ....In a letter to the petition organisers [Professor Sir Stewart Sutherland] repeated an earlier statement that he found Mr Brand's views "false and obnoxious."“

¨ 4 xi. E. U. Principal Stewart Sutherland writes to The Scotsman that he has not condemned me: .

¨ 8 xi. ‘Paedophilia’ story appears in Scottish press. CRB suspended from teaching.

¨ 9 xi. “FIRE BRAND” (Front page banner headline of Daily Record [the Scottish version of the Daily Mirror].)

¨ 12 xi. E. U. Psychology ‘colleagues’ meet and dissociate from me. (At no point was I done the courtesy of being asked to explain my actions or to offer reassurances. The University forbade these colleagues to issue a press release, but they were eventually allowed to post their decision on the Internet in December.).

¨ 14 xi. Student [E.U. student newspaper], Laura Peek: ' First It Was Blacks. Then It Was Women... NOW IT'S KIDS!' "Racist psychology lecturer Chris Brand was suspended from teaching this week after claiming on his website newsletter that child abuse is harmless. Brand....said: "Non-violent paedophilia with a consenting partner aged over 12 does no harm as long as they are both of above average IQ and educational level." ....Brand now faces disciplinary charges for conduct that "has brought and is bringing the University into disrepute and that may seriously disrupt the work of the Department of Psychology." Brand wrote [of Nobelist Carleton Gajdusek]: "It’s disgraceful that a man of such distinction should be hounded by the courts and the press for events that happened 20 or 30 years ago." ....Childline Scotland condemned Brand’s assertions to Student: "The views which were expressed are absolutely unacceptable and abhorrent to us and this issue of consensual sex from a child is ridiculous. We see victims of child abuse on a daily basis who were too terrified and did not know how to say so. The pain and distress caused by this type of abuse is inestimable." ....But Brand insists all he wants is his book, ‘The ‘g’ Factor’, to be published again. He told Student: "I have been censored yet again by the hysterical forces of PC. The university have let me down badly by pandering to the loony left but I will fight them to the end and I will be vindicated." He responded defiantly to suggestions that he has terrorised female students with provocative comments, claiming that "these girls obviously have no sense of humour." ....University Chaplain, Rev Iain Whyte {National Socialist} told Student: "....I’m embarrassed that he’s identified with Edinburgh."

¨ 20 xi. The Scotsman: 'UNIVERSITY AXES BRAND'S INTERNET SITE'; 'Authorities act over paedophilia claim but lecturer promises to fight back.'

¨ 30 xii. CRB publishes ‘general defence’ of his actions at . Called ‘A Threefold Censorship of Differential Psychology — All My Own Fault?’, here is how it begins.

“I am a pariah trying to speak through my gag. My publisher (Abominable Wiley) has condemned me for racism and withdrawn my book; the Scottish press insists on its Divine Right of Context-Free Soundbite and refuses to print what I have actually said about adult-adolescent paedophilia; and Edinburgh University — having given in to my critics at every opportunity since Wiley DePublisher broke contract with me on April 17, 1996 — has suspended me from teaching and forbids me to use its Internet facilities to explain my views on race, paedophilia, IQ or anything at all. Making the censorship of me extra-effective, few people want to hear what I have to say. Most people find it easier to believe that my reported views do indeed put me ‘beyond the pale’, that my conduct simply must have been blameworthy at some point along the line since de-publication day, and that, anyhow, my censorship means people could not read my book even if they wished to do so. Still, there are some kindly lights amid the encircling gloom. Thanks to computer cafe's, the Internet and supporters who have understood the technical possibilities, I am able to 'broadcast' worldwide for 24 hours per day — a great improvement on the situation of heretics of the past. In particular, people who search the Net on topics like psychology, personality, heredity and environment will be bound to come across my 'Personality, Biology and Society' — my coverage of the entire range of topics that compose modern differential psychology (including sex, crime, politics, psychometrics, education and eugenics). You could say I have the good luck that my metaphorical mobile phone is still working. From my island in the middle of the metaphorical village duckpond, I can thus tell you what happened to me and the cause of realism in differential psychology. Just please prepare yourself for some decision-making — for my own account of events is very different from that which you can more easily hear in many a village pub from plenty of my fellow psychologists.”

¨ 10 i 97. CRB replies to his colleagues on the Net.
COLLEGIAL CONDEMNATION

My colleagues now have their condemnation of press reports of my views posted on the Internet at Edinburgh LUniversity's Edinfo Website. Like Wiley DePublisher and Principal Dame Stewart Sutherland before them, they do not say precisely what are the views that they wish to condemn. That can apparently be left to the public — as a bizarre projective test. (This is evidently the key PeeCee technique for smearing and censoring a person today. You send the Press to get an out-of-context soundbite from the intended victim; then you condemn the resulting report, relying on the Press not to issue the victim's own press release. Probably they all find it in a Handbook somewhere.) Nor do my colleagues explain why, in my 26 years at E. LU., they have never before taken action to dissociate themselves from my so-shocking views. I hope assiduous newsies and students will make it their business to find out more. It would be interesting to hear what my colleagues think about race, IQ and paedophilia; and to learn what academic authority they claim for their own views. (The phone number for the Head of E. LU. Psychology Department, Professor Robert Grieve, is 0131 650 3441. His e-mail address is robert.grieve@ed.ac.uk.)

¨ i ‘97. The Scotsman claims CRB will be offered ‘early-retirement-or-else.’ This possible ‘leak’ from E. U.’s Old College is promptly denied by University Secretary Dr M. J. B. Lowe.

¨ 28 i ‘97. ‘Race and IQ’ in Cambridge University (CRB vs Darcus Howe). Varsity [Cambridge University’s student newspaper] 31 i 1997, pp. 1-2, 20. ‘Banned Brand Sparks Fury’ ‘Demonstration After Racist Invited To Speak At Caius Debate’ 3 pictures: Police and protesters outside Caius this Thursday; Protesters came from Edinburgh; Brand ridicules opponent’s speech. "An Edinburgh University lecturer facing the sack for arguing blacks are mentally inferior put his case at Caius on Tuesday — while a crowd of protestors {sic} chanted anti-racist slogans outside the gates.”

¨ ii. Principal proposes charges against CRB; CRB replies to Principal.

¨ iii. Tribunal announced.

¨ 2 v. First meeting of Tribunal (entirely behind closed doors). Front page headline, Times Higher (Olga Wojtas): ‘IQ Man Faces Axe After Child Sex Letter.’ “.... Mr Brand told THES that he was not urging a change in the law on paedophilia, and claimed nobody would have been interested in his views had it not been for the controversy over his theories on race and intelligence. He speculated that left-wing critics had seen his latest comments as another means of smearing him. He denied he had tarnished the university’s name, saying he had done academic life proud by fighting to get his views across, and would defend himself with vigour. ....A university spokeswoman....would not reveal the precise charges, which she said “related to aspects of Mr Brand’s conduct.””

¨ 4 vi. Second meeting of Tribunal.

¨ 27 vi. Third and final meeting of Tribunal with prosecution and defence present.

¨ Tribunal gives verdict and make recommendation to Principal who then decides how to proceed.

¨ ?Announcement of breach-of-contract action vs Wiley?

?Brand admitted to E. U. Re-Education Camp?

?E. U. Centre of Differential Psychology to be headed by Brand (now a Reader in Psychology)?

?Bound and gagged by E. U., Brand closes TgF NewsLetter?

?The g Factor to be published by Edinburgh University Press?

The above summary hopefully conveys something of the academic and media gunsmoke of April, 1996 - June, 1997 — my own story of which must await some conclusion to my various campaigns (against Wiley, Edinburgh University, the Anti-Nazi League, Child Line, my Psychology colleagues and feminaziedom in the E. U. student body). However, I would like to make one particular observation.

Support for me has been at a very personal level. As can be seen in the TgF NewsLetters for January 10 and June 1, I have been fortunate to receive encouragement and help from a wide range of advisers — many of whom contributed crucial ideas and support at key points, and some of whom have been with me throughout. In particular, the worldwide broadcasting of the NewsLetter on the Internet would have been impossible without the generosity of Rita Zurcher, Gavan Tredoux and My Computer Whizzkid (though the latter always thinks he’s going to get paid one day — his one strand of optimism in an otherwise heavily realistic set of attitudes). All this intelligent person-to-person support has made up a lot for the almost total absence of support from psychology colleagues, students, mainstream publishers, civil liberties groups, politicians, lawyers or millionaires. We all admire Voltaire saying ‘I deplore what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ However, I would advise any democratic elitist confronting the Scottish press and Scottish university not to expect help from many modern Voltaires. Still worse, even when 'Voltaires' do speak out, as did Regius Professor Gordon Graham of King’s College, Aberdeen (in The Scotsman, 13 ix ‘96, ‘Critics of university psychologist guilty of prejudice’) nothing happens. (Oh, well — I was appointed Convener of the Psychology Department's Ethics Committee....) Nor are organizations of the great and good the slightest help: only the US National Association of Scholars took an interest for a while, but their boss would not read my book and decided to believe Wiley’s rumours that I was in the Ku Klux Klan. Once I had been targeted by the press and my Principal for ‘racism’, and once I fought back in the only way I could, via the NewsLetter, the path to suspension was perfectly plain. When the ‘liberal’-left press wanted to ‘get’ me again, when it seemed the University and I were becoming too pally (Nov. 4, 1996)), they would just use the handiest stuff in the NewsLetter — re Gajdusek, as it turned out. To its Tribunal, the University would even try to deny that the suspension of me had anything to do with my book! Let no one think there is much support for the free speech of academic opponents on the modern campus. The US pornographer, Larry Flynt, with his millions, had been able to win a First Amendment victory because Pastor Jerry Falwell had been led by Flynt's clever attorney to admit good-humouredly that, such was the TV preacher's reputation, no-one would ever have believed Flynt’s claim that Falwell’s first sexual congress had been with his own mother. But student feminazies do not make the mistake of having or admitting to a sense of humour. They claim I and other ‘dominating males’ genuinely wound them time after time with our ‘insensitivity’ and ‘rapism’; and with them come all-purpose supporters of disadvantaged underdogs who are ready to keep such shows going rather than admit how such accusers bring feminism and anti-racism into contempt.^{Black people, in contrast, can hold their heads up high. Not a single Black person came forward to complain about me (apart from one who wrote perfectly polite letters in green ink drawing to my attention the academic qualifications of various African dictators). ‘Anti-racism’ is primarily a doctrine of failed White left-wingers, not of Black people themselves — as I explained in my Cambridge address [published in Mankind Quarterly 37 and at .} Those who challenge such nonsense must learn from my case that they will fight without organized support. Edinburgh University proved a pushover, letting its Psychology Department’s teaching and ethical arrangements be run by the Anti-Nazi League for fifteeen months: political correctness now has a terrifying stranglehold not only in the USA, but, we learn, in one of the most prestigious universities in Britain. Administrators and PC students effectively conspire to maintain the intellectual holiday camps that they have created. The resulting ‘degrees’ are often worthless does not matter to them. The administrators and students have successfully milked the British taxpayer. Whether the academics will one day be seen as guilty of what the French call le trahison des clercs, selling their own tenure for a mess of pottage, in now a central question — for PC clearly terrifies the living daylights out of them.


24. epilogue — Did it have to be me?

Lastly, there is one rather obvious question: Why me? Why was I the sniper to leash off far behind enemy lines but, instead of doing much immediate damage, to become involved in an almost hopeless public shoot-out for which many of my ‘colleagues’ said I had only myself to blame?

à There was one burden I did not carry. I knew I was not a racist in the ordinary sense of that term — involving at once dislike of, dismissal of and discrimination against people of other races regardless of their individual characteristics. As I grew up in North London, my next-door friend, who was almost as keen on Monopoly as myself, was a nice and bright halfe-caste boy whose Ghanaian lawyer father was in jail as one of the more distinguished opponents of the dictator Nkrumah.^{Having taken over the Jewel in the Crown of Britain’s African empire, Nkrumah first ruined the country with his Marxist dogmas and then turned to human sacrifices in the hope that these would bring the economy better luck.} On warm summer nights, Kaye and I would sometimes play Monopoly into the small hours in our back gardens, the board lit with our bicycle lamps; and it was he who would, when he became a librarian, give me — still very naive about communism — copies of the ludicrous, self-serving writings of another dictator, Kim Il Sung.^{Like Stalin, Kim loved nothing better than re-reading his own speeches about the heroic achievements of heroic peasants and factory managers.} Up in Edinburgh (where my favourite modern novel for several years [till I discovered John Updike] was Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by the US Black writer, James Baldwin), I often took lodgers to make ends meet. Two of my three favourites over the years were from India (a handsome and bright table-tennis champion) and Burundi (a genial Tutsi youth leader whose hands were actually steeped in the blood of his fellow Hutu and who quaintly professed a dim view of rioting Black youth in Britain). Of course, I learned something of African ways — my Tutsi was splendidly randy and could be relied upon to proposition female visitors as soon as I had left the sitting room to finish preparing lunch. But I knew I had no trouble at all in respecting intelligent and good-humoured people of other races and enjoying their company. (My Tutsi was a veritable caution. He was quite sure that his being turned down by so many White girls in Edinburgh had nothing to do with their ‘racism’ or his own marital status [married], but was in fact due to lesbianism which he would lay disapprovingly at the door of myself and other White males who had plainly let things get out of hand.)

à As well as being no common-or-garden racist, I genuinely believed my own anti-racist credentials were pretty good, if perhaps a bit dated. Quite the worst argument I ever had with my father, when I was eighteen, arose when, running three telephone exchanges as he did c. 1961, and having thus to use immigrant labour increasingly, he chose — after no doubt a trying day — to air some grievance about lazy Black workers over the family dinner table. With all the confidence that comes from total ignorance, I took him on and it required all my mother’s (considerable) diplomatic skill to separate us. I had thus been ‘blooded’ in the anti-racist cause before the term ‘anti-racism’ was even thought of.^Likewise I can recall arguing with irate French market mammies in Nantes after I had the cheek to complain to them that they were selling South African pears — contrary to my anti-apartheid principles. It was only later, at Oxford, when my Jewish pre-philosopher friend expressed liberal doubts about legislation to ban speech that ‘might cause race hatred’ that I began to realize that the issue of racism was not {sorry!} entirely black and white.

à I also carried no guilty emotional baggage about IQ. How to calculate IQ (as MA/CA x 100) had been explained to me first on the top of a Barnet trolleybus at age 13 by my then best friend and intellectual competitor, Edward Forgan [now himself a leading cold-temperature physicist]. — Probably Ted had learned it from TV or from his alert accountant father. The formula seemed pretty obvious^{I did not realize the problem with the formula — that since intelligence does not increase much beyond age sixteen, the formula dooms all of us to declining IQ’s from that point onwards. This is why psychologists eventually took to calculating IQ’s chiefly by comparing people directly with their age peers, though using the same mean of 100 and the same standard deviation of 15 that obtained in work with children of the same age-band using the original formula.} and I thought no more about it till, at university, I learned that students studying psychology had until recently had to take IQ tests.^{Apparently, few places were available in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology, PPP, for a while — though the story could also have been apocryphal.} I recall breathing a sigh of relief. Somehow — in my experience as a school debater, perhaps — I had come to believe that intelligence and, certainly, wit, were not my strongest points. In schoolboy chess, my successes were more often due to the use of borderline-reckless, initiative-seizing gambits (the dashing ‘Danish’ two-pawn sacrifice was a favourite) which would sometimes demolish seeded players in minutes but as often have my own team members howling at my having wasted a safe position from which I could have extracted a victory with another hour’s play. (What! You thought it was only a boy’s style with guns that predicted his future?) Anyway, I was right about IQ. When I joined the Prison Service and took the twenty-minute Raven’s Matrices along with the newboy cons one week at H. M. Prison Grendon, my first IQ result was only a “C-” (c. IQ 95). At the time, this didn’t matter. I had only just come from narrowly missing an Oxford First and I had a plum job and a much-admired wife. Later, however, I was glad to be quite sure that my own respect for intelligence and IQ-testing had nothing whatever to do with how the IQ tests had treated me! It was only as I realized that IQ was quite simply the touchstone for every other hereditarian endeavour in psychology that I realized I would would have to defend it. It was not a personal matter: I have the same personal reservations as anyone else about using a single, short IQ test to judge another person’s mental ability but experience and reading showed me that the tests were useful when used with reasonable caution.

à The first question that I ever asked of social science, after seeing Hans Eysenck’s work on social attitudes around 1965 in Oxford, was ‘How can you have a society without a religion?’ My own sudden apostasy raised this question: How could I have made such a big attitudinal change if personality were fundamentally linked to attitudes? Would new attitudes arise, in effect to replace those I had lost? Or had religion been a parental imposition which my personality had proved capable of shaking off? And did either of these processes happen for societies too? Perhaps my own current problems in 1997 are now revealing the answer: Without an intelligently orchestrated, literate religion, what you get is PC and the suicide of your race and music and liberties in the name of a perverted and wheedling idealism. In particular, without some form of patriarchy, feminism is unleashed with its dissipation of male energies into mere frivolity — until males once more resume control, as in 5th-century BC Greece when the homosexuality-indulgent military managed to re-assert dominion over women and their Dyonisian frolics. Right or wrong, I had it in mind to regard PC as a singularly febrile and ill-thought-out religion, the only attraction of which was to fill the vacuum left in the West by ‘the death of God.’

à Nor did I owe feminism any favours. My second wife had arrived equipped with paperbacks of Simone de Beauvoir and I recall encouraging her interest by subscribing her, as a birthday present, to an American journal of feminist sociology. After it had become crystal-clear that she had settled for maternos, I went on to an agonizing yet equally delightful nine-month infatuation with a boyish child-realist schoolteacher lesbian. Then there was The Doc who was 100% peecee. I had been sympathetic to modern feminism in its early days — except when it was coupled with conspicuous stupidity, illogicality or weight problems.

à One thing I did have was perhaps a sine qua non of my taking on the assembled mass of my peers in their new-found religiosity. I had grown up with somewhat elderly parents in a home that was well into the top 1% of UK families in terms of religious devotion (to the Church of England). Of course, I did not know this when I was just age seven and joined the church choir. This was undoubtedly the biggest event in my young life. Someone else, beyond my mother, wanted me and would pay (2/6 per week, £2-50 in today’s money) to have me practise and sing a few times a week. To negotiate my entry — scary as this would be, for I would have to be thrown into a hollybush and locked in the ‘Ghost Shed’ in the graveyard — a handsome adolescent ‘alto’ who had a motor-bike was invited to tea. As I clung to Trevor on the bike, he swore no great harm would befall me. Nor did it. Soon I was helping throw other boys into the hollybush and chasing around the graveyard as to the manner born. (The Ghost Shed was a peculiar outhouse that was rat-infested and on black nights reduced younger weeds to tears.) Thus the Church and Handel and Bach and Mendelssohn became part of my bone structure. Nothing could have been more natural. At primary school there was nothing — only one male teacher (and he living off his looks) and various oddball women who thought that drinking water with meals thinned the blood (how my favourite uncle laughed!) and that all schoolchildren should assiduously follow the progress of the Queen’s Royal Tour of Australia. By contrast, the Church was real: I sang the solo ‘Oh for the wings of a dove’, I had money for aniseed balls and Weights cigarettes (in packets of five from vending machines), I was Captain of Cricket (chiefly because my father supplied the stumps), I behaved myself when required and I moved up the hierarchy and became chief porn-purchaser and candle-snuffer. The most stunning girls would let me undo their bra straps — at least until my voice broke. Paedophiles were excited too.... In short, I was growing up in a real community — with high aspirations and aestheticism, which I liked, with a little power for me when I liked, yet also with a realistic element that perhaps only a boy on his way to manhood can serenely accept: that the good, the bad and the ugly rubbed shoulders with each other. I had enough fun with the Church to be suspicious of substitutes. Substitutes too would, in the end, yield hypocrisy, untruth and tyranny far worse than I had seen in the bosom of the Church of England — and the substitutes would not have Handel’s ‘Messiah.’

à Helpful also to backing IQ, elitism and eugenics was being a firstborn. I never thought much of being a firstborn when I was growing up or during my early years in psychology. The failure of Adlerian psychology to demonstrate its thesis encouraged such indifference — yet indifference is probably just one first-born style to which I am pretty prone. To barely admit the existence of oppositon is the trick — as in my own case with my sister Hilary, younger than me by three and a half years. Like most children — I realized many years later — I greeted her arrival as a pretty deplorable mystery. Probably my first childhood memory is of being shown a professional photograph of Hilary as a baby, reclined on a satin cushion, and remarking (entirely to myself) the amount of fuss that was being made over the newcomer. (It is one of Adler’s claims that ‘first memories’ commonly concern sibling rivalry.) With such a big difference in ages between Hilary and me, there was perhaps little scope for serious co-operation — though of course I would induce her with bribes to make up the numbers for Monopoly.... I noticed with alarm that Hilary, “old saucer eyes” as one of our mock-uncles would call her, had quite a way with the gentlemen, who would laugh if the hem of her gingham skirt swept the carefully positioned soldiers from a wall of my fort. Still, I remained officially patient and uncommitted until one day, after I had let Hilary in on ‘midnight feasts’ (at more like ten-o’-clock, probably), she revealed to our mother where I kept my secret supplies of condensed milk (still a favourite with me to this day — both Hilary and I were bottle-fed). It was this act of treachery which decided me, as many firstborns no doubt decide at some point, after years of saintly patience....., that ‘new arrivals’ can be great mistakes. In his enjoyable book on birth order, Born to Rebel (1996, Little Brown), Frank Sulloway observes that historically it was later-borns, and not especially children from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds who took to revolutionary causes (whether the French Revolution or Darwinism). The only exception to this generalization concerns eugenics. Though eugenics (thought up by Galton^{Galton was himself a later-born — but so late that his nearest sister, Adele, functioned as a virtual mother to him, thus making him psychologically more like a first-born.}) was a radical and utopian idea, its support always tended to come from first-borns. (The second-born Burt was not specially keen on eugenics, contrary to the public stereotype.) What Sulloway’s finding reflects is that that eugenics is not a radical movement to help the underdog — doubtless the ambition of many psychologists. Eugenics is rather about avoiding the arrival of snarling underdogs in the first place! As with maternos, psychologists have been altogether too slow to acknowledge the importance of adjustment to siblings, fraternos, in human affairs. The great libertarian, anti-communist writer, Ayn Rand (of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged), long settled in the USA after leaving Moscow at the time of the Revolution, managed to re-discover one of her long-lost younger sisters in the 1960’s and invite her to New York. Within a week the two of them had fallen out, the culminating episode being that a New York chemist’s shop assistant had declined to tell Ayn Rand’s sister which was ‘the best toothbrush’, saying instead that she would have to choose. Appalled at this lack of ‘helpfulness’ (so unlike what later-borns hope for and what Moscow citizens readily provided for each other in their ceaseless struggle to live under the degradations of communism), the sister had stormed out. When she found Ayn Rand sympathized with the sales assistant, she asked her elder sister to put her on the next plane back to Moscow.

à Further bracing me for being Bad Boy Brand was what I had long known as a strand of my character, though I would be hard pressed to pin-point its origins (except perhaps in the genes and as above). It could be said that it was after I left the choir (and primary school) and was no longer ‘a big fish in a small pond’ that I first experienced something like ‘alienation.’ Yet I would dispute that: I was usually near the very top of my grammar school classes, I was in demand for chess and debating, I could cheat oops persist as well as other boys at cross-country running, and I even made what were (for me) heroic efforts to ski and, later, to pole-vault to impress the boy I loved — qua David and Jonathan, for we had never heard the word ‘homosexual.’ Yet, though no-one could scorn me or push me around, I felt to a degree different and isolated: long rides on my drop-handlebarred sportsbike (looking for girls....) became a hobby. I especially remember staying off school with a bad cold for a week at age 14 and thinking myself unusual in reading six Ibsen plays instead of completing hated geography homework. (I have was always useless at diagrams — as later at ‘visual aids.’) (No, my reading did not include Brand — Ibsen’s marvellous tribute to independence-of-mind and individualism. I only discovered that in the 1980’s.) I suppose I felt a bit ‘laughed at’ — normal in adolescence but my natural inclination to claim the high ground, not least in fundamentalist Christianity, always invited brickbats. Not especially ‘creative’, I felt it was my responsibility to entertain and explore ideas. Why else had the privilege of a virtually public-school education with upstanding masters and beautiful cricket pitches been put my way? Though I made an effort to book up girls for tennis and to drink half-pints of beer, these ventures never seemed to lead very far. It was not long before I was reading Camus and Sartre and the (mercifully much easier) Colin Wilson with relief, knowing that I too was some kind of ‘outsider.’ Although my first marriage, then Oxford, and later Edinburgh University each offered at first brief ‘normalizing’ respites (perhaps while I was on my ‘best’ behaviour, still learning the ropes....), I had by and large grown used to being ‘different.’ I was thus not entirely surprised when my woman-of-the-world second wife wrote to me from Dublin in the mid-1980’s to say I was “mad” to hold the views I did and to argue with friends about the importance of intelligence and IQ. (In fairness to her, she took my side when it came to a dispute with my best man at our wedding — an ‘educational sociologist’ who, despite his having been with me at Oxford and got his own boy into Cambridge, had come by 1980 to the astonishing view that no British university was better than any other.) To some extent, my being different was plotted by psychological tests from my earliest days in the Prison Service: unfailingly an ‘introvert’ on Eysenck’s tests, I would score in the top 5% of the population on Cattell’s Sixteen Personality Factor tests when it came to ‘Independence’ or (as I later learned Cattell to have once called it) ‘Promethean Will.’ Had I also been high in Anxiety/Neuroticism I suppose I could truly have been called ‘alienated.’ As it was, I was just self-sufficient, radical and assertive (putting it politely), bloody-minded, rebellious and disagreeable (putting it impolitely) or wilful and inclined to take the initiative (as I myself qua academic would prefer to characterize the dimension in my own writing). Just how wilful I would hardly know till my darling youngest daughter, Emily, who always fancied herself as a chip of the (paternal) block, would, in adolescence occasionally turn the same traits on me. (Emily had established her skills in repartee by age seven. One day a Dublin schoolfriend, one Sandra Rath, called out in the street “Emily Brand, oh so grand!” Straightway Emily had shot back “Sandra Rath needs a bath.”) I was impressed by Emily — well, sometimes terrified (not least because Emily combined her high-w with a decent IQ. Arguments about whether, at age sixteen, in Edinburgh, Emily could go ‘clubbing’ till 01:30 left me shaking like a leaf — and serve me right, you may well say, dear reader.

à A further aid to my eventual public heresy was that I virtually never watch TV — indeed, I have no set in my home. Because of this, and because I seldom read a newspaper after Mrs Thatcher was booted out of Downing Street by her own Party, I was much less than fully aware in 1996 of the degree to which the media had adopted ‘anti-racism’ as a steady thread of propaganda meant to dignify their work as they displayed more and more sex and violence and glorified mediocrity when not stupidity and illiteracy. (As a Radio IV UK listener at breakfast time, I had naively assumed it was only this up-market programme for pinkoes that had been put at the disposal of pseudo-intellectual Melvyn Bragg and his pseudo-egalitarian ilk.) How had I made myself so ignorant of popular trends in multiculturalism and paedohysteria? (i) I had grown up in a home that had no TV till I was 16. When the set arrived, I was unimpressed: the only worthwhile programme I can recall was a one-hour interview with Jung conducted by John Freeman — and that was a programme that would today be unthinkable for letting an intellectual say more than two sentences without interruption. Subsequently, in Oxford, in student digs, I don’t think it ever occurred to my wife or I to have a TV (though Joan had grown up with a set at her parents’): Radio Luxembourg provided our auditory wallpaper, I suppose, plus a precious (stolen) radiogram I was lucky to have been given by a dear yet most alcoholic friend from my pre-university months as a mental nursing assistant. (ii) It was after my time at H. M. P. Grendon, when I landed my Nuffield College job and a big ground-floor flat at a low rent to go with it, that a TV somehow appeared. Undoubtedly the ‘Monty Python’ shows were the one thing worth viewing — though one noted that, once drink was taken, virtually anything would be watched by both our guests and ourselves(e.g. a disagreeable though intelligent detective in a wheelchair). It was plain that the human eye is drawn to movement when otherwise unemployed — and a few years later neurospychologists established that certain primitive brain centres are responsible for this phenomenon. When Joan vamoosed (at first with a groovy academic, but it was not to work out), one of the first things I did was to donate the TV set to the Oxford Old Age Pensioners. I never looked back. It seemed plain that TV was embarked on a determinedly down-market path that would unfailingly turn many Britons into intellectual invalids incapable of following a paragraph let alone a page of argument. (iii) There was a time when TV provided a welcome sense of community. In the nineteenth century, a senior civil servant would have been unwise to turn up at work without knowing what was in The Times. Likewise, Panorama summoned responsible citizens to attend to its output around 1970. Yet this would not last. As more TV channels came along, the chance of meeting anyone at coffee who had seen the same programme the previous night became vanishingly small. I remember the dismay of my scholarly colleague Boris Semeonoff on finding that only a handful of our 40-strong ‘Personality’ class had watched a seering Panorama exposition of cruelty to mental hospital patients the previous evening. Moreover, the failure to introduce coin-in-the-slot TV meant that TV producers were not subject to the disciplines of the market: whereas the market provides high-quality publications like The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman and The Spectator for those prepared to afford them even though they carry little tit’n’bum and no guide to TV (now the main service provided my many ‘newspapers’), no such development could occur within TV itself. No matter how much a viewer would pay for a decent weekly update on, say, ‘the behavioural, social, cognitive and brain sciences’ there was no way of him registering this with TV producers. (iv) Over the years, with academic open-mindedness, I might have concluded that such attitudes were becoming riskily out-of-touch. However, my three years with the Doc, including evenings when she would be popping out to provide free-at-the-point-of-use medicine for drunks on council schemes, meant I had a new exposure to TV. I was appalled: there was nothing worth watching apart from some of the films. Even Proust seemed preferable some nights — though, heaven knows, he is far from action-packed (start at p. 286 is my advice). (v) Is all this just sour grapes that I have not myself become a TV personage? (I have been interviewed a fair amount on radio, but never live on TV.) I don’t think so. In the 1970’s I was told by a TV producer I was telegenic, so I had no anxiety; however, on the occasions when TV companies have been in touch I have managed to put them off (i) by my frank race realism etc., or (ii) by letting them see there was no way I was prepared to give an hour of interview material only for them to extract some unrepresentative soundbite, or (iii) by saying I was not prepared to explain IQ in one minute and then be savaged by a hand-picked TV audience for the next twenty-nine.

à Another help to me in deciding to fight Wiley’s withdrawal was that I had no doubt about the importance of intelligence. Simply, the most most intelligent people in my life had been the most stimulating if not always the most encouraging. In childhood, my great amusement was always when my father (himself no slouch at repartee) was joined by his own younger cousin (who had been a Royal Navy officer and learned the difference between red and white wine — an impressive feat in Britain of the 1950’s) for weekends of fence-mending, gardening, fort-making and male banter. Surrounded by adoring women and children, and themselves fortified with a half-pint or three of pale ale (always drunk from cut glass) they were my window on the world. No one was immune to these Post Office engineers’ ribbing — certainly not the Mr Ernest Marbles oops Marples, the hapless over-educated intellectual who had been made Government Minister for a time of this monopoly job-destructive programme that would end with British Telecomms taking off and the poor old steam age, labour-intensive and strike-prone Royal Mail being left behind. Nor was the key trade union spared: the Post Office Engineering Union was known as the ‘Pop-Off’ because afficionados could ‘pop off extra urly’ so as to attend its meetings in Post Office time. At grammar school, too, the masters I admired were not the athletes, the group counsellors, the scholarly obsessionals or even the resident cynics. Rather I preferred those who combined clear and public purposes with vision, wit and and just a little self-deprecation. Of course, my favourite history master (a pink Conservative — eventually he became a Liberal) was one of these. So was the school’s German master whose concern for Anglo-German reconciliation was such that he had been locked up as a possible spy in 1940. Dry and drole successive housemasters helped too — fine, alert batsmen and umpires even in the days of their seniority. Our headmaster, too, E. H. Jenkins (MA Oxon.) was an admirable (and terrifying) 5’1” historian (himself a product of The Queen’s College) whose quite formidable drive had taken the school during his headship from ready-for-closure to being able to outpace London public schools first in games and eventually (as the staff became 80% Oxbridge) in academic rankings. Naturally, Oxford provided many other figures whom I knew I appreciated for their intellectual grip even if I didn’t like their mainly-pink politics: Jon Cohen, Peter Hacker, John Marshall, Brian Farrell, Herbert Hart, the blind Vinerian Professor of Law Rupert Cross (a chess grandmaster, or very nearly), Glenmorangie-fan Nigel Walker (later Professor of Criminology at Cambridge), David Butler and Red Chelly Halsey (Britain’s top sociologist) were just the most outstanding. In Edinburgh, too, I enjoyed the Department most when David Vowles, Jules Davidoff and John Marshall were all around, c. 1978, even though none of these brainboxes was much interested in my views on IQ, crime, personality or heredity.

à Of equal assistance to my determination to stand firm on race and IQ was the massive scholarship of Arthur Jensen. When I first came across the full extent of Art’s work on race^{Arthur Jensen’s early work on race, IQ and education was brought together by Methuen in three volumes Genetics and Education (1972), Educational Differences (1973) and Educability and Group Differences (1973).} I knew I had never seen anything like it. Especially with regard to human psychology, there was no comparable body of evidence for any specific and important proposition^{ The closest parallel might be the defence of ‘innate aggression’ by ethologists against social anthropologists and psychologists; but Konrad Lorenz and Lionel Tiger never had anything like such compelling scientific, quantified evidence as did Jensen. } In this case, the low average IQ of Black people, even growing up in the USA, was the issue, together with the importance of that psychometric finding in accounting for the many lifetime problems which Black people experience. I knew that the nativist vs empiricist argument about animal behaviour (bird song, etc.) had been big business; and there was a steady rumble of argument about the heritability of criminality and even schizophrenia. But Jensen’s material was in a different league; and subsequent studies were almost always confirmatory.^{BRAND, C. R., 1997, ‘Ten arguments for the existence of racial differences in intelligence, and why we should welcome race realism.’ Mankind Quarterly 37, 3, 317-326.} Plainly three quarters of a century of psychometric testing attested that, whatever their many advantages in athleticism and rhythm, Black people are on average deficient in the human quality that civilization most requires. Many other researchers of human personality certainly accept the basic London School case about IQ; yet they choose to keep quiet about the g factor, and especially about its link to race. I too had once been happy enough with that position. It was indeed perfectly natural for Eysenckians to follow their master and simply treat each dimension of human psychological variation quite separately, just as was indicated by the factor analyses which gave evidence of the dimensions in the first place. But one day in the mid-1970’s, the E. U. Department of Psychology’s resident sage, the kindly and introverted Boris Semeonoff happened to remark to me, ‘Of course, intelligence is part of personality, which cannot be properly assessed without considering a person’s intelligence.’ Boris was not one for making extravagant pronouncements and I was not much enamoured of his own great love in psychology, projective tests. But with regard to intelligence and personality I felt immediately that he was right. Over the next few years, I increasingly made my own writing on personality conform to the principle which Boris had enunciated.^{E.g. BRAND, C. R., 1984, ‘Personality dimensions: an overview of modern trait psychology.’ In J.Nicholson & Halla Beloff, Psychology Survey 5. Leicester : British Psychological Society.} In particular, I took the view that human intelligence and emotionality both assisted with the ‘crystallization’ of many human personality features relating to other, distinguishable dimensions of personality. For me, then, there was no way of putting IQ to one side: I could not imagine theorizing about the major social problems of Black people without taking IQ into account. Like Aristotle and many in the Western philosophical tradition I saw intelligence (Reason) as usually channelling and harnessing drive and emotion (Passion); indeed, I saw nothing ‘wrong’ with the great drives, nothing to worry about and no reason to write them off as ‘social constructs’ so long as intelligence was adequate to guiding and controlling them. Having taken some trouble to present publicly my views as to ‘the importance of intelligence’^{BRAND, C. R.,1987, 'The importance of intelligence.' in S. & Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer. BRAND, C. R. , EGAN, V. & DEARY, I. J. , 1994, 'Intelligence, personality and society: constructivist vs essentialist possibilities.' ln D.K.Detterman, Current Topics in Human Intelligence 4. New Jersey : Ablex. BRAND, C. R., 1994, 'Open to experience - closed to intelligence: why the ‘Big Five’ are really the ‘Comprehensive Six’.' European Journal of Personality 8, 299-310. BRAND, C. R., 1995, ‘What is it to be high-K?’ (A Special Review of J.P.Rushton, Race, Evolution & Behavior, New Jersey, Transaction Press.) Personality & Individual Differences 19, 3, 411-413. BRAND, C. R., 1996, ‘The importance of intelligence in Western societies.’ J. Biosocial Science 28, 387-404.} I was not in the business of backing off from the g factor just because it was plainly linked to Black-White race differences.

à There is one reason for my loyalty to the g factor that will have to remain a secret for a while yet. So here is my last reason for now for being prepared to say ‘Yes, I’m what’s called a scientific racist.’ Of course, it is a woman. While in April, 1996, I felt cocky at having a book published and having danced the nights away up the Nile, I would still probably have been less willing for a fight if I had not had the beauty and fun of Magic around me for two or three years. It is true that Magic could have made me feel more secure than she did. But she had made me feel a prince on some days anyhow; and, as depublication occurred I was grateful for her 100% insistence that I fight Wiley and, later, Edinburgh University.^{Magic cooled off over ‘paedophilia’, admittedly. ‘It doesn’t play well in the West of Scotland’ was her comment. But I was bound to loose many at that point who had not my academic, clinical and personal experience of paedophilia; and at that time I gained at least one new lady supporter who believed I was God. (Magic herself usually maintained she had never lost her Catholic faith, so for her I had been merely ‘Cherub.’)}

I can only hope that the homespun psychologizing of this Epilogue has not been too far from the mark. Any for whom it is far-fetched may prefer to consult my psychometric test scores from my early twenties and tell their own story from there — attesting my independnce/disagreeability and tough-mindedness/insensitivity as these scores certainly do.^{My IQ would be somewhere in the range 95 - 140. (I do markedly better on ‘verbal’ and ‘crystallized’ tests. Or, to put it another way, I score at around the 27th percentile on Minnesota Paper Form Board, a good test of the k factor. I am also rather a slow worker — I do not like making guesses and going on to the next question. On Eysenck’s tests I score as a very stable, non-psychotic introvert -- which surprises my students and perhaps many others who assume I’m an extravert just because I get on my hind legs and lecture in a pretty lively fashion. For Cattell, my main deviations from population means are as follows: very low Anxiety, very high Independence/’Promethean Will’ (vs Subduedness), high Corticalertia (vs Pathemia). (I would protest the latter a bit since I would say my main interests surely reveal me as more interested in the arts than in science. I am a keen defender of science, especially within psychology, but I do not profess to be a dab hand at it myself. However, it could be replied that I am actually more interested in poltics and philosophy than I am in either arts or science and there would be some truth in this: people have often said I’d be good in politics [no doubt thus hinting they would be glad to see me out of psycholopgy....]. Perhaps the truth is that my low Neuroticism makes me seem rather more tough-minded than I actually am?) As to Conscientiousness, I tend to come out on tests [like Paul Kline’s] as on the obsessional side and high in ‘self-sentiment’; however, I do not seem to have a measurably savage ‘superego’ — perhaps again reflecting low neuroticism to some extent.}

Certainly I would admit to have been spoiling for a fight for quite a while, and I take no pride in that. What I do hope (and pray!) is that I have chosen the right battle and have the right weapons and training. If I have, I will help the London School to a smashing victory and a far wider community of people to agree to live with human differences rather than premising all political action on trying to defy them. If not, I will be the merest footnote to the victory of PC in the West which would snatch back most of the gains for Europe in winning the Cold War and pave the way for massive statism. Already, searching for paedophile pornography looks set to licence intimate police searches of every home and its computer hardware and software — at least if there is such a dread thing as a man in the household. As I write, French police have just made hundreds of such arrests — in the course of which four professionally employed men took their own lives. If academic freedom is not reasserted after the fifteen-month witch-hunting of me in Edinburgh, civil liberties will take a nose-dive for a generation. I can thus only hope that my de-published book has in fact proved a weapon that has taken out some key PC players. As I finish these ‘intellectual memoirs’ that PINC kindly invited, I live in hope that the silence of the New York Times means at least that leading PC luminaries know that Wiley went too far in my case. I will be hoping to see still more red faces in PC ranks as the E.U. Tribunal vindicates me and Wiley have to pay up in full for their breach of contract. Still, whatever happens, the affair of The g Factor has been the battle of my life; and, probably thanks to having been the beneficiary of maternos in childhood, I have largely been able to enjoy it. As in my ‘sniper’ dream of adolescence, it will be to get back behind friendly lines and have colleagues agree I have done a reasonable job that will be the trouble.


Written by Chris Brand, mid-1997.


(Thirteen years later, in 2010, I enjoy a relaxed life [with the help of compensation from E.LU. and my 30 years of pensionable service] and the support and company of pals in many places [Brisbane, Kansas, Luxembourg, London, Macedonia, Paris, Portugal, Moscow, Denmark and Capri spring particularly to mind] and most especially of my dear Taiwanese wife, Shiou-yun [Ph.D.].) Have I changed my views? – Not a bit! Richard Lynn, Phil Rushton and I were apparently quite right to have backed East Asian IQ since the evidence began to come in during the 1980’s; though India stands a good chance if it can continue to let its Brahmins rule the roost.)

posted by JR 9:00 PM