Islam calling: Distal and proximal

 

 

Correlations are indicative of possible causes, but not definitive. In the modern way, we now have a torrent of information about the perpetrator of the Nice massacre. The quality of that information varies considerably.

Neighbours have spoken variously of him being:

a normal person, just like others in the neighbourhood, and doing normal things like drinking and going to parties;

a weird person; who looked odd, would not hold doors open for others, and was asocial and a bit scary.

Conflicting reports of this sort are pretty usual. Ordinary social behaviour has some common ground rules, of which non-involvement is a large part. Many people do not know much about their neighbours. In ghettoes like the one in Nice there are incentives to say nothing, and to have seen nothing. Interviews off camera are probably more informative, free from possible community retaliation.

His family have said that he had a long psychiatric history including treatment for schizophrenia. Other family members have said that he had recently sent them £84,000 which is a substantial sum for a divorced truck driver with an estranged family to keep.

His mobile phone has revealed a string of female and male sexual contacts, with many admiring selfie photos. His main homosexual lover, a man in his 70s, has been identified. The perpetrator’s texts have led Police to a suspected small arms provider and to other contacts.

Video surveillance from street cameras showed that he practiced taking his truck down the route he used for his rampage, and photographed the route. He hired the truck some days earlier, and also acquired weapons. Other witnesses said they had seen the truck, being driven erratically half an hour before the attack. Apparently he sent some text messages in that half hour of waiting. He gained entry through the police cordon by claiming to be delivering ice-cream. Overall, it was not a spur of the moment act, but carefully considered.

At this point some commentators are tempted to jump to conclusions: conflicted gay murderer; schizophrenic murderer (5 times more likely to be violent than non-schizophrenics); both gay and schizophrenic; depressed after his divorce; not depressed but in a whirl of sexual promiscuity, or polymorphous perversity as Freud called it; suicide by cops; or “very rapidly radicalised” as a French government minister surmised, which recent reports put at a mere 8 days. All possibly true.

However, the general distal explanations do not really show why he committed mass murder. They fit better with a lonely suicide bid (the depression angle) or a deranged random stabbing of passers-by (the psychotic episode angle), not a planned mass murder. The particular method he used involved him seeing the people he murdered at first hand, and feeling the truck rise and fall as he went over their bodies. It was close and personal and protracted.

In trying to find out why he murdered we have a long list of possible distal causes: North African genes, Tunisian culture, previous criminal behaviour, low ability, confused sexuality and particularly conflicted homosexuality, and persistent propaganda from Jihadists about the need to attack infidels. More recently he had a divorce from his wife (more than a year ago I think) and then most recently whatever was happening on Jihadist websites or contacts or friendship groups. He has been claimed by ISIL as one of their soldiers, and this is a reliable guide, according to those who study these matters. However, I would not bank on this unless a real link is proved in later investigations. (In a sense their real claim is: “We inspire people to violence, without knowing who they are”.)

The act was terrorism on a large scale, and each distal cause increased the probability that a proximate cause would lead him to his performance: attacking French civilians on their national day. Whatever the personal shortcomings of the perpetrator, he terrorised France, which is what the Jihadist cause required him to do. Their aim is to show Europeans they are unwelcome in their own countries.

Yesterday a 17 year old Afghan refugee to Germany, given government support and fostered by a German family for two weeks, has attacked passengers in a train with an axe and a knife, leaving a blood-splattered carriage with three very seriously injured passengers and 14 in a state of shock. He had shouted Allahu akbar" ("God is great"), a witness said. In his bedroom Police have found a home-made Islamic State flag.

ISIL has also claimed this attack: "The perpetrator of the stabbing attack in Germany was one of the fighters of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in answer to the calls to target the countries of the coalition fighting the Islamic State”. Apparently this is a more “arm’s length” endorsement.

Distal causes: Afghan genes and culture and (the Facebook rest will be filled in quickly, I presume, his website history will take a bit longer). Proximate cause: ISIL?

The perpetrators have a common theme: they have been convinced that they should kill the citizens of the countries which took them in. The most obvious ultimate cause of their violence is The Cause they espouse.

 

Islam calling: troublesome minorities

 

Minorities trouble in two main ways: by being a nuisance and by becoming majorities. Doing both in parallel is the greatest threat to the host nation.

Proportionality is the key here: in most places, most people, most of the time,  go about their business peaceably. They can rightly say of the troublemakers in their communities that “they are a minority”. True. However, those troublemakers are more frequent in some communities than others, and this is a subtlety that often gets lost in discussion. Troublemakers need some support from their own communities, even if just tacitly turning a blind eye.

The rate at which European communities commit mass murder of their own citizens is very low, though not zero. The US suffered casualties from anti-government bombers. The UK suffered more casualties from Irish Republicans. Basque separatists have bombed Spaniards. However, these dreadful events can be seen as localised grievances, not an over-arching plan.

What troubles most about the Jihadist meme is its generality: its scope is global, and although it has key Western targets, the Crusaders, it takes on all non-believers: white Europeans, Black Nigerians, and anyone else who gets in their way, including brands of Islamic belief they judge to be insufficiently pure.

Like any franchise, it attracts lone entrepreneurs: those who vaguely want to do something, and find a general plan excuse enough to vent anger, disappointment, and general malaise. Insurrections are begun by dreamers and implemented by criminals.

So now we have a dreadful calculus: Western Europe has sizeable Islamic populations, most of whom are not bent on committing murder. Within those populations there are a minority willing to murder on a large scale. Their spectaculars (as the IRA used to boastfully call them) are aimed at showing the population that their governments cannot protect them. They attack the presumption of safety on which civil society is based.

A nation is a protection system, and not a racket if you can leave of your own free will. In exchange for following the rules and paying your dues you get the protection of the state: the protection of borders and the protection of your safety within the boundaries of the state. Insurrections challenge that protection, and taunt both the governed and the government.

The paradox comes thus: any state which guarantees the rights of citizens must also grant them to those who would destroy the state and injure its people. Our interpretation of Magna Carta is that the big letter demands that no-one be arrested without due cause. A noble aim, though of course the original did not apply to all citizens, only to free men, say about 40% of the population at most. It did not contemplate millions of non-Christian non-Europeans, with perhaps 10% of them at least passively in favour of establishing the dominion of another religion and another system of law. That which would have been considered treason is now considered a right which must be defended by the very State which is the target of the attack.

The current European plan, avidly followed in Nice to deal with its sizeable Muslim population (in its own run-down, poor neighbourhood) is to try to spot the militant tendency as early as possible, and bring help, counselling and Police attention to those most likely to commit murder. It may have worked to some extent, but not sufficiently strongly to prevent a large number of volunteers to the global cause going off to do some beheading in Syria, and at least one depressed individual from planning to crush his fellow French citizens to death under the wheels of his truck.

The current plan will continue, I presume, as a careful calculation, that the Muslim minority must not be provoked into turning further against European states, but must be cajoled, convinced, and sometimes bribed to bring information to the Police. Hardest of all will be to explain to Muslims that Muslims in Europe are not poor because Europeans are nasty to them, but mostly because their skills, abilities, and educational achievements, though perhaps a bit higher than in their countries of origin, are not at European levels. European elites baulk at explaining that, and so are caught in a vicious circle of apology. They have assumed that all men are equal, and cannot concede that that is an ideal to which States pay homage (the French particularly, since they count all as Citizens without “noticing” origins) but which does not reflect reality.

So, the plan is for Europe to take casualties, often in very large numbers in very public spectacular executions, and hope that the ideals of the brotherhood of man will win through in the end. In the meantime the pernicious meme will be propagated to all believers: you are urged to kill the infidel by all means possible.

In historical terms, the dilemma is whether it is 1914 or 1939, the former being (according to one school of thought) a time when better diplomacy could have prevented war, the latter being a time when willingness to go to war could have preserved the peace. Perhaps neither war is the appropriate comparison point, and we need to go back as far as the siege of Vienna.

 

 

Islam calling: lorry attack in Nice

 

Police have identified the perpetrator of an attack in Nice, France, who has killed at least 84 people attending a 14th July firework display.

The perpetrator had weapons and hand grenades in the back of his truck.

Naturally, there is interest in who this person was. An Islamic petty criminal, known to the Police but apparently not to the security services.

In predicting intelligence we are guided by the indifference of the indicator. Any test will do, formal or informal, if it reliably distinguishes one person from another, and has real life predictive value.

In predicting mass violence we should also follow the indifference of the indicator. Muslim men, probably with a criminal background, watching lots of jihadi videos and sermons, recently becoming devout, and probably subject to some random change in personal circumstances which would otherwise not be significant. Noisy data, and hard to find the signal in time to do anything about it. More potential perpetrators than there are teams to follow them.

President Hollande has just told France they will have to get used to terrorist attacks. It would be good to have a Plan B.

 

 

Is St Petersburg Russia’s Disneyland?

 

In former times this would get me sent to the Gulag, but is St Petersburg Russia’s Disneyland? Intended to ape Versailles, Venice, and more generally the Western wonders of the world, it succeeded in showing Russia to advantage, and the West to Russians: an accomplishment in all ways. Perhaps every culture wants a magic castle: Russia got St Petersburg and the US got Disneyland. The key may be to start construction in 1703.

The ISIR conference brochure shows a young Lev Vygotsky, together with Luria probably the Russian psychologist best known to the West. Good to put a face to a classic figure, and a cue for a story of his I cherish: a peasant hearing two astronomers discussing distant stars one night was amazed, not that they knew the stars’ distances and types, but that they knew their names.

A conference is a grand place to know Names at close first hand, over many coffees. More details about the conference can be found here:

 http://www.isironline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ISIR-2016_full_programme.pdf

or just follow the hashtag #isir16 on Twitter.

Also very good to see a page in memory of Earl “Buz” Hunt. I can testify to the immense pains he took to improve papers he reviewed, saying “If I can find errors by spending 15 minutes on Google it would be best if the author reviewed his work again before anyone else sees it”. The obituaries did not exactly say so, but he was pretty tough-minded but admired for his forthright opinions. He tolerated me even when we differed, for which I am grateful.

It was Buz who some years ago reminded me of the work of Warner Schaie, who is being honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award. All I had remembered was that in studying ageing effects one had to distinguish between cohort effects and ageing effects, by some technique I needed to look up. Buz immediately understood that attempts to study the Flynn Effect ran up against the same problems as the study of ageing, and that repeated measures of age cohorts provided a better insight. That is, when comparing 60 year olds with 18 year olds you conflate cohort and ageing effects, but if you re-test both groups every 10 or 20 years you can distinguish between effects. Warner Schaie led the way.

In line with conference traditions, here is the Keynote, delivered by Yulia Kovas, who is hosting the conference with colleagues.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Behavioural Genetics for Education:
New Insights into the Origins of Academic Ability,
Motivation and Achievement
Yulia Kovas
Goldsmiths, University of London & Tomsk State University
Many  findings of importance for education have recently emerged from genetic research, suggesting that genetic effects are not static or deterministic, but change throughout life and in different educational and cultural contexts. For example, academic achievement – such as performance in reading, language and mathematics – has been found to be highly heritable throughout school education in the UK. On the contrary, heritability of general cognitive ability is only moderate in the early school years and increases gradually, reaching substantial levels in adulthood. It is possible that high heritability of reading and mathematics can be explained by the high homogeneity of educational environments. For example, the UK National Curriculum is highly uniform
and therefore may decrease the environmental contribution to the variance in these traits. On the contrary, general cognitive ability is not explicitly taught at schools, and therefore may be
under highly variable environmental influences across children, especially early in development.
Gene-environment correlations, whereby children experience, modify, and select their environments – partly because of their genetic propensities – may contribute to the observed increase
in heritability of IQ. Recent large-scale twins studies also provided insights into the origins of individual differences in such educationally-relevant characteristics as motivation, grit, academic anxiety, and choice of specific academic subjects. Incredible recent advances in molecular genetic research have led to identification of specific DNA polymorphisms responsible for ubiquitous genetic influence. Moreover, new methods allow us to make predictions about development directly from DNA, which opens up unprecedented opportunities for further research and educational practice.

More in a moment.

 

 

Some thoughts from China

 

You may remember that I posted up some research on dysgenic trends in China,.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2016/06/china-getting-duller-perhaps.html

Mingrui Wang, the lead author, has now added some further comments.

The paradox of democracy
In democratic societies, the government is elected by the people and it will respect their wishes. Sometimes, their wishes can be conflicting. For example, there can be a paradox between differential fertility desire and the development of society.
Rational individuals ought to hate eugenic policy and love dysgenic fertility.
There are two kinds of eugenic policies that try to alter the relative fertility rate of individuals with different breeding value (e.g., IQ) - positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics policies aim to increase the fertility of high IQ individuals. Negative eugenics policies aim to decrease the fertility of low-IQ individuals. These two kinds of policies are self-evidently unwelcomed by affected individuals because they aim to deviate their behaviour from their wishes. The reproductive behaviour of individuals who fall between these two extremes is unaffected by eugenic policies. They should hate eugenic policies too because if the proportion of high IQ individuals rises while the proportion of low IQ individuals falls, they and their offspring tend to become the new low IQ individuals. Eugenic policies, therefore, conflicts the interest of every individual in the society.
In the real society, low and high IQ individuals both have their wishes respected. As the proportion of low IQ individuals rises and high IQ individuals decreases, IQ of medium IQ individuals and their offspring rises quietly. Don't forget IQ is actually a sorting tool, setting population average=100, SD=15. More than the performance on a test, their relative rankings in wealth also rise in the society. Don't forget, people feel happy because they are better than others. You may enjoy far more modern gadgets, eating more kinds of food, than any ancient emperors, but not feeling happy as they did. When controlling for an individual's own income, higher earnings of neighbours are associated with lower levels of self-reported happiness. Dysgenic fertility and immigration will, therefore, increase the happiness level of individuals in the medium class. Hence, dysgenic fertility ought to be favoured by people from each class of the society.
On the other hand, individuals also desire the benefits from a strong society (e.g., defence and welfare), which might not be possible if dysgenic fertility persists for a long time. Therefore, democracy might be a paradox because it respects conflicting wishes from the people.
Although China is considered by the west as an authoritarian nation, the rise of thoughts on individual rights might make eugenic policies also not feasible here. Breaking fertility regulations in China will face fines, which make it look like a crime. Behaviour genetic research suggests all psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence, so there might have been a selection favouring genes that predispose individual to break such policy. The rise of regulation-breaking genes will make any eugenic policy not long-term sustainable, even in China.
You may think China have already implemented a eugenic policy. The fertility policy indeed contains some element of "good birth". But it is mainly about a good rearing of children and the elimination of genetic defects. It completely ignores the literature of behaviour genetics. In the 1980s, there are Chinese scholars who have noticed the possible "inverse selection" on the urban status and they were ignored. In 2007, Di Zhenwu, the dean of School of social and population college of Renmin University of China published an article rejecting this claim by pointing out the increase in the proportion of the urban population and the large gains in the quality of the rural population. He did not consider the possibility that selective immigration wakened genetic quality of rural population because those who have left were those had been less able to move out. I expect critics continue to urge that the lower IQ of individuals with a higher fertility is completely due to environmental reasons. So at the end of the paper, I challenged them to refute by conducting molecular studies.
Perhaps the only solution is genetic engineering, a kind of within-family eugenics, if it is technologically possible. For the issue of dysgenics, I am planning to write a Chinese language review to raise awareness on it. I hope more research in related areas can be done.
Recommended readings
Lynn, R. (2011). Dysgenics: Genetic deterioration in modern populations (2nd revise). London: Ulster Institute for Social Research.
Lynn, R. (2001). Eugenics: A reassessment. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Woodley, M. A., & Figueredo, A. J. (2013). Historical variability in heritable general intelligence: Its evolutionary origins and socio-cultural consequences. Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press.
Kind regards,
Mingrui

The Economist is economical about intelligence

 

The Economist is not a reliable guide to human ability. It believes in homo-economicus: all-purpose, equipotential beings without inherent differences, any such adventitious peculiarities to be smoothed away by compensatory education and the amelioration of unfavourable circumstances.

Very occasionally, like a maiden aunt reluctantly acknowledging the existence of sexual arousal, they refer to genetic differences, but soon revert to their standard mantra: with more education, earlier education, and more flexible education those nasty gaps between one person and another, and one group and another, can be washed away. Perhaps so.

As part of a holiday ritual I buy The Economist to take to the beach and find out if it has improved. The issue of June 25th looked promising, in that it had a special report on artificial intelligence, in which they said that the intelligent response to the dislocation caused by this development would be “making education and training flexible enough to teach new skills quickly and efficiently”. Quite so. They should have added “but the intelligent will always learn more quickly and will generalise their learning more widely, and to greater advantage”. Learning speed is correlated with general ability. The US armed forces have all the data, and Linda Gottfredson has dug it up. The Wonderlic data also show that training a person in one simple task in one ability domain does not generalise to improved ability in simple tasks in other ability domains. A task is learned, but the individual is no brighter or faster at learning the next task.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2013/12/the-7-tribes-of-intellect.html

They also champion social skills, which they say will be particularly required when robots strip out many humdrum jobs from the economy. However, social skills and character are largely personality characteristics which are heritable, and not easy to alter. (Heritability estimates for personality variable may be lessened by the poor reliability of self-assessed personality, so the use of better tests may show even higher heritability than the current 40% or so). Some social skills can be trained, and this is currently very popular, because it is cast as “emotional intelligence” and everyone likes being intelligent in some way. Moving in a mysterious way, for example.

Measures of emotional intelligence turn out to contribute little to job success and response to training. Hunter and Schmidt.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2015/12/multiple-emotional-intelligence.html

Being one standard deviation above the norm leads to 60% higher wages. These are OECD results, though they make absolutely no mention of intelligence.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2013/10/how-illiterate-is-oecd.html

 

The special report on artificial intelligence is worth reading. They point out that advances in technology usually create new jobs of different sorts, usually more complicated and demanding service jobs. Most people keep busy and are in work. The authors don’t mention that the current elite belief that mass immigration is required to provide low skilled workers does not sit well with the promises of artificial intelligence: governments seem to be hell-bent on bringing in people to do jobs which , if the advances of artificial intelligence are to be believed, shortly will not exist.

Although the report is interesting, one needs to fill in the empty spaces. It shows US employment by type of work (US Population Survey, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis). The graph shows that the greatest increase since 1983 is in “non-routine cognitive” jobs, with routine cognitive and manual jobs stagnant, and even non-routine manual jobs increasing. They fail to point out that routine jobs are for those who need training on every step of a simple job, and that these people find departure from routine challenging, because those non-routine problems require higher ability. “Non-routine” jobs are where brighter people flourish because they do not need to be trained on each step of a task, but can grasp the general principles. This is increasingly the case at IQ 115 and above.

It is findings of this sort which make me question the predictions of Frey and Osborne (2013) as to which jobs are at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence. They list many complicated non-routine jobs as being at risk: typists, technical writers, and accountants and auditors. Typists have already been reduced in number, but highly paid busy people still employ them, because on Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage it is worth while for a highly skilled, highly paid individual to employ one so as to free up their own time. In this way digital secretaries can proliferate in Scottish islands while executives fret in central London: these assistants are not strictly necessary but very useful. Equally, global job clearance centres (oDesk and others) can provide people to spruce up websites, enter data, draw graphs and generally tidy up stuff so that higher paid workers can get on with their higher paid enterprises. Will auditors become redundant? Seems unlikely. More likely that they will extend the scope of the feedback they give their clients. We shall see.

By the way, self driving vehicles, all the rage at the moment, may turn out to be something of a waste of time, except perhaps in slow moving traffic jams. Incidentally, such jams might be better dealt with by road pricing systems: charge by the minute rather than the mile and road users will stagger their journeys or use satnavs and local knowledge to work round traffic jams.

The main point is that driving is too easy. Most people can do it. The better thing would be to automate motor maintenance and repair. Drivers are cheap, mechanics expensive.

Further into the magazine another story caught my eye. “A running start: Poor children fall behind early in life. Better pre-school education could help”. This notes with dismay that “By the time pupils begin primary school, there is a huge gap in achievement between rich and poor”. It further notes that the plus one standard deviation between 10th and 90th income percentiles in school achievement has barely diminished by age 18, equivalent to several extra years of secondary schooling. How to explain this? Perhaps brighter parents earn more and have brighter children, with some drift downwards because of regression to the mean. Perhaps duller parents earn less and have duller children, with some drift upwards because of regression to the mean. This obvious genetic hypothesis is not mentioned. Instead (brace yourself) poor parents don’t talk to their children, because of poverty. “By the age of 6 children of wealthy parents have spent as much as 1,300 more hours in enriching activities than those of poorer families.”

How to test this, avoiding the blindly obvious confounder that the bright and wealthy parents are bringing up their own genetically brighter children? How about something more powerful than necessarily part-time pre-school activities? How about full time adoption?

 

 

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2014/11/adopt-child-but-discard-illusion.html

 

 

The article then goes into the Perry Pre-school project and a few selected Head Start programs. I sympathise. I could have written such an article 4 years ago, based on my favourite examples of early pre-school intervention, until I knew better.  The general drift of the findings on pre-school intervention is disappointing. Interventions do not have lasting large effects on intelligence, and the welcome general beneficial effects are not often found, apart from the frequently mentioned star projects, which turn out to be outliers. Andrew Sabisky found the paper and the link is below:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aea/jep/2013/00000027/00000002/art00006

Although the trend shows little effect, the outliers need further investigation. Ramey, talking at the ISIR conference in San Antonio, said that they reason he got results with the Abecedarian project whilst others did not, is that he made his teachers understand that if they didn’t get results they would not have a job. They followed protocols carefully, was his argument. He is running replication studies, this time with a full genome on each child, so we should have better results say 25 years from now.

There is nothing malign in offering compensatory education to young children, just significant doubt that it is effective and can be scaled up across entire education systems to smooth away real individual differences.

The Economist has massive reach among influential people in the world’s economies. The magazine, popular as it is with readers wanting to understand the ways that economies work,  is resolutely behind the curve of contemporary research on human ability. One day The Economist may commission articles from people who know something about intelligence, education and genetics. For example, Ian Deary, Robert Plomin, Stuart Ritchie, and Tim Bates for a start. Until then, blogs like this one will be bringing the most recent findings to a small but highly select group: my dear readers. If your friends sometimes read The Economist, can you direct them to this post, in the hope that they can avoid the torrent of misunderstanding purveyed by the mainstream received wisdom? It would be a small mercy.

The Economist is confused about human beings, but if we are to accept their shaky presumptions about the power of pre-school education, then even journalists can be educated, if they can be caught young.

To Russia, with love and Powerpoint

 

Unusually, the next ISIR conference will be held in summer, in a week’s time, so this presents a challenge for intelligence researchers, used to winter weather in which it is appropriate to huddle in cellars looking at Powerpoint slides. Now the whole of St Petersburg will be shining golden in the sun, and what are the mere rotations of factors when compared with a stroll down the Nevsky Prospekt, perchance bumping in to the ghosts of Russian literature, and perhaps even a young Nabakov making his way to school.

However, the feast of modern day intelligentsia may win out in the end: M.A.McDaniel, Warner Schaie, Robert Plomin, David Lubinski, Linda Gottfredson, Doug Detterman and virtually everyone doing intelligence research will be there, so the architecture, canals, palaces, the Hermitage and other diversions may be set to one side by delegates intent on improving their already well-stocked minds.

So long as delegates can find their passports, and also get their Visas, which apparently is done through hotel bookings, they will all converge on the Window to the West for the 15th July opening session.

Much more about this soon.

Post-Brexit abreactions

 

I had intended to do a few posts on post-Brexit reactions, but now I realise it should be abreactions. Large quantities of stupefying substances must be in circulation, leading people to gabble out their innermost thoughts whilst dribbling profusely. I cannot follow the plot at the moment. Something to do with rivalry, tribalism, fear and loathing, I think. I recall the wry saying (privately given to me by the partner of a political figure) that politics is no business to be in if you want to have friends.

The story goes back to a Mr Heseltine, who ran for the Conservative leadership against Mrs Thatcher. The Tory tribe did not thank him for toppling their notable leader, though they all felt she had become a liability, and instead went for an amiable man who, against expectation, won the next election by being likeable and saying, after the divisive achievements of Thatcher, that “the nation needs to be at ease with itself”. He lost the following election by being himself, and because of Tory infighting about Europe, and because the Labour Party, guided by Peter Mandelson, elected an electable leader in the person of Tony Blair. British elections are determined by voters deciding who will best manage their conservatism. Now Boris Johnson has advertently or inadvertently dethroned David Cameron, winner of two Conservative elections against the general leftwards national trend, (a fall which has reduced the still alive Heseltine to tears). The successful are to be punished.

Therefore Boris was the front runner, as Heseltine was in his day, but has now been dumped, or has dumped himself for unknown reasons, probably related to an internal “anyone but Boris” campaign. Boris (no surname required) is the best known and electorally most successful Conservative challenger since Heseltine, with the highest name and image recognition bar none. Boris won Red London against Red Ken Livingstone, overturning the natural urban, and also large immigrant left-leaning vote by being an entertaining blond. He could defuse most tricky situations by quoting some Latin and making a joke, the sort of skills which can save your life in out of the way places. He would most probably have won the Conservatives the next election.

Speaking of political partners, this could all be seen as due to the advice or machinations of political wives. I do not know any of them, so am betraying no confidences, but here is a possible scenario.

Mrs Cameron may have told her husband: your friends are not your friends, they have shafted you and I am sick of the lot of them, and I have taken up smoking again, and the children are all upset and I have had enough of this, and we could have a normal life and live happily, not among this savage band of treacherous scum. I have toned it down a bit, but you get the drift.

Mrs Gove may have told her husband: all I hear about is Boris, Boris, Boris; but you, my dear husband, with my help, won the Brexit election, and I don’t want to see you as a lapdog to Boris, who is a scatter-brain whereas you are a man of principle, and don’t screw around so far as I know, so why don’t you stand for the leadership, on the basis of the following points which I will write down for you, because you only got a 2.1 in English. I may have toned that up a bit, but you get the drift.

Mrs Johnson may have told her husband: my dear, I am so sorry that you won’t be Prime Minister, but we are rich because of your journalism, and young enough to fight another day, and as for Mrs Gove don’t get me started. There may have been some other bits about living a happier life together, but you get the drift.

Teresa May took very little part in the great Brexit debate. She backed Remain, feebly, so will probably end up Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, in the Labour camp, the rank and file have overwhelmingly elected a leader who most accurately champions the views of activists, but who least commands the confidence of members of Parliament, who have to look past activists to the general public for their votes. Also, they doubt his abilities, because he can only win by preaching to the unconverted, and did not manage that during the Brexit debate. Every political act is a compromise between what you want and what you can get, guided by your core voters, but determined by those yet to be convinced. Politics is the art of the possible in search of the desirable. 

Does psychology have anything to say about politics?

Post-Brexit reactions

 

When something goes against expectation adjustment takes longer. Here are some post-Brexit themes, as reported to me by friends.

One reaction is angry denunciation of Leavers by young Remain daughters, of the “how could you have done this to us” variety, mixed in with some invective about “having to live through this longer”. A moment’s thought would reveal that on that argument the opinions of young people should always be preferred at elections, because they will live longer.  The counter argument is that older people are more experienced and have made far greater contributions, typically about 40 years of paying taxes as opposed to roughly 6 years for the young. Of course, this counter-argument, like the original argument, misses the point.

Democracy is based on the fiction that individual voters are equal in their ability to judge the direction of national policy. Not so. Among the voters there will be a few who are well versed in constitutional matters; a few skilled in trade negotiations; a few who have good track records as investors; a few who have worked in employment tribunals, trade disputes, and businesses. Most will not have that knowledge base, nor the intellectual ability to research and evaluate these matters.

The one-person-one-vote is a principle based on an untruth about human abilities, but it seeks a greater truth, which is that a nation will work best when all are consulted and their opinions are given equal weight. I believe that this optimistic view is the lesser of evils, and that as a democratic citizen my vote should count no more highly than that of the voters I met last Thursday, some of whom asked whether the top or bottom line of the ballot paper represented the “Out” option. Better to have a nation which votes together than one from which large numbers are excluded. Much as I would like to set entry barriers, such as having made at least a year’s contribution to taxes, the divisive nature of such proposals restrains me from championing this policy.

One friend, hearing the torrent of dismay from his daughter wondered why so much emotion and apocalyptic terror was being vented. I can only assume that the Leave option was seen as an attack on international cooperation. That is, they assumed that leaving FIFA meant that no-one would ever be able to play football again. This particular friend had some specialist knowledge, as an advisor to the motor trade on employment law. To his surprise, a trade poll of these car salesmen showed them to be in favour of Brexit, despite their reliance on German cars for a living, very probably because European employment law broke an English common law principle: innocent till proved guilty. Currently, the moment an employee makes a complaint, employers are guilty until they win the case, a step which costs them at least £8000 to mount a defence. Car salesmen responded by saying they would back Leave, despite being reliant on German car producers. He thought it surprising, and unseemly to bet on this inside knowledge.

Another friend asked me whether I had anticipated the financial and social upheaval. In fact the market position is now very much like before, apart from the very important 11% drop in the value of sterling. There have been reported cases of immigrants being abused and graffiti posted on social centres, but these seem to be isolated incidents.

Friends abroad worry about the future of the country, and assume that everyone is regretting a moment of madness. The world is very international, they say, missing the point that Leavers saw the EU as a cumbersome cartel, originally designed to protect French farmers.

Most friends assume that I voted Remain, and that I share their sense of shame about the result, unable to look Europeans in the eye. This is the Received Wisdom. A neighbour the evening asked diffidently which side I had backed, and then confessed he too had canvassed for Leave, but that is a minority.

Apart from one couple, none have shown any sign of liberation and optimism. Our history as an independent trading nation is forgotten. It as if we had been allowed to drive after a long suspension of our licence, and are looking around seeking someone to give us permission to set a destination of our choice.

Was the Referendum an Eton Mess?

 

 

 

Carlyle had no doubt that great men changed history. His house is open to the public, who can wander round the great man’s abode at 24 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, imbibing the Victorian atmosphere in the well preserved building. Jane Carlyle would ask local workmen to abate their noise so that he could pen his great works in his cork lined quiet attic, quietness still cherished in Chelsea to this day. Friends who noted their stormy relationship opined that they had married each other only to avoid making four people unhappy. Thomas Carlyle’s admiration for heroes led to what was called Great Man Theory, summarised in his quip that “History is nothing but the biography of the Great Man".

The Sage of Chelsea certainly had a case in his biography of Bismark, and the thesis seems self-evident to any historian. Joachim Fest, who wrote the first substantive German biography of Hitler paid at least passing homage to the Marxist theory that biographies of great man are no more than the late remnants of courtly flattery, and that history is merely the playing out of historical inevitabilities, but went on to refute that reductio ad absurdum by remarking that of Hitler it can certainly be said: here was a man who changed history. Greatness of effect does not always imply goodness.

Therefore, in discussing the referendum between the Remain and Leave camps it is apposite to asks Lenin’s question: Who? Whom?

Well, this turns out to be a bit awkward. Yes, the poor  and downtrodden White working class and older voters were mostly in the Leave camp and the Metropolitan professional classes, young people and urban immigrants were mostly in the Remain camp, so one can attempt an analysis on the basis of class, age and race. Remain saw themselves as Refined people, Leavers were cast as louts, and worse, bigots. However, the main antagonists, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, were both at Eton, and maintained a friendship despite being rivals. This is more psychoanalytic territory, in the sense of convoluted imaginings bereft of any possible confirmation or discomfirmation. Did one bully the other, fancy the other, did they lust after each other’s mothers or, more likely, were they just two likeable, bright boys who wanted to be Prime Minister, as any bright boy should want to be? So, are we talking about major forces of history, or a tussle between two bright and rich kids: the march of inevitability or an Eton Mess?

David Cameron was born to wealthy upper-middle class parents, and after Eton (circled in the picture above) went on to Brasenose College, Oxford. He worked in the Conservative Research Department, then in a TV company before becoming an MP in 2001. Boris Johnson was born to upper-middle class parents, and after Eton went on to Balliol College, Oxford. He worked in journalism and became an MP in 2001.

From a hereditarian point of view this all makes sense. Your parents may account for 60% of your ability, and parental ability is best judged by intelligence tests (not available), scholastic attainment (probably available somewhere and very informative), occupation (available and informative) and wealth (available though not as predictive as parental education). Eton, excellent school though it may be, serves mainly as an achievement hurdle for wealthy families, because they have to pay the fees and proffer up boys who will maintain the academic achievements of the school. So, it is an achievement test and an intelligence test.  It is no surprise that the leading lights of the campaign are eighth cousins and share a school and a university. On that point, perhaps Oxford should have a say: David Cameron read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and got a First Class degree; Boris Johnson read Classics and got an Upper-second class degree. Advantage Cameron.

Having discussed the Conservative leadership in the form of the outgoing Prime Minister and the leading candidate to be the incoming Prime Minister, what of the loyal opposition? Jeremy Corbyn, at the time of writing still the Leader of the Opposition and Labour party leader (his Shadow Cabinet have resigned in large numbers) was born to a Maths teacher mother and expert electrical engineer father, and went to Adams' Grammar School (achieved two A-Levels with "E" grades before leaving, which is extremely poor)and later went to North London Polytechnic, and did not complete his degree. He represented various trade unions, then entered local politics and became an MP in 1983. His parents have bright occupations, but he has shown little aptitude.

Of course, being interested in great men, it would hardly be seemly to discuss the minor characters, those lowly creatures who labour below stairs, preparing the food their betters will eat.  I stoop to these depths only because the underdogs won, against the torrent of expert and international opinion. How did the Leave campaign manage to win, when they were out-gunned in every way? Reportedly, their lead backroom boy said that everything they did must be guided by science. He decreed that the campaign should avoid the very popular movement lead by Nigel Farage despite him being a natural ally and having a wealthy backer. With minimal resources and a small staff this researcher ran an asymmetrical campaign against the entire political and financial establishment. The Daily Telegraph summarised the main features. Rigorous research, quizzes on commercial websites to test voters’ views and focus groups which tested the key campaign messages resulted in him settling on three key points: 1) Taking back control of taxpayers’ money being sent to Brussels 2) Taking back control over immigration 3) Warning that Turkey and Serbia could be joining the EU in the future. All were rigorously tested, and when Turkey was mentioned voters exploded in dismay. The Leave campaign built a new 46 million voter database with postcodes to map the streets where their supporters lived. 20,000 volunteers were available to turn out voters on election day. £1 million was spent on Facebook and YouTube.

Dominic Cummings was born to an oil rig project manager and a special needs teacher. Educated at Durham School and then Exeter College, Oxford,  he read Ancient and Modern History and got a First. He was a Special Advisor to the Minister for Education Michael Gove. He is a very bright cookie and here is my review of his work on education:

https://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/dominic-cummingss-thoughts-on-education.html

Of course we should cast the net wider, looking at the backgrounds of the 20 or 30 most influential Remain and Leave campaigners, but I hope I have done enough to show you that while a school might give you some help it is university which has highest predictive value because it provides a double test: can you get into a university which is ranked in the top 20 in the world, and can you get a First there, or at least an Upper Second? Class and money are trailing indicators, intelligence leading indicators.

An Eton Mess is a dessert which uses up broken meringues by serving them up with whipped cream and strawberries. It was while finishing one of those last night that these reflections came to me.