Chapter 31 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

ARE WE OVEREDUCATED?



John Ray

ONE OF THE 'sacred cows' of our society is education. The one reason advanced for our not having more of it than we do is that we cannot afford more. The way teachers' unions talk, one could be forgiven for believing that they will never cease agitation until there are at least two teachers for every pupil. With roughly sixty per cent of state budgets spent on education already, we seen bound to have to disappoint such agitators.

Yet one can quite well argue that we are already over-educated. There must be a break-even point somewhere where further investment in education does not pay off. Bangladesh has not reached that point. We may have passed it.

It all depends, of course, on what you think education is for. The 'plain' man would think that it is to place you into society better and to make you a more productive member of that society -- to provide you with skills that society needs and is willing to pay for.

Cato, the great Roman conservative, had a similar view in his time. He despised the aristocratic Romans' habit of sending their sons to receive what we would now call a 'liberal' education at the hands of a Greek pedagogue. Instead, Cato insisted on educating his son himself in the 'manly' arts of farming and fighting. To us, nowadays, this does at first seem hopelessly reactionary and ludicrous, but that was not true at the time. In Roman society farming and fighting were the crucial skills. They were what the society needed. Learning to read and write would not help secure Rome, but swordsmanship might. History proved Cato to be resoundingly right. It was precisely the decay of farming and the decay of martial skills among the Romans which led to the eventual downfall of their empire.

In our day, the skills essential to the survival of society are infinitely more varied and more complex than in Cato*s day, but the same principles can be applied. All education is not of equal value and our investment in certain categories of it may well need critical examination. It will be submitted here that, at both secondary and tertiary levels, too much value is attached today to education in the 'humanities' and that such education does not bring the benefits claimed for it.

The key phrase used in justifying a humanities type education seems to be 'personal development'. To many of our starry eyed intellectuals, this appears to be the only justifiable goal for education of any sort. Education with a capital 'E', we might call it. All else is mere 'training'.

Just what do we mean by this rhetorical heavy cannon of 'personal development'? It is obviously an extraordinary broad term. One's musculature is indisputably personal, so would a body-building course be included in what is meant? Not quite, I think. One's mind is indisputably at the centre of one's personality so does 'cramming' one's mind with all sorts of useful facts come under the heading? Horrors no!

Insofar as it is possible to give the concept any meaning at all, it seems to include at least three things: the first is the acquisition of social skills and socially adaptive attitudes; the second is the acquisition of interests and skills with which one can occupy one's leisure time ('training for leisure'); and the third is something vaguely referred to as 'broadening the mind'.

To take the last category first. It would seem to collapse into two concepts: the concept educationists call 'transfer of training' and something that might be called 'education for citizenship'. The first concept is widely recognised to be based on a false premise -- the premise that, like muscles, minds improve with exercise. The classic example of an argument based on false transfer of training assumptions is the old argument that learning Latin is good for you because it teaches you mental discipline. This argument has been shown to be false and is now universally rejected. No one now learns Latin just because he thinks it might be good for him. He learns now it only if he has a specific use for it (such as a desire to read the classics in the originals). What is now recognised to be the case is that only insofar as two tasks have common elements or require similar specific skills will transfer occur. To give an example: learning Latin will help one to learn Sanskrit -- because Latin and Sanskrit are related languages with many common grammatical forms and words that sound similar. Learning Latin will not, however, help one to learn Magyar -- which is a totally unrelated language. In fact, it might interfere. When one tries to call up the Magyar word for something, the Latin word for it might inadvertently come to mind and thus delay (or even suppress) recall of the required word.

When, therefore, people argue that 'broadening the mind' is a good thing, they are often making assumptions such as that a study of medieval French Chansons will help one make better decisions in business or in public administration. Given what we know about transfer of training, this is most certainly false. A course in Social Psychology might help us in those fields, but a course in medieval French Chansons will not. The most effective training is training directed specifically to the goal in mind. It would be good if there were some training that would fit us generally for any challenge we might encounter. Such a thing is, however, but a dream.

The second sense that might be ascribed to the term 'broadening the mind' is that certain sorts of education fit one better to exercise ones privileges and responsibilities as a citizen in a democratic society. As it is generally applied, this too is an argument based on transfer of training assumptions. The only difference is that the endpoint of the transfer (citizenship) is specified. Again, therefore, the same rejoinder applies. A course in economics would help. but a course in literary criticism would not. If we want to educate people for citizenship, we will be most likely to succeed if we design a course specifically for that task. We cannot just sit back and hope that people will pick up an odd connection here and there between two minimally related fields.

The second major sense of 'personal development' is that of 'training for leisure'. Again the connection between this and what actually happens in education as we have it is essentially a hit-or-miss affair. A good example is the study of English literature -- which is very widespread and which can surely be justified on no other grounds.

Initially, one must note that what one learns in such a course is literary criticism, not how to write novels, plays etc. Only a tiny minority of our successful writers are English graduates and an even tinier minority of our English graduates are successful writers. A course in English is not, then, vocational training of any sort. It is supposed simply to help you appreciate existing literature better. I would submit, however, that the number of people who become better trained for leisure in this way is infinitesimally small. Who would undertake a university course in English who did not enjoy reading novels? Who reads more novels because he has done English? Who needs an English course to help him enjoy plays? Who has ever been converted to reading poetry because of an English course? I think there is little doubt that to all these questions only one answer can be given: very few indeed. At the secondary school level, I think that there can he little doubt that the study of English literature often has a deterrent effect. How many generations of school-children have come to hate Shakespeare and Dickens because they were forced to study them at school?

The reading of English literature is certainly an invaluable leisure activity, but I have yet to see an iota of evidence that courses in literary criticism get anybody to read who did not already enjoy doing so. Perhaps some rather clear evidence against courses in literary criticism having any effect is the type of books people borrow from libraries. Any librarian will tell you that contemporary romances, mysteries, and science fiction are as popular as books of poetry and books of plays are unpopular. What people read is largely what English Literature courses do not teach. Courses in English Literature seem to have little or nothing to do with reading as a leisure-time activity.

I would agree, then, that training for leisure is an important thing. I agree that one day it may be almost the most important thing of all. What I do doubt, however, is whether a humanities education is at all effective in accomplishing that goal. I am sure that a six week course in pottery would have more effect in this connection than would any university Arts degree. Again it is surely far more rational to design a course (or a selection procedure) that will be specifically aimed at accomplishing what one has in mind, rather than just hoping that what one aims at will somehow emerge of its own accord.

The remaining effect that seems to be hoped for by advocates of 'personal development' is the acquisition of socially adaptive attitudes and social skills. Again, they are hoping for an effect that is quite incidental to the whole direction of any university or secondary school course. Again the obvious comment is that there are surely much more immediate routes to the goal concerned. Instruction in the art of cricket or a course in scientology would certainly be much more beneficial (as far as one's social attitudes and skills are concerned) than would an Arts degree. In fact in general Arts degrees seem to be ideally designed for producing disgruntled people rather than well adjusted people. The young lady who does an honours degree in Italian and then finds that the best job she can get is serving Kentucky fried chicken in a Colonel Sanders shop is not going to be too happy with the society that encouraged her to commit such a folly. There just are hardly any jobs that satisfy the high expectations that Arts degrees build up. Arts degrees help one to develop a taste for the abstract without giving one any economic means to satisfy that taste. But if an Arts degree does not help one adjust to society does it help one adjust to other people? I cannot see how. In fact an Arts degree would seem to me to foster an 'Ivory Tower' mentality rather than a warm awareness of other people.

One must conclude that those who expect 'personal development' from 'humanities' education are demonstrating a faith akin to the religious rather than showing serious or realistic concern for the issues involved. There is no such thing as 'general' personal development. There is only the acquisition of particular interests, knowledge and skills. If these are not directly useful to the person in themselves, no comfort can be taken from any superstitious belief that they could some day be of indirect use. If you study French literature, not because you like it, but because you think it will make you a better person, you are deceiving yourself. A more realistic plan of action would be to define in what way you want to be a better person and go and take a course specifically directed to training you in whatever that might be.

The main virtue of a humanities education must lie in its being a form of recreation or hobby in itself. It is a recreation that I enjoyed. It is surely not a form of recreation that we can moralistically judge as being in some sense 'better' or more praiseworthy than any other. Just because I 'groove' on Chaucer, I do not consider myself as being better in any way than 'Joe Bloggs' who 'grooves' on racehorses.

As such, it seems particularly hard to justify the demands that are made on the taxpayer to subsidise this form of recreation. Education is hugely expensive and tends to be a form of recreation most favoured by the more affluent sections of society. Why 'Joe the worker' has to pay more for his beer and cigarettes so I can study Chaucer free of cost I do not know. It can surely only be described as a monstrous injustice -- robbing the poor to pay the rich. If justice and equity were our concern, it would be fairer to subsidise horseracing. More people enjoy it.

Much of our education today represents little more than a confidence racket -- a racket, however, from which no-one profits. The ordinary voter is sold a bill of goods that is often not delivered. He thinks that the contributions to education that he makes via his taxes are going to train people in socially useful ways, As far as the training of doctors, engineers, and research scientists are concerned, this is so. In the 'humanities' this is not so and the indications are that, if anything, such education serves more to produce misfits -- creative people with nothing to create. At best, it is simply useless to society.

We are then substantially over-educated -- in that many people have spent years acquiring an education at both secondary and tertiary levels that is of no benefit to themselves or to anyone else. Helped by a lot of woolly thinking, we have spent untold millions on something which is dubious even as entertainment value. How much better that money might have been spent in giving pensioners a higher standard of living or in giving some tax relief to the family man. There should be no impediment put in the way of people who want a humanities education, but it is something that people should pay for themselves. There are more uses for the taxpayer's dollar than subsidising the hobbies of the rich.

Even outside the humanities it is possible that we might be overeducated. This is particularly so in those increasingly frequent cases where supply leads demand. This comes about because many people, quite realistically, see education as the key to advancement in life. They therefore want to get a better education for themselves or for their children. For this reason they support political moves to make education free and more widely available. There is a fallacy of composition involved here, however. If everybody acquires a better education my better education will not mean much. When competing to get the best jobs I will be no better off in comparison with others than I was before. What has happened is that the standard required to have a chance of getting a particular job has risen. In future, no-one will get such a job unless society has made a bigger and bigger investment in his education. Where once the completion of primary school was sufficient qualification for me to become a clerk in the Public Service, the Public Service is now even employing university graduates as clerks. Where does the spiral stop? How long will it be before even the garbage man has to have a university degree?

At present we cannot know whether we have come to a point where the increasing levels of education in practical fields have ceased to pay off. Such is the drain of education on public finances that soon we will have to do serious studies of just where a particular level of education is required and where it can be dispensed with. When such studies are done, the government could set realistic quotas for the number of people to receive particular sorts of training in our schools and universities. This would ensure that the level of training required for a job was not unnecessarily pushed up by an oversupply of more highly qualified people. If society is to be asked to pay for education, it has a right to ask whether it is all really necessary.

Chapter 32 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Upper Houses



By: PETER COLEMAN

Is he going to have a go at Parliament? I asked a woman recently whose husband is actively involved in Liberal Party politics outside Parliament. 'Only if he wants a divorce', she said.

She summed up a common view of the life of politicians. The view is that a politician is a general dogsbody who has to sacrifice almost all his private and home life for politics: a man who is subject at any time of day or night to phone calls from indignant or distressed constituents ("I will ring my Member' is still an important citizen's weapon); who when Parliament is not sitting until 10.30 or 11 p.m. is out attending local, municipal, Parents and Citizens', Scouts' and Guides', Chambers of Commerce, etc. meetings, functions, balls. He also expects his wife to do the same things, even if when she married him it was the last thing she had in mind. On top of all that, every three years he (and she) has to work like a dog to hold the seat in the elections. It is perhaps a minor detail that in many cases the politician drops in income when he goes into Parliament.

This fairly popular view is exaggerated. Certainly most politicians and their wives love the life. Resignations are few and defeated politicians keep trying to get back. But there is enough truth in it to make clear why so many men who would have so much to contribute to Parliament would not consider for a moment standing for election. It is not only that they would lose income but they temperamentally could not stand the daily life.

In practice, however, parliamentary life tries to cater for such men. Upper Houses in particular are maintained on the principle that a place must be found in public life for the sort of man who has much to contribute, but whose personality does not fit him for the democratic hurly-burly. This appplies (in theory) especially in the NSW Upper House and is one of the main themes of Ken Turner's new book Houses of Review. It is the first serious examination of Australian Upper Houses and a particularly timely one in view of the debates in NSW, South Australia and Britain.

The NSW Legislative Council is not even elected by the democratic public but by an electoral college made up of the existing members of both the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council. It was reconstructed in 1932 on principles derived from the 1917 Bryce Report on the reform of the House of Lords. Viscount Bryce had argued that an Upper House, such as the House of Lords or the Legislative Council, had an important role to play in Parliament by discussing, revising, delaying and, sometimes, initiating Bills. Such Chambers should be made up, he said, of three types of men or women: (a) experts; (b) men of judicial and disinterested temperament; and (c) 'Persons who, while likely to serve efficiently in a second Chamber, may not have the physical vigor needed to bear the increasing strain which candidacy for a seat (in the Lower House) and service in it involve.' Viscount Bryce also recommended that the best way to elect such a Chamber is through election by existing parliamentarians -- although only NSW in the whole wide world seems to have accepted his advice. The point is that many of Bryce's three types are turned off ordinary democratic politics. This means that their influence should be limited, but it doesn't follow that they should be kept out altogether.

The theory is splendid. Legislative Councillors not only do not have to face universal suffrage elections (and in any case have twelve year terms) but they have no constituency work at all. Their minds are left free for the discussion of high policy. In return they were for years unpaid and are now paid about a third of the salary of a Member of the Legislative Assembly and they are expected to leave policy initiatives to the Government based almost solely on the Lower House. While they may delay and sometimes reject Bills they are not supposed to perversely obstruct the decisions of the elected Government.

The question is: how well does it work? As Ken Turner points out, the method of election has always meant that charges of buying votes have been common. As soon as the reconstructed Upper House was established. Parliament became known as Tout's Paradise and in 1933 'Bet you 50 pounds I'm not elected' became a headline. By 1936 the usually quoted figure was 200 pounds. Nowadays it is alleged to be higher. It's fair to say, however, that this is also a criticism of the Members of the Lower House who are said to co-operate with such practices and that despite the risks in this method of election it would still be worth it if it means that many men of the kind mentioned earlier can be brought into public life who would otherwise shun it.

The question then is: does the end result justify the method? Ken Turner tries to answer it with some precision by examining the Council's performance in debates, committee work, revision of Bills. Turner concludes that 'the most effective criticism of the Council is not poor attendance, but the low level of contribution by most of its members.' Too many of these Councillors barely make any contribution to debate and it would be naive to assume that they may have fed their ideas to more fluent members. Similarly, Turner says the Council has not been active in committee work. In fact it had more committees in the days before it was reconstructed in 1932.

Turner thinks that its best defence is based on its record of revising and tidying up legislation sent to it from the popular Chamber. Between 1934 and 1987 the Council inserted over 2300 amendments to Bills and had over 2100 of them accepted by the Legislative Assembly. While many of these would have been small amendments which, if there had not been an Upper House (as in Queensland or New Zealand) the Government would have inserted anyway, this is not true of the most important ones. Further, in the 1960s, morale has improved. 'Attendance is good, more Bills are being amended, more pages of Hansard filled, and greater use of committees is being made' -- such as the recent one on sex crimes.

The general conclusion of Turner's study is that while NSW has a system of electing an Upper House that makes possible the incorporation in public life of a disinterested and inexpensive body of either experts or at least publicly spirited men and women, in practice it has not lived up to its ideal -- although at times it has come close to it.

The practical conclusion is that any other sort of Upper House (leaving aside minor reforms that almost anyone would accept) would be unnecessary. If it is to be elected by universal suffrage, why have two Chambers at all? If it is to be appointed by the Government it will be an instrument, so again why have it at all?

It seems to me that you can make out a good case for abolishing all Upper Houses, but if we are going to have one, the NSW model is a better one than either a universal suffrage Chamber such as Mr Steele Hall proposes in South Australia, or an appointed one such as Mr Harold Wilson proposes for the House of Lords.

At least it gives an opening to those useful mavericks who should be in politics, but won't take on the life of an ordinary politician.



This chapter originally appeared as an article in "The Bulletin", 17 January, 1970

Chapter 33 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

SUBSIDIES TO "THE ARTS"



John Ray

THERE ARE TWO basic propositions to this chapter: (1). That any creative artist in the twentieth century who needs a subsidy is not worth his salt; (2). That if any recreational activity is to be subsidised by the government, it should be sport -- not 'The Arts'.

Defence of subsidies too often relies on tales of great artists from the past starving in garrets. What is overlooked is that the society we live in today is vastly different from that. In Australia today no-one (artists or not), has to starve in a garret. Of greater importance, however, is the emergence of a mass market for art this century. Where once only princes (sacred or secular) could afford to patronise the arts, now we have an entire middle class eagerly seeking originals. Even people with the merest glimmerings of talent can make a fortune, and, one suspects, even talent is not always necessary.

While what was said above was written with the visual arts particularly in mind, it is also largely true of music. Even Stravinsky, whose music only the tiniest minority of people can enjoy, when he died in 1971 left an estate of three million dollars. If it is good, even art that enjoys only minority interest is worth a fortune. The difference is that Stravinsky was a genius, whereas many of our avant garde composers clamouring for government handouts are little more than frauds and quacks. If their music was of any quality or appeal it would attract enough private support to make government handouts superfluous.

'But creative work is a risky and insecure business that may not be recognised for many years. What is the artist supposed to do in the meanwhile, starve?

The answer is that creative artists are not the only people who take risks or who take some time to build up a business -- and there is really no reason why the entertainment industry (of which creative artists are a part) should be favoured above others. Everybody has setting-up costs.

'But to regard the arts as merely part of the entertainment industry is monstrous and unreal. How can anyone in his right mind say such a thing?', is the cry of outrage I hear at this point. Before we go any further, therefore, we must move on to a consideration of what it is that 'The Arts' do which makes them deserving of our spending any money on them at all, be it privately spent or taxes spent on our behalf by the government.

The key to the reverent and deferential attitude which some people adopt towards the arts seems to lie in an assumption that the artist is in some sense a better person than us ordinary mortals and that art has an uplifting effect on those exposed to it, which makes them in turn also better persons. Nothing could be more absurd and lacking in proof.

There is absolutely no guarantee that artists or those who patronise them are in fact good or wise persons in any sense. Hitler and the top men in the Nazi hierarchy were great lovers of the arts and Hitler himself was by occupation an artist. If that is what artists and art-lovers are like then I want no part of them. Nor is this the exception that proves the rule. The Medici of Renaissance Florence were perhaps the most famous patrons of the arts of all time and yet it was the name of a policy adviser of theirs from which our word 'machiavellian' comes. They were as ruthless a gang as any princely family Europe ever had. Even England's gross, bloodthirsty, unscrupulous and self-centred Henry VIII was a great patron of the arts -- both in painting and in music. We may have to thank his overwhelming self-love for England's liberation from the papacy, but that is no reason to admire the man who for selfish reasons beheaded the Anne Boleyn whom he had once claimed to love and whose only sin and major mistake was to marry him. No, some of the vilest men in history were great lovers of 'The Arts'. Anybody who claims that the arts are upbuilding has, to say the least, the burden of proof upon him.

The arts cannot, then, be justified on the grounds that they produce desirable changes or improvements in people. They can only be justified by the fact that people enjoy them. They are entertainment or recreation -- not education. They are, however, not just any old form of recreation: they are primarily the recreation of the middle and upper classes. The pictures the working man puts on his wall, the books he reads, or the music he listens to, are highly unlikely to be included under the graceful rubric of 'The Arts' -- and they are even less likely to attract a government subsidy.

But what possible reason could there be for a government to subsidise the recreational activities and preferences of its more affluent citizens? Surely there exist great needs in basic social services-needs involving food, clothing, housing and health-which must take precedence over any recreational needs, let alone the recreational needs of the people who already are best qualified to pay for their own.

This is not to say that recreation is unimportant. It is important; but it is surely the last field into which governments should be intruding. If they absolutely must intrude, then surely it is the recreations of the working man who are most in need of subsidy. Since such recreations are pre-eminently in the field of sport, it is sport that should come first. If we are at all troubled about social justice, it is football and other sporting clubs that should get the subsidies-not art galleries, cacophonous composers, writers of books, whose only purpose is the parading of every conceivable neurosis and psychosis, or "experimental" film-makers whose major achievement is to bore the pants off those who see their productions. This is not to say that I would like to see the arts die out. I am passionately devoted to some of the arts -- music particularly. I have even had a small amount of poetry published. What I do say, however, is that good art is art that pleases people-even if it is only a tiny minority of people. In our society such art will have no need of government subsidies. I love the arts too much to want to see mediocrity even tolerated in them -- let alone have it encouraged by government subsidies.

Chapter 34 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

THE "POWER ELITE"



By John Ray

ONE OF THE ritual phrases used by Left-wing intellectuals whenever a demon is necessary to explain the occurrence of some disliked state of affairs is 'The power elite'. 'The power elite' is a demon to which all the ills of society can he traced. It is a slightly sophisticated intellectuals' version of the workers' "Them".

Among academics the discussion of the role of elites in society is a very old and very ramified one. There is no doubt that we do have elites. The only question is the degree of influence that they do or should have. What I want to do here, is to present simply how power is distributed and exercised, and in so doing, to show that the radical's image of a small, cohesive, conspiratorial and self-seeking group as being the ones who exercise between them all or most of the power in our society is quite distorted and false.

Both the extreme Right and the extreme Left tend to have conspiracy theories about how society is run. For the extreme Right it is 'The Jews' who run society to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of the rest of us. To the Leftist it is 'The Bosses' if you are a worker, or 'the power elite' if you yourself are in danger of appearing to be in 'the Bosses" class. In fact, all of the mentioned theories about the distribution and location of power are very much alike and are mistaken in approximately equal degrees. Given the education, affluence and positions of influence that are characteristic of Jews, they are quite as plausible as the holders of power as anyone else. Once you think society is run by a small collusive minority, you have all the ingredients necessary for a pogrom. 'The Jews', 'The Bosses', and 'The power elite' are very nearly interchangeable terms. However you define who belongs in each of these three classes of people, you will still end up by naming many of the same people. It is this that explains what must be very painful to many of those who are proud to bear the label 'socialist' -- the fact that Hitler too thought himself to be a 'socialist'. The name 'Nazi' is of course the German abbreviation of 'Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiter Partei' ( NSDAP ) or 'National socialist German workers' party'. When Gough Whitlam describes himself as both a nationalist and a socialist, one is duty bound to point out what went wrong with the last lot of National Socialists we suffered from. What went wrong was that they worked with a conspiracy theory of power. Who they thought held that power was really quite secondary, and was in any case not greatly different from what our socialists think. When things were going wrong they looked for a group of evil men to blame rather than trying to understand the real complexities of societal functioning. Just as it fell to that arch-Conservative Churchill to lead the opposition to our last most serious outbreak of paranoid socialism, so to conservatives today must fall the role of challenging our modern forms of paranoid socialism.

Why are conspiracy theories of power so common? One obvious attraction is that they help people to avoid coming to terms with the fact that their values are deviant from the values of the rest of their fellow citizens. If you do not like the motor car, it helps to propose that people buy them only because the power elite have created an artificial demand for them by way of advertising. In fact this proposal casts the deviant in the role of hero. He alone has been smart enough to see through and resist the forces the power elite use to manipulate society to their own advantage. By postulating the existence of a collusive power elite, one can defer recognition of the fact that the existing social order represents by and large a compromise between the various things that most people want. It is easier to attack and find fault with a small elite than to find fault with and attack practically the whole of one's fellow men. That your more satisfactory enemy is imaginary matters very little, except perhaps to the majority of the people who would be oppressed if you ever got your way. It is no accident that the world's two most vicious recent dictatorships, Hitler's and Stalin's, were perpetrated in the name of socialism and were accompanied by the mass slaughter of elites. The conspiracy theory allows the paranoid to tell himself that he is acting in the name of the people (socialism) and is freeing them from the oppressors who have hoodwinked them. No better formula for enabling one to ignore in all good conscience the actual wishes of the people could be imagined. If people disagree with one, they must have been 'manipulated'. Whether it is the power elite or the Jews who do the hoodwinking and corrupting is of little moment.

What then is the reality of power distribution? The reality is that in a Western society no person has much power. Power is fractionated. Some have more than others, but no person has a significant portion of it by himself. For great power to be exercised, many people, perhaps not even knowing one another, must act together (or permit others to act) .

This fact that no person has much power by himself is amply illustrated by our Australian Prime Minister himself. Gough Whitlam bears much of the credit for the 1972 and 1974 ALP electoral victories and at the time of writing is head of the government -- nominally the most powerful man in the land. Yet he is constantly being overruled. And who overrules him? Nobody individually, but rather the majority of his colleagues acting collectively. Yet any of his ministers by themselves would have even less power than he does. Who then has power? Is it Bob Hawke, our much-exposed union boss? Scarcely. He could not even get union support for his quite benevolent housing scheme. Of all his proposed innovations, only a faltering department store and a travel scheme being run in partnership with big business remain. Even his outspoken Zionism -- backed as it was by many ALP politicians -- did not succeed in getting Australia to take a pro-Israel stance during or after the Yom Kippur war. If the head of the political system, the Unions and the Zionists do not have the power, who is left to constitute "the power elite"? "Big Business"! I can hear the Leftists cry triumphantly.

This however is the most absurd answer of all. Far from being collusive, businessmen love nothing better than to cut one another's throat. Their jealousy. their competitiveness and just the fact that they are so numerous make them even less likely than the groups mentioned above as candidates for forming a Power Elite. Even 'multinationals' -- that modern day refinement of the 'Big Business' shibboleth -- will not do. If multinationals are so powerful, how did the multinational oil companies fail to prevent the Arabs from turning off the oil and then raising its price? By any definition. Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso, Exxon) is probably ten or more times the size of Kuwait and the other tiny Arab Sheikhdoms, yet America still could not get any oil from them. Where did all this Power that the multinationals are supposed to have disappear to? Getting back to Australia, how was it that the combined efforts and opposition of practically the whole of our manufacturing industry still did not prevent the ALP government from introducing its twenty-five per cent tariff cuts? What about our largest company, BHP? Are they or their top management part of the power elite? Well, how come they are so unsuccessful in getting approval for price rises? If big businessmen have all the power, someone ought to tell Lang Hancock, our iron ore millionaire with a large share in the Pilbara deposits. He is so dissatisfied with the deal that our Federal government forces on him that he advocates his home state (Western Australia) should secede from the Commonwealth! If his position as one of the biggest of our big businessmen gives him all the power that our Leftists think it must, then he certainly does not seem to have noticed it. He makes no bones about saying what he would do if he did have any power.

No: no one group constitutes 'The Power Elite'. There is only a multitude of competing interests, each with their own very small quantity of influence. All of us have some power, some have more than others. The only power many of its have is power over our own actions. The only power our politicians have is that power they can persuade us to collectively approve. The only power our big businessmen have is the power to hire or not, to buy from one supplier or another. They once also had the power to fire or not, but this now is a right exercised only by courtesy of the unions.

What about 'The Military--Industrial Complex' and the 'Old Boy network'? Do these constitute the Power Elite? Certainly in naming these, one is naming real frameworks for collusion. No one surely has ever imagined that collusion never takes place or has tried to deny that some people have more power than others. One should note, however, that this collusion is informal and unsystematic. It is, into the bargain, in no way immune from the competing interests and attitudes that so bedevil co-operation by other people in other spheres. By contrast, the business of government and of political parties generally is a formal and systematic attempt by people with common interests to act in concert with one another. If the Old Boy network is a framework for informal collusion, them political parties could be called a framework for formal collusion. Yet we all know how circumscribed are the ways in which political parties succeed in attaining their ends. How much less successful must the much less strongly organised and more sporadic efforts of the Old Boy network be?

For all that, however, the only way we can really judge the power of a group is by looking at what success it actually has in getting what it aims for. Let us therefore take one instance of an Old Boy network -- the American 'military industrial Establishment'. This group has, for our purposes, the advantage that its supposed aims are fairly clearly specified -- getting the U.S. government to spend up big on defence procurement. What success have they had in attaining these aims? We have the American Army running down in numbers with conscription recently abolished, and with already only a fraction of the fighting troops of the Soviet Union; the once mighty U.S. navy now appears on most criteria to be inferior to the Soviet Navy and the U.S. airforce has nothing that can come near to matching the MiG 23, Russia's front-line fighter aircraft. Russia has long overtaken the U.S. in number and size of intercontinental missiles and now appears to have mastered or nearly mastered the American trick of giving each of them multiple warheads. Moscow is protected by anti-missile missiles, Washington is not. And all this has taken place with what must be seen as a fairly sympathetic President in the White House. Truly the military industrial complex must be one of the world's most colossal failures as a power elite.

The military industrial complex was simply another one of the fake bogeymen of which the Left is so fond. Faced with the monumentally unpalatable Vietnam war and the even more unpalatable fact that the initiation of the American involvement there was the work of such a Leftishly righteous person as John F. Kennedy, some explanation had to be found for America's supposed error in being there. That the involvement might have been due to the deep idealism of the American people in being unwilling to see another country taken over by an immovable and pervasive totalitarianism just would not do. That would have made the Leftist intellectuals seem the odd ones out. It would bring their judgment into conflict with too much of what they loved as America. So the conspiracy theory made its inevitable and convenient reappearance. 'The people and their government disagree with me so they must have been manipulated'. was the predictable, but so dangerous and so arrogant line of reasoning. The 'military industrial complex' thus rose to unprecedented popularity as the scapegoat. If it could not be admitted that the people were so foolish as to want or approve of the great military expenditures, then, someone had to be engineering them. That the power of this 'complex' was a myth was shown by the fact that as soon as public support for foreign military adventures waned, so apparently did the success of the 'complex' in securing continued military expenditures. There was no need to inject such a 'complex' into the explanation of American military expenditures at all.

In summary, exercises of great amounts of power are secured only when a wide spectrum of sources of power coincide or co-operate. This roughly means when there is extensive public support for a particular principle or line of action. Any source of great power that can run against public sentiment for any length of time is a myth. Even Hitler's great almost absolute power was the direct result of the fact that he was able to persuade huge numbers of Germans in all walks of life that his obsessions were right and correct. In the last elections held under the Weimar republic, the Nazis received far more votes than any other political party.

In Western society, then, and to a lesser extent in other societies, the ultimate source of power is plausibility. If you can get many people to agree with you, you then have power. Even if you get a majority of people to agree with you, however, you still will not have absolute power. It is by way of plausibility that political pressure groups generally work. The Associated Chamber of Manufacturers is generally thought to be one of Australia's more powerful political lobbies yet its operations consist of little else than issuing public statements, sending interested people propaganda and ensuring that politicians and senior public servants are given the occasional lavish dinner in appropriate company. Persuasion is the name of the game. It is a game that large organisations probably have a head start at, but the successes of the various ecology and consumerism lobbies show clearly that if people are really concerned, persuasion is an art that almost anyone can effectively apply. Elites are powerful only insofar as they are persuasive. The way in which all sorts of established elites have been taking a tumble in the battle with the ecology movement shows that elite power is certainly not something to be feared.

{There is a later article on elites HERE}

Chapter 35 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Women and Suburbia



By JUDY JOHNSON

LOOK HERE, FELLAS, there seems to be this mistaken idea around that we working mums work because we're bored to sobs with suburbia. Or that we're mad careerists or neurotic or something.

Frankly, I can imagine few jobs nicer than knocking off the housework in a couple of hours, then going to the beach or watching the midday movie and being all relaxed and smiling for my kids when they come home from school. That's if I could still afford to give them steak when I wanted to instead of sausages, and buy the odd good book, and go on the occasional holiday.

High Prices

Have you ever considered that the reason a lot of us work is to take a little of the load from our husbands so they're not crushed down with bills and dread? So they can take time out to laugh? OK, so we may have job satisfaction. But I know stay-at-home mothers who are equally satisfied learning pottery.

Do you know what I think of that suggestion of paying a weekly wage to women who prefer to stay at home with their children? Unreal.

Nearly all of us would prefer to stay at home with our kids. Most of us can't because the price of meat etc. has risen slightly lately (in case you hadn't noticed).

We may arrive at work all tarted up and composed (we have to-the competition's stiff) but don't imagine it's a breeze. The big bugbear is we get so tired. It's not the amount of work we necessarily have to do in each of our jobs-keeping the household in order, caring for the children. The job. It's knowing we have to do them all.

We're not doing our own thing either. We're incredibly timetabled. Make the beds 6.45, breakfast 6.50, shine dem shoes, tote dat bale. God help us if one of the kids decides to go slow.

No unwinding over a beer after work for us mums. We're so damn guilty it's straight back on the treadmill-- usually to a darkened house and the dinner to cook and the stories to read and the homework to help with.

Missing Out

Then there's the missing out bit. Like visiting day at the school. The vision of that little face, eyes fixed wistfully on the doorway, waiting for the Mum who never comes.

I used to work five days a week. I liked the job. No hangups about child care centres (or the lack of) because my children had reached primary school. A succession of non-tax-deductible house keepers (no, you can never rely on them staying despite all your blandishments) to keep the home scene from becoming too chaotic. Until the day my eight-year-old said: 'What's the point of having a mother if you hardly ever see her?'

Well I'm one of the lucky ones now with a part-time job. But a lot of my fellow working mums have to slog it out full-time through sheer economic necessity and/or because they can't get part-time jobs. See?

The Women's Electoral Lobby has an alternative proposal-- that the housewife's wage replace child endowment and that it be paid from the first child, but not increase with the number of children. At least we'd all get it. But I'd be surprised if the amount was much more than the drop-in-the-bucket child endowment is now.

Instead of mulling over 12th of Never projects, why don't you fellas get to work lowering the cost of living? Then indeed we might be able to spend more time with our children.



This chapter originally appeared as an article in the Sydney "Daily Mirror", 21 June 1973.

Chapter 36 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Blueprint for Disaster: American Defence Expenditure



By STEWART ALSOP

This is going to be one of those old-fashioned, reactionary columns that will cause all right-thinking persons to label the writer a tired old toady of the military-industrial complex. But there are certain facts of our present situation that really do seem worth a bit of thinking about, and that are hardly being thought about, or argued about, or written about, at all. Here are four examples:

1. The way things are going, the U.S. Army will soon hardly be in shape to take on a determined girls' hockey team. The Army is now dependent on volunteers, and young men are not volunteering fast enough, despite a pay scale that makes our Army infinitely the most expensive per capita in world history. So the Army is headed down to 800,000 men, and could go down to 730,000 men.

Moreover, the Army bureaucracy, in its incredible way, has ruled that only fifteen per cent of the men in Army uniform should be the fighting men of the three combat services, infantry, artillery and armour. That means an Army of around 120,000 combat soldiers -- the rest are support troops or bureaucrats in uniform, rather less capable of harming an enemy than a determined girls' hockey team. An Army of 120,000 combat soldiers must seem some sort of joke to the Russians, who field a superbly equipped army of at least eighty combat-ready divisions.

2. Norman Polmar, U.S. editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, the traditionally accurate British guide to naval strength, believes that the Soviet Union, which hardly had a navy fifteen years ago, 'may already have become the dominant seapower'.

3. U.S. intelligence satellites have spotted no fewer than three new Soviet missile types since the SALT 1 agreement was signed last year. All three are designed to carry very heavy warheads. One, for example, is a heavier version of the SS-9, which already carries a warhead about twenty times as heavy as the American Minuteman. Another uses a 'pop-up' technique to enable the smaller SS-11 to carry a much heavier warhead than before.

Why all this emphasis on heavier warheads? The answer is obvious. MIRVing a warhead is like slicing a pie-the bigger the warhead to be MIRVed, the bigger, and the more numerous, the individually targeted warheads into which it can be divided. The SALT agreement represents a stable nuclear balance, simply because the Soviet missiles are not MIRVed and ours are. But all the experts are agreed that the Soviets will have fully mastered MIRV technology by 1980 at the latest.

Then, unless something is done in the meantime, the nuclear balance will cease to be stable. For then, according to the experts in such matters, the Soviets will have the capacity to knock out our entire land-based nuclear deterrent in a first strike, with enough nuclear warheads to destroy every major city in this country in a second strike. We will lack an equivalent capacity. Thus the stable nuclear balance will cease to be stable.

4. The Canadian truce team in South Vietnam, just before it withdrew in frustration, issued a report. The Canadians, hardly toadies of the U.S. military-industrial complex, reported that the North Vietnamese had been cheating wholesale on the Paris agreement. North Vietnam, the Canadians charged, 'without being deterred one scintilla by the Paris agreement, has been infiltrating massive armed North Vietnamese troop units into Cambodia and South Vietnam in order to conduct military operations against the Republic of South Vietnam . . .'

One thing that is interesting about these four assorted facts is the reaction to them of the Democratic opposition. The Democratic Party of John Kennedy and his predecessors would have been howling to high heaven that something had to be done to right the growing imbalance in both conventional and strategic power. The current reaction of the Democrats is summed up in a paper signed by almost the entire liberal Democratic defense establishment -- Paul C. Warnkle, Adrian Fisher, Morton Halperin, Roswell Gilpatric, Herbert ScoviIle, Herbert York and so on. The booklet proposes to cut more than $14 billion from the current defence budget.

Curious Reasoning

This is to be done partly by sharp reductions in conventional strength. 'At least' three divisions are to be cut from our enfeebled Army, and carriers, nuclear submarines, tactical air wings and so on are to be similarly cut back. It is to be done partly by eliminating virtually all new strategic-weapons procurement, even to the point of halting 'the final instalment for the MIRVing of the first 550 Minuteman missiles.' And it is to be done partly by cutting off all logistic, economic or other support for the South Vietnamese.

All three proposals are fairly mind-boggling. The men who put their names to the report are intelligent men, but it is curious reasoning, surely, that the way to deal with an unquestioned threat of decisive Soviet superiority in conventional and strategic power is to cut back on U.S. conventional and strategic power.

The report points out that the 'imbalance in the teeth-to-tail ratio' needs to be reversed. Indeed it does, and by the toughest kind of action, up to and including the mass firing of generals and admirals. But the way to do so is not to cut three divisions from our thirteen-division Army, for example, but to demand that the Army provide a lot more divisions --at least twenty-from its 800,000 manpower level.

Insuring Defeat

As for the proposal to cut off all logistic and other support to the South Vietnamese, this would of course insure the defeat of South Vietnam. The 'massive' infiltration which the Canadians report is clearly in preparation for another North Vietnamese offensive, for which the Soviets and the Chinese are providing generous logistic support, including heavy tanks and long-range artillery. Cut off from all U.S. support, the South Vietnamese cannot possibly contain the offensive.

The betrayal of South Vietnam was the price demanded by the Communists for the return of our prisoners, before the Paris agreement. If this Democratic defence blueprint is approved, South Vietnam will be betrayed gratuitously, and the war lost retroactively. It is a curious atmosphere in which we find ourselves, in which moral men like those listed above can blandly propose the betrayal of a small dependent ally, amid nods of approval from other moral men, who can claim to have been right all along, when the inevitable defeat of South Vietnam occurs.

In such an atmosphere, the Democratic defence blueprint seems likely to be adopted without much argument or much thought. For to dispute its wisdom is to invite the Pavlovian label of cold warrior or Pentagon toady, and no sensible man, no politician especially, wishes to be so labeled.

This chapter originally appeared as an article in "Newsweek", 13 August 1973, p. 35.

Chapter 37 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


In Defence of Monarchy



By T. D. ALLMAN

JUST AS QUEEN VICTORIA would not have been, so I, too, was not amused at the cheeky presumption of the upstart military junta in Athens to abolish the Greek monarchy and declare a republic. Like all leftwing, communist-sympathising, radical and subversive newspaper columnists, I gradually have come around to the opinion that what the world needs now is not fewer, but more kings and queens.

As things stand now, there is not a single hereditary monarchy at the moment in the whole of North and South America --unless one counts places like Canada and the Netherlands Antilles, where a European sovereign is technically chief of state. There only are two or three kingdoms left in Africa, a mere handful remaining in Europe, with not very many more in Asia, even when one counts all those tiny Persian gulf emirates.

Practically every year another monarchy is overthrown, or abolished. This year it is Greece. Before that it was Cambodia, before that Libya, and before that it was Burundi. Just in the years since world war two, monarchies have been done away with in countries stretching from Italy to Zanzibar. Have conditions improved in those countries, as the result of these intemperate and impulsive constitutional changes? No, of course not.

Greece, the birthplace of Western democracy, now languishes in throes of dictatorship. Cambodia is ravaged by war. Colonel Khadafi, no more than King Idris, has been able to make the Libyan desert bloom; but he has banned cold beer- which at least used to make it bearable. Burundi is rent by terrible tribal massacres.

Italy last year went through dozens of expensive and time consuming ballots in an unedifying constitutional crisis over the election of a figurehead president. Had the figurehead Italian monarchy not been abolished in 1946, the cost and bother would not have been necessary. In Zanzibar, there is a permanent reign of terror, the likes of which was never seen while the sultan was on his throne and all was right with the clove trade.

Many years ago, the late King Farouk of Egypt remarked that in fifty years there only would be five kings left-- the king of spades, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds, the king of clubs and the King of England. In my opinion two other countries-- Japan and Thailand-- also will have the courage and good sense to preserve their monarchical institutions in the face of the worldwide, lemminglike fad for wasting time and money, and obscuring the real issues, by firing kings and queens.

This disturbing, anti-monarchical trend in world affairs might not be so depressing if kings were replaced by something worthwhile. Instead they tend to be replaced by colonels, or when a touch of glamour is required, by generals. Instead of King Constantine of Greece-- a presentable, industrious and pleasant young man, who once won a medal in the Olympics-- we now have some mustachioed, semi-literate Greek colonel as chief of state, who not only is a power-hungry autocrat, but a bore as well.

In Libya, we have Colonel Khadafi. There is a colonel ruling in Burundi as well, who is responsible for the massacre of at least fifty thousand of his countrymen. A colonel --named Nasser-- also succeeded King Farouk in Egypt.

As these random samples indicate, colonels are like the rest of us. They can be boring, eccentric, wicked or even rather clever. But since colonels are just like the rest of us, I fail to see why, therefore, the Divine Right of Kings should be replaced by the Divine Right of Colonels.

All over the world, but especially in places like Vietnam and Washington DC, one runs into many colonels. As a rule, they have about as much sense of state as does a canister of napalm. On the other hand, most of the kings one runs across are persons of above average experience and intelligence. The king of Thailand, like King Constantine, is a skilled yachtsman, King Birendra of Nepal went to Harvard. The King of Sweden is a trained archeologist. The Emperor of Japan is very knowledgeable about seashells.

The advantage of kings over colonels was definitively demonstrated not too long ago when the Shah of Iran gave a dinner party at Persepolis, to which all the crowned heads of the world were invited. The event provoked intense curiosity and enthusiasm all around the world, and I do not know a single person -- however strong his or her pretentions towards inverse snobbism --who would have rejected an invitation had it been offered. But would anybody bother to travel all the way to Persepolis just to have dinner with twenty-five or thirty colonels?

It is interesting that the monarchies most likely to survive are precisely those in which the monarch no longer wields political power. In Japan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the Low Countries and Scandinavia everyone wants the monarch to go on reigning, because he or she no longer rules. There are other countries -- Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Morocco, Jordan --where the kingship remains not only the highest, but also the most politically powerful office. But these are precisely the parts of the world, I venture to predict, where we sooner or later shall see the face of some dreadful colonel staring out at us from the postage stamps and national currency.

The reason, of course, is obvious: the combination of hereditary kingship and absolute power is too much for any one man to wield all by himself for a lifetime. Were prime ministers of Australia, or presidents of the U.S.A. absolute monarchs for life, instead of just for a few years, they all eventually would be overthrown by guerilla warfare or coups d'etat. As things stand, we grow sick enough of them in a few years anyway.

This does not mean, however, that just because a king is politically powerless he is unimportant, or a mere cipher or constitutional convenience. Far from it. The indispensability of a successful monarch lies precisely in the fact that he provides a non political identity for his country and people, that he does not owe his office to any group or faction, that he imbues the state with an ethos transcending political issues, that he influences events by example rather than command.

The function of the ideal monarch is not to be a great man, but to be a good Englishman, Swede or Japanese; that he personify, rather than direct, the state. To the extent that he performs all these tasks well, the monarch can and should be a much more important national figure than any colonel or politician.

Being a native of a republic, I was inculcated in my youth with the belief that kings were bad, undemocratic things, like walking sticks and spats. But, since putting away childish things, I have lived all but a few months of my adult life in kingdoms: Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Britain. And while the monarchies and royal families of these various countries were not always the types of people with whom one would wish to share a railway carriage, in all cases they were of much more use to their countries than the local politicians and colonels.

Once, while visiting an upcountry fair in Thailand, I happened upon one of the more spectacular diversions offered there, which I thought well demonstrated the value of the kingship. It was a round wooden cylinder some twenty feet high and a similar distance in diameter. One paid the equivalent of ten cents to climb up a flight of outside steps to a balcony which surrounded the top of this large, open cylinder.

Front that vantage point, one could watch several Thai motor-cyclists start their machines and then, extracting their livelihood from the principle of centrifugal force, drive the vehicles at great speed around and around the inside of the cylinder, defying gravity, until the motorcycles circled some twenty feet straight up to the top of the cylinder.

Having edified the customers with this daredevil exploit, the motorcyclists then returned to the base of the cylinder, there to bide their time until sufficient new members of the public paid enough prices of admission to make the display once again profitable.

Above the ticket window of this diversion, respectfully garlanded with flowers, was a photograph of the King of Thailand, in a white dress uniforrn, mounting the same stairs the customers did, in order to view the same display. Although the King of Thailand is politically powerless, he is a person of such exalted status that his presence is considered nearly divine. Protocol commands that he never smile in public and that the slightest familiarity never be directed towards him.

Thus the King was shown in the photograph mounting the wooden cylinder with the same impassive dignity with which he habitually receives foreign ambassadors or news of the latest coup d'etat. The effect was to impart upon this lowly, but harmless economic activity of some of his most humble subjects a certain dignity, to incorporate them -- in an act of state magic --into the cosmological total of the Thai state and national identity.

The King of Thailand occupies many hours each day in the diligent fulfilment of state duties. I am sure that the majority of Thailand's thirty-eight million people at one time or another personally have seen the king, and that his contribution to perpetuating Thailand's national stability and sense of self respect has been far greater than that of any Thai colonel or politician.

I think the secret of the success of the British royal family is that they, too, appreciate the importance of the trivial duties diligently performed. For a long time, I considered the Queen a dull woman, before realising that her dullness was her greatest virtue.

One does not want an arbiter of fashion, a movie star or an intellectual leader to open a primary school or hand out OBEs. One does not want the speech from the throne read with feeling. The Queen's job is neither to direct the British nor to dazzle them, but to be always there, cutting the ribbon, inspecting the new wing of the hospital, lending a degree of non-political dignity and national recognition to the everyday events that are much more important, in their cumulative weight, in the life of the nation than who wins the next election, or whether the pound floats or sinks.

It is not necessary that the Queen be famous for her witty repartee, only that she not run out of small talk in the reception line. The Queen thoroughly realises this-- and the result is something wonderful and unique. Though she is charismatic as a brocaded tortoise after twenty years of bland and unremitting performance of her duty (Britain doubtless would be far better off today if the country's wildcat strikers and sex-obsessed cabinet ministers had followed her example), the Queen not only is a more popular figure, she is a more interesting and more indispensable one than either Mr Wilson or Mr Heath.

The Queen undoubtedly will be remembered as the greatest and best loved British leader since Queen Victoria, and for the same reason; she does a tedious job diligently and well; that of being a powerless, hereditary constitutional monarch.

In America, on the other hand, there long has existed exactly the opposite kind of office, and it has failed abysmally. The president is an all-powerful, elected, absolute monarch. The president can treat Congress, the public, the rest of the government with an unchecked arrogance that has not been possible in Britain since the days of Magna Carta, or at least since the beheading of Charles I.

Yet at the same time, the president is expected to he as far above politics as the King of the Belgians is above the squabbles between the Walloons and Flemings; to be a virtually divine figure, like the Emperor of Japan.

The inevitable results of perpetuating this ridiculous office of the American presidency not only have been disasters like Watergate and Vietnam, but the cloaking of such abysmal crimes in an ethos of royal inviolability that at once preserves the particular scoundrel holding the office from punishmont, and which at the same time cheapens and degrades the presidency's symbolic personification of the American state.

In consequence, America currently is ensnared in the worst of all possible situations: Richard Nixon cannot be sent packing by a vote of no-confidence like some normal, mortal prime minister. At the same time, the United States is deprived of the reassuring alternative to its politicians' sleaziness that, for example, the engagement annnouncement of Princess Anne has provided to the British callgirl scandal involving several ministers in the Heath government.

As an American, I would be quite prepared to exercise my franchise in favour of the establishment of a constitutional, hereditary American monarchy. Had one of the sons of Franklin D. Roosevelt --the only really successful American president this century-- been permitted to inherit the presidency upon his father's death in 1945, the excessive political powers presently being unconstitutionally abused by the White House long ago would have declined to those presently enjoyed by the royal families of Norway or Malaysia.

The present American crisis of confidence could be best resolved if the Pentagon computers discovered and identified the legitimate heir, according to Salic Law, of George Washington, and he then were crowned King of the United States.

Some bland, aristocratic, well mannered, unpretentious and slightly inbred old Virginia family is exactly the alternative America now requires to our present royal family, which has been sullied by King Richard's myriad malfeasances of office, the ineffably lower middle class origins of his wife, and by the bright-young-reactionary-housewife-next-door demeanor of his two daughters, whose only advantages are that they are less grotesque, parvenu and uninspiring than America's two previous princesses royal --Luci Baines and Lynda Bird.

As the foregoing suggests, it is not merely enough that the monarch be preserved in the few places where it still exists. Keeping the colonels and politicians out of the royal palace in Tonga is not going to set things right in Brazil, where a perfectly decent, efficient and hardworking imperial family was needlessly pensioned off at the end of the last century, just so some general could enjoy a twenty-one gun salute and have his profile immortalised on the coins of the realm. Wherever and whenever the circumstances arise, monarchies instead must be re-established, and even implanted in those countries never privileged to have enjoyed that form of government.



This article originally appeared in "Nation Review", 29 June 1973, p. 1143, under the title 'Every country needs a queen'.

Chapter 38 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Conformity or Diversity? -Which Way Are We Going?



By ALVIN TOFFLER

THE SUPER-INDUSTRIAL revolution will consign to the archives of ignorance most of what we now believe about democracy and the future of human choice. Today in the techno-societies there is an almost ironclad consensus about the future of freedom. Maximum individual choice is regarded as the democratic ideal. Yet most writers predict that we shall move further and further from this ideal. They conjure up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer-creatures, surrounded by standardised goods, educated in standardised schools, fed a diet of standardised mass culture, and forced to adopt standardised styles of life.

Such predictions have spawned a generation of future-haters and technophobes, as one might expect. One of the most extreme of these is a French religious mystic, Jacques Ellul, whose books are enjoying a campus vogue. According to Ellul, man was far freer in the past when 'Choice was a real possibility for him.' By contrast, today, 'The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice.' And, as for tomorrow: 'In the future, man will apparently be confined to the role of a recording device.' Robbed of choice, he will be acted upon, not active. He will live, Ellul warns, in a totalitarian state run by a velvet-gloved Gestapo.

This same theme-the loss of choice runs through much of the work of Arnold Toynbee. It is repeated by everyone from hippie gurus to Supreme Court justices, tabloid editorialists and existentialist philosophers. Put in its simplest form, this Theory of Vanishing Choice rests on a crude syllogism: science and technology have fostered standardisation. Science and technology will advance, making the future even more standardised than the present. Ergo: man will progressively lose his freedom of choice.

If instead of blindly accepting this syllogism, we stop to analyse it, however, we make an extraordinary discovery. For not only is the logic itself faulty, the entire idea is premised on sheer factual ignorance about the nature, the meaning and the direction of the super-industrial revolution. Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

Design-a-Mustang

No person travelling across Europe or the United States can fail to be impressed by the architectural similarity of one gas station or airport to another. Anyone thirsting for a soft drink will find one bottle of Coca-Cola to be almost identical with the next. Clearly a consequence of mass-production techniques, the uniformity of certain aspects of our physical environment has long outraged intellectuals. Some decry the Hiltonisation of our hotels; others charge that we are homogenising the entire human race.

Certainly, it would be difficult to deny that industrialism has had a levelling effect. Our ability to produce millions of nearly identical units is the crowning achievement of the industrial age. Thus, when intellectuals bewail the sameness of our material goods, they accurately reflect the state of affairs under industrialism.

In the same breath, however, they reveal shocking ignorance about the character of super-industrialism. Focused on what society was, they are blind to what it is fast becoming. For the society of the future will offer not a restricted, standardised flow of goods, but the greatest variety of unstandardised goods and services any society has even seen. We are moving not towards a further extension of material standardisation, but towards its dialectical negation.

The end of standardisation is already in sight. The pace varies from industry to industry, and from country to country. In Europe, the peak of standardisation has not yet been crested. (It may take another twenty or thirty years to run its course.) But in the United States, there is compelling evidence that a historic corner has been turned.

Some years ago, for example, an American marketing expert named Kenneth Schwartz made a surprising discovery. 'It is nothing less than a revolutionary transformation that has come over the mass consumer market during the past five years,' he wrote. 'From a single homogenous unit, the mass market has exploded into a series of segmented, fragmented markets, each with its own needs, tastes and way of life.' This fact has begun to alter American industry beyond recognition. The result is an astonishing change in the actual outpouring of goods offered to the consumer.

Philip Morris, for example, sold a single major brand of cigarettes for twenty-one years. Since 1954 by contrast, it has introduced six new brands and so many options with respect to size, filter and menthol that the smoker now has a choice among sixteen different variations. This fact would be trivial, were it not duplicated in virtually every major product field. Gasoline? Until a few years ago, the American motorist took his pick of either 'regular' or 'premium'. Today he drives up to a Sunoco pump and is asked to choose among eight different blends and mixes. Groceries? Between 1950 and 1963 the number of different soaps and detergents on the American grocery shelf increased from sixty-five to 200; frozen foods; from 121 to 350; baking mixes and flour from eighty-four to 200. Even the variety of pet foods increased from fifty-eight to eighty-one. One major company, Corn Products, produces a pancake syrup called Karo. Instead of offering the same product nationally, however, it sells two different viscosities, having found that Pennsylvanians, for some regional reason, prefer their syrup thicker than other Americans. In the field of office decor and furniture, the same process is at work. 'There are ten times the new styles and colours there were a decade ago,' says John A. Saunders, president of General Fireproofing Company, a major manufacturer in the field. 'Every architect wants his own shade of green.' Companies, in other words, are discovering wide variations in consumer wants and are adapting their production lines to accommodate them. Two economic factors encourage this trend: first, consumers have more money to lavish on their specialised wants; second, and even more important, as technology becomes more sophisticated, the cost of introducing variations declines.

This is the point that our social critics - most of whom are technologically naive - fail to understand: it is only primitive technology that imposes standardisation. Automation, in contrast, frees the path to endless, blinding, mind-numbing diversity. 'The rigid uniformity and long runs of identical products which characterise our traditional mass-production plants are becoming less important' reports industrial engineer Boris Yavitz. 'Numerically controlled machines can readily shift from one product model or size to another by a simple change of programmes ... Short product runs become economically feasible.' According to Professor Van Court Hare Jr, of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, 'Automated equipment . . . permits the production of a wide variety of products in short runs at almost "mass-production" costs.' Many engineers and business experts foresee the day when diversity will cost no more than uniformity.

The finding that pre-automation technology yields standardisation, while advanced technology permits diversity is borne out by even a casual look at that controversial American innovation, the supermarket. Like petrol stations and airports, supermarkets tend to look alike whether they are in Milan or Milwaukee. By wiping out thousands of little 'mom and pop' shops they have without doubt contributed to uniformity in the architectural environment. Yet the array of goods they offer the consumer is incomparably more diverse than any corner shop could afford to stock. Thus at the very moment that they encourage architectural sameness, they foster gastronomic diversity.

The reason for this contrast is simple: food and food packaging technology is far more advanced than construction techniques. Indeed, construction has scarcely reached the level of mass production; it remains, in large measure, a pre-industrial craft. Strangled by local building codes and conservative trade unions, the industry's rate of technological advance is far below that of other industries. The more advanced the technology, the cheaper it is to introduce variation in output. We can safely predict, therefore, that when the construction industry catches up with manufacturing in technological sophistication, gas stations, airports, and hotels, as well as supermarkets, will stop looking as if they had been poured from the same mould. Uniformity will give way to diversity.

{Where the process has begun, the results are striking. In Washington, DC, for example, there is a now famous computer-designed apartment house, Watergate East - in which no two floors are alike. Of 240 apartments, 167 have different floor plans. And there are no continuous straight lines in the building anywhere.}

While certain parts of Europe and Japan are still building their first all-purpose supermarkets, the United States has already leaped to the next stage, the creation of specialised super-stores that widen still further (indeed, almost beyond belief) the variety of goods available to the consumer. In Washington, DC, one such store specialises in foreign foods, offering such delicacies as hippopotamus steak, alligator meat, wild snow hare, and thirty-five different kinds of honey.

The idea that primitive industrial techniques foster uniformity, while advanced automated techniques favour diversity, is dramatised by recent changes in the automobile industry. The widespread introduction of European and Japanese cars into the American market in the late 1950s opened many new options for the buyer, increasing his choice from half a dozen to some fifty makes. Today even this wide range of choice seems narrow and constricted.

Faced with foreign competition, Detroit took a new look at the so-called 'mass consumer'. It found not a single uniform mass market, but an aggregation of transient mini-markets. It also found, as one writer put it, that 'customers wanted custom-like cars that would give them an illusion of having one-of-a-kind.' To provide that illusion would have been impossible with the old technology; and new computerised assembly systems, however, make possible not merely the illusion, but even-before long-the reality.

Thus the beautiful and spectacularly successful Mustang is promoted by Ford as 'the one you design yourself', because, as critic Reyner Banham explains, there 'isn't a dung-regular Mustang any more, just a stockpile of options to meld in combinations of 3 (bodies) X 4 (engines) x 3 (transmissions) X 4 (basic sets of high-performance engine modifications) - 1 (rock-bottom six-cylinder car to which these modifications don't apply) + 2 (Shelby grand-touring and racing set-ups applying to only one body shell and not all engine/ transmission combinations).' This does not even take into account the possible variations in colour, upholstery and optional equipment.

Both car buyers and auto salesmen are increasingly disconcerted by the sheer multiplicity of options. The buyers' problem of choice has become far more complicated, the addition of each option creating the need for more information, more decisions and sub-decisions. Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. In short, the auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants.

Yet we are only beginning the march towards destandardisation of our material culture. Marshall McLuhan has noted that 'Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colours available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer ... When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as cheap to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination.' Many of McLuhan's other assertions are highly debatable. This one is not. He is absolutely correct about the direction in which technology is moving. The material goods of the future will be many things; but they will not be standardised. We are, in fact, racing towards 'overchoice'-the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualisation are cancelled by the complexity of the buyer's decision-making process.



This chapter originally appeared as the first part of Chapter 12 of "Future Shock"

Chapter 39 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Under the title 'Do mental events exist: Physiological adumbrations', this paper was originally published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, 1972, 120, 129-132. The abstract originally appeared in the November 1971 issue of the same journal.

DO MENTAL EVENTS EXIST OR IS MAN JUST A PROTEIN MACHINE?



J. J. Ray

It is argued that the present state of neurophysiological knowledge and theory does give grounds for an explanation of all those phenomena normally held in some quarters to be irreducibly 'mental'. Suggestions are made as to what physiological events particular mental events could be made up of. It is proposed that perception should be regarded as a response and that the problem, 'What is consciousness?' should be treated as an empirical one -- the tentative answer proposed being: 'All those responses accompanied by an orienting response'. It is concluded that peculiarly "mental" events do not exist.

IN THIS PAPER, elaboration of a Realist answer to some of the classical questions of psychology and epistemology will be sought, starting from a knowledge of Soviet and Western findings in psychophysiology (particularly the work of Pavlov, 1932, and Hebb, 1949. See also the summary by Burt, 1968). The point of departure taken in the philosophical literature is the paper by Place (1969). This paper will adopt a reflexological model of brain function -- with its implied view that memory is synaptically encoded. While this model has largely fallen into disfavour, it is used here paradigmatically -- to show that well-developed physiological models in general can provide a satisfactory account of 'mental' phenomena.

The central expository device to be used here is theoretical consideration of a man who has had a microelectrode inserted in each cell of his CNS, each of these being connected to one of a vast array of oscilloscopes situated in front of him in a manner such that he can see at all times a representation of the electrical events going on in his brain. While such a preparation is not technically possible at the moment, the day when it may definitely be possible does not seem so far off at all against the historical perspective of the two or more millennia in which questions of epistemology have been discussed. Nonetheless the technical possibility as such is really irrelevant here. Such a preparation is considered merely for its value as a model. It will be evident that with such a preparation we would be able to determine exactly what brain processes go on when particular mental events go on. In this paper, an attempt to predict the type of answers we would get will be made on the basis of present neurophysiological knowledge and theory. There will then follow some consideration of questions more purely epistemological in nature.

A few stipulative definitions to start with: When 'stimulus' is used here, it will be used to mean any event which causes a neuron to discharge with a spike potential ('neuron' here will include those specialised cells which make up the classical sensory receptors). A discharge across a neuro-muscular synapse will also be called a stimulus (to muscle fibres). 'Response' will be used here to mean a spike potential in any neuron or a contraction in any muscle tissue. From this definition, it will be obvious that the stimulus to one neuron or muscle fibre will very often be a part of the response of another neuron or muscle fibre. A 'reflex' will be used to refer to a structural feature of nervous tissue which predisposes one particular neuron or set of neurons to fire another particular neuron or muscle fibre (out of the many particular adjacent neurons or muscle fibres it could possibly fire).

Let us go back now to our man with the wired-up brain. The responses shown on the oscilloscope are set up with a three-second time lag. He looks at a plain blue surface and then quickly looks at his oscilloscope array to find out what happened in his brain when he saw 'blue'. He sees a myriad of events going on, all over his brain. Not discouraged he looks again and again at a series of objects all of the same blue shade. Eventually he notes that of all the brain events going on there is one and only one which coincides always with his seeing blue and which never occurs without his seeing blue. What then might he say? He might say: 'Now I know what blue is' or 'Now I know what causes me to perceive blue' or 'Now I know what the perception of blue is made up of'. While we might feel confident of our ability to convince him that the first two of these statements need revision, it seems to me that, in the third statement, all people but some philosophers would agree that our man is right and his statement is accurate. But such a statement implies that the total set of brain events is the perception of blue, that a perception is a brain process. Only the object perceived is blue. There is no need of an internal analogue to represent blue. To perceive blue is to respond in a certain way to a blue object. Even in dreams, what we see are things -- not images. What does need explaining in dreams is that we see things at a time when those things are not present. The explanation of this is merely a particular technical problem. So perceiving that a thing is blue is not the same as seeing the brain process that goes on when a person perceives blue -- nor should it be. Blue is a property of the object. Perceiving is an activity of organisms. Accurate perceptions are adaptive responses in organisms, and misperceptions are unadaptive responses in organisms. (A part of the reason why they are unadaptive is that they set off stimulus-response chains which may call for opposing effector actions at any one point in time.)

The above is tantamount to a denial that there are mental events. When we close our eyes (and other receptors) what 'mental' events might go on? We could 'call up an image of an object' -- which is not quite like seeing an object. This is conceivably a conditioned response to a sub-vocalised or even non-vocalised verbal stimulus --and, like all conditioned responses, not quite like the unconditioned response. We do in fact 'see' a modified object because brain activity goes on in accordance with known conditions for brain activity.

To move out of the visual modality, we could also claim that we hear our own thoughts quite clearly. This testifies to the strength of the auditory conditioned responses to (sub-verbal) speech. At other times, brain activity may go on without verbalisations (or any 'central' part thereof), but while in retrospect we may feel that something went on, we cannot 'say' what it was -- i.e. in this sense there was 'imageless' (or non-verbal) thought. 'Imageless thought' then is any brain process not involving sub-vocal verbalisations or conditioned response perceptions of objects.

Why is it that only some responses are 'conscious'? When we 'see' an object a response takes place that has the quality of 'consciousness'. Why do not all our responses have this quality? The short answer is again that this would be unadaptive. Particular perceptual responses have their stimulus properties magnified by another, concurrent 'orienting response' (Lynn, 1966). This 'orienting response' is a stereotyped set of physiological changes which occur in various degrees after stimuli of certain strength. As so far measured, it has always peripheral components, but in the case of weak stimuli there may be a purely central form of the response with no peripheral indicators. It is stimuli eliciting orienting responses that we describe ourselves as being 'aware of or 'conscious of . Thus, when we open our eyes we respond to or perceive all the things before us. The strongest of all these responses however, will be accompanied by another, orienting, response and it is this strongest of responses which is conscious perception. For a person to be said to be conscious, orienting responses must be taking place in his central nervous system.

Just as I become 'conscious' of objects in the external world, so I may become 'aware' of my own responses. Each response acts in turn as a stimulus for another response. That a response is triggered off is perception. If this response is accompanied by another, orienting response, I then become 'aware' of my original action. Thus I may come to 'know that I know' -- when the perceptual response accompanied by an orienting response becomes itself a stimulus for a further response of like nature. At this point it becomes possible to define 'perceptual' versus 'non-perceptual' responses. A perceptual response is one that an orienting response could magnify. In humans, this is mainly the class of responses occurring in the cerebral cortex. Note that the difficulty of demonstrating unconscious conditioning is paralleled by the difficulty of demonstrating sub-cortical conditioning.

From the foregoing it follows that while it may be true that we describe a disposition of a person when we say 'he knows something', to say that 'he came to know something' is not to describe a disposition he had but rather to assert that he had an orienting and a perceptual response to a particular event that caused structural alterations in his brain; i.e. from that point on a reflex was established which was the mechanism for his having in future a disposition to respond in a way different to the way he would have responded had that perception never occurred.

In vision, how is it that we see objects, although it is a light wave that actually produces the receptor response, i.e. how is it that we know the object to be 'out there' and not on our retina? This is an inference the brain learns to make using several cues. How does it learn? Reflexes are set up by the coincidence of certain visual cues with tactile stimuli. Distance receptors evolved subsequent to contact receptors and hence touch is the 'final check' (unconditioned stimulus) of visual impressions (compare our responses when confronted with the 'bent stick' illusion in water). Thus responses to tactile stimulus could be said to form first-order conditioned reflexes while some responses to visual cues are formed as second order or 'generalised' reflexes. Note, however, that the distinction between touch and distance receptors is only one of the nature of the characteristic stimulus. In both cases stimuli cause us to 'perceive' (or: 'react to') objects. The difference is that in one case. we believe the stimulus event to involve only the object perceived (touch), whereas in the case of the distance receptors we have to learn otherwise.

The inferences necessary with distance receptors may of course fail when the needed cues are attenuated. This has often been shown in distance perception and size constancy experiments. This shows that the 'inference' is in fact a conditioned response as dependent on appropriate stimuli as any other conditioned response. To say the 'brain infers distance' is to say that we respond as if the thing perceived were not touching our receptors. This is what the perceiving of a thing 'out there' is. We respond in such a way because that has been both learnt and selected for in evolution -- and the reason such a response has been learnt and selected for in evolution is that the object really is 'out there'.

But when it is asserted that perception is made up of neural responses and nothing more, someone will want to claim that Watson (the founder of behaviourism) was discredited for just such an assertion when he denied that mental events exist. This is not so. The failure of Watson was not that he denied mental events but that he also acted as if brain processes too did not exist. Watson acted as if he believed that the only responses and stimuli which existed were those observable from outside the organism without the aid of instruments. The remarks made here, on the other hand, if they have any implications for the direction of future psychological research, point rather to the importance of introspection, free association and other techniques which stimulate and disinhibit vocal muscle responses to neural outputs from the brain.

I will, however, heartily concur with Watson in claiming that mental events do not exist. How do we know there are mental events unless we perceive them? But how could we perceive them? We perceive objects and some of our own physio-chemical processes, but if one defines mental events as something beyond physiochemical processes or objects then how can they be perceived? How can one know them? If mental events are an 'aspect' of brain processes, in what sense of the word 'aspect'? I believe that if we are to retain the term 'mental events' we may do so only if we use it as a term completely interchangeable with 'brain processes'.

As a coda to the above considerations, Anderson's (1962) suggestion that 'mind is feeling' rather than brain processes may be treated. Do we really think of emotions when we think of mental events? No. We think of emotions as somatic events. They are perceived in the same way as we perceive a blue object. The only difference is that the impulse comes from different receptors (visceral) and projects in a different part of the cortex. An emotion is a visceral conditioned response to stimuli perceived externally and then a conditioned stimulus for further motor conditioned responses (e.g. flight). The temporal order here is not important. As in the James-Lange theory, the motor action may also come as a direct conditioned response to external stimuli, with the emotional response subsequent.

REFERENCES

ANDERSON, J. (1962) Studies in empirical philosophy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

BURT, C. (1968) Brain and consciousness. British J. Psychology, 59(1), 55-69.

HEBB, D.O. (1949) The organization of behavior. N.Y.: Wiley.

LYNN, R. (1966) Attention, Arousal and the Orientation Reaction. London: Pergamon

PAVLOV, I. P. (1932) Selected works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

PLACE, U.T. (1969) Burt on brain and consciousness. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 22, 285-292.

Chapter 40 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

IS SELF THEORY THE HYPOSTATIZATION OF A SYNCATEGOREMATIC WORD?



John Ray

IN BOTH PSYCHOLOGY and sociology, there is an amorphous current of thought variously termed 'existentialism', 'phenomenology', 'self theory' etc. Although probably a minority view, it does represent a continuing challenge to the usual standards of scientific practice always prevalent in the social sciences and in other sciences. In fact, more than a challenge, this stream of thought represents to the scientifically inclined almost a foreign and certainly an unintelligible language. Although attacking it is rather like waging war on a mile-high cube of jelly, it is desired in this chapter to point out a possible major source of fallacy in this form of 'theory'.

From J. P. Sartre to Carl Rogers, a central theme in existentialist talk has been 'the self. An article by Bertocci (1965) summarising something of the history of this body of ideas goes back even earlier than this. Bertocci refers to the work in 1915 of the psychologist Mary Calkins in the following words: 'The self, as Calkins saw it, is self-identical, unique, related to its social and physical environment, but not "beyond or beside" the experience it has' (p. 300).

What this desperate mumbo jumbo means is anybody's guess. It creates a feeling rather than conveying any information or offering any explanation. One gets the idea that some concept of 'the self is central, but what this 'self actually is seems rather mystical. At the very least Bertocci is not so much offering an explanation as providing an oracular utterance that requires explanation and elaboration. It is very much like a verbal Rorschach inkblot -- a lineal descendant of the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle. Unfortunately the whole of Bertocci's paper and the whole of existentialist writing in general is like this. It could mean anything or nothing. Nowhere are there any plain utterances the truth of which could be tested.

An examination of the one sentence quoted from Bertocci will serve to exemplify the difficulty of finding out just what is being said in 'existentialist', 'personahstic' or 'phenomenological' writing. What, for instance, could possibly be conveyed by saying that the self is 'self-identical'? To say as much is a totally unilluminating tautology. Even primary school children realise that if you want to define a term you cannot use that term itself in the definition. The self is 'related to its social and physical environment'. What does that tell us? Practically nothing. The one totally trivial thing that we might perhaps infer is that the self is something other than its social and physical environment. This inference, however, is little more than a case of something being true by definition. Next we are told that the self is not 'beyond or beside' the experience it has. By any criterion this means that the self is the experience it has. Yet if it is experiences, how can it also have experiences? This seems to be a case of either an infinite regress or a statement that is untrue by definition. Putting 'beyond or beside' in quotes is no help except that it provides mystification. Why it was done or what it means no-one can know.

So we see how existentialist talk -- and one could multiply the above example indefinitely -- is not really discourse at all. It looks like discourse, but violates all rules of discourse. It is either totally trivial, tautologous, true by definition or false by definition. It includes no real statements, propositions or assertions at all. It is a verbal fruit salad-rather like a dictionary gone berserk. It is not even a question of being uncertain of what it means. It quite certainly and obviously can have no meaning at all. The words used do have meaning in isolation, but the use that is made of them is not meaningful. The use that is made of them contradicts what we understand to be their meaning in isolation. In isolation we are quite happy to regard an experience as something that is 'had' by someone, but when we read Bertocci we are told that this is in fact not the case. Experiences have themselves. All meaning crumbles. Words evidently are not being used according to their conventions. What is being spoken can at the best only be a private, esoteric or idiosyncratic language that just happens to look like English.

I have just used five hundred words analysing only twenty-six words of Bertocci: For this to be necessary, existentialism must at the very least be a remarkably unclear form of talk. The fact that the passage analysed came from what was supposed to be a textbook and was the nearest Bertocci came to offering a definition of his central concept is even more depressing. Even if the analysis had succeeded in discovering something that the passage meant, we would have to conclude that such writing was very, very uneconomical and poorly done indeed. Only some sort of intellectual masochism could motivate anyone with alive critical faculties to read it.

Bertocci and the existentialists are not of course the only ones who have had difficulty in defining the self. Hall & Lindzey (1957) record William James as defining the self (in his 1890 book Principles of psychology) to be 'the sum total of all that a man can call his -- his body, traits and abilities; his material possessions; his family, friends and enemies; his vocation and avocation and much else' (p. 515). The idea of my friends and even my enemies being part of myself is quite bizarre and one can only say of James' definition that why he excluded anything at all from it is difficult to work out. The definition is hopelessly overinclusive and highly idiosyncratic.

A book on the 'self' that Hall & Lindzey do recommend is The ego and the self by Symonds (1951). Symonds defines the self as 'the ways in which the individual reacts to himself'. Now the self is a way of reacting. What next will it be? The obvious question is: "Why not just say what you mean and explicitly talk about how a person reacts to himself? Why create this magical entity of the self?" The answer also is obvious. When Symonds talks about the self, he wants to talk about it as if it were something like a person or at least as if it were a definable entity. If we substituted 'how a person reacts to himself on every occasion where Symonds uses the single word 'self', it would make nonsense of what was being said.

One could go on through the excellent summary of self theories that Hall & Lindzey offer, but to do so would only be to reinforce what has been pointed out already: everybody uses the word 'self' in a different and often bizarre way.

Why is this? Why is this little word such a conceptual stumbling-block to so many people? I would suggest that it is because of an elementary philosophical mistake: Nobody has realised that the word is topic-neutral. It is a grammatical word -- not a contentful word. To wax technical it is 'syncategorematic'. It is part of the grammatical machinery used to string contentful words together -- like 'the', 'and', 'if' and so on. If anyone was foolish enough to try to define what a 'the' was, then they might have as much difficulty as do the people who try to define what the 'self' is. What a downfall it is if it can be shown that the central concept in existentialist thought has no content at all and is merely a piece of grammatical machinery --- a word that does not represent anything!

The grammatical function of the word 'self' in English (and its equivalents in other languages such as 'sich' in German), is as an indicator of reflexivity. It is used to indicate that the person or thing referred to at one point in a sentence is the same as the person or thing referred to earlier in the sentence. For instance, if we wish to amplify 'he hit him' to indicate that the 'he' and the 'him' are one and the same, we make such an indication by adding 'self' to the 'him'. To do so is so customary that it would be deceptive, and hence 'ungrammatical', if we did not add on 'self' in this context. The force of the custom is indicated by the normal English practice of spelling the two words as one (unlike 'sich' in German). Much the same is true of hyphenated compounds such as 'self-conscious'. If I use the phrase, 'A self-conscious man.' I indicate that the consciousness is reflexive (i.e. it is not of the world about, but of the man discussed). There are also some contexts where we do use the word uncompounded: as in 'his better self'. Here the word is being used to indicate that what is 'better' is still the same person as the 'his' and the entire expression could be awkwardly paraphrased as 'him being better'. It is such usages as this, however, that have given rise to the careless impression that the 'self' must have a denotation of its own. Because the expression 'his better self' falls into the identical form to 'his better suit', we tend to assume that 'self' introduces as much new content as does 'suit'. Once such an assumption has been accepted, 'hypostatisation' or 'reification' has been committed. Once we have decided that because there is a separate word for it then the 'self' must be different from 'he' or 'him' (we 'reify' it), we then may proceed to 'explain' something about the man by reference to his 'self' (hypostatisation). As Maze (1954) points out, this is a 'kind of fallacy to which psychology seems especially prone'.

Now there is of course absolutely no reason why someone cannot come along and stipulate that he is going to use the word 'self to indicate something other than reflexivity. He could use it to refer to all non-spinning flying saucers if that was his fancy. The point is that 'self' is not normally used in such a totally random way. Normally, the attraction of using the word stems from an apparent conviction that people already have some idea what it means. It is this conviction which is mistaken. People cannot know what it means for the simple reason that there is basically nothing for it to mean. It is topic-neutral. People are, however, very adaptable and when so many people use 'self as if it were topic-relevant (or "informative") they do try to construct some meaning for it. If somebody started talking about 'ands' as if everybody knew what he was talking about, we could probably make some shift at working out what he might mean there too. The revealing part is the wide variety of quite different things that various people take 'self' to mean. Because it really has no conventionally accepted substantive meaning, your guess is as good as mine as to what meaning should be attached to any particular use of the word in a substantive way.

The central concept and explanatory device in existentialist theory, then, has no meaning. It is just a noise. It could become meaningful if existentialists stipulated carefully what they intended it to mean but this, it seems, is too much to ask. Bertocci's best attempt at such a definition has been shown to be equally as meaningless as the word itself. Even a contentful stipulative definition would run the risk of not being stuck to. If 'self has to be defined by reference to other words then it should be possible to continue just using those other words and avoiding the inherent ambiguity of 'self' entirely.

It follows from the above that a theory of the self cannot be used to explain what men do. A man's self does not cause him to be or to do something for the excellent reason that he is that self. Insofar as it might mean anything at all, 'self theory' is simply a deceptive synonym for psychology.



Full citation details for all references used above can be found here.