2010年1月3日 星期日

Chris Brand's The Cattell Controversy

The Cattell Controversy is an astonishingly good book. It details the history and “extraordinary productivity” of the world’s greatest psychometrician-psychologist, second-born (as Adler used to recommend) on the outskirts of Birmingham into a family of part-Scottish, self-taught entrepreneurial engineers, Raymond Bernard Cattell (1905-1998). Properly affected by the carnage of the First World War (which he saw at first-hand, working voluntarily in a military hospital in Devon), Cattell took to pacifism, socialism, vegetarianism, progressive education and eugenics, but mainly to science (moving after his first-class degree in chemistry at King’s College London to study with Burt and Spearman at University College London, then on to research arguably declining national intelligence in Leicester), and became (in Illinois, after Second World War service at Harvard) the first big computer user in psychology, a major theorist of intelligence and genetics (along with Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen), the only systematic and comprehensive thinker in empirical psychology outside behaviourism, and the leading personality test constructor (with his empirically-developed but Freud-backing ‘16 Personality Factor’ [16PF] questionnaires). Written by a former admirer, The Cattell Controversy properly identifies Cattell’s distinction of ‘fluid’ and ‘crystallized’ intelligence as a key breakthrough; and correctly assigns the ‘Big Five’ (admittedly g-ignoring) dimensions of turn-of-the-century differential psychology as “indisputably his illegitimate child.” Nicely, Tucker acknowledges Cattell’s talented last two wives, who were a big help to him with statistics and psychometry. (These areas had been the weak points of his mighty Harvard-migrated medico-anthropologist mentor, the Anglo-Scottish democratic elitist, instinct theorist and scorner of ‘race slumping,’ William McDougall -- to whom Cattell had dedicated his Psychology and the Religious Quest in 1938, and whose spirited daughter, Leslie, Cattell had failed to marry, to his great personal regret at the time).

Yet all such commendation and excellently instructive detail are emphatically not the point of this book. William Tucker, 60+, of Rutgers University-Camden, who had begun to make a name for himself in 1994 by denouncing Sir Cyril Burt (uninformed by Nicholas Mackintosh’s 1995 vindication of that splendid rogue – see Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed?), was among the most instrumental academics in denying Cattell a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ from the American Psychological Association in 1997. The reason? Cattell – like most ‘progressives’ of his day -- had had sympathies with Nazi Germany of the 1930s, had continued mildly with his ‘racism’ through his fantastically successful (and money-making) career, and finally made a hobby of racist-eugenic proposals in his retirement. He notably came to talk of possibly “phasing out” defunct races -- albeit only after extensive scientific examination of their problems and education and inducement to accept contraception or sterilization. In the course of his youthful and elderly enthusiasm, Cattell, a voracious reader, evidently knew books by German anthropologists whose tracts “had been used to provide scientific justification for the [Nazi] regime’s racial policies” and eventually wrote articles in the journal Mankind Quarterly, which journal had become by 1980 (thanks to leftist terror in the West’s ‘universities’) the only home for race-realistic social scientists in academia (but with an extra demand that writers be implicitly anti-Semitic and uncritical of Hitler). Tucker’s own experience was one of gradually learning that his idol had feet of clay -- or worse.

Of course, much of the book is the normal leftist smear job of ‘linking’ the assigned victim to Hitler and/or Holocaust denial – a hard task in Cattell’s case since he was a loyal patriot of his adopted country and was never even accused, let alone found guilty of even the ‘liberal’-invented campus offences of ‘hate speech.’ Needless to say, Cattell did not support race war, compulsory eugenics (he stipulated that even surgical sterilization would have to be voluntary – Beyondism [Cattell’s main race-eugenic work, Praeger, 1987], pp. 200, 214; TCC, p. 157), chastity-till-marriage, bans on divorce, euthanasia of the handicapped, the German invasion of Poland or the Stalin-style death camps of the Nazis. His “religion from science” did not outlaw miscegenation -- though he did think racial hybridization needed scientific scrutiny in case crucial gene-gene interactions be lost in the “shuffle” (Beyondism, p.203) (some of the interactions perhaps yielding Western classical music, Black athleticism and Chinese cuisine). He backed ethnic segregation; but then many do, not least the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland (currently separated by 13 self-chosen miles of walls and barbed wire in Belfast alone – contrary to the myth that their problems were solved by Revs Blair and Clinton) and the American Blacks and South African Whites (whose leaders, at least, would relish a state-aided population swap). Admittedly, deriving morality or politics from facts (deriving an ought from an is) attracts little philosophical favour in Anglo-Saxon circles; but controlling supposedly worthy and certainly expensive improving efforts by facts seems reasonable enough – thus outlawing the futile egalitarian endeavours by which the Left has wrecked the state-education systems of America and Britain and made school streaming (tracking) look ever-more attractive. Tucker claims Cattell was not just ‘guilty by association’ but ‘guilty by collaboration,’ at least in his (very) old age; but this amounts to no more than Cattell being admired as a scientific racist by outfits like William Pierce’s tiny anti-Semitic ‘National Alliance’ (to which the French far-right intellectual Alan de Benoist, listed as “integrable” by Cattell, had once sent a ‘delegation’….). Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries which in turn inspired Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, plainly went off at a violent tangent from Cattell’s modest proposals for raising intelligence, retaining racial treasures and reducing ethnic conflict.

Admittedly, from relatively remote Harvard of the 1930s, Cattell flirted for longer than Britain’s Eugenics Society (today the Galton Institute), with the Left’s main eventually chosen enemy, Hitler, who seemed for a while to share Churchill’s commitment to eugenics. Tucker sometimes admits that one needs to remember “the context of the time” for he probably knows that the ‘enlightened’ Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, J. M. Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb1 and the Anglo-Jewish radical Harold Laski all backed strong forms of eugenics, especially for the feeble-minded; that the great love poet, Ezra Pound, not to mention D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, P. G. Wodehouse and Labour star Oswald Mosley, had fascist sympathies or ‘worse’ – there being no other obvious way of opposing communism at the time2; that the father-to-be of Britain’s post-1945 welfare state, William Beveridge, thought it obvious to deny rights for the “unemployable” to “the franchise, civil freedom and fatherhood”; and that, fooled by the lying leftist editors of the Manchester Guardian and New York Times, ignorant people of Tucker’s own political persuasion were at that time (and for much longer) backing the mass-murderous Lenin, Stalin and their infamous police chiefs Latsis3 and Beria. And Tucker is prepared to admit that, in an economic sense, some lives are indeed worth more than others (as has to be assessed by courts when families lose a provider in a motor accident). But he weirdly declines to consider that Cattell lived through a period when a person’s worth as a scientist, artist, doctor, social worker or parent was also becoming substantially predictable and explicable from IQ. Largely ignoring the g factor, Tucker, while sweetly reasonable and well-informed on many points, misses the meat in the Cattellian sandwich.

Of course, such temporal ‘context’ is not in the end the most dignified way to excuse a self-styled rugged individualist like Cattell. How bad did the flirtation with Hitler get in Cattell’s case? Well, among all the ‘links’ in Cattell’s reading and writing, the worst that Tucker can find is probably that to the intellectual Mathilde Ludendorff (the second wife of Generalquartiermeister and war hero, Erich von Ludendorff, 1865-1937) who thought in 1928 that Hitler was being “too slow” in tackling the Jewish -- as well as the Christian -- question. But how does this truly ‘link’ Hitler to Cattell, whose own first reference to the Jews in Beyondism is to equate them with the historic English (in realistically keeping to “a race-conscious ideal”)? If the Jews were something of a model for Cattell, with their “cultural integrity,” “guided inbreeding” and “religious segregation,” then what was Hitler? Driven by his leftist agenda, the able Tucker fails to see the wood for the trees.

If Hitler had been a good White racist -- as Cattell aspired to be -- would he have triggered the 1939-45 war with Poland, Britain and France; then gone on to attack his supine and, by 1941, White-run ally, Communist Russia (only pausing in 1940 -- disastrously for him -- to help the White Italians fight the White Greeks); then, loyal to his Asian ally, Japan, have madly declared war in late-1941 on the White-dominated USA (a self-destructive declaration doubtless intended partly as revenge for American Jewry’s key assistance of White Britain against White Germany in 1917)? In short, what serious White racist could have brought about then-White Europe’s second civil war in 25 years? Hitler (accused eventually by Cattell himself of “utter lunacy” -- as in 1928 by General Ludendorff of “evil”) did not even love Germany (in which, partly as an Austrian, he had no personal or financial stake -- except in so far as it freed him from his tyrannical father and gave him the Iron Cross for bravery in the trenches -- and in the service of which he was probably sodomised by German officers as well as being gassed by the French). By 1944, Hitler regarded most Germans, especially his soldiers (of whom a million had died for him on the Eastern Front) as traitors. Hitler’s criteria of ‘racial solidarity’ should surely not pass muster at today’s Mankind Quarterly; and his use of ‘race’ was evidently a matter of convenience – rather like communists’ use of ‘democracy.’
Hitler’s adult motivations were personal, anti-Semitic, imperialist and national-socialist, not race-realist. It is the modern multicultural Left, seeking more minority voters for its empire of welfare-dependency, that forever seeks to define itself as ‘holier than Hitler’ and thus anti-White. (The left only started being anti-Hitler as it objected to the Catholic General Franco’s takeover of Spain; and it quickly swallowed its newfound pride during the 1939-1941 Nazi-Soviet Pact.) But two can and should play this game. Hitler drew less succour from Europe’s Christian Right than he did from the Left (think of the ‘liberals’ of the Oxford Union and the Nietzsche- and Heidegger-loving ‘left-bank’ collaborators of Paris). Neither was Hitler a proper racist or eugenicist – let alone IQ-ist, for the Nazis shunned IQ testing since it was Jews who did best on the tests. Koenigsburg’s Immanuel Kant and Edinburgh’s David Hume and star surgeon-professor Robert Knox were better racists than Hitler.
Funnily enough, the modern Left has lately been adopting Hitler’s anti-Semitism and pro-Islamism (for thus Hitler proposed to shake the British and French out of the Middle East, if he could get there by land, around the Black Sea). Whereas Cattell seriously and scientifically faced the world’s main problems (notably of stupidity and the resultant inefficiency, superstition and corruption throughout Africa and the Middle East), the modern Left hysterically condemns realism about where the West’s foreign problems lie, finding that its noisy Hitler-bashing frightens off most cowardly ‘conservatives’ who get anywhere near thinking of telling the truth (for which their boring degrees in ‘accountancy,’ ‘business studies’ and the worthless social science of ‘economics’ anyhow scarcely equip them).
Fortunately, Ray Cattell had both the idealism and the courage to fight in his own way for hereditarianism through a long career; and the intelligence, methodology and good luck to be proved correct about the major measurable psychological truths of the human condition which -- since love is not currently measurable -- could well be headed by the great truth of race. Cattell lived to see the growing fulfilment of his predictions as the West’s major competitor, China, with its IQ of 107+, came to have a million-man taskforce bribing mineral wealth out of long-independent Africa’s still decrepit slave-labour states; and Africa’s men and boys slaughtered, pillaged and raped in disorganized warlord armies and left their women to breed more ‘soldiers’ and prostitute daughters in the bush, supported by crazy, corruption-supporting Western ‘charitable’ operations such as that of ignoracist Irish punk rocker ‘Sir’ Bob Geldof.

Of course, Hitler’s problem had come from the French Revolution and its destruction of Christian rule; and from the failure of the French and British to accept the pan-European settlement that was on offer after Germany’s taking Paris in 1870. But the understandable German reaction to the non-acceptance of that well-earned victory did not make Germany or Hitler racist – quite the opposite, very sadly! A bit of serious racism would have done Europe a lot of good over the last 140 years; but, with the help of piously and socialistically warped (though admittedly scholarly, lucid and corner-fighting) souls like Tucker, it was not to be. So now we face le déluge after a century of disastrous socialist-backed nationalism and lately anti-Semitism, a ‘postmodern’ half-century of fanciful Sartre-inspired subjectivist, anti-essentialist, anti-elitist and ‘postmodernist’ moi, and the colonizing ‘multicultural’ invasion of millions of low-IQ third-world immigrants and foreign-recruited wives who scarcely speak English but reliably vote (‘by post,’ i.e. bullied by husbands) for the Left’s ‘welfare state.’ Already dependent on our young to pay for the years of state-enforced sub-prime multicultural American lending of 1995-2005 and the resultant property bubble and crash, we need Cattell’s English good sense, ‘Nordic’ initiative and psychologically informed compassion as never before. Thankfully, Tucker’s well-researched -- though biased and IQ-neglectful book -- will serve, for any discerning mind, as an excellent introduction to the most sophisticated, systematic and successful differential psychologist in the empiricism-respecting and eugenic4 tradition of Darwin5 and Galton.

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