WELCOME TO CHAPTER 16 OF:

Brand for the Burning!

OR: HOW I BECAME A 'SCIENTIFIC RACIST', A 'SEX REALIST'
AND 'THE PAEDOPHILE'S FRIEND'

-- AND WAS THUS WITCH-HUNTED BY THE 'LIBERAL'-LEFT, CENSORED BY VIRTUALLY EVERYBODY, SUSPENDED FROM TEACHING BY EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY AND EVENTUALLY SACKED

BY
CHRIS ('MINE'S A PEACH BRANDY') BRAND,
M.A. (OXON.)
[A.K.A. 'Congo Chris']

THE PRESENT DOCUMENT IS
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
OF TWENTY-FOUR

These autobiographical reflections are published in the Internet bi-monthly magazine, PINC, [which champions POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS], at http://cycad.com/cgi-bin/pinc beginning in July, 1997. Go back to Chapter 15?

16. The Irish poet, 1988-89
-- Battling with Piaget

Politeness about Ireland was long Britain's main form of 'political correctness.' There is little in Ireland for intellectual snobs -- except a boat, a bird, a bottle and a lot of Anglo-Irish history. Irish universities (especially those in the South) maintain a low standard in most (not, of course, all) subjects, doubtless due in part to chronic under-funding. (It costs Éire effectively a 50% rate of income tax to maintain for itself a National Health Service which even then is free for only the bottom 50% of wage-earners.) In psychology, the universities have been particularly clueless -- not liking behaviourism because it is anti-Catholic, psychoanalysis because it is anti-Catholic and the London School both because it is anti-Catholic (in its eugenic tendency) and because it offends the egalitarianism that is intrinsic to Éirish, anti-British nationalism.

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

      Fortunately, my Irish connections also brought me a few tangible intellectual gains. One of the very first 'Edinburgh' IT/IQ studies was in fact run in Dublin (by the delectable Susan Hartnoll, with help from Ireland's leading psychometrician, Tom Kellaghan, at St Patrick's College of Education, Drumcondra). Also, since I had given up Brit. J. Psychol. (both as a dead loss in its own right and because it had not published the Anderson & Brand paper), I was glad to have Irish J. Psychol. (a refereed journal, unlike Hans Eysenck's PAID at that time) take my evidence of only a modest IQ-type rise for  Scottish children on the Wechsler scales from 1961 to 1983/4 (Brand, Freshwater & Dockrell, 1989). However, it was my introduction to the cerebrally palsied young Irish poet, Davoren Hanna, that was the most important to me intellectually. It was learning Davoren's remarkable story1 and meeting him which convinced me that the Edinburgh IT/IQ work may have touched on the essential nature of human intelligence.

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

      Once upon a time, the practitioners of 'applied psychology'2 had been allowed to talk -- among themselves, at least -- of 'multivariate causation.' This term usually cloaked ignorance about causation with a mantle of piety: 'multiple regression analysis' might show many statistical factors 'contributing to' a dependent variable, but most such 'contributions' were vanishingly small and unlikely to be replicated in further research.3 Typically, a writer's espousal of 'multivariate causation' concealed a reluctance to acknowledge the leading role of the g factor in educational and vocational achievement.

      In the 1970's, the fast-growing special interest group of 'developmental' psychology would allow itself and its students to sing choruses to themselves about 'interaction' -- meaning thereby to banish equally the two demons of behaviourism and hereditarianism. The ideology was that development occurred by 'interaction', and thus that any currently backward child would surely catch up once enough opportunities for interaction were provided. It was a cunning deceit -- a cross between old-fashioned social environmentalism on the one hand and the psychogeneticists' idea of 'genetic-environmental covariation' on the other. Genes and environment can be correlated because parents supply both, because parents adapt the environment to a child's nature or, most importantly, because growing children increasingly select and fashion their own micro-environments -- by choice of friends, TV programmes, etc. according to their own pre-existing personalities, including genetic propensities. Robert Plomin and Sandra Scarr would soon begin spelling out and providing evidence for such entirely non-mysterious causes of final psychological differences between people.4

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

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

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

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

THE DANCING BEAR5

Festivities will never stop at Berlin's wall.
Streets that were once lugubrious grey
now entangle as lovers do through
the long-limbed summer nights.

Seeking admission to the nuptial feast,
flesh once striped by searchlight-beams
now dances arm in arm with comrades
on the other side of freedom's wall.

Slow caravans of eager immigrants
bring knapsacked hopes in their hearts.
Light kindles the naked callous stones
and luminous dreams mutate the skies.

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

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

      What with the Edinburgh IT/IQ work and Tom Bouchard's demonstration of high (Burt-level!) similarities in IQ between separated identical twins, I was beginning to feel there was a revamped story about IQ which I could tell. Admittedly, it would be a little naughty of me to try out Davoren's story and my own conclusions at a private conference of the Pioneer Foundation that was meant to focus on race. But I had to try out the Pioneers: Were they really interested in IQ? By 1989 it was plain that little further research on IQ would ever be done unless there could be a breakthrough for a realistic yet individual-centred account of human intelligence.

 

ENDNOTES to Chapter 16

  1. See e.g. The g Factor, Chapter 2, p. 65.
  2. By 1970, 'applied psychology' was unfailingly the sub-intellectual rump of psychology. It involved those who probably believed in g but had neither the courage nor the ability to defend their belief against the rising tides of behaviourism and Piagetianism.
  3. Notoriously, any single statistical multiple regression analysis capitalizes on chance.
  4. For a full exposition, see Brand, 1988, in D. Anderson, Full Circle, London, Social Affairs Unit.
  5. The bear is symbolic of Berlin -- as the bulldog was once of Britain.

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Chris Brand, June 1997.