Saturday, August 14, 2021

Lashings (*)

Note: This essay contains several occurrence of a very strong racial slur. 


Once upon a time, the three bold Gollywogs, Golly, Woggie, and Nigger decided to go for a walk on Bumblebee common. Golly wasn’t quite ready, so Woggie and Nigger said they would start off without him, and Golly would catch up with them as soon as he could. So off went Woggie and Nigger arm in arm, singing merrily their favourite song, which as you may have guessed was Ten Little Nigger Boys.”


Enid Blyton



There are people in this world who are so holy, so sanctified, so iconic that they are effectively beyond criticism.

To think a word against them is to abuse all their followers; their fan base; their compatriots.

Jesus Christ; the Prophet Mohammed; the Queen; Edward Colston.

And Enid Blyton.


The author of Noddy and the Magic Faraway Tree has been cancelled. And by cancelled, I mean “A small memorial has been erected near her place of birth.”

"Enid Blyton, Children’s Writer, Lived Here", it says.

Pretty shocking stuff.

I don’t know if America has an equivalent to the English system of Blue Plaques. They are small signs, attached to old buildings, that tell you that so-and-so, the inventor of such-and-such, lived here from such a date to such a date. Anyone can put a name plate on a property, and lots of people do, but the official Blue Plaques are surprisingly prestigious because English Heritage only puts up a limited number each year.

I have very mixed feelings about Blyton. I never read her stuff myself. I do have a vivid memory of being traumatised at nursery school when someone read us the one in which black people steal Noddy’s clothes and he has to crawl home in the nude. (Please tell me I didn’t dream that?) But I work in a library and I have noticed that a small number of her books—the Fives and the Sevens and the Jolly Hockey Sticks ones—are the kinds of books that children positively want to read. That counts for something.

Sometimes a reader—often an older lady—will take out a great pile of books, often crime stories and romances, and say “Oh, I know its all rubbish really”. I always reply “It is certainly not rubbish if you like reading it.” I am happy to say the same thing about lemonade and treasure maps. If kids like it, it must be the sort of thing that kids like, and being able to come up with the kind of things that kids like, and that kids carry on liking forty years after you died, is worth something. A great deal. You certainly deserve a plaque on the side of your house.

Unfortunately, English Heritage also has one of those newfangled websites, and on the website it gives a little more biographical information about the seven hundred celebrities whose houses have got little blue signs on them. Of Mrs Blyton it says:

“Blyton’s work has been criticised during her lifetime and after for its racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit.”

And this is enough to make white people who liked the Secret Seven when they were nippers go into overdrive.

Blyton? 

Lack of literary merit? 

As well say that Jesus was gay or that one of the Prophet’s wives was a prostitute. If the Blytonians could declare a fatwa we can be sure they would.



The BBC recently launched a streaming service called Britbox.

It has all of Doctor Who; all of Blake’s Seven; very nearly all of Gerry Anderson; all of Sapphire and Steel, a decent chunk of the Avengers—and that’s without scratching the surface of dear, dear Sir Larry doing Shylock and dear, dear Sir Alec doing Malvolio and Our Friends In The North Revisited. There is no particular reason for me ever to leave the house again.

But this sort of thing comes with a cost. Do I, in fact, want to re-watch Grange Hill? Do I want to find out that the Tomorrow People consisted primarily of wooden acting (as in “they wouldn’t act”), cardboard sets, exposition to camera, plots which would make the worst Doctor Who writer cringe (along with a very trippy set of opening credits and a stonking theme tune, admittedly.)

I have always been the sort of person who would rather have the text than the memory of the text: I think that I am richer, not poorer, because my memories of Daddy reading Winnie-the-Pooh have largely been overwritten by dozens and dozens of re-readings of A.A Milne’s actual stories. But on the other paw, the reason I watch Star-Wars-Episode-Four-A-New-Hope a hundred times, and the Bad Batch at all, is because I want to drill through the text and get back to the thing I experienced on or about my twelfth birthday. I want to watch the film over and over but I want it to feel like it did when I had only seen it once.

This is, of course, impossible.

This is, I think, what people mean when they say that someone has “spoiled” Richard II by introducing tanks and army uniforms and black people. They say that they don’t like theatres “mucking about” with Shakespeare; they say they want his pure virgin words unsullied by some producer’s ideas. But what they really want is their memory of that one evening when they were young and in love and saw dear, dear, Sir Donald doing “this royal throne of kings” at Stratford. This is also true of people who think that Jodie Whittaker has spoiled Doctor Who and the European Union has spoiled bananas. I have spent 20 years making fun of the Star Wars fan who said that George Lucas had raped his childhood, but I completely understand what he meant.

I totally get that Enid Blyton is a totemic writer. I am not impressed with the people who take an instrumental view of fiction. I don’t think that Blyton is good because reading is virtuous and Blyton’s writing was an entry-level drug that got some kids hooked on classics. But I am very impressed with people who go as misty and gooey when they think of Kirrin Island and the Land of Magical Medicines as I do when I think of the Tatooine Cantina and the Hundred Acre Wood. That’s what stories are for.

Once you have thrown up a Colgate ring of confidence around your first reading, then any encounter with the actual text feels like a violation. People who believe that the Bible is the exact word of God have rarely read it. Sci-fi geeks are particularly prone to seeing critiques of venerable movies and comic books as vicious attacks on the core of their being. Normal people do it as well. People have been literally murdered for thinking that United (or Rovers) isn’t a particularly good football team. Maybe watching high budget fan-fic in which it turns out that Threepio was kit-built by Darth Vader really does feel like being sexually assaulted? Or maybe the fan in question only meant that Lucas had robbed and pillaged his childhood.

And so we cast our eyes to the heavens and cry out “I deny this reality!”

The Tomorrow People never did have bad acting and bad special effects. It had very good acting and very good special effects. It is just that your palette is not sufficiently attuned to appreciate them. Only initiates can see the value of the sacred text; if you are not an initiate, you shouldn’t be allowed to read it.

You may also, if you chose, go full Jeffcote on their arse.

“You can’t appreciate the very good special effects and the acting because THEY won’t let you. THEY have BRAINWASHED you into thinking that if it isn’t a late night Channel Four movie sub-titled in Latin then it isn’t proper literature. Even though no-one really likes that stuff. THEY are just jealous of our jet-packs. Or in this case, jaunting belts."

When the Hundred Acre Wood is under siege on moral or political grounds, the impetus to retreat from reality is even greater. If the Famous Five is racist, then it is not a good book. If the Famous Five is not a good book, then my memories of the Famous Five are inauthentic. But my memories are authentic; so it must be a good book; so it cannot be racist. Stop looting and pillaging my childhood.

You can do this in different ways. You can deny the tao. Racism and racist language are bad now but they were not bad in 1944 when the books were written.

*They were written in another time and were not inappropriate in any way, and should not be judged by today’s “standards”.

*Her work is a reflection of the life and times she grew up in. Her work should be left alone.

*You are judging these by today’s standards, they were written in a different era, we had vastly different standards back then.

You can appeal to that strange mental operation called “intention” and say that the text is not racist because the writer did not intend the text to be racist.

These people need to get off their high bloody horses and accept them for the innocent way that they were written. I am quite sure Enid Blyton would never even have thought of anything like that

* You can say that Enid Blyton’s books have some quality called “innocence” or that they came from “simpler times” and that this acts as a sort of literary fainites.

* Do not destroy children’s innocent pleasure in reading by putting a nasty spin on things.

* But let’s not forget, these were written for innocents.

You can launch a counter assault: people who say that this text is racist are puritans, or unemployed, or they are wasting their time on an essentially pointless activity.

*Triggered commie!

*Media controlling these complaint Muppets!

*PC Idiots!

*Get a life people & stop trying to change the past,

*No, people need to get a life.

*Where does this rubbish emanate from - the ‘do gooders’ who have nothing else to do than waste their and other peoples time.

*I wish the bloody do-gooders could find something useful to do instead of criticising dead people.

*Please woke folk, get over yourselves and find something more productive to do

You can claim—a very common one, this—that critics are finding only in the text what they bring to the text; that they, being mean spirited and hateful of literature, are combing the text in order to read things into it which aren’t there.

*You have to wonder about the minds that twist everything toward sexual innuendo—they live in a skewed world

*Everything is looked into under a magnifying glass for errors and negativity rather than just looking at the positives.

*If you have a twisted mind you can read anything you like into a story.

You can even claim that there is a secret agenda in play

* I think there is an agenda to kill imagination and creativity, magical wonder. I think they want us all to conform to one way of thinking.

But the most extreme argument is the most common one. It is a plea to disengage faculties. A faith-position which says that reading takes place in some kind of zen, sub-rational state. There is no sub-text. Three bold rag-dolls named after a racial slur do not imply anything about the writer’s attitude to race because books are not like that. Repeated appearances of dishonest gypsies does not in any way suggest that the writer thought that gypsies were, on the whole, dishonest. Stories are just stories and should be allowed to just be stories. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream to toy-town.

*Let our children enjoy the stories as we did way back to our grandparents time.

*What nonsense is this?! They are books. Stories. Creative writing. Artistic endeavours are subjective and open to interpretation. We cannot judge past results by today’s standards. Let’s just judge for them for what they are. Which is, tools for escapism and to allow your imagination to free fall into a magical existence.


Interestingly, the Blytonians are very reluctant to make the two defences which would certainly hold water.

They could point out that words do, in fact, change their meanings. I doubt that when Enid Blyton wrote “Noddy and Big Ears were feeling gay...” or introduced two protagonists called (really) Fanny and Dick she was consciously inserting double entendres into a kids book. The words are dirty now, but they genuinely weren’t dirty then. Modern editions very sensibly change “gay” to “merry” and “Dick” to “Ricky”. (The counter-wokes scream about P.C Gonemad, but this is really no different from changing Autumn to Fall in the American edition, or Noddy to Oui-Oui in the French one.) Demonstrate to me that in 1968 the N-word was not current, or not a slur, and I shall concede the argument. 

The Blytonians could also defend their scripture in the way I have defended Talons of Weng Chiang, Cerebus the Aardvark, Othello, the Ring Cycle and practically every other book that has ever been written in the history of the human race.

“Yes, these texts contains sinophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism, but this does not make then irreducibly sinophobic, misogynistic, anti-semitic and racist texts. We can praise the story telling, but condemn the bad words. We can enjoy the tunes, but deplore the politics. They are good stories, which I loved and love, but which I can now see contain some bad attitudes (and, in fact, bad special effects). There is celebration of the story telling and condemnation of the bad attitudes.”

Why is this so hard?

The  truth is, the Anti-Woke-Mob agree with the Woke Mob. If Enid Blyton really did refer to black people by using the n-word; if Talons of Weng Chiang really did contain vicious caricatures of Chinese people; and if Colston really had been a slaver then we really would have to burn their books and rip their statues down. If a modern author published a children’s book about Three Bold Wankers called Cock, Willy and Cuntty (who sang their favourite song, The Good Ship Venus) the Blytonians would immediately form a mob and start screaming “ban this evil filth now”. As Enid Blyton herself did in her lifetime.

Since they want to keep their books and their statues they have to deny reality. This racist thing is not racist. That space ship does not look like a cardboard cut-out. Slavery did not exist. Or if it did Colston was not a slaver. Or if he was, the slaves didn't mind. The least reward they will have is that the memory of Kirrin island and the Lab and Olde England shall remain ever clear and unstained in their heart and neither shall fade nor grow stale.

The Woke Mob and the Anti-Woke-Mob are in agreement. The two sides of every political debate always are. The pigs are always turning into men and the men are always turning into pigs. We are always meeting the enemy and it is always us.






Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com
 





(*) Of ginger beer. 

155 comments:

Mike Taylor said...

“Blyton’s work has been criticised during her lifetime and after for its racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit.”

I do think "lack of literary merit" is a bit gratuitously cruel, especially in light of the fact that they put the plaque up because of her literature. Surely whatever the role of English Heritage does encompass, it does not encompass literary criticism? If a literary figure is racist and xenophobic, doesn't it suffice to point out their racism and xenophobia? Does Barbara Cartland's blue plaque mention the lack of literary merit in her work?

(As an aside, I can't find the phrase you quoted at https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/enid-blyton/ — is there another website?)

Mike Taylor said...

In other news ...

"This is also true of people who think that Jodie Whittaker has spoiled Doctor Who"

Objection, m'lud. It's perfectly possible to think that Jodie Whittaker has contributed to spoiling Doctor Who by being a not-very-good actor doing a not-very-good impression of David Tennant. (While of course recognising that Chris Chibnall is far more culpable.)

Andrew Rilstone said...

Objection, m'lud.

My learned friend is perfectly well aware that I mean "some of the people who think that Jodie Whittaker has spoiled Doctor Who."

As an aside, I can't find the phrase you quoted...

You are right. Big Brother has evidently forced them to erase "lack of literary merit" and replace it with "formulaic plots and deliberate use of simple language". They have also airbrushed out the general comment about xenophobia and replaced it with a more PC version about a particular publisher turning down a particular book. I think that the original version should be allowed to stand because cancelling it is the same as changing history and if we do not remember what people wrote on their website three weeks ago we are condemned to repeat ourselves.

Mike Taylor said...

Indeed, the case of English Heritage erasing their own history is a genuinely interesting development. It's all very Inceptiony.

For what it's worth, I think "formulaic plots and deliberate use of simple language" is much better than "lack of literary merit", as it specifies precisely what her writing is like rather than merely expressing an evaluative opinion of it. But I bemoan the removal of the honest and expressive "xenophobia".

Andrew Stevens said...

Demonstrate to me that in 1968 the N-word was not current, or not a slur, and I shall concede the argument.

Agatha Christie, who was a very nice old lady, wrote "Ten Little N-words" in 1939. The word was, of course, changed in the American editions to "Indians" because of its history here. Ian Fleming, who was not really a very nice man at all, included the N-word in "Live and Let Die" in 1955. He was, or at least he claimed to be, shocked that it was censored in the U.S. He claimed he saw nothing offensive about the word.

1968? I'm guessing she should have known better. Apparently Enid Blyton's racism was criticized at the time. But it's unquestionably the case that the n-word - which, after all, is only the Latin word for "black" with an extra 'g' to anglicize it - became a hateful slur (perhaps the worst in all of history?), rather than simply a normal descriptive word, in the American South some time after the U.S. Civil War and it took a while - well into the 20th century - for the British and the rest of the English-speaking world to catch on.

Andrew Stevens said...

I'm not saying Agatha Christie was not racist (and had other typical national bigotries of her time), by the way. Some of her caricatures of Americans are quite offensive, frankly. That was typical for British writers of the time and, as an American, I prefer to overlook it. I was quite shocked to notice, when reading Dracula to my daughter recently, that the cowboy American Quincey Morris, was a pretty straightforward hero and dies a martyr at the end. (John and Mina Harker name their first-born son after him in gratitude.) I am so used to American characters from British writers of that period being absurd stereotypes that this surprised me. Perhaps this was because Stoker was Irish?

Andrew Stevens said...

Tangentially, I am reminded of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I have heard people suggest that Ebenezer Scrooge was a caricature of a Jew (stingy, doesn't like Christmas, etc.). But we know that if Dickens wanted to write an anti-Semitic caricature, he wouldn't just not mention the Jewishness out of squeamishness or something (see Fagin). Scrooge, of course, is a parody of my ancestors - he is straightforwardly a Puritan.

Aonghus Fallon said...

A lot of Blyton’s stuff was rewritten around thirty years ago. I remember because there was an article in an English Sunday paper about it (of the ‘When Will the Madness Stop?’ variety). One detail in particular sticks in my mind. Apparently when Noddy first arrives in Toytown he gets work in a local garage. The garage owner is particularly fierce Gollywog who was replaced by a doll called Mr Sparks.

So this sort of thing has a long history - at least, when it comes to Blyton.

‘The Tomorrow People never did have bad acting and bad special effects. It had very good acting and very good special effects. It is just that your palette is not sufficiently attuned to appreciate them.’

While I know this statement is knowingly ironic, I’m not sure just how knowingly ironic, it is?

I do know what you mean about revisiting old childhood favourites. I watched an episode of ‘Space 1999’ last year, and it was terrible.

postodave said...

The racism in Enid Blyton is bizarre and extreme. It boils down to 'The English, the English, the English are best. I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest!' For example there is a story about a French girl going to an English school and we learn that the French have no sense of honour. The girl is converted and the head mistress asks her at the end to take the English sense of honour back to France with her. No one seems to have thought how useless having a sense of honour no one shares would be. And, as a working class kid I had never come across this sense of honour. In fact that is one of the interesting things about Blyton as a writer, she is read avidly by people who do not share the cultural world she takes for granted. I sometimes got confused by the way my parents values were nothing like those of the 'goodies' in the Blyton books. She certainly does not get working class people who are always depicted as dim or dishonourable. So why did we and do we read her?

Andrew Stevens said...

I do see, however, that The Three Golliwogs, in which the offensive word is used as a character name, was written in 1944, not 1968 (which was when Enid Blyton died). I certainly think one can defend Blyton's use in 1944 on the grounds that the word was not considered a slur yet in Britain. An American author of the same period would not receive the same pass as I am willing to grant British writers.

For example there is a story about a French girl going to an English school and we learn that the French have no sense of honour.

Could you cite the name of this story?

Andrew Rilstone said...

“We” read her because she has a breathless, direct, narrative style, with action presented mostly as dialogue, in which independent children have thrilling but not threatening adventures with no adults to get in the way, and this appeals hugely to kids of a certain age. Make small changes to the text where necessary, or put in critical apparatus pointing out the problematic areas in kid-appropriate language, and carry on publishing them as long as kids carry on reading them.

Worth noting that while the adventure stories and school stories remain popular, the darling little fairy stories about naughty little pink pixies have fallen totally out of print — not because of political correctness but because that kind of writing is no longer enjoyed by most children. Noddy exists as an intellectual property, but the original books are little read.

postodave said...

"Could you cite the name of this story?"
Yes, it's called Claudine at St. Claire's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_at_St.Clare%27s
The wikipedia page gives a good summary of the class based morality:
"As is typical in Blyton's boarding school novels, class lines are drawn sharply. St Clare's is an upper-class domain, and its pupils are from upper class (if not always fabulously wealthy) backgrounds. With wealth, however, comes responsibility - the girls are expected to treat any lower-class people with the respect that goes with their own privileged positions. Lower class girls are seen to try to fit into St Clare's by deception, but their class lies are unmasked, to their great shame. Being lower class is not considered intrinsically bad, but lower class girls are expected to know their place in society and are not able to fit into the St Clare's milieu. Eileen, for example, is the daughter of Matron, and has a brother with a working-class name - Eddie - who gets into trouble. All these things are marks of a lower class girl. This book shows a moral - Never judge others or yourself from the amount of wealth you have, or family background; always see one for the person they are."
But does not even mention the French lack honour subplot. The girls are put on their honour not to sample the strawberries set out for parents day. Claudine tries one, and says something like 'I do not like zis English honour, it stops you doing things you want to do.' At my secondary school some lads got into trouble for stealing fifty pounds of bananas from the canteen. The deputy head held a mock trial and said, 'I know kids nick stuff, a few sweets and so on, but when fifty pounds of bananas go missing and children have to miss their lunch, I know it can only be . . . ' Honour never came into it - a different world.

Andrew Rilstone said...

My bad: I think 1968 was the date the book was reprinted, with the term “gollywog” intact, but the names changed to Wiggy, Waggy and Wolly.

(I read that one running joke in the story is that the gollywogs all look alike…. Can this be true?)

Andrew Rilstone said...

My bad: I think 1968 was the date the book was reprinted, with the term “gollywog” intact, but the names changed to Wiggy, Waggy and Wolly.

(I read that one running joke in the story is that the gollywogs all look alike…. Can this be true?)

postodave said...

“We” read her because she has a breathless, direct, narrative style, with action presented mostly as dialogue, in which independent children have thrilling but not threatening adventures with no adults to get in the way, and this appeals hugely to kids of a certain age.
I get that but for it to work you also have to identify with the heroes and heroines. It's not true of all fiction but that is the way these stories work, that's how the spell is cast. And I would expect the cultural differences to be a barrier to that but they are not. I suspect that, in my case, what I did was not enter her fictional world but to imagine the world I lived in was more like the world she created.
When I was a little older someone did ask me to join a secret organisation. He was suspended from school at the time for taking pictures of girls in the changing room - so that should have been a clue that we were not in Blyton world. He swore us to secrecy about this secret club he had joined when he lived in the channel islands. When my dad asked why I was 3 hours late home from school I said I had been sworn to secrecy, thinking that would be enough since the 5 find outers expected the working class boy Ern not to tell his uncle the local plod about the case they were working on when they swore him to secrecy. It did not work out like that and like the cowardly Ern I cracked under threat of a beating - not something my dad routinely threatened.

Make small changes to the text where necessary, or put in critical apparatus pointing out the problematic areas in kid-appropriate language, and carry on publishing them as long as kids carry on reading them.

I would not want them banned. There is a lot that is good about them. Even morally I think the world would be more a better place than a worse place if people did act like Blyton heroes - but it's a morality that would only work if most people were in on it and that's not going to happen.

The trouble is the racism and classism is not just in odd words. Prince Paul of Baronia is Northern European and is brave and resourceful, almost as good as the British kids. Gussy, the Prince of Tauri-Hessia is Eastern European, long haired, weak and pompous. The implicit race scale of British Imperialism is just assumed. The working class kids are always ignoble and a bit dim.

There are times when she attempts something more subtle. In Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm there are three town children wih arty parents who have to live on the farm after their house burns down. Blyton clearly favours the country kids but both sides learn from each other. The same thing happens in Those Dreadful Children, where I one set of kids are meant to be more lower class. The two sides learn from each other.

At the end of the day kids will read what they read. You can talk about it with them to some extent and question it but if you could decide what was good or bad to read you'd be a monster wouldn't you?

Worth noting that while the adventure stories and school stories remain popular, the darling little fairy stories about naughty little pink pixies have fallen totally out of print — not because of political correctness but because that kind of writing is no longer enjoyed by most children. Noddy exists as an intellectual property, but the original books are little read.

There is some good nature writing in The Adventure of Pip, which is about a Pixie. But it didn't pull me back the way the adventure stories did.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Thank you: this is a very subtle and nuanced commentary on Blyton. It hadn't occurred to me that the whole idea of secret societies could be distinctly problematic. I never read Blyton; I only note that some of her books are still very popular with some children. My fantasy was more clearly demarked as fantasy when I was that age: The Tripods and Blast Off and Woomera, and very quickly Tolkien and George Lucas, with Stan Lee the presiding spirit over my whole life.

Mike Taylor said...

My personal history happens to be that the first "proper" book I ever read — by which I mean words with the occasional picture, not pictures with a few words here and there — was Secret Seven on the Trail. Unsurprisingly, I don't remember much about it nearly half a century later, but it does make it hard for me to dislike Enid Blyton as much as I feel I ought to.

I am firmly in the "Change the obviously offensive words and keep them in print" camp, while being sympathetic to postodave's observation that the racism doesn't just crop up in Bad Words but in Blyton's pervasive assumptions. I suspect that kids in the age-range these books work for are unlikely to pick up on (for example) the idea that Eastern Europeans are less to be trusted than Northern Europeans.

postodave said...

' I suspect that kids in the age-range these books work for are unlikely to pick up on (for example) the idea that Eastern Europeans are less to be trusted than Northern Europeans.'
Oh agreed, but there is a pervasive, the more different the less trustworthy thing going on alongside a version of the white man's burden. And northern European was looks were the Nazi ideal.

postodave said...

Thanks

"Thank you: this is a very subtle and nuanced commentary on Blyton. It hadn't occurred to me that the whole idea of secret societies could be distinctly problematic. I never read Blyton; I only note that some of her books are still very popular with some children. My fantasy was more clearly demarked as fantasy when I was that age: The Tripods and Blast Off and Woomera, and very quickly Tolkien and George Lucas, with Stan Lee the presiding spirit over my whole life."
As a child I was not allowed to buy books. My dad thought it was a waste of money when you could use the library for nowt. But Blyton's could be picked up at fetes second hand and I read loads of them. With this secret society, my dad was obviously very worried that I was three hours late home from school and saying I was sworn to secrecy would have been like a red rag to a bull. On this expedition we had broken into an empty house, and it was breaking in since it had been boarded up to prevent just that. The lad we were with was talking about finding things and selling them which as my dad said probably meant finding things before they were lost. Kids having secrets from their parents is healthy up to a point but when the secrets are about petty crime it becomes a concern. I work with teenagers and in the last couple of years gangs have become a major problem in rural areas. There is a certain glamour around them as well as the chance of making loads of money selling hard drugs. Once the secrets are not innocent it can go to some very dark places. And secret is a favourite word of child abusers. That's certainly not Enid Blyton's fault. She helped create a special magic word that then got appropriated.

Stan Lee got me in trouble with my dad as well. I put toothpaste on my hands and made prints on the bathroom wall. 'Bloody Spiderman,' he said, 'You're not reading those comics anymore.

postodave said...

I wanted to check if some of my memories of Blyton books were accurate. There are some pretty extensive plot summaries on the internet. I found out that in Those Dreadful Children there is also a Christian sub plot. The slightly prissy, cleaner, more upper class family are Christians who are trying to convert, or perhaps more precisely 'educate' the dirty lower class heathen family. Blyton is obviously with the Christians but also accepts that they have something to learn from the more physical culture of the heathens. Its almost as if she thought it would be good to combine the muscular values of heathenism with Christianity to build something more robust; a sort of muscular Christianity. Anyway, it's more subtle than than the conversion of Eustace in The Narnia books - Lewis certainly seems to think there could be nothing of value in these effete vegetarian non drinkers who send their children to experimental schools. But maybe the conversion, like the landscape had to be more archetypal in Narnia.
I then found that no one agrees with my identification of Baronians as vaguely Germanic. It is suspected they too are Eastern European. But I found there is a book that analyses all this in detail, why Prince Paul is seen as being not quite as good as the English, and the whole tie in with British Imperialism. It picks up on the attitude to the French as well, who are seen as bit silly and disrespectful of property unlike the level headed English. The book is called, Goodly Is Our Heritage: Children's Literature, Empire, and the Certitude of Character by Rashna Singh. There is quite a lot of it on Google Books.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Jazus - I thought you were joking about the Gollywog's names! Weirdly enough, we had a lot of books at home, but very few Blyton books - one of which was the 1969 edition of 'The Three Gollywogs'. (I actually think we got it out of the library and never returned it) so I guess this is why I thought you were making the names up?

postodave said...

This may seem obsessive but I found a review of the book set in Baronia on the Enid Blyton Society website that says, 'The general feel to Baronia is akin to Austria or Switzerland or the German Harz Mountains.' So I am not the only one who thought this was set in Northern Europe. So yar boo sucks to Wikipedia that said it was in Eastern Europe. All those bear like retainers. Of course, Blyton world is only loosely based on our reality. Years after reading The Sea of Adventure I wondered where it was set. It's sort of the Shetland islands but with all the tides made safe for sailing; nowhere that could really exist. There is not really room for a partly wild, vaguely German country with room for an entire lost people in a forest anywhere on the map. The point is they were white Anglo-Saxon and jolly nearly as good as the English.

Andrew Stevens said...

Whatever Enid Blyton's pros or cons either literarily or morally, I would be willing to defend her on her use of the N-word in 1944. I think I have strong historical evidence that British people did not regard the word as offensive at the time, even though Americans did already.

Andrew Stevens said...

Hell, in 1966, the British still thought it was all right to include the word in an episode of Doctor Who. This would never have even been considered on U.S. television at the time. (Yes, the word was used a couple of times in "edgy" shows in the 1970s, but the word was always used by a black person and it was played for laughs.)

Mike Taylor said...

Really??! Which episode?

Andrew Rilstone said...

The Celestial Toymaker; but only in the context of the "eenie, meanie, minie, mo" rhyme.

The BBC guidelines said as early as the 1940s that the word could never be used to describe a black person (but could be used specifically of a black-face musical act.)

Andrew Rilstone said...

"British people did not regard the word as offensive at that time."

I have a number of issues with this, but it is past my bedtime, so I will limit myself to saying

"What do you mean 'we', kemo sabe?"

Andrew Rilstone said...

I guess my question is:

When you say that "British" people did not "regard" the word as offensive, are you saying

Black people did not find the word offensive

White people did not know that black people found the word offensive.

White people knew that black people found the word offensive, but didn't care

postodave said...

I suspect Blyton was taking a side and using a word some people thought should not be used quite deliberately. I think the reason she would do this is because she thought people were being over sensitive about language. There is a bit in one of her school stories where someone calls a fat girl name Alma Pudden 'Pudding' and she takes offence. Blyton comments along the lines that if she had laughed and said something like, 'Yes, I am a bit puddingy', the girls would have seen that she was a good sport. Blyton can have a hero who is a bit overweight as long as he does not mind everyone calling him 'Fatty'. So she probably thought black people were being a bit precious about language and this was a way of addressing the issue. So I would guess she knew some black people found the word offensive and thought they should grow out of it. I'm not trying to defend that but explain it.

While I was in Norfolk this week I popped into Peter's Bookshop in Sheringham. It's a great second hand bookshop and I knew he would have some Enid Blyton. He had four shelves full of various ages and conditions. If I had wanted to I could have replaced my entire childhood collection more or less. And there were stacks of the bedtimes stories and pixie stories. There were two books I wanted to check out. One was The Secret of Killimooin, which I wanted to consult on the 'Where was Baronia meant to be' question. The other was The Secret Mountain because that has a black character in it. I got a 1978 edition of that which means the language may (or may not) have been purged. But there are enough clues left. I'll get back on that later.

postodave said...

It is fifty years since I last read The Secret Mountain and I could not remember much about it. I can remember exactly where and when I read it. I found an old hardback copy at my grans, and for some reason I was sleeping on a camp bed downstairs. My clearest memory is of a picture of the pane flying through the sky with a cup of cocoa beneath it. An image combining the adventurous and the homely which is the appeal of the book. I could not remember the black character at all. There are several black extras but one boy from an African village befriend the children and plays a key role. He is shown to be intelligent and resourceful; it is he rather than any of the while children who finds the difficult and dangerous way into the mountain. However, we are very much in the world of Rider Haggard here a secret tribe inside a mountain. The local tribesman are depicted as savage and superstitious. The boy fits a familiar Blyton trope, the kindly but simple child, with a cruel guardian, who befriends the heroes and comes to adore one of them with a fervour close to worship - Blyton has used this with model with the child being Indian in other books, but also Gypsy and Welsh and working class - the superiority of the English upper classes being recognised by these holy innocents. While the boy Mafumo is shown to be brave and resourceful, he is also shown to be superstitious and fearful. In this he is unlike the English boys, who are admittedly a bit older and never cry or show fear. Prince Paul is not English but the others are glad to see that when he is going to be sacrificed to the sun god he comes out smiling so he can die like an English boy. If you asked Blyton I suspect she would have said this was about culture rather than race in the physical sense. These lesser cultures need the guidance of the English to move away from their savagery and superstition.

Rashna Singh heads her chapter on Blyton with a quote from her in which she says how popular her books are all around the world, and she notes, 'I am perforce bringing to them the ideas and ideals of a race of children alien to them, the British. I am the purveyor of those ideals all over the world, and I am perhaps planting a few seeds . . . that may bear good fruit; in particular, I hope with the German children, who, oddly enough, are perhaps more taken with my books than any other foreign race . . . ' Clearly she was hoping that if the Germans took on board her message they would not go starting another war in Europe. The plan seems to have worked.

Andrew Stevens said...

Black people did not find the word offensive

This is my guess, yes. That the large majority of British black people with no connection to the U.S. would not have found the word offensive until at least the 1950s. They had not yet been conditioned to find it offensive. We see this continually, of course, with all the replacements for the word. Plenty of people eventually came to find Negro (though it occurs in United Negro College Fund) or colored people (though it occurs in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) offensive, but obviously they were once merely meant as descriptive, just as we might use "black people" today. (And there are certainly people who want to get rid of that as well.)

Now there are words which simply began as slurs. I'm pretty sure nobody ever thought the words "gook" or "wop" were anything but slurs. In the reverse, the word "WASP" actually did begin as an intentional slur. It just didn't stay that way and if somebody calls me a WASP, I wouldn't be offended nor think they were trying to give offense.

Andrew Stevens said...

We see this same treadmill, of course, with efforts to describe - I don't even know what the polite term for it nowadays is - mental retardation. The word "moron" was originally used scientifically in the early 20th century to mean an adult with a mental age of about 8-12 years old. It became offensive pretty rapidly.

Andrew Stevens said...

The BBC guidelines said as early as the 1940s that the word could never be used to describe a black person

The BBC, by its nature as a worldwide news-gathering organization, is quite cosmopolitan. It would not have escaped their notice that there were many more English-speaking people in the U.S. than in Britain, a fact which (I think) often escapes the notice of the average British person even today.

Andrew Stevens said...

I'm sure however that part of the issue was just that Britain barely had any black people in the country. 1944 represented a peak for black people in Britain, but almost all of them were American GIs. That peak wasn't surpassed until 1958.

postodave said...

The BBC guidelines said as early as the 1940s that the word could never be used to describe a black person (but could be used specifically of a black-face musical act.)

Well here is the BBC in 1963 breaking that guideline on it's flagship satire program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOKqzJJvEOw There may be a black faced musical act going on here but that is not what the word is being used to refer to. Maybe it was thought to be okay because it was satire. It is not quite clear if this is the target is the current events or the sentimentalising of the US South in the UK. If the latter then there is an element of hypocrisy going on because the minstrels are being played by members of the George Mitchell Minstrels who did this kind of thing for a living at the time for many years after.

postodave said...

We see this same treadmill, of course, with efforts to describe - I don't even know what the polite term for it nowadays is - mental retardation. The word "moron" was originally used scientifically in the early 20th century to mean an adult with a mental age of about 8-12 years old. It became offensive pretty rapidly.

in 1989 I began training as a mental handicap nurse, by the time I qualified the term was learning disabilities nurse. The term mentally retarded had been out of use for decades, but I gather it was still used in some parts of the US into the early 2000s.

Not long ago I struggled to explain to a 16 year old why using the word "gay" to mean effete was offensive to some people. He had friends who were gay and was not hostile to gay people, this was just a word he was used to using. The term had not been directed at the person objecting, who was gay, so he wanted to know how it could be wrong. The word itself was a term once offensive, then reclaimed, then used pejoratively in a different way later. Back in the 90s I was told that terms like 'raving queen' were no longer offensive to the gay community. I remember Chumbawumba using terms like 'tranny' and 'slut' on the back of one of their singles. Then I was told a few years ago that 'transgender' is okay and 'trans' but 'tranny' is offensive again. I'm happy not to use words that offend people but it does shift over time as you say.

Mike Taylor said...

Wow, that Millicent Martin song is genuinely shocking. And I think it might just be Great Art, too. Highly recommended.

postodave said...

They used it in a couple of years ago in a program called, 'It was alright in the sixties' where they show clips from the past to people today; you could see jaws dropping as she sang. They felt her use of the n word was not appropriate, but the impact would be lessened without it. 'That was the Week that was' was ground breaking. The BBC dropped it and then spent years trying to do what it had already done in other programs. I don't know if this song would have been more shocking or less when it was first broadcast.

Mike Taylor said...

"It was alright in the sixties" seems 100% wrong here. Surely the whole point of that song was ALWAYS that it was shocking. It was intended to be shocking.

postodave said...

The problem for me is this. The people objecting were black. If black people feel the use of this word is not appropriate despite the satirical content who am I as a white guy to overrule that? Isn't this a bit too much like someone saying black people shouldn't have been offended by Enid Blyton's use of the n word? TW3 had a very definite policy on racism. Where with political issues they tried to follow the BBC policy of balance and representing both sides on racism they felt it was just wrong and they should say so. So there is no doubt where they were coming from. But is it okay for a bunch of white people then, or white people now, to be saying to black people, 'It's satire; we're on your side, what are you complaining about?'

Mike Taylor said...

Wait wait. Are you introducing the new (to me) information that British black people at the time objected to the song? If so, I agree that that would be significant, and it wouldn't be for me to tell them they were wrong to do so.

Andrew Rilstone said...

1: Words change their nuance over time. We need to be quite sure we know how rude the word "bloody" was when Eliza Doolittle said it at the tea party before we talk about the scene. (Similarly, in an old film or TV show, we may not understand whether a particularly character is supposed to be dressed at the height of fashion, or whether they are rather old fashioned.)

2: I have noted before that Pete Seeger and indeed MLK use "negro" as the preferred term for a black person, even though we would regard it as patronising, at best.

3: When I was growing up, "spastic" was used both as a term for a person with cerebral palsy, and as a playground insult. It would now be thought grossly abusive in any context. But it never seem to have been used as a slur in the USA, so English people have sometimes misunderstood American comedians.

4: When I was growing up "bloody" was still regarded as quite a bad swearword in the UK (kids got punished for saying it at school); but American comic books sometimes depicted English people saying it, even though the Code wouldn't let them say "hell" or "damn".

5: I am told that school history books now refer to Mary Tudor as "blood Mary"

6: It's complicated.

Andrew Rilstone said...

1: I assume that no-one here would go from "At different times, different words have been regarded as offensive" to "And therefore no word is offensive, there is no such thing as offence, and everyone should fucking get over themselves."

2: The question of swearing on the stage came up on Twitter the other day. (Two of the singers I most admire use the f-word very much as punctuation.) Someone said that no-one could object to the word "cunt" because it is "really" just a word for a part of a person's body, and in olden times it was used neutrally in medical text books. What a wanker!

Andrew Rilstone said...

3: A passage quoted in TV Tropes, from the Billy Bunter school stories, pre-World War I, has a sympathetic character complaining about another pupil's racism. He uses the n-word as a neutral synonym for "negro". ("And if he were a nigger, we should like him just as much, and he would be just as good a sort. And we don't share your ridiculous prejudice against coloured people, and if a nigger ever comes to Greyfriars, and you put on any airs about it, we'll jump on you. Is that quite clear?" The boy he is defending is called, er, Inky.) But (it says here) that by the 1920s Frank Richards was treating the word itself as offensive.

4: It'a complicated.

Andrew Rilstone said...

1: There is a particular phenomenon I describe as "Colstonianism", after a little local fracas about a statue, which no one outside Bristol will know about. Essentially: the racists very badly want to keep the statue in place because the people who are not racists want to take it down; and the fact that the racists want to keep it in place makes taking it down even more important. But the statue stood there quite happily not doing anything for a hundred years and could happily have stood there for another hundred years if the debate hadn't happened.

2: The n-word now controls the semantic context of any sentence containing it. I suspect that it has always been rude and insulting, but that in the past it was one of a number of rude insulting words available to rude people: on a level with, say, Yank, Frog, Limey, Itai, Kraut -- not nice, but not unremittingly awful either. It is now a Colstonian word: the only reason for using it is to signify to everyone that you are a massive racist; and therefore no-one who isn't a massive racist should use it at all. The fact that 50 years ago it may not have had quite that power is neither here nor there.

3: Yes, there exists such a thing as irony, historical context and black people sometimes reclaim the word. (But I think they reclaim it because it is racist: "I can call you a n- to show that we are such good friends that you know I don't mean it." Compare Motherfucker.

4: I think that this can be taken to silly extremes. I read the other day about a school teacher who had put post-it notes on the covers of all the copies of Of Mice and Men telling the students that the book contained a word that they were not allowed to say out loud.

5: If my great grandfather had been treated by your great grandfather as a piece of farm machinery or live stock I might not find it so silly.

6: It's complicated.

Andrew Rilstone said...

1: The sketch from That Was The Week That Was (new to me) is clearly evidence that the n-word was regarded as highly offensive by liberal English people in the 60s. It would make as much sense to take the song to mean "TW4 thought it was okay to say n-" than it would be to say "TW4 were okay with lynching an segregation".

2: Note the use of "chocolate coloured coon" as a slur. This was the stage name of G.H Eliot, a British black face minstrel act in the 20s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-fCz0AfYAg. Note also the user of (presumably stand ins for) the Black and White Minstrels. It is clearly not true that people only started to find black-face offensive in the PC 1980s and people "at the time" didn't think it had anything to do with black people. These comedians and this audience clearly see a connection between Eliot's musical hall act, the BBC's minstrel show, lynching and segregation.

3: The song is a non particularly subtle song-and-dance version of Strange Fruit: contrasting a nostalgic, romantic image of the Deep South with the contemporary reality. There seems to be a strong streak of this kind of dark humour in the satire of the day. "Mississipi is racist and segregated" isn't a particularly devastating message, but neither is "If there were an atomic war, everyone would die". (I suppose the point is "racists are racist and we think they are ludicrous")

4: Black people today are entitled to be offended by the fact that the song uses the N word, for Colstonian reasons. Certainly no satirist would make that film today; and arguably even showing it and distributing it disseminates the N-word and therefore signifies "I am a massive racist." Anyone who says "There you are you see everyone in England at that time were racists and thought that lynching was funny" has misunderstood the joke. (A bit like saying "George Benard Shaw was a massive prude, because he shows everyone being shocked by the word "bloody" and it isn't even a swear word.)

5: If my great grandfather had been treated by your great grandfather as a piece of farm machinery or live stock I might sometimes misunderstand jokes.

6: It's complicated.

Andrew Rilstone said...

1: We seem to have got into a bit of a muddle about Blyton herself.

2: It appears that she had very deep rooted attitudes about how white middle class English people were better than other people, and that she actually had a consciously colonialist agenda. This is problematic.

3: We seem to be happy to concede that the n-word didn't have quite the same toxic power when she used it in her gollywog story than it would do if she used it today.

4: However it remains true that she wrote a fairy tale about three rag-dolls that were comical caricatures of black people, and characterised them entirely by their blackness, using two racial slurs as proper names.

5: Many people have spotted that Enid Blyton wrote a silly fairy tale about a Chocolate Cock, which was the The Biggest Cock In the Sweetshop Window, and everyone who went passed said My, What a Big Cock. We are quite happy to concede that she was talking about a rooster and everyone at the back should jolly well stop tittering. Similarly, when A.A Milne wrote his stories about a teddy bear, no-one used the word poo as a euphemism for shit. These are texts which have accidentally acquired unfortunate double meanings. No-one is suggesting that Gollywog and Nigger are unfortunate accidental racists double entendres. Are they?

6: It would be possible to defend The Chocolate Cock in a few words "It didn't mean then what it does now". Strikingly, none of the Blytonians say that about the N-word (although it may implicit in the Tao-denying "times were different"). Instead they say that anyone who has a problem with the word is a communist, wants to drain all the joy out of life, hates reading, hates kids, believes that masks stop the spread of covid, etc. I feel therefore that the Three Golly Wogs have become Colstonian: we have to stop reading them because the people who want to carry on reading them are so obviously terrible.

7: Are the books even in print, in any form, even as the Three Bold Pixis?

8: It's complicated.

9: So, Andrew, how is your plan to stop talking about politics and touchy subjects going?

10: I suppose I will have to unroll this as an article.

Andrew Rilstone said...

NOTE: The BBC "Green Book" banned the use of the n-word; along with toilet jokes (including jokes about dogs and lampposts); sex jokes (including references to rabbits); jokes about underwear (specifically including "Night draws on" "Yes, I'm glad I brought a pair") and references to fig leaves was likely not in force in 1960s, and was presumably not an absolute ban. I imagine the ban on scatological humour applied to the Goon Show and ITMA but not so much to a prestige adaptation of Arisophanes or Measure for Measure. Some of the radio comedians managed to make very filfthy jokes by using Army slang and Polari. Max Miller, for a bet managed to get passed the censor a sketch set in an opticians in which the patient said "It's not good. When I see F u see K." It isn't clear whether the line "Don't be such a silly Constable" in one of the early Carry On films was deliberately or not.

postodave said...

Wait wait. Are you introducing the new (to me) information that British black people at the time objected to the song? If so, I agree that that would be significant, and it wouldn't be for me to tell them they were wrong to do so.

No. I meant the people on the 'It was okay in the sixties' program were black. It's a complex business, because they are just some chosen celebrities, but they are on the program to represent how some black people see this now.

postodave said...

Note also the user of (presumably stand ins for) the Black and White Minstrels. It is clearly not true that people only started to find black-face offensive in the PC 1980s and people "at the time" didn't think it had anything to do with black people. These comedians and this audience clearly see a connection between Eliot's musical hall act, the BBC's minstrel show, lynching and segregation.

I read somewhere that these were the actual George Mitchell Minstrels, which would muddy the waters a bit, but that may be an urban myth. Humphrey Carpenter in his book on the sixties satire boom calls them mock minstrels.

Andrew Stevens said...

in 1989 I began training as a mental handicap nurse, by the time I qualified the term was learning disabilities nurse. The term mentally retarded had been out of use for decades, but I gather it was still used in some parts of the US into the early 2000s.

I was just talking to an American nurse who was treating a patient with the condition and she referred to it as MR. I did not understand the abbreviation and she translated it as "mental retardation." So the term is still in use in the U.S. medical profession though presumably always abbreviated. As with many terms we have been talking about here, there is nothing objectionable in the words themselves. They were originally meant and sometimes still are meant to be descriptive, not insulting.

I grew up with a young man (by the name of Mark) who lived in a group home down the street who was about 22 when I was about 10 and we would often play together. In some ways, he was much more sophisticated than I was (he would have conversations with my mother about his job which bored me), but in other ways, he never put aside childish things and liked to play make believe with me. And, in other ways, I was much more sophisticated than he was. E.g. my abilities to read, write, do sums, and general factual knowledge were way ahead of his. I have very fond memories of him and certainly have no desire to give him or people like him any offense. Hell, I may be the only one in this comments section who finds the idea of aborting a Down's Syndrome baby to be horrific.

For what it's worth, I absolutely do think that the British had cottoned on to the offensiveness of the n-word by the 1960s, Doctor Who notwithstanding. (See the 1964 Smethwick election, which cemented the word's offensive status in Britain for good.) I imagine the Doctor Who exception was made because it occurred in an old nursery rhyme (that nursery rhyme had been changed in America to "tiger" decades before, so it could still be used in polite society). And because the offensiveness of the word had only recently impinged on British public consciousness, they thought that it was fine to include.

I assume that no-one here would go from "At different times, different words have been regarded as offensive" to "And therefore no word is offensive, there is no such thing as offence, and everyone should fucking get over themselves."

Seems unlikely anybody here would go there. There are clearly some words/phrases which have always been meant to be offensive and always were offensive. E.g. the various slurs which compare black people to monkeys or apes. On the other hand, I would argue that taking offense, even at things which are plainly meant to be offensive, is always a choice. I often choose to ignore it when people are obviously trying to offend me and not just because that often drives them crazy.

Andrew Stevens said...

However, I don't mind at all when other people are hyper-sensitive and quickly take offense even at things which were obviously not meant to offend. Personally, this looks (from the outside) to be a rather exhausting way to live, but presumably they get some sort of psychic rewards from it or they wouldn't keep doing it.

Andrew Rilstone said...

It is a good thing I am never going to talk about politics again, because that last remark needs a lot of unpacking.

postodave said...

The most recent term for what used to be called learning disabilities seems to be intellectual disabilities; I don't much care for that. Intelligence is far to abstract a concept and largely a construct. The more recent terms have not become terms of abuse; perhaps they never will. There are various things that some people find difficult to do; we need a word for these difficulties and we will always be able to use that word as an insult. Apparently the followers of Rudolph Steiner thought more people with Down's syndrome were being born in response to the over valuing of intellect in our culture; I think that is an interesting myth. Intellect is important but so are other things.



If you take the example of the guy who was offended at the word gay being used to mean effete, I think he felt this was demeaning not only to him but to any gay people. It was his duty then to oppose that. The psychic reward would be that of knowing he had done right. I think he had good reason to object, even if I can see the case for just letting some of these things go. There are things I have heard that I have felt compelled to challenge. Usually it's not about a group I belong to.

Andrew Stevens said...

Intellect is important but so are other things.

I totally agree with this.

Intelligence is far too abstract a concept and largely a construct.

I do not agree with this. There are a huge number of intellectual tasks a human being might perform - reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., etc. What we discover however is that ability at these skills is highly correlated in human beings. If someone is above average at reading or writing skills, we find that person also tends to be above average at arithmetic and indeed all other intellectual skills. Similarly with people who are below average. This is a statistical truth, of course, not a universal truth. Are there people who are really good at reading and writing, but actually below average at arithmetic? Sure. The opposite type of people exist as well. Effort, interest, practice, etc. all play into how good one is at any given intellectual skill.

But there is still that extremely stubborn general correlation. Psychologists chose to call this g or the g-factor - the "general intelligence factor" - and IQ tests were designed to measure it. Thus, they focus on so-called "g-laden" skills, such as working memory, and minimize or neglect intellectual skills which are not highly correlated.

Note that this absolutely does leave out non-cognitive aspects of mental functioning - interpersonal skills, socio-emotional skills, etc. This is deliberate and is because these skills are simply not what we mean by the word "intelligence." You may have seen theories of so-called "multiple intelligences" including "bodily-kinesthetic intelligence." This is clearly just an attempt to comprehend virtually all human abilities as "intelligence," likely due to some sort of belief that intelligence is all that matters. But whatever we mean by intelligence, we don't mean "bodily-kinesthetic" skill - it certainly has never been used (until recently) to comprehend athletic ability. Another example of this misuse of the word intelligence is "street smarts." I have no doubt there is such a thing and that it is a useful thing to have, but it's not what we mean by the word "intelligence" or "smarts." This all just falls under your claim (which I agree with) that "intellect is important but so are other things."

Andrew Stevens said...

To unpack that last sentence, I mean that if we accept your claim that other things are important than intellect, then we no longer need to define every human ability in terms of intellect.

Andrew Stevens said...

If you take the example of the guy who was offended at the word gay being used to mean effete, I think he felt this was demeaning not only to him but to any gay people. It was his duty then to oppose that. The psychic reward would be that of knowing he had done right.

Sure, that's all very reasonable. I was talking more about people getting offended by things written by a children's author 80 years ago who died 60 years ago.

Andrew Stevens said...

(Vicariously offended, even, since they typically don't even belong to the groups who supposedly should be offended.)

Andrew Rilstone said...

Interestingly, I was writing about people getting "offended" because someone had noted in print that a children's author who died 60 years ago sometimes did racisms.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Isn't the issue that for some years a society of people who were good at solving puzzles defined intelligence as "the ability to solve puzzles".

Andrew Rilstone said...

English education has still not quite recovered from that time an English public school teacher who had read his Plato got a psychologist in to invent intelligent tests that would divide kids into workers, artisans and philosopher-kings at the age of 11.

SK said...

Isn't the issue that for some years a society of people who were good at solving puzzles defined intelligence as "the ability to solve puzzles".

What word do you think they should have used to refer to the concept of 'the ability to solve puzzles' instead?

Andrew Rilstone said...

Puzzle solving ability.

SK said...

Ah, the German approach. I gather it works for them but I don't think it will catch on over here.

postodave said...

Ah, the German approach. I gather it works for them but I don't think it will catch on over here.

We could use the other English approach and name it after a place name such as Angmering or Upper Beading.

postodave said...

I do not agree with this. There are a huge number of intellectual tasks a human being might perform - reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., etc. What we discover however is that ability at these skills is highly correlated in human beings. If someone is above average at reading or writing skills, we find that person also tends to be above average at arithmetic and indeed all other intellectual skills. Similarly with people who are below average. This is a statistical truth, of course, not a universal truth. Are there people who are really good at reading and writing, but actually below average at arithmetic? Sure. The opposite type of people exist as well. Effort, interest, practice, etc. all play into how good one is at any given intellectual skill.

It's a very broad correlation. For example quite a lot of people with PhD in Maths make errors in basic arithmetic. I am told Bertrand Russell was not very good with sums. On the other hand there are what used to be called autistic savants who are brilliant at arithmetic but have difficulties in daily life. The Paul Erdos discovered more mathematical proofs than anyone else ever - by a very long chalk - but he did not know how to open a carton of tomato juice (I think he used a bread knife). It has been said for some years that people with an IQ below 70 have MH LD MR ID or whatever it has been called. But there are people who would measure as lower than that who cope well and people who measure higher who need support. I am not sure all the people belong in one category and if they do whether Erdos should be included or excluded. He was appreciated for what he did and so had coping skills, but they were ones that depended a lot on others. I once read some notes on a blind man who had learning disabilities. The notes said he could take himself to the toilet but it was clear to me he couldn't. Someone explained that when the notes were written he had a friend, also blind, who knew when he wanted to go and would take him. So he could go independently of staff help. The other guy got moved because he was more able. It's complicated.

postodave said...

But there is still that extremely stubborn general correlation. Psychologists chose to call this g or the g-factor - the "general intelligence factor" - and IQ tests were designed to measure it. Thus, they focus on so-called "g-laden" skills, such as working memory, and minimize or neglect intellectual skills which are not highly correlated.

Note that this absolutely does leave out non-cognitive aspects of mental functioning - interpersonal skills, socio-emotional skills, etc. This is deliberate and is because these skills are simply not what we mean by the word "intelligence." You may have seen theories of so-called "multiple intelligences" including "bodily-kinesthetic intelligence." This is clearly just an attempt to comprehend virtually all human abilities as "intelligence," likely due to some sort of belief that intelligence is all that matters. But whatever we mean by intelligence, we don't mean "bodily-kinesthetic" skill - it certainly has never been used (until recently) to comprehend athletic ability. Another example of this misuse of the word intelligence is "street smarts." I have no doubt there is such a thing and that it is a useful thing to have, but it's not what we mean by the word "intelligence" or "smarts." This all just falls under your claim (which I agree with) that "intellect is important but so are other things."

I found Daniel Goleman's work on Emotional Intelligence very interesting. I don't know if that was the best word to use but he was talking about a real skill set and again there is some correlation. Some of the skills are measurable. It was found that many children with behavioural issues did not know how to read emotions. They would mistake fear for anger for example. In theory Simon Baron-Cohen's reading the mind in they eyes test is measuring that skill, but in practice I have noticed some very odd results. People with good emotional skills getting a below average score and people who got scores that were way below anything Baron-Cohen discussed such as 25% right which you would expect by random guessing or even 0 which is bafflingly low. But these skills like intelligence seem to me to also be partly socially constructed.

BTW my old tutor Peter Squibb wrote an essay on the social construction of the concept of intelligence and another on the social construction of the backward child. I started out by disagreeing with him but changed my views.

Andrew Stevens said...

Interestingly, I was writing about people getting "offended" because someone had noted in print that a children's author who died 60 years ago sometimes did racisms.

I wasn't "subtweeting" you actually. I was more referring to the entire industry of professional offense-takers, which likely includes the person who noted that a long dead children's author sometimes did racisms.

Isn't the issue that for some years a society of people who were good at solving puzzles defined intelligence as "the ability to solve puzzles"

What we mean by intelligence seems to me to basically be the ability to solve intellectual problems and the ability to acquire knowledge and apply it. Of course, we can always simply refuse to define the word and then believe it means whatever we want it to mean at any given moment.

Psychologists divide intelligence into two parts - fluid intelligence, the ability to solve novel problems (puzzle-solving ability), and crystallized intelligence, which is more "how much do you know and how well can you apply it." The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale calls them, respectively, "performance IQ" and "verbal IQ" (the latter of which is a bit misleading since mathematics would certainly be comprehended by "verbal IQ," as is general knowledge, etc.). It then basically averages the two to come up with "full-scale IQ."

Andrew Stevens said...

It's a very broad correlation. For example quite a lot of people with PhD in Maths make errors in basic arithmetic. I am told Bertrand Russell was not very good with sums.

Well, what do you mean by "a lot"? I think you will find that the large majority of people with PhDs in Math are, in fact, quite good at basic arithmetic, far above the average person.

I found Daniel Goleman's work on Emotional Intelligence very interesting. I don't know if that was the best word to use but he was talking about a real skill set and again there is some correlation.

I only object to the nomenclature. I certainly don't disagree that it is a real skill set. It's probably also true that it is correlated with g. The interesting thing about intelligence is that it helps a person accomplish virtually anything, even athletic tasks. (There was a guy on Survivor once named Yau-man who became somewhat famous because he took a different tack on the physical challenges than everyone else, using his intelligence to try to figure out the best way to accomplish it and was surprisingly successful, even though he was middle-aged and not in the best shape.)

But these skills like intelligence seem to me to also be partly socially constructed.

We can quibble, of course, over definitions. Are the IQ tests measuring "intelligence" or something else? What we can't quibble over is that they are measuring something. To put it in scientific parlance, IQ tests are definitely reliable, i.e. they are measuring something. But we do not have to agree that they are valid, i.e. they may not be measuring what they claim to measure. I think they pretty much are. The people who I think of (and, I would argue, everyone thinks of) as intelligent almost always do extremely well on them. Sometimes you might get a surprising person, an expert in a particular field, who doesn't do particularly well on them. But this just shows that intelligence isn't everything. Effort, practice, interest, etc. all play very large roles in the acquisition of any intellectual skill.

Andrew Stevens said...

(Oh, while I would expect "emotional intelligence" to be correlated with g, I would not expect the correlation to be strong. It would probably be a fairly weak correlation.)

Andrew Stevens said...

To put it another way, "emotional intelligence" is an intellectual task, but it isn't particularly g-laden. We wouldn't expect the best at that task to be completely dominated by people with high IQs or the worst at the task to be completely dominated by low IQs.

Andrew Stevens said...

Whereas I would expect things like ability at basic arithmetic or vocabulary size to be extremely highly correlated with IQ.

Andrew Stevens said...

I am told Bertrand Russell was not very good with sums.

As a side note, it is my opinion that Bertrand Russell was a fantastic writer. He had an extremely strong ability to make complicated issues clear to the layman. His Nobel Prize in Literature was well deserved. In terms of sheer intellectual horsepower, I think he was plainly quite a bit behind Alfred Whitehead, G.E. Moore, and Maynard Keynes - just to mention a few people he knew extremely well. Russell himself said of Keynes that every time he argued with him, he felt that "I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool."

Andrew Stevens said...

(Perhaps it was Russell's relative lack of IQ, compared to his brilliant colleagues anyway, which made him such a good writer. He had to boil down the concepts in order to think clearly about them and this greatly helped his transparency as a writer. Meanwhile, Moore was clearly more brilliant, but his writing is sometimes very close to impenetrable.)

SK said...

I had that Bernard Russell in the back of me cab the other day.

Andrew Rilstone said...

I wasn't "subtweeting" you actually. I was more referring to the entire industry of professional offense-takers, which likely includes the person who noted that a long dead children's author sometimes did racisms.

I think what happened was something like this.

1948: Long dead children's author writes book about racist caricatures named after a racial slur

1968: Librarians and teachers say they would rather not have books about racist caricatures named after racial slurs in their schools and libraries, thank you very much, and anyway, the books aren't very well written. Long dead children's author's books do in fact disappear from school and libraries, though they remain in print.

2021: English Heritage decides to commemorate long dead children's author with a small memorial on the house she used to live in.

2021: English Heritage put a small biography of long dead children's author on their website, mentioning the fact that some librarians and teachers felt that books about racist caricatures named after racial slurs were not very nice.

2021: Rampaging mobs of responsible adults take to Twitter, Facebook, and the letters pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and Fascist News saying that English Heritage have destroyed their childhood, robbed children of their innocence, hate books, are triggered communists, woke, worse than Big Brother in that book by George Orwell they haven't read, working for the downfall of civilisation as we now know, sad, without a life, pathetic, and further more that their mother was a hamster and their father smelt of elderberries.

2021: Very famous blogger who has been described as quite good by the greatest comic book artist of his generation mentions this controversy as part of an ongoing series on cancel culture and the "woke' myth, shortly to be collected in a handsome one volume un-redacted edition, order your copy now.

2021: Very famous bloggers most dedicated fan ("He knows what's wrong with every edition of the Chronicle since I took over" - C. F Kane) insinuates that the people who reported that other people had said that books about racial caricatures named after racial slurs were not very nice were only pretending to feel aggrieved, possibly for pecuniary rewards ("industry of professional offence takers"); and that they deliberately chose to be more upset by racial slurs than was sensible and reasonable because they got some kind of spiritual or psychological kick out of it.

2021: V.F.B points out that the people who appeared to have been oversensitized were the ones who regarded a critical remark about an author as a personal attack and/or a communist plot.

2021: Everyone else decides to talk about MENSA instead.

postodave said...

Mensa was a bit of an aside I admit. But we also talked a lot about Enid Blyton and racism and stuff that was more than tangentially connected. I think whatever is going on in these old children's books is interesting and I read an Enid Blyton book for the first time in years. A also think you did a good job of unpacking what had happened with the n word; how it shifted from mildly to very offensive and became a word that you should not say even when opposing racism.

Now, would you like to unpack the claim made in todays Daily Mail that someone has identified 'The Tiger Who came to Tea' as a cause of rape?

Andrew Rilstone said...

I am quite happy to talk about Mensa. Or at least I am quite happy for other people to talk about Mensa. And your stuff on Enid Blyton has been very illuminating.

I was mainly looking for a punchline for my little riff, I exist.

(My Little Riff: Dialectic Is Magic.)

Andrew Stevens said...

Mensa? I assume you are referring to your own reference to "a society of people who were good at solving puzzles defined intelligence as "the ability to solve puzzles"?

I have no interest whatsoever in talking about Mensa, which always seemed rather pointless to me unless it was to put together a good role-playing or other gaming group. I've never belonged to Mensa personally. I was talking about IQ tests and their usefulness in psychology and psychometry. I was given an IQ test (the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Revised) right after I turned 17 since I was attending the school at a psychiatric institution as a "day student." (I.e. I was an outpatient who only came in to attend the school.)

Andrew Stevens said...

"He knows what's wrong with every edition of the Chronicle since I took over" - C. F Kane

Love the Citizen Kane reference about Thatcher. My favorite exchange from that film was about Thatcher.

"Thatcher! That man was the biggest darn fool I ever met!"

"He made an awful lot of money."

"Well, it's no trick to make a lot of money . . . if all you want . . . is to make a lot of money."

Andrew Stevens said...

(Tangentially, while never a member of Mensa, I am a member of Phi Beta Kappa. I don't know if that's close enough.)

Andrew Stevens said...

A very quick defense of the use of IQ tests in the social sciences. There are often times when we want to "control" for intelligence. For example, it is well known that college graduates are more financially successful than non-college graduates. But this immediately raises the question, "Yes, but how much of that is value added by colleges and how much of that is simply because college graduates are smarter on average?" IQ tests are a way to control for this. Whether perfect or not, it's the best we have. The factor analysis behind IQ tests is, in my view, extremely sound scientifically and I also believe that IQ tests, while they may not be a perfect measure of "general intelligence," certainly must be pretty damn close.

They also have a lot of utility in simple diagnostics by psychologists - diagnosing intellectual disabilities, for example, or for use in educational assessment, etc. IQ tests are one of the many, many, many things in this world which are primarily valued by experts in that specific field, but are commonly rejected by laymen who know nothing about them or the science behind them.

Andrew Stevens said...

I am curious about one thing. Do you think there aren't any people who make money from deliberately stoking racial tensions? Because I can name dozens of them just off the top of my head. (Granted, however, all the ones I can name are American. I can't name a single British person in that category. The U.S. has always had an uncomfortably high percentage of conmen, grifters, and carnival barkers.)

Andrew Rilstone said...

I think that there are people like Kathy Hopkins and Nigel Farage who have made a career out of telling lies about foreign people, yes. I do not think that black people who say "please do not show that TV programme in which black people are referred to as n-s" or "please could you at least include a warning or a apology" are part of an industry or a profession.

There are campaigning and advocacy organisations, and some of them pay some people are a salary, so I suppose you could say that those people are "professionals". That would a bit like calling doctors "part of the illness industry" or police officers "part of the crime industry."

SK said...

I think that there are people like Kathy Hopkins and Nigel Farage who have made a career out of telling lies about foreign people, yes. I do not think that black people who say "please do not show that TV programme in which black people are referred to as n-s" or "please could you at least include a warning or a apology" are part of an industry or a profession.

What do you think of the principle that 'organisations will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution'?

That is, if your income depends on, say, fixing cars, it is in your interest to sabotage efforts to produce cars which break down less because the less cars break down, the less money you make.

And likewise if your income depends on, say, running anti-racism seminars or writing anti-racism articles, it is in your interest to sabotage efforts to make society less racist because the less racial tension there is in society, the less money you make.

Andrew Rilstone said...

I think that it is complete and utter nonsense.

SK said...

Why then you never change, O sweet summer child.

Mike Taylor said...

I'm afraid I am at least partly with SK on this. The observation that "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" comes from Clay Shirky's observations on publishing. It used to be the case that distributing copies of a book, or an academic paper, was a very difficult logistical problem. Publishers invested mightily in solving that problem, through typesetting, printing, binding, stocking and distributing copies. In the Internet era all of those problems have gone away(*) -- it's trivially easy to publish something, as you Andrew have shown in publishing this blog-post. But publishers are so invested in being the solution to the problem of publication that now much of their investment is in systems to make publishing more difficult -- journal paywalls, DRM on books, lobbying for more restrictive copyrights, etc. They absolutely have dedicated themselves to preserving the problem to which they are, or rather were, the solution.

So. We know that this does happen. The question then becomes whether it's happening in any given case. And I am not sure it's prima facie ridiculous to wonder whether this tendency might be a factor in some of the things we've been discussing.

Aonghus Fallon said...

I do think there’s a quantitive difference between the publishing industry and the - supposed - grievance industry. Publishing really is an industry generating a particular product. I can imagine the Big Five (or whatever they are, these days) meeting to discuss how to manipulate the market. Left-wing colleges and the Klu Klux Klan meeting in some underground bunker to plot how to keep racism alive and well to the mutual benefit of both? Errr…

‘If someone is above average at reading or writing skills, we find that person also tends to be above average at arithmetic and indeed all other intellectual skills.’

Not sure if this is always true. I remember being tested when I was around eight. I was good at art. Apparently this meant - by inference - that I would be bad at maths (as indeed I was).

The IQ test was originally instituted by the army. It was never meant to be a definitive test for intelligence; more a way for the army to find out what particular skill set you had and how it might be useful to them. I always got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that it was pretty reductive - ie, ’Are you good at engineering? Then you must be very intelligent!’ (although this does make sense in terms of what an army might be looking for in a potential recruit).

That’s disregarding how it seems to have limited relevance when it comes to life skills. DominIc Raab has an LMM but is a pretty useless politician.

SK said...

I can imagine the Big Five (or whatever they are, these days) meeting to discuss how to manipulate the market. Left-wing colleges and the Klu Klux Klan meeting in some underground bunker to plot how to keep racism alive and well to the mutual benefit of both?

Neither coordination nor conspiracy is necessary. Imagine you have a left-wing media channel and a right-wing media channel. Both notice that the more polarised the political environment becomes, the more viewers they get (and therefore the more money they make). What's more, the more extremely they represent their side, the more viewers they get: some of them people from their own side, of course, there to have their ideas confirmed, but also a fair proportion form the other side who tune in to see what the latest insanity the other side has come up with is.

But if they try to dial down the rhetoric, if they try to publish pieces suggesting that things maybe aren't so bad, they discover that they lose viewers. Nobody, apparently, wants to hear that society isn't about to collapse into fascism / wokery.

So, independently, both will come to the same conclusion: in order to maximise their viewership, they have to keep publishign the most extreme, most paranoid articles and stories they can.

And then, again independently, their contributors start to realise that when they pitch pieces that aren't catastrophic and shill, they don't get commissioned; in fact, by looking at what does get published, they start to notice it's a bit of an auction: the pieces that get commissioned are the ones that present the most extreme, most paranoid, most catastrophic viewpoints. So, in order to maximise their income, they start trying to outbid each other because whoever can come up with the most extreme, paranoid and catastrophic articles are the ones who get the (very limited) commission slots, and therefore who get paid.

And hey presto: left-wing and right-wing commentators co-operate to ratchet up tensions, all just by following the incentives that are in their own interest, without any need for any central co-ordination or any conspiracy.

I'm not saying this has necessarily happened, note, just pointing out that there are many possible mechanisms for this that don't require anyone 'meeting in some underground bunker', but just for people to act in their own interests according to the incentives presented to them.

DominIc Raab has an LMM but is a pretty useless politician.

He's Foreign Secretary! He's clearly, objectively, not a useless politician: he's successfully got to one of the Great Offices of State. That's, like, very nearly the most successful at politics that a politician can possibly be. Only being Chancellor or PM would be a greater achievement.

Okay he might not be great by the standards of cabinet ministers but that's a very different standard from just 'politicians' (and even then there are many many cabinet ministers even just right now who are much less competent than him).

Richard Burgon is a 'pretty useless politician'. Saying Dominic Raab is a 'pretty useless politician' is as silly as picking, I don't know, the worst player at Manchester United and claiming they are a 'pretty useless footballer'. The very fact they got into one of the top clubs in the top league proves that they are definitely not 'pretty useless' at football — even if by comparison with their team-mates they might look it week after week, the point is that you're comparing them with a highly selective comparison group.

Aonghus Fallon said...

‘Both notice that the more polarised the political environment becomes, the more viewers they get (and therefore the more money they make).’

Sure, but how much money do they make? Really? I haven’t watched a terrestrial channel in years. And I’m guessing most conspiracy theorists these days will watch podcasts online etc rather than Fox. My suspicion is that a lot of the woke/anti-woke stuff is highly visible (because, the Internet) but isn’t really much of a money-spinner - except maybe a handful? (ie, not enough to constitute an industry).

Re Raab. I guess I was making a distinction between being academically gifted and having what most of us would call common sense? More specifically, judgement? Cummings was another example. I just wonder sometimes what we mean by ‘intelligence’. Both men made poor choices and were vilified by the press as a result. Their actual competency is another matter, but even that seems to be a bit of a mirage.

SK said...

Sure, but how much money do they make? Really? I haven’t watched a terrestrial channel in years.

I repeat:

'I'm not saying this has necessarily happened, note, just pointing out that there are many possible mechanisms for this that don't require anyone 'meeting in some underground bunker', but just for people to act in their own interests according to the incentives presented to them.'

I was specifically refuting your objection that I was suggesting 'meeting[s] in some underground bunker' by providing just one example of how such 'unco-ordinated co-operation' can arise simply through lots of discrete actors independently following their own best interests.

Re Raab. I guess I was making a distinction between being academically gifted and having what most of us would call common sense? More specifically, judgement?

Make all the distinctions you like, and frankly what is going through Raab's mind when he keeps bringing up more details about his holiday instead of just trying to let everyone forget about it is a mystery, but it is an objective truth that Dominic Raab is not 'a pretty useless politician'. No one who has managed claw their way high enough up the greasy pole to occupy one of the Great Offices of State can possibly be a 'pretty useless politician', by definition.

Aonghus Fallon said...

For what it’s worth, I was actually responding to Mike - who was saying he thought your point had some merit (I hadn’t actually read your original post).

Re Raab. I guess I just think his behaviour is politically stupid? So much of politics is optics and spin. Johnson - love him or loathe him - is very good at both. Cummings and Raab? Not so much.

Mike Taylor said...

Is Dominic Raab good at politics? It depends whether by "good at politics" you mean "Having he skills necessary to attain a high position" or "having any idea what to actually do with that power". I draw m'learned friends' attention to my short post The fundamental problem of politics at https://reprog.wordpress.com/2020/03/11/the-fundamental-problem-of-politics/

SK said...

For what it’s worth, I was actually responding to Mike - who was saying he thought your point had some merit (I hadn’t actually read your original post).

Irrelevant.

Re Raab. I guess I just think his behaviour is politically stupid?

You can think whatever you like, and you might be right and you might be wrong, but you can't argue with results. You could look at the Olympic Foil bronze medallist and you could think his technique is weird, his footwork sloppy, his timing dire, but none of that matters: he won the bronze medal at the Olympics, so he can't possibly be 'a pretty poor foilist'.

SK said...

Is Dominic Raab good at politics? It depends whether by "good at politics" you mean "Having he skills necessary to attain a high position" or "having any idea what to actually do with that power".

Clearly the claims 'Dominic Raab is a pretty useless foreign secretary' and 'Dominic Raab is a pretty useless minister' are arguable in a way that 'Dominic Raab is a pretty useless politician' is not.

Now it's possible that someone might use language loosely and write the last when they meant one of the first two, but given that the meaning of 'politics' was clarified by the specification that the evidence for the claim was 'ma[king] poor choices and [being] vilified by the press as a result', the original claim was definitely about being able to play the game of politics rather than skill or competence in governing. So the specified claim was not one of the two arguable ones but the one which is objectively and obviously false.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Irrelevant? Not really. My core point was that it was inaccurate to compare the publishing industry with the grievance industry, inasmuch as the latter is not an ‘industry’ in any real sense. The comparison was made by Mike rather than you, so my response was intended for him rather than you.

I guess - if I wanted to be churlish - I could say your feelings about this one way or the other are ‘irrelevant’, as I wasn’t even addressing you.

Plus I think the analogy with a fencer is disingenuous at best. Unless you were somebody who boasted about your fencing prowess to all and sundry: enough to convince them to have you on the olympic team, with sorely disappointing results.

Aonghus Fallon said...

(ie, it's not getting elected that counts - any accomplished liar can pull that off; you just need certain moral blind spots - it's what you do once you're in power that matters)

SK said...

Irrelevant? Not really.

To whom the argument was addressed is irrelevant. All that matters is the argument. Your argument was invalid. That is all that matters.

My core point was that it was inaccurate to compare the publishing industry with the grievance industry, inasmuch as the latter is not an ‘industry’ in any real sense.

And that is the argument I refuted.

I guess - if I wanted to be churlish - I could say your feelings about this one way or the other are ‘irrelevant’, as I wasn’t even addressing you.

My feelings about this and every other matter are indeed irrelevant, as are your feelings and everyone else's feelings.

Plus I think the analogy with a fencer is disingenuous at best. Unless you were somebody who boasted about your fencing prowess to all and sundry: enough to convince them to have you on the olympic team, with sorely disappointing results.

Is the claim now that Dominic Raab managed to convince all and sundry to make him Foreign Secretary? Well — given that convincing people to put you in power is the very definition of 'being good at politics' — surely that by itself proves that Dominic Raab cannot be 'a pretty useless politician'?

Andrew Stevens said...

Response here is to Aonghus Fallon:

Not sure if this is always true.

Of course it isn't always true. Positive correlation does not mean perfect correlation. That's why I said "tends." Men are physically stronger on average than women.
That's a simple fact. It does not mean, and nobody has ever even thought, that every single man is stronger than every single woman. Anyway, I'll bet you'll find that even visual art and math are positively correlated, not negatively correlated, though the correlation is almost certainly extremely weak.

The IQ test was originally instituted by the army.

No, the Army decided to use IQ tests which pre-existed their decision to use them. The IQ test was originally designed by Alfred Binet to help diagnose intellectual disabilities. The science has advanced very considerably since his day.

I always got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that it was pretty reductive - ie, ’Are you good at engineering? Then you must be very intelligent!’

Well, yes? I mean, that's like saying "Are you intelligent? Then you must be intelligent!" All science begins with tautologies. Factor analysis was used in the IQ test because there was obviously some sort of "general intelligence factor" which helped a person be very good at a wide range of disparate intellectual skills. Some of those intellectual skills, like art, are not g-laden and are weakly correlated with the "general intelligence factor." Some skills, like vocabulary and arithmetic, are strongly g-laden and highly correlated though, again, not perfectly correlated. Could a man have a 150 IQ and be bad at math or have a small vocabulary compared to average? I suppose it's possible.

Andrew Stevens said...

But if the only thing you know about a person is that they are above average at math and you are forced to bet on whether he has an above average or below average vocabulary, bet on his being above average. Sometimes you'll win, sometimes you'll lose, but you'll win more often than you'll lose.

SK said...

it's not getting elected that counts - any accomplished liar can pull that off

This is obviously false, just because of maths (there are 650 seats in the House of commons, but many more than that number of accomplished liars in the country).

Andrew Stevens said...

Why is that true? I don't think anyone has ever offered a better theory than that there exists some sort of "general intelligence factor." I went to a school with "tracking" where every subject was independently tracked. So a student might be in the "A-track" for science or the "B-track" for math or the "C-track" for social studies or the "D-track" for English classes. Each subject, as far as I know, was simply tracked by how well the student did in that subject. There was some variation, but what you find is that the kids who make A-track for science and math are the same kids (for the most part) in the A-track for social studies and English. And being in an A-track for one subject, but a D-track for another subject virtually never happened.

postodave said...

Well, what do you mean by "a lot"? I think you will find that the large majority of people with PhDs in Math are, in fact, quite good at basic arithmetic, far above the average person.

The evidence I have is anecdotal, My daughter told me a lot of the Maths lecturers on her degree course would slip up with arithmetic and there was the story about Russell. But there are two different skill sets here. Doing what PhD level mathematicians do is not the same as doing what book-keepers do, or used to do in the days before we had calculators and spread sheets. One needs a highly specialised form of focused imaginative thought the other needs attention to detail. But the PhD Mathematicians are going to be ahead of the people who never do a sum from week to week.

I only object to the nomenclature. I certainly don't disagree that it is a real skill set. It's probably also true that it is correlated with g. The interesting thing about intelligence is that it helps a person accomplish virtually anything, even athletic tasks. (There was a guy on Survivor once named Yau-man who became somewhat famous because he took a different tack on the physical challenges than everyone else, using his intelligence to try to figure out the best way to accomplish it and was surprisingly successful, even though he was middle-aged and not in the best shape.)

What Goleman says in his later book 'Working with Emotional intelligence is that in business these skills add to intelligence or academic achievement to create super high flyers.

We can quibble, of course, over definitions. Are the IQ tests measuring "intelligence" or something else? What we can't quibble over is that they are measuring something. To put it in scientific parlance, IQ tests are definitely reliable, i.e. they are measuring something. But we do not have to agree that they are valid, i.e. they may not be measuring what they claim to measure. I think they pretty much are. The people who I think of (and, I would argue, everyone thinks of) as intelligent almost always do extremely well on them. Sometimes you might get a surprising person, an expert in a particular field, who doesn't do particularly well on them. But this just shows that intelligence isn't everything. Effort, practice, interest, etc. all play very large roles in the acquisition of any intellectual skill.

I once went for a job with a company that did a lot of data analysis. They would employ anyone based on their own test which looked a bit like an IQ test but had other features like mental arithmetic. I did some work to boost my IQ before the test and managed to up it by around 20 points but did not get the job. These people knew what skills they were looking for and intelligence in itself was not enough.

Andrew Stevens said...

The average engineer, by the way, has an IQ somewhere in the 120s. Of course, IQ is not predestination. That's the average, not the minimum. Would it be possible to have an 85 IQ and still become an accomplished engineer? I don't see why not, but that person would have to work at it, far more than his more intelligent counterparts. And his more intelligent counterparts would probably say about him, "Well, he's not very quick on the uptake, but nobody works harder and he still gets the job done."

postodave said...

Whereas I would expect things like ability at basic arithmetic or vocabulary size to be extremely highly correlated with IQ.

If this was true the company I did the test for would just be able to use a standard IQ test.

Andrew Stevens said...

What Goleman says in his later book 'Working with Emotional intelligence is that in business these skills add to intelligence or academic achievement to create super high flyers.

This seems unobjectionable to me. We call interpersonal skills "soft skills," probably because they are not what we mean by "intelligence," but I certainly agree that they're very important. I might even agree with a statement like "Math is easy. People are hard."

I did some work to boost my IQ before the test and managed to up it by around 20 points but did not get the job.

This is not remotely typical of most people and real IQ tests. IQ tests are highly reliable and people score roughly the same for most of their life, regardless of how much they "study" to take the test. However, I see no reason to think it's impossible to genuinely boost one's IQ. Just because people generally never do it doesn't mean it's not possible.

postodave said...

As a side note, it is my opinion that Bertrand Russell was a fantastic writer. He had an extremely strong ability to make complicated issues clear to the layman. His Nobel Prize in Literature was well deserved. In terms of sheer intellectual horsepower, I think he was plainly quite a bit behind Alfred Whitehead, G.E. Moore, and Maynard Keynes - just to mention a few people he knew extremely well. Russell himself said of Keynes that every time he argued with him, he felt that "I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool."

Russell does have a gift for writing. He once said it was because he wrote a first book that was incomprehensible to most people that he could get away with writing books people could understand. But I would not be able to make the kind of comparison you are making. I suspect that if we had sat these guys down and tested them any differences in IQ are not likely to have been statistically significant.

Andrew Stevens said...

If this was true the company I did the test for would just be able to use a standard IQ test.

Don't know about Britain, but that's illegal in the United States (Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1964). In the U.S., you must be able to show that any test given is directly related to the job.

Andrew Stevens said...

But I would not be able to make the kind of comparison you are making. I suspect that if we had sat these guys down and tested them any differences in IQ are not likely to have been statistically significant.

I am reasonably certain they would be, though I suspect Keynes, Whitehead, and Moore would test off the scale. (All reputable IQ tests have "ceiling scores" where they do not attempt to go any further due to lack of data about such people. E.g. the Wechsler gives a top score of 150+.) I would guess Russell would be more like in the 130s.

Andrew Stevens said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andrew Stevens said...

One of the issues in any discussion of IQ tests is that most people have seen online "IQ tests" or some Mensa puzzle book and think that's what an IQ test is. The vast majority of people have never taken a real IQ test, administered one-on-one by a psychologist and therefore have no idea what a legitimate one is actually like.

Andrew Stevens said...

I might, however, be being unfair to Russell. Russell made a large number of what I regard as elementary intellectual errors, but A) his writing was much more wide-ranging than the other people whom I mentioned, who typically stuck to their specialties - obviously if you cast your mind that widely, you're going to make more mistakes and B) the errors may have been due not to a relative lack of intelligence, but a relative excess of stubbornness. On the other hand, some of the errors he made really were quite elementary. His crystal clear writing style was very admirable and is certainly a very large point in favor of his intelligence. He was certainly no dummy.

Andrew Stevens said...

(My estimate of his IQ would still qualify him for Mensa and put him in the top 2% of all people.)

Andrew Stevens said...

I think that there are people like Kathy Hopkins and Nigel Farage who have made a career out of telling lies about foreign people, yes.

When you realize that this exists on both sides, you will have made a lot of progress.

Andrew Stevens said...

(I'm sure this is much more true in the U.S. than in the UK though. The UK is, what, 87% white and has no single ethnic group larger than 3%? There just aren't a lot of votes or money there. We have a state like that in the U.S.; it's called Utah.)

Andrew Stevens said...

I do not think that black people who say "please do not show that TV programme in which black people are referred to as n-s" or "please could you at least include a warning or a apology" are part of an industry or a profession.

Even in the U.S., the large majority of the people I am talking about aren't black.

Andrew Rilstone said...

I do not think that white people who don’t think that it is very nice to call black people niggers are part of an industry or profession either. I do not think that there is any liberal or left wing equivalent to Kathy Hopkins.

postodave said...

I am reasonably certain they would be, though I suspect Keynes, Whitehead, and Moore would test off the scale. (All reputable IQ tests have "ceiling scores" where they do not attempt to go any further due to lack of data about such people. E.g. the Wechsler gives a top score of 150+.) I would guess Russell would be more like in the 130s.

I did some tests, admittedly not formal ones, and managed to get my score into the 130s. My wife used to be in Mensa and said at a meeting she attended they mainly talked about the Bay City Rollers. She after had a formal test and came about 10 points less than Mensa had tested her at; the psychologist said that was usual. I have a friend who tests in the 160s but thinks the tests are a bit pointless.

One of my faviourite Russell stories is that someone in an audience once said to him, you say from a contradiction anything follows if 2+2=5 prove I am the pope. Russell replied quick as a flash if 2+2=5 and 2+2=4 then 5=4 we, if subtract 3 from each then 2=1. You and the Pope are two, so you and the pope are one: you are the pope. Pretty quick thinking.

SK said...

I do not think that there is any liberal or left wing equivalent to Kathy Hopkins.

Owen Jones, Laurie Penny, Aaron Bastani, Femi.

SK said...

I do not think that there is any liberal or left wing equivalent to Kathy Hopkins.

Ash Sarkar, Priyamvada Gopal.

Andrew Rilstone said...

we're in the twilight zone

Aonghus Fallon said...

This is obviously false, just because of maths (there are 650 seats in the House of commons, but many more than that number of accomplished liars in the country).

One might as well say this is obviously false because Britain has only sent one fencer to the Olympics. Surely must be more than one accomplished fencer in the entire UK?

The average engineer, by the way, has an IQ somewhere in the 120s.

A disproportionate number of the terrorists responsible for 911 were engineers. Various theories were put forward to explain this - there was even a book about it - one theory being that when it comes to problem-solving, engineers aren’t very good at looking at multiple solutions; they tend to fixate on one idea and refuse to consider alternatives, something - coincidentally enough - that they have in common with terrorists.

SK said...

One might as well say this is obviously false because Britain has only sent one fencer to the Olympics. Surely must be more than one accomplished fencer in the entire UK?

Don't understand. I pointed out that if someone had won an Olympic medla in foil then they could not possibly be described as 'a pretty useless foilist'.

You seem to be responding as if I had argued that anyone who hadn't won an Olympic medal therefore was 'a pretty useless foilist'.

How low does one's IQ have to be to fail to understand that 'if A then B' implies 'if not B then not A' and not 'if not A then not B'? I mean that's, like, the very simplest bit of logic.

Aonghus Fallon said...

You seem to be responding to one point by answering another. Just to clarify:

(1) You pointed out that there were far more accomplished liars than MPs. You seem to regard this as proof no MP could be an accomplished liar 'because of maths'. I assumed you were being facetious, but thought I might as well point out the number of MPs was immaterial, citing how the UK sent only one fencer to the Olympics (ie, doing so doesn't reflect the number of accomplished fencers and in the UK).

(2) 'A pretty useless foilist'. This analogy fails because a fencer has to demonstrate some ability to get on the Olympic team, whereas you can get elected by making promises you have no choice intention of keeping - ie, by lying.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Owen Jones
It's a myth that managers are more stressed than workers.The research shows that what causes stress isn't responsibilities, it's not being given enough power to deal with them. That's one reason workers need more power in the workplace

Katie Hopkins
COVID-19 may be the biggest HOAX ever perpetuated on the global citizen, it cannot be located, has not ever been isolated, and may not even EXIST!

SK said...

(1) You pointed out that there were far more accomplished liars than MPs. You seem to regard this as proof no MP could be an accomplished liar

I can understand not bothering to read what I wrote, but you're not bothering to read what you wrote. The fact there are far more accomplished liars than MPs is obviously not proof that 'no MP could be an accomplished liar'. but I never claimed it was.

I claimed it was proof that:

'it's not getting elected that counts - any accomplished liar can pull that off'

is false.

That is, the claim that you made was not 'some MPs are accomplished liars' — that's obviously true — it was 'any accomplished liar can become an MP'.

This is obviously false because at most 650 accomplished liars at a time can be MPs.

Therefore it is obviously false that any accomplished liar can become an MP. Only the 650 best accomplished liars in the country can become MPs.

(2) 'A pretty useless foilist'. This analogy fails because a fencer has to demonstrate some ability to get on the Olympic team, whereas you can get elected by making promises you have no choice intention of keeping - ie, by lying.

And a politician has to demonstrate some political ability to get elected, because 'getting elected' is pretty much the baseline measure of 'political ability'. The aim of politics is, first, to get elected, so if you manage to get elected, you have proven that you have better political ability than all the other candidates who tried to get elected and failed (whether you demonstrated that ability by appealing to the electorate at large, or by politicking your way onto the candidate list for a safe seat, is mere detail: it's all politics and if you managed it you succeeded, so you must be decent at politics).

SK said...

Owen Jones

All the people I mentioned have made careers based on manufacturing things for their side to get outraged about — just like Katie Hopkins. Different side, so different topics, but same grift.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Katie Hopkins is as serious a political commentator as Owen Jones? Or Owen Jones is just as much of bad faith contrarian as Katie Hopkins?

Andrew Rilstone said...

"Workers should be allowed to work from home" as ludicrous as "Covid is a hoax"? Or "covid is a hoax" as sensible as "workers should be allowed to work from home"?

SK said...

Owen Jones is just as much of bad faith contrarian as Katie Hopkins

The light of understanding dawns!

Andrew Rilstone said...

Please stop patronising me on my blog, you annoying right wing troll.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Well, it’s good to see we agree about something - ie, ‘Only the 650 best accomplished liars in the country can become MPs.’ - (we just seem to be differing about my use of the word ‘can’) but I’m still not sure that simply getting elected is proof of political competency. I actually think there are two quite different skill sets involved* - getting elected and governing the country - and that the first favours a certain type of opportunist. The most obvious example is Trump, who was a good salesman peddling a substandard product.

*An acquaintance of mine is always quoting that old line - ‘Campaign in Poetry. Govern in Prose’ as his assessment of the UK conservative party and how the current incarnation delivered on the first but hasn’t really succeeded at the second.

postodave said...

I’m still not sure that simply getting elected is proof of political competency. I actually think there are two quite different skill sets involved* - getting elected and governing the country - and that the first favours a certain type of opportunist. The most obvious example is Trump, who was a good salesman peddling a substandard product.

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

Andrew Rilstone said...

He was a very bad burglar. He used to rob houses in broad daylight and set all the alarms off.

So if he had sneaked into houses stealthily and not got caught, he would have been a good burglar.

What? You think that stealing things is good?

I see that we are using the word "good" in two different senses. Oh Socrates, you are so wise.


There are contexts within which you might say that the Sun was a good newspaper (people read and buy it) and Hitler was a good politician (he commanded crowds by the power of his rhetoric, and swayed a whole nation.) But there might be other contexts in which you said that the Sun was a bad newspaper, because it doesn't tell the truth; and that Hitler was a bad politician for various reasons we probably agree on.

I could see a good case for defining "politics" as "the arts of policy; the wheeling and dealing and manoeuvring that puts you into power" and using a different words -- governance, say, to describe what you do when you are in power. On which basis we had have to say that Boris Johnson and Tony Blair were astonishingly good at politics but rather hopeless at governance.

There might be someone -- Jimmy Carter, maybe, or John Major -- who was a bad politician, but who managed to get into power, and ended up being quite good at governing. Some people still think that Jeremy would have been good a governing while acknowledging that we was terrible at getting into power.

Of course, you might think that under certain circumstances "being bad at politics" -- not manoeuvring or scheming or trying to look good -- but just saying what you think -- is a good political move because people are tired of the slick clever kind of politician. Like a beer advert that says "We aren't going to advertise our beer -- just taste it and we think you will like it."

Sincerity is the great thing. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

Andrew Stevens said...

Sincerity is the great thing. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

This was, in fact, part of Trump's appeal. I found it baffling. Because he was willing to say controversial things (unlike most politicians), some people found him a "breath of fresh air," "so unlike professional politicians," etc.

I responded that it has been obvious to me for at least 30 years that Donald Trump is a habitual liar - far, far worse than a typical politician. Almost everything that comes out of his mouth is not true because he is entirely indifferent to the truth. I think that most of the smart people who disagreed with me in those early days (late 2015-early 2016) eventually came to see that I was correct. (Though some of them, I know, still supported him against Biden in 2020 for transactional reasons.)

Trump, however, does have a genius for manipulating the media and getting attention. He's really, really good at it. Saying controversial things is one of the ways he does this.

Andrew Stevens said...

For what it's worth, I have never heard of or read Owen Jones. It is not obvious from his Wikipedia page whether Mr. Rilstone or SK are correct about him. It does say, "In 2013 Jones praised Hugo Chavez and his handling of the Venezuelan economy, and criticised characterisations of Venezuela as a dictatorship. In 2014 he reaffirmed his belief in Venezuela's democracy. As the economic crisis and unrest in Venezuela intensified, Jones was criticised for his support of the Venezuelan government." This does not, of course, say anything about his good faith, but it is certainly an indictment of his judgment.

Andrew Stevens said...

However, I am inclined to believe Mr. Rilstone that Owen Jones is, in fact, arguing in good faith. But then I'm also not sure whether Katie Hopkins is either A) a bad-faith actor or B) a complete moron. She is certainly one or the other.

Andrew Stevens said...

I did some tests, admittedly not formal ones, and managed to get my score into the 130s. My wife used to be in Mensa and said at a meeting she attended they mainly talked about the Bay City Rollers. She after had a formal test and came about 10 points less than Mensa had tested her at; the psychologist said that was usual. I have a friend who tests in the 160s but thinks the tests are a bit pointless.

One of my faviourite Russell stories is that someone in an audience once said to him, you say from a contradiction anything follows if 2+2=5 prove I am the pope. Russell replied quick as a flash if 2+2=5 and 2+2=4 then 5=4 we, if subtract 3 from each then 2=1. You and the Pope are two, so you and the pope are one: you are the pope. Pretty quick thinking.


Formal tests matter. E.g. there is no person who tests "in the 160s." All accepted standard IQ tests have ceiling scores of, at most, 160. I have heard very weird results from Mensa tests. I would not take a test administered by Mensa very seriously.

As I've said, I estimate Russell's IQ to have been in the 130s. That's very high! People with IQs that high usually are quick thinkers. I just think that Russell was what one might call a "garden variety genius" with an exceptional talent for writing about difficult situations clearly.

Andrew Stevens said...

Sigh. I said "situations," but obviously I meant "subjects." I am old enough (47) and in ill enough health that I am myself experiencing some level of cognitive decline, there is no doubt.

Andrew Stevens said...

Oh, just to clarify: the Wechsler scale (which is a 15-SD scale) used to top at 150+ and (I believe) currently tops out at 155+. I believe Stanford-Binet (which is a 16-SD scale) has always topped at 160+. People higher than that are just too rare for there to be enough data to meaningfully differentiate them.

Andrew Stevens said...

Back on topic, I did look up English Heritage's Charles Dickens page and there is no mention of his antisemitism. To give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Andrew Stevens said...

(Parenthetically, I never knew before that Mensa started in the UK. Which explains why I'm suddenly talking about Mensa more than I ever have before in my life. The U.S. did have more than twice as many Mensa members than Britain, but then the U.S. also has five times the population of Britain.)

Andrew Stevens said...

Technically Mensa membership required a person to be in the top 2% of the population. Perhaps they fudged their tests a bit (or even more than a bit) to be able to expand their membership?

Aonghus Fallon said...

To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Absolutely. And then the really competent ones come in the most unlikely parcels. I mean (and I can understand why Britons might be ambivalent about her merits as a statesperson) but Merkel? MERKEL?

I see that we are using the word "good" in two different senses. Oh Socrates, you are so wise.

Well, there were a lot of very bad people who were very good at certain things - too many to list. I only mentioned how Trump was a good salesman because his general incompetency is taken as a given, whereas he was clearly good at something .

Re Dickens’ antisemitism.

I read Our Mutual Friend a few years ago. It’s actually not bad. I think as long as you think of Dickens as a latter-day Stephen King (ie, as a competent hack) you won’t be disappointed. I only mention it because there’s a Jewish character in it - a Mr Riah - who is clearly one of the good guys, and who was created largely in response to allegations by a female reader that Fagin was an antisemitic caricature. So there you go.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Sorry - I was using 'latterday' in the wrong context. Maybe 'As long as you think of Dickens as an old-school version of Stephen King'??

Andrew Rilstone said...

I felt that Our Mutual Friend was one of the best books and one of the worst books I had ever read. Loved the social satire. Quite liked the fairy tale. Wanted to murder all the chirpy cockneys, well, maybe I do, t'otherest gov'nor and maybe I don't. Will also pass over the Booful Lady.

It is a complete non sequitur to point out that other people apart from Enid Blyton had bad views. I don't think "widely criticised for his anti-semitism" would particularly come into a one paragraph summary of Dickens, whereas it would (presumably) for Wagner. "Her books are very, very bad, but children really, really like them" seems to be quire a fair thing to squeeze into a short summary. But "you can't criticize one bad thing unless you criticize ever bad thing, and therefore you nave to criticize no bad things" is Bristol Post level whataboutery. ("I know we have a statue saying that Jack the Ripper was a great humanitarian and champion of women's writes, but if we take his statue down we would logically have to take down the statue of the Winston Churchill who once made a rather sexist joke at a cocktail party.")

Aonghus Fallon said...

The boofal lady! Forgot about her! Which reminds me in turn of how the book is very geographically distinct (ie, most of the action takes place along the banks of the Thames)

Aonghus Fallon said...

Not sure if Dickens ever specifies the significance of the title - although it's suggested it might apply to one of the characters - but maybe he was talking about the Thames?

SK said...

I could see a good case for defining "politics" as "the arts of policy; the wheeling and dealing and manoeuvring that puts you into power" and using a different words -- governance, say, to describe what you do when you are in power.

Exactly.

SK said...

However, I am inclined to believe Mr. Rilstone that Owen Jones is, in fact, arguing in good faith. But then I'm also not sure whether Katie Hopkins is either A) a bad-faith actor or B) a complete moron. She is certainly one or the other.

I think there's a point where 'good faith' and 'bad faith' start to blur. If you deliberately stake out extreme and provocative positions for attention (Chavez-backing was never anywhere near the mainstream left in the UK even early on) and deliberately blind yourself to the rather obvious pieces of evidence that you are defending the indefensible, but you maintain a belief in the rightness of doing so because although you know that your particular position is bunk nevertheless you think there's an important kernel of truth there that you are helping bring attention to — ie, the modus operandi of both Hopkins and Jones — are you arguing in good faith because you really believe you are doing the right thing and helping your righteous cause by drawing publicity and attention and that's more important than being pedantic about the truth, or are you arguing in bad faith because you are putting forward positions you know are unsound or invalid as if you actually believe them?

And what if you actually do believe them, but only because you have deliberately conned yourself into doing so?

Nevertheless, the point is that Hopkins and Jones both have made a career out of taking extreme, controversial stances in order to generare outrage and get attention. They are running exactly the same grift, just to different audiences.

Andrew Stevens said...

I read Our Mutual Friend a few years ago. It’s actually not bad. I think as long as you think of Dickens as a latter-day Stephen King (ie, as a competent hack) you won’t be disappointed. I only mention it because there’s a Jewish character in it - a Mr Riah - who is clearly one of the good guys, and who was created largely in response to allegations by a female reader that Fagin was an antisemitic caricature. So there you go.

By the time anyone in Britain started criticizing Blyton's works for its racism, she was old, suffering from dementia, and wrote very little. By the by, her treatment of her first husband is entirely shameful as near as I can tell.

Andrew Stevens said...

And what if you actually do believe them, but only because you have deliberately conned yourself into doing so?

Interestingly, I am actually (and possibly almost uniquely) far more likely to grant good faith to people I disagree with politically than to people whom I generally agree with. With the latter group, I generally say to myself, "He/she can't be that stupid." I imagine both Katie Hopkins and Owen Jones would both fall into that group of people whom I virtually never agree with though, so I am certainly willing to listen to "they're not evil, just incredibly stupid" arguments about either.

Andrew Stevens said...

I should clarify what I mean above by "incredibly stupid." I do not mean stupid in the sense of having a low IQ.

"You might hope that intellectual honesty and self-awareness would be sufficient to prevent people from switching justificatory standards . . . . But my experience is that the human capacity for self-deception is both vast and subtle. It enables us to seize upon any available tool for maintaining the beliefs — particularly about philosophy, religion, and politics — that we prefer, while avoiding full consciousness of its own operation. In fact, it takes a concerted, conscious effort not to engage this otherwise automatic faculty." - Michael Huemer

In fact, the capacity for self-deception, for "conning yourself," is much stronger in high IQ people than in low IQ people.

postodave said...

I wanted to add a few final comments on The Secret Mountain. Firstly, in the most recent reprint of the 'secret' book in 2019 this one is left out. It was reprinted in 2009 but it may be that people know feel the attitude to race is not acceptable. Although I suggested this was more about culture than race in the biological sense, Blyton's own use of the word race to distinguish between British and German would suggest that she thinks of race in a way that would encompass both. She undoubtedly thinks the British (really the English) as a race are superior, even though the things she admires are largely cultural and she hopes to spread them by cultural means.

The first thing that struck me on reading the book was the sheer implausibility of the plot; the whole thing turns on a series of coincidences that it would be pointless to list. This culminates in the trop of the civilised people fooling the superstitious primitives through their knowledge of a solar eclipse. This trope has been used many times; I've been searching for a list of them because it is surprising how often it has been deployed. Twain uses it in The Connecticut Yankee and Rider Haggard in the first edition King Solomon's Mines. But apparently Haggard changes this to a lunar eclipse in later editions because he had misrepresented what happens during a solar eclipse. I think Frank Richard's used it in one of the Billy Bunter stories, though I can't track that down. I think by the time Blyton wrote this it was already a cliché, and here it just happens there is a total eclipse that the children know is coming when they are held captive by sun worshippers. The other coincidences are just as unlikely.

The Africa depicted in the book as a vague place, as fictional as her made up countries. She says a one point that one of the girls did not realise how big Africa was, but by coincidence the part of Africa the children's parents are lost in turns out to be a place some of those involved know from a previous visit. When Blyton wrote the first book in the series she used a lot of her knowledge of the natural history of the UK. Here she just relies on imagination, fruits are described as combinations of known kinds of fruit. This is an Africa of the European imagination.

The adults in the book agree to take the children into danger because they are sworn servants of the young prince, and this is the kind of thing foreigners do; having explained this is and repeated it a later stage, they can then act reliably and responsibly, like scout masters taking a party on a hike in the days when adults tried to act responsibly, but before health and safety became much of a concern.

But, for all that the book was enjoyable in its own way; I don't know if that was because I was remembering the pleasure it gave me as a child. It is probably just as well that it will not be reprinted. I suspect the racist elements are not detachable in this case and if children do want to find it there will be plenty of old copies to track down.