Adelphiasophism
Society and the Failure of Our Rulers
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Monday, June 04, 2001
A Vacuum of Belief
Not one of us is a fully rational creature. Our beliefs and disbeliefs are seldom arrived at through reason, though we might think they are. Many young people today do not seem to believe anything at all, though a substantial minority will believe anything they are told, as long as it is fantastic enough. It seems that the twentieth century ideal of liberality is too fine a line to tread and societies always tumble into anarchy or totalitarianism. Moderation never seems enough. People want to be extremists of one type or another.
Those who are already immensely rich and powerful see danger to their position from the poor and ignorant of the world, whether their own poor and ignorant, or the poor and ignorant of other countries held subject by the terms of trade imposed by the wealthy. The wealthy have not lost faith in Western ideals because they are in the position to enforce them. The poor and ignorant, certainly of the Third World have not lost faith in their ideals because they have a deep hatred for their First World exploiters and hatred is the most powerful generator of ideals.
For the people in between, the urban middle classes of blue and white collar workers, many technologists and intellectuals, many women, blacks and homosexuals, traditional beliefs have failed. The Churches have milked their flocks over the centuries and continue to milk them so unmercilessly that they now have the same interests as the rich. They also seem to modern people to want to maintain ethical positions that are unsuited to the modern world.
In countering this, they have some success by appealing to the sickly sentimentality that has increasingly pervaded the West, as exemplified by the hysteria in Britain over the death of Princess Diana. Instead of weeping on each others’ shoulders, modern people really ought to find a sentimentality with a hard edge that will stimulate them to selfless action rather than self-indulgent tears. The princess that they are so maudlin about “did” actually try to do something!
For the period in history of the nation states, patriotism has been a worthy belief to which idealists could passionately hold. Though it might seem admirable for oppressed people, nationalism has rarely led to liberation for individuals but merely to a change of oppressor, and, today, the destructive power of modern weapons guarantees no easy path to liberation but only an easy way to destroy more of the surface of the world. Bertrand Russell rightly said:
Patriotism is the chief curse of our age and will bring civilization to an end if it cannot be mitigated.
Progress
The nineteenth-century ideal of progress has also ceased to be a belief to be held by people of modest means, despite the proliferation of unnecessary gadgets. Today the statistics that used to astonish us with the ingenuity of humanity, measure nothing other than the state of decay of the world. So, now everyone has a mobile phone, households have three cars, and more air miles are flown by jet aeroplanes than ever before. All simply signify that the resources of the earth are being depleted and the pollution of the atmosphere is getting critical. Though the experts are aware of the attack on the biosphere, they cannot tell us how serious it is. They cannot measure important things like how close we are to extinction.
People could, at one time, claim that they believed in their sense of beauty and would try to make a pretty house and garden. Many still do but, in so doing, they buy hardwood furniture, depleting the lungs of the earth and plant invasive and inappropriate plants that local species cannot compete with, or are incompatible with.
Meanwhile, those with a professional responsibility for beauty, our artists, architects, and even poets and musicians produce garish and morbid rubbish intended only to shock or to test exactly how far the public can be pushed into bad taste. It is symptomatic of the end of empire—or perhaps civilisation or even the human race. In the shadow of extinction we begin to look ridiculous.
Truth used to be, in classic times, a virtue worth seeking, and from time to time it has a revival for some idealists and schoolteachers. The main reason for its demise was the Christian church, which only in the last few centuries has even made a pretence of upholding truth. The Church has built itself on a foundation of lies, and now cannot allow truth to get too popular in case the foundations should be found to be unsafe.
Modern Christians remain blind to the church’s gruesome and unholy history. Many are, of course, just uneducated and superstitious ignoramuses, but even intelligent people will turn away from the truth about the church’s long history of ecclesiastical murder and terror, while—at a time when we have just seen the six billionth human enter the world—arguing for the sacredness of the life of a human embryo. It is time truth was revived permanently as an essential belief and a desirable virtue.
The Failure of the Intellectuals
One might have thought that universal education, democracy and mass communications would have produced a generation of intellectuals willing to pick up the banner of truth and attempt to influence the way things are turning in the world. Yet, all they are interested in doing is being fat cat employees of the greedy and unintellectual rich, as PR experts, technologists or marketeers.
The work of intellectuals is ordered and paid for by governments or transnational companies, whose aims are pernicious to the general good of the world and humanity too. Only a cynical attachment to their comfortable baskets and perquisites allow these fat cat experts to survive for they have their qualms but pretend otherwise, so as not to lose any privileges. Rabelais published anonymously for fear of losing his University post. Today’s intellectuals adopt the same pragmatic lack of principles en masse, when the mass of them could stop the continuing destruction.
Scientists and technologists, at one time, were perhaps justified in feeling that they were doing good—assisting progress— even though they were also helping some capitalist to own what ought to be common to all—a chunk of the world. Now that the world has been sliced off down to the bone, they ought not to feel so smug. Everyone today needs a cause that is worthy of genuine concern, and to protest while upholding the best of truthful and honest standards.
The Failure of Our Rulers
Disraeli said we must…
…educate our masters,
but that now seems out of the question. They are too greedy and there is not enough time to wean them off their addiction to power. How is anyone to persuade a financier or a government that their are crushing prices to pay that they are not allowing for in their books? There might, indeed, not be enough time to do anything about the rot of greed and exploitation that has set in. We might already be doomed. Educating the ordinary people off the consumer goods that they have become addicted to might be equally impossible.
In the twentieth century, we have insisted that professional people should be qualified and certificated before we will allow them to practise, but we have not taken it far enough. What professional qualification does a media magnate require. He dominates the world’s opinions but might be as ignorant as a blowfly about the crucial things concerning survival. What qualifications does a Prime Minister, a President or a Finance Minister need in science, ecology or aesthetics.
Not that such qualifications would eliminate error because, above all, we need people ruling us that are sensitive to the delicate state of the world. The complex web of ecology has shown us that cause and effect are not simple one-to-one relations but have unknown ramifications.
The men—they are nearly all men—that control transnational organizations are ignorant and particularly so of the consequences of their actions. Russell was again on target when he declared:
Stupidity is more firmly entrenched than at any other time since the rise of civilization.
Few rulers have ever been intelligent but they have never previously been as powerful as the controllers of the multinational corporations are today. It is more important than ever to ensure they are called to account. We had better be quick about it, too!
Teaching and Society
Adelphiasophists never believed that schooling should involve dumbing down intelligent children. In the UK, there was a long argument between political parties and educationalists about comprehensive schools, meant to give all children the same opportunity without prejudice over their family or racial background. Previously, the system had been one of selection on the basis of certain tests taken at age 11. Generally, middle-class children did better in these tests than did working class children unless they were especially clever and from understanding parents. The so-called “grammar schools” were therefore full of average and unambitious middle class kids, while most working class children went on to “secondary modern schools” to while away the time until they started work.
Americans and other non-Brits might wonder what happened to the rich kids and the children of nobility. They did not have to bother about tests at all. Their parents, either through wealth or background, secured them places in the “public schools”—schools that were not public at all but were thoroughly exclusive unless your family had riches or power. Those same schools also had guaranteed places to the highest universities in the land, Oxford and Cambridge, so Britain had a sort of Mandarin system, and indeed, the senior people in the civil service were called “mandarins”, mostly coming from the “public schools”.
The introduction of the grammar schools after the War cannot be faulted for working class children and many benefited who would otherwise have finshed up in mind and bady destroying jobs like their fathers. But the injustice of the system still rankled, many clever children being denied places because they had not been given the learning environment at home that would have got them past the examination hurdle. Selection and the segregation of children into successes and failures at such a young age as 11 were seen as the faults. “Comprehensive schools” were introduced as being like US “high schools” and the earlier tier in the UK, the “primary schools”, open to all.
Several decades later, the argument continues, parents being concerned that “comprehensive schools” are out of control, full of inadequate teachers, aggressive and delinquent children and having poor standards. Teachers are on the defensive, rightly in many instances, blaming parents for abnegating control over their children and society for turning its head away from delinquency. Teachers are “in loco parentis,” but, if the parents let their children behave as delinquents and teachers therefore do the same, for an easy life, they are acting “in loco parentis”—precisely.
The point is that parents and teachers should work together in giving children respect for what is in the world, whether it is other people, hedgehogs or trees, all of which are victims of delinquency. It is a puzzle for Adelphiasophists why people, however frustrated and angry they might be, should want to make their circumstances even more unpleasant by barking trees, mugging their grandparents and torching local schools and shops. It might be argued that society has a responsibility here, and indeed it has, but society is the sum of its parts and if the parts have been neglected, society also decays.
Christians blame it on the loss of influence of the churches, but the cynic would reply that modern strreetwise youth, faced by far worse horrors, are not going to be given the frighteners by a heavenly bogeyman. The solution must involve teaching children the importance of this world, not an ineffable nothingness in heaven that they can safely ignore. They cannot safely ignore the world, and their own experience must show them what a mess can result if thoughtless selfishness is allowed to reign supreme as it does in our inner cities.
Naturally, it needs a change among the greedy accumulating types, whether corporate bosses or their decoys, depicted daily in the tabloids as desirable, “role-models”—mainly empty headed louts deliberately behaving obnoxiously in the delusion that they are being funny or entertaining. Parents and teachers will get nowhere with schoolchildren as long as the media support the cult of loutishness, the cult of selfishness and the cult of ignorance. There is little hope of that from selfish, loutish ignoramuses that the media barons prefer to have as editors.
Not that anyone wants children to be sitting in rows as they did in Victorian times. School is an unpleasant experience for some children but all of them should be brought up by their parents to accept that it is in their own interest. A teacher who did not tolerate some dissent by a pupil would be a bad teacher, but the dissent should be intelligent dissent not peevish dissent. It is up to parents and teachers—particularly parents—to explain which is which.
Intelligent children, dumbed down might well dissent through boredom, and the teacher has undoubtedly failed if intelligent pupils rebel because they are bored. Put an intelligent student into a junk room and they will remain there happy as a pig in muck, exploring their new environment. Intelligent pupils in some ways are the easiest to teach, because they motivate themselves. They should not be held back, and indeed would be better employed, if necessary, helping to teach the weaker students, in village school style, rather than dumbing them down.
No one is more interested in creativity and originality than Adelphiasophists but all such high skills are valueless unless they are built on the proper acquisition of lesser skills. Intelligent children will co-operate with their teachers to acquire them and can be trusted to get on with it when free of disruption. And weak or jealous pupils will try to disrupt them unless they in their turn are fully occupied. If any pupil refuses to co-operate, they have to be segregated or expelled, because a school depends upon co-operation. If it is not to be imposed with a stultifying heavy hand, as it once was, it has to be done by co-operation, and the pupil who adamantly refuses to co-operate must be withdrawn before the others pupils despair and join in.
All teachers should be able to recognize unusually intelligent children and to give them proper challenges rather than dumbing them down. The dumbed down intelligent pupil will be a far worse troublemaker than the pathologically mischievous child. The intelligent child will respect the enlightened and encouraging teacher.
From the vantage point of the United Kingdom, the impression is that American middle class youth are more insane than our own. They are given astonishing freedom by their parents, yet are subject to strong pressures by society. Rod Steiger, the old and excellent film actor, tells us that American adults simply cannot afford to be non-conformist in any way. People have to suppress even altruistic acts so as not to offend colleagues or especially their boss. All of us are social animals and have to take cognisance of our community and not just do as we like, but such strong pressures to conform are inhuman. At one time, it was the proper thing to do to assist someone being attacked in the street. Not now, especially if they are a minority, you are more likely to get the sack when your boss finds out.
So, it can be counter-productive to get people to conform when social norms become intolerable. But society can only get to this stage when it is an advanced pathological state. Chaos in the schools will produce worse chaos in society. It has to be stopped somewhere and it will only be stopped when our youths enter high school with a proper respect for the planet we live on and all its divers products, including other people, especially teachers. When youth accept this, their teachers ought to able to do their proper job of directing their learning experience, not doing what parents ought to do, or acting as wardens for gangs of delinquents.
Social conformity is neither the beginning nor the end of virtue, but respect for the world and other creatures in it is!
Idiotocracy
As Bertrand Russell observed, there have been times in the world’s history when people were confident they knew all that needed to be known, times when everyone lacked confidence in everything, times when education conferred confidence and the uneducated at least respected education, and times when it was a boon to be uneducated and education was a liability.
The worst sort of social system is the latter—the anti-meritocracy or idiotocracy. The idiotocracy is a state in which the stupid rise to power. In that sense, it is perhaps, the most common form of government we have, but usually the idiotocrcy is not institutional, being relieved from time to time by meritorious governments. Idiotocracies depend upon total ignorance throughout society and a belief that anyone who shows any symptoms of undertanding should be burnt or beheaded.
The longest period of idiotocracy we know of is called The Dark Ages and corresponds to the absolute rule of Christianity in Europe from about 500 to the Renaissance.
Primitive societies had little knowledge but they were confident they knew what was needed—the inviolability of their customs, the effectiveness of their seasonal magic to secure fertility, the wisdom of the mother-centred household and tribe and the contentedness of men to occasionally hunt or dig and adorn themselves with ochres and defend their women and children. Life was not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short as Hobbes claimed but was generally easy and of average length for those who survived infancy.
Russell thought the early centuries of this era in the clasical world was a time of profound lack of confidence leading to gradual decay, but the philosopher emperors of the second century held sway over some of the most enlightened of times and if doubt sometimes stultifies action as Russell claims, it also can stimulate inquiry. Of course, the doubt to which he refers is really a profound lack of confidence not simply doubt which is—given confidence and recognized and handled properly—certainly a stimulus.
From the Industrial Revolution, the progressive discovery of the scientific method based on being skeptical about everything until the evidence proved it beyond further doubt, gave a new confidence in education. Ignorance was recognized as impoverishing and undesirable and many a novel of the early twentieth century was about the struggles of the working class to get an education, rather than being forced down the pit or into a lifetime of pregnancy. Even those who disdained education for themselves or could not benefit by it preferred, in the new fangled elections, to elect those who were educated.
So, Christianity left us with one of the clearest and longest periods of idiotocracy. But are we returning to it? With the gains of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religion entered a downturn but today we see tele-evangelists with huge audiences and bigger fortunes, the most sophisticated nation on earth turning to every sort of bizarre cult and believing that monsters from outer-space abduct them every night, and in the Moslem world, the ugliest and most ignorant forms of fundamentalism turn to bombing American and European tourists and provoking retaliation intended to cause civil war.
In the modern age, the people with definite convictions are those who are too stupid to know that convictions can never be definite. Admittedly there are among them those who know it but prefer to assert their convictions as definite for their own gain or expediency. We are governed by fools or charlatans, and prudence and caution count for nothing in the wisdom of the boardrooms and parliaments of the planet.
If this persists, the world will continue to plunge into ecological disaster. The corporations of the world have shackled intellectuals in the same meretricious desire for wealth as everyone else, and so they have abandoned their proper role as critics and become impotent. Many even justify the greatest scam of history, Christianity, as a “phenomenon” that should be accepted on its own terms rather than exposed as a fraud and a lie. Intellectuals, bar a few, are effete and accommodating to the councils of the world, which they consider to be doing a good job for them and their own living in plush mansions on sinecures paid for by international monopolies. Nothing needs to be done so they do nothing.
If history is cyclical, then we can look forward to a new Dark Age, and with the corporate world impatient for more and more profit and more and more exploitation of Nature, it might not be far off.
Marketing
In the disposable society, much money, time and mental output is committed to inducing people to buy what they do not particularly want. Marketing, as it is called, is considered a virtue and those who are adepts at it are highly rewarded. Yet, a moment’s thought shows that it is a practice that does more harm than good. People buy bits of obsolescent equipment through the pressures of peers, salesmen or advertising—equipment which is obsolescent because it is made that way, designed not to work properly so that the buyer feels obliged at an early date to buy an “update”—and all of it made of the hills and valleys of the earth, excavated for the minerals used in its production.
In return for all this misery, the salesman and manufacturer both are well thought of because their enterprise is “good for business”. We are required to spend money not on something we need but to enrich a manufacturer. Since the greatest of virtues is the marketing skill of making people buy things they don’t need not just what they do need, the people who are most respected are those who cause the most pain to the world.
Everything economic is looked upon from the standpoint of the producer rather than of the consumer. Bill Gates is a hero and his hundreds of billions of dollars wealth prove it, yet consumers tear out their hair in frustration at the inadequacies of his products and having to cough up another few hundred dollars every couple of years, while computers are simultaneously in need of updating to provide space for the bloating software.
Products are no longer solutions to our problems, we are the solution to the manufacturers’ problem of how to dispose of unnecessary products.
Notionally, we each have a certain pot of money to spend—what we earn less what is consumed for the necessities of life—so when we spend money on one widget, we no longer have it to spend on another. Marketing has two purposes, one is to draw the consumers’ attention to one product rather than another, but the other is to increse the consumers’ desires so that they will actually desire both products. Yet, if they are to buy them both, they must starve. The producers get over this by giving “credit”—their way of saying that they will sell you money to spend now on their widget, as long as you pay it all back and more in the future.
All this means ultimately is that someone will have to stay out in the fetid pollution of the dying world, still tearing apart the earth when the mega-rich have already departed to a synthetic earth on Mars or wherever. They will still be demanding interest on their credit when the world is on its last legs. If you do not believe it, see it now, in the Third World!
People used to work to live, and when there was not much work to do while the crops were growing, they had festivals. Then when the crops were taken in they had some more festivals. Now people live to work and there is not much time for festivals, but lots of time for worry and neurosis. Yet most of the extra money they work extra hours for, only buys accessories for work, and would not be needed if they did not work so much, and obsolescent trinkets.
We make extra money to pay for the expenses we incur in working and to enable others, often already rich people, to make even more money. And all this unnecessary work and manufacturing is done at the expense of the earth and the welfare of future generations. This is insanity.
Conscience
Conscience is our mental judge, telling us when we are doing bad. Some say it is a mental parent chiding the child within us, and thence Christians take it to be the voice of the heavenly father speaking to them by telepathy. The danger of that is plain and many cases of paranoid schizophrenia show it. People, believing that they are obeying the voice of God speaking to them in their heads, get the illusion that the Almighty cannot proceed to correct the wrongs of the world, that he could make in six days, without the help of some mentally ill human being. The supposed requirements of a supernatural being whispering in your head cannot provide adequate norms of behaviour because they are so easily perverted in the minds of the ill.
It is possible that conscience at the most basic level is instinctive. An instinct to protect your own children and perhaps your spouse and other immediate relatives, especially those sharing genes, is likely to be of evolutionary value, and end up being a form of behaviour preferred in selection. From this ready-made instinctive base, parents could condition their children, as society required more sophistication in behaviour.
Conscience then is largely social conditioning. Society has a legitimate interest in teaching children to do the “right thing,” and parenting serves as the main instrument in doing this, so long as society leaves the early years of children to the care of their parents. In modern society, schools are also important, as are the mass media, notably TV. Peer group pressure is vitally important but it should be conditioned by the influences mentioned, acting coherently.
What fails today is that peer groups reject the influence of parents and schools, seen as authoritarian and instead follow the lead of media that are not primarily used to reinforce social norms but to magnify the power of manufacturers to make money by pandering to supposed youthful alienation from society. The media have no social responsibility because they are not controlled by anyone trying to maintain social cohesion. Music and its lyrics once did allow youth to bond together under rebellious banners and those rebellions were good for society but clever marketing men saw its power and took a hold of it themselves.
Rock groups are no longer independent, they are run by and even made by global corporations with no responsibility to anyone in particular except themselves. Once children begin to take their cues from what seems to them to be daring rejection of parental and social norms, then peer group pressure strengthens the anti-social behaviour and parents, schools and society as a whole have little chance of changing it.
It might seem authoritarian for governments to curb corporate power, through the media, over young people but it must be done. Otherwise social breakdown and chaos will invite a decidely unwelcome and undemocratic authoritarianism. As history shows this will be underpinned by the orders of the Almighty, when a little respect for the natural world effectively taught without countervailing propaganda from chainsaw wielding rap singing corporate puppets would have preserved social sanity.
