Breeding the Super-man?

We note this week the blog-musings of a government advisor in which he claims people of colour are innately less intelligent than white people. This same advisor is also on record as supporting the idea of compulsory contraception for the lower classes in order to avert the emergence of a mentally retarded underclass, because by certain selective and elitist measures, poverty – as well as colour – is held as an indicator of low intelligence, all of which is passed on genetically, thus souring a nation’s gene pool. Said advisor, having been outed by the lefty press, has now gone, but it ought to worry us – even if it does not entirely surprise us – how anyone espousing such views might ever have crossed the hallowed threshold of Number 10, all of which suggests the direction of travel is pretty much as we feared it would be.

My own understanding is that intelligence can indeed, in part, be inherited – perhaps as much as 50% – but whether we’re able to capitalise on those particular genes depends very much also on the environment we grow up in. Poverty does therefore have a bearing on intelligence, but only in so far as it’s correlated with poor nutrition and the multiplicity of social stresses that might be suffered when one is grindingly poor.

All things being equal, intelligence is gifted with no regard to social class or race. Just because you’re a king does not mean you’re also a sage. Conversely, if you grow up in a poor family, but feel otherwise secure and loved, you’ve as much chance of being an Einstein as anyone else. So, next time you’re passing one of those tower-blocks where the nation houses its poor, pick a window and imagine the life that lives there. The only difference between the potential of that life, and the most accomplished – and by that I don’t mean the wealthiest, but say an artist, poet, musician, dancer, industrialist, scientist, and, yes, a decent politician – is opportunity. In a successful society the door to opportunity is opened by talent, ambition and hard work. In a failing society it is opened by money.

When looking to science for solutions, we do well to be careful with the sciences from which we choose to selectively quote. If we want a healthy, happy population, if we wish to avoid that so called “underclass”, all that’s needed is the means to earn a living decent enough to put good food on the table, and the social infrastructure to provide a pathway for us all to realise our dreams. We do not need a program of enforced sterilisation, or selective breeding to maintain the vitality of a nation. We have been there before, all be it a long time ago with the evil of eugenics and its ideal of a super-race. This was a line of thinking that ended at Nuremberg, but only after the letting of much blood and a generation scarred by unimaginable cruelty.

But that we speak of eugenics again, now, in 2020 it seems to me we have begun another retrograde phase in the evolution of self awareness, compassion and simple decency, that the eugenicists cannot see how the very eugenics of which they speak and its aims of racial purity and intellectual supremacy, is itself evidence of rottenness, theirs the impure and soulless thinking we could well do without visiting again.

I hope this is something we can wake up to and avert by our collective revulsion, and that we don’t have to live through the first half of the twentieth century all over again before we do. But I look at where we are now, and I’m not optimistic. It’s one thing to be clever, quite another to be wise and honourable. I’m sure there are a lot of very clever people running the show, but at the same time we seem to be seriously lacking wisdom, while all sense of honour is routinely trampled into the dirt of lies, and political expedience.

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Corncrake my foot!

 

The searing heat abated somewhat today, though the stupefying humidity remained. I decided on just a short outing then, not too far nor too strenuous but still found myself dripping in minutes.

Where was I? Well, see if you can guess: the forest floor was ferny thick and the canopy abuzz with a torment of flies. There were plastic bottles a plenty in the undergrowth, ditto crisp packets, also a wealth of spent nitrous oxide cartridges. Higher up the hill, among the painstakingly restored terraced walkways there were the usual bags of dog turds hanging from trees like bizarre offerings to the ever salivating demons of barbarism, oh,… and there was an adult diaper oozing mess. We could only be in the Rivington Terraced Gardens then, or just about anywhere else in the countryside these days.

But on a lighter note I had recently discovered this thing called Google Lens. If you have a data signal, you can point your Android device’s camera at anything, and it will tell you what it is. So, whilst out and about in the green and with quite a perky signal, I decided to try it out – in the field so to speak. However, it swore blind the oak leaf was from a different tree entirely, a more exotic and entirely unpronounceable Amazonian species. It struggled to find any sort of name for a sycamore leaf at all, was confused by a humble bramble, but did identify, in the corner of that particular frame a corncrake, which would have been sensational had it not actually been my foot.

All of which got me thinking, if Google really is intent on displacing superfluous human activities like driving cars and reading maps, and telling us what things are, there must come a point when we’re no longer capable of knowing about these things for ourselves. It is at that point our entire frame of reference will be dictated by a kind of iron-brained deity we have in fact constructed, placed our trust in, and quite probably sacrificed our own long term survival on planet earth so this unconscious entity can thrive while missing the point entirely, that without us humble thinking beings, this artificial creature has no purpose at all.

It might well be an oak tree we are looking at, but we shall be forced to call it whatever the machine says it is, whether it is or not. And if the machine has no name for a thing, we shall stare at that nameless thing in horror, as we might at a demon come to threaten our entire world view.

For a time there’ll still be grey-haired die-hards who like to read books and maps, Luddites who insist on driving their own cars, but we won’t last much longer and then, well, you kids are on your own, and you’ve only yourselves to blame. The real world is still out there, though looking a little sorry for itself now, quite literally shat upon, and suffering ever more frequent paroxisms of climatic excess that we’re probably too late to fix. And I suppose the thing is we’ve never respected it, trusted instead in our own superiority, in our technologies, so now we find ourselves with gormless expressions, tongues hanging out, noses pressed against the glass of our latest device, peering in to a world that doesn’t exist, while the one that does, the one that sustains us and gives us air to breathe, we have allowed to catch fire.

We are adept at adaptation, so much so there can never be an example of dystopia outside of science fiction, for no matter how weird or absurd, oppressive or dangerous our world becomes, we have already accepted it as the new normal, even before it’s claimed its first victims.

Corncrake? Yea right.

 

 

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The machine that ate my brain

I’ve just noticed my novel “Between The Tides” popping up for sale on various strange websites, adult sites, the sites you hesitate to click on, so I refrained from further investigation. It used to happen a lot with Amazon too, my stuff getting stolen and sold by pirates. The first couple of times this misappropriation and misrepresentation bothered me deeply. It used to feel like a violation.

It’s my business if I decide to give away a novel I’ve spent years writing, quite another if some n’er-do-well cuts and pastes it and charges $5 for the download, but for all of that it concerns me less nowadays, and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. I hasten to add “Between the Tides” is not an “Adult” novel. It’s a contemporary literary romance, so anyone paying their $5 and expecting pornographic rumpy pumpy are going to be disappointed.

Technology opens up all manner of possibilities, not all of them for the better. The Internet enables many, like me, a means of self expression, changing the definition of what publishing actually is, and I count this on the plus side. But on the other there’s a million new ways of exploiting the innocent, of scamming them, hurting them, even enabling new forms of global warfare with whole nations trying to shut down each other’s essential infrastructures, like electricity or air-traffic control. And its effect on global politics is only just becoming apparent, sophisticated algorithms undermining the democratic process and swaying election results in favour of the plutocratic moneyed minority.

I’ve always been a progressive when it comes to technology, but some of the visionaries driving it now are clearly nuts, also unfortunately incredibly rich and powerful. Technology changes lives, brings about revolutions in the way we live and work. These revolutions used to take centuries to come about, then it was decades, now it’s down to a few years. The pace of change is accelerating, and some visionaries, real live CEOs of Silicon Valley companies, extrapolate a future where the time for change is compressed to zero. They call it the Singularity, and it’s at this point everything happens at once.

Really, forget religion, the techno-visionaries are quite evangelical about it. The Singularity is analogous to the Second Coming, or the End Times, or the Rapture. It’s at this point, they tell us, machines will become conscious beings in their own right, and we will have achieved immortality by virtue of the ability to “upload” our minds into vast computational matrixes, like in some hyper-realistic massive multi-player online role playing game.

But given the darker side of technology, is this something we really want? I’ve only to watch my kids playing GTA to know it’s the last place I’d want to be trapped for eternity. Or perhaps, given the inevitable commercialisation of the meta-verse, our immortality could only be guaranteed provided we obtained and maintained sufficient in-game credit, and when we ran out, we could be deleted. Thought you’d be safe from market forces when you died? No way, the visionaries are working on ways of it chasing you into the afterlife.

Certainly our machines are changing how we live at an ever accelerating pace. Meanwhile we remain essentially the same beings that walked the planet two thousand years ago. Whether or not you believe it’s possible to preserve your essential thinking being by uploading it to a computer depends on how you imagine consciousness coming about in the first place. There’s the mechanistic view, that the brain is a computer made of meat, so as soon as we can make a computer as complex as that, Bob’s your uncle. But I’ve never been of that view, so I’m able to rest a little easier that my afterlife will not be spent avoiding evil bastards in a GTA heaven or keeping up the payments on my immortality.

In the matrix, there’s nothing I can do to stop the bad guy from stealing the book I’ve written, but he cannot steal the one I’m writing nor, more crucially, my reasons for writing it. Such a thing transcends the mechanistic world view, a world view that’s a century out of date, yet still cleaved to by the technocracy with all the zealotry of an Evangelical Preacher. The technocracy long ago deconstructed heaven and transcended God with their own omnipotence, but what they’re offering in its place now makes less sense for being all the more transparently absurd, and for the simple fact that machines do not come for free, that those who own them are paid by those who do not. Bear this in mind and our relationship with machines will remain balanced, and correct. Forget it, and the machine will eat your brain long before you get the chance to upload it.

 

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The unexamined life

I understand that not everyone is interested in enquiring into the nature of things, but what concerns me of late is the denigration of those who do. I’m not talking about intellectuals whose job it is to make professional enquiries into this or that, but ordinary souls who are simply interested in stuff. Being of an enquiring mind myself, I find this denigration is itself interesting and perhaps even culturally significant.

For a while now I’ve been asking the question: are interests are dying? And by interests I mean simply: hobbies. At a job interview nearly forty years ago, one of the first questions I was asked was: What are your interests? Back then it would have been photography, cycling, shooting, Origami, making Airfix kits, making balsa-wood aeroplanes, slot car racing, Judo, drawing, reading – to name but a few. None of these things had anything to do with the job I was applying for, but a wide range of interests and the ability to speak about them was considered a good thing back then. It certainly gave us lots to talk about, and I got the job.

Of course, as we age, adult responsibilities take their toll, and my hobbies have been pruned back somewhat, old hobbies have fallen away and news ones have been embraced, with writing foremost among them, and what hobbies remain to me still provide an outlet for an energy that finds its satisfaction in no other way.

I remember my father, a blue collar working man, with his insatiable interest in local history, from the Victorian engineering of mines, to prehistoric concepts of time and measure. He spent years investigating what he believed to be a neolithic calendar site on the West Pennine moors. To aid in this thesis, he taught himself mathematics, ancient astronomy and celestial navigation. He also liked to shoot and fish, studied geology, read Plato and Milton, and he wrote stuff. My father was never going to change the world with his interests and they had no bearing on his job as a colliery deputy. I think it was more the case that he found himself in them.

If you type train spotting into the Google box you’ll be a long while scrolling down to the original meaning of the word. Train spotting now means something else entirely, due in no small part to the Danny Boyle film of the same name whose brutal depiction of Edinburgh drug addiction so excited the critics at the time, and continues to inform popular culture. But train spotting was and remains a very particular hobby. That men will go out with notebook and camera to gather “intelligence” on railway engines and rolling stock seems pointless, but then most hobbies are like that. I am not a train spotter, but I understand the motivations of people who are.

What hobbies are, in fact, is an outlet for the innate and often quite humbling intelligence of ordinary men and women. Certified intelligence, in terms of school leaving or graduate qualifications, is not necessary. My father left school at fourteen without any formal qualifications, but following his interests he was motivated to take up the study of A levels at night classes in later life. These classes weren’t taken with an eye to professional development, but more as tools for the development of purely personal aims and interests. He expanded himself into the world of his interests, as I expand myself into mine.

Geek is a word I don’t approve of. Dress it up how you like it’s mainly used in a pejorative sense, and is pointed at anyone with an excessive (translate as pathalogical) interest in a technical or intellectual field – the implication being someone who is socially ill adjusted, non-mainstream, possibly even autistic. Of course in a hi-tech world where so few have any idea what’s under the bonnet of their computers, the geeks have begun laughing their way to the bank, but not every geek wants to transform their interest into a multi-billion dollar business. Use of the word geek in popular culture underlines for me the denigration of the very idea that it is normal for a human being to be interested in anything.

My youngest son is a keen guitarist, and through his interest has developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the development of popular music and both the history and the technology of guitar construction. It’s perhaps counter-intuitive then that he considers the formal study of music at college to be a drag, nor has he any ambition to form a band so he can make it big on X-factor. It is the interest itself that absorbs him; it is the block on which he hones his intelligence. My eldest son follows the sport of motor racing in minute detail and lives for each fresh season of Formula One. He revels in the statistics of points and lap times. It was this passion that provided the lure which had him navigating his independent way across Europe to Monza last summer at an age when I would have lacked the confidence to do so. In short these are developmental issues. Through hobbies and interests we see the development and the maturing of intellect in ways that a more formal education cannot address.

But my fear is that as our civilisation has matured these past decades, the plethora of interests available for pursuit has atrophied to the extent that the question I was asked in that interview forty years ago would now be met with an embarrassed silence. For many, the majority pastime is merely keeping up with social media, and the presentation of a false face to the world of ones imagined peers. And then again many otherwise intelligent people turn each evening to the world of soap opera, which can occupy the mind from six until nine p.m, each weekday night, mesmerise it in a never ending formulaic cycle of dramatic conflict and resolution. Try as I might, I cannot classify either of these things as hobbies, since they are each in their own way capable only of suspending the activity of the mind, rather than encouraging any thoughtful application of it. They each create an artificial reality of simple rules and boundary conditions, beyond which one need not stray.

To scratch build, and then fly a model aeroplane requires the development of a set of skills on a par with those of an aeronautical engineer, and all this in someone whose dayjob might involve nothing more technical than selling insurance. Pointless perhaps, but intelligence is infinitely transferable and an intelligent citizen is better equipped to cope with the real world than one who is untrained in the critical application of whatever intellect they possess. The intelligent citizen does not accept uncritically the tritely emotive headlines of newspapers with their constant calls to arms, their vilification of innocent minorities, and their scaremongering over one spurious health issue after the other.

In Aldous Huxleys dystopian novel “Brave New World” the citizenry are sold a fantasy that they are happy to believe in, and over time have lost their ability to question why things are the way they are. They are happy, of a fashion, and they simply don’t care that they are living lives that are essentially sub-human. Unquestioning and uncritical they are vulnerable to the forces that control them, and so easily suggestible they can be fed any lie and they will wholeheartedly believe in it, because they no longer possess the confidence nor indeed the independence of their own minds.

I am a defender of the hobby and all who would be branded as the geeks of this world. It’s an unfortunate turn of events that a young person indiscreet enough to advertise their liking for collecting stamps, or coins or Meccano, would find themselves hate-mailed by uninteresting trolls on that Freindface thing, but I know which of the parties would be capable of holding the more interesting conversation, and of spotting the weaknesses in the arguments put forward by their own society. It is the geeks who bring about change, the geeks with their eclectic interests who will be the first to question the order of things, while the trolls prefer instead to wallow in the mud of their unexamined lives.

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