Homo Sapiens or Homo Obsequens – Wise Man or Conformist Man

 

by Andrew Brons

When anthropologists chose the name Homo Sapiens – wise man – for our species, they showed that they were not dispassionate observers. Whilst Homo Sapiens undoubtedly had rather greater intellectual ability than his predecessors, those predecessors were not exactly threatening competitors.

The characteristic that is much more widely distributed throughout our species is not wisdom but a desire to conform. If wisdom is the capacity to discern and use evidence in rational argument, our drive to conform to dominant opinion serves too readily to stifle that process.

We have seen this drive historically, among otherwise intelligent people, to conform to the most absurd of beliefs. The belief in Witchcraft was not only absurd but tragic and cruel in its consequences and yet otherwise intellectually-able people seemed to subscribe to the belief.

In more recent years, academics have demonstrated that this drive did not die in antiquity. A cabal of psychologists from Yale University during the Post Second World War period provided graphic demonstrations of it. The first generation of these academics was led by one Soloman Asch and the second generation by Stanley Milgram, whose resemblance to Woody Allan is striking but clearly of no consequence.

Milgram conducted an experiment that was described to its participants as an experiment in perception but it was, in reality, an experiment in conformity.

Milgram would assemble a group of student volunteers who would be shown a card, to the left,  with three vertical line of different lengths marked on it. They would then be shown a card, to the right, with one vertical line marked on it. The students were asked, individually and in turn, which of the lines on the left-hand card most nearly approximated the length of the line on the right hand card. The experiment was repeated with a whole series of cards with three lines, to the left, and one line, to the right.

The answer, on each occasion, was glaringly obvious but five of the six students repeatedly gave the same wrong answer. Why? Because, unknown to the sixth student, they were in league with the experimenter. Only the sixth student was a genuine guinea pig in the experiment. The guinea pig started by supplying the correct answer but, in 60% of the experiments, ended by conforming to provide the same wrong answer as the other students.

In 60% of experiments, the guinea pig denied the evidence of his own eyes and conformed to the answer provided by the other students. The desire for conformity was a more pressing need than the desire for objective accuracy.

Milgram justified the experiment by  claiming that it was an attempt to explain conformity under totalitarian régimes in the past. I cannot resist the temptation of believing that it was to provide a blueprint for enforcing conformity in the future.

If this instinct to conform is genetic and has been developed through natural selection, what function could it possibly fulfil? Perhaps we should not assume that all inherited characteristics have positive functions or indeed any functions at all.

The answer might be that in prehistoric societies, facing scarce resources and threatening climates, co-operation was vital to survival. Conformity, with regard to prescriptive behaviour, is the essence of organisation – turning a collection of individuals into the semblance of a single organism.

It is possible that the inherited tendency does not distinguish between conformity of precriptive behaviour and conformity of descriptive fact.

In Milgram's experiment, the only inducement to conform was the opportunity to enjoy the cosy feeling of consensus and mutual approval. In mediaeval society (indeed in primitive societies that exist today) a failure to conform to religious and superstitious beliefs might result in horrific punishments.

Even in modern academic circles, there are issues on which conformity is demanded. The threats range from loss of status and respect; social opprobrium; loss of promotion; loss of employment.

The issues include the nature-nurture debate (or perhaps we should call it the nurture-nurture compulsory consensus). On this issue, the eminent psychologist, Hans Eysenck, was physically attacked by left-wing thugs eager to enforce the Political Class's compulsory consensus. They include any suggestion that different races have different average IQ scores. We saw the enforced retirement of Frank Ellis, from Leeds University, because he arrived at heretical conclusions on this issue.

On these issues, the weight of evidence is on the side of the heretics and that evidence is there to be seen by all. However, there is a self-enforced blindness that prevents that evidence from being seen, recognised and acknowledged by the people who matter – the people who take decision on behalf of all of us.

On the continent of Europe, in many countries, there is an enforced consensus on where, to what extent and by whom genocide had or might have been committed. In France, one might be found in the dock and convicted, because of an ill-chosen word or phrase. It is not necessary to have decided consciously to embark on a course of heresy. A French MEP was asked by a journalist about his views on the holocaust. He said that he did not want to engage in that debate. His use of the (French equivalent of) the word debate was enough to ensure that he was prosecuted and convicted. The word debate suggested that there might be doubt about the matter. His conviction was  several years later quashed on appeal but only after it had done him some considerable damage.

Criminal prosecutions for thought crime in the United Kingdom, are usually restricted to Nationalist activists. This serves the additional function of 'balancing' prosecutions of Islamist terrorists with prosecutions of Nationalists whose weapons have only been words.

In Establishment circles: the public sector; the media; and academe; drastic punishments are rare because they are unnecessary. The instinctive drive to conform produces the learned consensus. If a potentially-erring functionary felt tempted by a piece of evidence that might undermine the consensus, an internal warning signal would sound calling the functionary to order and obedience.  Orwell called this device crime-stop. Heresy would be avoided and consensus would be restored.

The functionary does not have the opportunity to contemplate his blindness to evidence, his weakness. his cowardice, his flight from reason. It all happens so quickly, so smoothly. It happens unnoticed to all but the seasoned outside observer.

As Inner Party member, O'Brien, explained in Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four: it was not sufficient to achieve compliance, when encouraging a subject to agree to an obviously false answer. It was necessary that the erstwhile or potential heretic really believed that two plus two equalled five, if that should be demanded by Big Brother.

What evidence is there for such compliance in practice?

The most topical at the time of writing, would be the findings of the inquiry into organised grooming and child abuse by Asian men in Rotherham. This had been happening for years with 1,400 known victims. However, the police, the media, the political parties (apart from Nationalists) and Rotherham Council Social Services had all denied knowledge and persecuted and threatened the victims and those who sought to help them.

At a more general ideological level, nurture is presumed to be the only plausible explanation for aberrant conduct, especially motiveless violent conduct. Nature (or heredity)  is eclipsed from consideration. Nature is not so much dismissed with or even without argument. It is not considered at all.

Articles or broadcast programmes about serial killers ask the assumption-laden rhetorical question: "What could have turned Harold Shipman/Peter Sutcliffe/Mary Cotton into a conscienceless killer?" The hypothesis that they might have been conceived and born conscienceless killers does not see the light of day. One does not need to be a Hobbesian protagonist to recognise such an approach as deeply-flawed.

Peoples of the world are presented in the media and in public debate as being of equal ability or at least equal potential, when the evidence from IQ test results shows that there are significant differences in average test scores between different population groups.

Different population groups are presented as peoples capable of equal achievement, when the evidence shows great variation in artistic, scientific and technological achievement – nearly all of it coming from people of European descent. Some population groups were still living in the stone age until rescued from it by traders or colonists.

Public policy is based on a demonstrably false premiss and nobody has the courage or foolhardiness to point it out. Immigration from the Third World is seen as an appropriate compensation for falling European birthrates. Third World immigrants are seen as substitute Europeans, when in reality they turn parts of Britain and the rest of Europe into parts of the Third World.

It would appear that reason has been defeated and eclipsed by the desire for conformity.

The principal reason that homo sapiens emerged as the unchallenged global master was his intellectual superiority. If that superiority has proved to be vulnerable on key issues in important areas of public policy, that superiority has been badly dented.

What is the answer? Can people be taught to defy conformity.

Perhaps we should start by examining which sections of the population are less inclined to obey the drive for conformity.

The largest by number would be those who have least influence over decisions or the implementation of decisions in the public sector or in areas of smaller importance to the political class. These would include skilled manual workers and the semi-skilled or unskilled.  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, they were designated the proles. Orwell described them as being left to themselves with little surveillance or control. Why? Because they had no power.

Nationalists have tended to concentrate their efforts on winning the support of those without power and have experienced some success. People have been elected on the strength of that success. However, the wielders of power and influence have been largely unaffected.

We might be tempted to pay attention to the 40% of guinea pigs, in Milgram's experiment, who did not conform, even by the end of the experiment. However, we must remember that the only incentive towards conformity in Milgram's experiments was desire for social consensus. There were no threats to deter heresy. How many of the 40% would defy conformity if threatened with social ostracism or loss of promotion or employment? I suspect the answer would be, very few.

What about those who choose to be openly defiant? They would include isolated academics – some of whom have suffered loss of status and position and some have suffered physically for their heresy. Some of these did not seek heresy but found themselves propelled by intellect and evidence to arrive at conclusions  unpopular among the arbiters of orthodoxy and heresy.

There are some – active Nationalists in particular – who seem to have been born as square pegs that do not fit easily into  holes of any dimensions. Indeed, human progress has depended on a small number of heretics, just as much as on a generality of conformists. I have heard it suggested that political or religious heretics might occupy lower rungs on the autistic scale. However, I shall leave that hypothesis to others to test.

Some of these are so ill-fitting that they start from the assumption that everything stated by the Establishment can be regarded as false, without putting it to the test. That can be self-defeating. Scepticism is nearly always a virtue. Automatic refutal of all received opinion, without supporting evidence, serves to give scepticism a bad name. Those who play the part of caricature refuters are, in reality, serving the conformist cause.

The question that we face is how we might influence the policy-makers and publicists. If all of the Emperor's courtiers appear to accept the consensus that he is wearing a new suit of clothes, how can we embolden one or more of them to point out that the Emperor is really naked?

There is the underlying question of whether we – political activists – ought to be seen to be doing the influencing. There is a powerful argument that political activists pursuing academic causes do lethal harm to both the causes and to themselves.

I do not claim to have the answer to all of these questions and, if I did, it would perhaps be unwise to provide it here in a public article. However, it should be a matter of urgent debate among those of us who understand the problem and would like to find a solution.