BY ROGER WATSON
In Banalysis, Frank Haviland tackles an unpopular subject: that people are different from one another. To even the casual observer it is obvious that people are different, but to say so these days is virtually an anathema. In our increasingly homogenised world, we are expected to accept that nobody wins a race, they merely participate. Nobody fails an examination; instead they receive a certificate with a letter so far down the alphabet that it merely demonstrates that they turned up. A man can punch the living daylights out of a woman in a combat ring because, by identifying as a woman, he is one.
But we are different, and thank goodness. If everyone had a brain like Albert Einstein, then who would do the more valuable jobs like collecting our refuse and building houses? Our society is founded on the concept of difference: some rule and the rest of us are ruled; there are millionaires, but most of us get by on more modest incomes; some play for Arsenal and some (like me) never made the school soccer team. No amount of social engineering or, indeed, socialism can obviate these simple facts. Indeed, when it is tried, a hierarchy of a different kind arises, whereby those who are sufficiently brutal rise to the top to enforce equality on those they rule. Oddly, such self-sacrifice is usually accompanied by considerable privilege.
That people are different is due to the way nature churns us out. All biological traits that can be measured are handed out to those who possess them according to something called normal distribution, also known as a bell curve. Thus, traits such as height and weight—if we measure these in enough people—conform to a normal distribution whereby most people land in the middle and fewer land at the extremes. This means that most men in the United Kingdom are around 5 feet 9 inches tall. Very few are 7 feet 5 inches tall and very few are 4 ft 2 inches tall. We only need to look around to confirm it. Note that I said, “most men,” because that is another feature of biological traits: they differ between the sexes, with women tending to be smaller and to have lower measurements for most other biological traits, for example, lung capacity.
Banalysis tackles these facts directly and, as anyone who has read Haviland in The New Conservative or The European Conservative will know, he writes with humour and passion. Banalysis is, therefore, a great read. The author is a social psychologist, and his understanding of the issues he covers in the book is profound; hence the journalistic flair of an accomplished writer is accompanied by academic rigour and, where necessary, meticulous reference.
The book opens by considering the lie that we are all the same, and that we all have an equal opportunity in life. It is a lie we ought to be alert to, merely by the absurdity of the claims made on its behalf. In industry these claims are called ‘leverage.’ A company will make itself look virtuous (e.g. by advertising its ‘green’ credentials) while selling you something that is profitable but not especially good.
We all do this, whether we admit it or not. Companies lie for profit; men lie to gain sexual favours; and our government lies to us almost constantly. People prefer being thought of as having done good—for example, by taking part in a charity run—rather than forking out their own cash. They appear virtuous rather than practise virtue. And not all victims are equal. Less is to be gained by anonymously helping some poor person in your neighbourhood than by taking in a Ukrainian refugee family and making sure that everyone knows about it. Remarkably, the Biblical story of the widow’s mite summed this up two thousand years ago.
The second chapter explores the concept of force majeure which, in this context, refers to the extent to which we can fool ourselves (and, more importantly, others) that nothing is our fault. We are not responsible; everything is done to us. External forces: God, the economy, or circumstances are to blame. We can also be complicit in being fooled by others in the same way as people were taken in by the main character in the film Catch Me If You Can. The range of linguistic and psychological tactics we use to implement these delusions, such as evasion and displacement, are considered here, each exemplified by some capricious politician who has had the arrogance to deploy them in the media.
In chapter three, “The Majesty of Variation,” we meet the normal distribution, with which I prefaced this review; and the book really takes off by exploring the consequences of ignoring the phenomenon of variation. Starting out with some obvious facts related to physical variation, it does not take the author long to step into the minefield of intelligence. While most commentators prefer to tread carefully here, Haviland runs in without caution and seems to delight in the explosions that result.
Famously, the issue of intelligence was the subject of The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The book looked at the outcome of variation in intelligence and how it affected achievement. In short, it argued that higher intelligence generally leads to higher achievement in almost any walk of life, and pointed to the heritable nature of intelligence. The book became notorious because it mentioned the fact that, in some intelligence tests, the mean score for black Americans is lower than for whites. Although this passage occupied five pages of an 872 page book, The Guardian managed to ‘summarise’ The Bell Curve as follows: “Black people are more stupid than white people: always have been, always will be.” The book, of course, made no such point.
For the above reason, Haviland is brave in entering the bell curve debate. He does not flinch from presenting the data, for example, on the correlation between mean intelligence-test scores and the GDP of countries; and, of course, it is far from a picture of white domination, with Asian countries faring best. The reasons are not entirely straightforward, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is at least an element of heritability. Again, these data only occupy a few of the book’s 248 pages, but they will bring much criticism from areas of academia where opinions outweigh facts.
The essential problem underlying the obsession with equality, and the denial that we do not all start life with the same set of genetic cards (and that it might make a difference), is that the issue of how to help people from whatever country or genetic makeup to achieve their best gets buried under heaps of politically-correct garbage. In the main, this is propagated by white academics who are unwilling to acknowledge that, if the system of privilege which they are always bemoaning really exists, they have been among the first beneficiaries: a problem they could alleviate by demoting themselves”? That way we leave it more ambiguous, and hoist them by their own petard.
Hard work only takes you so far, and this applies to physical as well as mental traits. For example, 1.5 million boys play regular organised football; only 180 of those end up with a professional contract; and only 30% of those who make it to an elite football academy end up playing professionally. The average schoolboy could spend every waking hour strumming his guitar, but the chances are he will never play like Jimmy Page.
It must be said that Haviland takes a bleak view of man’s sojourn through life. He does profess his own lack of faith, which may add to his misanthropy. However, in one brilliant chapter titled “Zero Tolerance,” which begins by stating that, for most of us, life is dull and repetitive, he shows how the ‘variance denier’ (aka the ‘social justice warrior’) leads what he calls (ironically) a full and satisfying life. Everything they experience, eat, see, and hear is an outcome of an injustice that must be corrected. To the social justice warrior, nothing is the outcome of differences between people; it is ‘the system’; and nothing is too trivial to be noticed.
The book continues, masterfully, in the same vein, and few aspects of our society, dominated as it is by identitarian politics, are not covered. The conclusion is that, unless we take variability into account, we blind ourselves to facts. And these facts can be serious. We readily ignore the grooming and raping of young girls in the UK by Muslim men, to the detriment of thousands, but call out the slightest whiff of misogyny in any white person, especially if their politics are right of centre. We see the trouble in some black communities as the outcome of oppression, and focus on the oppressed rather than asking why the vast majority in these communities do not steal and stab. Due to our wilful ignorance of variance, we do them the ultimate injustice of treating them as ‘all the same’ (only not, apparently, in a racist way).
Banalysis was published in the approaching shadow of the tsunami of stupidity that became the ‘pandemic’ and all that ensued. It did not get the attention it deserved then. It deserves to be read now.
Roger Watson is a British academic and former professor of nursing at the University of Hull. He is the editor-in-chief of Nurse Education in Practice and an editorial board member of the WikiJournal of Medicine. He was the founding chair of the Lancet Commission on Nursing, and a founding member of the Global Advisory Group for the Future of Nursing. In 2020, Watson was elected vice president of the National Conference of University Professors. In 2022, Watson was elected president of the National Conference of University Professors. You can follow him here.
First published on The New European.