It is very unusual for so long to pass between Postings on As It Happens. We can put this down to two developments.

First, the remarkable 'take off' of the Right2Link Campaign which has touched a nerve in the new economy and set the agenda far more quickly than we had all expected. Follow the Twitter account for the latest news which includes a news on a Clause put down by The Lord Lucas to the Digital Economy Bill.

Second, although we remain cautious about 'recovery', our sister company, Pendry White (which is also handling much of the implementation for Right2Link), has been seeing a surge of activity and this has pulled the As It Happens editorial team into the new business fray.

So, apologies to regular followers, but ten more days of this and we should, with a fair wind, be back on stream ... in the meantime, here are some thoughts on psychology ...

**********

The picture of humanity that is emerging today from the fast-moving world of behaviourial psychology and from the new cognitive sciences is very different from the 'tabula rasa' model that so long impressed policy-makers, especially those of the Left, often against all the instincts of common folk.

As animals, we come out as a lot less flattering to ourselves than we might have liked but before we go any further, we must state our prejudice - a distrust of science-derived theory being applied too easily to social relations. We alluded to this in our climate change and anthropology postings.

Psychology & The Normal

There is a particular problem that arises out of psychology - the 'science' of psychology is solely a method since no human, let alone collection of humans, can be knowable in the way that inanimate matter or even animals can be known.

Psychology is thus only partially a science. It is a series of experimental probabilities and of 'norms' of highly variable reliability. In this, the science of normal perception seems to be far more reliable than the science of normal behaviour and this should be constantly borne 'in mind'.

The quintessential psychological tool is the Bell Curve. There is a danger that the centre of the Bell Curve is given a normative rather than a descriptive value - that the process of describing the Bell Curve both lessens the 'value' of the rims of the Bell and over-values the 'norm' at its centre.

The 'norm' of Victorian or German fascist or Soviet Communist thinking would horrify our contemporary liberal. The 'good person' in all of these societies would, by modern liberal standards, have been normalised out of existence as we try to normalise out prudes, racists and reds today.

But contemporary psychology, neuroscience and sociology are often funded by the public purse and so are part of the political process. Even contemporary liberalism has its totalitarian aspects. The association of these 'soft sciences' and power needs to be placed under permanent critical scrutiny.

The Psycho-Arms Race

Nevertheless, great strides in understanding the working of most brains in most circumstances have been made in the last two decades.

A picture is emerging of a sort of arms race between the normal person's instinct to take the easy way out in dealing with data, in order to process the vast amounts of it coming into the mind through perception, and organised attempts to manipulate that laziness for commercial or political reasons.

As psychologists uncover the tram-line aspects of most people's behaviour under most conditions, so some, in learning these truths, learn also to resist manipulation and to build relatively independent world-views.

The corporate and political manipulators, meanwhile, create ever-more sophisticated means to manage those who either cannot (for reasons of intelligence or access to information) or will not (for lack of will or excess of comfort) question their situation.

It could be argued that people in the advanced Western societies are falling into three broad classes of person in any one particular situation.

A large majority who are unaware of or uninterested in their own manipulation, a class of manipulators for profit, power or (increasingly 'security') and a minority who see what is happening and either fight it or seek to insulate themselves from the process ('fight or flight').

The last group which is far from small is made impotent by the sheer weight of numbers of the first group although, to be cynical, the weight of numbers depends on that weight being well fed and entertained.

It may be that this is just the normal condition of humanity - as applicable to the Roman Empire as the modern West: a struggling mass, a manipulative ruling class and those who cannot but see how the trick is performed.

Knowing Is Resisting

However, a new factor may be the degree to which an understanding of psychology itself arms the 'rebels' as much as the elites.

For example, the experimental work in the wake of the authoritarian fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, notably that of Stanley Milgram, caused horror rather than emulation and it drove ruling elites increasingly towards 'soft' forms of social management.

At the same time, Milgram's work is known to far more people than just the 'rebels' in society and this has helped them become more resistant to blind authority and command.

Ordinary soldiers are increasingly volunteers from the least well educated and poorest comunities and are less likely to be conscripts for good reason - better educated conscripts are no longer prepared to accept authoritarian claims to knowledge.

Perhaps some personality types pine for a simple world of command and control and military obedience but the cultural norm is (at least in the Anglo-Saxon world) one of a presumption of liberty and questioning to which ruling elites have now had to adjust.

Governments - as in the recent announcement that the British Government will be using military drones against its own population - are thrown back on intense surveillance and on the isolation and marginalisation of the people who are at the extremes of the political Bell Curve.

In addition, fuelled on the centre-left by the post-Marxist interpretations of thinkers like Gramsci, they are more intent than ever on guiding the centre of the social Bell Curve into territories of automatic self-willed compliance with an authority that presents itself as benign, inclusive and liberal.

One suspects that this master plan of social management will last only so long as the population does not grow hungry. It is designed for a world in which economic decline for large numbers of people is small, incremental and steady rather than precipitous or sudden.

Whether this system can remain both effective and benign with a large angry population on the streets is another matter.

The Problem Of The Sociopath

Fortunately, psychiatry and abnormal psychology (in the sense of conditions that cause serious distress to a person) have been de-politicised fairly effectively by the medical establishment's historic compromise with the anti-psychiatry movement.

But we should not be complacent - the sociopath (a biological reality) is in danger of being quasi-medicalised as complaints grow about a 'broken society'.

Sociopaths used to make up marginalised criminality and the highest ranks of the elite, with social order containing them in the levels between the two. Today, social order has partially collapsed leaving far freer rein for the sociopathic personality, especially in the lower ranks of business.

Similarly, sociopathic behaviour by one sexual predator at the expense of others is much easier in a liberal society. The problem of the sociopath preying on communities under pressure has become salient as case after case of child abuse, including by children on children, horrifies the British at least.

The solution - the systematic reintroduction of community and reversal of thirty years of radical liberalism - does not fit the time-scale of electoral politics so clumsy state intervention, weakening civil liberties and a form of 'liberal terror' against problem communities seem likely.

The irony that it is the sociopathic and authoritarian BNP that is emerging to defend beleagured poor communities from a sociopathic crisis is merely an indication of the depth of the failures of liberal governance.

The Rationality Of The Irrational

At the other end of the social is the personal. Contemporary psychology paints a fairly grim picture of our general inability to think or act rationally or altruistically. In fact, psychologists tend to exaggerate what this means.

Given their particular conditions of life, 'irrational' thought or conduct (including delusions and apparently self-destructive behaviour) amongst the disempowered may be wholly rational - a truly rational assessment of those conditions might well lead to despair.

Some of the most interesting recent research is into 'irrational' modes of thinking although the inherited positive value attributed to 'reason' makes us blind to its flaws and accidentally judges the 'rational-'irrational' behaviour of the masses, irrationally, as somehow 'bad'.

The existence of 'group think' as an observable phenomenon encapsulates why New Labour is consistently incompetent in its decision-making.

There is also useful research from the behavioural economists on why we make dumb decisions on investment and cannot seem to get out quickly from a failing situation. Such research should be required reading by anyone active in public life or in business.

Unfortunately, most of the people making the decisions that affect us do not read books like this and it may take a generation before some of this commonsensical material feeds through into the wider public domain.

The Construction Of Memory

Another area of interest is memory. We construct ourselves and our society on narratives of the past. Yet we forget and remember selectively even if different people have different tendencies in this area, whether towards repressing trauma or sensitising themselves through a talking repetition of trauma.

One can see how there would be a natural conflict of interest between these two main personality types amongst Jews in dealing with the Shoah. Some would want to put the horror behind them and create a new life. Others would want to tell the world and get them to understand and empathise.

This happens in families with child abuse histories, even if the 'talking' might be displaced onto other related subjects. In the case of the Shoah, the narrative required by Israel and European guilt forced the pace and gave the edge to the 'talkers'.

Positive Thinking

One powerful tool for transforming individuals has been Cognitive Behaviourial Therapy and we should also not be too dismissive of its happy-clappy cognate, Positive Philosophy.

Critics might say they merely create a better class of delusion but, if our aim is not to sink into the unproductive gloom of critical theory but to live long, prosper, love and be happy, then these practical applications of experimental psychology are wholly beneficial.

It is tough out there. If people can use the discoveries that the mind is malleable and that life can be made more tolerable and even be improved through thinking in a different way and positively, then psychology (so dangerous in the hands of governments and corporations) can be a liberating force.

Indeed, a mentality of positive thinking might, eventually, help direct the mind to thinking not only about how to improve one's own condition but why our rulers are so signally failing to assist in that process. In our current crisis, a 'positive politics' is sorely needed and can only come from below.

Cognitive behaviour therapy seems to be particularly useful for conditions where distress (such as depression) is caused by a negative narrative of life that has been built up in the past for good reason but has become increasingly dysfunctional over time.

Improvements in the treatment of mental illness in recent years have been considerable and are only be held back by lack of resources.

If the £8bn spent by the New Labour Government on the Iraq War had been directed into mental health services and improved community conditions, a great deal of human distress might have been avoided in two nations.

The Complexity Of Intelligence

Another positive development is in the increasing sophistication of psychological work on intelligence. This has two countervailing potential results. The first unnerves liberals but has to be faced - we are not all equal in general intelligence and general intelligence matters.

The 'tabula rasa' view is defunct and not only in relation to intellectual equality but in relation to gender difference. We can safely predict the imminent death of the extreme version of egalitarian ideology (though not that of the equal value of all persons regardless of intelligence).

The countervailing discovery (still uncertain in the detail) is of many different types of intelligence to be found in humanity, painting a picture of complexity of talent that no longer privileges people according to their place in a pecking order of general IQ.

This means that a simple stratified society is likely to be sclerotic. The dynamism of society depends on it being a society of all the talents. This opens up society once again to people who may not be formally highly intelligent but have massive advantages in particular types of intelligence, skills and aptitudes.

It also suggests a society of respect for the potential of everyone rather than obeisance to a privileged exam-passing few.

Respect For Difference

The shift from a stratified world of fixed roles to a tabula rasa world of forcing individuals into an egalitarian straitjacket (often under the malign influence of the behaviourists) is now becoming a further shift from the 'tabula rasa' to a respect for difference.

Nowhere is this clearer than in gender relations where the feminists of the 1970s school have found themselves on the run as society rediscovers the fact that boys and girls are fundamentally different even if you can get very boy-like girls and very girl-like boys where the Bell Curves overlap.

There may be an alchemical truth in the magical position of the hermaphrodite where the curves meet but the real message is that is no longer regarded as helpful for women to strive to become like men.

The model is one not of separate but equal (with all the apartheid implications) nor equal and not separate but of complementarity and difference yet equality in worth and access to resources.

This more sophisticated formulation has been seized upon by younger women (as sex-positive or 'lipstick' feminism) as far more truly liberatory than 'traditional' feminism.

Although the new could not have taken place without the struggle of the old, the new really is based on the science that we have in place so far.

Language too now looks as if it follows Chomsky's model of having innate characteristics even if one can dispute the detail.

Deep brain structures imply profound predispositions in learning, language, behaviour and gender difference - not to the extent of presenting any silly predestination arguments but as representing natural constraints on radical versions of existentialism.

Why Psychology Matters

Brain matter, in short, matters. Anyone who has been at the birth of his child knows that twenty years later aspects of personality present then are present now.

The history of psychology is full of half-baked nonsense - the Rorschach inkblot test, phrenology, simplistic Freudian and Behaviourist ideas, discredited left/right brain theories - and there may be half-baked nonsense in the new ideas but we are moving forward all the time.

Much past experimentation is redundant and even silly so that, as tools for understanding oneself, or for creating a dialogue about personal meaning, Tarot cards and dream interpretation are now as one with the ink blot (and that does not mean that they are not useful).

Freudianism increasingly looks daft in its potty theorising about repressed sexuality but it was a vital stepping stone in exploring the unconscious even if the path best taken was back into neuroscience and into imaginative cultural studies (Jung) and investigation of particular drives (Adler, Reich).

Behaviourism too seems more like an ideology than a considered exploration of the mind but its experimentation in conditioning has proved central to effective treatment of phobia as well as providing further proof in its findings that cruelty and conditioning can debase both child and man.

The new wave of research is taking us into fresh territory with real public policy implications. The tendency to enforce conformity, the use of psychology in the struggle between authority and freedom and the problem of the sociopath are all live issues in contemporary politics.

Of equal importance is a proper understanding of how individuals are pre-set to irrational decision-making, to selective memory and to their talents and gender. The ability to improve lives through behavioural therapies contain the seeds of liberation but also of political manipulation.

Back in the nineteenth century, anthropology was central to the imperialist project. Understanding and categorising all the strange new cultures for whom administrators became responsible was a political necessity, not an 'ivory tower' academic pursuit.

Racism, Science & Imperialism

As the (non-academic) Gyrus (quoting Ellingson), in a recent talk at the October Gallery, has pointed out, power struggles within Britain's Ethnological Society in the 1860s displaced the Quakers whose role in constructing an earlier liberal and tolerant attitude towards other 'races' had been important.

The intellectual triumph of Charles Darwin created a potential new model for social evolution. Racists with 'experience' of colonial administration, such as John Crawfurd, seized on the theory to build a new consensus for racial superiority.

In the years to come, skulls were measured, customs analysed and the primitive contrasted with the civilised. Colonial administrators spread across Africa and South and East Asia. Amerindians were hunted into reservations. Fu Manchu was to epitomise the wily oriental.

Survival of the fittest developed into a full-blown theory, actually owing more to Lamarck than Darwin, under Herbert Spencer. This fed not only the new ideology of empire but that of capitalism as a progressive force, even infecting Marxism a little on the way.

Anthropology became a central plank in the ideology of Western expansion, reaching its vicious and very unscientific apogee in the Germany of the 1930s and in the distinctly potty late-romantic narratives of the Ahnenerbe and the racial politics of mass murder.

Reform and Reaction

After the horrors of the death camps, a new anthropology emerged, derived from the far more liberal position in America of Franz Boas whose empirical research knocked most a priori racial theory firmly on the head.

Anthropology and political ideology largely separated out. No academic discipline can be called un-ideological and anthropology contributed from the academy to the massive liberalisation of Western culture from the 1960s but it was certainly not a central concern of states or the military.

But this is about to change. Whereas the first phase of the politicisation of anthropology derived from the expansion of empire, this second phase owes its potential to the renewed interest of authority to the preservation of empires under siege from below and from the margins.

There are three factors in this just as there were in the second half of the nineteenth century - shifts in scientific theory, shifts in political concerns and shifts in funding by those with resources that will bias the interests and positions of those working in all the social and cognitive sciences.

The Arrival of the New Cognitive Science

In the first phase, Darwinism kick-started a new vision of humanity as engaged in struggle. Empires actually did struggle and the ideological and moral justification for struggle required that patronage go to those who could service the intellectual needs of an expanding system.

In the latest phase, the underlying scientific theory is a revolution in the cognitive and neuro-sciences where the consensus seems to be, perfectly reasonably, that our minds are not blank slates but that some aspects of ourselves are innate and so genetic.

As far as it goes, this is, as with evolution, unexceptionable. It describes the world as it is and we would do well not to try and work against it. It has the same effect on radical attempts to change humanity through environmental manipulation as evolution had on religion.

The point here is that the new sciences do not posit God nor do they posit the possibility of changing conditions to change humanity but they do posit changing conditions in order to change behaviour in recognition of the general thrust of 'human nature'.

It may not be essentialism as we know it but it is still a form of it. It objectifies us and it posits, and this is important, that those in authority can make reasoned and right judgements about what is in our interest more effectively than we can ourselves.

Scientists & Politicians

This may seem a problem that we might have with the political process rather than with scientists - especially given this week's stand by Professor Nutt against Home Secretary on drugs policy. Surely, scientists will resist any manipulation of their work beyond the evidence available?

But some scientists have a tendency to get too big for their boots and to want to extrapolate their findings into public policy and the wider culture. We see this with the almost comical performance of Richard Dawkins in his campaign against religion but the matter is a deadly serious one.

The elision of evidence-based science into, first, the application of theory to society (as Spencer did) and thence to the use of the theory by the authorities to justify their own interests is often far too easy and smooth. There are always 'intellectuals' hungry for adulation prepared to help this process along.

This process is unchallenged by a cultured but not always very bright media. It is allowed to happen because critical theory about society constantly theorises about itself and relations of power but fails to turn its eye on the worm in its midst - the positivist who is too positive about what he thinks he knows.

Bad policy slips in through the cracks between good science and a self-referential and scientifically-illiterate intelligentsiya. Elsewhere, on a private blog, we have critiqued one such case, Stephen Pinker's claims about social violence in contemporary society, but we do not want to get sidetracked here.

From Liberation to Manipulation

The new cognitive sciences feed into the social senses via psychology. Just as Darwin enabled Spencer, so important new and, in our view, liberatory thinking about the mind is drifting into strategies of 'nudge' and social manipulation that are far from liberatory.

These social applications are emerging at a time of crisis for authority in two separate but linked directions - libertarian mass resistance to authority enabled by globalisation and new technologies and the increased ability of marginal groups, especially in the emerging world, to resist 'empire'.

In another age, the power of law enforcement internally and brutal application of superior military force externally could solve anything but times have changed. Mass global social networking exposes any extreme expedient use of power. Much of the public is no longer trusting or tolerant of authority.

The application of the cognitive sciences to the social sciences provides not merely practical methods for getting people to do what Governments want ('in their own interest', of course) but is the basis for an ideological justification for such actions here and overseas.

It is no accident that Pinker, an experimental psychologist and leading populariser of the attack on the 'blank slate' theory of mind, has weighed into an essentially anthropological debate about violence in tribal and modern societies.

The new cognitive scientists are becoming as dynamically engaged in the application to society of their theories of human nature as were those who had received, through Darwin, their revelation about evolution.

Evolution was to go through many years yet of sophisticated development. There is also no necessary relation between evolutionary theory and either social structures or the actual workings of the mind. Leading intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did not understand this.

One suspects that the cognitive sciences will have to learn the same lesson. Evidence-based science is not an absolutely reliable guide to how existence is either experienced or organised. But a lot of personal ambition and vanity might lead to a great deal of damage being done in the meantime.

Military Patronage

This brings into play the third factor in the story - patronage. The first phase represented patronage within a middle class elite where relatively few jobs were circulated amongst a closed group that was embedded in the system. Generational change would conspire with this to construct 'group think'.

After the death camps, academic futures were dictated by academic standards. Social democratic or liberal states respected traditional academic freedoms - basically, taxpayers' money was doled out without very much being asked in return other than that findings be published and students taught.

But there was another source of funding for science with much more direct demands for results - the military and the whole panoply of organisations that covered issues of state security. Investment has tended to be hard science in orientation - guns, rockets, encryption, submarines, energy and so on.

The global public relations, advertising and market research industries were partly midwifed out of the psychological warfare operations of the late 1940s and 1950s but these latter were largely directed at propagandising at the populations of rival systems - and can't be said to have achieved a great deal.

Manipulation within states was largely left to dull public information, private sector marketing and corporate communications and political snake oil sales. Little direct social and political manipulation was required because common cultures, with limited media and state education, tended to be self-correcting.

Big Budgets, Big Changes

Things are now changing fast. The Pentagon, for example, has a massively increased budget and a re-orientation away from big ticket military hardware to counter-insurgency, while 'homeland security' concerns have seen the emergence of significant diversions of funds into social monitoring.

This is where things may get very dodgy indeed.

If States in general have massive resources to apply and academics need resources to undertake research, get tenure, be published and, indeed, not end up unemployed during a general contraction in the domestic economy, then obviously we have a marriage made in heaven ... or hell.

Where might this lead? The cycle of cod-racism that started with Crawfurd's coup in the Ethnological Society ended in the death camps. Even now we are still trying to root out daft racial politics 140 years later in British inner cities and the American backswoods.

The new alliance between frightened authority, the military, ambitious science and hungry academics is unlikely to result in anything so obviously dark but it may end up with its own evils in due course. Let us speculate intelligently.

Universalist Egalitarianism Under Benign Authority

First of all, though, let us remind ourselves that no modern ideologist has any theory of class or racial superiority - on the contrary, they are all almost painfully liberal. Instead, the new ideology treats us all equally, equally recalcitrant, ignorant, victims of blind drives and not knowing our best interests.

Internally within the West this elides naturally into 'third way' or guided democracy models where authority looks on the more overt confucian models of the Chinese and wonders how to reproduce them within a framework of democratic and liberal values - the arrival of 'nudge' is heaven sent.

Externally, the vision is more subtle. Undeveloped, insurgent and native peoples are not inferior as persons (after all we are now all equally inferior and flawed compared to our past cultural aspirations) but their cultures are undeveloped and far less noble than romantics would have them be.

There is no loss in the daft idea of the 'noble savage' but the new ideology sees a process of modernisation as liberatory of persons from cultures, especially from the taboos and constraints that are regarded as oppressive of individual human rights.

Whether they want it or not, non-European peoples are to be 'liberated' to become nearer in status to us ... we are lowered and they are raised into something close to a universal citizen, quite similar to the flawed sinful universalism of Christian ideology.

The Nightmare Society

Some may find this highly attractive but the devil is in the detail - and in the implementation. It is not that 'nudge' and other psychologically-based policies may not work, but that politicians will become impatient.

There will always be the temptation to remove the recalcitrant and to force through conditions to ensure that, as far as the public are concerned, they will always appear to work.

This is the road to hell that is paved with good intentions because, as with all universalist churches (and we include Soviet Marxism in this), the problems of implementation ineluctably lead to the weeding out of heresy and increased pressure on right behaviour, right speech and right thought.

People can be very recalcitrant. As in any species, there is wide variation and this variation includes the eccentric, the dissident, the far-sighted, the highly ethical and the stubborn. 'Nudge' policies tend to promote external 'norms' removing the variation that is central to social and cultural survival.

The nightmare society of 80 years from now (the trajectory from Crawfurd to Auschwitz) is a highly 'normalised' and sclerotic society where lack of conformity means low status and, worse, where free speech, free behaviour and free thought is curtailed to achieve normality.

Instead of the physical death and dispossession of Jews and gypsies, we will have the cultural and existential extinction of creativity and deviance. Fortunately, the invention of the internet has doomed such an enterprise from the start - so long as it remains a free channel.

And Anthropology?

Which brings us back to anthropology which is in danger of shifting from being a science of description, with a determined stance against interference, to a science of intervention in order to pacify recalcitrant communities, deal with 'failed states', undermine enemies and preserve allied elites in power.

There is no doubt that the wave of post-Soviet colour revolutions were partially engineered by Western political scientists and that the failure to overturn the Iranian regime will redouble efforts to find new techniques in what may amount to a sociological arms race.

The US military in particular will soon be flush with cash. There are hungry social scientists, political scientists, neuroscientists and anthropologists eager and willing to please such patrons rather than be thrown on to the job market.

There will be private sector intermediaries keen to sell the latest social science or psychological gizmo. Fortunes may be made on the application of new technologies to prove that academic theory can be made practical 'in the field'. That 'field' may be Waziristan, Somalia, Leeds or Detroit.

By its very nature, this massive investment in social manipulation strategies, domestically and overseas, poses a threat to democracy and to all forms of self-determination - individual, community and national - and leaves us with the question of what 'ideology' will serve it and it serves.

The Threat

Social Darwinism became associated with a now-discredited imperialist mind-set. The new ideology is associated with the primacy of 'good' authority over 'bad' liberty. Just as racist missionaries believed that they acted in the interests of their victims, so do the new ideological liberal 'progressives'.

The nearest analogy that we have for an unprecedented situation is the transfer of power from the ramshackle Roman Republic to the Augustan Empire and, when that started to crumble under its own weight, from a multi-faith world to the hard-line authoritarian Catholic Church under Constantine.

Or at least that is what underpins the thinking of the new authoritarian 'liberals' who are seeing their world crumble under the twin onslaughts of economic correction and new communications and information technologies. They are now relying on weight of cash to turn the situation around.

So, be warned, we are entering a new phase in the West, an attempt to reassert authority over us and over the 'imperial' periphery. Work has started on developing an ideology and a theory of human nature that will help it along. It could yet result in a sclerotic politics and a dead culture.