When I reviewed the Meryl Streep-as-Maggie-Thatcher biopic in Taki's last year, I quoted Thatcher's contemporary Freeman Dyson, the great physicist, on one source of the endless hatred for Thatcher:
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class.…I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher….
The only thing I'd add is that in reality, a commercial middle class usually breeds its own critics. And I'm using "breeds" literally. Consider the perhaps most prestigious clan in the history of the British intellectual middle class -- the Darwin-Galton-Wedgwood-Benn-Keynes agglomeration.
This was, in a way, an outgrowth of the Lunar Society of Birmingham that met during the full moon in the early decades of the industrial revolution. According to Wikipedia:
... fourteen individuals have been identified as having verifiably attended Lunar Society meetings regularly over a long period during its most productive eras: these are Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Samuel Galton, Jr., James Keir, Joseph Priestley, William Small, Jonathan Stokes, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, John Whitehurst and William Withering.[8]
Watt was the chief inventor of the steam engine, Boulton was Watt's millionaire business partner, Erasmus Darwin was the most celebrated doctor in England, Samuel Galton was a merchant, Priestly was the great chemist and radical intellectual, Josiah Wedgwood was the owner of the famous dinnerware factory and still valuable brand name. The next generation of Darwins, Wedgwoods, and Galtons intermarried, providing the fortune for grandsons Charles Darwin and Francis Galton to be gentlemen scientists.
The heirs of the Lunar Society continue to be prominent.
For example, one of Margaret Thatcher's archrivals was Labour Party star Tony Benn, the grand old man of the left. "Tony Benn" is, however, the proletarianized version of the name ultimately adopted by Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate. From Wikipedia:
Benn was born in London on 3 April 1925.[6] Benn's paternal grandfather was John Benn, a successful politician who was created a baronet in 1914, and his father William Wedgwood Benn was a Liberal Member of Parliament who later crossed the floor to the Labour Party. He was appointed Secretary of State for India by Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, a position he held until 1931. He was elevated to the House of Lords with the title of Viscount Stansgate in 1941; the new wartime coalition government was short of working Labour peers in the upper house.[7] From 1945 to 1946, he was the Secretary of State for Air in the first majority Labour Government.
Both his grandfathers, John Benn (who founded a publishing company)[8] and Daniel Holmes, were also Liberal MPs (respectively, for Tower Hamlets, Devonport and Glasgow Govan). ...
Benn's mother, Margaret Wedgwood Benn (née Holmes) (1897–1991), was a dedicated theologian, feminist and the founder President of the Congregational Federation. She was a member of the League of the Church Militant, which was the predecessor of the Movement for the Ordination of Women – in 1925 she was rebuked by Randall Thomas Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women. His mother's theology had a profound influence on Benn, as she taught him that the stories in the Bible were based around the struggle between the prophets and the kings and that he ought in his life to support the prophets over the kings, who had power, as the prophets taught righteousness.[11]
Benn went to Westminster School and studied at New College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1947. In later life, Benn attempted to remove public references to his private education from Who's Who; in the 1975 edition his entry stated "Education—still in progress". In the 1976 edition, almost all details were omitted save for his name, jobs as a Member of Parliament and as a Government Minister, and address; the publishers confirmed that Benn had sent back the draft entry with everything else struck through.[12] In the 1977 edition, Benn's entry disappeared entirely.[13] In October 1973 he announced on BBC Radio that he wished to be known as Mr Tony Benn rather than as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and his book Speeches from 1974 is credited to "Tony Benn".
Tony's son Hilary Benn was a Labour cabinet minister under Blair and Brown.
Somewhat similarly, in New England, some merchant families such as the Eliots got out of business around 1820, and then went into religion, academia, and writing. (In 1818, the Royal Navy began to suppress the slave trade -- did that have something to do with the Eliot clan's career shift into uplift?). The old commercial wealth funded the careers of worthies such as Harvard president Charles Eliot, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and poet T.S. Eliot.
Somewhat similarly, in New England, some merchant families such as the Eliots got out of business around 1820, and then went into religion, academia, and writing. (In 1818, the Royal Navy began to suppress the slave trade -- did that have something to do with the Eliot clan's career shift into uplift?). The old commercial wealth funded the careers of worthies such as Harvard president Charles Eliot, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and poet T.S. Eliot.
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I think you picked an imperfect example with the Eliots. TS was a banker for most of his life until he was hired by Fabers because there was no money to "support" his career as a poet. They were pretty much always a mix of commercial and intellectual caste and never super wealthy. There is a reason they were college presidents and not for instance globe hopping amateur botanists. Think Carraways not Buchanans in Gatsby.
Movers perhaps but not shakers. Although TS would have been a good Shaker.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/oct/18/inside-room-237-the-shining
"It would be nice to dismiss Ascher's subjects as a gaggle of idiotic, excitable fan-boys with too much time on their hands. Annoyingly, the shoe won't quite fit. Geoffrey Cocks, who sees the film as a Holocaust parable, is professor of history at a Michigan college. Bill Blakemore, who decided that the film was about the genocide of the Native American, after spotting a carton of baking soda in the background, is a senior correspondent at ABC News. These people are educated, articulate and often plausible. Yet somehow The Shining has infected them."
If educated people can be this ridiculous, I shudder for humanity.
"The old commercial wealth funded the careers of worthies such as Harvard president Charles Eliot, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and poet T.S. Eliot."
Wouldn't William and Henry James fit in here?
Wedgwood Benn was a deranged and unpleasant piece of work, and that quotation you cite from Wikipedia shows how he'd so imbibed the poisonous chalice of leftist nonsense that he loathed himself. And those who indulge in pop psychology might be tempted to explain the vitriolic hatred of the left directed at Margaret Thatcher as a form of projection. After all, as that other great representative of the British thinking class, Monty Python, informs us, murder is simply extroverted suicide.
"The only thing I'd add is that in reality, a commercial middle class usually breeds its own critics. And I'm using "breeds" literally."
Yeah, but sometimes it goes the other way. In Silicon Valley particularly, and to a certain extent in Wall Street. For example Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Steve Jobs all had very academic parents. Arguably they founded and ran the two most important corporations of the 21st century.
So, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts are middle class? Who knew!
Nice to see the College of William and Mary figuring prominently in the Lunar Society. We took a significant downturn over the next 150 years, to gradually rise in the late 20th as an elite academic institution again.
Of course, that often means great foolishness these days, but we were pretty good when we were on the make in the postwar era until the fall of the Iron Curtain.
As a kid I was friends with descendants of the celebrated Bingham family, who got rich as Hawaiian missionaries/landowners in the early 1800s, which let the grandson become an explorer and discover Macchu Picchu. The one I knew was a northern California hippie/dropout who through native ability became first a commercial salmon fisherman, then a successful Sacramento lobbyist.
http://southtownstar.suntimes.com/19404787-522/story.html
Shoo!
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-ever-shrinking-role-of-tenured-college-professors-in-1-chart/274849/
Isn't Benn a Jewish name?
All of which argues against the idea of "regression to the mean"...
Freeman Dyson is known as a climate skeptic, but ironically enough there a climate skeptic documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" which blames pro-nuke Thatcher for starting the hype!
"TGGP said...
Freeman Dyson is known as a climate skeptic, but ironically enough there a climate skeptic documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" which blames pro-nuke Thatcher for starting the hype!"
Dyson also supported the idea of strategic missile defence, while most academics poo-poohed it.
For example Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Steve Jobs all had very academic parents. Arguably they founded and ran the two most important corporations of the 21st century.
Well, no. They didn't. No argument about it.
Isn't Benn a Jewish name?
No.
All of which argues against the idea of "regression to the mean"
Oh? The descendants of wealthy and presumably intelligent businessmen turning out to be vapid nitwits sounds like a fine example of regression to the mean in action.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?_r=1&
Nice to see Steve mention Freeman Dyson again. The last mention astonished me: at age 89, leaping into a completely unfamilar field, Dyson overthrew decades of academic consensus WITH A SINGLE DAY'S WORK.
I don't mean to sound as if I'm buttering up Steve, but he reminds me just a bit of Dyson:
Both combine quant smarts with sensitivity to people, politics, and art
Both enjoy cutting through the BS CW to present surprising perspectives
Both truly enjoy being mavericks and troublemakers
Second time I've read that write-up and wondered what the dude meant by "Now the odd thing kept happening: My program kept crashing, but at a different point in the strategy space each time. It took a while to recognize that all these points lay exactly on a plane, and that the reason that the program was crashing was because "
Interesting you mention Thatcher lowering her voice to sound more authoritative. I used to wonder why there weren't more tenors, why most men are baritones, with some bass voices. At meetings, the lower voice generally sounds more authoritative, less whiny. They get more respect whether their arguments are correct or not. Which kind of voice is going to lead to more reproductive success, more often? I'd say baritone or bass over tenor most of the time.
On the other hand, reproducing successfully is not just about producing a large number of children but also relates to the reproductive success of your children, your grandchildren and so on and so forth. So it pays to seek the center. Your manly man sons might do above average in reproducing, but your bulldyke daughters aren't going to produce many children. Similarly, your extra-feminine daughters may not make up for your gay sons.
I spent much of my career teaching in some of the better universities but am a son of the commercial middle class. I have never warmed to the academic class - to some members of it of course, but not to the generality. This may be partly due to my discovery, as a fresher, that few university teachers were as intelligent as my father. I don't mean "intelligent" in some feeble folksy way, I mean that both in power of reflection and in quick-witted reasoning he was clearly their superior. There are other reasons too but that'll do for starters.
One of the English academia, Tony Jodt, wrote a book about Europe since WWII called "Post-War."
The Thatcher bashing should have been embarrassing to both the author and the editor.
Pretty decent up to about 1962 went it went south badly. I think it no coincidence that the author was born about 1949 so got the history correct until his hormones kicked in.
It was her hair. Always that same hair that never changed. British society flattered itself for embracing change since the 60s, but Thatcher's hair was the same always, like Bozo the Clown's.
There was something about her that simply wasn't likable. You know the type. Never has any fun in school. Always does the homework and hands them all in time. Has no use for funny bunny talk. Always critical of bad manners. Always acting like she's in the wrong place--among inferiors--and must rise in the world.
What really pissed off the left was that she was successful. It's what riled many about Pinochet too. It wasn't just that he killed leftists--so did many latin american right wing dictators--but he did good things for Chile and had enough class to move aside.
Both Thatcher and Pinochet undermined the leftist pigeonholing of the right.
Thatcher was actually popular among the PEOPLE, indeed more so that the leftist academes, and the leftists were aghast--and this may be one reason why leftists took revenge on the British masses by allowing massive immigration. It's like 'how dare you re-elect that rotten Thatcher over and over when she holds you in contempt while WE LEFTISTS love you?'
And the fact that Pinochet was actually pragmatic and sensible enough to save the economy and then regally step aside made the LEFT fume. A rightwing thug was NOT supposed to succeed and improve lives for the people and not supposed to step aside graciously.
It all goes back to Chiang Kai-Shek. Western progressives just loved to bash him and blame him for everything wrong with China while praising Mao as a revolutionary and reformer and man of the people. Ideological blinders and moral narcissism among progressives.
"One of the English academia, Tony Judt, wrote a book about Europe since WWII called "Post-War. The Thatcher bashing should have been embarrassing to both the author and the editor."
Ironically, Eric Hobsbawm in his AGES OF EXTREMES is kinder to Thatcher though his politics was far more to the left than Judt's.
Hobsbawm even says what Thatcher did with the unions prolly needed to have been done.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/107966/eugene-genovese-eric-hobsbawm-age-of-extremes#
An interesting piece. Genovese the ex-Marxist has praise for Hobsbawm the communist-by-habit(but without conviction near the end).
"So, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts are middle class? Who knew!"
They were bourgeois - not members of the upper class (i.e., the aristocracy). Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt were both self-made businessmen, not scions of inherited wealth. Carnegie was a poor Scottish immigrant; Vanderbilt quit school at age 11 to work on his father's ferryboat in New York harbor. He was said to have retained the coarse accent of his origins until the day he died. Both were considered "jumped up" by the established society of their time.
Benn's brother Michael was a decorated pilot killed in WWII.
Benn wrote in the Guardian of attending the funeral of a left-wing Labour MP, Eric Heffer. He turned round and there was Mrs Thatcher crying. She respected an honest opponent.
"Anonymous said...
All of which argues against the idea of "regression to the mean"
Oh? The descendants of wealthy and presumably intelligent businessmen turning out to be vapid nitwits sounds like a fine example of regression to the mean in action."
Yeah, because only vapid nitwits disproportionately become successful, wealthy businessmen, world-renowned scientists, inventors, famous doctors, successful politicians, and top military leaders like the descendants of the Lunar Society.
In the 1970's British classic TV show The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin Reggie Perrin's son wore a t-shirt with "Wedgewood-Benn for Pope" on it.
In the pre-internet days I wondered who Wedgwood-Benn was. As an anglophile, I had heard of arch lefty Tony Benn but it took a while to put 2 and 2 together.
BTW, the net also informed me that in the original Perrin novel the t-shirt read "Wedgwood-Benn for King."
Oh, dear me, you said FREEMAN Dyson. I had momentarily confused the chap with that irksome light-skinned negro fellow- What's his name? MICHAEL Dyson. Well of course MICHAEL hates Thatcher, and anyone else to the right of ultra leftist hatemongering.
Freeman Dyson's comment contains some truth but perhaps could use expansion, to judge by the confusion on display in some comments. English society did, traditionally, have two types of middle-class: the kind that depended on commerce of various kinds and that owed nothing to the Establishment, i.e. the aristocracy, and the second type of middle-class, considerably older and usually poorer, that owed its social place and money to the Crown: barristers, doctors, clergy, soldiers.
What muddles the story is that the former often ditched the religion, occupations and accents that carried the taint of commerce as soon as they were established enough to do so, and married into the latter class. If they were really lucky/successful, they married into the aristocracy, or were given titles of their own.
Margaret Thatcher, of course, had not got far enough away from her commercial origins to please the non-commercial middle-class. And, of course, as an Oxford wag said of her when the university refused to give her an honorary degree, "why should we feed the hand that bites us?" She was a direct threat to that particular class, and for most of them, that was enough reason ti dislike her. Few had the detachment to wonder if she might be good for the country as a whole.
"Oh, dear me, you said FREEMAN Dyson. I had momentarily confused the chap with that irksome light-skinned negro fellow- What's his name? MICHAEL Dyson."
Isn't there a Neil Degrassie Tyson?
Last year there was a movie about what Hitchcock really may have been thinking while making PSYCHO.
Now, this nutty movie on Shining.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/labyrinths-of-reason/
All of which argues against the idea of "regression to the mean"
There are two sources for regression to the mean, in practice:
1) Intelligence has a genetic and random component.
Children will, on average, tend to inherit the average of their parents' genetic component (with scatter around the biparental mean due to random sampling).
However, they won't tend to inherit their parents' random component, and if this is high in parent, it will generally tend to be lower in a child, because probability. The random component will tend to be average in children, on average. This regression tends to be gone in the first generation.
Henry Harpending has explained this at his and Cochran's blog, if you are interested.
2) Random mating.
Even intelligent children will tend to mate with other less intelligent people if mating is purely random, since the number of intelligent people is relatively few compared to less intelligent people (and equally very stupid people are less frequent than less stupid people). So will have less intelligent offspring for this reason.
Generally, I think the right view of Thatcher is of someone whose deregulation and conflict program ultimately produced no real industrial growth for the country, no industries other than buying and selling a lot of dodgy debts and whose lack of any real manufacturing growth was masked by the extraction of the North Sea gas and oil. True, she may have had limited options with the abysmal performance of British industry by the late 1970s, but did not provide any genuine sustainable solutions.
Her deregulation framed the opening of Britain to all and sundry via immigration, even if this was never intent, and that is her only true legacy.
In particular, she in part manufactured a property boom with the selling of nationalized property, maintaining which property boom is one of the key drivers of migration as supported by the "commercial middle classes".
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