THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Happy anniversary to CIS

Happy anniversary to CIS

The article below by Peter Coleman tells "How two leading intellectual institutions - the Centre for Independent Studies and "Quadrant" magazine - are turning the tide of opinion in Australia's culture wars". Seeing I get a mention in the article, I thought I might add a relevant link. I was indeed one of the very first contributors to the CIS. Peter's article is a longish one so I have reproduced below only his comments on the CIS

It should be a swell party! Tonight, at the splendid Four Seasons in Sydney, 600 captains of commerce, cabinet ministers, professors, pundits and policy wonks will assemble - in the distinguished presence of the NSW Governor, the Chief Justice, the governor of the Reserve Bank and the Prime Minister - to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Centre for Independent Studies, the most illustrious of Australia's think tanks and the champion of free markets and free enterprise.

There will be messages of congratulation from across the world, toasts, speeches and salutes to the CIS founder and director, Greg Lindsay, the true believer who had a dream in his backyard shed and made it all come true. (There may even be a touch of fundraising.) In October, Quadrant, allegedly one of John Howard's favourite magazines, will also celebrate an anniversary: its 50 years of defending the free market in ideas. Between them, these allied partisans in the culture wars have played leading roles in the transformation of Australian intellectual life.

Start with the CIS. Lindsay launched the think tank in 1976, in that period of public relief at the defeat of the Whitlam government but confusion at the unwillingness of the Fraser government to dismantle the Whitlam legacy of regulation and control. All he had was a letterhead, a post office box and $400. He was 25 and unmarried. He hung on to his day job as schoolteacher (mathematics). He started off with the occasional lecture by Lauchlan Chipman or John Ray (charge: $2.50). Then there were weekend conferences on Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy and State ($15 including meals) or on What Price Intervention? Government and the Economy with Ross Parish, Warren Hogan and Michael Porter.

In 1977, the CIS was incorporated. It began to catch attention of people ranging from Maurice Newman, Neville Kennard and John Stone to Heinz Arndt and Wolfgang Kasper. A turning point came in 1979 when Hugh Morgan, of Western Mining, invited Lindsay to Melbourne for talks. Together they worked the phones. Morgan persuaded nine companies to chip in $5000 a year for five years. It was enough to give Lindsay a salary and set him up in an office. He took leave without pay from the department of education. In 1980 he married Jenny Buswell, a key figure in the CIS story.

Since then the CIS has expanded its range from economic policy and social policy (family, crime, education, indigenous affairs) to foreign policy and religion. It has published 250 books and monographs, and the quarterly magazine Policy (edited by Andrew Norton), and has hosted innumerable seminars. It has sponsored lecture tours by leading European and American thinkers, from Shirley Robin Letwin, Peter Bauer and Thomas Sowell to Francis Fukuyama, Mario Vargas Llosa and Vaclav Klaus. (Mark Steyn is next.) Its Australian lecturers have ranged from George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, to Fair Pay Commission chairman Ian Harper.

It has a staff of 24, almost no bureaucracy and an annual budget of $3million (still pitiful compared with the $60 million or so of some US think tanks). It is tied to no political party. While close to the top end of town (some say too close), it knows the Hawke Labor government did more to free up some markets than the Fraser Liberals. It welcomes Labor leaders to its seminars (and, as with Quadrant, gave Mark Latham a platform until he turned flaky.)

There are gaps. It is patchy on media criticism ("We love the press!" Lindsay says), health policy ("Still looking for the right economist), the Middle East and the baleful influence of Marxism and capitalism on universities. But its achievements are many and great. Try discussing family policy without Barry Maley, taxation without Peter Saunders, the Solomons without Helen Hughes, education without Jennifer Buckingham, foreign policy without Owen Harries or Sue Windybank. You can do it, but it's hard. CIS opposition to identity cards and scepticism about guest workers also have been influential. CIS is one of the great success stories of Australian public life. It has succeeded without a cent of government subsidy or sucking up to the prime minister. "I have never been to the Lodge or Kirribilli House," Lindsay boasts....

Peter Coleman, a former federal and state Liberal MP, was editor of Quadrant magazine for 20 years

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Happy anniversary to CIS

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