Journalists From England

"Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes make’s an animal’s descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not “evolving.”"

"The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates."

"As every bird-watcher knows, the beauty of a bird’s song is inversely correlated with the colorfulness of its plumage."

"It is no harder to explain than a game of cards. There are aces and kings and twos and threes in any deck of cards. A lucky player is dealt a high-scoring hand, but none of his cards is unique. Elsewhere in the room are others with the same kinds of cards in their hands. But even with just thirteen kinds of cards, every hand is different and some are spectacularly better than others. Sex is merely the dealer, generating unique hands from the same monotonous deck of genetic cards shared by the whole species."

"One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counterinvention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow. Every hegemony comes to an end. Evolutionary history is no different."

"Everything can be inherited except sterility. None of your direct ancestors died childless. Consequently, if we are to understand how human nature evolved, the very core of our inquiry must be reproduction, for reproductive success is the examination that all human genes must pass if they are not to be squeezed out by natural selection. Hence I am going to argue that there are very few features of the human psyche and nature that can be understand without reference to reproduction. I begin with sexuality itself."

"Reproducing sexually must improve an individual’s reproductive success or else sex would not persist. It is increasingly hard to understand how human beings came to be so clever without considering sexual competition."

"The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design. Every living thing is “designed” quite unconsciously by the selective reproduction of its own ancestors to suit a particular life-style."

"I know of no other way that human nature can have developed except by evolution, and there is now overwhelming evidence that there is no other way for evolution to work except by competitive reproduction. Those strains that reproduce persist; those that do not reproduce die out."

"The study of human nature must have profound implications for the study of history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and politics. Each of those disciplines is an attempt to understand human behavior, and if the underlying universals of human behavior are the product of evolution, then it is vitally important to understand what the evolutionary pressures were."

"I have gradually come to realize that almost all of social science proceeds as if 1859, the year of the publication of the Origin of Species, had never happened; it does so quite deliberately, for it insists that human culture is a product of our own free will and invention. Society is not the product of human psychology, it asserts, but vice versa. That sounds reasonable enough, and it would be splendid for those who believe in social engineering if it were true, but is is simply not true."

"We assume, and rightly that a Russian is just as human after two generations of oppressive totalitarianism as his grandfather was before him. But why, then, does social science proceed as if it were not the case, as if people’s natures are the products of their societies?"

"In species where the females get nothing useful from their mates, they seem to choose on aesthetic criteria alone."

"Such “habituation” is just a property of the way brains work; our senses, and those of grackles, notice novelty and change, not steady states. The female preference did not evolve: it just is that way."

"Sexual selection theory suggests that much of the behavior and some of the appearance of an animal is adapted not to help it survive but to help it to acquire the best or the most mates."

"If females have an existing aesthetic preference, it is only logical that males will evolve to exploit that preference."

"In the 1970s a few brave “sociobiologists” began to ask why, if other animals had evolved natures, humans would be exempt. They were vilified by the social science establishment and told to go back to ant-watching. Yet the question they had asked has not gone away. The principal reason for the hostility to sociobiology was that it seem to justify prejudice. This was simply a confusion. Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of ism, have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed because one believes in universals and the other in racial or class particulars."

"Morality is never based upon nature."

"Anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity."

"The stuff of anthropology—the traditions, the myths, the crafts, the language, the rituals—is to me but the froth on the surface. Beneath lie giant themes of humanity that are the same everywhere and that are characteristically male and female. To a Martian an anthropologist studying the differences between races would seem like a farmer studying the differences between each of the wheat plants in his field. The Martian is much more interested in the typical wheat plant. It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing."

"Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favor to either sex."

"Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not."

"Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women."

"Beauty is not arbitrary."

"Men and women have different bodies. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family. Men and women have different minds. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family. The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory. The proposition that men and women have evolved different minds is anathema to every social scientist and politically correct individual. Yet I believe it to be true for two reasons. First, the logic is impeccable….Second, the evidence is overwhelming."

"These concerns (that is, about differences being used to justify unequal treatment) are fair. But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not inequality."

"We give boys tractors and girls dolls. We are reinforcing the stereotypical obsessions that they already have, but we are not creating them. This is something every parent knows. Despairingly they watch their son turns every stick into a sword or gun, while their daughter cuddles even the most inanimate object as if it were a doll."

"Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity….Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes. Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history."

"These facts have been first disputed and then actively suppressed by the educational establishment, which continues to insist that there are no differences in learning ability between boys and girls."

"There is a contradiction at the heart of feminism, one that few feminists have acknowledged. You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally capable of all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women, they would be done differently."

"Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education. If you give someone £20 and say, 'Feed your family for the week on it,' a lot of people just couldn't do it adequately and that's because there's – and I do blame the readymeal industry for it, because it is so easy and so attractively packaged, and you just put it in a microwave – a disconnection between what's in that packet, and how simple and cheap it might be to make it for yourself. I think if we can solve food education then we are part of the way to solving food poverty."

"We believe that to the great body of the reading public the name of George Boole first became known, if indeed it has yet become known, through the announcement of his death; the announcement being accompanied in a few of the papers by a brief sketch of his life and works. Boole's researches were not of a nature to be appreciated by the multitude, and he never condescended to those arts by which less gifted men have won for themselves while living a more splendid reputation."

"By all tokens of greatness made known to me in biographies of famous men, and in contact with illustrious idols of the time, Robert Blatchford, despite his contrariness as a journalist, is the greatest man I have known. If greatness is a quality of the heart, alive with splendid sympathies, not behind its age but just far enough ahead to lead its march, Robert Blatchford is a great man. In the thirty years of his fighting period, between 1890 and 1920, he has done more to improve the lot of our people than any statesman, general, or man of letters."

"When a great politician dies, or any man who has filled a large space in the public mind, and made a noise in the world, the newspapers long ring with the event. But it is otherwise with the great thinker, the mathematician or the philosopher, who has laboured silently and in comparative seclusion, to extend the boundaries of human knowledge. When such a man is removed by death there are public journals, even among those professedly devoted to literature and science, which can dismiss the event with a few faint and cold remarks.* But time rectifies all that. It is found sooner or later that no reputation, however brilliant, is permanent or durable which does not rest on useful discoveries and real contributions to our knowledge."

"There are few men who can write as Nunquam does, with conscience and strong feeling; and yet without malice. Above all, he has that power of getting at other people's point of view which enables him, when he is not writing persuasives to Socialism, to follow the trade of Shakespeare and Dickens."

"In these years Mr. Blatchford gave invaluable help to Socialist propaganda. No man did more than he to make Socialism understood by the ordinary working man. His writings in them had nothing of economic abstruseness. He based his appeal on the principles of human justice. He preached Socialism as a system of industrial co-operation for the common good. His arguments and illustrations were drawn from facts and experiences within the knowledge of the common people. Socialism as he taught it was not a cold, materialistic theory, but the promise of a new life as full, sweet and noble as the world can give...Mr. Blatchford is still living, hale and hearty, his mental powers undiminished at the ripe age of eighty-three. I saw him recently, and we talked of those grand and inspiring times of forty years ago. Only the men who were in the Socialist movement in those days can know the great part Robert Blatchford took in making it popular, and of the personal devotion he inspired by his writings."

"[Blatchford is] the first genuine spokesman of the enfranchised working classes."

"For every convert made by Das Kapital, there were a hundred made by Merrie England."

"[ John Henry Newman's earlier poems are ] unequalled for grandeur of outline, purity of taste and radiance of total effect."

"Blatchford's chief charm as a writer is that he wins into our affections... Blatchford in all he writes is impelled always by a great human kindness and love of man... Incapable of a dishonesty, intellectual or moral, loving the people with a great love, he never hesitates to whip its follies or to point out its weaknesses. Blatchford cannot be bought...the sad part of his splendid achievement for the good of man, the part of it that touches well-nigh the hem of the tragic, is that his broad humanity should have had to take up the sword—that this fervent lover of freedom and singer of the glory of peace should have had to put on the armour of the crusader and call civilization to battle."

"It is disturbing that, while Hobson and Brailsford were so penetrating about the present, they were wrong about the future... Brailsford...wrote...in March 1914: "the dangers which forced our ancestors into European coalitions and Continental wars have gone never to return"... It may be unfair to judge any writer in the light of what came after. Yet men with far less of Brailsford's knowledge and intellectual equipment foresaw the conflict of 1914, and even the shape that it would take. The true vision of the future was with Robert Blatchford, when he wrote his pamphlet, Germany and England, for The Daily Mail. This is a sad confession. Hobson and Brailsford are our sort. We think like them, judge like them, admire their style and their moral values. We should be ashamed to write like Blatchford, though he was in fact the greatest popular journalist since Cobbett. Yet he was right, and they were wrong. Their virtues were their undoing. They expected reason to triumph. He knew that men love Power above all else. This, not Imperialism, is the besetting sin."

"Now, remembering Germany's gospel of force and frightfulness, her plea that necessity knows no law, her carefully organized war and peace machines, her enormous and costly system of espionage and intrigue, her immense armaments, her avowed intention to conquer the world, her record of treacherous diplomacy, her hatred of Russia and Britain and France, her steady persistence on the Bagdad Railway, her secret alliances with Turkey and Bulgaria, her building of her Fleet, her expansion of her own and the Austrian army, her expenditure on Zeppelins and poison gas and flame throwers, her secret siege artillery, her pushing of strategic railways to the Belgian border, her fortification of Flushing, and her purchases of gold; and remembering her three sudden attacks on Denmark, and Austria, and France; and remembering her contempt for "scraps of paper," and her contempt for the law of nations; and remembering her savagery and lawlessness on land and sea; and remembering the Kaiser's speeches and the thousands of books and articles abusing Britain and France; and remembering all that Germany hungered for and hoped to gain; and remembering that Russia, and France and Britain coveted nothing, had threatened nobody, and were unready and unwilling for war, what conclusion can we come to as to which nation is to blame for the agony and ruin which have come upon Europe since the end of July, 1914? Who caused the war? Who threatened war, who preached war, who stood to gain by war, who had been for forty years preparing for war? Germany."

"I will venture to claim that I have been an honest writer and a loyal Englishman. England has many worthier sons; but few who more dearly love her."

"Very few intellectual swords have left such a mark on our time, have cut so deep or remained so clean... His case for Socialism, as far as it goes, is so clear and simple that anyone would understand it, when it was put properly; his genius was that he could put it properly ... his triumphs were triumphs of strong style, native pathos, and picturesque metaphor; his very lucidity was a generous sympathy with simple minds... For the rest, he has triumphed by being honest and by not being afraid."

"Having explained what my mother was like and what her child was like, it will not be difficult to understand that as a grown-up man, with a wife and children of my own, the thought of a hungry or unhappy child or ill-used woman infuriated me. I saw and felt what was going on all around me, and I searched and prayed for a remedy. And while I was searching someone sent me a pamphlet on Socialism and I jumped at it. It answered my questions. It was what I sought. It meant human brotherhood and co-operation. It meant the collective action of the Army. It meant esprit de corps, a larger, deeper, nobler esprit de corps. I snatched Socialism to my bosom. I went out into the highways and the by-ways and raved about it. I became notorious. I was no longer respectable. One of my friends told another of my friends that I was an ensanguined crackpot. Ah, well. I am older now, and wiser—perhaps. But it was a great adventure. After all, I was only acting up to the precepts of the Litany, and I don't regret it."

"To say that we could not work without capital is as true as to say that we could not mow without a scythe. To say that we could not work without a capitalist is as false as to say that we could not mow a meadow unless all the scythes belonged to one man. Nay, it is as false as to say that we could not mow unless all the scythes belonged to one man and he took a third of the harvest as payment for the loan of them."

"I have never been converted from Socialism. But careful observation of the facts of for the last twelve years or so has convinced me that Socialism will not work, and a study of Mr. Ford's methods has provided what seems to me as good a substitute as we may hope in this imperfect world. Socialism as I knew it in past years was an excellent, almost a perfect, theory... But I have had to take towards Socialism the same regretful attitude which so many earnest Christians have had to adopt towards Christianity. The golden rule will not work in international politics, because the nations are not good enough to live up to it. Real Socialism strongly resembles real Christianity. It is a counsel of perfection and cannot be adopted and adhered to by our imperfect humanity. There is nothing the matter with Socialism, but the people are neither wise enough nor good enough to make it a success. Socialism implies the self-abnegation of the individual for the good of the community."

"I started on Britain for the British by Robert Blatchford, of whom I had heard only faintly up to that time... From its title I expected Britain for the British to be directed against foreigners in one way or another but to my surprise I found it a cogent and reasoned argument for Socialism. It was written with a clearness and bite which were unusual."

"I have always been a Tory Democrat... You remember that from the first the Clarion crowd and the Hardie crowd were out of harmony. It was a repetition of the old hostility between the Roundheads and Cavaliers. The Labour Leader people were Puritans; narrow, bigotted, puffed up with sour cant. They were nonconformist, self-righteous ascetics, out for the class war and the dictation by the proletariat. We loved the humour and colour of the old English tradition... I loathe the "top-hatted, frock-coated magnolia-scented" snobocracy as much as you do; but I cannot away with the Keir Hardies and Arthur Hendersons and Ramsay MacDonalds and Bernard Shaws and Maxtons. Not long ago you told me in a letter of some trade union delegates who were smoking cigars and drinking whisky at the House of Commons at the expense of their unions. You liked them not. Nor do I like the Trade Union bigots who have cheated J. H. Thomas of his pension... I am glad the Labour Party is defeated because I believe they would have disrupted the British Empire. I dreaded their childish cosmopolitanism; their foolish faith that we could abolish crime by reducing the police force. All the other nations are out for their own ends. American enthusiasm for Naval Disarmament is not dictated by a love of peace. It is an expression of naval rivalry. All the nations hated our naval supremacy. Do the Americans love us? Do the French love us? Is France, America, Italy, devoted to an unselfish and human peace? Can we dispel the bellicose sentiments of Russia and China and Japan by sending an old pantaloon to talk platitudes at Geneva, or by disbanding the Horse Guards and scrapping a few submarines? ... The England of my affection and devotion is not a country nor a people: it is a tradition, the finest tradition the world has ever produced. The Labour Party do not subscribe to that tradition; do not know it; could not feel it. And if that tradition is to survive, the policy of scuttle and surrender must be abandoned. You agree with all this I feel sure. You always upheld the Pax Britannica."

"In giving to the world "Merrie England," Robert Blatchford has rendered a service of inestimable value to humanity. It has been read, and is being read and will continue to be read by millions. No book has done so much to convert the masses to Socialism."