A Scientific Outlook: CCF, Bertrand Russell, William Empson, & The New Critics (Occult Yorkshire 11)

To read the full article (& rest of this series), order The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse.

“The state not only had a vested interest in becoming an active agent of evolution, it could not help but become one, willy-nilly. Fabians set out to write a sensible evolutionary agenda when they entered the political arena. Once this biopolitical connection is recognized, the past, present, and future of this seemingly bumbling movement takes on a formidable coherence. Under the dottiness, lovability, intelligence, high social position, and genuine goodness of some of their works, the system held out as humanitarian by Fabians is grotesquely deceptive; in reality, Fabian compassion masks a real aloofness to humanity. It is purely an intellectual project in scientific management.”
— John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education


According to a citation-free source (Larouche) which is possibly apocryphal, another of Robert Graves’ affiliations was with a late-night drinking circle at Oxford consisting of poets and occultists, some but not all of whom were contributing writers for Alfred Orage’s magazine The New Age. This latter is worth a brief mention. It began as a journal of Christian liberalism and socialism before being re-oriented to promote the ideas of Nietzsche and Fabian socialism. It famously published a debate on the role of private property, with H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw on one side, and G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc on the other. It also discussed the need for a socialist party as distinct from the newly formed Labor Party. The editorial line moved from initial support to bitter opposition over the issue of women’s rights in 1912. As The New Age moved away from Fabian politics, the leading Fabians founded The New Statesman and Nation to counter its effects, in 1913. The New Age also concerned itself with the definition and development of modernism in the visual arts, literature and music, and consistently observed, reviewed and contributed to the activities of this movement. It also became one of the first places in England in which Sigmund Freud’s ideas were publicly discussed.

Orage’s collaborators and cohorts included Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and (allegedly) Robert Graves. There’s certainly a significant area of overlap, and once again, the intelligence community seems to have colonized, if not created, the vesica piscis in the Venn diagram. In this case, the fish takes the form of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist advocacy group created by the CIA in 1950, via the Ford Foundation.[1] The CCF had a magazine called Encounter which attracted some of the leading intellectuals of the period and beyond (despite having its intelligence roots revealed, Encounter continued until 1990). Contributors included Graves, Stephen Spender (founder), Melvin J. Lasky (co-founder), John Strachey, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, Arthur Koestler, Anthony Burgess (who had his own MI5 affiliations), Ted Hughes (whom I met as a child), Jorge Luis Borges, Dwight Macdonald, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, Tavistock employee R. D. Laing, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Marshall McLuhan, Phillip Larkin (who according to my brother’s memoir visited our childhood home), Paul Theroux, Elias Canetti, D. M. Thomas, David Lodge, Martin Amis, and Clive James. It’s been only half-jokingly called “some of the best money the CIA ever spent.”


Alec Horsley’s friend J. B. Priestley attended a CCF meeting hosted by Arthur Koestler in 1956, and Bertrand Russell was one of its chairmen during the early years. Since Russell was viewed as a great philosopher and humanitarian, it’s easy to see how the CIA would want someone of his caliber to lend credibility to their cultural battleship. On the other hand, a chairman has power to steer the ship, so it seems unlikely the CIA would take a chance on someone not already in intelligence employ—or perhaps that of a higher governance body? While trying to ascertain Russell’s possible intelligence connections, I ended up reading online passages from Russell’s 1931 work, The Scientific Outlook. I was surprised to see that it reads like a manual for totalitarian control.

“[T]the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play. . . . All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called ‘co-operative,’ i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them. . . . Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific technique, and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements. . . . In normal cases, children of sufficient heredity will be admitted to the governing class from the moment of conception. I start with this moment rather than birth since it is from this moment and not merely the moment of birth that the treatment of the two classes will be different. If, however, by the time the child reaches the age of three it is fairly clear that he does not attain the required standard, he will be degraded at that point. [T]here would be a very strong tendency for the governing classes to become hereditary, and that after a few generations not many children would be moved from either class into the other. This is especially likely to be the case if embryological methods of improving the breed are applied to the governing class, but not to the others. In this way the gulf between the two classes as regards native intelligence will become continually wider and wider. . . . Assuming that both kinds of breeding are scientifically carried out, there will come to be an increasing divergence between the two types, making them in the end almost different species.” (Routledge, 2009, emphasis added. Ebook, so no page numbers.)

This was my grandfather’s colleague, correspondent and fellow Fabian, to whom he made an unknown number of monetary donations? Is it then safe to assume he approved of Russell’s plan for a scientifically engineered society in which the division between classes would—like in an H. G. Wells novel—eventually become a species divide? Where exactly does socialism or the avowed concern for the rights of “the common man” fit into that vision? Roughly as a sheep’s clothing fits into the strategy of wolves?

Russell is also attributed with introducing the possibility of peaceful protest in the 1950s and 1960s, for example with CND’s sit-downs against nuclear weapons, thereby setting the template (one he learned from Oxford-alumni Mahatma Gandhi) for non-violent resistance ever since. While it might be argued that violent resistance is easier for the ruling classes to deal with because they can meet it with greater force, there is a degree of social chaos that results from such open conflict that may interfere with business. It also forces the iron fist of government to remove its velvet glove, thereby alerting the public to the exact nature of the oppression they are under and sowing the seeds of future revolt. It’s possible, then, that Russell (and by extension my grandfather), by rechanneling social unrest into peaceful forms of expression, were, in the long run, serving the interests of State and not the people.

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Returning briefly to Robert Graves: according to The Birth of New Criticism by Donald J. Childs, Graves was the unacknowledged father of what’s known as “New Criticism”: a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century.[2] The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism, and its early practitioners formed a loose-knit community sometimes referred to (because of a literary magazine that featured much of their work) as the Fugitives, and also as the Agrarian poets (linking them up loosely with the camping movement of Glaister, Byngham, and co). Primary influences were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot and the work of English scholar I. A. Richards, especially his Practical Criticism and The Meaning of Meaning, which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach to poetry and literature. In a similar way, Eliot had argued that “the study of literature ought to strive towards scientific objectivity” (Childs). A scientific outlook.

To read the full article (& rest of this series), order The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse.

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[1] This first came out in 1962, via the World Marxist Review. Four years later, the New York Times ran an article about how the CIA secretly funded the CCF’s British magazine Encounter; soon after (also in 1966) it revealed that the CIA had been instrumental in creating the group.
[2] The full title is The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I. A. Richards, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding. New Criticism emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. This is the equivalent to removing a literary work from its context. Teaching people to think in boxes (separate compartments that have no need of any deeper context to be understood) is a way to get them to live in boxes, and eventually to become like boxes: separate, isolate individuals. “Every man is an island” becomes the truth of the modern mindset, and plays into the (entirely false) notions of the “self-made man” and the “meritocracy.”  Compartmentalization or boxing was also key to the Prussian education system, the breaking up of learning into arbitrary “classes” separated by the ringing of a bell. It’s also central to the shaping of information in TV (and even newspaper) media, each show or article boxed off from the others via commercial breaks (or margins on the page). All of this might well lead to an internal state, that of the “objective”—i.e., decontextualized—experience of self and world: a self-objectification.

19 thoughts on “A Scientific Outlook: CCF, Bertrand Russell, William Empson, & The New Critics (Occult Yorkshire 11)”

  1. well I guess it’s really just the old trick of ‘keep the dum dums occupied’. Like Scientology, Kabbalah, Jungianism, Freudianism, alchemy etc etc; present a complex language for a system that promises rewards and requires abstract thought and lots of memorization while having almost zero reference to the real life of emotions and justice. Ignore the rising tide of corporatism. And at all costs never discuss morality. Right and wrong. Good and bad. So childish, boring, retrograde, simple minded! Academese as a viral agent, mental bio-warfare. Again though, misdirection, sleight of hand and hypnosis. Incredible find on B. Russell. What more does one need. Zapruder? It’s really all there…this is empire at home, the inner navy for the town commons. Or is it just the ordinary the process of culture? Or both? I believe it is one more than the other. Empire at home.

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    • The moral “slack” is taken up by religion. So it’s ignored as irrelevant by one wing of the culture, while touted as a matter of your soul’s salvation by the other. Neo-liberalism & scientism is a weird fusion. Amorality is morally-enforced. The pursuit of happiness via personal choice has replaced heaven by submission to higher authority.

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      • Right. And those personal choices have nothing to do with politics. It is suggested that happiness is found in sex and music and getting famous as an artist. Or if you have a high forehead study Freud and New Criticism and/or Kabbalah. Why bother with the mundane, the day to day? Trip out! City council, town hall, party meetings, boycotts? You’ve been liberated.

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  2. Russel (1931): “[T]the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. …”
    *
    I WONDER: IS THIS WRONG?!
    I remember an interview with Christopher Hyatt where he said that the liberals have it wrong: How do you educate stupidity?! Most people are stupid by biological necessity! That’s THE REAL ISSUE here.
    I have a German book in front of me, published 1927. The author goes by the name of Ludwig Ziegler. In the book is a chapter titled “America and the rise of the Untermensch”. Ziegler quotes research from another book: “The Revolt against Civilization” by Lothrop Stoddard (1883 – 1950). Quoting Stoddard, “the average mental age of the American population is 14. Half of the population will never develop mental abilities beyond that of a child of the age of 12. The statistics become even worse if you look at the non-white races.”
    *
    “Stoddard argued that race and heredity were the guiding factors of history and civilization and that the elimination or absorption of the “white” race by “colored” races would result in the destruction of Western civilization.”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothrop_Stoddard
    Osho: In the ordinary human being it stops at the age 14 – the growth of intelligence – because the biological purpose is complete. At the age 14 the person is mature enough to give birth to reproduce. Biology is no more interested beyond this point. This is the reason why the average human being is stuck at the age 14 as their mental age is being concerned. … This can be changed but the change will come only if you have some goals beyond biology. If your life remains only concerned about sex, family, children, food, house then there is no need. That much intelligence is enough.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAc0yVHL2yg

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  3. Have you heard about the DODD REPORT?!
    Norman Dodd (June 29, 1899 – January 1987) born in New Jersey, was a banker/bank manager, worked as a financial advisor and served as chief investigator in 1953 for U.S. Congressman B. Carroll Reece Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations.
    He was primarily known for his controversial investigation into tax-exempt foundations. His claims about his investigative work have become the cornerstone of theories implicating the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. It was stated by him that these or other foundations were involved in the intentional instigation of the United States into World War I and attempting to mold world history through the explicit control of education in the United States.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Dodd
    “In summary, our study of these entities [tax-excempt foundations, chiefly by Carnegie and Rocekfeller] and their relationship to each other seems to WARRANT the inference that they constitute a highly efficient, funtioning whole. Its product appears an educational curriculum designed to indoctrinate the American student from matriculation to the consummation of his eduction. It contrasts sharply with the freedom of the individual as the cornerstone of our social structure. For this freedom, it seems to substitute the group, the will of the majority, and a centralized power to enforce this will – presumably in the interest of all.”
    http://brynmawrcollections.org/traces/archive/files/552952f585af5ef916a246c55fcb7a76.pdf
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2xcwFpSW0k
    Excerpt from the Norman Dodd interview:
    We are now at the year 1908, [Abe: actually 1910] which was the year that the Carnegie Foundation began operations. In that year, the trustees, meeting for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance of the year in a very learned fashion. The question is: “Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?” And they conclude that no more effective means than war to that end is known to humanity.
    So then, in 1909, they raised the second question and discussed it, namely: “How do we involve the United States in a war?”
    Well, I doubt at that time if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. Then, finally, they answered that question as follows: “We must control the State Department.” That very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? And they answer it by saying: “We must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country.” And, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective.
    Then time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I. At that time they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatched to President Wilson a telegram, cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly.
    Finally, of course, the war is over. At that time their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914 when World War I broke out. At that point they came to the conclusion that, to prevent a reversion, “we must control education in the United States.” They realize that that’s a pretty big task. It is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller Foundation with the suggestion that that portion of education which could be considered domestic be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the Endowment. They then decide that the key to success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American history.

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  4. Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, CBE, DSO (3 March 1878 – 17 June 1967)[2] was a British soldier, intelligence officer and ornithologist. He had a decorated military career spanning Africa where he was credited with creating and executing the infamous Haversack Ruse. While early biographies lionized Meinertzhagen as a master of military strategy and espionage, later works such as The Meinertzhagen Mystery present him as a fraud for fabricating stories of his feats and speculated he was also a murderer. The discovery of stolen museum bird specimens resubmitted as original discoveries had raised serious doubts on a number of scores as to the veracity of ornithological records he claimed as well.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Meinertzhagen
    Tall, handsome, charming Col. Richard Meinertzhagen (1878-1967) was an acclaimed British war hero, a secret agent, and a dean of international ornithology. His exploits inspired three biographies, movies have been based on his life, and a square in Jerusalem is dedicated to his memory. Meinertzhagen was trusted by Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion, T. E. Lawrence, Elspeth Huxley, and a great many others. He bamboozled them all. Meinertzhagen was a fraud.
    “The Meinertzhagen Mystery” shows how recorded history reflects not what happened, but what we believe happened.
    http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/1597970417

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  5. Richard Meinertzhagen was a military hero, explorer, spy, friend of Israel, diarist, world renown Ornithologist and prevaricator.
    He left an 82 volume library of his ‘life’, much of which was wishful thinking or down right false.
    *
    Ian Fleming had written that RM was the archetype for “James Bond”. He could not have known how right he was in basing his fictional spy on a real-life falsified spy.
    Col. Richard Meinertzhagen’s exploits are those of either the greatest and most daring man ever to wear a British Military Uniform, or that of the most whopping fraud to walk the earth.
    *
    An Unbelievable Mess
    His diaries are full of stories so outrageous that you’d think they have to be made up.
    It turns out that most of them now appear to have been made up indeed. The difficulty is to split out what is true from what is false. And then we need look at what historians have reported as fact based on what is now seen to be false. It’s enough to make you wonder about all of history.
    *
    The reader can’t help admiring the chutzpah of the con man.
    *
    “The Meinertzhagen Mystery” shows how recorded history reflects not what happened, but what we believe happened.
    http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/1597970417

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  6. Menachem Mendel Schneerson (April 5, 1902 OS – June 12, 1994), known to many as the Rebbe, was a Russian Empire-born American Orthodox Jewish rabbi, and the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.
    As leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, …
    In 1978, the U.S. Congress asked President Carter to designate
    *** Schneerson’s birthday as the national Education Day U.S.A.. ***
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Mendel_Schneerson
    The Jewish People have a big problem. This problem is an organization known as Chabad, Chabad-Lubavitch, or Lubavitch. This website describes this problem, and tries to prevent additional Jews from becoming “Victims of Chabad.”
    This website was created by Jews for Jews. If you are not Jewish you may not understand what is being presented.
    http://www.chabad-mafia.com/
    Yeshayahu Leibowitz is asked about the Chabad Lubavitch belief that their Rebbe is the Moshiach. He says he is not sure whether the Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, is a Psychopath or a Charlatan.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_VDXugMS1o

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  7. The next chapter of Russell’s book begins: “The scientific society which has been sketched in the chapters of this Part, is, of course, not to be taken as serious prophecy. It is an attempt to depict the world which would result if scientific technique were to rule unchecked.” He says that it has “features that are repulsive,” “likely to be disastrous,” a “world… devoid of beauty and joy.” He is not advocating this society or saying that we should build it. Just the opposite.

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    • That explains how the book was republished without comment then. I’m not entirely sold by BR’s disclaimer, however, since the text still works as a blueprint. But thanks for pointing this out, since I was dependent on an online version that skipped that part.

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    • I have not read the entire work, but it strikes me that, if someone can be quoted in large, several-paragraphs-long passages that give no indication of irony but read like calculated blueprints for social engineering, it is reasonable to suppose that this is what they are, or at least can be used as. At the very least it’s crazily irresponsible, and there’s nothing to indicate that Russell was crazily irresponsible. That he chaired a CIA front, fraternized with Fabians, and described himself as a Vampire, however is a matter of public record. Do the math.

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  8. I am not so sold on BR’s disclaimer either. What has been said cannot be unsaid. The idea is now ‘out there’. Job Well Done. In point of fact the technocrats are well on their way to installing their utopian and ‘Scientific’, cybernetic educational, ( well really behavioral ) training system globally. Julian Huxley’s UNESCO is its CORE , birthplace. It is called Personalized Learning or Individualized Learning. And it makes constant use of the computer all day long in every classroom .
    Personalized Learning is BR’s and I can imagine many Fabian’s dream come true. It the ultimate Teaching and Learning Box for desired attitudes, values and behaviors. The desired worldview is programmed into every lesson. Every keystroke, every answer, every gaming choice made provides the machine with an understanding of the individual’s innermost motivations. The program then adapts to ensure, based on the individuals unwittingly revealed profile, how best to change the inner world of that student so that they are brought into the fold of consensus and shared understandings.
    This is happening now. Competency and Compliance and Comfort for All. Invisibly attained.
    Semi related; In the US Louise Rosenblatt was pivotal in spreading Close Reading and Transactional Reading philosophies into k-12 education. And all of this was useful in part because the 30’s marked the period of the beginning of the push to teach reading to kids without phonetic instruction but as Whole Words. The former recognizes our language is based off of a symbol system with corresponding sounds which can be decoded by anyone if they learn the rules. The latter intends for the individual to memorize thousands of english words as if they were Chinese pictograms . And then what words are not ‘Known” the so called reader can simply infer or guess at to make meaning up on their own. Voila! Barely functionally literate plebes.
    An increasingly illiterate populace would then of course need help understanding the meaning of what an author intended to say in his text. Perfect for any group desiring to steer, Nudge or otherwise control mass perception.

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  9. As a non-Anglo, I didn’t know Bertrand Russell, but after reading your words about his “manual of totalitarian control”, I went to check.
    Maybe you should read introductions, summaries or even readers reviews prior to jumping to conclusions.
    Russel states clearly his book is a criticism of the scientific outlook, and he goes indeed to great lengths to expose the ills that could befall society if we followed its mandates. Hence, the painfully detailed totalitarian control threat he warns against.
    Please try to do better research in the future.
    About why Bertrand Russell was used by the CCF, the answer lies in his anticommunism. That alone made him into a cherished asset. BTW, he was fully aware of who he worked for and why. His intelligence connections ran with the British Foreign Office, the MI6, MI5 and CIA. It is all neatly explained on the Bertrand Russell Society Website.

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