The courageous work of social psychologist Raymond Cattell

The great social psychologist Raymond Cattell freely roamed all fields and brought highly intelligent insights to all of them, but he was also very courageous, which is a rare thing in academic thinkers.

Cattell worried about the fall of intelligence and the fall of cultural morale and he saw four major things influencing decline: the rise in luxuries (machines, goods), pluralistic ethics (few values in common, moral relativism), loss of the reality principle by the pleasure principle (the id assaults the hard reality of the ego), and negative eugenic survival of moral conduct (altruists die).

Cattell listed three, sometimes competing, ideas regarding cultural change: the materialist idea (economics, environment), diffusionist (copying, borrowing), individual leaders (inventions for the group).

Diffusionists have been given more weight, but invention is more rare than we have thought. Before 10,000 BC man was extraordinarily slow to invent and change; was it the migration of Cro Magnons (now called “European early modern humans”) with their cousins from the East that jumped started things?  Cattell thought both coercion and imitation, and both the materialist and leader schools needed to be included in explaining social mutations.

The great sociobiologist E.O.Wilson affirmed Cattell by confirming the biological origin of social behavior, even if Wilson underplayed the extra courage of Cattell's work on the rise and fall of intelligence in different ethnic groups, which was not “racist” but factual.

Wilson and other academics also maltreated Cattell's courageous work on a new religion from science called Beyondism, which was way ahead of its time, and brilliant---it influenced my work on theological materialism.

Cattell and his friend Robertson even thought about ethnostates to protect variety and differences, and suffered much heat for doing so.