Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Patterns of Prejudice, 1973, 7 (1), 6-16.

(With two post-publication addenda following the original article)

ANTISEMITIC TYPES IN AUSTRALIA



By John J . Ray

THIS is a study of some present-day Australian Nazis. The data I have derived by the increasingly respectable method (among scientific sociologists) of participant observation [1]. Over the last seven years I have joined Nazi organizations and "collected" people of Nazi sympathies. As a young WASP of basically conservative political views, I found this relatively easy to do -- provided I paid my tax of an occasional antisemitic utterance. Almost all my knowledge is of people living in Brisbane and Sydney -- the two cities where I have spent my last seven years.

As an initial categorization, I feel that the Nazis I have known can be divided into three groups. The first are the old-fashioned Nazis; the second are the ideological Nazis; and the third are the young Nazis. A fourth category are antisemites who would roundly deny any interest in, or approval of, Nazism. I will firstly describe the individuals who fall roughly into these categories and then I will go on to identify anything that I feel is common to all these antisemitic people. For obvious reasons I will identify individuals by initials only and will avoid mention of details which could expose their identity to the casual reader.

The old-fashioned Nazis are generally, but not exclusively, men upwards of fifty years. H.B. is one instance. H. was a tradesman of German origin who had come to Australia before the first world war. He had taken an interest in some of the more millenarian American religious sects and had collected in his very dilapidated home a great array of books and journals (mostly quite old) which claimed to tell of various sorts of esoterica and "inside information" on world events and human history. Between the two world wars he had been very active in the "Australia First" movement. He did not speak much of Hitler: to him it went without saying that Hitler had been right and that it was "the Jews" who had contrived his defeat. His belief in a malevolent international Jewish conspiracy was as implicit as his belief in the Bible as God's verbally inspired word. The Jews had murdered his God and were now trying to murder his race. He was always concerned to see "behind" world events for their "real" significance and origin. "Bible prophecy" and "International Jewry" both provided him with answers to his quest. His religion was hence a quest to understand rather than an emotional compulsion. Except in the particular nature of his obsession he seemed much like any old man railing at the world about him. Of the utter genuineness of his beliefs, however, there was absolutely no question. He was utterly convinced that the Jews - one and all - had the prime aim of destroying or enslaving all other races. To question this belief was only to draw out an incredible array of "proofs" in the form of events and utterances over all the period of recorded history. He felt that the objective truth of what he had to say would be proved to anyone who was prepared to "study" the matter.

L.L. was another "old-fashioned" Nazi. Also an old man of German origin who had migrated to Australia in the early days, he lived on a very run-down farm outside Brisbane. Most of the things said above of H.B. could be said of him. He was, however, much more active than H.B. and got his picture into the paper from time to time -- celebrating Hitler's birthday or some such. He was also not as concerned with religion. Such interest as he did have in religion, however was in the more millenarian sects. W.D. was yet another hoary-headed old man. He was of Dutch origin and a devout Baptist. He wrote and distributed tracts which consisted of mingled warnings about Jews and Armageddon. He was also concerned about pure or "natural" food. All three mentioned so far believed implicitly in the writings of Major Douglas and the Social Credit movement. Seeing bankers as scheming villains who had hoodwinked the innocent majority of the population to their (the bankers') own aggrandisement has obvious affinities with what is believed of the Jew. Given indeed the prominent historical association between Jews and finance, the two beliefs reinforce one-another. Again like H.B. and L.L., W.D. lived in a dilapidated old house crammed with old books and defunct magazines. All three were married to wives who obviously believed in their husbands. To all three the Jews were the epitome of everything evil.

Others in this category I have met at Nazi party meetings are N.S. and E.N. N.S. was in his late forties and of German descent. Like H.B., he had grown sons who did not reject his basic views but who were simply not interested in community affairs. He was a manual worker with some inclination to minor crime. His own financial woes served as a confirmation of his belief in the oppressiveness of "the Jewish financial system". He too accepted the tenets of Social Credit. E.N. was a nephew of L.L. and bore a surname equally Germanic. Although in his mid-twenties, he belongs in this group because of the similarity of his belief system. He had been brought up by parents of fiercely Pentecostal religious beliefs but seemed to have no real religious commitment of his own. He did not appear to be versed in Social Credit but went along with it when it was mentioned. Fair-haired, blue-eyed but physically slight, he was something of an errand-boy and hatchet-man to the local Nazi leader. He took part in Nazi demonstrations and was very regularly at meetings of Nazis. He had the interesting characteristic of tending to stand "too close" to one [2]. Unlike the more serious older men mentioned so far he seemed to be of a noticeably cheerful disposition. He had at one stage had a small entrepreneurial business but this had failed, leaving him in debt. E. was unmarried and worked in a manual occupation.

For all the people in this category, an obsession with Jews seemed to be paramount -- with little concern for other elements of Fascist belief. Their Nazism seemed more an outcome of their antisemitism. For the group next to be described the reverse is true. Other Nazis in the present category that I have known I will not here describe in detail. One was an officer in the local Social Credit organization. It must be stressed however that not all Social Creditors are Nazis or antisemitic. The converse - that all Nazis believe in Social Credit - is however very nearly true.

The next category is of the Ideological Nazis. Epitomizing these is M.H. About 5'4" tall, mustachioed and with the slightest trace of an early speech impediment which he claims to have cured by "self-hypnosis", M. is a one-time Methodist theological student and lay-preacher. He is very gregarious and popular. Wherever he lives is always a foregathering point for others of the extreme Right. Recently married to a girl of "good Aryan type", he has two small children. He has a criminal record for small offences of fraud (mostly with cheques). He works in a manual occupation but is presently an evening student in one of the more marginal medical arts. He was at one time a first-year university student but failed to complete the year. He has the most devastating contempt for "the masses" and regards them as properly and easily gulled. His interest in religion is directed solely to this end. He was at one time however a true believer of a very fundamentalist sort. As a byproduct of this he still enjoys hymn music. He and I have often joined in the strains of the old Protestant favourites -- as I too was once a believer.

Although still in his mid-twenties, he has an impressive record of Right-wing activism and at one time stood for election to an Australian parliament -- under the banner of a party he had formed especially for the purpose. His party members were entirely diehard Nazis. One of his favourite recreations is listening to endless replays of Hitler's speeches. He also enjoys however a great deal of good music -- the predictable Wagner and Bruckner but also Bach, Vivaldi and other composers of the Baroque period. His father was an English Fascist in the heyday of Sir Oswald Mosley or at least a strong Fascist sympathizer. His brothers have quite similar attitudes to him but are simply not interested in community affairs. They hence take no part in Rightist activities.

What then is the ideology of this "ideological Nazi"? He believes implicitly in the principle of race and regards all non-Germanic races as "degenerate". He believes in the Fuehrerprinzip and in Kueche, Kinder und Kirche as the proper role of women. He venerates everything traditional even long after it has ceased to be functional or relevant. He is fiercely proud of everything typically English or Australian and greatly enjoyed (and often quotes) Barry Humphries' "The wonderful world of Barry McKenzie". He admires Ian Smith of Rhodesia and Johannes Vorster of South Africa. He plans to migrate to South Africa in the future. He is much more of a racialist than the old-fashioned Nazis. Their main concern was the Jews (though they also considered it self-evident that blacks were inferior) whereas he has a violent antipathy to all non-Germanic races and is well-versed in even the most recent debates among psychologists about innate racial differences in intelligence, e.g. Jensen, 1969 [3].

He has a complete collection of the works of Nietzsche and often quotes things in it he has read. He has a great attraction to mysticism and witchcraft-- the latter not because he believes in its supernatural efficacy but because it is traditional, "Germanic" and pre-Christian. He often talks of re-establishing an "Odinist" religion (the supposed religion of the pre-Roman German tribes). He contemns Christianity because it is "effeminate" and has seduced the Western European races away from their traditional "manly" virtues. He has utter contempt for weakness and the weak and believes that the "ideal" population of the earth is "about 30 million" -- to include, naturally, no wogs, Jews, Asians or blacks. Thus all could live in the "noble simplicity" of the ancient Germanic tribes -- with lives regulated only by codes of honour and duty, not morality.

He wholeheartedly approves of Hitler's eugenic aims and the extermination of "the useless eaters". He is a great believer in health foods and I still have unhappy memories of a glass of fresh cabbage juice that he once regaled me with! With him, therefore, it will be evident that his antisernitism is only one aspect of his overall Fascism. Had Hitler spoken well of the Jews, he might have been pro-Jewish. Like all the Nazis mentioned so far he was a strong believer in the claims of Social Credit (until I endeavoured to disillusion him in the matter -- he being intelligent enough to give such an enterprise some prospect of success) and even now he does not appear to have abandoned entirely such notions.

Another ideological Nazi is G.H. Although he does not normally claim to be a Nazi, he is one of their most regular associates and is an "expert" on local Jewry. Like all the Nazis mentioned so far, he accepts "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" as genuine and relevant. While he will derogate "the Jews" in casual conversation, he will, if pressed, insist that he is "anti-Zionist" - not anti-Jewish. While he is just as much a believer in race as M.H., he does not appear to harbour any particular animosity towards other races. He believes more in Apartheid ("apartness") than in the "final solution". He is a veritable encyclopedia of Right-wing apologetics and exegesis and writes articles for various limited-circulation Rightist publications from time to time. At Right-wing demonstrations and meetings pressmen find him only too ready to give a well reasoned and very lengthy justification of his stand. He is a member of several more moderate Right-wing organizations than the Nazis and often succeeds in having a "letter to the Editor" published in the dailies. He is unmarried, works as a clerk and is aged about 30. He is of undoubted intelligence, very well-informed on all things political and is very respectful of religion even though he himself is the most nominal of Anglicans. His very serious disposition goes with an undoubted insensitivity and clumsiness in social matters. He completed his secondary education but did not go on to university. By inclination and habit he is nonetheless very much an intellectual. He is a great attender of meetings. His Nazi associates seem to have partly talked him into a belief in Social Credit.

Another Nazi in this category is X.Y. When last I knew him, X. was at one of the best Greater Public Schools in his final year. Very tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed he was a most capable and eloquent public speaker. Good-humoured, socially masterful and of obviously outstanding intelligence, he embodied all that one expects of the best G.P.S. products. His wealthy and long-established father was an influential figure in Liberal-Country party politics and X.Y. himself was a Young Liberal. X. was the sort of person one would expect to go on to a brilliant career at the bar. He was an admirer of Hitler, an undoubted elitist and knew well his "Protocols". His acceptance of the "Protocols" was probably more tendentious than serious but, whatever the rationale, he was clearly anti-Jewish. He was beknown to the local Nazi leader but restricted his activities to more public and legitimate political channels. He was strongly in favour of recognition for Rhodesia. His fundamental contempt seemed to be for weakness of any sort. In his public face he was "anti-Zionist" rather than anti-Jewish. His strong traditionalism was well matched with his love of legalistic debate and expert manipulation of the forms of democracy. He had contempt rather than animosity towards weaker races and stopped short of advocating "the final solution" for anyone but the Jews. He himself was a WASP of pioneer Australian background.

The next ideological Nazi was C.D. -- a local Nazi leader. I met C.D. at a folk music club. He was about 30, with his own rather entrepreneurial business, and unmarried. He seemed well-known and widely accepted in the demi monde of the local folk-music and coffee-dive "scene". Although rather serious, he was very socially oriented and seemed well-liked. He had at one time been an Australian Olympic athlete, He believed literally in the existence of some conspiracy to undermine traditional values and virtues in society. He saw the answer to his very real concern for Australian society in strong government and prestigious leadership. He admired strength per se and all the military virtues. At home he would listen either to Hitler's speeches (on tape) or Beethoven piano sonatas and such like. To him antisemitism was a "study". By "studying" his collection of bigot literature he believed that he increased his understanding of what was going on in the world and how he might come out on top. The Nazi meetings that he organized often took the form of a study of chapters from "The Protocols". He was by birth half Greek but had anglicized his name. Powerfully built, he had swarthy to yellow skin and looked in fact rather Chinese -- something of great mortification to him. He was a great devotee of Social Credit. He had also great admiration of traditional British values and led himself a rather Spartan life.

As a youth he had, I gathered, often suffered the humiliation of being called a "Dago". His sporting record was, at least in part, an attempt to prove himself better than his tormentors. Given his extremely conservative values he found that the Jews were a group that he could convincingly vent his own aggression on. This, however, was apparently quite unconscious. He obviously really believed that all the woes of the modern world could be traced to the corrupting influence of the Jews -- whom he identified also as being in control of the mass-media. He was indeed much concerned to copy the supposed successful tactics of the Jews. He often observed that the Jews maintained their own racial exclusiveness while selling the rest of the world a doctrine of (supposedly weakening) "race mixing". By observing that "the first race laws were passed by Nehemiah" he felt that his own racialism became justified as merely a legitimate defence against a conniving enemy: "fighting fire with fire". Were it not for his wide-ranging Fascist values in fact, his obsession with the Jews would put him best into the first category mentioned in this paper. As it was, however, he could wax as eloquent about "discipline" as he could about Jews. His attitude towards religion was very respectful and one suspects that he did have some residual beliefs himself.

The second local Nazi leader I came to know was A.S. A. was slightly built, bald and sported a rather Hitlerian moustache. Paradoxically, he was a rather "moderate" Nazi, with a well thought-out political "platform". His durability as a Nazi leader seemed attributable to his personal gregariousness and social pleasantness. His policy towards Aborigines of giving them Arnhem land and thus forming a sort of permanent anthropological zoo, rates as very moderate in Nazi circles if not "weak-kneed". Despite this, his personal popularity seems never to have been in any question. He is a very dapper dresser and there is a possibly apocryphal tale circulating that attributes his interest in Nazism solely to the attractions involved in dressing up in uniforms. The tale is that he once got himself appointed ambassador of some small nation formed since the last world war and succeeded thus in getting himself invited to certain garden parties and other formal occasions. He would arrive at these occasions in the full ceremonial uniform that went with his (honorary) office. While he was there, he would get his friends to ring up and ask for him. This would give him the opportunity to be called out from the throng and enable him to parade before all eyes in his resplendent uniform. This tale was told to me by one of A.'s oldest Nazi associates, but one who had subsequently fallen out with A.

A. is the only Nazi who was living on the proceeds of his Nazism during the period I knew him. Since he was living in considerable squalor during most of that period, however, it was obvious that the financial support he was receiving was not great. A. has been imprisoned on various occasions for the possession of dynamite and other weapons but claims that he was on those occasions "fitted" (framed) by the police. Knowing A. (he seems in no way inclined to personal violence or physical attack on anything he opposes) and knowing the police, I am inclined to accept A.'s account of the matter. The dynamite was said to have been "seized" from one of A.'s publicly signed Nazi headquarters. As he himself observed to me, if he had been going to use dynamite, he would have been mad to have kept it in a place so open to a police raid.

His favourite recreation is listening to tapes of Hitler's speeches and World War II Nazi marching songs but he is also a devotee of Bach and other recondite composers. I have heard him claim (evidently under some misapprehension as to the meaning of the word) to be a "musicologist". His attitude to religion is cynical but not contemptuous. He is Australian by birth and immediate ancestry. In public he makes much of "the honest Australian worker" and he definitely attempts to appeal to working class sentiments. In one of his not uncommon public appearances I heard him say in reply to a questioner "Yes, I live in R., among the workers" -- evidently presenting this as a considerable virtue. In private, however, he is as much an elitist as any Nazi and is very proud of his occasional contacts with people in positions of power and authority. While he does not thus have any real regard for the workers as such, it must be conceded that he does nevertheless seem to have something of an affection for them. He feels sorry for them because of the way they have been exploited by "vested interests" and "The Jews" (which he sees as largely synonymous). He does seem to have a clearly paternalistic philosophy and much admires the England of "Colonel Blimp". As with all the ideological Nazis, his antisemitism is only one aspect of a larger traditionalist but conspiratorial outlook.

I have known four thoroughly committed Nazis in this category who are university students. Two in fact were quite active as student leaders but understandably kept fairly quiet about their Nazi sentiments. One of the students (not one of the two who were leaders) is in fact the most "red hot" Nazi I have met. Although very softly spoken, he is utterly committed to ruthless destruction of everything non-Nazi. He is very culturally oriented (he spends hours daily listening to Beethoven and the Baroque) but seems to know no such thing as pity. He is one of a large working class family but is thoroughly an intellectual by both inclination and habit. Unlike the others he is reasonably outspoken about his Nazi views. Since he is at present only 19, this may not last. He is (coincidentally?) a blue-eyed, fair-haired WASP.

All of the student Nazis showed remarkably low levels of antisemitism. Although they would all voice some antisernitic sentiments from time to time, this was clearly little more than perfunctory -- something done as an expression of solidarity with historical Nazism rather than out of the sort of genuine indignation and apprehension displayed by the old-fashioned Nazis described above as category I. If not of antisemitism, of what then does the Nazism of this group consist? It is admiration for the ruthless display of power and the splendid panoply of Hitler's Germany -- for the sense of destiny and the pursuit of an ideal goal that makes no concessions to human weakness, inadequacy or ugliness. This distaste for ugliness is in fact something that seems to have received little comment from previous writers on Nazism. Many of the Nazis in the present category (2) show very real aesthetic sensibility. Their real attraction to even the most recondite composers of classical music puts them above the vast majority of the population at large. Their desire for a world of Nordic-appearing WASPs is substantially the pursuit of an aesthetic ideal. Unlike the normal person in a democratic society, the Nazi is willing to sacrifice human lives and happiness to the pursuit of his aesthetic ideal. What does not measure up to the standard must be destroyed. For readers who have been keeping a tally, it may be of interest to know that three of the four student Nazis had substantial German ancestry. Among these were both the student leaders. All four were not in any way religious believers.

By reason of his long notoriety, there is one more ideological Nazi I will describe here. G.R. is about 40, tall but portly in build, and exudes an air of middle class trustworthiness and respectability that would easily lead one to thinking him a very successful and important businessman. He has innumerable convictions for various types of fraud and false pretences. He might be described as a confidence-man by vocation. He has no time for "Nat-Socs" -- as he calls the uniform-loving associates of A.S. -- but does acknowledge himself as a Nazi. He makes a good thing out of religion and has been appointed a "bishop" by one of the more enthusiastic American minority denominations. As a man of religion he is compellingly reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry". He evidently sees religion as a legally immune confidence racket of which he wants his share. In this respect his sentiments are identical with those of M.H. (described earlier) and the two are in fact very good friends and companions.

In different cities, both he and M.H. took the lead in "organizing the Arabs" (against Israel) and made substantial financial gain from the connection. To my knowledge, however, the local Arab anti-Zionist movement now has entirely woken up to its Nazi "friends" and ejected them. It is characteristic that the Nazis try to "con" even their potential political allies -- after all to them conning people is what politics consist of. G.R. is a great former of various "front" movements and it is for this that he is well-known. He also makes a speciality of infiltrating other legitimate Right-wing political movements and has thus on some occasions been able to exert some political influence. He was one of a group of Nazis who at one time "took over" a certain Liberal party branch that was of importance to a then current national political furore. G.R. is an Australian of WASP background. I have the strong impression that his antisemitism is largely nominal. The essence of his Nazism is his satisfaction in (through stealth) dominating and deceiving others. Nazism is the only political creed that openly acknowledges this as proper behaviour. One of G.R.'s great delights is to assume Jewish-sounding names. This legitimizes his actions as "beating the Jews at their own game". He shows however none of the genuine apprehension of Jewry that characterizes the old-fashioned Nazis.

We now come to the category I have labelled as the "Young Nazis". Most of these are associates (or "troops") of A.S. They are simply brutally-minded young men of limited intelligence. Again in several cases of German origin or extraction, they are simply seeking opportunities of being exhibitionistically nonconformist and aggressive. Had they more intelligence they might be anti-Apartheid demonstrators. I do know two of their number (unusually intelligent for this group) who have made the conversion. Most, however, cannot manage the complicated rationalizations and self-deceptions necessary for them to do this. This is not to say that the Nazism of the young Nazis is not genuine. Nazism again is the only political creed that openly justifies (even glorifies if the object is appropriate) their nakedly aggressive impulses. To them Nazism makes obvious sense: it preaches what they instinctively feel.

An essential feature, however, is their acknowledgement of their own aggressiveness. A child who was brought up to repress and deny his aggressiveness would not, of course, see Nazism as being so common-sense -- although he might fundamentally be just as aggressive as any of these young men. A more extended commentary on anti-racist aggressiveness is available in one of my earlier articles [4]. It will be obvious that detailed descriptions of any of these young Nazis would be of little profit here. They could change their allegiance overnight to some other movement that offered them better ego satisfactions. Equally, many aggressive young men in our society of no present political awareness could lend their support to any Nazi movement that developed into a real political force.

We now come to the category of antisernites who are not Nazis. These are all people whose antisernitism is at least partly traceable to personal experience with individual Jews. They embody what might be called "traditional antisemitism" and represent perhaps the last remnant of nearly 2,000 years of Christian antisemitism, This dislike of Jewry does not imply any desire to persecute or oppress Jews. It is simply a personal preference to avoid and dislike Jews -- as one might dislike people who drive flashy cars or part their hair in the middle ( ! ).

Such a person is D.R. D. is a very successful business entrepreneur with an attractive wife and three beautiful small children. He is in his early 40s and, although of Australian Irish background, was brought up an atheist. A follower of the Communist party in his youth, he is now an admirer of John Gorton. He has a formidably well-informed and catholic devotion to classical music. He is a great lover and exponent of Australian working class traditions and language. Nazism to him is utterly contemptible and "sick". For all that his dislike for Jews is probably rivalled only by his contempt for Aborigines. Jews to him are "scabs" -- people who take what they can get with no accompanying sense of obligation or duty to the others who make their opportunities possible. Aborigines he condemns for their whining disinclination to work and their tendency to "lower the standards" of their community. Both offend against his Australian credo of being "fair dinkum" and allowing "a fair go". He sees both as grasping -- the one by deceit and the other by indolent whining. In standard literary English we might say that D. dislikes insincerity and failures of consideration for others. He can relate many vivid anecdotes which show that his "prejudice" is not prejudice at all. He condemns after and because he has come to know those of whom he speaks. His profusely exemplified Philippics against Jewish and Aboriginal moral defalcations are worthy in fact of an independent literary record. Coming as he does from the "outback", I have seen him use his first-hand knowledge of Aborigines to devastating effect in informal debates with citified Left-liberal intellectual idealists. Let it be clear, however, that his ideology of everyone deserving a "fair go" would make him a resolute and formidable opponent to anyone who proposed or practised oppression of others on the basis of their race. I hope I have made it intelligible that he would oppose his daughter marrying a Jew but would oppose Belsen and Auschwitz much more. If Jews he disliked, injustice he hated.

Although I have other examples of non-Nazi antisemites in mind -- some even with postgraduate degrees and of superb personal adjustment - I believe that I have said enough here to establish the point that dislike of Jews can exist on a purely personal (and thus, in some sense, legitimate) basis of actual experience with Jews. This phenomenon may of course be something of a vicious circle; persecution could well have bred characteristics of servility and hatred for Goyim which in turn excuse fresh discriminatory practices. The ebullient unconcern and self-confidence of the Israeli sabras may be just the antidote needed here. One could scarcely claim of them that "You never know what they're thinking" [5].

We have now come to the point where we may ask: "What characteristics are general to antisemites?" The two things that stand out from the account I have given so far are no doubt German ancestry and liking of classical music. Concerning this latter point, however, a word of caution is in order. I myself am a Baroque music devotee and as one consequence of this it could perhaps be said of anyone I know that they are very likely to appreciate Baroque music. This works two ways. I do tend to get on best with people who I discover share my tastes and my own championing of Baroque music does tend to influence others who might not previously have given it much mind to take it up. This does not however well explain the tastes of people I have met solely through joining Nazi organizations; and the capacity of people in general for an appreciation of this music is so rare that I still remain impressed by its incidence among Nazis. It must be recollected that even Hitler had artistic sensibility of a sort. I can think of several possible explanations for the phenomenon but would want to see them on a firmer evidential basis before suggesting them in print.

The common German ancestry is, I think, a slightly easier phenomenon to deal with. I would like to say at the outset that I do accept the idea of a national character (whether socially or genetically transmitted is irrelevant). I would say then that Nazism expressed something peculiarly congenial to (but not exclusive to) the German character. Even anti-Nazi prewar writers such as Roberts [6] admit that Hitler was immensely popular in Germany. He was no mere military dictator. As I speak good German I have also come to know many migrant Germans in Australia and their main complaint against Hitler seems to be only that he failed. They commonly speak well of the Nazi period. There are some migrant Germans who do, very cautiously, give support to the Australian Nazis. They are, however, very wary of being caught at it. They have, after all, experienced or observed the post-war "De-Nazification" of Germany. Australians who are merely of German descent or have lived here throughout the war years are under no such inhibitions. If their German characteristics have survived, they may well find Nazism very congenial.

What then is this character that is so salient among Germans? Again I can only proceed here with extreme caution but I believe that a certain combination of energy with emotional flatness is in evidence. Perhaps one might even speak of an emotional starvation. Only strong emotional stimuli get through to them. The images here are of a high barrier that only a strong force can surmount or of a partly blocked channel. This would explain both the Nazi's relative insensitivity to suffering on the part of others and his appreciation of the supercharged emotion in one of Hitler's speeches. Most Australian Nazis cannot speak German and some of the speeches they have are not provided with translations. They therefore spend hours listening to speeches that they cannot understand the sense of. The emotion alone and the admiration for Hitler is sufficient. In fairness, however, it must be mentioned that most of the speeches are interspersed with marching songs of a very stirring character. What the Nazis do is thus not unlike what classical music fans do when listening to a cantata in a language other than their own. That a shortage of normal emotional stimulus might cause one to turn more to the canned emotion of music does thus fit the Nazi pattern well. The historical Nazism of' Germany too was very musically oriented. As well as the immense number of Nazi songs, performances of Wagner, Bruckner and Beethoven were almost a Nazi ritual. The immensely percussive and dramatic music of Carl Orff also dates from the Germany of this period. On one of the (American-produced) tapes that the local Nazis often listen to, the commentator says of the S.S. "Where ever these murderers went, they sang".

To put the theory of Nazi (and to a lesser extent, German) personality given here in a larger framework, the account by Eysenck of his two major personality dimensions (neuroticism and extraversion) is of relevance [7]. One possible interpretation of Eysenck's account is that the neurotic is over-responsive and the introvert over-receptive. Conversely, the extravert is under-receptive or has a high threshold for stimulation. In the context of the present theory, this leads to the testable proposition that Germans, and particularly Nazis, should be especially extraverted. That I have not in fact tested out this hypothesis among my Nazi contacts is due to their considerable suspicion of anything like a psychological test. Even the best informed of them would see it, not inaccurately, as an attempt to "get at" them. Given, however, their love of parading in uniforms, this hypothesis does fit the facts extraordinarily well. It is also of interest to note that I have shown elsewhere [8] that authoritarianism correlates significantly with Social Adaptability. Further data from the same study show that the relationship with militarism is even higher. A subsequent unpublished study has shown that the Social Adaptability variable is highly related to Eysenck's Extraversion variable. Eysenck himself connects extraversion and authoritarian attitudes [9].

Eysenck's theory of extraversion is basically physiological and, hence, presumably genetic. On a-priori grounds, however a theory of social transmission through child-rearing practices would be equally plausible. It should be pointed out that the postulated Nazi emotional non-liability is not at all a necessarily negative attribute. It may have great immediate survival value. It was without a doubt the stolid ferocity of the average German soldier that gave the Wehrmacht an effectiveness out of all proportion to its numbers. The traditional emotional lability of Italians and the effectiveness of the Italian army make an informative comparison. In the second world war we saw 80 million Germans take on 100 million English and Frenchmen plus 200 million Russians and 200 million North Americans, That they might have succeeded had Hitler taken one or two decisions differently is surely food for thought. Had, for instance, Hitler allowed Willy Messerschmitt to begin producing the Sturmvogel jet fighter when it was ready in 1942 or had he not ordered Goering to desist from attacks on R.A.F, bases and bomb London instead, the R.A.F. and hence the Royal Navy and hence Britain could not long have survived. A Fascist imperium such as that of ancient Rome might indeed have been re-enacted in our world. Fascist virtues are to be feared -- not scorned.

One may ask how well my observations of antisemites square with the account of antisemitism given by Adorno et al [10] -- now a classic in the psychological literature on this subject. This account attributed various types of psychopathology to the Nazi personality. In a previous work [11] I have already identified crucial areas of difficulty with the Adorno et al account and my original interest in the research there reported was largely due to the poor fit that their account provided to what I knew of actual Nazis. I will therefore concentrate here not on dissecting the Adorno et al. account (other than my existing work to this effect, there is also the work collected in Christie and Jahoda [12]) but rather on the general question of psychopathology among the neo-Nazis I have described.

There is for a start little evidence of psychosis, One exception to this is W.S. When I first met W.S. he was in Goodna mental asylum's maximum security ward for taking a pot-shot at a rabbi with a rifle. He clearly showed loss of reality contact, and even C.D. (in whose company I first met W.S.) subsequently would speak of "poor old W." W.S. was something of an associate of L.L. but all the other Nazis shied clear of him. As in the research of Elms [13], however, people such as W.S. are entirely exceptional. On the whole in fact (as should be apparent from my descriptions of X.Y. and others above) most Nazis have very good reality-contact -- marred perhaps by an excessive cynicism. At the worst they tend to expect falsely of others the same conspiratorial inclinations as their own. Their view of the world might, however, best be described as jaundiced rather than delusional. Their suspicion of Jews is, I feel, no different from the Radical's suspicion of "the establishment" or "the power elite". Their account of Jewry is a theory about the world -- not a distortion of their immediate perceptual and ideational processes.

The question of neurotic tendency is harder to answer. Tauss [14] has shown that a substantial majority of the population may be said to have some form of neurotic disturbance. Against this I have noticed only the most minor manifestations of what might pass for neurotic symptoms among my Nazi contacts. They are in fact almost always concerned with things outside themselves. If they were not very interested in large-scale social phenomena they could not in fact be Nazis. They are definitely not the sort of people who would eagerly answer "yes" to questions such as: "Do you often get pains?" On the other hand their social adjustment is often superb. They would not make such good confidence men if they did not have an instinctive ease with the rules of interpersonal conduct.

An entirely different question, however, is the question of psychopathy. This was once known as "moral imbecility" and is now coming increasingly to be called "sociopathy". It refers to a failure to have acquired inbuilt moral restraints. Its worst manifestation is criminality. Most Nazis are completely amoral. They do not believe there is any such thing as Right and Wrong and they feel themselves under no constraint to obey moral dictates. It is interesting context to this to note that academic writers on moral philosophy are also often very skeptical about the viability of a concept of discoverable or objective Right and Wrong. Debate on the reducibility of "is good" statements to "I like" statements is in fact a common exercise for undergraduate philosophy students. I also have before me at the moment an as yet unpublished paper by John Maze, lecturer in philosophical psychology at the University of Sydney, which contains a most sweeping and persuasive indictment of moral convictions as representing themselves a learned delusional system [15].

For better or for worse, then, Nazis will only do what they see as being in their (perhaps long term) self-interest to do. Whether or not they are criminal depends then on the ratio of effort to reward and whether they think they can get away with it. In fact only three of the Nazis I have described above show criminal proclivities and I know of only one other such. Some of the young Nazis do from time to time get into trouble for possession of drugs but the harm they do to others by this is at most presumptive and certainly not intentional. Again in confirmation of the theory about Nazi emotional phlegmatism, Eysenck has long associated psychopathy with extraversion.

To conclude this section then it can be said that the Nazi is perfectly normal psychologically [13], except for his high threshold to emotional stimuli. Once the threshold has been passed, however, the response may be of normal amplitude. His personal aggressiveness could also be attributed to the same characteristics. One of the normal deterrents to aggression is counter-aggression. With his high threshold, the Nazi would very likely be much less affected and consequently less deterred by this. Indeed one very extreme example of such a phenomenon is R.M. R. is very often a lone counter-demonstrator at Left-wing rallies but ridicule and physical assault seem to deter him not a whit. He still derives great satisfaction from the febrile rage his presence seems to evoke among the hated "peace creeps". He is, however, himself very strongly built physically and is of clearly below-normal intelligence. He is one of the young Nazis. This relative failure of social sanctions among Nazis also goes far to explain their failure to acquire reflexes of moral restraint.

So much for what characterizes Nazis. I am also sometimes asked what it is that Nazis get up to. What do they do at their meetings and how do they endeavour to influence the course of events in the world about them? The answer is "very little". Their meetings -- most of which are informal -- are principally occasions for reinforcing one-another's values, of doing in fact what most Australians do in the bar of their local pub. They certainly have no programme of action or set of immediate goals. They sometimes stick up posters calculated to scandalize the Left rather than achieve any real results and in Sydney hold occasional meetings on the Domain. The anti-Apartheid movement has also stimulated them into more counter-demonstrating than was once their wont. Again the aim here is entirely to provoke the "Lefties". The counter-demonstrators are almost entirely drawn from the young Nazis. The ideological Nazis tend to be individualists who do their bit for their cause by infiltrating other community organizations and representing themselves as "ordinary decent citizens" outraged by the excesses of the Left. This is seldom, however, a concerted campaign.

Like the extreme Left, the extreme Right is extremely divisive and it is almost impossible for them to get concerted action on any issue. Each has his own idea of what should be done. Since there are far fewer active Nazis than active Left-wingers, this divisiveness does often leave one Nazi alone to his particular point of view. Since Australia does seem to be a fundamentally conservative country, one man in the right place (particularly in the Liberal or Country parties) can have a lot of influence for all that and in general I think it would be true to say that Nazis are as successful in promoting their aims as are the Left. The difference is that the Nazis have to operate almost solely underground.

What I have said above in using the terminology of "the extreme Right" must not be taken as implying that I believe the Nazi simply to be a conservative who is more extreme in his views. Shils [16] long ago pointed out that there are some things that Nazis and Communists have in common that in turn distinguish them from Liberals and Conservatives taken together. At its simplest Nazi and Communist are both totalitarian ideologies and Liberal and Conservative are both democratic ideologies. Attempts to find a psychological counterpart to this political division have been made by both Eysenck [17] and Rokeach [18]. Eysenck proposed a two dimensional schema where Fascists and Communists fell together at one end of a "toughmindedness" dimension while the democrats were both "tender-minded". Thus the Nazis were tough-minded conservatives and the Communists were tough-minded radicals. Critiques by Christie [19] and Rokeach & Hanley [20] have, however, substantially undermined Eysenck's position. Rokeach [18] replaces tough-mindedness with "dogmatism" as the variable common to both Fascists and Communists. Although useful, his account is however of a personality variable rather than an attitude dimension. It may also not be the only or even the main thing that the two have in common.

The dimension that I would like to propose as a fundamental to the difference between Conservatives and Fascists (as also to the difference between Social Democrats and Communists, Maoists etc.) is the relatively obvious one of respect for the individual and belief in the primacy of individual liberties. If the conservative's commitment to these things be doubted, let it be remembered that it was this that Churchill was most eloquent on in his polemics against Nazism. Hitler and Churchill were certainly both, in some sense, Right-wing * but on the question of respect for the individual the gulf was unbridgeable. Note that American opposition to Communism has also been in the name of freedom and "the free world". In the political debates in our society the Right have in general opposed the cry of "freedom" to the Left-wing cry of "peace". Note that freedom from regulation is also the ideological underpinning to the traditional conservative preference for laissez faire in economic policy.

Parenthetically, I would also like to point out that the Nazi and the Conservative do not differ on ethnocentrism. Churchill was as proud of his "English-speaking people" (witness his great four-volume History) as Hitler was of his Herrenvolk. The difference was in the inferences for action that the two saw as warranted by this. Churchill saw a duty to help. Hitler saw a right to exterminate. I also attribute the Nazi fascination with religion that I observed to their conservative predilections. True Conservatives, I take it, are generally in some way or other religious believers #. Nazis thus have a feeling that they should be religious or at least feel that to be so is in some sense traditional and legitimate. Their complete amorality on the other hand makes the compulsions of religion fundamentally foreign to them, Thus their continual ambivalent trifling.

Another question that I am sometimes asked is: "Where do the Nazis get their financial support?". There is in this question implied a conviction that people who "put their money where their mouth is" show an especially deep level of commitment. The question is as naive as asking: "Where do the Communists get their money from?", and I hope that the answer by this stage is as obvious. Most Nazis work for their living and they have few projects requiring funding. When they do the funds are often found from among their own ranks. On one occasion when A.S. set up an offset printing press, the funds were provided by one of the "oldfashioned Nazis" from his savings. For other specific needs however funding was in the past provided through certain Arab embassies and the Croatian community also provides support of various kinds. Some Australian Nazis who have travelled to Germany have also been regally entertained there by at least one sympathetic German industrialist.

In conclusion let me reiterate that Nazis are not generally in any way bizarre people. If you met one unknowingly you could quite well like him. Nor are they in any sense bogeymen. They are very much a marginal minority. Even if crypto-Nazis do attain to some power in public life, the traditional respect for the individual in Anglo-Saxon societies should ensure that he could function only as a (perhaps extreme) Conservative. There is obviously some room for further research on the explanation advanced here for the phenomenon of Nazism. I, naturally, hope that it will prove a more viable one than those previous attempts rooted in Freudian theory.

---------------------------

Footnotes:

1. See S. Bruyn, The Human Perspective in Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. Prentice Hall. 1966.

2. E. T. Hall, The Silent Language. Garden City. Doubleday. 1959, p. 163.

3. Arthur R. Jensen, "How much can we boost IQ. and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review, 1969, Vol. 39, pp. 1-123.

4. Ray, J.J. (1971) Ethnocentrism: Attitudes and behaviour. Australian Quarterly, 43, 89-97.

5. For a more extensive treatment of non-Nazi antisemitism see Ray, J.J. (Unpublished) Semitism and antisemitism: Some
observations from Australia in support of the Stein/Glock hypothesis


6. S. H. Roberts, The House that Hitler Built. Now York. Harper. 1938, pp. 41 and 359.

7. H. J. Eysenck and S. Rachman, The Causes and Cures of Neurosis. San Diego, California. Knapp. 1965. Also H. J. Eysenck and S. B. G. Eysenck, Personality Structure and Measurement. London. Routledge. 1969.

8. Ray, J.J. (1971) An "Attitude to Authority" scale. Australian Psychologist, 6, 31-50.

9. H. J. Eysenck, The Psychology of Politics. London. Routledge. 1954, p. 174.

10. T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson and R. N. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality. New York. Harper, 1950.

11. Ray, J.J. (1972) Is antisemitism a cognitive simplification? Some observations on Australian Neo-Nazis. Jewish J. Sociology 15, 207-213. See also footnotes 4 and 8.

12. R. Christie and Marie Jahoda, Studies in the Method and Scope of "The Authoritarian Personality". Glencoe, III. Free Press, 1954.

13. A. C. Elms, "Those Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes are No Nuttier than Anyone Else, It Turns Out". Psychology Today, 1970, Vol. 3, pp. 27-59.

14. W. Tauss, "A Note on the Prevalence of Mental Disturbance". Australian Journal of Psychology, 1967, Vol. 19, pp. 121-123.

15. See Maze, J. (1973) The concept of attitude. Inquiry 16, 168-205.

16. E. A. Shils, "Authoritarianism: Right and Left". In Christie and Jahoda's Studies as under footnote 12.

17. H. J. Eysenck, The Psychology of Politics, as under footnote 9, p. 130.

18. M. Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind. New York. Basic Books. 1960.

19. R. Christie, "Some Abuses of Psychology". Psychological Bulletin, 1956, Vol. 53, pp. 439-451.

20. M. Rokeach and C. Hanley, "Care and Carelessness in Psychology". Psychological Bulletin, 1956, Vol. 53, pp. 183-186.

POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDA

*Principally in that both Churchill and Hitler were anticommunist. And Hitler did to some extent romanticize the past. No real-life political party is purely anything so the fact that Hitler's Nazism was a mixture of elements should come as no surprise. In economic policy and in disrespect for the individual he was clearly of the Left but his nationalism conflicts with the internationalism that most Marxists preach so has usually served to place Hitler on the Right in modern-day minds. In his day, however, Hitler was not alone in being both Leftist and nationalist. From Napoleon Bonaparte onward, there were many nationalist Leftists prior to Hitler. Even Engels was a German nationalist, in fact. So in his day, Hitler was a mainstream Leftist, only to the Right of Communism. And even in modern times most Leftists are to the Right of Communism. See here for a more detailed treatment of Hitler's ideology. Even his antisemitism was Leftist in his day.

# This sentence was rather vague but was nonetheless still a little careless. I would revise it these days to say something even more qualified: "Christians were at the time usually conservative in at least some senses". Roman Catholics at the time in fact most usually voted for Australia's major Leftist political party (the Australian Labor Party) but were nonetheless respectful of the traditional order in many ways. And in a generally irreligious place like Australia, there are far more voters for conservative parties than there are regular church attenders of any kind. The depth of Australia's irreligiosity (and the consequent irrelevance of religion to Australian politics) is perhaps best shown by the fact that just about all all the politically outspoken Christian clergy in Australia of the year 2004 seemed to be opposed to the conservative government of John Howard -- which seems to have caused Mr Howard little concern and which certainly did not prevent him from having a notable election victory in that year.

It may be of interest to some readers that the journal in which this article appeared -- Patterns of Prejudice -- was published by the Institute of Jewish Affairs, in London.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

The Journal of Social Psychology, 1984, 124, 237-246

THE GREAT ANDROGYNY MYTH: Sex Roles and Mental Health in the Community at Large



JOHN J. RAY & F. H. LOVEJOY

School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Australia

ABSTRACT

Previous research on androgyny has focused heavily on college-student populations and has used measuring instruments open to several methodological criticisms. The present research used a random postal sample (N = 214) of an entire state and a modified form of a new sex role inventory by Antill, Cunningham, Russell, and Thompson (1981). The modifications were designed to control against acquiescent response bias. Only a minority of the items discriminated the male and female respondents, making scale construction difficult. Two 12-item inventories of male and female orientation were produced but without balancing against acquiescence. Femininity was found to correlate strongly with neuroticism, lack of assertiveness, and lack of self-esteem. Masculine orientation, however, also went with low self-esteem and low assertiveness. It was concluded that the best mental health was shown by undifferentiated respondents (those who tended to say that sexually polarized self-descriptions were inapplicable to them). Those who were androgynous were generally low scorers on the three indices of mental health.


IN A RECENT STUDY with the Bem sex role inventory (1974), Myers and Gonda (1982) found that the inventory was completely invalid in a most basic sense. When it was applied to groups of respondents other than college students, Myers and Gonda found that items said by Bem to measure general community stereotypes of what is desirable in, for instance, masculinity did not, in fact, correspond to general community stereotypes of what is desirable in masculinity. Previous work on androgyny based on college-student samples, then, becomes very suspect. Myers and Gonda also suggested that work with other scales constructed with student samples, such as the PAQ, would be similarly flawed (Beere, 1979; Spence & Helmreich, 1978).

A very interesting sex role scale is, therefore, the recent inventory by Antill et al. This inventory was specifically constructed to avoid several of the methodological criticisms that have been aimed at the Bem inventory (e.g., Pedhazur & Tetenbaum, 1979) but is of the same general type and format. That Antill et al. used at least some non-student raters during scale construction may also make their scales immune to the Myers and Gonda (1982) criticisms.

One possible source of artifact that remains uncontrolled for in even the Antill scales, however, is acquiescent response bias. The masculine scale, for example, contains only pro-masculine items. There are no anti-masculine items. There is now extensive evidence that this can be a source of serious artifact (Altemeyer, 1981; Block, 1965; Christie, Havel, & Seidenberg, 1956; Martin, 1964; Ray, 1972a, 1972b, 1979a, 1983, 1984; Ray & Pratt, 1979; Rorer, 1965). Such scales may simply measure tendency to careless responding. Balancing the Antill scales to eliminate this problem, then, seemed necessary.

Method

To enable balancing of the Antill scales, any item in either their Form A or Form B that could be replaced by an antonym was so replaced. This meant that 35 Antill items were administered unaltered, and 45 were replaced by their antonyms. Other scales administered were Eagly's (1967) revision of the Janis-Field self-esteem scale, the short Eysenck (1959, 1969) Neuroticism scale, a short Marlowe-Crowne (Greenwald & Satow, 1970) social desirability scale, and the Ray Directiveness scale (Ray, 1976, 1980, 1981; Ray & Lovejoy, 1983).

The measurement of assertiveness, although of obvious importance in this research area, posed a difficulty in that there is no real agreement about what it is (Burkhart, Green, & Harrison, 1969; Law, Wilson, & Crassini, 1979; Lawrence, 1950). It was arbitrarily decided, therefore, to use the 14-item Ray (1980) Directiveness scale. This is generically a dominance scale and was originally written to measure dominance of an authoritarian kind. Its correlates, however, show that it is associated generally with good mental health (Ray, 1979b), and Ray (1981) has pointed out at some length that there are many points of contact in the authoritarianism and assertiveness literatures. Lorr and More (1980) have also identified directiveness as one of the four main subtypes of assertiveness, although they measure it with a scale of their own construction.

All the above scales were included in a single questionnaire mailed out under a university letterhead to 950 people selected at random from the registered voter lists of the Australian state of New South Wales. Because voter registration in Australia is compulsory for all adult citizens and even for many non-citizens, the sampling frame was, thus, unusually comprehensive. A total of 214 (23%) usable replies were received-from 88 men and 126 women. Aside from the slight imbalance in the sex ratio, the distribution of demographic characteristics (age, occupation, and education) did not differ significantly from that observed in contemporaneous samples obtained in the Sydney metropolitan area (Sydney is Australia's largest city and accounts for 3 million of the state's 5 million people). Thus, although the response rate was low, it did not result in any noticeable biasing of the sample in terms of basic demographic criteria. The total sample may perhaps seem small, but with such a sample correlations explaining as little as 2% of the variance are significant.

Results

In view of Antill et al. using some non-student raters in developing their scales, an unexpected and awkward finding (but one in line with what Myers & Gonda, 1982, predicted) was that most of the Antill items, whether originals or their antonyms, did not, in fact, discriminate men and women. Only 36 of 80 items separated men and women among the respondents by one fourth of a standard deviation or more. In other words, on many of the supposedly male-role and female-role items, both men and women were equally likely to get high (or low) scores. This may have some significance in and of itself; a scale of supposedly male or female sex roles, if it is to have any validity at all, however, should show men as, on the whole, following male sex roles and women as, on the whole, following female sex roles. Although there may be a great deal of role overlap in the community, it is the aim of sex role research to detect and study those roles that do not totally overlap. Furthermore, if men do not score especially high on an item believed to measure, for example, a male characteristic, the claim that it measures a male characteristic is arbitrary. Although it is true that the Bem inventory discriminates men and women at the total score level rather than at the item level, its approach, as has already been mentioned, is unsatisfactory.

Under the circumstances, then, further scale development was confined to the 36 discriminating items mentioned above. Unfortunately, the reduced size of the available pool of items meant that the aim of producing balanced scales could not be realized. An attempt was made to construct two scales using equal proportions of original and reversed Antill items, but this restriction led to scales for masculinity and femininity with reliabilities (alpha) of only .40 and .30, respectively. More conventional one-way-worded scales, therefore, had to be resorted to if any sex role scales that would be applicable to the general population were to be produced. Acquiescence had to be controlled for by means other than balanced scales.

Of the 36 discriminating items, 16 showed higher mean scores among men, and 20 showed higher mean scores among women. Some of these, however, correlated very little with one another so that two scales of only 12 items each were produced to measure masculinity and femininity. Their reliabilities (alpha) were .57 and .64, respectively. They did not correlate significantly with each other. Their correlations with other scales are presented in Table 1. Following the emphasis by Taylor and Hall (1982) on the separate study of masculinity and femininity, these results were the ones most heavily relied upon in assessing the implications of the present study. A high score on either male-polarized or female-polarized attributes was related to low self-esteem (high scores indicate low esteem) and low assertiveness. For neuroticism, however, subscribing to female roles was neurotic. Because neither the male nor the female scale correlated with social desirability, none of these results can be dismissed as due to social desirability.

The items making up the general-population masculinity scale were as follows: formal, bashful, seldom outspoken, not fussy, crude, insensitive, hard-hearted, mild, inconsiderate, reserved, quiet, and "I seldom if ever cry." The items making up the general-population femininity scale were: need approval, nervous, lacking confidence, "I feel inferior," unathletic, dreamy, little or no mechanical ability, "I change my mind easily," gullible, religious, unwilling to take risks, and excitable in a major crisis.

The simplest measure of androgyny would seem to be a high summed score on the masculinity and femininity scales, obtained only by scoring high on both male and female attributes, which is what generally seems to be meant by psychological androgyny. People with a low summed score would be undifferentiated, and people with a conventional one-role predominance would get middling scores. Such a measure was, therefore, calculated, and high scores on androgyny on this measure were found to be unassertive (r = -.415, p < .001), neurotic (r = .334, p < .001), and of low self-esteem (r = .594, p < .001). These are high correlations in comparison with much that is reported in the psychological literature and are uniformly unfavorable to the feminist hypothesis as enunciated by Bem (1974) and her successors.

In a third analysis of the data, all subjects were divided into low and high scorers on each of the two scales. High and low were defined as above and below the scale mean, respectively, rather than as above and below the scale median. Although use of the median is more usual, it was felt that dividing respondents into exactly equal groups was too artificial because there might have been an empirical tendency in the sample toward a greater proportion of, for example, male-oriented persons than female-oriented persons. Use of the mean gave the data some influence on the frequencies in the various categories, as can be seen from the variable ns in the different subgroups of Table 2. This table gives the means of the three mental health measures for each of the four possible combinations of dichotomized sex role scores. The conclusions to be drawn from Table 2 do not seem to differ markedly from those already drawn on the basis of the previous analyses. Undifferentiated respondents seem to have the best mental health and androgynous respondents, the worst.

The method adopted to control for acquiescent response bias derives from Martin's (1964) suggestion that an independent measure of acquiescence can be obtained by summing scores on a balanced scale without doing any reverse scoring. Such a score was obtained from the Directiveness scale for each respondent and correlated with scores on the other (substantively scored) scales. Acquiescence was found to correlate .36 (p < .001) with scores on the Eysenck Neuroticism scale, .37 (p < .001) with scores on the self-esteem inventory, .14 (p < .05) with scores on the Masculinity scale, and .44 (p < .001) with scores on the Femininity scale. This implies that there was a pervasive influence of acquiescence throughout the battery of scales.

Partial correlations were carried out to remove the effect of acquiescence from the correlations between the sex role scales and the other personality scales. The initial relationships were, however, so strong that this did not affect any correlation substantially or alter its level of significance. Because the Directiveness scale was balanced against acquiescence, acquiescence could not be a common influence underlying the correlations between assertiveness and sex role.

Finally, of the 35 Antill items used unaltered for the purposes of the present survey, only 9 fell into the group of 36 valid items found to be usable for scale construction. Hence, the poor validity observed in the body of items available for the present analyses was not due to alterations in the Antill items. In fact, the altered items had a higher success rate in differentiating men and women.



TABLE 1

Correlates of the Two Sex Role Scales of Masculinity and Femininity

......................................Total sample (N = 214)

Variable.......................Masculine...Feminine

Directiveness................ -.28.............. -.34
Neuroticism................... -.04............... .49
Social Desirability.......... .10............... -.08
Self-esteem (a)............... .24................ .62
Sex................................ -.45................ .35

(a) A high score on the self-esteem scale indicates low self-esteem.

TABLE 1 (Continued)

........................................Men only (n = 88)..................Women only (n = 126)
........................................Masculine....Feminine............Masculine....Feminine

Directiveness................. -.04................. -.45..................... -.53.............. -.27
Neuroticism.................... .11.................. .42..................... .09................ .45
Social Desirability.......... -.03................ -.04...................... .19............... -.10
Self-esteem (a)................ .37................ .56....................... .46................ .60



TABLE 2

The Means on Three Mental Health Measures for all Possible Combinations of Scores on the Sex Role Scales

......................................................Directiveness...............Self-esteem (b)

Orientation (a)...............N..............M.............SD.................M................SD

Males

Masculine.....................40...........29.80.........6.39...............41.70..........8.02
Feminine........................5...........21.40.........3.44...............48.80...........9.06
Androgynous.................21..........26.61..........7.65...............49.95..........9.37
Undifferentiated...........22..........30.09..........5.13..............38.54...........6.28
F ratio...........................................3.58*...............................8.26**

Females

Masculine.......................7...........31.28.........5.99...............41.14...........9.03
Feminine.......................49...........28.44.........7.48...............49.49.........10.47
Androgynous.................33...........23.93.........5.28...............57.93.........10.60
Undifferentiated..........37............30.37.........6.78...............43.18...........7.83
F ratio...........................................6.07*..............................14.70**

Grand mean, males.......88...........28.63.........6.70...............43.28...........9.15
Grand mean, females..126...........27.98.........7.15...............49.38...........11.35
t ratio............................................ .66.................................4.15**

(a) Masculine = high M, low F; feminine = low M, high F; androgynous = high M, high F; undifferentiated = low M, low F. (b) A high score on the self-esteem scale indicates low self-esteem.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

TABLE 2 (Continued)

.....................................................Neuroticism

Orientation (a)...............N..............M.............SD

Males

Masculine.....................40............10.42........4.04
Feminine........................5............12.80.........3.65
Androgynous.................21...........13.04.........4.01
Undifferentiated...........22...........10.54........3.50
F ratio............................................2.48

Females

Masculine.......................7............12.28........2.65
Feminine.......................49............14.44........3.42
Androgynous.................33............13.93........3.24
Undifferentiated..........37............ 11.48.........3.50
F ratio...........................................5.91**

Grand mean, males.......88........... 11.21........4.05
Grand mean, females..126........... 13.31........3.60
t ratio............................................4.13**



Discussion

The present paper has been, in a sense, a deliberate attempt to reinvent the wheel. Very little of what has become accepted practice in this research area was taken on faith. If the various relationships reported in the existing literature were accurate reflections of reality, the attempt at thoroughly independent replication should have succeeded. It did not. The conclusions could hardly be more different. The usual findings to date have been that either androgyny or masculinity confer mental health advantages (Taylor & Hall, 1982). The present work appears to be the first occasion on which undifferentiated respondents have been shown to be most advantaged in mental health terms.

The present findings, however, fit in very well with those of Myers and Gonda (1982) that turning to non-college respondents reveals as totally invalid items carefully checked for validity on college students. Community stereotypes about sex roles turn out to be college student stereotypes only. Given the limited importance of the college student population in the world at large, existing work may at best be trivial.

Even an interpretation of the existing findings as reflecting reality among college students only, however, may be unduly expansive. To do so would leave us to explain why the situation is not only different among college students from the world at large but is, in fact, opposite in important senses. Because it seems rather improbable that reality is so perversely arranged, we must seriously consider another possibility -- the Rosenthal (experimenter-expectation) effect. It seems that feminist views are widely respected in academe, even to the point of being normative. Could it not be, therefore, that our students have in previous research simply given back to us what they thought we expected to hear? The possibility of experimenter expectations having affected responses in the present study, on the other hand, appear to be small. Mailed questionnaires seem to be thoroughly impersonal means of data gathering.

In conclusion, then, it appears that in the population at large it is maladaptive to see oneself in terms defined by sex roles. It is maladaptive to see oneself in ways that are either characteristically male or characteristically female. A fortiori, it must be even more maladaptive to see oneself as androgynous as that word is generally now used in the psychological literature. The finding that undifferentiated personalities are most advantageous is, however, still quite congenial to feminist theory. This is because the finding conflicts with the traditional point of view that had begun to receive some support in recent research (Antill & Cunningham, 1980; Taylor & Hall, 1982), that is, the view that it is male sex roles that are most adaptive.

REFERENCES

Altemeyer, R. A. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Antill, J. K., & Cunningham, J. D. (1980). The relationship of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny to self-esteem. Australian Journal of Psychology, 32, 195-207. Antill,

J. K., Cunningham, J. D., Russell, G., & Thompson, N. L. (1981). An Australian sex-role scale. Australian Journal of Psychology, 33, 169-183.

Beere, C. A. (1979). Women and women's issues: A handbook of tests and measures. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Bem, S. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, 42, 155-162.

Block, J. (1965). The challenge of response sets. New York: Appleton Century.

Burkhart, B. R., Green, S. B., & Harrison, W. M. (1969). Measurement of assertive behavior: Construct and predictive validity of self-report, role-playing and in-vivo measures. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 35, 376-383.

Christie, R., Havel, J., & Seidenberg, B. (1956). Is the F scale irreversible? Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, 56, 141-158.

Eagly, A. H. (1967). Involvement as a determinant of response to favourable and unfavourable information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph, 7(3, Whole No. 643).

Eysenck, H. J. (1959). Manual of the Maudsley Personality Inventory. London: University of London Press.

Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, S. B. G. (1969). Personality structure and measurement. London: Routledge.

Greenwald, H. J., & Satow, Y. (1970). A short social desirability scale. Psychology Reports, 27, 131-135.

Law, H. G., Wilson, E., & Crassini, B. (1979). A principal components analysis of the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule. Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology, 47, 631-633.

Myers, A. M., & Gonda, G. (1982). Empirical validation of the Bem sex-role inventory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 304-318.

Lawrence, P. S. (1970). The assessment and modification of assertive behavior. Dissertation Abstracts International, 31, 173-971B.

Lorr, M., & More, W. W. (1980). Four dimensions of assertiveness. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 2, 127-138.

Martin, J. (1964). Acquiescence: Measurement and theory. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 3, 216-225.

Pedhazur, E. J., & Tetenbaum, T. J. (1979). Bem sex-role inventory: A theoretical and methodological critique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 996-1016.

Ray, J.J. (1972a) Are conservatism scales irreversible? British J. Social & Clinical Psychology 11, 346-352.

Ray, J.J. (1972b) A new balanced F scale -- And its relation to social class. Australian Psychologist 7, 155-166.

Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.

Ray, J.J. (1979) Is the acquiescent response style not so mythical after all? Some results from a successful balanced F scale. Journal of Personality Assessment 43, 638-643.

Ray, J.J. (1979) The authoritarian as measured by a personality scale Solid citizen or misfit? J. Clinical Psychology 35, 744-746.

Ray, J.J. (1980) Authoritarianism in California 30 years later -- with some cross-cultural comparisons. Journal of Social Psychology, 111, 9-17.

Ray, J.J. (1981) Authoritarianism, dominance and assertiveness. Journal of Personality Assessment 45, 390-397.


Ray, J.J. (1983) Defective validity of the Machiavellianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 119, 291-292.

Ray, J.J. (1983) Reviving the problem of acquiescent response bias. Journal of Social Psychology 121, 81-96.

Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1983). The behavioral validity of some recent measures of authoritarianism. Journal of Social Psychology, 120, 91-99.

Ray, J.J. & Pratt, G.J. (1979) Is the influence of acquiescence on "catchphrase" type attitude scale items not so mythical after all? Australian Journal of Psychology 31, 73-78.

Rorer, L. G. (1965). The great response style myth. Psychological Bulletin, 63, 129-156.

Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. L. (1978). Masculinity and femininity: Their psychological dimensions. Austin, TX: University of Austin Press.

Taylor, M. C., & Hall, J. A. (1982). Psychological androgyny: Theories, methods and conclusions. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 347-366.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

CRITIQUES AND REJOINDERS BY JOHN J. RAY:

Although the great majority of articles that I had published in academic journals were reports of my own research, I was also on many occasions moved to point out deficits in the published work of other social scientists. Since journal editors in general greatly dislike publishing critiques (it shows their own review process as inadequate) the fact that I got so many published shows how gross were the errors I pointed to. The two commonest faults by far (usually in the same article) were to ignore most of the previous literature on the subject discussed and to fit almost any finding, no matter how adverse, to a Leftist view of the world





Gul, F.A. & Ray, J.J. (1989) Pitfalls in using the F scale to measure authoritarianism in accounting research. Behavioral Research in Accounting 1, 182-192.

Ray, J.J. (1971) Correspondence: Regarding the Lynn n-Ach test. Bulletin British Psychological Society, 24, 352.

Ray, J.J. (1971) Australians authoritarian? A critique of J.W. Berry. Politics 6, 92.

Ray, J.J. (1972) Subjective class -- A reply to Jones. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology 8 (Feb.), 18.

Ray, J.J. (1972) Militarism and psychopathology: A reply to Eckhardt & Newcombe J. Conflict Resolution, 16, 357-362.

Ray, J.J. (1975) Some dimensions of factor analysis that are not worth finding out: A reply to Gow. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology 11(1), 29.

Ray, J.J. (1981) Sample homogeneity, response skewness and acquiescence: A reply to Feather. Australian Journal of Psychology 33, 41-46.

Ray, J.J. (1982) Machiavellianism, forced-choice scales and the validity of the F scale: A rejoinder to Bloom. J. Clinical Psychology 38, 779-782.

Ray, J.J. (1984) Attitudes towards immigrants in Australia: A comment on Callan. International Migration Review 18, 373-374.

Ray, J.J. (1984) Reinventing the wheel: Winkler, Kanouse Ware on acquiescent response set. J. Applied Psychology 69, 353-355.

Ray, J.J. (1984) A further comment on the Winkler, Kanouse Ware method of controlling for acquiescent response bias. J. Applied Psychology 69, 359.

Ray, J.J. (1984) Directiveness and authoritarianism: A rejoinder to Duckitt. South African Journal of Psychology 14, 64.

Ray, J.J. (1984) Confusions in defining A-B personality type: A rejoinder to Jenkins & Zyzanski. British Journal of Medical Psychology 57, 385

Ray, J.J. (1985) Racism and rationality: A reply to Billig. Ethnic & Racial Studies 8, 441-443.

Ray, J.J. (1986) Letter to the editor regarding Carlson's review of "Authoritarianism across cultures". Political Psychology, 7, 395-396.

Ray, J.J. (1986) The inadequacy of "Psychological Abstracts" Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 39, 184-185.

Ray, J.J. (1986) Ray replies to Brand. pp 176-178 in: S. Modgil & C.M. Modgil (Eds.) Hans Eysenck: Consensus and controversy Lewes, E. Sussex, U.K.: Falmer.

Ray, J.J. (1986) Perils in clinical use of the Shostrom POI: A reply to Hattie. Personality & Individual Differences 7, 591.

Ray, J.J. (1987) Conservatism and attitude to love: An empirical rebuttal of Eisler & Loye. Personality & Individual Differences, 8, 731-732.

Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences 8, 771-772.

Ray, J.J. (1987) Complex jobs and complex mental processes: A comment on Miller, Slomczynski Kohn. American J. Sociology 93, 441-442.

Ray, J.J. (1987) Intolerance of ambiguity among psychologists: A comment on Maier & Lavrakas. Sex Roles 16, 559-562.

Ray, J.J. (1988) Sexual liberation, old-fashioned outlook, and authoritarianism: A comment on Kelley. J. Sex Research 24, 385-387.

Ray, J.J. (1988) A-B personality type and dominance: A comment on Yarnold & Grimm. J. Research in Personality 22, 252-253.

Ray, J.J. (1988) Cognitive style as a predictor of authoritarianism, conservatism and racism: A fantasy in many movements. Political Psychology 9, 303-308.

Ray, J.J. (1988) Semantic overlap between scale items may be a good thing: Reply to Smedslund. Scandinavian J. Psychology 29, 145-147.

Ray, J.J. (1989) Hypertension and personality: A comment on Thomas & Kirkcaldy. Personality & Individual Differences 10, 1101.

Ray, J.J. (1989) Homebirth and IQ. The Psychologist, 2, 443.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Authoritarian behavior and political orientation: A comment on Rigby. Journal of Personality Assessment 54, 419-422.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Racist extremism and normal prejudice: A comment on Grossarth-Maticek, Eysenck & Vetter. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 647-648.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Authoritarianism as a cause of heart disease: Reply to Byrne, Reinhart & Heaven. British J. Medical Psychology, 63, 287-288.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Politics and cognitive style: A rejoinder to Sidanius and Ward. Political Psychology 11, 441-444.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Altemeyer's Enemies of Freedom. In: Canadian Psychology, 31, 392-393.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 763-764.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Authoritarianism and group identification: A new view of an old construct: Comment. Political Psychology, 11, 629-632.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Authoritarianism and political racism: A comment on Meloen, Hagendoorn, Raaijmakers and Visser. Political Psychology 11, 815-817.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Intolerance of ambiguity and authoritarianism: A comment on Rump. Psychology, 27 (4), 71-72.

Ray, J.J. (1990) AIDS, authoritarianism and scientific ignorance -- A comment on Witt. J. Applied Social Psychology, 20, 1453-1455.

Ray, J.J. (1991) "Racism in a British journal" The Psychologist, 4(1), 18-19

Ray, J.J. (1991) The workers are not authoritarian: Rejoinder to Middendorp & Meloen. European J. Political Research, 20, 209-212.

Ray, J.J. (1991) Are conservatives despairing? Rejoinder to Petersen & Wilkinson. Personality & Individual Differences, 12(5), 501.

Ray, J.J. (1991) Authoritarianism is a dodo: Comment on Scheepers, Felling & Peters. European Sociological Review, 7, 73-75.

Ray, J.J. (1991) If 'A-B' does not predict heart disease, why bother with it? A comment on Ivancevich & Matteson. British J. Medical Psychology, 64, 85-90.

Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.

Ray, J.J. (1992) Authoritarianism among medical students: Comment on Pestell. Australian & New Zealand J. Psychiatry, 26, 132.

Ray, J.J. (1993) Do authoritarian and conservative attitudes have personality and behavioral implications? Comment on Eckhardt. Political Psychology, ? (UQ collection defective)

Ray, J.J. (1994) Are subtle racists authoritarian? Comment on Duckitt. South African J. Psychology, 24(4), 231-232.

Ray, J.J. (1996) Review of "The ethical crises of civilization" by Leslie Lipson. Political Psychology, 17(3), 587-589.

Ray, J.J. (1998) On not seeing what you do not want to see: Meloen, Van Der Linden & De Witte on authoritarianism. Political Psychology, Vol. 19, Issue 4, 659-661.

Ray, J.J. & Bozek, R.S. (1980) Dissecting the A-B personality type. British Journal of Medical Psychology 53, 181-186.

Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1984) The great androgyny myth: Sex roles and mental health in the community at large. J. Social Psychology 124, 237-246.

Ray, J.J. & Najman, J.M. (1988) Capitalism and compassion: A test of Milbrath's environmental theory. Personality & Individual Differences 9, 431-433.

Ray, J.J. & Singh, Satvir (1984) The Cattellian method of predicting child personality. Journal of Social Psychology 123,3-8.



CRITIQUES NOT PUBLISHED IN ACADEMIC JOURNALS

larsen.htmlATTITUDES TO SOCIAL AUTHORITIES AND CHILD-REARING: Comment on Shively & Larsen


gulreply.htmlAUTHORITARIANISM, ACCOUNTING AND THE F SCALE: REPLY


boyle.htmlCAN THERE BE TOO MUCH INTERNAL CONSISTENCY IN A SCALE? Rejoinder to Boyle


mchosk.htmlCARING CONSERVATIVES: A COMMENT ON McHOSKEY


maticek.htmlCOMMENT on Gallacher's criticism of Eysenck & Grossarth-Maticek


witt2.htmlCOMPANIONSHIP IN FOLLY may be a comfort but it is still folly: Reply to Witt


eisendir.htmlCONSERVATISM AND RACISM: A comment on Eisenman & Sirgo


straub.htmlDOING RESEARCH TO PROVE THE OBVIOUS: Comment on "A-B" and Straub et al.


scots.htmlDO STEREOTYPES MATTER?


mercer.htmlDRUG ABUSE, authoritarianism and the magical power of statistical significance


mogh.htmlHUMAN RIGHTS, right-wing authoritarianism and conservatism: Comment on Moghaddam & Vuksanovic


erotto.htmlIS EROTOPHOBIA old-fashioned? A comment on Fisher et al.


dorn.htmlMORAL JUDGMENT and authoritarianism: A comment on Van ijzendorn


bias.htmlNON-SCIENTIFIC BIAS IN THE EDITING OF THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY


burt.html PERCEPTION IS JUST ANOTHER RESPONSE


play.htmlPSYCHOLOGISTS ONLY PLAY AT SCIENCE


skeptic.htmlSELF-DECEPTION among psychologists


sdo.htmlSOCIAL DOMINANCE ORIENTATION: THEORY OR ARTIFACT?


forsgren.htmlSOME PERILS OF MAIL SURVEYS: Comment on Forsgren


louw.htmlTHE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY IN SOUTH AFRICA: A comment on Louw-Potgieter


vanhiel.htmlVAN HIEL'S PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSERVATISM

faids.htmlWARINESS OF AIDS VICTIMS: Authoritarian or old-fashioned? A comment on Witt and on Larsen, Elder, Bader & Dougard

Kruglanski's "Need for Closure" concept

Deconstructing Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff

Academic fakers: Comment on the "Berkeley" study of conservatism by Jost et al.