Anthony Daniels in the Quadrant writes of a card carrying psychiatrist, Ellery. Firm in his belief in psychoanalysis and socailism. Convinced he is correct. Reliably wrong. The kind of Ratbag Daniels hopes he is not.

The dictatorship, then, not of the proletariat, but of psychiatrists. Personally, I would take my chances with the betting, drinking, semi-moron class.

By the time he came to write his magnum opus, Ellery was starting on his road away from Damascus. Having been the most orthodox of orthodox fellow travellers, to the point of denouncing Trotsky, he wrote this footnote:

It should be borne in mind that the present political system in the Soviet Union is not Communism … Only in name is it a dictatorship of the proletariat. Its centralized oligarchy is in the hands of the Communist Party led by Stalin. That this party has done much to advance the economic, social and cultural standards of the masses cannot be denied; but in doing so, it has erected a cumbrous bureaucracy and has employed dictatorial methods to consolidate the hierarchy of the State which has become a ruthless and powerful instrument of government, to all appearances at present unlikely, in the wishful-thinking of Marx, to “wither away” for the coming of Communism.

This, of course, doesn’t quite capture the horrors wrought by the Russian Revolution, but it is a distinct advance on Eyes Left!, Ellery’s best-selling pamphlet of only two years earlier, when no praise was lavish enough for the miracles wrought under Stalin’s wise guidance (“a man whose modesty is as disarming as his determination is inflexible—a man of great vision, a sincere student, a warm friend”):

The Soviet Union must be the pattern for our reconstructional efforts … We should remember that it succeeded in spite of overwhelming obstacles because the socialist ideology appealed to men and women with courage and enthusiasm, willing to risk personal pleasure and private satisfaction for the splendid purpose in the task that lay ahead of them. We, likewise, can succeed if … we can enlist the pliant sympathies of youth to a doctrine which aims at the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.

Among the exploitative forces was religion: “Christianity has an ugly history … Its voice has been raised against gambling and drinking, but not against the root causes of social injustice.” Two years later, Ellery had softened his opinion somewhat:

Dr Ellery was of a type by no means uncommon, the intellectual who changes his mind but whose certainty is like the grin of the Cheshire cat, being what remains when everything else has disappeared. I, of course, am not at all like that; at least, I don’t think that I am. No, no, I am quite certain that I am not.

I should add that Daniels has a fanbase who find his writing so you don’t have to.

It is easy to mock such. The time of the Soviet is now one with Tyre. But my son had emailed to him a questionnaire from a PhD student in Sociology and Gender studies about adverse sexual experiences and rape culture. The only adverse experience he has had was this questionnaire, which he discussed, and the were methodological flaws clearly visible and inherent in the confidence the student had that she and her supervisors were right.

Doubt is the handmaiden of scholarship. But ideological certainty and “scientific” ratbaggery remain with us.