Nature Versus Nurture

Authoritarian ideologies are permeating American culture, and for quite a while now have been using scientific research to back up analysis that implies that genetics determines one's station in life. For example, their ideological camp would imply that people are poor because they are controlled by genetically predetermined behaviors that result in a penurious existence, and so therefore, we should not try to eliminate poverty because, in effect, poverty is inevitable. This is just another form of the Early Modern Protestant concept of predestination, which holds that people are poor because of their moral condition, which was predetermined by God. Just as the philosophical argumentation and resultant secular reforms of the Enlightenment tore apart the socially destructive idea of predestination, so now must clear thinkers and clear observers today tear apart the socially destructive arguments of pseudo-scientific research, no matter how many millions of dollars are poured into these spurious assessments from conservative interest groups who want to justify the status quo. Though genetic research is a good predictor for things like being physically disposed to certain kinds of diseases like cancer, or fundamental organic mental diseases of the brain such as manic depression, to say that anything so complex as social behavior is the result of chromosomal molecules is as great a stretch of the facts as believing that some sort of Supreme Being never wanted us to have free will and opportunity but childishly decided from the get-go that some of us would be moral and socioeconomic failures! Certainly we need good researchers to break down these heavily funded arguments today that posit we cannot escape our genetics when it comes to succeeding in this world. Yet even common sense would tell you that no matter how gifted a person is, if the game-board is tilted in the opposite direction, that gifted person will undergo long or even impossible odds at winning. Yet the examples of history, that greatest of our teachers, can be our helper in defeating the noxious idea of the pseudo-geneticists that we are confined by our family background. Let's just look at literary history, and the literary geniuses of the English language alone for proof of this falsehood! Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of the masterwork, The Canterbury Tales, was the son of a simple wine merchant (remember, wine was as common then as beer is now) and the grandson of a hose-weaver (hosen were the woolen leg coverings of Medieval times). The great Renaissance dramatist and poet (and model for Shakespeare), Christopher Marlowe, was the son of shoemaker. Then there is William Shakespeare himself, a thorn in the side of everyone whose psychological comfort derives from the idea that only an aristocrat could produce the greatest literature of the English language. Theorists of the proper social hierarchy of intellectual ability have tried to say that Shakespeare, the son of a glove-maker, could not possibly have written such great plays as King Lear or Hamlet, but rather, Shakespeare was actually a moronic theater-hand who held the horses of the audiences during performances. Their theory goes that Shakespeare secretly made a compact with some aristocrat, like Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, wherein Shakespeare would take all the credit, so that the proper reputation of this artistically inspired aristocrat would not be "soiled" by having composed these incredible works of human insight! And therein lies the rub, for the very reason that no aristocrat should like to be known as a serious artist of any kind, is because aristocrats were all about mastering what they felt was their proper role: accruing wealth as a means to exercising power -- anything else was seen as the dalliance of the lesser social orders. For such a conspiracy to have been pulled off, literally hundreds of important folk who were friends with Shakespeare, or critics, actors, and aficionados, would all have to have been either duped or convinced to keep mum about the truth. This is asking too much, and you know what they say in any form of rational inquiry: the simplest explanation is always closest to the truth. The fact of the matter was, Shakespeare grew up with enough middle class social stability, education (yes, it was called a "grammar school" back then, but not the same kind of grammar school as taught the Three R's in the backwoods of Nineteenth Century America -- grammar schools in Renaissance England were more like private college prep schools are today), and Shakespeare came into contact as young man with enough sheer cosmopolitan culture in London through its libraries, bookshops and literary salons of intellectual debate, for any reasonably inspired and intelligent man of properly nurtured background and idiosyncratic personality to have produced every blessed one of his masterful works of drama. Now where would Shakespeare have been in a society that began acting upon the presumptions of the pseudo-genetic sciences that are now being used to influence and substantiate government and corporate policies beginning to affect our world today? He would have been written off and sold down the river before he might ever have lifted pen to paper. I could easily go on about other literary lights of our linguistic heritage, but even these few examples of this select group of scions from a middle class of skilled workers, I think, is quite sufficient to make my point against the arguments of our new breed of predestinationists. It is Nurture not Nature that makes the critical difference, and if we destroy our middle and working classes (I never quite understood the real difference between these two social designations), we will be salting down the furrows of future cultural greatness. In effect, our society would be left only with the wealthy to experience the nurturing forces of life, and as history has proven, the wealthy mostly train their children toward one thing on pain of ostracism: the art of money-grubbing and the concomitant power that results from capital accumulation and concentration. If all that remains are those obsessed with such things, we will become the most philistine state since Ancient Sparta, and what a dour and dreary existence that will make -- even for the wealthy.