The subtitle here is “The Modern Denial of Human Nature,” and with good
reason, although it wasn’t something that was immediately apparent to me. Many
people believe that people are born as blank slates, without any innate nature
bred or programmed or carved into them, and are raised as total products of
their environment. I don’t think that. To me, the opposite is virtually
self-evident. But evidently many people operate and make momentous decisions
based on this false premise. And that, according to Pinker, is a problem.
The
refusal to acknowledge human nature is like the Victorians’ embarrassment about
sex, only worse: it distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse,
and our day-to-day lives. Logicians tell us that a single contradiction can
corrupt a set of statements and allows falsehoods to proliferate through it.
The dogma that human nature does not exist, in the face of evidence from
science and common sense that it does, is just such a corrupting influence.
Want an example?
In a
famous case study, an eight-month-old boy lost his penis in a botched
circumcision … His parents consulted the famous sex researcher John Money, who
had maintained that “Nature is a political strategy of those committed to
maintaining the status quo of sex differences.”
In other words, gender identity has no biological basis. It is entirely
a construction of our environment, built on the blank slate of the baby’s mind.
He
advised them to let the doctors castrate the baby and build him an artificial
vagina, and they raised him as a girl without telling him what had happened. …
A New York Times article from the era reported that Brenda (nee Bruce) “Has
been sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.” The facts were
suppressed until 1997, when it was revealed that from a young age Brenda felt
she was a boy trapped in a girl’s body and gender role. She ripped off frilly
dresses, rejected dolls in favor of guns, preferred to play with boys, and even
insisted on urinating standing up. At fourteen she was so miserable that she
decided either to live her life as a male or to end it, and her father finally
told her the truth. She underwent a new set of operations, assumed a male
identity, and today is happily married to a woman.
The fact that such edifices have been built upon the faulty foundation
of the blank slate should strike fear into our hearts. But for many of us, it
doesn’t. Because rejecting the blank slate means rejecting other artifices that
are even more dear to us.
Killing the Ghost in the Machine
I am not a dualist. I have been convinced for a number of years now
that I—if I exist at all—am a product of what my brain does, not an entity that
lives inside it. But most people, I know, disagree with me. To them, the Ghost
in the Machine is very real. Self-evidently so.
Francis
Crick wrote a book about the brain called The Astonishing Hypothesis, alluding
to the idea that all our thoughts and feelings, joys and aches, dreams and
wishes consist in the physiological activity of the brain. Jaded
neuroscientists, who take the idea for granted, snickered at the title, but
Crick was right: the hypothesis is astonishing to most people the first time
they stop to ponder it. Who cannot sympathize with the imprisoned Dmitri
Karamazov as he tries to make sense of what he has just learned from a visiting
academic?
“Imagine:
inside, in the nerves, in the head—that is, these nerves are there in the
brain…(damn them!) there are sort of little tails, the little tails of those
nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering…that is, you see, I look at
something with my eyes and then they begin quivering, those little tails…and
when they quiver, then an image appears…it doesn’t appear at once, but an
instant, a second, passes…and then something like a moment appears; that is,
not a moment—devil take the moment!—but an image; that is, an object, or an
action, damn it! That’s why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at
all because I’ve got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness. All
that is nonsense! Rakitin explained it all to me yesterday, brother, and it
simply bowled me over. It’s magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man’s
arising—that I understand…And yet I am sorry to lose God!”
Dostoevsky’s
prescience is itself astonishing, because in 1880 only the rudiments of neural
functioning were understood, and a reasonable person could have doubted that
all experience arises from quivering nerve tails. But no longer. One can say
that the information-processing activity of the brain causes the mind, or one
can say that it is the mind, but in either case the evidence is overwhelming
that every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events
in the tissues of the brain.
I’m not sure why, but this last paragraph really came as a revelation
to me. I don’t talk a lot about these beliefs, partly because I know most
people don’t agree with them and I’d prefer to avoid an argument, and it was
probably that mindset that always preserved a worthy opponent’s respect in my
mind for the dualist view. I didn’t agree with it, and it seemed illogical to
me, but I was willing to allow that it could be true. Lots of people, after
all, are smarter than I am, and perhaps they have evidence or a line of
reasoning I would find compelling if presented with it.
But I think I’m ready to drop my view that the opposing view deserves
respect as a viable alternative. People will continue to cling to dualism, and non-violent
people will always receive my respect, but I’m not sure I can any longer think
of this position as rational.
Mourning the Death
One of my favorite things is when the religious-minded react with
horror to the implications they see inherent in the material view of life. They
inevitably—and unconsciously—undermine their own worldview with the
“impossible” questions they reactively pose.
You most often see this in action with regard to evolution and its
implications for the authority of the Bible.
The
religious opposition to evolution is fueled by several moral fears. Most
obviously, the fact of evolution challenges the literal truth of the creation
story in the Bible and thus the authority that religion draws from it. As one
creationist minister put it, “If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why
should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation?”
To which the obvious answer is, “Yes, exactly.” If only they would
embrace the logical conclusion of the question they just asked. But sadly, they
more frequently retreat from it, and dismiss the truth they have just glimpsed.
The same is true with neuroscience.
By
exorcising the ghost in the machine, brain science is undermining two moral
doctrines that depend on it. One is that every person has a soul, which finds
value, exercises free will, and is responsible for its choices. If behavior is
controlled instead by circuits in the brain that follow the laws of chemistry,
choice and value would be myths and the possibility of moral responsibility
would evaporate. As the creationist advocate John West put it, “If human beings
(and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of the material existence,
then everything that gives meaning to human life—religion, morality, beauty—is revealed
to be without objective basis.”
Again. “Yes, exactly.”
This is actually a short primer on a major section of Pinker’s book, in
which he tackles four fears people have about the killing the ghost in the
machine, or writing on the blank slate. He calls them:
1. The Fear of Inequality: If people are innately different,
oppression and discrimination would be justified.
2. The Fear of Imperfectability: If people are innately immoral,
hopes to improve the human condition would be futile.
3. The Fear of Determinism: If people are products of biology,
free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for
their actions.
4. The Fear of Nihilism: If people are products of biology, life
would have no higher meaning and purpose.
I’m not going to dig deeply into each of them, but some do conjure up
some thoughts that are worth dealing with.
Genes Drive Our Behavior
Most people don’t think of this at all, and of those that do, most
probably don’t like thinking about it. The example from Pinker’s text is
related to the raising of stepchildren.
The
psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have documented that stepparents are
far more likely to abuse a child than are biological parents. The discovery was
by no means banal: many parenting experts insist that the abusive stepparent is
a myth originating in Cinderella stories and that parenting is a “role” that
anyone can take on. Daly and Wilson had originally examined the abuse
statistics to test a prediction from evolutionary psychology. Parental love is
selected over evolutionary time because it compels parents to protect and
nurture their children, who are likely to carry the genes giving rise to
parental love. In any species in which someone else’s offspring are likely to
enter the family circle, selection will favor a tendency to prefer one’s own,
because in the cold reckoning of natural selection and investment in the
unrelated children would go to waste. A parent’s patience will tend to run out
with stepchildren more quickly than with biological children, and in extreme
cases this can lead to abuse.
The implications can be frightening. You’re not choosing to love your
own child? A gene that has been bred into you over the millennia has given you
a preference for your child over others? And only because “in the cold
reckoning of natural selection,” the gene in question finds itself replicated
more frequently across your population? Is it any wonder that people fear and
reject the arguments derived from evolutionary psychology?
But wait. It gets worse.
Free Will?
The debate over whether or not we have free will is a difficult and
sometimes painful one. Like most everyone, it wasn’t a subject I even thought
about for most of my life—assuming that the fact of free will was as
self-evident as any of the other self-evident truths I saw around me. But as I
have read, listened and thought, I have come to realize that there actually is
a debatable question here. And, like most philosophical arguments, it really
depends on how we define our terms.
For Pinker, who does not believe we have free will, the experience of
choosing is not part of his definition.
The
experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It
is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior
according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the
senses, including the exhortation of other people. You cannot step outside it
or let it go on without you because it is you.
Speaking of philosophers, one of them could spend a lifetime teasing
all the meaning out of these words. For our purposes here, let’s focus solely
on the idea that you are the neural processes of your brain. Your brain doesn’t
have neural processes. That’s the wrong way to phrase it, because it creates a
separation between you and your brain. You are the neural processes of your
brain.
And when it comes to free will, the only real question is whether those
neural processes are “determined” or not (another philosophically loaded word
that is best defined in every usage). I get that the neural processes are
dependent on the biological, chemical and physical properties of the brain—but
that doesn’t mean that their outcome is necessarily determined by them. That’s
why it’s called “the process of choosing” instead of just “choosing.” There is
no chooser, just the process, but the process can result in non-determined
outcomes.
It’s much like what Pinker says about consciousness.
Consciousness
is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to
get the rare and unpredictable things we need.
In other words, we are not conscious. Again, that implies a separation
between us and our conscious state. We are consciousness—the manifestation of
the neural functioning of our brain. It works that way because, like all
evolutionary successes, it helps us survive and reproduce ourselves.
A Morality Play
One of
the deepest fears people have of a biological understanding of the mind is that
it would lead to moral nihilism. If we are not created by God for a higher
purpose, say the critics on the right, or if we are products of selfish genes,
say the critics on the left, then what would prevent us from becoming amoral
egoists who look out only for number one.
This one continues to flabbergast me. Look around. Are you trying to
tell me that human beings—regardless of their opinions about the source of
moral authority—are not amoral egoists? To my way of thinking, there are times when
individual humans transcend that position, and there are several individual and
societal benefits that come with that transcendence, but at our core and as a
species we are amoral egoists. Even believers—for whom altruism is leveraged as
a tool to get them into their heaven—have a hard time honestly defending that perspective
as anything other than amoral egoism.
But Pinker thinks differently, and he’s probably right. We do have an
innate sense of morality, and it can be seen manifesting itself in some strange
ways. Consider this story:
Julie and
Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer
vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the
beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making
love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie
was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be
safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They
keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each
other. What do you think about that; was it OK for them to make love?
This comes from psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has presented this
story to many people and tracked their reactions.
Most
immediately declare that what Julie and Mark did was wrong, and then they grope
for reasons why it was wrong. They mention the dangers of inbreeding, but they
are reminded that the siblings used two forms of contraception. They suggest
that Julie and Mark will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that
they were not. They venture that the act would offend the community, but then
they recall that it was kept secret. They submit that it might interfere with
future relationships, but they acknowledge that Julie and Mark agreed never to
do it again. Eventually many of the respondents admit, “I don’t know, I can’t
explain it, I just know it’s wrong.”
Haidt calls this “moral dumbfounding,” and it is a very curious
phenomenon indeed. Why do we perceive things that are factually not immoral as
immoral. Pinker tells us:
…private
acts among consenting adults that do not harm other sentient beings are not
immoral.
Which is as near a statement of fact as I’ve ever heard. So, what’s
going on here?
Out of Our Depths
It’s related, I believe, to a dynamic described in another section of
Pinker’s book that deals with his view that the way our brains inherently work
is increasingly at odds with the strange and modern world around us. He lists
ten cognitive faculties and core intuitions that evolution has bred into our
brains (destroying the myth of the blank slate in just proposing them, I
suppose). They are very simple things. For example, we all possess:
An
intuitive physics, which we use to keep track of how objects fall, bounce, and
bend. Its core intuition is the concept of the object, which occupies one
place, exists for a continuous span of time, and follows law of motion and
force. These are not Newton’s laws but something closer to the medieval
conception of impetus, an “oomph” that keeps an object in motion and gradually dissipates.
The list is comprehensive and defensible. An intuitive moral sense is
not listed among them, but the thing that gives us our intuitive moral
understanding is undoubtedly the same thing that gives us our other intuitive
understandings. In this domain, Pinker’s larger point is well summarized here:
These
ways of knowing and core intuitions are suitable for the lifestyle of small
groups of illiterate, stateless people who live off the land, survive by their
wits, and depend on what they can carry. Our ancestors left this lifestyle for
a settled existence only a few millennia ago, too recently for evolution to
have done much, if anything, to our brains. Conspicuous by their absence are
faculties suited to the stunning new understanding of the world wrought by
science and technology. For many domains of knowledge, the mind could not have
evolved dedicated machinery, the brain and genome show no hints of
specialization, and people show no spontaneous intuitive understanding either
in the crib or afterward. They include modern physics, cosmology, genetics,
evolution, neuroscience, embryology, economics, and mathematics.
It’s not
just that we have to go to school or read books to learn these subjects. It’s
that we have no mental tools to grasp them intuitively. We depend on analogies
that press an old mental faculty into service, or on jerry-built mental
contraptions that wire together bits and pieces of other faculties.
Understanding in these domains is likely to be uneven, shallow, and contaminated
by primitive intuitions.
I can’t stress enough how important this concept is—that we understand morality
and reality not as they are, but only through the constructions of our
aboriginal mind. It’s like an eclipse, that can’t be observed directly, but
only a pinhole camera. What we see is not morality or reality in their raw
sense, but only an approximation of both.
And it is this dynamic that often manifests itself as a series of
logical fallacies that we all succumb to in thus trying to make sense of our modern
world. There’s, for example, the naturalistic fallacy—the assumption that
everything natural is good and everything unnatural is bad—wonderfully
illustrated in the book through an examination of the hoopla surrounding
genetically modified foods.
Genetically
modified foods are no more dangerous that “natural” foods because they are not
fundamentally different from natural foods. Virtually every animal and
vegetable sold in a health-food store has been “genetically-modified” for
millennia by selective breeding and hybridization. The wild ancestor of carrots
was a thin, bitter white root; the ancestor of corn had an inch-long, easily
shattered cob with a few small, rock-hand kernels. Plants are Darwinian
creatures with no particular desire to be eaten, so they did not go out of
their way to be tasty, healthy, or easy for us to grow and harvest. On the
contrary: they did go out of their way to deter us from eating them, by
evolving irritants, toxins, and bitter-tasting compounds. So there is nothing
especially safe about natural foods. Their “natural” method of selective
breeding for pest resistance simply increases the concentration of the plant’s
own poisons; one variety of natural potato had to be withdrawn from the market
because it proved to be toxic to people. Similarly, natural flavors—defined by
one food scientist as “a flavor that’s been derived with an out-of-date
technology”—are often chemically indistinguishable from their artificial
counterparts, and when they are distinguishable, sometimes the natural flavor
is the more dangerous one. When “natural” almond flavor, benzaldehyde, is
derived from peach pits, it is accompanied by traces of cyanide; when it is
synthesized as an “artificial flavor,” it is not.
A blanket
fear of all artificial and genetically modified foods is patently irrational on
health grounds, and it could make food more expensive and hence less available
to the poor.
And there’s the physical fallacy—an economist’s term that refers to the
mistaken belief that an object had a true and constant value, as opposed to
being worth only what someone is willing to pay for it at a given place and
time.
The
belief that goods have a “just price” implies that it is avaricious to charge
anything higher, and the result had been mandatory pricing schemes in medieval
times, communist regimes, and many Third World countries. Such attempts to work
around the law of supply and demand have usually led to waste, shortages, and
black markets. Another consequence of the physical fallacy is the widespread
practice of outlawing interest, which comes from the intuition that it is
rapacious to demand additional money from someone who has paid back exactly
what he borrowed. Of course, the only reason people borrow at one time and
repay it later is that the money is worth more to them at the time they borrow
it than it will be at the time they repay it. So when regimes enact sweeping
usury laws, people who could put money to productive use cannot get it, and
everyone’s standards of living go down.
Just as
the value of something may change with time, which creates a niche for lenders
who move valuable things around in time, so it may change with space, which
creates a niche for middlemen who move valuable things around in space. A
banana is worth more to me in a store down the street than it is in a warehouse
a hundred miles away, so I am willing to pay more to the grocer than I would to
the importer—even though by “eliminating the middleman” I could pay less per
banana. For similar reasons, the importer is willing to charge the grocer less
than he would charge me.
And these fallacies can have dangerous consequences.
But
because lenders and middlemen do not cause tangible objects to come into being,
their contributions are difficult to grasp, and they are often thought of as
skimmers and parasites. A recurring event in human history is the outbreak of
ghettoization, confiscation, expulsion, and mob violence against middlemen,
often ethnic minorities who learned to specialize in the middleman niche. The
Jews in Europe are the most famous example, but the expatriate Chinese, the
Lebanese, the Armenians, and the Gujeratis and Chettyars of India have suffered
similar histories of persecution.
I have to admit, I never saw the persecution of Jews through this prism
before, but it connects the way Pinker explains it, and it makes me wonder how
much a human history can be explained by similar stories of people acting in
accordance with their evolved psychology rather than more educated ways of
thinking and understanding. Almost all of it, I would imagine. It forms an
interesting cautionary tale for anyone looking to introduce new ideas into the
world.
Political Evidence That the
Slate is Not Blank
Another large section of the book is devoted to politics, and the
observable fact that much of our political existence is actually premised on
the idea that human nature exists—that people are not born as entirely
malleable by the environment they are exposed to and the conditioning that they
receive.
As the
chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a
jaundiced theory of human nature in which “we” are eternally vulnerable to arrogance
and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were
explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect
humans.
Excellent point. What was it that Madison said? Ambition must be made
to counteract ambition? But let’s dig deeper.
A
nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material equality is
inherent to all political systems. The major political philosophies can be
defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right places
no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The
Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right
sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree
about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend that there is no
tradeoff. And that in turn means that any discovery of innate differences among
individuals is not forbidden knowledge to be suppressed but information that
might help us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner.
And, as a matter of fact, it is not just constitutional democracy that
assumes an innate human nature exists. Pinker points out that both Nazism and
Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity—something that wouldn’t be necessary
if an innate human nature did not exist. They also shared “a tyrannical
certainty in pursuit of this goal, with no patience for incremental reform or
adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policies.” This, in large
part, is what led to their atrocities.
As
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “Macbeth’s
self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago
was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of
Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no
ideology.”
Political ideology is a powerful thing—and those that seek to “reshape
humanity” have within them the seeds for wholesale slaughter of the humans they
seek to reform.
Tragic vs. Utopian?
Pinker’s chapter on politics spends a lot of time describing how our
usual classification of political philosophies—conservative and liberal—is
hopelessly muddy, the lines between the two ill-defined and their spheres of
concern often overlapping. He tries to establish another way of examining
political differences, and coins two new terms—the Tragic Vision and the
Utopian Vision—to elucidate the actual political differences that exist in
society, both referring to a unique vision of mankind and its capabilities.
In the
Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue,
and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. … In the Utopian
Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social
arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is
possible in a better world.
It’s an interesting dichotomy to explore, which Pinker does for several
more pages. And as he did I tried to follow along, expecting to find myself
squarely on one side or the other. In fact, I realized with some confusion that
some of my perspectives are Tragic, while others are Utopian. Too much like the
conservative/liberal axis, then, the tragic/utopian one is less useful as a
guiding political philosophy, and more so as another construction through which
to examine one’s various political opinions.
There are, however, more examples that support the Tragic Vision—that
humans have an inborn and limited nature—than the Utopian One—that all human
limitations come from the environment around them.
When law
enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old
scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias.
This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of
Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with a long tradition of
civility.
Pinker offers a personal anecdote that helps demonstrate this.
As a
young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a
true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that
if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our
competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969,
when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first back was
robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a
few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that
had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a
provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants,
and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six
banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been
set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million
dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to
call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive
empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as
a scientist).
It’s enough to make you reconsider any Utopian vision you might have.
Unless, of course, you choose to argue that the violence was direct result of
the inequitable social construction that overlaid Canadian society in the late
1960s. That’s what makes politics so frustrating. The political mind doesn’t
fashion philosophy from events. It weaves events into a pre-existing
philosophy. Don’t know if that’s Tragic or Utopian, but it certainly seems
true.
Modernity and Egalitarianism
Here’s another interesting idea, this one in reference to the growing
equality of the sexes.
Another
cause is the technological and economic progress that made it possible for
couples to have sex and raise children without a pitiless division of labor in
which a mother had to devote every waking moment to keeping the children alive.
Clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine lowered infant mortality and
reduced the desire for large broods of children. Baby bottles and pasteurized
cow’s milk, and then breast pumps and freezers, made it possible to feed babies
without their mothers being chained to them around the clock. Mass production
made it cheaper to buy things than to make then by hand, and plumbing,
electricity, and appliances reduced the domestic workload even more. The
increased value of brains over brawn in the economy, the extension of the human
lifespan (with the prospect of decades of life after childrearing), and the
affordability of extended education changed the values of women’s options in
life. Contraception, amniocentesis, ultrasound, and reproductive technologies
made it possible for women to defer childbearing to the optimal points in their
lives.
Modernity makes egalitarianism possible. Without our modern way of
life, there would be no egalitarianism. The implications may be unsettling to
our modern sensibilities, but can another conclusion honestly be reached?
Partners in a Human Relationship
In one of his last chapters, Pinker tackles the question of child
rearing, and demonstrates to good effect how the theory of The Blank Slate can
complicate if not poison that process. He cites a fair amount of evidence that
supports the idea that environment and a parent’s actions towards a
child—outside of actual neglect and abuse—have very little effect on the kind
of person a child is and the kind of adult they turn out to be. Much of this,
it seems, is encoded in our innate natures, not molded and shaped by our
external environment. Most people—especially parents—rebel at this idea, but at
the same time, how many of us know a pair of siblings, raised in the same house
by the same parents, who are as different as night and day?
To people who, when confronted with this evidence, say “I hope to God
this isn’t true. The thought that all this love that I’m pouring into my child
counts for nothing is too terrible to contemplate,” Pinker has some pointed
advice.
No one
ever asks, “So you’re saying it doesn’t matter how I treat my husband or wife?”
even though no one but a newlywed believes that one can change the personality
of one’s spouse. Husbands and wives are nice to each other (or should be) not
to pound the other’s personality into a desired shape but to build a deep and
satisfying relationship. Imagine being told that one cannot revamp the
personality of a husband or wife and replying, “The thought that all this love
I’m pouring into him (or her) counts for nothing is too terrible to
contemplate.” So it is with parents and children: one person’s behavior toward
another has consequences for the quality of the relationship between them. Over
the course of a lifetime the balance of power shifts, and children, complete
with memories of how they were treated, have a growing say in their dealings
with their parents. As [scholar Judith Rich] Harris puts it, “If you don’t
think the moral imperative is a good enough reason to be nice to your kid, try
this one: Be nice to your kid when he’s young so that he will be nice to you
when you’re old.” There are well-functioning adults who still shake with rage
when recounting the cruelties their parents inflicted on them as children.
There are others who moisten up in private moments when recalling a kindness or
sacrifice made for their happiness, perhaps one that the mother or father has
long forgotten. If for no other reason, parents should treat their children
well to allow them to grow up with such memories.
And then comes this paragraph, which I believe contains more seeds of
effective parenting than some entire books written on the subject.
I have
found what when people hear these explanations they lower their eyes and say,
somewhat embarrassedly, “Yes. I knew that.” The fact that people can forget
these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern
doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of
putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship. Even the theory
that children adapt to their peer group becomes less surprising when we think
of them as human beings like ourselves. “Peer group” is a patronizing term we
use in connection with children for what we call “friends and colleagues and
associates” when we talk about ourselves. We groan when children obsess over
wearing the right kind of cargo pants, but we would be just as mortified if a
very large person forced us to wear pink overalls to a corporate board meeting
or a polyester disco suit to an academic conference. “Being socialized by a
peer group” is another way of saying “living successfully within a society,”
which for a social organism means “living.” It is children, above all, who are
alleged to be blank slates, and that can make us forget they are people.
It’s a good note to end on. The Blank Slate, in addition to all its
other destructive consequences, makes people forget that other people are just
as human as they are.