When it comes to freewill and choices, we have all heard the usual Nature versus Nurture debate. After working in the mental health field for a quarter of a century, I concede, many of our choices are governed by how we were raised and what we’ve experienced. But at the same time, even though I was raised by a feminist activist, I’m still often thinking… boobies!
It might be easy to jump into your favorite side of this debate and dig in, and don’t get me started on predeterminism, but I’d like to toss a third factor into this discussion. This third concept is Choice.
Let me back up a little first. Since I began the process of moving into what I hope will be the last place I will ever live, I’ve been binge reading two Jonathan Maberry series. First, during the fall, it was his Pine Deep novels, and since then I’ve been sprinting through the Joe Ledger series.
Then, when I’m in the middle of my 6th Joe Ledger novel, I find out JM is going to be in Tucson for the big University of Arizona Book Festival. Waking early on a Sunday, I head to the U to hear him speak on writing and designing villains. While speaking on how to develop an adversary for your protagonist, he mentioned he didn’t believe in nature and nurture as much as choice.
He explained one of his personal reasons why he thought this was true. When Maberry was young his father was abusive and beat him and his sisters. When he grew older, Maberry once asked his father why he’d been so horrible to them and his father had brushed it off by saying, “That was just how he was raised.” Maberry took this in and realized he had been raised the same way his father was, but had chosen not to be abusive, so in the end it remained his choice to follow this destructive legacy or break the dysfunctional mold.
In his eyes, nature didn’t make him an abuser and even though nurture could have, he still had a choice of how he would lead his own life and he walked his own path, which included never being physically abusive to anyone he cared about.
Of course this is just one man’s story, but I believe it shines light on an important point. If we had chosen to let nurture guide our hands what would the world look like now? Would we still be living in the dark ages, with people owning slaves, and women not being allowed to vote?
I think the speed with which our culture is changing has thrown the nurture argument under the electric bus. If humans never moved beyond what we’re taught, we would’ve never progressed to where we are now. People need to break away from how they might have experienced life to culturally and socially evolve.
Examples of mindsets we would all still possess if only Nurture controlled our Ethics:
- Slavery is acceptable
- Women are inferior
- Children should be abused
- The poor should be forced to die in wars against their will
- No room for social and economic advancement
- The poor can be ignored and used
- Might always makes right
- We need to worship various myths and believe unseen deities control our lives
I think we will find Nature is not much better. If we never evolved and made choices to improve ourselves and rise above our animal needs, we would see a world much different, and I doubt we would have advanced far enough to be able to engage in something as ancient as learning to herd animals.
Examples of mindsets and behaviors we would still retain if we let nature rule us:
- Indiscriminate mating
- Alpha male mating control
- Food hording
- Cross-male infanticide
- No true language
- No written language
- No attempts at morals
- No exploration
- Slow/no innovations
Both lists could certainly go on, but I think you can see my point. In the debate between Nature and Nurture many fail to see our species and culture would have remained unable to advance if these were the only avenues we relied upon. Either we would have stayed in a prehuman evolutionary state, or we would be mired in our cruelest incarnations.
Over time it has been the forces of empathy leading to men and women making different choices than their forbearers which allowed us to advance beyond our more primitive animal state and our often barbaric and violent uncaring natures. Nature and Nurture may still influence, and at times control us, but as our species continues to advance and become more caring and free, it is the ability to make the right choices to socially evolve which will guide us to a better future and give us a chance to help all life survive on this overcrowded world we call home.
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WildernessPunk 