Submitted by paul (not verified) on Wed, 2006-08-09 23:25.
When I think of the phrase (and question of) "nature or nurture," it makes me think that a person's experiences - their capacity to be influenced, and changed and all things intrinsic. Nurture seems to include a whole lot of reinforcing and developmental things – from spanking to your first kiss to a protest – that connect a person to the people around him/her. Obviously nurture goes far beyond our adulthood – posttraumatic stress syndrome can radically change a person’s life – but nurture to me implies the hope that experience, both of suffering and mercy imbues us with the compassion we need and seek from each other.
Often "nature" represents everything immutable and universal about a person, and often the first things that come to mind are often the ugliest, and the ones that most people are afraid of - hunger, lust, aggression, the capacity to create and sustain inequity and cruelty. Nature sometimes refers to seeing the socioeconomic forest for the biological trees - Tarzan putting on a suit is a reflection of a rigid class-based society, which one makes sense out of qualities that seem inherent in all people. "It makes sense that some people would live off the expense of others – everyone is capable of that baseness."
I see it this way because nature or nurture seems to me to be reflective of a struggle over how people tend to be - between enlightened civility and blind destruction. People talk about the “thin veneer of society� so often, and films like Taxi Driver and Fight Club try to illustrate it. Religion often discusses nature as something to be feared or overcome, from the idea of Original Sin to the Buddhist association between humanity, desire and suffering. Darwin and the survival of the fittest seemed only to confirm that fear. Without human nature, how else does one explain the horrors that still exist on another continent, or a few blocks away?
But the distinction can be blurred in so many ways. Raised by wolves long enough to affect the speech areas of his brain, Pascal couldn’t learn how to talk BUT he did learn to express concern and sympathy for the maid who helped tend to him. Often, you read about the middle class individual who wreaks havoc on the people around him/her, but there are just as many people who lift themselves out of the worst of circumstances thanks in part to caring individuals.
The future - climate change, peak oil, international strife, disease, death from above (the asteroid kind, not the awesome-band-that-broke-up-kind) and the occasional sandwich board of doom is, well, scary. Many people who look to the future fear a return to “nature.� I am too. But it is interesting to note that Darwin never coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest� and in fact expressed admiration for the ability of humans to rise above selfish needs and care for one another.
We have an amazing ability to sympathize, empathize, educate and learn. It is our greatest strength. It's in our nature to nurture.
(I know this is so long! I’m sorry, I hope it doesn’t come off as pompous. I also don't know what the film Emily mentioned is, but I'd like to see it someday.)
When I think of the phrase...
When I think of the phrase (and question of) "nature or nurture," it makes me think that a person's experiences - their capacity to be influenced, and changed and all things intrinsic. Nurture seems to include a whole lot of reinforcing and developmental things – from spanking to your first kiss to a protest – that connect a person to the people around him/her. Obviously nurture goes far beyond our adulthood – posttraumatic stress syndrome can radically change a person’s life – but nurture to me implies the hope that experience, both of suffering and mercy imbues us with the compassion we need and seek from each other.
Often "nature" represents everything immutable and universal about a person, and often the first things that come to mind are often the ugliest, and the ones that most people are afraid of - hunger, lust, aggression, the capacity to create and sustain inequity and cruelty. Nature sometimes refers to seeing the socioeconomic forest for the biological trees - Tarzan putting on a suit is a reflection of a rigid class-based society, which one makes sense out of qualities that seem inherent in all people. "It makes sense that some people would live off the expense of others – everyone is capable of that baseness."
I see it this way because nature or nurture seems to me to be reflective of a struggle over how people tend to be - between enlightened civility and blind destruction. People talk about the “thin veneer of society� so often, and films like Taxi Driver and Fight Club try to illustrate it. Religion often discusses nature as something to be feared or overcome, from the idea of Original Sin to the Buddhist association between humanity, desire and suffering. Darwin and the survival of the fittest seemed only to confirm that fear. Without human nature, how else does one explain the horrors that still exist on another continent, or a few blocks away?
But the distinction can be blurred in so many ways. Raised by wolves long enough to affect the speech areas of his brain, Pascal couldn’t learn how to talk BUT he did learn to express concern and sympathy for the maid who helped tend to him. Often, you read about the middle class individual who wreaks havoc on the people around him/her, but there are just as many people who lift themselves out of the worst of circumstances thanks in part to caring individuals.
The future - climate change, peak oil, international strife, disease, death from above (the asteroid kind, not the awesome-band-that-broke-up-kind) and the occasional sandwich board of doom is, well, scary. Many people who look to the future fear a return to “nature.� I am too. But it is interesting to note that Darwin never coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest� and in fact expressed admiration for the ability of humans to rise above selfish needs and care for one another.
We have an amazing ability to sympathize, empathize, educate and learn. It is our greatest strength. It's in our nature to nurture.
(I know this is so long! I’m sorry, I hope it doesn’t come off as pompous. I also don't know what the film Emily mentioned is, but I'd like to see it someday.)