nature or nurture?
"Culture is not your friend." - Terrence McKenna
All my life, in science classes and books, I’ve read the question, “are things the way they are due to nature or nurture?”
All my life I’ve known, it is nurture.
To be precise, it is mostly nurture, with a little nature mixed in. On planet earth, nothing is ever all one thing or another, it’s always a mix.
And, since nature is the one, that, by definition, is out of our purview; attributing too much to nature has always seemed like a cop-out to me.
Over the weekend we were with a lot of old friends at a very happy wedding. One of them told us how they adopted a rescue beagle and already had a labrador. When we asked if the beagle howled, they said, “actually, surprisingly, no.”
They were expecting howls from said beagle, but instead, it learned to bark in the same way as his new best friend the labrador, and hardly ever howls.
It is in a beagle’s nature to “howl” (although we could argue that breeding is a form of nurturance), but he was nurtured into a labrador’s short, protective bark.
His natural ability to howl hasn’t been unlocked the way it would have been had he been adopted into a family of beagles.
The howling would be incessant.
Have you ever met an evil baby?
I haven’t.
I’ve met babies that were hungry, tired or needed to be changed, fed, held or soothed; essentially, nurtured.
I’ve never met a baby with a vendetta.
I’ve never met a baby who would cancel USAID.
No matter the “innate” nature of the baby, there would have to be a real dearth of nurturing for it to grow up and do a thing like that - to other babies.
Imagine two apples, the same type, maybe even from the same tree.
Their apple nature is evident. They have a lot of similarities.
Now imagine I take one apple and I smash it with a bat, or a hammer.
And the other apple I wash and shine up with a soft cloth.
What affects the state of the apples the most in this moment? That they both started as apples? Or does their current state have something to do with the hammer?
I hypothesize we as a collective are in a nurturing* shortage.
Our culture has not been nurturing.
The history we are living through is like a hammer.
Those of us who are able to nurture have had our thumb in the dam since 2020.
What happens to our nature when we are not nurtured properly? What happens to our nature when it gets smashed by a hammer?…
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