Who Wins: Nature Vs. Nurture
According to Slavoj Zizek, an ideal egalitarian society will provide her people with opportunities to flourish their full potential. I have a similar idea of a society where everyone lives their dreams by doing the things they are passionate about. But it is debatable whether only an egalitarian society can provide such opportunities, or achieving this utopia makes a society egalitarian by default.
However, I can say for sure which societies don’t let our potentials develop. Those are patriarchal feudal society; a patriarchal system derived from religious values, and a society where the concept ‘career’ and ‘equality’ are measured by economic criteria alone (please note ‘alone’). In such communities, talent perishes all the time. I have no intention to undermine the ability and importance of money here. Money can morph into anything. My point here is, the services bought with money define us better than the amount of money deposited in the bank. Crapload of savings only indicates our ability to consume a lot of things due to its purchasing power. With this, we may choose to buy either paintings or pistols. The sad thing is that as much as we worship the arbitrary idea of money, we often forget its purpose actualizes while interacting with humanity. We don’t consider the fact that is converting cash into something altruistic, artistically pleasing, or something meaningful changes its meaning entirely. In this age, we measure success or equality with a metric based on money. It goes without saying; many talent dies when this vacuous perception spreads like wildfire. Lately, the word “career” implies earning enough money as a means to get rid of your evil partner and live a hedonistic life at will, but not developing potentials. Nonetheless, no one sees it as a means of making a constant effort for self-actualization. If anyone presumes career only means limitless options to consume anything and everything, their thinking is not only shallow but toxic.
Some leftists and postmodernists do not take biological determinism seriously. I quite understand the reason behind their concern. A disgusting and vile idea like eugenics and many other racist and sexist views is often legitimized through various cherry-picked researches. So the concept is tagged as pseudoscience Though I’m afraid I have to disagree.
Note that these ill-intended views are debunked regularly. But the problem is that our media is not very honest and objective. It is a weapon to run propaganda. I don’t have a serious objection against propaganda. Propaganda is a soft power. I doubt the usefulness of killing countless people in the name of the War on Terror with drones and rifles. The use of soft tools should be encouraged to avoid spilling of blood. Chomsky has a good point -” Propaganda is to a democracy, What the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” It is indeed a weapon to control the crowd, but it is the most peaceful one we have. The media propaganda and the attempt to confirm our various biases have created a significant problem. The media feeds us particular pieces of information that benefits their agendas. Some inquisitive people curiously search for information, but the rest of us are dependent on the media’s spoon-feeding. Media corroborates unscrupulous biased research based on inaccurate data and statistics (like -research done with a tiny sample size). If swallowed right, our intrinsic seeds of racism, sexism, xenophobia, narrow-mindedness get their nutrition and turns into a big strong tree.
My intention behind blabbing so much was to reconcile between nature and nurture or heredity and environment. Let’s try to explain what our current epigenetics concept tells us — our genes limit our traits. But we have 30,000 genes in our genome. The total possible combination of alleles for those genes is approximately 60,368,441,664. Our various traits are revealed through the constant interaction of the environment with genes. Many of our traits are not revealed in our lifetime due to a lack of an appropriate environment. Many possibilities are destroyed in a hostile environment before they are expressed. Genes indeed limit us; yet that boundary is not as small as we assume; though not infinite but immense, the environment is the controller or driver. So we may not have any control over our heredity, but what we have some control over is the- environment. No scientific community has forbidden us to work with it.
Hypothetically speaking, it might be true that the IQ test result of the black people in the 19** is significantly lower than the whites. After a decade, black people’s IQ test result is still lower than that of whites, but not as considerably as before. It isn't very ethical for us to ignore the data on the increase in black people with high IQs. The increment by the decade indicates the effect of environmental change. This is our incentive to change the social environment. This is where nurture meets nature.
