Wheels Within Wheels of Karma

In an interesting article that asks the whosical question Are You the Same Person You Use Used to Be? -- I know I’m not -- the author analogizes personality and environment to a machine that creates another machine: our inborn temperament is like

“a machine that designs another machine, which goes on to influence development.” This second machine is a person’s social environment (https://archive.ph/QByV1).

For example, 

Someone who moves against the world will push others away, and he’ll tend to interpret the actions of even well-meaning others as pushing back; this negative social feedback will deepen his oppositional stance. Meanwhile, he’ll engage in what psychologists call “niche picking” -- the favoring of social situations that reinforce one’s disposition.

Thus, over a lifetime, the machine of temperament can make choices that fashion an environmental machine that mirrors and reinforces it. 

Which can be a good or bad thing, depending upon any number of variables. For example, an extremely introverted and socially anxious person might fashion an environment in which she is totally isolated from others. On the one hand, her anxiety won’t be triggered, but her world will be so constrained as to forestall interpersonal growth.  

Well, that’s her problem, and I’m retired anyway. I’m more interested in how this works on the macro scale, with “human nature” at one end, “culture” at the other. 

If there is such a thing as human nature, then obviously we want a culture that doesn’t necessarily mirror it per se — since our nature is by no means “all good” — but which helps to actualize what is good (and truthful and beautiful) and suppress or sublimate what’s bad.

Straight away you’ll notice a problem, since a -- or I suppose the -- fundamental principle of the left is that there is no such thing as human nature, which is precisely what authorizes our utopian statist masters to force their utopian statism upon us. If we have a nature -- oh, for example, if we are conceived male or female -- then you can’t bloody well pretend the one can be the other.

In fact, the whole antihuman equity agenda is predicated on the fallacy that outcomes *should* be equal because people are identical, and it is only an unjust environment that creates inequality, e.g., White Privilege, the Patriarchy, Heteronormativity, etc.

The first question is how that “should” got in, since the denial of human nature should be the end of shoulds. In other words, material nature knows no Ought, only a blind and ruthless Is. Any Ought is a covert appeal to human nature — of how things oughtta be.

I’m not sure how far back this philosophical debate goes, but I’ll bet it appears in some form or fashion from the git-go. American-style classical liberalism was influenced by Locke’s theory that the mind is a “blank slate” at birth, which would be nice if true, but then again, not nice at all, because it would mean that any personal identity would be a function of the environmental machine; you could be anything you want, except for you.

Now, I myself once dabbled in the Bobula rasa. Indeed, my whole training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy was predicated on it. According to Prof. Wiki,

Tabula rasa also features in Freud's psychoanalysis…. Freud's theories imply that humans lack free will, but also that genetic influences on human personality are minimal. In Freudian psychoanalysis, one is largely determined by one's upbringing.

Does this mean my graduate training was a complete waste of time? Yes. And no, in that you have to start somewhere. If I had ended there, then yes, it would have been a total waste.

But now we know a great deal more about the genetic aspects of personality development -- which is not to say the environment isn’t a factor, only that it is much less of a factor than we had supposed.

(By the way, Prof. Wiki’s article confirms that this debate goes back to the beginning, in that "the concept of tabula rasa can be traced back to the writings of Aristotle.” )

I guess I just missed the genetic boat, in that I graduated in 1988, and the Big Five personality traits didn’t become a Thing until the ‘90s. 

In any event, it turns out science has identified five traits in particular -- openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism -- with heritability of 57%, 49%, 42%, 54%, and 48%, respectively. 

This still leaves a lot of room for environmental influence, but this influence will nevertheless cut across the grainium, especially in this or that particular person, in whom the heritability may be much higher.

But this leaves out the most consequential factor of all, which is to say, intelligence, which is certainly no less than 50% heritable, some researchers say as high as 85%. This itself provides the most devastating critique of leftism there could be, for which reason it is forbidden to notice.

For example, let’s say your progressive philosophy of tabula rasa dictates that everyone is good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, likable enough to succeed at anything, starting with college.

This idea is not even stupid, it’s delusional. Nevertheless… 

I won’t even bother to outline the many catastrophes that result from this delusion, but just one of them is our having to financially bail out people who were too stupid to be in college, but too stupid to know they were too stupid to be there. Certainly I've known my fair share of idiots with PhDs, so education is not only no cure for stupidity, but an aggravant. Two words: Jill. Biden. 

At the other end, academia works feverishly to assure that it is so stupid that even the most stupid can succeed there. They're almost there, but not quite, because there are actually people dumber than Jill Biden. 

I get it. I’m taxing your patience again. To be continued...