ENVIRONMENT vs. PERSON

Before reaching Spain this year, I had to pass through New York in obligatory attendance of a family function. In so doing, I found myself chatting with the husband of a cousin, a likeable, intelligent fellow I’ll call Ben. Ben’s wife (my cousin) has spent the better part of her life in public education and, for reasons lost in the food, drink, and loud music pounding our brains into thoughts of Tylenol, the conversation turned to so called “charter schools” and other desperate solutions groping for a scholastic environment worthy of such a name. This led me to voice my negative opinion of such solutions, not seeing the value of a few special schools capable of serving a miniscule amount of public education’s constituency. The creation of an elite tier of public education seemed more a surrendering of the idea than an enhancement of it. “For me, Ben, the only proper course of action will always be to try and make public education work for as many students as possible. If it is not working as it should, it is more because millions of children are nurtured (neglected?) in social settings that neither prepare nor motivate them for an educational experience and less because the schools and educators are bad.”

Ben seemed neither convinced nor antagonized. He shrugged ambiguously and talked about the individual, how no two people are the same, that some are smarter than others, that equality does not exist, etc. and etc. He looked at me, awaiting a response. Now it was my turn to shrug. Ben continued, “look, Jerry, you see a baseball game on TV (Ben’s a Yankee fan) and it’s obvious each player has different levels of talent, right?”

Of course, I agreed. But baseball is a vehicle meant to easily quantify even the most minute differences of talent. You cannot take intellectual capacity and do the same thing. Its shades and nuances are much more subtle and much less easy to delineate. I then went on to explain how with the exception of a microscopic sampling of what we call “genius” at the top, and another minute sampling of what we call “retardation” at the bottom, the rest of us have very similar physical abilities to ingest the data around us and make sense of it. Yes, there are an abundance of differing personalities and temperaments, but intelligence —? Who and what we become in life is far more the result of how this intelligence is developed than the intelligence itself, which is fairly constant in all of us.

With the tsunami of family celebration overwhelming us, we decided to leave it at that. Without having intended to, we had entered into one of the most traditional debates in intellectual history, that being the juxtaposition of environmental influence and individual capacity with regard to the formation of a human being. Now comfortably burrowed into the leisure time of my annual Spanish vacation, and with the hindsight of more than a week’s time, I’ve come to the conclusion it is perhaps the most relevant debate of our times, one that creates the most surveyed borderline between right and left, conservative and liberal, reactionary and progressive — call it what you may. How one feels about this issue can form one’s outlook on just about every social issue there is.

Before moving to the pulp of this essay, let’s better define the warring sides in this debate.

If the esteemed reader is not one of the approximately 6 billion people (perhaps 7 by now) that have never read this material, you should know by now that its writer would fall to the left-liberal-progressive side of the intellectual divide. Such people give substantial amounts of weight to environmental factors in human formation. I’d call this an optimistic viewpoint, one that believes in the abilities of almost all people to succeed given the proper circumstances.

Quite naturally, the Newtonian reaction to this theory is found on the other side of this intellectual divide with the right-conservative-reactionary elements of humanity. They take a fatalistic view of the situation. They feel as if the fate of each individual is imprisoned within the capabilities of that person and trying to enhance or facilitate such capabilities through socio-political tampering is a waste of time. I’d call this a pessimistic viewpoint, one that finds little hope in rectifying mankind’s failures. Unfortunately, throughout history, this point of view has been used as a smokescreen to justify unjust social orders where too few have too much and (let’s get Newtonian again) too many have too little. It is a way to rationalize the squalid existence of so much of humanity, even in a country as rich as the United States.

Throughout the course of the educational experience I call my life, I’ve read many philosophical outbursts from some of the most eminent scholar-writers in history, decrying this idea of equality (the latest was the Basque icon, Pio Baroja). Like my cousin’s husband, they trumpet the fact that no two people are equal, we all have differing levels of intelligence and competence and trying to create an egalitarian society is incompatible with such a reality. This is an attack upon people of my persuasion and our “naïve” attempts to change the human condition.

My answer to that is “yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, I’ve heard it all before.” It is an unfair attack that does not accurately represent our point of view. Regardless of the social system in play, we understand that some will triumph, some will fail — and everything in between. What we aspire to is not a totally egalitarian society, but a society of equal opportunity. If some facsimile of such could ever come to pass, we feel confident, at the very least, that almost the totality of mankind has the intellectual capacity to provide a dignified form of existence for oneself — and here’s why.

In pondering the issues of this transcendental debate, it has become evident to me that not even the seemingly irrefutable facts of Ben’s baseball analogy can withstand the pressure of the environmental onslaught. It should never be forgotten that this ultimate expression of baseball talent seen on TV could not have reached fruition without the proper setting to learn in. Obviously, all these professional athletes have remarkable physical abilities that burst through the wall of average. But — if in their formative years they had not had access to adequate playing facilities, good youth programs, motivated coaches and adult supervision, a good high school program, well organized summer leagues, proper equipment and officiating, as well as any other accoutrements relevant to optimal athletic expression, their exceptional physical talents would be no more than flowering fruit blown from the tree before ripening. We will never know how many gifted athletes are now stocking shelves in a supermarket — or wallowing in confined places.

But even if we just talk about the rest of us “athletes”, the average Joes who watch their Zeus-like idols on TV and just play for fun (or whatever reasons we play for), the environmental protagonists can find solace in their point of view. I’ve watched the tennis players come and go for 35 years at the public courts where I learned to play. In almost every case, all those new to the game with a reasonable desire to learn and get better, eventually develop a palatable form of tennis acceptable for this kind of play. True, some are better than others, but, in the end, the motor skills exhibited are not that drastically variable. If we apply these motor skills to the physical necessities of everyday life, it becomes apparent there is virtually no human being that cannot function in an adequate way. We all walk well, run some, squat, lift, maneuver in crowds and generally stay out of each other’s way. All the motor skills necessary to properly negotiate our physical environment are more than acceptable in those of us without a rare disability.

All that said above can be applied to our intellectual capabilities as well. There is virtually no human being lacking the physiological ability to decipher data so as to perform adequately in our society. Personality, temperament, ambition, interests, specific talents, etc., might funnel us to different places and levels of triumph, but almost nobody, given the proper preparatory environment, lacks the intellectual ability to conform to society’s positive roles. If large samplings of our culture live in unattractive conditions beset with physical aggression, crime, illegitimacy, poor diet, substandard housing; if large samplings of our culture have wallowed in such conditions institutionally from generation to generation, we must look beyond intelligence for solutions because it is more the lack of its development than its absence that is causing this situation.

At this point I can just hear all the skeptics losing patience with this diatribe. “Oh, c’mon Jerry, most people get what they deserve, why do you have to make so many excuses for them?” I cannot totally discard such feelings. To our society’s credit, some degree of social mobility has been achieved and one could riddle these environmental observations with a dose of bullet hole exceptions. But we are not talking in terms of unanimity here. We are talking about possibilities, probabilities, laws of averages. If Queen Elizabeth had been taken from the palace as an infant (or even as a small child) and put in a housing project on the south side of Chicago or a wooden shack in the hills of eastern Kentucky, she’d probably end up a single mother or strutting it like Dolly Parton, regardless of her intelligence, which is similar to the rest of us. Her chances of living to the ripe old age her bloodline is known for would be seriously compromised.

It’s really not that complicated.

The people who would fight back on these assertions (the pessimists) fall into two general categories. The first group has been touched upon above and is easy to define: those with a vested interest in such thinking, that is, people of traditional privilege who will deny such environmental factors as a means to justify their privilege. The second group of environmental nay-sayers is a more ambiguous concept with foggy contours and vaguer or even subconscious motivations. These are the John Does of our society. In a culture as competitive as ours, insecurity is a logical bi-product. This insecurity leads the John Does to self congratulate themselves for having done better than others. “Well, at least I’m smarter than those people.” Not wanting to recognize the chains of environmental bondage is a way to prop up one’s own self esteem.

OK, I get it, I know, none of this is algebraically consistent. Sure, it’s obvious, people triumph from all sorts of backgrounds and environments. But to deny the basic relevance of such environmental postulations is to deny reality. It is simply — well — to deny.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I began writing essays in the early 90’s, the collection “Because You Never Asked” being a fractional but representative cross section of an output that is still in progress today. I restrict their content to anything that may be relevant since the dawn of time to the end of eternity. They’ve given me a kind of therapeutical way to voice my objections to the paradigm of our culture and the negativity it is leading us into. All cultures attempt to inculcate their constituents into someone’s narrow minded, self serving version of reality and this book is an attempt to translate these subterfuges into the truth. Although a number of my earliest essays are included in this collection, the vast majority of them are more contemporary. Regardless of their chronology, they should all still be pertinent to whatever is happening at this moment.

To order you copy of “Because You Never Asked” by Jerome Grapel click here.