Winston's Diary

First of all, I know I really need to get to blogging on the experience of being a lower middle class student in a Ph.D. program in English, finally starting the conversation with J.V.C. we talked about almost a month ago. That requires careful thought, though, and posting some quotations from a terribly written textbook doesn't.

So, without further adieu, here's "Environment Versus Heredity."

Leftists believe that human behavior is learned and can be changed by proper environmental incentives. Antisocial behavior is largely the result of poverty, prejudice, lack of education, and low social status rather than human nature or lack of character, as in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

Rightists believe that character is largely inborn and genetically inherited. Hence the emphasis of many right-wingers on lineage and the advantage of coming from "a good family," as in Late Spring and Late Autumn. In some Asian societies especially, ancestor worship is common.

First of all, Giannetti obviously knows nothing about cognitive and evolutionary psychology, and hasn't a clue really about the subjects he's decided he is somehow qualified to pontificate upon.

But beyond that, this passage reads like a parody of something a leftist would say (though this joker is apparently serious). And a stupid leftist at that, given that both positions are a gross oversimplification of what we might expect to hear from the left and the right on this issue. And the right is represented by the fascist point of view, as is so common in leftist accounts of what the right thinks.

Yet we can see that the position of the left offers hope. Everything can be fixed if we just adopt their view of human nature, and look upon human beings as blank canvases upon which to paint the picture we want to see.

Why does that sound so familiar? Oh, yeah. Mao said something almost exactly like that, didn't he? Well, that certainly worked out well.