At certain seasons of the year great turtles come in
from the sea to deposit their eggs on tropical beaches.
They return to the sea immediately, leaving their eggs to
hatch in due time from the heat of the sun. Eventually the
little turtles emerge from their shells, push up through the
warm sand, and head for the sea. There, guided by a sure
instinct and without any need for instruction or learning,
they take care of themselves, seeking food where it may be
found and avoiding the dangers which are everywhere.
Enough survive to maturity to maintain this species of turtle
in existence.
The ability of this species of turtle to survive depends
upon two factors: (1) so many eggs are hatched each year
that, even with heavy losses of the young, a sufficient
number
reach maturity; (2) these turtles are able to grow up
without learning or instruction because their nervous systems
are connected up and functioning as soon as they
emerge from their shells. The newly hatched turtle is not
so much an immature turtle as a small turtle. With the
exception of his reproductive instincts, a newly hatched
turtle is as fully equipped with a functioning muscular and
nervous system as is an adult turtle.
Living things that can care for themselves in this way and
for this reason are not unfamiliar. Insects do so and so too
do such animals as chicks and ducklings. But man is
constructed
on an entirely different plan. When a baby is born,
it is quite incapable of taking care of itself, and remains
relatively helpless for years. Indeed, it would seem that
twenty or more years are necessary before a human being
reaches maturity.
The helpless condition of the newborn human arises
from the fact that his neurological and muscular systems are
largely undeveloped and uncoordinated. His nervous system
in particular is like the telephone system of a great city in
which almost none of the connections from phone to phone
or from phone to switchboard are closed. Of course, this
comparison is by no means perfect, for the human nervous
system is much more complicated, much more adaptable,
and much faster than any telephone system. The human
brain alone, as a kind of central switchboard, has millions
of neural connections. Other millions are distributed
throughout the body.
The way in which these are connected
up, or even the fact that they come to be connected up at
all, depends on what happens to the child, how he is trained,
and how he grows. The things he is capable of becoming
originally we can speak of as his potentialities; the things
he does become, as the result of experience and training, we
can speak of as actualities. The sum of his potentialities
we call human nature, while the sum total of his actualities
we call human personality. It is quite clear that human
nature
(potential qualities) is very much wider than human
personality (actually developed qualities). Indeed, we might
assume that everyone, at birth (or even at conception) has
the potentiality for being aggressive or submissive, selfish or
generous, cowardly or brave, masculine or feminine,
pugnacious
or peaceful, violent or gentle, and so forth, and that
which of these potential qualities becomes actual (or to
what degree it does so) depends, very largely, on the way
in which each person is trained or on the experiences he
encounters as he grows up. The fact that there are
societies
or tribes in which almost everyone is aggressive (like the
Apaches) and that there are other closely related tribes in
which almost everyone is submissive (like the Zufii), and
the fact that infants, taken from one such tribe and reared
in the other, grow up to have in full measure the typical
characteristics of their adopted tribe would seem to indicate
both that all such people are potentially about the same at
conception and that their personalities are largely a
consequence
of the way in which they are reared. If this is so, it is
clear that the way in which people are brought up is very
important. This is, of course, evident from
the consideration
already mentioned; namely, that humans are helpless at
birth and must be cared for and trained during a period of
many years. The way in which they are cared for and trained
depends very largely on the personalities of the people
whom they encounter as they are growing up, but these
personalities again depend on the way in which these adults
were reared. Thus there appear in any
society certain patterns
of action, of belief, and of thought that are passed on
from generation to generation, always slightly different both
from generation to generation and from person to person in
any single generation, but possessing a recognizable
pattern.
This pattern depends not only on the way people are
trained to act, to feel, and to think but also on the more
concrete
manifestations of their social environment, such as
the kind of clothes they wear, the kind of shelters in which
they live, the kind of tools they have for making a living,
the
kind of food they eat and how they eat it, the kind of toys
they have to amuse themselves, as well as the kind of
weapons they have to defend themselves. All of these things,
patterns of action, feeling, and thought, as well as concrete
objects used in these activities, are known in the social
sciences as culture. This culture forms the environment in
which a child grows up as the natural environment surrounds
the baby turtle as it grows up in the sea. Man is
surrounded by natural environment, to be sure; but it is
much more remote from him than from the turtle, for, in
man's case, culture intervenes as a kind of insulation
between
him and his natural environment. In fact, the surrounding
environment of culture penetrates both into him
as a person and into his natural environment, changing
both. His neurological reactions in behavior, in feeling, and
in thought are largely determined by his cultural
environment,
and at the same time this cultural environment modifies
his natural environment by such activities as heating his
home, cooking his food, cutting down forests, draining
swamps, killing off animals, and generally modifying the
face of the earth.
We have said that the individual's reactions in behavior,
in feeling, and in thought (what we call his personality) are
largely determined by his cultural environment. At the same
time, his personality is part of the cultural environment of
those people whom he meets. And, as already said, only by
such relationships is his personality developed from his
human
nature. All this makes a human being so different from
a turtle that nothing very relevant to human behavior can
be learned from the study of turtle behavior. With the turtle
we are dealing with a twofold situation: the turtle and his
environment. With the human being we are
dealing with a
threefold situation: the human being surrounded by his
culture and both together surrounded by the natural
environment—
and by other cultures. Where a turtle
lays
dozens of eggs and hopes that some turtles from those eggs
can be carried to maturity by obedience to fairly rigid
instincts,
the human has almost no rigid instincts, and adapts
his personality to his culture. The culture in turn must
adapt
itself to the natural environment. Thus, if the natural
environment
changes, the turtle must change his nature, while
man merely changes his culture (and thus his personality).
But this beautifully flexible relationship requires such a
long period of training and learning during which human
nature becomes a human personality and the individual becomes
able to care for himself, that humans are dependent
upon their parents for many years. Accordingly, humans
have few offspring, and each offspring is very valuable,
since
the survival of the species does not depend (as with turtles)
on the more or less accidental survival of a very few out of
the many reproduced, but depends instead on the ability to
bring up almost all who were born and to train them so
that they can take care of themselves, have the intelligence
to modify their culture (including their personalities) when
it becomes necessary to adapt to the environment, and at the
same time develop the capacity to use the freedom to change
their behavior (which this whole situation assumes) in such
a way that it will be beneficial to themselves and to the
group
on which they depend for the continuation of their culture.
All this leads us to certain tentative assumptions about
human nature, about the nature of culture, and about the
nature of human society. In regard to human nature,
it
would seem that we have to
deal with two things:
(a) a wide range of
potentiality and (b) a drive to make these
potentialities actual...
http://www.archive.org/details/
Great post though i only read through half of it
