We’re born with certain physical characteristics, some good and some bad, some allowing us to excel and some limiting our possible accomplishments. Modern psychologists have shown that the physician Galen was largely right in his general principles which he taught nearly 2,000 years ago. We are born with relatively well-defined temperaments and with other relatively well-defined personal traits. Freedom for a creature is built upon a foundation of more or less well-defined traits. Movements which can be truly labeled `creative’ are possible when a human being begins to respond to Creation, more firmly shaping his own (species) nature and his own particular traits, and thinking and feeling and acting in ways which lie in the sometimes large set of what’s appropriate for a human being of his particular sorts of traits who lives in a specific context.
We now know that there are only so many resources available to the developing brain and a young man developing high-levels of skills in mathematics might be short of resources for developing the brain regions associated with social skills. We’re not born as potential all-purpose supermen and superwomen. Nor are we born as well-shaped moral persons. Someone with the hormonal flows usually associated with timidity and shyness may well develop behaviors and attitudes which allow her to rule the roost and maybe the entire barnyard. Much of which is good for building on strengths and shoring up weaknesses comes from the wise guidance of adults trying to respond to the needs of the youth under their care in light of what is possible within and necessary for their human communities.
What does it mean to be different? Let me speak about the differences between human beings and members of other species. We share an immense amount of DNA with other species. Very roughly speaking, we share 95% of our DNA with chimpanzees. This should be taken as very rough because DNA is part of a very complex organism embedded in a family line which changes over time. It’s not even clear how much of the DNA of humans or other species is active or even potentially functional; much is broken inheritance from ancient ancestors or of ambiguous status for unknown reasons. Much allows for multiple possibilities depending upon environmental signals or regulation by other genes acting for various reasons. Other facts enter into any measurement of our differences, as human beings relative to chimpanzees and also as individuals relative to other human beings. Yet, we can gain some insights by a simple consideration of that genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees. If we claim, just as a starting point, that we are `95% the same as chimpanzees’, then it becomes obvious the other 5% is—to say the least—rather important.
Turning to comparisons of human beings from different ethnic or regional groups: the genetic differences might be small between desert-dwellers, descended from those selected Darwinistically as being capable of surviving in the desert, and mountain-dwelling Nordic peoples, descended from those selected for different survival characteristics, but those small differences might well be important in themselves and they can also produce large differences over the course of a lifetime. Small differences acting over a long time are important—this is, in fact, one of the basic principles of evolutionary theory and of the theories of many geological processes.
Do we think culture is unshaped by environment? Do we think Inuits and Hawaiians and Bedouins and Pashtuns developed cultures so well adapted to their environments only as a holding strategy while waiting for the British to bring them the factory system and Americans to bring them television? Do we think these peoples hold on to as much of their cultures as they can out of a misguided sense of nostalgia, an effort to get on a National Geographic documentary, or an obstinate refusal to become as good as an American from the (once?) booming suburbs of Atlanta, which refusal is perhaps motivated by a hatred of our freedoms and our goodness?
Once upon a time, Americans—at least many—were like Emma, the protagonist of the Jane Austen novel of that same name. She was good-hearted and dedicated to the propositions that she knew how everyone should live their lives and that those good lives she could envision were mostly similar to how she would have lived their lives under the unlikely assumption that she would still be the same as Emma, the daughter of a modestly prosperous country squire, even if she had been raised in a farming family to have the skills and desires of a wife and mother of a similar such family. But Emma had good reasons to be fooled. She was a teenager and had observed that the young women from different circumstances than hers were still mostly like her. The more subtle, but often important differences, can sometimes be seen only by a mature eye. It was those smaller differences which made all the difference in that admittedly small region of English countryside, but a young woman with well-developed love for others and confidence in her immature insight could be excused for ignoring those small but very important differences. Americans are no longer like the Emma of the Austen novel. We have become as Emma would have been if she hadn’t learned her lesson and had grown into self-righteous and perversely adolescent woman.
It’s not likely that someone born into a desert town or a jungle village will even see the world the same way as someone born in a river valley town in New England. Moreover, someone born in Montana and accustomed to vast expanses of plains rising to high mountains won’t see the world the same way as that New Englander. Richard Gregory has written of anecdotal evidence that the Zulus when they first emerged from their region of roundish huts set in rolling valleys were not subject to being fooled by those optical illusions where most human beings will wrongly see cleverly presented parallel lines as converging. Decades ago some scientists showed that kittens which didn’t see vertical lines when they were growing up wouldn’t be able to see poles when they were adults. And so they observed cats walking right into poles, multiple times, incapable in their maturity of learning how to see vertical lines.
Desert-dwellers almost certainly see the world differently from those who grew up in New England river valleys as I did. How about those who grew up in the bayous of Louisiana or the wheat-fields of South Dakota? Do the sea-coast dwellers of Great Yarmouth see the world differently from those who grew up near the beaches of Tahiti?
Are a given people musical, do they have rhythmical speech, because of inborn tendencies, or have they been shaped by generations of cultural formation beginning with the accident of a highly rhythmical and musical founder of their community? Or do initial accidents of culture and individual peculiarities enter into future Darwinian selective processes in a strong and interactive way?
Do a given people literally have thick skin from growing up in a hot and dry land? Are they accustomed to sleeping on whatever ground is available and doing with little in the way of blankets when the night air grows frigid? Do you think this might affect their thoughts and feelings and behaviors? Do you think this harsh environment might have a major effect on who survives and upon who prospers the most amongst survivors?
All of this can be addressed from a different angle, as I did in an essay I posted more than three years ago: The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding.
The details of [King Phillip’s War] aren’t at issue here except for a general background understanding. My interest lies in an important stream of thoughts and attitudes of New England European colonists which showed itself during the period of King Phillip’s War, a stream which I think to represent a failed intellectual maturing process on the part of highly educated and intelligent men in confrontation with alien cultures. Instead of moving towards a proper abstraction that would have allowed a defense of their own culture but also an understanding of the human good in a different way of life, the European settlers raised their particular way of life to a self-righteous ideal. A conflict of cultures was seen as a war between God’s servants, the White settlers, and Satan’s slaves, the Indians. This stream, which may have been nascent in Puritan thought from the time they first stepped into that wilderness region of the New World, developed fully during the lead-up to the war as the Puritan leaders dealt with the growing resistance of the Indians to the expansion of settled ways of life.
A tolerance which is really masking a bigoted self-righteousness can lead to hatred and war, including genocidal war. At the very least, we will be disappointed if we expect the other to respond joyfully to our offer to help them become more like us. They will likely show at least confusion but may flame up with hatred which we’ll misunderstand. They will probably harden their hearts even against good or necessary changes made obvious by their conflicts with us or by more peaceful interactions.
There’s also a lesson to be learned about how to go about the human task of exploring God’s Creation and coming to understand it. We are limited and prone to various sorts of mistakes even in our seemingly raw perceptions of our immediate environments. It doesn’t matter in the end. It’s simply another aspect of Creation to be studied and understood by the proper workers, physiologists and neuroscientists and instrument-designers and others. Those trying to understand at a more abstract level, theoretical physicists and philosophers and theologians and political theorists, should study the work of those scientists of perceptual organs and the brain, but should then go on with confidence that we can compensate for our limitations and defects when necessary. We can understand created being, Creation as a whole, if only in principle.