Becoming Human
by
Charles Lamson
To do the experiment, they would need a pair of newborn identical twins. They would also need a large box in which one of the twins could live without contact with other humans. The box would have to deliver food and water, and remove waste, mechanically. The box would also have to be opaque and soundproof, so that there could be no interaction through its walls.
The experiment was simple: One child was raised normally, and the other was put in the box. After 18 years, they opened the box, and compared the two children to see if they were any different. If they were, they could conclude that being with other people matters. If both children were the same after 18 years, they had to conclude that socialization (learning from being with other people) makes little difference, and that personality is genetically programmed.
They might think, of course, socialization makes a difference. They did not need to raise a child in a box to prove that. But there were many people who argued that what a person becomes depends on his or her genes. If that is true, then it should not matter if a child is raised in a box. Genetic programming should turn the child into whatever h/she is destined to become, inside or outside the box.
It would be wrong, of course, to do the box experiment, since one baby would be denied`experiences that we value in our culture: intimacy, physical affection, and mental stimulation. We value these things precisely because we know how crucial they are to creating decent human beings. Merely imagining the box experiment shocks us into remembering this.
But not everyone is mindful of how social life makes us human. One time after a discussion about how children are taught to be girls and boys, a male student said, "My mom taught me to sew and cook, and my dad taught me to hunt and fish. My sister learned to do all these things too." His point was not clear. So the teacher asked, "Are you stating that you were biologically wired to become the man you are, regardless of what your parents taught you?" He said, yes, that is what he was getting at.
At the next class meeting, the teacher told this student about his twin brother, Fester, who had been sold to unscrupulous experimenters right after birth. "He lived the first 18 years of his life in a box," the teacher said, "and when the box was opened, it was a sad sight. Fester cowered like a helpless and terrified animal, unable to speak or reason. You did not know the comparisons that were made between you and him, because they were done secretly by video. The judgments were made by a team of scientists who reviewed the tapes and determined that -" at which point another student chimed in, "There were no differences!" Even poor Fester's brother laughed.
The joke made the point that it is absurd to think that anyone could just turn out to be a well functioning adult; if that were so, parents could save themselves a great deal of trouble by raising their children in boxes.
In real life, the nature-verses-nurture debate is unresolvable. Every person develops as s/he does, because some potentials are nurture, while others are not. Without social life, no potentials would be developed; a different social life would develop different potentials, and if the potentials are not there, nothing can develop them. So there is really no separating the contributions of nature and nurture to making us what we are. Everyone is a result of the interaction between those two influences.
To be sociologically mindful of how we become human, we need only presume this: Everyone has more potential than will be realized. This means that what we become as individuals - the abilities, desires, and habits that make us who we are - is just the realization of one set of possibilities. We cannot really know what all our potentials are; we can only know late in life which ones have been realized. What we can know, or at least be mindful of, is how social life turns us into certain kinds of people.
To see this, we must be mindful of our interdependencies, but there is more to it if we must also pay attention to how society is organized, where we fit into it, and how our place in it gives rise to experiences that make us what we are. The "socialness" includes all that makes us more than animals: the workings of our minds, the possession of self-consciousness, our desires, and our hopes and our feelings about ourselves. All of these things about us, these qualities that make us human, arise out of social life.
Not everyone wants to know how this happens. Some people, like Fester's brother, resist being sociologically mindful of how we become human. Why? Perhaps we are taught in American culture that our worth depends on being unique individuals - while being mindful of how we are shaped by
social life, makes us seem less special. Since a lot of other people have been shaped in similar ways, to reflect on this fact, may make us feel like undistinguished members of the common horde.
Are we just like others? In some ways yes. We have had similar experiences, hold similar attitudes, values, and beliefs, and do similar things. This is what we would expect when people grow up in the same culture. In some ways, we are slightly different from others - not a lot different, just a little. And in still other ways we may be unique. No one else has been shaped in exactly the way we have, and no one else lives inside our skins.
It is the case then, that we are both one of a kind, and of a kind. We are both different from, and the same as others. Often in U.S.cultures, we exaggerate our differences, and fail to be mindful of what we have in common with others.
An old Chinese proverb says, "The first step to becoming an individual, is to recognize that you are not one." This means that as long as we cling to an illusion of individuality - without examining how we are like and unlike others - we will fail to become all that we could become as individuals. It is as if the illusion of being unique is so satisfying, that it stops us from doing the kind of thinking that helps us grow as people. The proverb also reminds us that our similarities with others are essential to being human.
The point of being mindful of these matters is not to strive toward individuality as if that were the highest goal of a human life. The point is to be mindful of how we make ourselves and others human, as a step toward doing it with more wisdom and compassion. Being sociologically mindful is a way to see how what we become as people, depends on the nature of our ties to others. We can thus see perhaps how we can do things together, in ways that make human beings more able, and willing, to create good lives for themselves and for others.
*THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, MICHAEL SCHWALBE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, PGS. 62-65*
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