Nurture Vs Nature Essay

[Ezilda Newnam]

GloriaSteinem is a journalist and social activist in the feminist, peace and civil rights movements. A fellowship to India in the late 1950s inspired her to fight for the rights of women and the poor. Steinem founded Ms. Magazine in 1972, and is the author of four books.

I didn't go to school until I was 12 or so. My parents thought that traveling in a house trailer was as enlightening as sitting in a classroom, so I escaped being taught some of the typical lessons of my generation: for instance, that this country was "discovered" when the first white man set foot on it, that boys and girls were practically different species, that Europe deserved more textbook space than Africa and Asia combined.

Instead, I grew up seeing with my own eyes, following my curiosity, falling in love with books, and growing up mostly around grown-ups -- which, except for the books, was the way kids were raised for most of human history.

Needless to say, school hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn't prepared for gender obsessions, race and class complexities, or the new-to-me idea that war and male leadership were part of human nature. Soon, I gave in and became an adolescent hoping for approval and trying to conform. It was a stage that lasted through college.

I owe the beginnings of re-birth to living in India for a couple of years where I fell in with a group of Gandhians, and then I came to the Kennedys, the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.

But most women, me included, stayed in our traditional places until we began to gather, listen to each other's stories and learn from shared experience. Soon, a national and international feminist movement was challenging the idea that what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural -- that the first could be changed but the second could not.

I had the feeling of coming home, of awakening from an inauthentic life. It wasn't as if I thought my self-authority was more important than external authority, but it wasn't less important either. We are both communal and uniquely ourselves, not either-or.

Since then, I've spent decades listening to kids before and after social roles hit. Faced with some inequality, the younger ones say, "It's not fair!" It's as if there were some primordial expectation of empathy and cooperation that helps the species survive. But by the time kids are teenagers, social pressures have either nourished or starved this expectation. I suspect that their natural cry for fairness -- or any whisper of it that survives -- is the root from which social justice movements grow.

So I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe that a unique core self is born into every human being -- the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

The truth is, we've been seduced into asking the wrong question by those who hope that the social order they want is inborn, or those who hope they can write the one they want on our uniquely long human childhoods.

But the real answer is a balance between nature and nurture. What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them? Or what would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence?

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This is one of a few essays that are neither on tech nor on Startup(Bharat). But this is one aspect of life that I would like to improve. I have found myself and others making these subconscious mistakes. But starting I would like to point fingers at myself, first. And I wish with time - we as a society stop making these subconscious mistakes!

Before I summarise all three books. I would like to start this essay with a story. This is a 200% true story, and the incident of this story left me thinking - about how many mistakes I might have committed in the past subconsciously.

It was the day of my sister's wedding anniversary. Frankly, I was formally not invited - but still found myself in the middle of the small party. Of course, everyone was surprised, but I was greeted warmly by the rest of the attendees. I walked straight to my brother-in-law, shook hands, and wished him a Happy Wedding anniversary. Adjacent to him, my sister standing - we hugged each other. And I walk around the table to sit in front, feeling happy.

On the fundamental level - this universe is following the same evolution. Everything that you are seeing around you is built with a few fundamental components. And combination and recombination of these fundamental components create all these facades around us. :) And I am being super serious - let me explain this in the most-possible simplest language.

One of the reasons the Digital World took a fraction of time compared to the Physical world to have, almost, the same level of scale and dominance because - the entire digital world consists of just two components - 0 and 1. I think you would agree as well :) One of the reasons the Physical world took 4.54 billion years of evolution to the current stage is that - it has atoms of 118 fundamental elements. And initially, it has very little help from Nurture :) We as a species took around 3.8 billion years, starting from single-cell species to evolve as a current complex human structure - 20,000 Genes. Since species are still evolving, the evolution duration is going to be the highest because of the highest number of fundamental components - we humans have probably the lowest knowledge and understanding about - genes, cells, DNA etc. And of course, language complexity is directly proportional to the number of alphabets. English is easier than Hindi because English has only 26 alphabets.

But with all the above examples the evolution process is the same. This means that natural selection might have found the most optimized method of building an autonomous complex system - after multiple trials and errors. Subconsciously we humans also followed the same building principles. Nice!

But after a time, we followed natural selection only because that was the most optimized available method. However, we decided there is no way we can only rely on Nature and therefore we started building the type of nurture (environment) - we wanted to have. Because ultimately, we wanted to have freedom from nature - or at least some control. In fact, in the absence of the nurture (environment) that we built - we all can agree, the possibility of Humans being the most intelligent species in the known world would have been impossible. In fact, me writing this essay and you reading, if you are reading, is possible because we nurture an independent environment, not completely, independent from nature.

Here, you can ask yourself - did we (humans) let control our nurture just because we all were the byproduct of nature, no right? [Please hold the answer to this question in your conscious mind - we would need it).

The only problem was, it was not a respectable job. Let me explain the context. My village was divided into two parts. Government Jobs and Jamindar Vs the rest of the villagers. And the latter has been dominated by the former, until a few years back. That also includes buying ration from Kirana Store and not paying the money. And Baniya is not something that you want to be in my village. On the hierarchy ladder - government jobs were at the top. At this point in time - nurture was totally dominated by nature (How?).

My dad was conscious from the day-1 about us ( we and my brothers). He wanted us to study and do a government job. But only for the purpose of learning and exposure - he used to allow me to run his Kirana Store for a few hours per day. And what I am going to write next, you might find this manufactured but this is 500% true.

When villagers used to tell me: Hey Baniya, I used to feel bad ( I remember vividly, I can even identify those people with faces and names). And my instant answer used to be No, I will study, and I will do Naukari (Sarkari and Private). The next sentence I could hear from them that Baniya ka Beta Baniya (The son of a Baniya is by default Baniya). I had no answers. According to them, humans are byproducts of nature.

According to my nature, I should have been a Pandit but thanks to my dad's nurture I could have been a Baniya. But folks here I am writing an essay on a topic that many humans would avoid touching. And I am also sure the company that I am building shall have the largest impact on the 1.2 billion Bhartiya. All of these were/are/will be possible because I say F**k You to those who said my Nurture would be based on my nature.

If you can recall, I started this essay with my personal story. I wanted to make sure to tell everyone what kind of hypocrite I am. When someone tried to control my nurture based on my nature - I felt bad, I felt threatened, I felt someone was controlling my freedom. And subconsciously, I have been making the same mistakes. Unknowingly, we all are part of the problem. Committing the same mistake subconsciously every single day.

Homosexuality was considered a mental illness when Richard Pillard was in medical school. It was the 1950s and the School of Medicine professor of psychiatry was at the University of Rochester. At the time, the American Psychological Association still listed homosexuality as a disorder and psychologists and psychiatrists were trained on ways to treat it.

BU Today caught up with Pillard to talk about the lecture he will deliver tonight, titled Born This Way: The Biology of Sexual Orientation. The talk is part of the OUTlook Lecture series, sponsored by the LGBTQ ministry at Marsh Chapel.

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