July 7, 2008
 
MANN TALK: Creatures of Circumstances
 
By Perry Mann
 
John Locke’s belief that a human’s mind is a blank slate at birth and that what an individual becomes is what he experiences in his societal environment is erroneous. And George Will’s assertion that liberals accept what John Locke propounded in his essay is false. There is little question now that the mind is never a blank slate but that it is inhabited at birth with a potential array of innate ideas, dispositions, neural circuits and emotions that determine to a large extent the character and personality of the individual.
 
George Will in a column in the Gazette titled “Left wing hugs phony crime myths” asserts: “Liberalism likes victimization narratives, and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which ‘society’ writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.”
 
Will’s “blank slates” has reference to John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” in which he wrote: “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, EXPERIENCE.”
 
Thus, most liberals know that tinkering with social conditions will have little effect on those innate ideas residing in humans’ minds from conception. But social conditions that are optimally in harmony with nature and her laws will conduce to less criminal conduct. The man-made environment is socially toxic and conducive to crime because it divorces people from nature and locates them in conditions alien to their natural environment, ugly in their sight, and it leaves many bereft of opportunities to use their energies and intellect to provide for themselves. It also creates an economy whereby the powerful leeches on the proletariat and grows rich from proletariat production.
 
From the evidence available, one socio-biologist has asserted that if a group of children were isolated on an island without any knowledge of its culture and history and its descendants could survive, the descendants would in a few generations create a culture little different from the one from which the group was exiled. Their innate ideas, predispositions and genetic mandates would produce essentially the same culture that their parents’ innate ideas created.
 
Will: “Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today’s near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement. For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer.” But Policing and prisons are costly expedients that keep a lid on crime now in a manner that generates more of it in the future.
 
A third ear does not hear what Will should admit. Certainly, a columnist as well read as he is has learned what the sociobiologists have discovered and written about Locke’s blank slate, about how un-blank the mind is and how much a person’s character and personality are determined by his genes and his nurture. What we don’t hear from him is that to a large extent people are creatures of circumstances and that the circumstances often determine whether one commits a criminal act or not. Will should know better than to believe that a human’s will is free and his acts are freely chosen without any input from his nature and nurture; that is, they are committed in a vacuum emptied of life’s history and its complexity of circumstances.
 
There is strong evidence that a human is totally material, that consciousness is a product of the brain and not a ghost in the machine or a soul with eternal prospects. The evidence is conclusive that all life, including Homo sapiens, evolved from a common ancestor and that in human reproduction, the offspring are fashioned by their nature and nurture. One has no choice of her genes and, during her formative years, little choice of her environment. Her choices, if all causes and effects from Day One were known, would be predictable. But not even imagination can conceive of three million years much less of the number of causes and effects in that timeframe. It’s like counting sands of the seas
 
Humans are products of nature. They cannot divorce themselves from three millions years of evolution, during which it created minds and hands to enable them to cultivate the earth and to use them to fashion raw materials into tools with which to produce their amenities. Thus, for humankind to create cities with an environmental matrix alien and antithetical to nature’s, one that leaves thousands exiled from their natural environment, idled and hopeless, and not anticipate that some drug that depresses the past or brightens the future would become essential to endure such an existence---is to have imagination jailed. And then to add to the misery of those idle standing on street corners surrounded by bricks and concrete, and by flaunted affluence, their apprehension and arrest for the use or sale of narcotics and the conviction and incarceration for the offense of trying to make endurable the unendurable is to compound injustice.
 
George Will and his ilk believe the human will is unfettered with history and free to choose one act rather than another. That is, humans are free to choose to be criminals or law-abiding citizens. The conservative mantra is responsibility and accountability based on the belief that the will is free. They have no evidence of its freedom except their consciousness of acting freely in any choice they make. Their consciousness is probably an illusion of free will. The act is done and the consciousness of it follows, giving the actor the feel that he chose to do what he did.
 
Every individual is born programmed in her DNA uniquely with the history of life and introduced into an environment not of her choosing. Thus, when confronted with an option to do good or to do bad, her choice, if not foreordained, is heavily tilted by her nature and nurture to do the act toward which they have tilted her. If she acts lawfully she is praised; if she acts criminally she is incarcerated and subjected to an environment that spawns criminality and recidivism. No one can survive in a cell divorced from nature for twenty years and not have her humanity sapped and warped.
 
George Will is either treading in the 17th century or alleging that liberals are treading there just in order to write a column denigrating them in his usual fashion: Sitting like a god on a throne on Mt. Olympus pontificating conservative dogma. But his judgment of liberals and his views and statistics about crime are way off target.
 
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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.