Brad: > I think we know very little about "universal human tendencies". > All we know is what humans become in various flavors of > primitive and repressive social environments. There is > a literature about childrearing that would seem fairly > large if books were fewer, which argues in this direction: > Frederick Leboyer, Lloyd DeMause, Alice Miller.... > Donald Winnicott's and Heinz Kohut's work are strongly > even if more obliquely supportive, and even Melanie Klein > has some remarkable things to say here. John Dewey and > Paolo Freire would probably agree as well.
Perhaps putting things in terms of "universal human tendencies" is stretching it a bit. But people do seem to need explanations of, and rationalizations for, what has happened to them. They don't accept that their fate is in their own hands and, of course, very often it isn't. In the ethnic community I came from as a child, everyone would say "It's God's will" at least ten times a day, sometimes fifty. Currently, much of the world's ills are the result of "globalization" and "the corporate capitalist agenda". Perhaps they are, but, like invoking "God's will", the references are almost always made as though they need no further explanation. I would not disagree that a child's social environment has a considerable bearing on adult behaviour. However, many people have come through the most difficult and repressive circumstances as children, and have nevertheless become productive and well rounded adults. Some things I've read have suggested that genetically inherited "hard wiring" may be as important as nurture in defining personality, but I'd better stop here because I'm in danger of not knowing what I'm talking about. > But for ourselves, most if not all of whom have been > in varying degrees crippled and distorted by our > childrearing, we who have Freudian personality > structures with punitive superegos (introjected > parental tor-mentors) and even today are > insecure in our social security, we need to struggle > against our tendencies to do such things as "convert > good and interesting thought into dogma". But people do have to rationalize their circumstances and make them less intolerable by whatever means they can. The people of my "God's will" ethnic community had been kicked around Europe for many generations. The notion that there was no chance of a better life for them in this world had become deeply ingrained and passed on from generation to generation because it was the experience. Their only possibility lay in reading their Bibles, praying night and day, accepting whatever burdens God loaded on them, and getting to Heaven where things would finally improve. My grandmother saw Heaven as a place where she would, literally, walk on streets paved with gold. > > I have been an existentialist (the "atheist", > not the Christian kind!) for over 35 years. I am > more and more convinced that "the finitude and uncertainty > of being" are not nearly as anxiety producing > in general as banal economic and emotional insecurity. You're probably right. Most people I've known were far more concerned about their careers and their relationships than about their place in the universe. Ed Weick
