Kathy Morgan wrote: > > It is not surprising that a perspective that emphasizes nativism and > evolutionary history should develop in a part of the world where > leadership was still determined by heredity, while a point of view > that emphasized proximate explanations for behavior such as immediate > environmental conditions and instrumental conditioning (focus on > individual learning and accomplishment) would develop in a young > nation in which Horatio Alger was idealizing the American dream (i.e., > that nothing but your own drive and skills stood in the way of your > being whatever you wanted to be.) > Kathy,
If that were true, then it would be mighty difficult to explain why America, in the years before and after World War I, was dominated by a strong anti-immigration policy buttressed by the widespread belief that southern and eastern Europeans were innately mentally inferior to the Northern European stock that was believed to dominate the American gene pool. Let us not forget that the American government mandated the intelligence testing of 1.75 million military conscripts, and then drew from that data sweeping racial conclusions (viz., that southern & eastern European have an avg mental age of 11 yrs, and African Americans around 10 yrs) and then they started testing whole boatloads of immigrants, rejecting on the spot those who did not "measure up" for fear than they would dilute sturdy American stock. These conclusions were then used, among other things, to prevent Jews fleeing Nazi Germany from even docking in US ports, much less immigrating, and many ended up returning to Germany where they were murdered. Tens of thousands were sterilized across the US for not having adequate IQ, in order to prevent them from passing their "weak seed" on to a new generation. (Yes, other countries had sterilization laws as well, but the US was particularly early and particularly "successful".) Sure, there were a few prominent opponents of these conclusions and policies -- e.g., Walter Lippman and John Dewey -- and we like to lionize them now, but they were a distinct minority at the time and their criticisms were mostly ignored by politicians and psychologists alike. What stopped this process had nothing to do with the mythical popular American that anyone could rise to any level. Rather, it was the public horror evoked by Nazi government policies with respect to the "mentally defective" the "racially impure" (policies, by the way, which were developed after close Nazi study of, among others, American eugenics laws and American Indian reservations. But even at that, it didn't end quickly. The last compulsory sterilization in the US occurred in Oregon in 1981. Those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it. - Santayana Regards, Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ "Part of respecting another person is taking the time to criticise his or her views." - Melissa Lane, in a /Guardian/ obituary for philosopher Peter Lipton ================================= --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
