© 1992 Ronald Conway
© 1992 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
| “Is Copyright Really Necessary?” | Vol 13 No 2 100th Issue — Index | A Statistical Investigation Of Writing Styles In The Urantia Papers |
by Ronald Conway, Melbourne
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights.”
So runs the famous preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. This is the fundamental statement behind the ideal (but hardly the reality) of modern democratic government.
What a pity it isn’t true!
Indeed the American republic and its part-imitations, such as the Australian Commonwealth, rest upon a basic doctrine that modern science does not support and the founder of Christianity never taught.
There is nothing “self-evident” about human equality, even before the State and the law. Even the grandfather of all modern political mischief-makers, Jean Jacques Rousseau, was forced to admit that the whole notion was merely a noble concoction of the mind.
We are certainly not “created equal” but to a wide variety of inherited and environmental circumstances that clearly limit our options in life and therefore much of our freedom.
The late B.F. Skinner, doyen of American behavioural psychologists, even went so far as to dismiss the whole idea that we are socially free as a romantic political delusion.
With the classless society, all conventional inequalities could be erased. Even the Catholic church then contributed its portion by spreading the now familiar catchery of “social justice”, which was ironically often at variance with its own authoritarian ecclesiastical structure.
Strangely corresponding with the recent collapse of socialism has come an increasing body of research evidence in psychology and biology that nature — via natural selection and genetics — is usually more important in the human development than the shaping factors of later environment.
If so, we are forced to face the reality that nature itself, and indeed the whole known universe, does not provide a level playing field. We see an immensely complex hierarchy of entities and events in which each phenomenon and creature has its own appropriate slot. Because of our superior intellects and skills, humans may substantially vary, modify or compensate for the pressures of this natural hierarchy. But they can neither abolish it nor stand aside from it. We, too, are creatures of the natural order — a fact which the arrogance of recent technology has often caused us to forget.
One of the most fascinating research projects of recent decades — and perhaps unrepeatable — is the famous Minnesota twins study, whose findings by Dr Thomas Bouchard were published in October last year. One hundred sets of identical twins sharing exactly the same genetic structure, from several parts of the world, were assembled for study. Each twin in every pair had been reared apart from birth.
A hundred cases does not sound very many in global terms, but considering the rarity of such examples, it constitutes a very powerful research project indeed. Bouchard studied the progress of the twins since 1979, and produced a detailed study of the role of nature versus nurture, which is like nothing before it. His conclusions were that the effects of inherited characteristics in youthful development outweighed those from the environment by three to one.
I was not at all surprised to hear that the intelligence (insofar as it can be measured) was more inherited than acquired, but the finding that personality characteristics were similarly weighted in favour of inheritance was startling.
Bouchard has hastened to point out that the power of families, parents and peers to shape our development, while less potent than originally thought, is still very significant. This is particularly true if parents are bright, resourceful and persistent.
Critics have pointed out that the Minnesota study may have produced a self-selecting group with only those twins who are very similar tending to present themselves. The argument is far from settled, but most recent studies of genetic influences tend to favour Bouchard’s conclusions.
We are certainly not “created equal” but to a wide variety of inherited and environmental circumstances that clearly limit our options in life and therefore much of our freedom.
The social significance of such findings can hardly be underestimated. Many random questions offer themselves. Are we wasting too much effort and money trying to raise the educational standard of untalented children who can gain little benefit from the exercise? Are many criminals beyond any hope of rehabilitation because of “bad genes”?
In refusing to discourage breeding among the handicapped and underprivileged while failing to persuade the gifted to have more children, are we loading the genetic dice in favour of cultural backwardness and decay?
Such embarrassing questions will doubtless turn the faces of many modern clerics, social planners, and civil libertarians a bright purple. To them, all human creatures must be uniformly precious.
But merely announcing such a conviction in the media, public forums or from pulpits does not make it a fact of nature. The Christian gospel merely proclaims human beings as being spiritually beloved and equal as souls in the sight of God.
To extend the vision beyond this point is not to invoke the Christian ethic but merely to sing along with Rousseau, Jefferson, Marx and all their other chums.
The most that modern “democracy” can hope to bring about is to provide decent opportunities for every person according to his or her capacity and motivation. To deny the wide variety, and therefore natural inequality, of the human species is to mouth political cant.
It is also dangerous cant because out of it the bloodiest revolutions of our century have been hatched. It is not essential to human happiness that we all enjoy the same status and possessions as our neighbours, but to use what we have wisely and well.
“While a good environment cannot contribute much toward realty overcoming the character handicaps. of a base heredity, a bad environment can very effectively spoil an excellent inheritance, at least during the younger years of life.” (UB 76:2.6)
| “Is Copyright Really Necessary?” | Vol 13 No 2 100th Issue — Index | A Statistical Investigation Of Writing Styles In The Urantia Papers |