GENETICS vs CULTURE (Nature vs Nurture, Heredity vs Environment), AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS

 GENETICS VERSUS CULTURE;

Nature vs Nurture;

Heredity vs Environment

AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

November 3, 2014

NOTE:

This exchange was stimulated by the posting of a review of A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA (2013) on www.amazon.com by a reader, a book about a young American executive in South Africa facilitating the formation of a new company, and losing his way in the process.  The views that follow deal with Africa, Africa Americans, genealogy, and culture.

READER'S REVIEW OF "A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA"

I am an African American privileged to grow up in this country a free man, and to have the extraordinary career that I have had. Fisher writes a story of South Africa during apartheid, and spares the reader no comfort in describing his sense of betrayal when his company, his country and his church puts him in the midst of a colonial society and expects him to function without sensitivity to its colossal injustices. It takes me back in my own history of growing up in a similar segregated society in the early 60's in the Midwest of Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Even then I remember the pain of discrimination in restaurants, hotels and social settings. The story tracks the moral and emotional breakdown of the protagonist, a man who prefers being addressed by his surname, Devlin, as he encounters one duplicity after another. The book is grand in scope and reminds one of books written by the Russian masters, as it departs from the stereotypical characters familiar to American readers. Is it a great book?  I leave that to the literati. I only know it is a book I'm glad I read. Twice.  The author has his way of making us confront our own demons, even if the subject matter goes against our conscience in the way Mark Twain used Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to make a similar statement about his time.

FIRST READER RESPONDS TO REVIEW

   

Really significant. So personal, you can feel it!  Keep punching!  (Reader is president emeritus of my university where I received my Ph.D.)

 DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

So good to hear from you.  I feel so connected to you.  When I was commenting recently about courage I should have thought of you.  Quietly and unobtrusively, you have contributed so much.  I feel so lucky to have you in my life.

SECOND READER WRITES:

The events in South Africa were not humanities finest hour, but I find it interesting that the black leadership in this country found problems only with South Africa but never mention the mess that exists in many other African countries.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

True, Africa in many places is a mess, but only South Africa imposed apartheid, or separate development of the races on the Bantu or black majority by the Afrikaners or white minority.

Once I experienced South Africa, I wondered what kind of a person I would have been if I was born black in the United States or South Africa, or any other place as color too often is an indictment.

Given my capacity for anger, and with my mind for organization, well, it was a bit scary for me to contemplate.  Tom Friedman has a column in the Tampa Bay Times today, "Sunni grievances and the echoes of Vietnam."  It caught my attention because "Time Out for Sanity,“ implies the USA has never left the 1970s.  His column suggests this and the misreading of history from the colonialism aspect. 

Well, I have seen, first hand, in Africa and South America how colonialism has messed up these continents with the WEST's imperialistic solipsistic hubris, translated "greed." 

Reading Foreign Affairs my wonder is how people in government, privy to these sensible commentaries, can still get it so wrong, Africa being one of the places.  It is the reason I was never a fan of Theodore Roosevelt and his imperial expansion driven colonial policy.

George Kennan wrote a Foreign Affairs article on his "containment theory" with the pseudonym "Mr. X."  That was in 1947, and the theory worked so well it kept the world out of WWIII.  Predictably, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles got him booted from the diplomatic service seeing him as too soft on communism.  Sometimes I wonder if these fine schools that produce our leaders do anything more than staple their brains.  Africa is a mess and the West has a lot to do with stirring up the pot to make it so.

THIRD READER WRITES:

I only know about Africa by what I have read.  The current leadership appears to be taking care of itself just like in many other places.  The tribalism which is also an issue in many parts of the world also contributes.  Then there is the human condition of yearning for power and control of some of its members.  Colonialism certainly was not a good thing but just like slavery in this country it is not the problem of why blacks over here are in the situation they find themselves.  Apparently we find in Ferguson that the killed black guy’s friends lied, that he was a thief and that he was probably racist toward whites.  Also, Hattie is another example of failure that can be laid squarely on the population.  All the problems of the world are certainly not the fault of the west.  Islam prevented scientific inquiry back in the twelve hundreds.  Many Arab nations supported Hitler and what he did to the Jew.  Culture and genetics play a big part in who we become.  Had my mother stayed in Germany after the war, I doubt I would have had the same opportunities that I had here.  Your achievements and thinking are also relevant in this context according to the background information you have provided over time. 

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Your responses, which are always succinct versus mine which are not, is something to behold. 

Words are the fuel of ideas and language its vehicle, not a very reliable one but all that we have, and therefore, I guess, they should be cherished.

Explosive words such as "tribalism," "power," "control," "colonialism," "culture," "slavery," "race," and now "Islam," "Jew," and such places as "Haiti," and "Ferguson," keep the pot boiling.

One time, I was in Kingston, Jamaica, and during that trip two things happened that made an indelible impression upon me.  I was getting my shoes shined, listening to the lyrical expression of the shoeshine boy, who had some vocabulary.  I asked him if he had been to university.  He broke into a raucous laugh, looked down at his shoeshine rag, and laughed again, "Mann do you think I would be doing this?"  He laughed again.

I apologized, saying I meant no disrespect but I was impressed with his use of language.  He paused to see if I was sincere, deciding I was, and said, using his hands to express his rolling words, "I hear a word.  I roll it around my tongue.  I look it up to get inside it.  Once inside it, I make it my own, mann, then I use it every chance I get as now it belongs to me."  This was all said in that lyrical Jamaican confluence, which proved quite mesmerizing, so much so that I can remember that voice and those words, although that was nearly sixty years ago.

Later, I attended an evening Mass at the Kingston Cathedral, along with my Protestant assistant, who went because he was curious, knowing I had a reputation of being a devout Roman Catholic. 

The Catholic Bishop of Jamaica conducted the Mass, and gave the sermon.  The sermon, too, has stayed with me.  The church was packed but with more than three-fourths women, all black, with my friend and me the only whites. 

The sermon was about dignity and pride, and concerned Jamaican men.  I am paraphrasing but the essence of what the bishop said went something like this:  "When a man cannot find a job, when a man cannot make a living for his family, when a man is treated as less than a man, his loins speak for him, and he spreads seed because that is the only way he can express himself as a man.  It is not the right thing to do, but it is the only thing he knows.  But give him a job, give him a right to his dignity, treat him as a man, and he will behave as a man."  He turned and left the rostrum without another word.

No "fire and brimstone," no "hell and burning forever in Dante's inferno," no "God this and God that," nothing that I was used to hearing as a third grader at St. Boniface Church at Sunday Mass from Father Sunbrueller.   .      

Much as it made an impression on me, I stood in line after the service with others, and waited my turn to thank the Celebrant for his moving sermon.  When my time came, and I expressed these thoughts, he looked at me for a moment, a tall blond clearly an American white man, looked past me and greeted the next person, as if I were invisible. 

I was crushed, also naive and yet to work in South America, which I was surprised to find so extensively black, not yet scheduled to work in Africa, and to ultimately live in South Africa. You imply I have had the advantage being born and reared in the United States.  I expect that is a fair assumption.  Yet, at every juncture, it is appropriate to note that assumption has been used against me on a regular basis as if that explained my life.   

My da was a yeller, complainer, and a "woe be me an Irishman," whose mother died when he was born and da took off never to be seen again.  He never overcame that handicap, in fact, juiced it to his advantage all his life, never trying to improve himself, learn new skills, or challenge the system, dying three days after his fiftieth birthday.   I chose to be different.

In sport, I was quite an athlete in my youth, in the classroom, a diligent student, in life, always with the same chip on my shoulder as my da, call it DNA or genetics, another word you mention that can be inflammatory.  As a thinker and writer, I have relied upon my experience to guide me to what is and what is not, often in opposition to what is popularly professed.   

Were I my da I would have given up and given into the very arduous work that it takes to be a serious writer, but I remembered the yelling, the complaining, and the "woe is me" and have chosen to be otherwise. 

From my experience, I have found colonialism evil no matter who orchestrates it.  Because of my experience with my da, I know no one can take my power away from me unless I give it to them, and once given, I cannot get it back. 

The UAW in the automotive industry never learned this.  Nor have the peoples of Third World nations.  The UAW gave the industry its power and control of what workers did for perks, benefits and salary concessions. The leadership of Third Word countries gave away their natural resources for pennies, and then found most of those pennies going to the corrupt, and not to the benefit of the people.  Now the UAW workers don't have jobs, and Third World countries are in constant civil wars.   

The freest people are not the millionaires or the billionaires, but the people who live within their means, and buy what they need and let those out of control buy what they want.  The "want industry" is a multi-trillion dollar industry and is not wanting for customers. Millionaires and billionaires never have enough because there are always millionaires and billionaires who have more.  Greed is more enslaving than any kind of slavery because it is self-inflicted.  A person has to be trained to listen to the heart, and it is not part of the curriculum in school.

I have been told "How lucky you have been!"  Luck had nothing to do with it.  Work did. Turning away from flatterers did.  I've never been good at turning the other cheek either. Cross me, and I have often been crossed, and you don't get a second chance.  The chip shows.

My books are written for people who think they believe in luck.  I believe in courage. Luck is only when preparation meets opportunity.  People may think they get promoted because they are "good guys and good gals," when they are promoted because they can be used, which is different than being useful; useful you determine the game, used the game determines you.   

Were I a victim of a heritage of 300 or 400 years a slave, given my Irish roots, as no people were less desirable when they came to this country than the Irish, I can imagine what I would be like.  The Irish have never been comfortable under the colonialism of British rule, which brings me to Ferguson, Missouri.  Ferguson is Dante's hell on earth.  That tall strapping young black man with a chip on his shoulder epitomized that fact. He may have been a bad apple, but he didn't deserve to die because of that chip or because he was black.  A community gets the police force it deserves. 

With no job, nothing to do, no place to go, burning with resentment, and no language or insight to why you feel that way, or any inclination to do anything about it, well, it can get dicey for any band of young people.  There is a theory in psychology called "reaction formation," which has to do with what triggers a cataclysmic reaction to a circumstance.  The right trigger was boiling in Ferguson waiting for something to happen to break the surface and explode, and it did. 

We are often unconscious of what is troubling us because we are so good at self-denial and self-deception, what Sartre calls "bad faith."  Few us know ourselves and are constantly looking for some tree in the forest upon which to post our grievances, where similar grievances have already been posted, confident that we are not alone.  The religious and political delight in exploiting this inclination to their advantage, and of course, most of us are obliging.

FOURTH READER WRITES:

Again, you mention the Irishman's position in the pecking order.  Just as African-Americans (are there really any left?  Are they not Americans?) are clinging to that slavery rung, time to move on.  Do you realize the Irish were used as slaves on the railroad and in New Orleans to dig the canals?

We share the ill-will directed our way of being the non-protestant, non-Anglican lower level of the American caste system: however, that was another time, another place.  On my mother's side, both sides, her people had been in America prior to 1845.  In fact, on the McDowell side the very early 1700's as Scottish soldiers brought over to fight the Indians in upper state New York.  There was a Revolutionary and a Civil War general among them.  A county in North Carolina named after these same McDowell’s

On my father's side purely Polish.  The paternal side from Warsaw and educated in sciences.  Maternal side purely peasants, lived in villages and farmed on their own farms Lublin area, very near the Ukrainian border.  My gramps and his brother were chemists brought to Sheboygan to work in Chicago but choose to come to Clinton Foods thus to Clinton.  My dad worked first in chem lab at Clinton Foods then went to Chicago to business school while working for American Can Corp again in chem lab, when he met Mom they married and lived in Chicago building a nest egg...Mom worked as a companion for a Mrs. Olsen who owned hotels around Montrose and Sheridan, for that a small salary and a small apt.  In the evenings she babysat for band leaders and members who played at the open air dance halls at Wilson beach, two blocks away.  Eventually she added bar tender at that open air dance hall.

Ironically when the boys were finally over 19 they could live off campus of SAIC and found an apt. in a brownstone six-plex on Racine and Montrose just two blocks west of where the folks had lived in the late 30's.  Prior to WWII the folks moved back to Clinton, Dad again at Clinton Foods and bought a bar, dubbed Tony's Tavern, as Mom wanted to work and knew the trade.  She began selling fishing equip and bait as well, then Dad added guns and finally they had enough to build Sportsman's Exchange at 910 south 4th St.  As you demonstrate in each of your writings the only limits on what you can accomplish is you.   

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Your heritage is impressive and you can rightly be proud of it.  As you have noted, my interest is not in family trees but in cultural heritage.  It is why I am working on "Search for the Real Parents of My Soul."

Granted, it is frustrating that people of color have not made more progress.  It is equally hard to imagine Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, but it happened.  Are we to blame for the unrest among blacks?

During the Great Depression, most black families in the United States were two parent families; the African Christian church and its ministers were powerful influences in the black community; the black community thrived.  With all the good intentions of integration, and the Civil Rights Movement, it resulted in fragmentation of the black community, African American churches lost their authority and influence, and with rare exception, that has continued to this day.  

A strange dichotomy is still in vogue: African Americans have much greater unemployment than whites, while progress for African Americans remains the exception rather than the rule, possibly with the exception of professional sport, where they dominate in the National Basketball Association (70%) and National Football League (60%), and are competitive in Major League Baseball (40%), but trail considerably in the National Hockey League, National Tennis Federation and National Golf Association.

African Americans can trace their heritage as accomplished Africans back before the Plymouth Rock Puritans.  Going back to the sixteenth century, and the arrival of the Puritans, is not far enough, not even back to the Greeks and the Romans is far enough.  You have to go back long before Aristotle and Plato, or the Roman conquests, back to the early Persians, long before Alexander the Great, when language, the alphabet, mathematics, art and architecture, and Zoroastrians were working out ideas that often had a Manichean duality to them.  We forget long before there was a West there was an African and Middle Easterner culture.

On a personal note, my uncle Leonard escaped Clinton, Iowa ethnic poverty by getting an education and earning two Ph.D.'s in economics and psychology at the University of Iowa in the 1920s, becoming a powerful influence on me in the 1940s.  While he was head of the department of finance and economics at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit university, he would invite me to spend part of my summer vacations with him and my cousin at his Higgins Lake retreat in Michigan. 

My cousin and I would argue baseball, until one day, my uncle said that our lunch breaks would be devoted to discussions about great civilizations, including the Etruscans who preceded the Romans, and of course, Zoroaster, the eighth century B.C. Persian mystic.  These seminars were boring to my cousin, but not to me.  They helped me to develop a discriminating mind.

Often, I have run into generalities, stereotypes, assumed truths, and outright dissembling offered as the basis of how to think and what to believe.  Through my educational years, and early working years, these were willfully upheld despite evidence to the contrary.  Gradually that changed.  I suspect it shows in “A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA,” which is a morality play that attempts to show how Seamus "Dirk" Devlin was duped by his culture only to find everything he had been told to be true was a lie.  

Manuscripts written forty years ago -- “Time Out for Sanity” and "Search for the Real Parents of My Soul" – manage to get inside old mysteries, cherished dogmas, and sacred beliefs many of which proved to have pagan origins in prehistory.  This does not make them wrong.  It just makes them human.

Currently, the Pharisees fascinate me whereas they infuriated Jesus.  Even the Pharisees changed their views back and forth on eternal life, mortality of the soul, but one thing they consistently upheld, and that was freedom and individualism, a legacy that predates Western democracies.

The problem, as Erich Fromm shows in "Escape from Freedom" (1941), is that freedom is not easy, so most people move away from it.  That is why I have such regard for people of Jewish heritage.  There are only 14 million Jews in the world, 8 million in Israel, and only 6 million elsewhere, which means Judaism represents two tenths of one percent of the world's population.  Yet, Heidegger and Hitler feared a Jewish conspiracy for their dominance in finance, banking and academia, claiming such dominance was traceable to the Jewish propensity for abstraction and assimilation.  I trace it to individualism and the courage to embrace freedom with gusto.

A far greater percent of Jews have won Nobel Laureates than any other ethnic group.  Conversely, while we celebrate the scholarship of the Chinese, who are at the top in the categories of math, science and technology according to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), not one Chinese trained student since the Chinese Revolution of 1949 has won a Nobel Prize.

Zheng Yefu in "The Pathology of Chinese Education" (2013) writes:

“No one, after twelve years of Chinese education, has any chance to receive a Nobel Prize, even if he or she went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Cambridge for college.  Out of the one billion people who have been educated in Mainland China since 1949, there has been no Nobel Prize winner.  This forcefully testifies to the power of education in destroying creativity on behalf of the Chinese society.”

You cannot force feed creativity because it needs individualism and freedom to thrive in the crucible of meaning.  Poor as our American educational system is, you cannot say it is not free and that the individual cannot prosper through his or her own efforts.   

FIFTH READER WRITES:

What I learned from my students teaching art was that almost anyone could learn to draw, paint and do pottery.  However, there were some students who stood out in ability, and if you talked to them you would find out that someone in their family tree was good in art.  However, as far as I know none has achieved renown.  Of the few I know one is a lawyer, another is a social worker, another an elementary art teacher.  These people were all hard working students who appear to be happy like I was in my chosen profession.  When you look at the lives of many famous artist, you find people whose parents were not artists but who had inherited talent, motivation and a mind set for looking for their own path instead of following. In every case luck or chance played a part from their inception as to which egg was fertilized by which sperm as well a multitude of events in their lifetime over which they had no control including their talent and drive.

As far as blacks in this country are concerned I also learned a lot from teaching.  I had black students who worked hard but also students who did not and some of it had to do with studying made you wanting to be white.  People in Africa were tribal which appears to be one of the problems also in the mid-east.  The mess in either place cannot be placed on the west as the history of the Jews strongly supports.  Genetics determine how you react to your environment.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

We politely disagree.  Although I think genetics are important, I find culture is more so.  True, each of us is born with attributes to excel at certain things.  Although these attributes differ from individual to individual, all individuals have them.  Genetics fail to explain why China has never had a Nobel Laureate and Japan, although excelling in quality, has lagged in its number of inventions.  China is a draconian society with a strong cultural delimiting authority; Japan is a group culture in which individualism and free expression are frown upon outside that norm.  I use myself as an example to express the power of individualism and freedom. 

When I was a child, I had a rather traumatic beginning, something many children have, when they have little sense of parents, my mother was in hospital, my da a bit of a dandy.  That all changed when I was five years old.  Suddenly, we were a family, a struggling family but together, a sister and brother at that time, another sister to come later.   My da was no longer a dandy, but a good father and devoted husband, and remained so until his early death at 50.

My parents put me in the public school after the first grade.  They were unaware of me as a child those first five years.  There were, however, indicators that something was wrong.  At recess, I would leave St. Patrick's school, and go home every day, which was a half a block away.  I suppose today they would say I acted autistic, but closer to the truth I was there (in school), but not there.  Being a family was a new experience for my mother and me.  She became my muse and I her listener.  I write about this in my novel (In the Shadow of the Courthouse), and here for readers experiencing something of the same. 

My family moved from St. Patrick's to Lyons in the north end of Clinton, and put me in the second grade at a public school too far from home to leave at recess every day.  The teacher and the principal found me a daunting task.  They told my parents I was there but not there and should repeat the grade.

It devastated my da, who went to school through the seventh grade, but for my mother I became a work in progress.  Thereafter, I was returned to the parochial school system, where I flourished. 

Already as a sixth grader, now back at St. Patrick's, I showed considerable athleticism, being the tallest boy in my class.  The high school basketball coach, started recruiting me for his high school team from that point forward, spending many a day over at courthouse where we, the Courthouse Tigers, played baseball during the summer.

He was successful in getting me, and Bobby Witt, the star of "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" to go to Clinton High School. Bobby took public school in stride, a boy that had a much older brother and was reared essentially as an only child by doting parents who were always there from birth.  Like Deja vu, once at Clinton High, having been an "A" student at St. Pat's, I retrogressed (at first) to that lost lad I had once been as a six-years-old, as the public school was a cultural shock to my system.  My high school basketball coach (who was Catholic) and my mother stepped in to right me, clearly with different motivations, I'm sure.  That said, they were effective in getting my attention, after that rocky freshman year. 

I would excel in my studies for the next three years taking the most difficult courses offered, and graduate in the top ten percent of my class, despite that freshman year.  I would again excel at university, graduating with honors, honors coming my way throughout the balance of my life. 

Culture, irrespective of genetics (I believe genetics are exaggerated) can make or destroy you because it is mainly subliminal, felt but not seen, inevitable but usually not understood.  In my books, I tell people to feel the place they find themselves, and if it doesn't feel right it is the wrong place for them to be.  You will not change the culture, but the culture will endeavor to change you, and in the process of trying to do so it may destroy you.  This has been my experience.

Culture was not consciously felt much less understood at first, but having been trained as a chemist, or a lab rat, I gradually came to see the work environment as a laboratory with draconian pressure to conform.  As I once studied stoichiometric equations in chemistry, I now studied people in the workplace.  Life has given me a great opportunity to do so, working in the chemical and hi tech industry, first as a laborer in five summers while going to university, then as a bench chemist, then as a sailor in the Mediterranean on a ship with 1,400 men on board.  All the peoples I saw or met throughout the Mediterranean region including North Africa, Europe and the Middle East became statistics in my constant data collection.

Once again traumatized by my experience in South Africa, devastated to the point that I was not sure I wanted to go on living, I returned to the US and did nothing for two years but read books, play tennis and basketball, and wonder throughout the Tampa Bay (Florida) area, observing people, writing poetry and thinking.  I had a wife and four young children, and lived on my savings, having given up what some might have thought a dream job, making more in a week than my da ever made in a year.     

A professor, a regular tennis partner, persuaded me to go back to school, which I did, finding the university a factory just like the world I had left, only if possible, more petty. This promoted my interest in culture seeing how the invisible hand of fear controlled the academic workplace every bit as much as I had seen it control the world of the Bantu in South Africa with apartheid.    

Academia took grit but I stuck it out to earn my Ph.D. not feeling I had learned very much about life or this world, but for a few authors, and a few mentors, one named Bernie Turner, president of my university, and Billy Gunter, a professor who literally saved my life.

Reading diligently on culture, mainly from anthropologists and philosophers, I developed my own paradigms, which I have tested and retested throughout life, but with no interest in promulgating other than in my books, which are not about solutions but defining problems that I have experienced then conceptualizing these experiences in paradigms.  This is one:

“The structure of work (academic curriculum, workplace modus operandi, policies & procedures, pecking order, rites of passage; power & subjugation; instrumental & terminal values) determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior; the organizational behavior establishes whether the organization is going to thrive, vegetate, flounder, and expire, or succeed and the people of all hues with it, or not.”

For ten years (1970-1980) as an OD (organizational development) consultant, I worked intimately with police organizations from Hartford, Connecticut to Miami, Florida along the east coast of the United States, while also conducting executive seminars for the American Management Association across the United States during that same period in which senior officers of police organizations were usually in attendance. 

Additionally, I was embedded in the Fairfax County Police Department (the county adjoining Washington, DC) where most senators and congressmen live, for nine months, after a 27-year-old African American was killed in a Seven/Eleven store by a white police officer, who unloaded his service revolver on the young man after he pushed the young man into a cooler, and the man grabbed the officer's nightstick in an attempt to defend himself, a riot followed (my master's thesis is on this work, "A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot,” 1976). 

Later, I would spend five months embedded in the Raleigh, North Carolina police department, when the 350 sworn officers threatened to mutiny if the chief of police was not fired.  Later still, I would spend six years as an organizational and management development psychologist at Honeywell, Inc., and then as director of human resources planning and development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd.  Each situation verified the dominance of culture irrespective of genetics.  

Currently, my wife is business manager of Hillel Academy, a Jewish day school, where the head of school, with no input from me, has opened the campus, literally, so that it looks less like a school, and more like an open learning environment, a kind of environment in which culture urges students on to explore their attributes and natural gifts, which differ from person to person.

Given this assessment, were the culture more women friendly, as it has not been over the last several centuries, we would have more female philosophers, artists, mathematicians, engineers, inventors, composers, architects, and scientists.  Genetics do not favor one gender over another, or one race over another, but culture does.

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