ESCAPISM:

Are some people born evil? (BRIAN MASTERS, 6th February 2007, Daily Mail)

[M]ailer's novel does raise the issue of whether Hitler was predisposed at birth to be a genocidal tyrant.

Or to put it another way, whether people can be born bad - whether it is inevitable that some individuals will turn out to be murderers or rapists or bullies or thieves and there is nothing that can be done about it.

Coincidentally, a so-called scientific study from the University of Virginia this week reached the conclusion that children may be 'born to be bad'.

But I believe this conclusion to be completely misguided. And I come to this conclusion having spent a lifetime studying truly bad people - I wrote the biography of the north London mass murderer Dennis Nilsen, for example, and came to know him well.

Virginia's experts in human genetics would have us believe that character defects such as criminal behaviour, the desire to bully others and the necessity to tell lies despite all evidence that one has been rumbled are tied up in our DNA.

They have little or nothing to do with influences that may bombard us in our infancy.

Thus, there is precious little virtue in trying to be a good child, because the programming of your personality has decided in advance that you can't win.

Forget about the soul. It's all to do with the ingredients that were thrown in by your parents, and by theirs, and so on ad infinitum. The result is a soup which cannot be unmixed.

Scientists seem to have spent the best part of a century gleefully promoting this idea and repudiating the Romantic notion of the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau that 'there is absolutely no fundamental perversity in the human heart', and that all bad behaviour is the result of society itself.

Today, experts appear to take a perverse pleasure in making sure we know how irredeemably wicked we are. This week's research is just the latest in a long line of simple-minded foolishness.

It is wrong because it confuses two separate categories of inquiry. One is whether children have a predisposition to behave badly; the other is why they behave badly, which is not at all the same thing.

Of course, a child inherits traits of personality from its parents. It also learns much of its behaviour from its parents. These facts are undeniable, and manifested every day in ordinary observation.

We have all encountered terrible parents who spend all their energies in berating their offspring, shouting, forbidding, chastising, screaming their own frustrations with spitting mouths and glaring eyes at infants who are at first bewildered, and subsequently adopt the same negative behaviour patterns as their only way of dealing with the world.

It is no wonder they bully in the playground and attack their peers, physically, violently, as well as verbally. The genes have predisposed them to angry behaviour and the way they have been treated by their parents has encouraged it. They seem trapped.

Yet not all of them succumb to this hideous imprisonment - and this is why the scientists are fundamentally wrong. Some children break free and evolve, in contradiction to the supposed predisposition that should, say the scientists, warp their soul.

In other words, the predisposition may be there; it is what you do about it that makes the difference. The fact that one child may turn into a bully or become a criminal and another not remains a tantalising mystery, and one that scientists cannot possibly explain in simple terms of DNA.

Modern Predestination: The dangerous notion that misconduct is genetic (Theodore Dalrymple, 6 February 2007, City Journal)

[A] recent small item on the front page of the Sunday Times, the largest-selling serious Sunday newspaper in Britain, insinuated something both false and dangerous to believe.

The headline ran: WANT A FIGHT? SCIENTISTS SAY IT'S ALL IN YOUR GENES. The story begins: "Scientists have discovered an answer to one of the most intractable squabbles in family life--argumentative children are born and not made."

According to the article, new research has found antisocial traits to be inherited rather than acquired (actually such research has been going on for a long time, and the ideas behind it are nothing new). The implication of this research, the newspaper says, is that a bad child would be bad however he or she was brought up.

What a relief to parents, then! It no longer matters how they raise their children: whether they coddle them, abuse them, neglect them, discipline them, or let them run wild, it's all the same. There is no such thing as parental responsibility, except perhaps in material provision. The good will be good and the bad bad.

The article cites the work of a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, to the effect that "men with a mutation in a single gene were predisposed to be violent." The same professor also allegedly discovered that antisocial behavior is largely inherited. The only faintly contradictory note in the article occurs when the professor argues that "an early diagnosis of a child who is predisposed to bad behavior be the key to offering them treatment to stop such tendencies developing." So perhaps the way children are brought up is not quite so unimportant after all. The professor is unlikely to be quite the idiot that the paper presents her to be.

Our search for, and apparent willingness to believe in, or at least give credit to the possibility of, "the" gene for complex social behavior suggests that credulity and inability to think critically did not die out with the advent of the Enlightenment. The will to believe is as strong as ever. We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious.

All of the isms were just attempts to escape from God, from Free Will, from the Fall, and from responsibility for our own evil acts.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2007 7:34 AM