I have often beat the drum that it is genetic, not environmental influences that matter. An interesting article came my way via Rob Henderson (who finds remarkable articles) that pushes back against this. Why Your Mother Affects Your Intelligence hits an angle I should have seen but didn't, that the fact that environmental effects gradually wash away while the genetic effects show more and more prominence does not mean that those earlier years, when the environment did matter, are of no account.The years from 0-10 or 11-20 count just as much in a life lived as the years from 50-60 when careers are peaking and the earthly accounting of it all is beginning to come in. We measure income, years of education, and accomplishments and declare that Genetics Finally Prevailed.
That is narrow-minded. Admittedly, when it is a measurement in the shorter term, such as the study that Lyman Stone tweeted out, that even recorded maltreatment of children did not result in increased traumatic response, except in certain conditions, we find it easier to discount or dismiss the childhood abuse. After all, it doesn't seem to "matter" later. Yet it certainly mattered then.
I read to my two oldest children when they were small because I thought it would be good for them academically. (Okay, I thought it would be good for them emotionally, culturally, and socially as well, but work with me here. Reading aloud is often pushed mostly on its effects on intelligence and schooling.) I now know that doesn't hold up. But y'know, I'd do it again anyway, just because it's enjoyable. It's a good thing for families to do together in the moment, even if the effects wash away. Happiness when you are nine counts as much as happiness when you are forty-nine. Maybe more.
Also, Happy People Have Children. We may rise above a terrible environment and succeed in our forties and beyond but pro-natalists might be alert to the fact that girls who lost their mothers have fewer children or none. (Boys seem less affected.) The Swedish study of eventual outcomes that is often referenced may show that the longest term effects of losing a parent may wash out, but the initial effects are enormous, and only gradually recede. Mortality is greater, so you uh, don't get to show your equal outcome at age 60, and there is more depression, anxiety, etc. Years of misery count. I noted myself that we have this fascination with how a story ends, likely based on our living in a mind-world of stories. If someone had eighty fruitful and happy years but the last two were lonely and they died alone, we think that a sad story. Yet if they had eighty years of misery but found happiness in the end we call that a good life. That seems to overvalue the emotional kick we get from narrative completion.
How did our ancestors make it through? The lives even the wealthy lived until quite recently still make me shudder and very grateful I was born in the second half of the 1900s.
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Maybe we inherit from Ezekiel 18, or from the pagan saying that one should not "Praise a sword until it is tested, a day until its evening, or a woman until she is dead." (One could slot "man" in that last clause just as well.) How you end matters.
Though that's no comfort for dementia.
The ‘pagan saying’ is Havamal 81, if anyone wants to look it up.
My uncle— my father’s elder brother— once told me that he thought the lesson of the Beowulf was that a man who lived the best kind of life died in a manner he might have chosen. This is suggested more by Greek mythology than his example, I think on reflection; and even Herodotus’ examples are debatable. (Beowulf’s end as non-choiceworthy is argued for both by the ending verses that imagine destruction for his people, and this excellent essay: https://www.medievalists.net/2013/06/beowulf-is-not-god-cyning/ ).
I would rather die well than badly, so much so that I’d prefer sooner but well to later but badly. Yet in fact we don’t get to choose, unless we take the cowardly path of suicide.
Environment: My husband and his younger brother were less than 3 years apart in age, yet they did not grow up in the same environment. While they remembered specific incidents, the memories were often expressed in "no, that's not the way it happened" terms. My siblings and I did not share most childhood experiences/memories as we were 6 to 7 years apart in age.
Reading to children: I seldom read to my children, yet they all learned to read at an early age. They preferred reading to me, or perhaps we read together instead of me reading to them. I never read them bedtime stories -- too stimulating/nightmare inducing. I sang to them instead. (I changed a lot of lyrics, but kept the tunes... ie, 'go to sleep - insert name - to the tune of Tom Dooley, where have all the flowers gone, they are blooming in your dreams, etc.) Anecdote: The first time my grandson stayed with me overnight, his mother brought several books saying that he'd need one of them at bedtime. I thought she meant I should read them to him. He soon let me know that he wanted one of them to sleep with. He hugged the book like many children would hug a stuffed animal. That reminds me of something I read long ago that said the presence of books in a house predicted academic success.
@Grim - cowardice as 'the' cause of suicide is far too simplistic, shallow, and seldom. The 2nd most shallow misunderstanding of suicide is punishment for those still living. I know that I do not understand the unrelenting pain that some conditions cause, nor do I understand the mental agony that some experience. I don't understand suicide and certainly don't condone it, but I'm not about to dismiss it as simply cowardice.
@Donna: I assume that your remarks reflect some personal experience with suicide, about which I should not wish to intrude. In fact suicides are popular, whatever motives them: so much so that high moral walls against them have long been built. Mine is not so high as the traditional theological one, which declares their souls eternally damned; no one but God knows if that is the case, and if the wall fails to dissuade the assumption of damnation can only harm the suffering and innocent loved ones.
Kenneth S. Greenberg, in his book on honor, noted that Antebellum Southerners frequently preferred suicide to natural death as more honorable. He thought this was because it allowed them to maintain a sort of control, in the face of extreme weakness or vulnerability brought on by age or disease. In this way they could remain masters of themselves up until the very moment of death, which brings an end to all human power.
I read Dr. Greenberg in context as suggesting that this was a kind of moral error too; perhaps the refusal to acknowledge and accept their human weakness was a sort of pride. Perhaps the desire to flee pain or the shame they felt at vulnerability was inhumane. If it is understood as a vice, at least it is not mistaken for a virtue (as apparently was the case in the Old South).
@Grim - Since there's a correlation between suicide and depression and there is evidence of genetic factors for depression, I wondered if Southerners still preferred suicide. If you have any trust of the CDC left, they have a map based on 2021 data that shows they do not.
Apparently, they never did. On page 95, Dr. Greenberg writes:
"Most Southern men of honor rejected suicide as an appropriate mode of death. Religious constraints turned them away from the path followed by Ruffin. Most died of natural causes in their beds."
I think Dr. Greenberg's premise and conclusions are both a bit specious.
You don’t have to push hard to get me to question Dr. Greenberg. I value his criticism because he is fundamentally opposed to the value of honor, and shows so many good examples of how it can go wrong.
I agree with Aristotle that a virtuous reflection on what ought to be most honorable is a reliable guide to living the best life. Greenberg seems to pose a challenge to that, one that resolves only when one remembers that it is only the fully virtuous reflection on what should be honorable— and not what a given society happens to honor— is reliable.
I do value Greenberg for his critique, though. It’s helpful in avoiding the errors he so often identifies.
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