{"id":4075,"date":"2014-05-26T12:14:10","date_gmt":"2014-05-26T17:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=4075"},"modified":"2014-05-26T12:14:10","modified_gmt":"2014-05-26T17:14:10","slug":"nature-vs-nurture-at-the-movies-hollywood-turns-on-the-blank-slate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2014\/05\/26\/morality\/nature-vs-nurture-at-the-movies-hollywood-turns-on-the-blank-slate\/","title":{"rendered":"Nature vs. Nurture at the Movies: Hollywood Turns on the Blank Slate"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Hollywood is any guide, we can put a fork in the Blank Slate.\u00a0 I refer, of course, to the delusional orthodoxy that\u00a0was enforced by the\u00a0“Men of Science”\u00a0in the behavioral sciences for more than half a century, according to which there is no such thing as human nature.\u00a0 Consider, for example, the movie Divergent<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 It belongs to the dystopian genre beloved of American audiences, and is set in post-apocalyptic Chicago.\u00a0 A semblance of order has been restored by arranging the surviving population into five factions <\/a>based on what the evolutionary psychologists might call their innate predispositions.\u00a0 They include Candor<\/em>, whose supreme values are honesty and trustworthiness, and from whose ranks come the legal scholars and lawyers.\u00a0 The brave and daring are assigned to the Dauntless<\/em> faction, and become the defenders of the little city-state.\u00a0 At the opposite extreme is Amity<\/em>, the home of those who value kindness, forgiveness and trust, and whose summum bonum<\/em> is peace.\u00a0 Their admiration for self-reliance suits them best for the agricultural chores.\u00a0 Next comes Abnegation<\/em>, composed of the natural do-gooders of society.\u00a0 So selfless that they can only bear to look in a mirror for a few seconds, they are deemed so incorruptible that they are entrusted with the leadership and government of the city.\u00a0 Finally, the intelligent and curious are assigned to the Erudite<\/em> faction.\u00a0 They fill such roles as doctors, scientists, and record-keepers.\u00a0 They are also responsible for technological advances, which include special “serums,” some of which are identified with particular factions.\u00a0 One of these is a “simulation serum,” used to induce imaginary scenarios that test a subject’s aptitude for the various factions.<\/p>\n

As it happens, the simulation serum doesn’t always work.\u00a0 When the heroine, Tris, takes the test, she discovers that she can “finesse” the simulation.\u00a0 She is a rare instance of an individual whose nature does not uniquely qualify her for any faction, but who is adaptable enough to fit adequately into several of them.\u00a0 In other words, she is a “Divergent,” and as such, a free thinker and a dire\u00a0threat to anyone who might just happen to have plans to misuse the serums to gain absolute control over the city.<\/p>\n

Alas, there’s trouble in paradise.\u00a0 The “factions” are groups, and where there are groups, there are ingroups and outgroups.\u00a0 Sure enough, each “in-faction” has its own “out-faction.”\u00a0 This aspect of the plot is introduced matter-of-factly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.\u00a0 And, of course, since it can be assumed that the audience will consist largely of the species Homo sapiens<\/em>, it is.\u00a0 Most of us, with the exception of a few aging behavioral scientists, are familiar with the fact that it is our nature to apply different\u00a0versions of morality\u00a0depending on whether we are dealing with one of “us” or one of the “others.”\u00a0 It turns out that Abnegation<\/em> is the outgroup of Erudite<\/em>, who consider them selfish poseurs, and weak and cowardly to boot.\u00a0 That being the case, it follows that Abnegation<\/em> is completely unsuited to run the government of Chicago or any other post-apocalyptic city state.\u00a0 That role should belong to Erudite<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Which brings us, of course, to the “bad guy.”\u00a0 You’ll never guess who the bad guy is, so I’ll just spill the beans.\u00a0 It’s none other than Kate Winslet!\u00a0 She plays the cold and nefarious Erudite<\/em> leader Jeanine Matthews.\u00a0 These smarties are planning to overthrow Abnegation<\/em> and seize control for themselves with the aid of the martial Dauntless<\/em>, whose members have been conveniently mind-controlled with the aid of one of Erudite’s<\/em> serums.\u00a0 Eventually, Jeanine unmasks Tris and her amorous partner, Four, as Divergents.\u00a0 And with them in her power, she treats them to a remarkable soliloquy, which nearly caused me to choke on my butter-slathered popcorn.\u00a0 Once Erudite<\/em> is in the saddle, she explains, they will eliminate human nature.\u00a0 Using a combination of re-education a la<\/em> Joseph Stalin and mind control drugs, all citizens will become latter day versions of Homo sovieticus<\/em>, perfectly adapted to fit into the Brave New World planned by the Erudites<\/em>.\u00a0 The utopia envisioned by generations of Blank Slaters will be realized at last!<\/p>\n

There’s no need for me to reveal any more of the plot.\u00a0 It’s a very entertaining movie so, by all means, see it yourself.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that, if Hollywood now associates the denial of human nature with evil bad guys, then the Blank Slate must be stone cold dead.\u00a0 Or at least it is with the exception of a few ancient Blank Slater bats still hanging in the more dark and obscure belfries of academia.<\/p>\n

For the benefit of the history buffs among my readers, I note in passing that Hollywood never quite succumbed to Gleichschaltung<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 They were always just a bit out of step, even in the heyday of the Blank Slate orthodoxy.\u00a0 Consider, for example, Sam Peckinpah’s<\/a> 1971 movie Straw Dogs<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 It was directly inspired by the work of none other than that greatest of b\u00eate noires<\/em> of the Blank Slaters, Robert Ardrey<\/a>.\u00a0 The first to taste of the forbidden fruit was Strother Martin<\/a>, best known for his portrayal of the sadistic “Captain” in Cool Hand Luke<\/em> (“What we have here is a failure to communicate”).\u00a0 He, in turn, passed on\u00a0Ardrey’s African Genesis<\/em> <\/a>to Peckinpah, with the remark that the two\u00a0seemed to share similar attitudes about violence in human beings.\u00a0 Peckinpah was fascinated, and later said,<\/p>\n

Robert Ardrey is a writer I admire tremendously.\u00a0 I read him after Wild Bunch<\/i> and have reread his books since because Ardrey really knows where it\u2019s at, Baby.\u00a0 Man is violent by nature, and we have to learn to live with it and control it if we are to survive<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That statement, rough around the edges though it is, actually shows more insight into the\u00a0thought of Ardrey than that revealed by about 99.9% of the learned book reviewers and “Men of Science” who have deigned to comment on his work in the ensuing 45 years.\u00a0 Specifically, Peckinpah understood that Ardrey was no “genetic determinist,” and that he believed that aggressive human predispositions could be controlled by environment, or “culture.”\u00a0 As it happens, that is a theme he elaborated on repeatedly in every one of his books.\u00a0 The theme of Straw Dogs<\/em> was taken directly out of The Territorial Imperative<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 According to Ardrey,<\/p>\n

There is a law of territorial behavior as true of the single roebuck defending his private estate as it is of a band of howling monkeys defending its domain held in common.\u00a0 Huxley long ago observed that any territory is like a rubber disc:\u00a0 the tighter it is compressed, the more powerful will be the pressure outward to spring it back into shape.\u00a0 A proprietor’s confidence is at its peak in the heartland, as is an intruder’s at its lowest.\u00a0 Here the proprietor will fight hardest, chase fastest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Straw Dogs<\/em>, Peckinpah’s diminutive hero, timid mathematician David Sumner, played by Dustin Hoffman, travels from the sheltered campus of an American university to be with his young wife, Amy,\u00a0in her native village in England.\u00a0 To make a long story short, she is raped by\u00a0three of the locals.\u00a0 Eventually, these muscular miscreants are joined by other townspeople in besieging Sumner in his territory, his house, in the mistaken belief that he is knowingly harboring a murderer.\u00a0 Ardrey’s territorial boost takes over with a vengeance, and Sumner draws on unimagined reserves of strength, courage, and resourcefulness to annihilate the attackers one by one.\u00a0 As badly behind the PC curve as any Disney film, Hollywood eventually repented and in 2000\u00a0churned out an alternative version of Straw Dogs<\/em>, in which all the violent behavior was “learned.”\u00a0 By then, however, getting in step meant getting out of step.\u00a0 Even the Public Broadcasting Network had given the Blank Slate the heave ho years earlier.<\/p>\n

Straw Dogs<\/em> was hardly the first time Hollywood took up the subject of nature versus nurture.\u00a0 For those whose tastes run more to the intellectual and profound, I have attached a short film below dealing with that theme that predates Peckinpah by almost a quarter of a century.<\/p>\n