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An unnatural What are the causes of today's social problems? Margaret Creear examines the 'nature or nurture' debate. Angry scenes outside the Jamie Bulger court hearing. HE MURDER OF Jamie Bulger became the occasion for a national offensive by the Tories, and academics linked to them. to put the blame for violence, juvenile crime. and other social problems, onto the shoulders of single parents. The Tories were trying to tap into the widespread concern about crime and other social problems.
Some of our increased awareness of crime comes from media reporting. When presenters of Crimesystem in Boctle watch tell you not to worry after 30 minutes of reports of, usually, violent crime, you do not necessarily feel reassured. To argue statistically that there is not really more crime than in the that some types of crime have not past, or increased at all, does not really help when there is a general perception that life is becoming more brutal.
Concern about crime, however, also has its progressive side, one which is not entirely in the Nature or Nurture • 19
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Tories' interests. There is a greater intolerance of some social crimes such as rape, domestic violence and sexual abuse. This is in line, in spite of the Tories' offensive, with an increased rejection of authoritarian attitudes.
However, the 'moral right' and the Tories can get an echo because people do feel threatened. They want their children to be safe. They would like to live in happy personal relationships and a supportive community. The real question is, can the ideas being put forward by the right help them achieve any of this?
In these arguments the right gets very much a free hand. The Labour Party's shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair, said in a recent article in The New Statesman that, "we should be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime... Our approach is rooted in our belief that society needs to act to advance the interests of individuals. Crime ultimately is a problem that arises from our disintegration as a community, with standards of conduct necessary to sustain a community. However, Tony Blair sees the 'disintegration of community' as an abstract moral question and puts forwards no policies which would relieve the social conditions which can lead to some crime.
In these
arguments
uch
right gets very m
the a free hand.
In the past, in the course of struggle, when many of the working class people who built the movement had a belief that they were involved in creating a totally different society, the labour movement had its own morality which emphasised collective strength and collective solutions to individual problems. Now the leaders just cow tow to the Tories' idea of 'individual responsibility.
HAT LIES BEHIND the current Tory pro-
W paganda campaign against single parents
and youth is not a concern for the victims of crime, but an attempt to blame other people for the social degeneration which is their responsibility. At the same time they are trying to justify their social policies.
They are doing this not from a position of strength but of weakness, to try to turn the tide of opinion which is surging away from them. Basically they've got a problem very much exacerbated by the Thatcher years.
For example, the economic policy of the Tories demanded a restructuring of the workforce based on low pay, poor conditions and casualisation. Women, especially married women, were drawn into the workforce in large numbers. In spité of the conditions that they faced at work and the low pay that they received, this led generally to
• Nature or Nurture
Credit: Annie Lawson.
Men's brains dre heavier than women's
brains!
greater confidence and broke down the isolation of women. This was inevitably accompanied by a re-examining of the idea that a woman's place was in the home.
At the same time, the Tories were forced by Britain's declining economic position to cut back on social services and other services such as childcare which working mothers would rely on, antagonising women workers. They try to justify these cuts by reference to the role the family should play but this is changing because of their economic policy.
In addition, the economic decline of capitalism inevitably shakes the faith of the working class in their rulers. The customary rottenness, the behaviour of the monarchy, the hypocrisy of the church, the corruption and self-seeking of politicians, which is always there to some degree, becomes an issue.
Their ideological offensives are attempts to persuade us that, in spite of the fact that they run and control society, they are not responsible. They find scapegoats in the population such as the currently fashionable theory of the 'underclass' the long-term unemployed, those on benefits and single parents. Those, in other words, who suffer most from the economic decline of capitalism, and on whose shoulders it has placed the greatest burdens, are blamed for all the problems of society.
This is nothing new for capitalism. Propaganda offensives are necessary because of the contradictory nature of capitalism itself. But before explaining why they happen, it is worth looking at how they happen.
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UST AS THE capitalist class as a whole controls the means of producing goods through ownership of factories etc, they also control the means of producing ideas through the press and their dominance of the boards of the media. Of course it is not as simple and straight forward as that. For example, there are disagreements amongst the Tories themselves. Some are more constrained than others by how far social attitudes will allow them to go and also by the practicalities of what is being proposed. As part of the review of social security in the mid-1980s, for example, the then Tory cabinet minister, Norman Fowler, floated the idea of paying all benefits, including child benefit, to the father. It was argued that not to do so undermined the fathers thereby his control of the family budget and authority. However, it produced such an outcry that it was immediately abandoned.
Similarly the Tories opinions on young oftenders were openly contradicted by senior police officers and prison governors who have the job of carrying out their policies and who realised their impracticality.
Propaganda offensives are not accidental. In the past they were organised through the church, education and so on. Now there are 'think tanks' made up of academics and 'experts' with close links to the media, who, by and large, share the basic assumptions of the politicians who appoint them.
Nowadays science, and increasingly some schools of sociology, have replaced religion as the authority hauled in to obligingly convince people of all sorts of eccentric but politically useful ideas. Science has authority, of course, because many people recognise its benefits. But scientists are not 'objective'. Their work is not just a question of the unbiased interpretation of facts. One example is that of Konrad Lorenz, who developed theories about the role of aggression and territoriality in animals, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work. His ideas have been popularised and crudely applied to humans by Raymond Dart and Desmond Morris. Lorenz himself gave a scientific talk on animal behaviour in 1940 in Germany during the Nazi extermination campaign, saying that: "The selection of toughness, heroism, social utility... must be accomplished by some human institutions if mankind, in default of selective factors, is not to be ruined by domestication induced degeneracy. The racial idea as the basis of the state has already accomplished much in this respect".
What he is arguing is that we have built societies which enable people to survive who left to nature would have perished. 'Inferior' types or can now survive, requiring social action to races 'cull' them.
Even demonstrates a the approach to crime class bias. The discussion has been on juvenile crime in working class areas. Yet the social policy of the Tories in relation to the NHS, benefits etc, probably causes more premature death through perinatal mortality, breast and cervical cancer and hyperthermia, than murder does. Does the extensive breaking of health and safety laws, wages councils' minimum wage rates, and the flouting of pollution regulations, mean that most capitalists, not to mention the Tory cabinet, are the product of single parent families?
So why are these propaganda offensives necessary? The reason lies in the contradictory character of capitalism itself.
So why are these propaganda offensives necessary?
IN SPITE OF their condemnation of revolutions, that is how the capitalist class came to power. To establish the conditions for the development of capitalism, they had to overthrow the aristocracy, the landlords, and the material power of the church as major land owners. They needed workers to be free' to move off the land and sell their labour to the capitalists. They challenged the 'superiority and 'natural right to rule of the feudal lords and church in the name of freedom and equality, so they could have access to political power.
Having carried through their revolution, they constructed a society which for the vast majority was unequal and oppressive. Since everyone could not be equal or free, they had to explain inequality between the classes but also between the races and sexes. They did so by constructing a theory of human nature. They argued that anyone in capitalist society could become rich. If you did not, then it was not because the system had stacked things against you. It was because 'abilities' are not 'naturally' equally shared out. Science, of course, was very important to the capitalists in undermining the old order and in revolutionising technique. It was pressed into service in the cause of explaining inequality. The explanations have changed over the centuries. Some seem laughable today. Today's rationalisations seem ludicrous tomorrow. For example, inwill equality between men and women and between whites and blacks was explained by trying to prove differences in brain size. Of course, brain size is related to body size. Theories were put forward to justify imperialist policies by emphasising the more prominent brows and jaws of some Africans, depicting them as being closer to the apes.
There were also theories that criminals were born and had identifiable physical characteristics. And it wasn't just criminals. In a book by Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary, the upper class hero is watching the arrival of a trade unionist: Nature or Nurture • 21
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Class has always affected testing.
"The man who came up the staircase with _a soft-footed tread was quite unknown to Tommy. He was obviously the very dregs of society. The low beetling brows, and the criminal jaw, the bestiality of the whole countenance, were new to the young man, though he was a type that Scotland Yard would have recognised at a glance". the arguments today. Artly the claim that HERE ARE REALLY two main strands to people are unequal in society because they have different abilities. These abilities are part of genetic make-up. They are passed on from So, although education generation to generation.
and a stimulating environment, for example, could the extent to which people developed their abilities, it would obviously be better to spend more time and effort on people who came from good genetic stock (the wealthy) rather than poor genetic stock (working class children). If you fully developed someone from good genetic stock you would end up with a genius. The best the working class would achieve would be mediocrity. were given credence by the These arguments so-called 'research' of Sir Cyril Burt, who perpetrated one of the biggest intellectual frauds of all time. He claimed he had done a study to show that identical twins who were separated at birth, and therefore brought up in different environments, had very similar intellectual ability. Because they had been brought up in different environments the similarity must be accounted for by inherited features. This provided the basis for IQ tests. Leaving aside the fact that the environments of those separated twins who could be traced were not all that different - for example, they were brought up next door to one another, played together, went to school together - it turned out that the research assistants he said he had employed and that he himself had never never existed carried out the research. In fact he made the whole thing up.
22 • Nature or Nurture More important than his faking research is the fact that he was unchallenged for so long. He produced results which fitted contemporary prejudices which he unswervingly shared. For example, in 1937 he wrote a book called The Backward Child, a study of backward London school children so classified because they were one year behind their schoolwork. Looking at their a 73% correlation with environment, he found the poverty line; with overcrowding, living below 89%; unemployment, 68%; and with juvenile mor- 93%. The case would seem to be made for the influence of social conditions on educational attainment. But what did Cyril Burt conclude? That the innately poorest 'stock' create and then gravitate to the worst boroughs and that the degree of poverty is a general measure of 'genetic worthlessness'. This is just an earlier version of today's fashionable 'underclass' theory, even though that is now being presented as something new. Originally IQ tests were developed in France by Binet, who was trying to identify differences in achievement to introduce special courses develop those who had learning difficulties. He did not suggest that intelligence was an innate, fixed characteristic, arguing that "we must protest and react against this brutal pessimism". However, IQ tests were used to justify consigning working class children into inferior education under the old selection system that the Tories are now surruptitiously reintroducing. Significantly, there is also now a campaign underway to re-habilitate Sir Cyril Burt.
IQ tests were used to justify consigning working class children into inferior education.
The second strand of argument was that not only were differences between individuals decided by biology, and were therefore unchangeable, but that the way in which society was organised, ie the capitalist way, was also natural and based on human characteristics that had been 'selected' through evolution and were therefore innate'. Writers such as Dart and Morris, who wrote The Naked Ape, argued that, to some extent, humans are aggressive, territorial and naturally drew their examples from male-dominated. They the animal world where there is a sense of territory, although not universally so. It is linked to particular situations, for example, protecting a nest, young or a food source. It can vary depending on available resources. It is also very chimpanzees and gorillas who range widely and who are considered our closest relatives. Confrontations over territory, food supplies etc,
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are very ritualised amongst animals. They boil down to displays of aggression rather than actual physical violence. In other words, aggression and terntoriality are not universal instincts but behaviour tuned to a particular life style and to changes in the availability of resources in the environment.
No one has been able to relate social behaviour to genes.
Such writers argue that hunting, which they characterise as an aggressive activity, was fundamental to the development of human society and this characteristic is now built into humans. But hunting also involves a range of skills, cooperation, patience and a knowledge of the movements and habits of animals. Singling out aggression merely reveals an attempt to justify a pre-conceived conclusion.
Such arguments have also been used to justify arms expenditure. After all, if aggression and therefore war are naturally built into society, it is best to be successfully aggressive and armed to the teeth. Whatever may be the case concerning territoriality and aggression amongst animals, wars in modern society are not 'spontaneous eruptions of innate aggression'. They are planned and calculated by the ruling class for gain. The state and ideology play an important role in mobilising a population for war. Even so it can come up against resistance and armies can collapse, as in the 1917 Russian revolution and the US army in Vietnam.
Such ideas are merely speculation. Even if we accept the link, it is difficult to think of any behaviour which is solely biologically determined. Even the most basic functions such as eating, sleeping and sex, are affected by culture and the environment as well as biological factors. What strikes anyone looking around the world is not its uniformity, the automatic working out of biological imperatives, but the enormously rich diversity of cultural expression and life styles. "HE CURRENT CAMPAIGN has highlighted T the role ahe camily Not only is aggression a built-in feature of human society, so, according to the dominant ideology of the capitalists, is the nuclear family, ie a husband, wife (usually financially dependent) and dependent children. Their argument is that this form of the family is natural and any deviation from it will produce dire social AH Halsey, described by the newpapers as 'an old-style socialist, is one of many 'experts' who has been recently wheeled out to pin the responsibility for social problems on the breakdown of the family. He attacks the left's refusal accept that the nuclear family is "the best model so far devised for individuals and society". The Sunday Times, in an editorial on 28 February, said: "For communities to function successfully they need families with fathers. In communities without fathers, the overwhelming evidence is that youngsters begin by running wild, and end up running foul of the law".
These ideas were a constant theme of the Tories under Thatcher. Ferdinand Mount, who was an adviser to Thatcher, believed that the nuclear family had always existed and was universal. In fact, there have been many ways in which people have organised their personal relationships. The family as a social institution, which is what the right are really talking about, has only existed relatively recently and can be traced to the development of private property. Even so such families were extended families, as is often the case in agricultural based communities today. It is part of the inherent racism of the 'moral right' that they ignore this.
The family as a social institution has changed along with society. The supplanting of agriculture by industry as the dominant form of production was accompanied by a shift from the extended family to the nuclear family. People have always rebelled against their personal relationships being hemmed in by a social institution which serves not just personal but economic needs. Otherwise, why the plethora of laws punishing adultery (for women) and the divorce laws concerned mainly with property?
Why does such a 'natural'
institution require religion, ideology and state laws to hold it together?
Why does such a 'natural' institution require the full force of religion, ideology and state laws to hold it together? The answer is that it is not natural that everyone should live in exactly the same sort of household but it is important to capitalism because it serves their interests. Behind the talk about the responsibility of parents which accompanied the introduction of the Child Support Act, is the naked intention of cutting public expenditure.
The growth in single parenthood is not a symptom of moral decline. It is a social process brought about in the main by the increased confidence of women who will not tolerate abusive behaviour and who prefer to try to survive by themselves, although many will hope to form other, better, personal relations. They are able to survive economically because in the past the capitalists were Nature or Nurture • 23
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SCOTsH CAMPAIGN AGAIN FREE KRANT AHLUNALL STOP VIOLENCEAGANST WOMEN.
FICHT THE CHED SUPPORT ACT.
PROPER BENEFTS Campaigning against the Child Support Act. forced by fear of the working class to provide benefits to ensure people did not starve, provision of local authority housing also had a A third of marriages end in divorce because of a breakdown in the relationship.
This happens for a variety of reasons, including the pressures of government policy and of living in a capitalist society. It can also be because many people develop throughout their lives and relationships can weaken as a result. People no longer feel forced to tolerate an inadequate or destructive situation. Although relationships are clearly affected by society, in continue a relationship or not, is a the end, to personal decision.
Halsey, and many others, have recently claimed that there is evidence that 'childen of single parents are relatively disadvantaged in every area of life'. In the US and Britain the implication is that children live in poverty, and have worse housing and education, not because of the economic system under which we live denies their parent the right to work, childcare or decent benefits, but because of the irresponsibility of their mother and/or father and the absence of a male role model. The provision of benefits merely encourages irresponsibility, hence cuts in benefit and the Child Support US social scientist Charles Murray, who has many supporters in the Tory cabinet, has developed the idea of the 'underclass'; of the unemployed who are simply workshy, and of single parents who produce children because is fun and children are endearing and the state will pay their benefits. Crime has risen because illegitimacy He further argues that poverty is the lifestyle 24 • Nature or Nurture of the underclass. There is no point in throwing government money at poor areas. He points out that poverty grew in the US as public expenditure grew. In fact, this had nothing to do with benefits encouraging more people to adopt 'deviant' lifestyles, as he argues, but had a lot to do with the weak state of the economy, the replacement of full-time, better paid work with part-time, casual, low paid work, (which amongst other things people on benefits could be worse off if they took a job because of the poverty trap'), the growth of the elderly population and so on. for any of There is not a shred of evidence the right's assertions. The children of single parents are no more likely to commit crime than any others in their area. Many of the genuine problems children do suffer are a consequence of conflict between their parents before their mother became a single parent, and of the poverty single parents experence as a product of Tory policy. Of course many children in two-parent families also suffer from conflict between parents, from abuse and Murray and others are quoted as authorities and feted, because what they say coincides with what the capitalists want to hear. Murray and others provide the arguments for governments who want to portray social degeneration as the result of the behaviour of the poor, those capitalism has failed, and not the result of government policy and the capitalist system.
class-based society, has always had a tendency to try to cram everything and everyone into hierarchies. Even if we accept the argument that abilities were unequally given out naturally, why should that lead to inequality? Why should people who play one role in society be worse off than those who play a different role, especially if there's nothing they can do about it? If we accept that the role of women in giving birth to and rearing children led to a differentiation in the role of men and women, why should those who play such an important role in the production well-being of future generations be classed as inferior and treated accordingly? It reflects a society based on commodities and wage labour. It reflects capitalist values.
it were true that childbearing and childrearing resulted in disadvantages for women in early Roman and Greek society, for example, why should that still be the case now? There is nothing biological which prevents maternity leave, benefits, a shorter working week and community childcare, enabling both men and women to participate in bringing up children and being part That is decided by government of the workforce.
policy and what is in the interest of capitalism. On the other hand, human beings are not just like plasticine moulded by their environment. One of the reasons for the success of humanity has'
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GERRE LABOUR WOMENS Militant on a Campaign Against Domestic Violence demonstration. tant NO CUTS ERVICES END MESTIC OLENCE been its ability to affect and shape its environment. Human beings have a biology which allows for a vast range of activity, cultural expression and life styles.
But through the purposeful banding together of humanity they increased their chances of survival and achieved advances through the development of technique which would have been as individuals. Biology, for example, impossible has determined that no matter how hard we wave our arms up and down we are not likely to develop wings and fly. But by banding together, through invention and social production, aeroplanes have been produced which mean that potentially everybody can fly.
Our biology means that at some point everyone dies but how we organise the quality of life and within limits can increase the average lifespan.
A 19th century German philosopher. Feuerbach. tried to show how all reflection of our biology. At the time this was revolutionary. It was a blow against the mystical ideas of religion. But Marx produced an account of his own ideas which challenged this crude approach. He put forward instead the idea of 'dialectical materialism', of the active relationship between humanity, biology and society, constantly hanging and being changed by one another n his Theses on Feuerbach he wrote: «Thi materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstance and upbringing, and that therefore changed men are a product of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that change circumstances".
Ideas are important to the ruling class to mislead NO Milita CUTS slaViolence SEE the working class in is to change it".
society can influence and Leon Kamin. £6-99.
social processes were a Gould. £7-99.
£8-99.
that it is men A PRIGH CORRECT SENT CHESTER Stopistence its struggle for a better society. In the end capitalist ideology is challenged by the working class because it serves the interests of the ruling class and not its own. By understanding their use of ideology we can explain what they are up to and direct our energies and our programme more effectively in the struggle for a socialist society. As Marx said, "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point Further reading.
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature, by Steven Rose, RC Lewontin The Family and the New Right, by Pamela Abbots and Claire Wallace. £10-95.
The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English culture, 1830-1980, by Elaine Showalter. All titles available from World Socialist Books, 3/13 Hepscott Road, London E9 5HB. For orders under £10, add 10% for postage and packing. Cheques payable to World Socialist Books. Nature or Nurture • 25
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letters
Dear Comrades,
Could we have an update on the colonial revolution for a future MIR? I would envisage material which looked back to the revolutions in the 1970s, in the era of the oil crisis and the first post-war world slump, and those in the early 1980s such as the Philippines, with an analysis of the different kinds of struggle that took place (guerilla wars, army coups and so on) and what the situation is now in those countries.
Bringing it up to date, I would like an explanation of why the 'Asian Tigers' have developed and why certain Latin American countries have been booming. What do these say about the possibility of capitalism 'developing the excolonial world?
I know it is a big subject but I think we need a world view of the colonial revolution. Has
Dear Friends,
Thank you for including a review of Strike Across the Empire:
The 1925 Seamen's Strike by Baruch Hirson and Lorraine Vivian in MIR 50. We are obviously pleased that you included the review but would like to make one comment.
In the final paragraph, Richard Knights states that the strike "was eventually broken by the use of 12,000 scabs, some of them foreign seamen", and he continues "this fuelled racist overtones laid by the refusal of the National Sailors and Firemens'
Union (NSFU) to organise foreign seamen in the UK fleet".
I wondered, as I read this, whether the reviewer had perhaps read another text. The strike collapsed because the seamen in
26 • Letters