by Hugh M. Lewis

  Obviously, the present great differences in vigor and welfare between nations cannot be the result of differences in the performance of their elites but must be ascribed to differences in character of their masses. (Eric Hoffer 1973:59)

The first years of an infant’s life have been well mapped out by child behavior experts and child-care authorities. Yet the exact how and why of the miraculous development from a blind helplessly screaming neonate into a little walking, talking, misbehaving child remains an unsolved mystery baffling the experts but delighting parents around the world.

Central to this mystery has been the question of how and why a child acquires its first language abilities at an astonishing, almost phenomenal rate, and transforms within a few too brief years into a competently speaking and acting human being. And central to this question, and to the whole problem of human development, has been the long-standing debate of whether such acquisition is more a matter of nature or of nurture. Is it by virtue of genetic inheritance and biological programming that a child’s clock is set to invariably go off and necessitate the acquisition of her/his world competencies? Or is it by the exclusive virtue of social limitation, environmental enrichment and parental instruction that a child acquires and achieves development or not?

The question has been an important one, and has had a long history of philosophical, and later, scientific/humanistic debate. The tabula rasa or blank slate or ‘erased tablet,’ has been ‘applied figuratively to the mind on which no impression has been made by experience, as the mind of an infant.’ (Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1983) It was the Romantic Social philosopher Rousseau, who in reaction to the Encyclopedia salon rational enlightenment philosophers of his day, that we owe the conception of the ‘natural’ and ‘unfettered’ development of the child, in which social influence was deemed as interference. The debate has not been an exclusively Western one, but has had other Eastern style formulations upon whether human character was by nature good or evil--requiring either the intervention or interference of social authority. But the debate has also always had basic socio-political overtones and real world resonances in reform policies and the promulgation of social and educational ideologies, and it continues today, albeit, in a more modified and scientifically sophisticated manner.

A great deal of how we construct, and reconstruct, our world hinges upon how we answer this question. If nature is seen to be the governor of human character, then this belief can and has been used to legitimate ‘self-fulfilling’ social policies. Thus the rich are innately more achievement oriented and inherently successful because they have by natural right inherited their human superiority, while the poor are ‘Nature’s failures’ who lack the inherent potential for development. This line of reasoning, when carried to its logical extreme, promulgates a faith in varying versions of social Darwinism--‘selection of the fittest’ was applied to social process in the same manner that it was afterward applied to natural process. The lot of the poor and miserable must not be alleviated as social evolution inevitably works to eventually weed out the unfit. Social evolution is a purifying process in which ‘those not sufficiently complete to live should be allowed to die.’ 

It is not too difficult to see how this line of reasoning can be used to systematically discriminate and exclude certain categories of inferior human beings. Blacks, women, homosexuals, criminals, alcoholics and drug addicts, all represent inferior or weaker classes of human beings left out of competition in the social market place. It is not difficult to see how it can be used to justify and legitimate certain educational ‘tracking’ policies that tend to channel from a very young age people into two different trajectories in their development. There are those geared toward reproducing the lumpen proletariat and then those promised to fulfill the ranks of the professional and elite priesthood. It is not hard to see how, given such a social policy, those who are born poor become socially pre-conditioned to remain thus, whatever their incredibly average character.

On the other hand, extreme commitment to the other line of reasoning, of the absolute blank slate and infant silly putty, has led those more rationally enlightened to crusade for radical socio-political reforms that possibly ignored crucial individual differences in human variation and the important role that nature really does seem to play in child acquisition. It led somewhat unwittingly to spurious utopian presumptions that proved no less harmful than those of the opposite camp. Certain restricted cultural, linguistic and cognitive codes were somehow incomplete or inadequate for the purpose of comprehending and successfully transmitting rational science and technology, and the gap could be bridged by heavy doses of technical instruction in superior codes. The imperialistic presumptions of empowerment, and of bureaucratic, political economic encapsulations and enforced structural dependency within the capitalist world system, are not very deep beneath the surface of such extreme enlightenment ideology.

The nature/nurture debate, carried to either extreme, seems quite unsatisfactory, and even, from a strictly intellectual point of view, unnecessary. Though today few worth their weight would take an exclusive either/or position, the basic contrast between Nature and Nurture remains today as important as ever. This is not just because social action requires the kind of simplifying illusion that can only be sustained upon the logical extremes of strong determinism. It is also because sophisticated scientific theory and jargon often obscures a predominant commitment to one or the other orientation in the guiding questions of research and publication, even though a mixed, balanced and bi-directional systems causality is ostensibly professed. 

A holistic perspective that views the problem as essentially an counterproductive hen and egg dilemma runs across the positivistic grain of modern scientific praxis which depends upon naturalistic observation, empirical experimentation and verification, and upon a correspondence theory of language descriptivism. With such a science oriented worldview, synthetic and dialectical models implicit in complex ‘formal/functional’ systems theory and in historical and biographical narrative fundamentally contradict an extremely analytical orientation aimed at reduction of the complex to the essential and universal. It remains more subtly important what is taken to be more primary and pre-determinative in the overall process, or whether nature or nurture is the strongest influence. Answers of this kind can still lead us in certain directions of research while possibly ignoring other especially vital avenues of understanding.

Nevertheless, the nature/nurture debate, cast in its tacit political frame, obscures more scientifically interesting issues of the exact role that both play in the shaping process that goes on during early human development and the crucial questions of critical concern are exactly how much and in precisely what ways. Scientific researchers can and have adopted fruitful and productive ‘synthetic’ research orientations to the problem of child acquisition. Consider the conclusive statements made by John and Beatrice Whiting in the classical ‘Six Cultures’ study. They mention the two prevailing views: 1. Whether children in all cultures have the same developmental processes and sequences, without significantly important differences in the rate of development: or 2. That culture affects child development in profound ways such that developmental sequences are incomparable across cultural contexts.

Like so many dilemmas involved in the understanding of human reality, there is no simple or straightforward way off the horns of Nature or Nurture. We are left, something like Humpty Dumpty, to sit somewhat precariously upon a fence, to make what sense of nonsense we will.

The issue of Nature and Nurture has been important for deeper and less obvious reasons. All societies that have some form of traditional institutional order and corporate cultural history that transcends the individual biographies of its members, are centrally engaged in the critical moment of their own reproduction and cross-generational transmission. Not only does the adaptive success and survival of any society depend upon the success of its reproduction and transmission, but its progressive development, if it holds and puts into practice such ideals, also depends critically upon the same mechanisms of social reproduction and transmission. 'Only with the transmission of the social world to a new generation (that is, internalization as effectuated in socialization) does the fundamental social dialectic appear in its totality. To repeat, only with the appearance of a new generation can one properly speak of a social world.’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966:61)

The relative success or failure of a society therefore depends centrally upon its ability to reproduce itself in its newer generation. This a lesson long taught by teachers, parents, child-care experts and children, but one which our Modern World Society, technologically based as it is upon the hyper-development of the political- economic World System, has come to ignore. Technological development is being promoted, almost world- wide, at the expense of the promotion of human development. There is a sad and tragic trajectory in this for the future of our world society, as our children, and our children’s children, will be inheriting a world that may be ill suited to meet most of their human needs. 

Because non-relative measures of the quality of life have been next to impossible, it has been difficult to justify purely in economic terms the investment of social resources into improving the human condition that can be seen as a bottomless sinkhole without tangible, touchable, material results. But there remains a very real formula that investing resources into human development is an indirect way of ‘making more from less’ and that continued exclusive techno-environmental-economic development is leading down the road of diminishing returns--of getting less from more.

It is with this larger political issue looming in the background that this work is written treating the problem of early human development. It is not a new problem, but it is the mark of the basic wealth of human reality that it has not, and will not soon, become an exhausted and infertile ground for discovery.

Language remains at the center of this problem, because it is primarily via language that the world comes together and things fall apart. Language is both our naturalistic handle upon human nature, and our window upon the ‘seat’ of human culture and cognition. Language, and its critical absence, expresses and reveals human thoughts, feelings, moods, values, attitudes, beliefs, of the individual’s subjective world, as well as communicates information in the social coordination of practices and production. Language has the virtue, in spite of the inherent ephemeral nature of its broadcast transmission, of being quite amenable to scientific methods of analysis and study. It is something that happens as a discrete event of our senses, to which and from which general laws may be applied. Of course, in this work, unless otherwise specified, language will be used in the more general and comprehensive sense encompassing not only spoken and written forms of linguistic discourse, but para-linguistic, pragmatic, contextual, meta-linguistic and even ‘non-linguistic’ phenomena as well.

The purpose of this work is to promulgate and explore several of the dimensionalities of a basic synthetic theory that I have called organic human development that addresses the central issue of nature and nurture in the form of what I refer to as ‘the primary acquisition problem.’ Though the theory is synthetic, it nonetheless is not unamendable to analytical treatment of its various elements in relation to one another or as separate complex set of components, or in interrelation to the whole problem. This theory has not only important theoretical and philosophical implications, touching upon diverse fields of science, especially the intersection of developmental psychology, linguistics and cultural anthropology, but also has certain important teleological and ideological ramifications. The study will come to focus upon the life world of my own daughter, whom I shall call by her middle name Alyce, whom I know best of all children of the world, and yet as but one example among many.