A nature can never be made to change; what has been once formed in it cannot be reformed by any sort of change. Change does not involve the nature itself; it necessarily modifies, but does not transform the structure - Clement of Alexandria
I discovered that
something was wrong when I was thirteen. My mother and I had been taken in by
an aunt and uncle, and my aunt - who was a ward sister in a mental hospital -
noticed that when I ate, I held the knife in my left hand and the fork in my
right. She thought this should be corrected, partly as a matter of social
etiquette and partly for the good of my mental health. My aunt was not an
eccentric; the forced conversion of left-handers has a long, worldwide cultural
history and Wikipedia can entertain you if you want to know more.
The situation was, in
fact, rather complicated. I am naturally right-handed and my aunt could see
that I wrote right-handed and that when I used my knife to spread butter on bread,
I held the knife in my right hand. And I was not ambidextrous: I couldn’t
spread butter on bread holding the knife in my left hand. But when it came to
knife and fork, I had to have the knife in the left.
My mother wasn’t
left-handed, as far as I know, but somehow she had mishanded or transhanded me
when, early on, she taught me how to hold a knife and fork. Despite my aunt’s
concerns, my mother declined to co-operate in putting the matter right. I
continued to eat meat and two veg with a knife in my left hand. This gave
strength to that hand and a lifetime later I still twist off jam jar lids and
open bottle caps with my left. But I uncork with my right and likewise hold a
bread knife in my right and the same for hammers, scissors, and so on.
When I got to
university, I discovered that something else was wrong. I sat down for the
first time in my college dining hall and confronted four pieces of cutlery
rather than the three I was familiar with. In addition to knife, fork and spoon
there was a second fork. I had not previously eaten puddings - things I grew up
calling afters - with two implements.
I used just a spoon. But now, it seemed, I was supposed to address apple pie
and custard with spoon and fork. On my first day at college table, I held back
and watched what other students were doing with this second fork and
discovered, as you may have worked out if you are with me so far, that I had a
problem. I had grown up to hold my main course fork in the right hand, and
likewise the solitary spoon used for afters.
Decision time. After a
bit of experiment, the spoon stayed in my right hand and the fork went to the
left where I suspect it is still not fully functional. But I conform to
etiquette and pick it up in restaurants, sometimes to the bafflement of servers
who have seen me switch knife and fork for main course and now see me switching
the fork back again.
There is a point to
this story. It probably explains why I tend to Manichaeism in all my thinking.
I believe in both Nature and Culture and in their interaction. There are some
things where I think Nature has the upper hand, and others where I think
Culture does. In addition, there are areas where the outcome of the interaction
might best be described as uncertain. But even with that qualification, were I
still looking for work, my Manicheanism would probably disqualify me from
teaching Cultural Studies, since it violates the first article, That all things are made Cultural and none
Natural.
This belief has been very successfully propagated in a very short
space of time despite being expressed in execrable prose and explains why, for
example, our Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) has converted the Sex I gave them many years ago to a Gender which I am not sure is mine. But
the word Sex to all intents and
purposes has been banished to outer darkness leaving me not much choice. As far
as I am concerned, I am male by nature and not very masculine by culture, but I
don’t expect the DVLA to get their heads around such subtleties and simply wish
they had stuck with the Sex.
In the past I did work
hard to articulate my core belief, without knowing that really it was all just
an attempt to understand how in life you can get to be transhanded. My academic
publication most cited according to Google Scholar, and in my own mind the one
over which I sweated most effort, is a defence of the coherence and
plausibility of Chomskyan linguistics, Language
in Mind and Language in Society (1987). The book goes beyond Chomsky’s core
concerns with how the human mind spontaneously develops the representation of a
language and tries to show how, within a Chomskyan paradigm, there is still
space for an account of an interaction between Nature and Culture in ways where
the outcomes are not always easily predictable. Language growth is indeed
triggered in the mind of human infants, but it is also to some degree shaped
even though in growing their language infants do not begin by targeting the language around them.
Infants are not heat-seeking missiles and they make their own way into language
by a more devious route than imagined in theories (easily falsified by
observation) which imagine language learning as a cumulative, straight line
affair in which culture is simply ladled into the child.
Later on, as teenagers
or adults, many of us will fine-tune our language - spoken and written - to
conform to what we think are prestige norms or political expectations. These
adaptive modifications are made using small mental Apps. But those quite often
get things wrong and are never comprehensive. You might not catch me out if we
talk about philosophy, but should I have occasion to tell you to pull your
trousers up you will probably spot that I have said trowzis as I still do despite much well-meaning correction. It was
just so early in life that I learnt about trowzis and I’m rarely on high enough
alert to defeat the past in the present. In contrast, in my writing life I have
willingly moved from he to he or she to they and I can do the last so that it does not clunk, seems to be
the natural thing.
The belief that all is
cultural and nothing natural does have a longer history than I have so far
implied. It fits well with any aspiration to control the lives of others.
Despite their belief in original sin and such like, most religions are
convinced that children can be moulded to fit, perhaps with some local
difficulties needing to be overcome by beatings and starvings. That religious conviction has been shared by
English public schools and by American behaviourist psychologists - Chomsky
earned some of his early fame from comprehensively trashing the mindless work
of the behaviourist, B F Skinner.
But the belief that humans can be shaped has
also been shared “on the left” where there is a long tradition of believing in
the perfectibility of human beings. The long philosophical tradition was then
reinvented in things like Soviet Pavlovian psychology and now in contemporary
gender theory.
The only comfort in all this is that it is just mistaken; beat and starve and shame on Twitter as much as you like and still human beings refuse to be shaped to order. It’s a wonderful if sometimes demanding thing that we live at the interface of nature and culture. But to my mind, it is the mark of authoritarian thinking to suggest that the interface does not exist, and that’s as true of those who believe that there is only Culture as those who believe that there’s only Nature.
The only comfort in all this is that it is just mistaken; beat and starve and shame on Twitter as much as you like and still human beings refuse to be shaped to order. It’s a wonderful if sometimes demanding thing that we live at the interface of nature and culture. But to my mind, it is the mark of authoritarian thinking to suggest that the interface does not exist, and that’s as true of those who believe that there is only Culture as those who believe that there’s only Nature.
But how the interface
works is a complicated affair, each aspect of it no doubt subtly different.
There are aspects which make humans more like cats and others which make them
more like dogs. When there is a choice available, my advice is to feed your
inner cat.
© Trevor Pateman 2019. First published here April 2019. The passage from Clement of Alexandria comes from his Christ the Educator, quoted in Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidences, page 108
© Trevor Pateman 2019. First published here April 2019. The passage from Clement of Alexandria comes from his Christ the Educator, quoted in Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidences, page 108
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