The Ultimate Solution:
I’ve found the ultimate solution in The Blank Slate, by Dr. Steven Pinker, one of many books by one of many academics who has come to all the same conclusions I have in his own way. His book is very insightful and focuses on the basic premise of this book in excruciating detail, and includes a bibliography made up of 925 reference sources, by my count. It doesn’t cover nearly as broad a scope as this book, but it includes a lot of research that I didn’t do myself or couldn’t’ve done myself (like neural imaging of brainwave patterns), and he does make a few connections that I hadn’t thought of.
The ultimate solution I’ve found isn’t in what Dr. Pinker did, but in what he didn’t do. In spite of the immensity of that book’s insightfulness, the value of its conclusions, and its legitimacy within the scientific community, to the average non-intellectual, I imagine reading that book would be slightly less enjoyable than driving an ice pick into your forehead repeatedly. I can summarize most of the book in one sentence: “Scientists are making great advances in using modern science to discover the origins of human behavior, but a lot of people have a problem with that.”
By measuring the forces of human nature objectively, scientists are able to expand humanity’s perspective on itself, which allows people to put that new information to constructive use. For instance, parents are more likely to abuse adopted children than they are to abuse their own biological children, for the basic evolutionary reason that their biological children carry the parents’ genes and adopted children don’t. Does that mean that adoptive parents ought to be watched closely by the Department of Human Services? Not quite. Just because they are more likely to abuse their children, the great majority of parents don’t abuse their adopted children. But now that people know this piece of information, they can decide how to use it. If people didn’t know about it, the only course of action they could pursue would be to assume that parents don’t abuse adopted children more often than they do their biological children, so a bunch of adopted children would get abused by their stepparents, and nobody would ever realize it was a problem.
A lot of people for a lot of different reasons, mostly religious, political, traditional, and emotional, don’t want to believe that scientists can study people the way they study laboratory mice or any other species of animal in the world. As a result, the progress of scientific study is faced with a constant battle for acceptance, scientists get denied governmental grants, politicians ban their research, centers for research get shut down by demonstrators, all kinds of things. Usually it happens because scientists get misquoted, misinterpreted, and misrepresented by politicians, religious leaders, and the general public who can’t even grasp what the scientists are doing.
Here’s another good example. It is a simple product of evolution that men are prone to seek out more sexual partners than women are, just because having children is a lot more work for women than it is for men. Whether you look at humans or any other species of mammals, the females have good reason to be selective about their mates, and males… well, males don’t really care that much. (Guys, am I right, or am I?) Obviously in that interaction, in order for one side to get what it wants the other side has to lose.
The politically correct thing to do is to deny that fact of human nature, expect men to learn to be content with fewer sexual partners than they want, and accuse all rapists of being inherently wicked. But where did that wickedness originate? What do you do about it? How do you correct it? The way the government in America is set up at the moment, it recognizes that men might want to have sex more often than women do, but women have the right not to get raped.
Unfortunately, if all you do about it is to insist that men ought to know better and that anybody can be trained to accept anything at all just because people say they should, then it would be just as easy for a male-dominated society (like our own) to decide that women should just expect to get raped every so often and learn to live with that. Anybody see a problem here yet?
So that’s what all the academics are up against, ultimately—people trying to force scientists to discover what the people want to believe, what religions have been preaching for hundreds or thousands of years, and what will earn votes for politicians. Unfortunately, science just doesn’t work that way.
That’s where me and my ultimate solution come in. I have something on my side that the academics weren’t counting on: the youth of America (and the young at heart). The academics are running into all kinds of cultural obstacles that they just can’t overcome. But the youth of America are the ones who create culture, and they don’t need any authority figures’ permission to do it. For that matter, the more traditions they can upset and the more authority figures they can piss off in the process of inventing their new cultures, the better. Have you ever heard of a bunch of middle-aged academics coming up with new styles of music, clothing, or art within the history of the recorded music industry? Neither have I. But the academics are the ones figuring out what’s going on in the world, and the youth of America are the ones who are trying to figure out what’s going on in the world, who feel like there must be an answer, and who would be willing to accept any answer as long as it worked, no matter who figured it out or how.
All it would take would be for someone to make sense of the world in a way that would satisfy everyone—that the scientists agreed with and the young people could understand. There’s all the cultural acceptance for scientific discovery anyone will ever need. It might take a decade or so to take root, but it’s the best idea anyone seems to have at the moment. So, ladies and gentlemen of the academic world, don’t worry about a thing; I’ve got it all covered…
ROCK AND ROLL IS HERE TO SAVE THE DAY!!!!!