The Nomadic Alternative – Page 16

coincide with so many vested interests, this tempted another sort of progressive thinker to emancipate himself from the very idea of human nature and deny its existence. Man, they said, does what he likes. He has no instincts. No Nature. Only Culture. He is infinitely malleable and adaptable, at birth a blank slate – the proverbial tabula rasa – on which his parents and relatives had the power to condition his future. The kaleidoscope of existing cultures resulted from the compound experience of man; as this experience grew, he faced an ever increasing number of cultural possibilities and value judgements, the product of numberless borrowings, reshufflings and restructurings. As culture progressed, instincts were stifled and suppressed. Now there are none left, but the clinging reflexes of a newborn child towards its mother and these wear off rapidly after birth. An animal, activated by instinctive patterns of behaviour, may be able to survive on its own; but if a child is deprived of human contact, it suffers a complete mental breakdown and becomes a moron, incapable of symbolic thought or moral judgements, flailing in a grey twilight of incomprehension. The pitiful stories of the ‘wild children’, Kaspar Hauser of the Boy of the Aveyron, are held to prove man’s lack of instinct.

I confess I find this attitude wholly mystifying. Though seemingly benign, it has overtones more sinister than anything the aggression pedlars have to offer. If man is infinitely malleable, he is infinitely susceptible to brainwashing. And this he is not. Instincts are what Pascal called the “reasons of the heart of which the Reason knows nothing”. And if man has none, he has no standard of behaviour, no inner life of any kind, the discovery of his subconscious will be a nonsense, his dreams meaningless, and religion of any kind a farce. Adherents to this idea are perhaps overconcerned with their own rugged individuality, and are, I suspect, usually less impressed by the human capacity to learn than their capacity to teach.