A little essay about the evils of Tabula Rosa–the idea that all people are born alike and can be easily molded by government. This is a truly toxic idea that is behind the current refugee crisis in Europe. Germany will not be able to digest Muslim immigrants no matter how hard they try and the evidence is everywhere. Just consider blacks in the US and gypsies in Europe. Lots of other examples, too. R.W.
Ideas have consequences but these can be deadly. Think the millions killed in seemingly endless religious strife and the carnage fueled by Marxism and Nazism. But less obvious is the damage inflicted by barely acknowledged bad ideas. The parallel might be death by carbon monoxide—scarcely noticed and almost painless but in the long run no less destructive than terrorism.
In today’s political landscape, the doctrine of human nature as a blank slate illustrates this carbon monoxide-like harm. Indeed, this culprit is so imperceptible that it barely makes any list of threats and those who embrace it often are actually celebrated for their hopeful views.
The blank slate view, frequently called by its Latin name Tabula Rasa basically holds that all humans are born without any mental content so, for better or worse, they are creatures of the environment. The opposite is that many human traits are hard-wired genetically and thus impervious to environmental manipulation. Going one step further, as a result of evolutionary divergence people sharing similar physical traits, for example, members of various racial or ethnic groups, differ at birth in terms of propensity for violence, intellectual ability, and multiple other readily measureable (and often obvious) dispositions. Current unspeakable popular stereotypes reflect this reality—the hard-working orderly German or the loquacious Irish. Note well—no psychologist who studies this subject claims that innate group differences are totally determinative. There will always be some lazy Germans or tongue-tied Irishmen.
