Behavior versus Behaviorism: Tabula Rasa and Gender Ideology

Konrad Lorenz
Nobel Foundation Archive

The theory that holds that we are a blank slate, on which someone (perhaps ourselves) should write our character and our behavior is quite old. It could go back at least to Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and actuality, according to which the human soul is born in a state of potentiality, like an unwritten tablet, and must become an actuality:

What [the intellect] thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind. (On the Soul).

This idea was recovered by medieval philosophers such as Avicenna and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and later in the 17th century by John Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he replaced the term Tabula Rasa by White Paper:

For such who are careful... to principle children well... instill into the unwary, and as yet unprejudiced understanding, (for white paper receives any characters) those doctrines they would have them retain and profess.

And later he adds:

Suppose the mind to be, as we say, a white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished?

B.F. Skinner

In the twentieth century, these ideas were framed in the great dispute of the practitioners of the new science of psychology about whether the human mind is mainly the result of its genes (i.e. programmed from the beginning and mainly instinctive) or it is shaped by education (nature versus nurture). Freud opted for the second alternative. In the middle of the century, B.F. Skinner became the main representative of the movement called Radical Behaviorism, which argues that education plays an essential and critical role to determine all our behavior, as explained in Skinner’s novel Walden Two (1948). When I read this novel in 1982, I wasn’t convinced.

The debate was resolved during the seventies to nineties thanks to a series of studies with identical twins separated at birth, which unquestionably proved the influence of both sources (genes and education) on the human mind, forever discrediting Radical Behaviorism and the Tabula Rasa theory.

Konrad Lorenz received the 1973 Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in the science of Ethology, which studies the behavior of living beings (and therefore also of man). This behavioral expert opposed strongly Radical Behaviorism, which he considers one of the civilized man’s eight deadly sins (1973). In chapter 8 of this book, devoted entirely to combating Behaviorism and meaningfully titled Indoctrinability, Lorenz says the following:

But the decisive step in the formation of a doctrine, in the strict sense of the term, is taken... when to the mentioned supported forces of a theory an all-too-large number of supporters is added... Then that doctrine is defended with the same tenacity and identical passion as if a proven prescription had to be preserved against annihilation... Those who don’t agree with such opinion will suffer: they’ll be stigmatized... they’ll be slandered and, if possible, discredited. In short, the highly specialized reaction... of social hatred, will be unleashed upon them... Any fact that contradicts it is denied or discounted, or - even more frequent - buried away in Sigmund Freud’s sense, i.e. banished under the threshold of consciousness. The oppressor opposes a bitter and passionate resistance to every attempt to return to the level of conscious thought what has been buried away; a more tenacious resistance the greater the change demanded on his thesis... But indoctrination begins to have satanic effects only when it unites vast human conglomerates, whole continents, even the whole of humanity in a single, or erroneous, evil creed.

In the 1970s, as a final attempt before the Behaviorist theory was invalidated, John Money and other radical Behaviorist psychologists claimed that sexual identity (or gender identity, as they preferred to call it) is the result of a social construction and has nothing to do with genes. Despite being scientifically discredited, this theory has become the dominant ideology of our time. Note that everything Lorenz says about Behaviorism is perfectly applicable to its successor, the Gender Ideology, which when he wrote those words was far from having the diffusion it has reached today.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on What is Man?: Previous Next
Thematic Thread on Politics and Economy: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca