“Private schools are for weaklings,” an older relative of mine liked to say. She continued, “When I gave my presentation to kids at Iolani School, I noticed they leave their backpacks and laptops out unattended. Any schoolmate could swipe their stuff. Remember the public schools we went to? We and everyone else there knew better. If I have kids, that’s why I’m sending them to public school. That’ll toughen them up.”
The implication of this rant greatly offended me. I wanted to say, “Would you also get drunk and beat them up? By your logic, that’ll really make ‘em tough!”
Sadly, while very few people would choose government schools over private schools for the reason my relative gave, many people do agree with a particular pernicious philosophic premise of hers. Most people believe that your personality as an adult — including how tenacious you are — is determined by circumstances entirely external to your conscious choices.
That is the premise behind the very term “Nature vs. Nurture debate” — what gave you your personality were either environmental circumstances in which you grew up, which were beyond your choosing, or some inborn biology that was beyond your choosing. With “Nature” (meaning inborn biology) and “Nurture” (meaning environmental circumstances) presented as the only two possibilities, your own choices are not even countenanced as a possible factor in making you who you are. Incidentally, it is not an accident that the very expression “Nature vs. Nature” was coined by Francis Galton, the biological determinist founder of eugenics.
My older relative’s rant was a manifestation of the “nurture” side of that false dichotomy. The implication is that the degree to which you are tough as an adult was mainly a consequence of unpleasant circumstances being imposed on you. The assumption is that if you were in pleasant surroundings as a child, it would make you soft and weak. By contrast, the assumption goes, if some unpleasantness is imposed on you, it will make you strong. In this interpretation, you are a passive receptacle. Further in this interpretation, it is your environmental circumstances that are active, actively molding you.
The reality is far different. The very same difficulty can be thrust on two different people who grew up in the same sort of environment. They might even be blood relatives. Despite these similarities in genetics and environment, one of these people may rise to the challenge while the other may not. The reason is simple. Difficult circumstances are not the main factor in making anyone tough; it’s the person’s choices. Insofar as you rise to some challenge in circumstances, the approach you took and even the lessons you drew were primarily up to you.
Toughness is not a passive response to circumstances; it is a proactive choice. And, to a large extent, a tough person doesn’t have to have difficulties imposed for him or her to undertake creative projects that require discipline. For that reason, a child does not need for adults to impose harsh circumstances upon him for him to learn discipline. All he needs is to be encouraged and supported in following through on the goals he set for himself.
In 1903, a member of the New Thought movement, James Allen, published a self-help book titled As a Man Thinketh. It emphasized that your well-being as an adult is mostly the result of your own choices. It was too harsh for my taste in saying that if you are poor in the USA, it is your own fault. However, the book also provided some wise words that are most pertinent to this discussion: “Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.”
As pointed out to me by Maus Merryjest, Epictetus understood this as well. The Stoic philosopher put it, “It is circumstances (difficulties) that show what men are” (Discourses, Bk. 1, Ch. 24, lines 1–2).
Also helpful are some ponderings from yet another Stoic philosopher, the emperor Marcus Aurelius:
You need never believe that anyone who depends upon happiness [to come from circumstances external to the self] is happy! ...that joy which springs wholly from oneself [one’s own choices] is legal and sound... All things that Fortune looks upon become productive and pleasant only if he who possesses them is in possession also of himself...For men make a mistake, my dear Lucius, if they hold that anything good, or evil either, is bestowed upon us by Fortune; it is simply the raw materials of Goods and Ills that she gives to us — the source of things which, in our keeping [choices], will develop into good or ill... ...the upright and honest man corrects the wrongs of Fortune...
On Friday, September 10, 2021, I added the quotation from Epictetus about hard times showing what men are.
