dmariel Post Blog

In class on Tuesday we touched on the idea of nature vs. nurture referring to Marx’s statement “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being which determines their consciousness”. The questions is: Is it your class structure or your genetics that determine your consciousness? I always found the debate of nature vs nurture very complex and interesting, but this is the first time I have approached it in relation to culture and politics. In reference to the example we did in class, we have come to learn that Mercedes means high class and luxurious, whereas GM is the ‘average’ American car dealer. We learn these generalizations through signs and symbols and the way that we interpret them. Barthes would say that mythologies get created by this type of communication, whereas Althusser would say that ideology saturates everyday speech in the form of common sense. In Thursdays class, we furthered this idea with Althusser when talking about the author and the reader living naturally in ideology. Althusser would argue that there is nothing natural in this world unless it appears in nature. I would agree-I think that everything we do as humans we have learned. It does not exist genetically within our DNA. Consistency in our lives produces a ‘natural’ lifestyle. Therefore, our social beings (unconsciously) determine our consciousness.
In my Contemporary Jewish thought class this week we had a visiting rabbi that talked about the nature vs nurture debate. We discussed whether or not gender is an illusion or if it genetically exists. Do women have a gene for motherly characteristics or is it something that has been repetitively produced in our society? I believe that clearly there are opposite sex but that gender roles are completely learned and arbitrary. The only things that we innately know are aspects of nature-our needs to eat, sleep, etc..We do not ever question what appears ‘normal’ to us so we come to believe that it is natural.