What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [121]
In spite of their being taken to the opera once a month, learning to eat chèvre, gardening with Daddy, and taking tuba lessons, Joan and Sarah are no more likely both to like opera, chèvre, the tuba, or gardening than any two random kids—once you take genetic similarity into account. So even though they start with similar personalities and are raised in practically the same way—same parents, same teachers, same strict discipline, same church, same allowances—Sarah and Joan turn out to be very different adults.
Freedom and Depth
Childhood events—even childhood trauma—and childrearing appear to have only weak effects on adult life. Childhood, contrary to popular belief, does not seem, empirically, to be particularly formative. So, contrary to popular belief, we are not prisoners of our past. How we were raised—by martinets swatting our little fingers with rulers or by permissive parents of Spock (the pediatrician, not the Vulcan) persuasion; how we were fed—on demand or on schedule, on breast or on bottle; even mother’s death, parents’ divorcing, and being second-born exert, at most, small influences on what we are like as adults. We do not need to go through elaborate exorcisms, like ceremonially divorcing our parents, to change our lives.
As adults, we are indeed free to change. I believe that most of the hoary free-will controversy has been empty, full of false dichotomies and reifications: “Is all action strictly determined by the past, or is it sometimes a product of free choice?” “Do we have a faculty of free will?” “Can human beings participate in their own salvation, or is it a gift of God?”
I believe that these questions stem in large part from a misunderstanding about words. With opposites, we sometimes understand both words fully. Both members of the pair can be known separately. Sweet and sour, smart and stupid, are examples. Sweetness, sourness, smartness, and stupidity all exist, and have meanings definable without reference to their opposites. But sometimes we understand and can define only one member of a pair fully, and the other means nothing more than the absence of the first. We know what embarrassed means, but unembarrassed means nothing more than “not embarrassed.” There is such a thing as embarrassment, but there is no such thing as unembarrassment. Embarrassed can be defined without reference to unembarrassed, but the reverse is not true. Colored and colorless, finitude and infinity, are like this. Insanity and sanity, disease and health, abnormality and normality, have generated disputes, with scholars manufacturing qualities of sanity or health or normality, when all these concepts amount to is the absence of insanity, the absence of disease, and the absence of abnormality.14
The attempt to define free will is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be coerced. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more.
Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance