Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century
Breeding is a scholarly study of ideas about nature versus nurture, focusing chiefly on eighteenth-century Britain and drawing primarily on literary sources. Persons with more than a passing interest in these matters, even non-academics, are likely to find it well worth reading. Jenny Davidson, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia who is also a published novelist (for both adults and teens), claims that she wants “to keep all the intensity and precision of academic writing, and the virtues of specialization, but to make what I write at least potentially open to readers in other disciplines, or in other walks of life.” She succeeds. Breeding is both discerning and mostly free of literary studies jargon.
In the eighteenth century the word “breeding” connoted both bloodlines and upbringing, and Davidson observes that it continues to be charged with this tension between nature (a porous term that can take on many meanings) and nurture. In the 1700s “environmental” causes such as weather or nutrition were often invoked to explain human nature, health, and behavior. While it was recognized that children might look like their parents, it was not until the 1740s (in France) that a strong theory of bi-parental heredity emerged, and it remained controversial. By the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century period inheritance of moral or mental qualities as well as physical traits had become a topic of dispute, but we should remember that heredity was not understood very well at all until Mendel’s studies became more broadly known in the early twentieth century.
Davidson contends that in the 1700s nurture’s power to overcome nature was an article of faith, but that even the most vigorous nurture advocates were aware of nature’s influence. She points out that Locke, for example, allowed for natural differences in children (contrary Steven Pinker’s assertions in The Blank Slate). She highlights the prominence of the “prose georgic” of the period, literary works in which man transformed the environment by means of hard work (for instance, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker, and many manuals on agriculture). “The fantasy of improvement — improvement of children in the form of education, improvement of landscapes by a whole host of techniques of cultivation — was very widely held in eighteenth-century Britain, to the point that the period’s orientation toward culture and cultivation is taken to be one of its most striking and distinctive features,” she writes.
For me, two high-value insights, in particular, help to make this work especially outstanding. First, Davidson connects the breeding debate all the way back to Augustine and the question of whether “man’s sinfulness was a matter of birth or whether he chose freely to sin.” She asserts that “… the ways we understand and explain new developments in science are profoundly inflected by older framings of similar questions.” I will pick one example that I think helps make her point. In eighteenth century many believed that what the mother thought or imagined during pregnancy could affect the characteristics of the child (for instance, a strawberry-like birthmark might be attributed to the mother’s craving for strawberries). That seems not so much different from today, when we believe that what the mother eats, drinks, or otherwise ingests during pregnancy can affect the health of the fetus, however much our current beliefs are supported by science.
Second, Davidson notes that now we see the peril of determinism coming from genetics, whereas in the eighteenth century writers frequently saw free will as threatened by environment, custom, and habit. Crediting others (Mary Midgley and Jay Fliegelman), she calls attention to the fact that it is not obvious that the influence of nature (heredity) is somehow more deterministic than that of nurture (education) — our freedom is protected, in part, by the fact that we are not entirely malleable after all.
Still today there are humanists who want to dismiss scientific findings regarding the contributions of heredity, and one-dimensional scientists who view humanistic inquiry as a waste of time and intellect. Someone ought to put them all in a (possibly very big) room to listen to Davidson for a few hours, or maybe just pass along a copy of this book to any you may know.
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