Another example of the unreliability of poorly-informed public opinion as the guide to legislative action.
In Modern Predestination, which appears on the City Journal website, Theodore Dalrymple comments upon the dangerous notion that misconduct is genetic. He writes:
How do bad ideas spread and enter the general stock of received wisdom?
One culprit is sloppy or uncritical newspaper reporting. For example, a recent small item on the front page of the [UK] Sunday Times....... “Scientists have discovered an answer to one of the most intractable squabbles in family life—argumentative children are born and not made.”
According to the article, new research has found antisocial traits to be inherited rather than acquired ...... a bad child would be bad however he or she was brought up.... There is no such thing as parental responsibility, except perhaps in material provision.
Mr. Dalrymple notes that such speculation is not new and that it is unlikely to be true.
The sloppy readiness to print anything “scientific,” if it supports an editorial viewpoint, is characteristic of the New York Times. Particularly so in the oft repeated assertion that the greenhouse-gas hypothesis of global warming has been conclusively proved.
For our Baby Boomers and today’s youth, impoverished by PC education and not trained to think critically (see former Harvard president Derek Bok’s remarks to that effect), the knee-jerk reaction is to accept as true anything labeled scientific. Needless to say, this calls into question the worth of public opinion polls on the Kyoto Protocols.
An interesting sidelight is that unquestioning acceptance of the Sunday Times article introduces a fundamental impasse. If bad behavior is genetically predetermined, then socialism’s fundamental premise is wrong.
The materialistic doctrine of socialism is that external, material factors such as government regulations determine humans’ nature and behavior. Eliminating private property is supposed to change human nature by eliminating sources of envy, aggression, crime, and war. Can regulatory bureaucrats also alter human genetic makeup?
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