Forming my newborn daughter

Since the birth of my daughter just over a week ago, I’ve been consciously aware the role my character, beliefs, habits, and so on, will play in influencing the calibre of a person she will turn up to be.

There’s nothing like a death or a birth to send one deep into introspection. When the people around us think a certain way, their thinking and judgment will invariably influence our own. Most of us do not like to be in open conflict with the company we keep, and children directly copy the methods of the environment and society they grow up in.

Our natural tendency is to align our opinions with those of our companions, especially when it is important to us to be looked upon favourably by them. Virtually under all circumstances, we unconsciously move towards a cognitive harmony with our parents, siblings, brethren, friends and associates. It’s a process by which our individual minds are fused imperceptibly into a group mind.

Of course, since time immemorial individuals have struck out on their own to find a different path more suited to their lights or maturing spirit. We have Abram leaving Ur to become Abraham and a father of believers in one God. But even that usually is a process of long personal deliberation with one’s self.

When I think about my children I get worried about how the worldly values might easily take a permanent hold on their persons, especially today under the guise of fashion. To me fashion is a creature of man’s mediocrity. But try telling that to the young.

Mediocrity betrays a lack of emotional insight, a gradual sanding away of self, and lack of self-control (emotionally and otherwise). Mediocrity is mortgaging one’s unique individual character for the vulgar taste of the mob.

I take comfort in what the scientists tell us, that human beings are not born into this world with minds like blank pages, waiting to be written on by others – family, church, politicians, advertising executives, and so on.

Homo sapiens emerged as a species a half-million years ago, during the Pleistocene period, and ever since have followed what is called the epigenetic rules. These are defined as innate operations in the sensory system of the brain. These are rules of thumb that allow organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment. They predispose individuals to view the world in a particular innate way and automatically to make certain choices based on their genetic code.

This is not to say that our genes explain every bit of human behaviour. In many species, evolution can be cultural as well as biological. Cultural beliefs and ideas or what some call memes, the cultural counterpart to genes pass from individual to individual or from group to group or are selected for survival.

Particularly in the case of homo sapiens, the processes of cultural evolution deserves at least an equal place alongside those of biological evolution.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has defined culture as a set of control mechanisms plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call programmes, for the governing of behaviour.

Those control mechanisms can be a powerful means of survival, more rapid and flexible in their response to environmental change than genetic variation alone.

Human evolutionary theory thus rests on the concept of a dual inheritance, in which genes and cultures both are powerful determinants and each co-evolves with the other. And culture, to a large extent, is co-determined by upbringing and that is where I come in as a parent.

The false glamour of the world is the one thing most dangerous to our children now. How then do we transmit true values to our children? How do I make sure my children take the path of magnificence, as opposed to glamour.

Magnificence produces awe; in contrast, glamour stokes desire. Glamour not only makes things look better than they really are, but also tends to edit out human complexity and the clash of values, preferring the satisfaction of diverse wants for immediate tradeoffs that do not always follow a good moral path.

As parents, we can do only so much; the rest is up to the individual and the grace of God.

Meantime, my spirit doth rejoices for the Lord has taken favour on us by choosing to make us the guardians of Umtha until she can decide for herself.