If you haven’t read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel yet, you should (full disclosure: I’ve read a lot about it but it’s on my to-read list as well).
At the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog, Nathaniel Whittemore lays out the book’s basic premise…
The essence of the argument is a total rejection of the notion that one group of people or another was natively smarter. Certain conditions led particularly societies to more quickly develop the capacity for production, politics, and war, and as those societies moved outward, they had advantages that allowed them to dominate others.
… and applies that thinking closer-to-home, incorporating a related lesson from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers as well:
The point is that in understanding why some succeed and others don’t, the environment in which innate capacity is nurtured (or not) is as essential as that capacity itself in determining how it will manifest.
It’s really hard to understand exactly how “nature via nurture” works (to use Matt Ridley’s phrase — by the way, another must-read). It’s something that takes practice (like riding a bike), not something you just “get” (like 2+2=4).
It takes time to learn not to look at the world in terms of absolutes, but in terms of processes of emergent potentialities.
There are still innate reasons why people fail and succeed. It’s how those interact and converge with the environment that’s important. People succeed or fail because their innate strengths, weaknesses, affinities, and aversions either do or don’t fit well with what’s around them.
The means by which the different factors interact (communities, values and social conventions, schools, jobs, organizations, laws and public programs — or the absence thereof) are constantly evolving.
Part of Open/Conceptual‘s emerging mission is to cultivate and refine our ability to manage that process.
Make sure you read the end of Whittemore’s post too.
Nobody needs to be left down or behind. When anyone can be successful — i.e. when everyone can capitalize on their own gifts and dispositions, adding more value to the world’s total — then even those who are already successful stand to gain even more.
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