Quote:
Originally Posted by mizpeh
What do you mean by this, Pel? And how did Chomsky prove the slate was never really blank?
Are you saying human souls are eternal and have memories prior to our birth?
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No. The "Blank Slate" was Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) idea of the "Tablet Rosa." In those days all school work was done on "slates" or mini chalk boards held by the individual student. To truly clean a slate from the wax-like "chalk" markings required scrubbing and scraping to clean the surface.
The "Tablet Rosa" means literally, "A scraped slate" or a clean slate.
Rousseau thought that all human beings come into the world with a "clean slate." This was his reaction against the Catholic Chrurch's teaching on original sin and the Protestant Evangelical teachings on Total Depravity. He rejected these ideas and offered the premise that all of us come into the world "pure" and "innocent."
It is the "modern" (for him "modern") State, Church and Society that has corrupted us all and made us into the uptight, fearful and emotional wrecks that we are.
Chomsky didn't really set out to establish anything about the "Tablet Rosa.' He was a linguist and psychologist who was looking at how human infants acquired the skill to use language. There had already been a number of studies done with "feral" humans - human beings who were raised in environments where they were deprived of the opportunity to learn language as small children. These people never did, and could not ever learn to speak. They had missed the only opportunity that humans have to acquire the ability.
It turns out, that there is a mechanism that works in our brains where we go through a period of development and our brains are literally "wired" to acquire speech when we are toddlers and infants. The implications of this discovery were far reaching. It turns out that our heads are "wired" or "preconfigured" to do a lot of things developmentally and throughout our lives.
In other words, we now have scientific data to support the idea that there is something we can call "human nature." In the very structure of our minds, there is something "inplanted" that influences who we are as individuals.
This starts out as a rather subtle point but its implications are huge to the POMO and "multi cultural" agenda. This also helps to explain why the Behavioralist movement (B.F. Skinner, Aldous Huxley etc.) never really succeeded and why socialism is doomed to fail as well.
We simply cannot be "programmed" into little robots. To try and do so leads to a violent opposition that is rooted in the very fabric of who we are as human beings.