Serial Nature and Textual Nuture

Think, for a moment, of each person as a text.

When thinking of a text, we are not considering merely a physical object that we can hold in our hands. A text has a physical presence, but also content and history.

A text has an author, the one who conceptualised and produced it. However much control the author has, or thinks s/he has, no text is ever exactly what was originally thought. Then, upon production, the text must be set free, it must exist and succeed or fail out in the world, beyond the reach of its creator.

At this point, the identity of the text becomes more fluid: it both is and is not the text originally produced by its author. To some extent, the text is what it was meant to be and tells the story it was meant to tell. But that is not, necessarily, the story that is read. There are now outside influences which come into play, which bend and shift and reshape the text and its story. Its meaning becomes a free play of interactions.

The text, then, is a product of its author and, simultaneously, a product of its readers. Under such circumstances, meaning is highly unlikely to be fixed and single. If there isn't an endless possibility of meanings, certainly there is plenty of scope for variations and nuances.

To continue our little thought experiment, now think of a human being in similar terms.

In a sense, each person is the product of, in this case, two authors - the givers of our genetic makeup. Our authors - or, for novelty's sake, let's call them parents - to some degree shape us, teach us, maybe even try to mould us into their own image. There is little doubt that who we are, or become, owes a huge amount to our progenitors.

Just like the text, we too must venture out into the world and, despite our genetic foundation and our upbringing, outside forces will bend and shift and reshape our personalities until, hopefully, we become approximately, the person who we are going to be. Again, the possibilities of who we become are probably not endless but, in all likelihood, there is plenty of scope for variation and nuance.

In effect, what we have is an interplay of nature and nurture and, pulled betwixt and between the two, we somehow become fairly normal human beings. Well, most of us do.

It is important to keep in mind, here, that 'normal' has its own field of play.

Somewhere in the midst of the play of possibilities, monsters are born.

Harry Cokely is such a monster.

Was he moulded by the beatings administered by his father? Were his feelings somehow bent out of shape as a result of being the only male in a family of five daughters? Or maybe he feels the need to compensate for the feeling of inadequacy engendered by the blame heaped upon him for everything that went wrong? 

If his crimes result from his genes, from whence did they come and why had they never manifested in his family prior to him?

When seeking the cause of serial killers, the questions themselves seem inadequate to the task. Because they are!

In most facets of human life today one would be derided for claiming some essential human nature as the cause of any aspect of our behaviour. It is not hard to see why this is; if there is an identifiable 'human nature' then our patterns of behaviour could be measured according to some norm and judged deviant, aberrant or, even, normal.

There are, however, a few types of behaviour for which there is an almost deperate need to find a genetic cause. This reason, also, is not hard to see. If Harry Cokely's behaviour can be put down to his genetic makeup the rest of us are absolved of any culpability.

If in fact, his serial crimes are a result of his upbringing, the manner in which he was nurtured, then we must be aware of not only how we ourselves were nurtured, but the impact of our nurturing upon our own children. How can we tell what impact any particular chastisement is going to have upon our child?

It is highly likely that some genetic influence upon wildly aberrant behaviour may be found. No one should feel that this will bring about any wider understanding of these monsters - what caused them? why they did what they did? what can be done to prevent future monsters?

If we adopt the textual view of human beings, as outlined above, it is clear to see that the factors involved in how we become who we become are too  varied and nuanced. What such a view does tell us, however, is that we are all part of the cause that makes each of us who we are. Anything else is just an abdication of responsibility.