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4.2.12
WC: 191694

I bring to this task a strong and dynamic world view that has been shaped by my life experiences and which has, in turn, shaped my life experiences. In looking back on my life, I am inevitably peering through the prism of the powerful ideology that has provided a compass for my actions.

Ideology is biography. Where we stand is the result of where we sat, who we sat next to, what we observed, what happened to us, and how we reacted to our experiences.

Ideology is complex. Its causes are multifaceted and rarely subject to quantification. The philosopher, Descartes, who famously said, "I think therefore I am" got it backwards. I am—I was, I will be—therefore I think what I think. The ability to think is inborn—a biological and genetic endowment. The content of one's thinking—the nature and quality of our ideas—is more nurture than nature. Without human experiences there could be no well-formed ideology, merely simple inborn reflexes based on instinct and genetics.³ There is no gene, or combination of genes, that ordains the content of our views regarding politics, law, morality or religion.⁴ Biology gives us the mechanisms with which to organize our experiences into coherent theories of life, but without these experiences—which begin in the womb and may actually alter the physical structures of our brain over time—all we would have are the mechanics of thought and the potential for formulating complex ideas and ideologies. It is our interactions—with other human beings, with nature, with nurture, with luck, with love, with hate, with pleasure, with pain, with our own limitations, with our mortality⁵—that shape our world views.

Among the most enduring and influential human encounters are those experienced at an early age. These include the accidents of birth: to which family, in which place, at which time we happen to come into the world. It is true that most people die with the religion and political affiliation into which they were born (or adopted). Identical twins, separated at birth, may share a common disposition, IQ and susceptibility to disease, but they are likely to share the religious and political affiliations of their adoptive parents. There is little genetic about the factors that directly influence religious, political or other ideological choices. They are largely a function of exposure to external factors.⁶

Many of these external factors are totally beyond the control of the person. They may involve decisions made by others, often before they were even born. Probably the most significant decisions affecting my own life were made by my great grandparents on my father's side and my grandparents on my mother's side: the decision to leave the shtetls of Poland and move to New York. Had they remained in Poland, as some of my relatives did, I would probably not have survived the Holocaust, since I was three years old when the systematic genocide began.⁷ That

³ Quote Steve Pinker
⁴ FN on Mark Hauser "Moral Minds." Drew Weston, George Lakoff.
⁵ Kafka once quipped that "the meaning of life is that we die," and when God told Adam and Eve that if they eat from the tree of knowledge, they will die, he meant they will obtain the knowledge of mortality—which elevated humans above other species.
⁶ This is not to deny the likely influence genetics and biology may have on a predisposition toward homosexuality or other orientations. Nor is it to deny that biological predisposition may influence ideology through the prism of experience. See [cite] [expand]
⁷ Perhaps, of course, had my forbearers remained in Poland, my father might not have met my mother (although their families lived in neighboring shtetls). Accident, timing and luck determine virtually everything relating to birth.

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