Mick Hartley

I'm clearly not alone in being somewhat alarmed at the grovel by Oxford's poor Ellie Greaves on her bio-essentialist and narrow-minded thinking. Louise Perry at UnHerd:

Although these kinds of post-cancellation apologies always have a bit of a holding-up-today’s-newspaper energy, this example is particularly alarming in its degree of self-abasement. The response to Greaves’ apology on Twitter suggested that I was not the only person to think immediately of the coerced “self-criticism” demanded of those caught up in the Chinese cultural revolution.

This case demonstrates two of the many dangers that come from holding to the blank slate theory of the human mind — that is, the belief that we are not born with any innate traits, but instead develop all of them through experience.

Firstly, it turns out that it’s only a hop, skip and a jump from one already ambitious claim about the human mind, to an even more extreme claim about the human body. That is, the Second Wave feminist commitment to the blank slate theory of gender — the belief that masculine and feminine preferences and behaviour are entirely a product of nurture, not nature — prepared the ground for the far more radical proposition from trans activists. Namely, that the notion of biological difference was also socially constructed — the very proposition that is now seeing women like Ellie Greaves cast out of polite society for being “bio-essentialist.”

The second danger inherent to the blank slate theory is that, if you don’t believe in human nature as such, then it’s easy to persuade yourself that you are radically unlike the people who took part in, for instance, the Cultural Revolution, and that you might therefore be immune to the social dynamics that have produced such atrocities again and again throughout human history.

Funnily enough, the point was put particularly well by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (now Daniel M. Lavery) back in 2016, before Lavery became a trans activist. The title of the piece begins ‘Reasons I Would Not Have Been Burned As A Witch…” and reason number five reads:

"Because I’m no better or smarter than a seventeenth-century peasant just because someone explained to me how electricity and outer space work. If I’d had the same information as your average Bavarian circa 1605, you can bet your absolute britches that I’d be in the tavern jabbering about spirits of evil portent come the first bad harvest or weird-looking moon, looking for someone to blame."

I don’t believe in the blank slate, which means that I’m quite comfortable with stating plainly what ought to be a humbling fact: that the brains of the students of 21st century Oxford are really not much different from those of 17th century peasants.

Daniel M. Lavery, in case you're wondering and in case the name Lavery seems familiar, is in fact married to Grace Lavery, the noted trans Berkeley professor who's written about George Eliot's transgender identification, and also published a novel, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. That book, I'm happy to say , although reviewed gushingly in the US, seems to have received all one-star reviews at Amazon UK – "misogynistic in the extreme", "worst book I've read in a long while", "self-obsessed". Makes you proud to be British.