A Place to Call Home

Today is World Refugee Day and this year, it is dedicated to the theme, “A Place to Call Home.” Amid the flight from conflict and persecution, in the tent cities of refugee camps, and during the wait in unbearable uncertainty to see what the future will hold, it is a refugee's most cherished dream to find a place to call home and live in dignity and security. At present, there are approximately 17 million refugees in this world.

Being a refugee is being a name and a number on lists. It is being in a mass of people shuffled from one point to another, not knowing what you have to do next or where you are going. It is being a child fearful you will be separated from your parents. It is having faith to believe that wherever you go will be better than where you have been. When you are a refugee, hope is the last thing you dare let go.

As a person who was once a refugee and whose family went through horrific circumstances to rebuild our lives, I speak straight from the heart as I appeal for compassion for refugees. :( They are human beings who have committed no crime. It is a moral crime to imprison innocent people. It is time to END MANDATORY DETENTION CENTRES.

Nature vs. Nurture

I'll be completely unoriginal and tackle an age-old debate that really just goes around in circles. :) So what dictates our behaviour: our upbringing or our genes? There's a growing body of research which supports the idea that genes do dictate certain behaviours. For a good read, try "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker. And Pinker is very consistent with behaviour geneticists who have shown that about half of the variability in a trait like IQ is biological in origin.

Pinker’s debunking of the theories of the Blank Slate, the Nobel Savage and the Ghost in the Machine are quite fabulous. And I think one of the most important messages is that he is right to insist we can't hope to expand our circle of creative, life-affirming choices without truthfully identifying its factual, natural, and evolutionary constraints.

But I think there is problem with the reliance on the logic of evolutionary psychology. From a pragmatic point of view, even when there is evidence that fixed biological factors contribute to behaviour, all that the evidence can show is that an evolutionary explanation is plausible, not that it is either necessary or sufficient. And while we can be clear about the distinction between underlying evolutionary mechanisms (selfish genes) & proximate psychological mechanisms (overt motivations eg. envy, altruism, malice). Politics & education need to assess the degree of freedom evolution may leave to those mechanisms as we seek to influence them for the better. (http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/)

Having said all that, therefore, our genetic background gives us more grounds for hope than despair. Our innate capacity for empathy, love and compassion, properly developed, usually can and does overcome our most disturbing selfish impulses. At the end of the day, I think we realise that we have to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy between heredity & environment and realised that all behaviour comes out of an interaction between the two. And also that “Nature is what we were put in this world to rise above.”