By nature close, by habit far apart

In plain language: the Master said, “By nature people are close to one another; by habituation they grow far apart.” (Author’s translation.)

The saying is often used to support “environmental determinism”, but its meaning is simple: most of the differences between people come from later “habituation”. It does not discuss how much belongs to nature and how much to habit, and it is not a proposition about variance decomposition. Read beside Chapter 2, it shows two very different ways of asking: the ancients asked why people become different and how they ought to be habituated, while behavioural genetics asks how strongly, in a particular population, individual differences are statistically associated with genetic and environmental differences.

Yan Zhitui: shifted unseen, transformed in secret

In plain language: when people are young and their temperament is not yet settled, those they are intimate with steep and dye them, as if with incense and in the kiln; in speech and laughter, in every movement, even without setting out to learn, they are shifted unseen and transformed in secret, until they naturally come to resemble them. How much more so with conduct and skills, which are plainer and easier to learn! Therefore living with good people is like entering a room of irises and orchids: in time one becomes fragrant oneself; living with bad people is like entering a salted-fish shop: in time one begins to stink oneself. Mozi grieved over the dyeing of silk; this is what he meant. A gentleman must be careful in choosing his companions. (Author’s translation.)

Most suggestive for this book is the phrase “even without setting out to learn”. Yan Zhitui noticed that what children learn most is not what adults deliberately teach but what they absorb naturally through intimate daily contact: speech, laughter and movement. This is structurally similar to the high-fidelity channel of Chapter 4, everyday non-verbal demonstration. Note too that the chapter is called “Admiring the Worthy”: Yan Zhitui is mainly discussing companions outside the family, not parents. In this respect it can be compared with the oblique transmission of Chapter 4 and with Harris’s emphasis on peer groups.

But Yan Zhitui’s “steeping and dyeing” is empirical observation and exhortation, not a study of mechanisms: he does not distinguish genes from environment, nor does he consider that children choose for themselves whom to be intimate with (the active gene–environment correlation of Chapter 3).

The room of orchids: sorting out the source

In plain language: living with good people is like entering a room of irises and orchids; after a while one no longer smells the fragrance, because one has been transformed by it. Living with people who are not good is like entering a salted-fish shop; after a while one no longer smells the stench, because one has been transformed by that too. (Author’s translation.)

In plain language: keeping company with the noble is fragrant, like entering a room of orchids and angelica; after a while one no longer notices it, and one has been transformed by it. Keeping company with petty people is rank, like entering a salted-fish stall; after a while one no longer notices it, and one has been transformed by it. (Author’s translation.)

“After a while one no longer smells the fragrance” adds something to “in time one becomes fragrant oneself”: once the assimilation has happened, one no longer notices it. This resembles habituation in psychology, and it bears on step 2 of the Chapter 8 checklist: part of why parents’ automatic reactions under stress are hard to change is precisely that they have become something “one no longer smells”, an unnoticed background.

In plain language: Confucius said, “What is formed in youth is like nature itself; what one is habituated to becomes the norm.” (Author’s translation.)

The saying is often cited as one source of the proverb “habit becomes second nature”. It can be set beside a result of Chapter 2, but with care: “what is formed in youth is like nature” says that behaviour learned early looks like nature, whereas Chapter 2 shows that, in behavioural genetics, “nature” and “learning” are statistically entangled (Chapter 3). Both warn us not to conclude that something comes from genes just because it “looks inborn”.

Mencius’s mother moves house three times: choosing neighbours, and the source

In plain language: the mother of Meng Ke of Zou was called Mother Meng. At first her home was near a graveyard, and as a small boy Mencius played at graveyard affairs, jumping about, building mounds and burying. Mother Meng said, “This is no place for me to raise my son,” and moved beside the market. There he played at being a merchant hawking his wares. Mother Meng said again, “This is no place for me to raise my son,” and moved beside the school. Now his play was setting out sacrificial vessels, bowing, yielding and advancing and withdrawing with ceremony. Mother Meng said, “Here truly I can raise my son,” and they stayed. When Mencius grew up he studied the six arts and in the end became known as a great scholar. The gentleman says that Mother Meng was good at transforming him gradually. (Author’s translation; for a complete English translation of the work see Kinney.)

Today the story is often taken as a classical warrant for “environmental determinism” or for buying a house in a good school district. But its focus is on how the child’s play imitates the activities of the adults around him: graveyard affairs, merchants hawking, sacrificial vessels and bows. In the language of Chapter 4, Mother Meng was adjusting the oblique channel (the surrounding adults) and the horizontal channel (the children he played with). The tale’s conclusion, “good at transforming him gradually”, also deserves notice: the change is gradual, not completed by a single move.

Modern research takes a more complicated view of “choosing neighbours”: the effects of moving to a better neighbourhood vary with age, neighbourhood and outcome, and whether a family can choose its neighbourhood is itself related to the parents’ resources and characteristics (the passive correlation of Chapter 3). Mother Meng in the story could afford to move three times, which is itself a resource.

Prenatal instruction: the boundary between classical ideas and modern evidence

In plain language: the wisest succeed without being taught, the most foolish gain nothing even when taught, and those of middling endowment do not know unless taught. In antiquity the sage kings had a method of prenatal instruction: in the third month of pregnancy the mother moved out to live in a separate palace; her eyes did not look on anything improper, her ears did not listen to anything unseemly, and music and food were regulated by the rites. This was written on jade tablets and stored in golden caskets. (Author’s translation.)

Read beside Chapter 1, the passage shows an interesting correspondence: both the ancients and modern research treat pregnancy as a special period. The Dutch famine study shows that the nutritional environment in pregnancy is associated with long-term biological differences in offspring; in this sense the intrauterine environment really does matter. But the content of classical prenatal instruction (not looking on the improper, not listening to the unseemly, regulation by the rites) consists of ritual norms, which are a different matter from what is meant today by nutrition in pregnancy, avoiding harmful substances and reducing severe stress; it cannot be said that the ancients “already discovered” fetal programming. Nor is the three-way division of “the wisest … the most foolish” a genetics in the modern sense: it treats human endowment as a fixed hierarchy, far from Chapter 2’s conclusion that heritability changes with the environment.

A boundary that must be drawn: rank, gender and corporal punishment

In plain language: when parents are stern yet loving, their children will be reverent and careful, and filial piety will arise. … When people fail to teach their children, it is not that they wish them to fall into wrongdoing; it is only that they are reluctant to scold them and make them look upset, and cannot bear to cane them and make their flesh suffer. One should take illness as an analogy: how could one not use decoctions, needles and moxa to save the patient? … When the cane and anger are abandoned in the home, the faults of the young appear at once; when punishments are not just, the people do not know where to put hand or foot. (Author’s translation.)

These passages explicitly advocate corporal punishment as a means of family instruction and liken family order to the penal law of the state. This book does not take this part over. The conclusion of modern research is clear: pooled studies have found no evidence that spanking improves children’s behaviour, and have found it associated with a range of detrimental outcomes, including aggression, antisocial behaviour, mental-health problems and damaged parent–child relationships (Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor 2016); many countries now prohibit corporal punishment of children in law. At the same time, classical family instruction rested on a patrilineal hierarchy and a strict separation of men and women (the Family Instructions of the Yan Clan itself contains many rules on the place of women), and its one-way obedience centred on filial piety differs fundamentally from the warmth, responsiveness and mutual respect between parents and children that modern developmental psychology emphasises.

Limits of the comparison

Reading these texts beside modern research has three limits. First, the classical texts are normative and hortatory (how one ought to teach, with whom one ought to associate), whereas modern research is descriptive and empirical (what actually happens and why); “steeping and dyeing” and “gradual transformation” can inspire, but they are not evidence. Second, the ancients did not distinguish genes from environment, nor did they consider children’s selection and evocation of their environments; the tale of Mencius’s mother cannot itself tell how much of Mencius’s achievement was due to the moves. Third, the plain-language readings in this chapter are the author’s, and the commentarial tradition often reads these texts differently; the texts follow standard editions, and individual words differ between editions (for example 鲍鱼之肆, “salted-fish shop”, which one edition writes 次, “stall”).

Chapter summary

“By nature close, by habituation far apart” says that differences come mostly from habituation; “Admiring the Worthy” (attribution corrected), with its “even without setting out to learn”, fits everyday demonstration as a high-fidelity channel; the room of orchids is the wording of the School Sayings, “Liu ben”, and the Elder Dai’s similar passage is in “Zengzi ji bing”, not “Bao fu”; Mencius’s mother comes from the Biographies of Exemplary Women, not the Records of the Grand Historian; prenatal instruction can be set beside research on the intrauterine environment, but the ancients did not discover fetal programming. This book does not take over the corporal punishment, rank and gender norms of classical family instruction.