Language, values and social interaction shape the human mind
The case of this girl occurred in a rural area of Ukraine and came to light in 1991.
She was the daughter of an absent father and an alcoholic mother who abandoned her at the age of three.
Her survival instinct led her to a shed where there were dogs.
There she learned to bark and to walk on all fours, developing canine-like behavior. When she was rescued, she was around eight years old.
She was never able to integrate into normal social life. Instead, she had developed an unusual sense of smell and hearing for a human being.
The fictional construction of Rousseau’s “noble savage”, with its supposed “natural pity”, was definitively shattered.
Without human contact in early years, language and the mind do not develop normally.
What we find is not the noble savage, but a dehumanized individual.
To be intellectually free, it is essential that society provides us with language, values and logic.
Language is more than an arbitrary system of symbols, says Borges: “it is a tradition, a way of writing reality”.
Logic is tied to language. The human potential for logical thinking necessarily requires social interaction.
The girl in the example used to smell food before eating it.
Religion plays a more than important role in the transmission of these values.
It is through teachings, rituals, sacred texts that it seeks to guide social behavior toward respect, empathy, honesty or solidarity.
Christianity does so through means such as the Church, religious education, art present in churches or sacred music, liturgy and the Bible.
Religious influence continues to be important in sustaining these values, although some argue that ethics and morality can be secularized.
And, in fact, that seems to be the path followed by what was once known as Western and Christian Civilization.
Although not from Rodó’s respectful perspective, but from an exacerbated Jacobinism.
The English historian Hilaire Belloc states in his work “The Crisis of Our Civilization” that it is possible to write the true history of Europe.
And to do so, one of his key propositions is that:
“Religion is the main determining element acting in the formation of every civilization.”
Because, he says:
“A group of human beings who generally and firmly believe that acting well or badly in this life has consequences after death, that the soul is immortal, that God is one and father…”, will behave according to those values.
On the other hand, those who seek that determining character in race, or in Marxism, or in another philosophy, do not deny religion.
They simply preach the religion of race or of matter.
In some systems, this transmission of values, which begins in the family, is replaced by an omnipresent state, or oppressive theocracies such as the one operating in Iran.
Thus, uniform thinking is encouraged.
That is not education but conditioning.
Proper education implies imparting knowledge to form thinking individuals.
But who can say that they think freely, that is, in a pure state?
Thus, in 1998, Saint John Paul II stated regarding the relationship between faith and reason:
“It cannot be denied […] that this period of rapid and complex changes exposes especially the younger generations, to whom the future belongs, to the feeling that they are deprived of authentic points of reference…”
And indeed, can man guided only by reason, that is, without faith, “…seek answers to dramatic questions such as pain, the suffering of the innocent and death…?”