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A reflection on the death of Dolly Parton and the renewed debate over whether innate gift or upbringing shapes genius, arguing that older cultures understood inspiration better than modern social sciences.
On the death of Dolly Parton, one of the enduring debates in psychology returns with renewed force: what weighs more in shaping a human being, the inheritance received at birth or the upbringing and environment provided afterwards?
In more direct terms, which is stronger, nature or nurture? The question arises again because her life offers such a vivid case study. Here was a major star who travelled from a small two-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains to the grandest stages in the world.
Scholars will spend considerable time tracing the roots of her music, since there is no doubt that the country songs she absorbed during her childhood were themselves nourished by ballads and tunes common across Ireland, Scotland and England. One can easily imagine a future academic working on a thesis about the influence of old Irish song tradition on Dolly Parton, even if no such guidance comes from me.
Attention will also turn to the influence of her family and surroundings, the poverty they endured, the limited literacy of her father who left school early, the education she did or did not receive, each factor presented as an attempt to explain her. Yet this is precisely where the limitations of certain systems of thought become clear.
Psychology, sociology and the human sciences more broadly, fields that enjoy considerable prestige and misapplied respect in our times, can only take us so far. They can travel part of the road, walk to the edge of the city of knowledge, but soon enough they encounter a thick and unbreakable wall and an impassable bridge before them.
They can follow the path of learning, take note of road signs, gather information from strangers along the way, listen to the chatter of beggars seeking alms, pay the toll to the road attendants, judge the wind and the heat, but in the end, at the close of day and of journey, they arrive at Dolly. For many in the soft sciences this is uncomfortable. Let them be uncomfortable.
Almost every culture in history had a better understanding of this question and found it entirely unremarkable. What was the cause of Dolly's gift and talent? Inspiration, a breath from the gods, a gift from heaven, an unasked-for offering, a kindness from who knows where. That was always how the talent of the poet, the musician and the artist was understood, and in Ireland no less than anywhere else.
That bird of inspiration, the bright vision that descended upon a person and from which the fire of creation was lit, was a familiar idea. It is not at all rare, insofar as an instinctive awareness of it exists in every primary school classroom in the country, the girl who can draw a picture neatly and accurately without training, the boy who can run faster than anyone else at school, the person who sits at the piano and finds the music in an instant.
Such gifts need not be of world-class standard like those of Dolly, Bob Dylan, Lionel Messi, Sébastien Ogier, Eddy Merckx, Marie Curie, Joseph Stalin, Jan Brueghel or Cian Lynch. They must be nurtured, however, and this is less well understood. People in the Irish tradition used to say that poetry was made, not created. The gift was already there; it had to be brought to usefulness
Dolly Parton Nature Versus Nurture Inspiration Irish Culture Psychology
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