The Blank Slate

Tabula Rasa

One of the keys to understanding how current Western culture works is knowing John Locke’s principle of tabula rasa or blank slate. What this means is that essentially, everybody is born neither good nor evil. Their mind – which of course drives their behavior – is written on by outside influences. Good and evil come through learning from parents, teachers, peers, culture, or other factors. 

This principle runs counter to the biblical principle that humanity since Adam has been born with a sin nature. That is to say, every human since Adam has been born with a propensity toward doing what is wrong, and contributing factors such as the residual image of God still residing in us, laws created by governments, and other societal impacts help people to mitigate that propensity towards sin.

Locke’s “blank slate” philosophy drives the current cultural practice of banning children from playing games that have reference to violence. Things like finger guns, play fighting, and other things that were common place in play only a decade ago have become taboo even in many Christian environments. The push to eliminate such things, even in a cartoon caricature sense, from video games and children’s television similarly stems from the philosophy of Locke. Basically, control what is written on the slate, and control what the slate reflects to the world.

Tabula Rasa and Crime Reform

Essentially, the argument made by secular philosophers. Is that what is written on the blank slate can be overwritten through re-education. Because human beings are neither good nor bad. They can be trained to be better, or worse, than they were, when they were born or first educated. For this reason, re-education through schools, prison systems or other social means is seen as the most likely way to eliminate violence and wrongdoing from our culture. 

However, secular philosophers realize that this isn’t enough to completely re-educate or retrain a person, because most people spend most of their time at home in family and friend environments. They are more likely to be influenced and educated in those environments than they are. By the school systems, the prison systems or other places that they might be retrained by society. To the end of reeducating them, the government has constructed a long school day and long school year that separates children from their families and puts them in the hands of their teachers and their peers for most of the day. In the prison system systems, of course there is no reason for them to worry about family and peer education. Other than fellow prisoners. So the retraining can be done through work, voluntary and involuntary education, and when necessary, drastic measures such as isolation and counseling.

Of course. The second part of this philosophy is that good and evil are derived from cultural norms, not from any religion or higher authority. In this sense, one way to eliminate wrongdoing is to make it not wrong. In other words, it is to make anything that the society can as a whole determine to not be harmful to other people or detrimental to the health of an individual to be permissible and even encouraged. We can see examples of this in our culture today, things that would have been considered very abnormal not even twenty years ago, such as homosexuality, transsexuality, gender fluidity, and the like, have become normal and even encouraged in the public school system and by our mainstream media. This is something that will be further discussed elsewhere.

The Christian, however, should take issue with this philosophy because according to the bible, there is one author of good, and that is God. There is also one author of evil that is the enemy, the devil. According to this principle, sin of some variety or another is innate to all people and cannot be educated out of them. Rather, even after receiving education they will have a propensity to return to certain sins or patterns of behavior once their re-education and the peer system that encourages them to behave in an appropriate way is removed. From a christian perspective, the only thing that can truly change the heart of a person, which will change their actions,  is a relationship with God. 

That is not to say that education, prison and reeducation have no place in a Christian society. Certainly, people can be taught to behave better. Often, the fear of reimprisonment, or having further accounts of crime added to their record, is enough to keep people from committing crimes or certain sins in the future. 

While Christians and secularists can agree on re-education as a practical way of discouraging new crime, the Christian must realize that there are some who cannot be re-educated for better. Re-education often focuses on harm caused to others and dealing with personal past trauma as a way to encourage better behavior in the future. The Christian, however, understands that the sin nature is not so easy to tame. Re-education and fear of the justice system may be enough to keep some from going back to crime, but only the power of the gospel can really change lives.

All of this is not to say that Christians should just allow unlimited exposure to games with violence and other negative themes. We also have to understand that what you put into your mind influences your outlook on life and often comes out in behaviors. But we should also understand that people in general – even children – understand to a large degree the difference between animated/digitally portrayed violence and real world violence. There are a plethora of reasons to keep the content you consume as healthy as possible for the Christian mind, but that is as topic for a different discussion. For now, suffice it to say that there is no harm in the kids playing “cops and robbers” in the backyard.