Alan Duff: Our future lies in our past

Eleanor Catton, who had her first novel published when she was 23, may well have known long before then that she would be a writer

Opinion

Where there’s a will there’s a way but it helps if your brain is wired to achieve as well.

What compelled a 20-year-old Irish youth last month to murder his two younger brothers after finding out he was adopted? Did his biological father, perhaps being some violent drunkard, pass down awful genes? Was it a genetic flaw from a grandparent? Are his adoptive parents to blame? What if one day all criminal behaviour can be genetically explained? Will our prisons empty? Will there be no such thing as guilt and culpability? Yeah, and palm trees will grow in the Antarctic.

There's a registered organisation in the United States formed by adoptive parents of Native Americans. Not to share backwoods tales, or celebrate their adoptive kids' original heritage. They got together after finding out, as people do, there is a common thread between indigenous Americans and their genetic propensity to alcoholism and committing serious crimes. Not to say alcoholics are criminally prone. But a booze-addled brain can compel a young adult to do stupid things. If you are genetically hard-wired to be an alcoholic, no matter who raises you, more than just Native Americans are in trouble.

Nature v nurture: way back in 1880, when one Aby Warburg of a Hamburg banking family made a deal with his 12-year-old brother Max to - I quote the International New York Times article - "cede his stake in the family bank in exchange for all the books he wanted for the rest of his life".

What makes a 13-year-old do this? That obsession became one of the world's greatest book collections known as the Warburg Institute now housed at the University of London. How can he have seen his future at such a young age? Or did he make his own future? Was it a fluke because he had access to money? Born of an act originally a cop-out?

It isn't some black or Latino kid growing up in an American ghetto vowing to become a world boxing champion, though that's arguably more admirable. He isn't going to inherit a share in a bank, more likely a cell in a penitentiary. Such a person works and sweats his way to the top, though he has to be born with ability and athleticism.

I've read of people who wanted to be writers from a ridiculously young age. Not this writer. But I do owe my genes to both sides of my paternal family. Our own lovely Eleanor Catton had her first novel published at age 23 and she won the Man Booker Prize at age 28 with her second. This modest person wouldn't dwell too much on herself, but you can bet she had some early inkling of her talent.

Prominent musicians, scientists, engineers, inventors, artists, many knew at an early age what they were going to become.

Is there is something in our make-up that some just "know" what they'll be when they grow up? I don't include the moderately successful; I mean the extremes at both ends. I doubt the criminally minded feel exceptionally blessed or cursed. More left-out loners or just unable to connect emotionally with others or feel connected. But genetically fated I'd argue.

I have a couple of very successful business friends. One is the most lateral thinker I've ever met who is an avid reader and has published numerous books. The other is a workaholic who as an 8-year-old couldn't wait to go out with the milkman on his 4.30am delivery run. To him work is not a chore but, rather, a great source of joy. He is adamant he was born this way.

I have another friend, an All Black great, who said he could "see" the direction of play before anyone else could and that was why he was so often in the right place when play turned. The great contemporary music composer Burt Bacharach lives in a mind full of music from which, like a spring, he can pull up memorable, even classic, melodies that last generations. He was born with this ability.

Did British businessman Richard Branson's destiny get moulded by his mother when she dropped him several miles from home and told him to find his own way? He was 5. Or was he always going to be an exceptional entrepreneur? Musical giants Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, one born blind and the other lost his sight at age 6, both black and poor, how did they know at a young age they had extraordinary talent? Can a person feel it? Is their brain somehow wired with knowledge of itself?

Did Einstein and Newton and Shakespeare have awareness of their genius at a young age? Surely they did.

From Michelangelo and Leonardo, to Van Gogh and Picasso, did they all know as little kids what they'd give to civilisation?

Is there a genius in your own human litter?