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Everyone is fighting for “rights” and the freedom to make various choices, yet few people seem to believe that we actually have any.
All ideas are in some sense correlated. In other words, your idea about one thing—especially something as fundamental as whether creation is good, or whether humans have the ability to act freely, or other metaphysical stances like a belief in the dignity of all human life, regardless of merit—affect your ability to accept or even to grasp other ideas.
Some ideas are more correlated than others. They tend to create a cascade effect of other ideas and beliefs. For instance: if you accepted the idea that you have smoked too long and that “the damage is already done, so there is no use in quitting”, your actions are going to look very different than someone who has not accepted that idea—someone who believes change and recovery is possible. Ideas matter.
And certain ideas, like leading indicators for the economy or the stock market, are leading indicators of cultural movements and the philosophical assumptions that underpin them.
Even before the slow slide into nihilism began, there was at least one leading indicator that it was going to happen: the way people were talking about freedom, and specifically about free will.
Conversations about free will have been going on for a very long time. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, free will has been foundational. "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). Of the three major cities of modern life, the position of Jerusalem has been the most consistent when it comes to the question of humanity’s ability to choose.
The view from Athens (the city of Reason) has been mixed. In the modern world, where “empirical evidence” is the only thing admissible, honest rationalists have no consensus view on the question. Still, there is a long philosophical tradition that supports the idea that it’s far more reasonable to believe that humans have the capacity to choose rather than the opposite view, which is to deny that this capacity exists at all.
(And by “capacity”, most would admit that various “capacities” of freedom exist depending on one’s circumstances, environment, and history. We may not have an entirely free will (Socrates viewed the passions as impeding the exercise of freedom, for instance)—but at some level a human being is not condemned to be a slave to his animal instincts.)
But the view in the third city—in Silicon Valley—while also mixed, seems to be trending strongly in the direction of free will skepticism or outright denial. If you watch the documentary The Social Dilemma, you will see a Skinnerian idea of human behavior in which we’re all simply at the mercy of decisions made by Big Tech.
Tech leaders flatter themselves with this idea (similar to the way that people who oversee large amounts of money for foundations tend to think of themselves as rich even when their only job is to disburse someone else’s money). Perhaps these tech leaders secretly think of themselves as having risen beyond the world of illusions—they are woke, in the real gnostic sense of the term. Through the secret knowledge they believe themselves to possess, their true understanding of how the world works, they promise to free the captives.
Never before have I heard so many people referring to, or at least alluding to, severe skepticism about free will. They make references to it in such a blasé way (I have heard things like “of course, we probably don’t have free will…” dropped into casual conversation at least 5x in the past month alone, which is just bizarre—and then they just move right along, as if this “probability” has an “of course” nature about it, like the “obviously” nature of political discourse these past 7 years).
My view is that there has been a massive shift in the narrative on the issue of freedom, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. I wish I had the bandwidth and resources to do an experiment: to crawl Substacks and social media to distill basic narrative direction and sentiment when any discussions of human freedom come up. I’m not sure if ChatGPT4 is capable or ready for that (if you ask it any questions about this, it gives the usual answer of it being a “complex” issue and there being any viewpoints). But I know what I’m seeing and hearing. There has been a noticeable shift.
Do I think it’s a coordinated narrative attack like the one on the US Dollar? No. I don’t think it’s that intentional. But there is a change in the narrative pattern that I’ve noticed since at least 2016—and I sometimes wonder if the Russian misinformation story was the first major indications that something had changed.
The implications of a widespread cultural denial—or even erosion in the degree of acceptance—of free will are widespread and serious.
There is an ethical implication to agnosticism on this issue because it calls into question the degree of one’s moral responsibility of any action. If there’s no free will, every solution must be a top-down one. If people aren’t free to choose, then “people don’t change”—they can’t change. It’s fair to write them off forever or make irrevocable choices in relation to them. A society that loses its belief in freedom loses the ability to believe in conversion. It loses hope. It’s not a huge step before we have real-life pre-crime units.
Moral responsibility is non-existent and our criminal justice collapses. A person can justify any action because they were “born this way.”
The denial of free will is probably behind the view that if you’re born with a certain color of skin you have blind spots that you are incapable of seeing or escaping from unless you submit to programmatic training by the people who accuse you. You’re not free to know the truth because of your racial identity. Your ignorance is determined. At the very least, it must be assumed.
The current discourse about free will lacks basic frameworks for thinking about it that very smart people were using 800+ years ago (more on that below).
Athens explores the question from the standpoint of evolutionary anthropology today (very little philosophical anthropology). Jerusalem offers a view of the human person from the perspective of theological anthropology, which admits of revelation. Silicon Valley’s implied anthropology is a mix, but it trends toward transhumanism to such an extent that it can’t really be called anthropology in the proper sense at all. It is closer to Yuval Noah Harari’s vision of the human as algorithm. Maybe we could call it anthropoidology. It’s an investigation of something like humans, or with human features, but is certainly not an investigation into the human person as a who and not just a what. Once the possibility of choice is denied, the entire subjectivity and inner life of the human person collapses. It is considered a black box about which we can know nothing: the great “Unknowable X” of human nature.
But the phenomenon of free will, which most people experience themselves as having, is a fundamental datum of human experience. It is beyond the reach of evolutionary or scientific anthropology to ever be able to disprove or prove that it exists. We ultimately must rely on philosophical and theological anthropology to even approach an answer. We must make some fundamental metaphysical decision about the nature of reality, and ourselves. In other words, some stance must be taken. The answer will not be given to you.
I think there are deeply spiritual reasons for not wanting to believe in free will. It’s an easy way of not having to come to grips with one’s own actions—or with evil in the world in general. It’s not easy to accept that someone else may have chosen to hurt you, and even harder to accept the fact that you have chosen to hurt someone else. It’s easier to claim that we had no choice.
I’d like to begin presenting a better framework for thinking about this question. I’m going to continue coming back to this topic because I think it’s the very heart of a vast array of problems both on a personal and societal level.
Any serious understanding of freedom, from at least Socrates on, has always understood one’s ability to make free choices as existing on a spectrum. There is no such thing as absolute freedom (yes, some people may belief that they are absolutely free to do anything at any time, like levitate, but that’s a delusion.) People can become more or less free based on their actions (a drug addict, for instance) and psychological factors. (“This person is not free—not capable—of engaging in X type of conversation at this point in their life,” can be a very true statement, and that inability could be due to everything from childhood trauma to extreme narcissism.) They’re truly not free.
But there are different degrees and even domains of freedom: physical, psychological, and even spiritual. (“No one can take my life from me. I lay it down on my own.”) We might start by simply recognizing them and being clear about which type of freedom we’re referring to.
The Scholastic view, articulated in depth by Thomas Aquinas, viewed any free act as a process which is composed of steps. Thomas Joseph White, OP, writes:
[Aquinas] sees the structure of the free act as composed of twelve distinct moments, of which elective choice is only one. Six of these moments pertain to knowledge, while six qualify the activity of the will.
Let us say that the rural Georgian in me is cast into a fit of nostalgia by reading David Yeago’s account of his childhood in Virginia. I formulate the sane plan to relocate from Manhattan to somewhere in the Appalachians. Therein my will is moved first by the love of a particular good perceived and desired. The judgment that this particular good should be worthy of possession moves me to form an intention to seek it out. After prudent reflection on how to go about accomplishing this goal, I consent inwardly to a formulated plan. Freedom takes on a definite shape, as it were, in the act of choice. I elect one path rather than another (Appalachia vs. Manhattan; travel by train rather than by car). I then command myself to act (the intellectual engagement of what Aquinas calls the imperium ), and I cast myself into action as I board the train headed south.
The pursuit of the good ends (perhaps standing on the front porch of a mountain home in rural Virginia) in the apprehension that I have come to possess the good. Therein I attain to the final end of the activity of freedom: delight in the possession of that which is loved. We move from desire, through intention, consent, choice, and engagement, to happiness and joy.
Reducing freedom to the act of choice alone, liberalism unintentionally cultivates an internal drama of incoherence.
“Reducing freedom to the act of choice alone” creates an “internal drama of incoherence.”
As we see this drama of incoherence play out in the world and in the lives of people, perhaps even our own, I hope to open up a discussion that at least attempts to move toward integrity. And by integrity, I mean Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. I also mean re-assembling the shattered piece of the traditions. I mean not butchering the concept of free will into component parts so that the whole is lost. I mean avoiding the temptation to use ideology to mask that which I am afraid to acknowledge about myself, which includes accepting my own guilt for the things which I have freely chosen to do—but also the good that I have done and may someday do, which is a source of hope and future joy precisely because it is possible.
Without free will, there can be no real love. That, perhaps, is why I am so fired about what I am seeing. The destruction of the mind is tragic, but the destruction of the heart is even worse.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/eJcZUsn
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