Accepting that we are governed not by free will but by the processes of the
body could provide a positive vision for society.
Free will was a necessary idea, once upon a time. For the religious, it was
the plaster over the holes in their god’s benevolence. For the wronged, it made
revenge feel like justice. It bolstered the pride of the great and nursed the
resentment of the foiled. It was a useful lie. And it thrived, so long as there
was metaphysical wiggle room for it to inhabit – some cunning dualism that
shunted decision making away from the body and towards ethereal incorporeality.
Yes, thirst and hunger and sex are grounded in the mechanisms of the body, we
were told, but there is real, tangible freedom tucked away deep within us all,
rescuing us from our clockwork natures.
There’s a desperate charm to that idea, but we’re quite beyond it now. The
mechanisms of decision making, the chemistry of empathy, the physics of neural
plasticity, each gnaws away every day at the few remaining supports of a free
will model of individuality. We are forced to either redefine free will to
something existent but meaningless or chuck
the idea altogether and make peace with finding the subtle joys of our
exquisite programmability.
Generally when an atheist talks about joy, what follows is a series of
verbal contortions intended to recast finitude as something really quite
lovely, and in all ways the equal of religious ecstasy. I have no ambitions
towards ecstasy, but I do believe that a constant baseline of indefatigable
pleasantness is the reward of thorough-going determinism and that, far from
necessarily resulting in a gloomy nihilism, it can rather beautifully enhance
one’s engagement with the world and those living in it.
In the absence of a will, what we
have left is a system of massive mutual programmability. The logic of evolution
has rendered us hyper-social, constantly monitoring our surroundings for
behavioural clues which get fed into our self-corrective systems. Through the
marvel of neural mirroring, we mentally experience the actions of others as our
own. We fire all the preparatory neurones
as if we were doing the actions ourselves, stopping just short of physical
re-enactment. We do not merely observe others – we become them.
Each human is a shifting conglomeration of influences – a tangle of other
people’s actions and emotions woven around a genetically and epigenetically
forged chemical system of evaluation.
All of which is to say, identity is something of a farce, and existential
angst over one’s authenticity is mostly unnecessary. It’s an engaging game to
work out where different parts of your personality hail from, but so much of
your waking self is made up of sub-routines foisted upon you by other people
that this sort of hand-wringing will only get you so far. When you accept
yourself as a shifting amalgam, the game of living well and truly begins.
Knowing your unwritten impact on others, and theirs on you, lets you partake in
a grand social alchemy, to view and savour the swirling personalities engaging
with your own basic routines, and to be aware of your own responsibility for
the well-being of everyone in your proximity.
More than allowing you to be a connoisseur of humanity’s subtle shadings of
mutual influence, a thorough determinism lightens considerably the starkness of
envy and scorn. The success of others rankles less, just as your own successes
are less self-damaging when viewed from
the perspective of necessary mechanical processes. Striving without envy, victory
without condescension – these were long deemed impossible for a humanity that
had been taught that it's Will be outside the natural order but become the stuff of psychological routine when you view
yourself as an elegant machine performing its unique role as best it is able.
For the individual, determinism means a lifetime, ringside seat at the
shifting spectacle of one’s self, a chance to cheer and wonder and weep, but
without the dire need to take everything that happens to you so damn personally.
There’s a bit less ego there, a good deal more room for compassion and the potential for enjoyment in even the most mundane
social circumstances is a bonus all its own. For society, however, the benefits
are weightier still.
Consider just how much of humanity’s inhumanity is predicated on the notion
of choice. Believing in the evitability of human actions, we incarcerate (or,
here in the United States, execute) our societal transgressors. We lionise
those who seek and achieve revenge. We construct societies that keep the poor on the strength of the Horatio Alger
notion that they can simply will themselves out of it. Our political discourse
is aimed at bludgeoning the opposition with insincere rhetorical flourishes
rather than seeking a comprehension of the structure of their alterity. We
construct educational systems that agonise over adhering to a set of numbered
standards while turning their backs on supporting the humanity of the teacher.
If we see ourselves as intertwined, linked brain to brain by a magnificent
evolutionary gamble that paid off and gave us dominion over the planet, the
structures we build will reflect that sensitivity, and we’ll start building
better systems to capitalise on that interdependence. We’ll be less willing to
institutionalise wrath in the form of an electric chair or conceit in that of a slum. Jails will still exist, but
with a better understanding of what it takes to shift decision pathways in a
positive direction, just as homeless shelters will continue, but with dehumanising,
“choice”-laden pity replaced with enabling respect.
And what will we lose when the change from believing in the dualistic will to accepting determinism comes?
For some, free will is the last barrier between decent humanity and a state of
lawless debauchery. People, rather disappointed that the loss of God didn’t
push society into rampant cannibalism and leather fetishes, have moved the
goalposts back, claiming that free will was the real issue all along and that once we stop believing in it,
there will be nothing we won’t allow ourselves. After all, if we consider
ourselves machines, and others to be machines, why wouldn’t we just rape and
pillage our way to an early death?
We wouldn’t, for the same reason that we are able to calmly discuss the
ramifications of a determinist worldview
in the first place – to create the world
stable enough to have the leisure to contemplate its own mechanisms of the decision, we had to heavily grow into each
other’s mental spaces. Each level of interdependence brought with it a new success
and new generations whose chemical experience of happiness was rooted more in
contributing to societal progress than experiencing isolated moments of
individual desire satisfaction. We are at a point where so very much of our
internal reward and motivation wiring is keyed into the collective project of
humanity that any new levels of humility we achieve must feed into the
enhancement of communalism rather than solipsism. Our philosophy has at long
last caught up to our biology, and there is no way of turning back that process
without subjecting ourselves to an isolation that our communication-hungry
brains are no longer equipped to withstand, let alone enjoy.
What would happen in a world that accepted determinism would be, first and
most bureaucratically, a clearing away of cumbersome vocabularies, of the
lexicon of choice that allowed humans to blindly
dehumanise each other with a mass of words and a clean conscience afterwards. A
superman can write off a sub-human, but a self-aware empathy machine cannot so
easily dispose of another. Once the metaphysical baggage has been checked, the real task of remaking society, of actualizing the potential within our
interdependent primate survival strategy, can begin, with consequences that
might well de-medievalism the
will-encumbered assumptions underpinning our health, welfare, and justice
systems.
God, it turns out, was our next-to-last delusion. Behind him stands the
real Big Bad of Western Civilisation, one whose fall will usher in the true
modern age of humanity, when we finally emerge from the tidepools of
Victorianism we’ve convinced ourselves are the end-all of secular progress, and
start figuring out just what an elegant machine can do, once it has accepted,
and found some source of entertainment and even pride in what it is.
SOURCE: THE NEW HUMANISM
