[Warning: Another lengthy treatment of an elusive reality. Fair treatment denies brevity, I say. But there is also the matter of how much appetite and patience you have for such topics.]
From the Chronicle Review (of the Chronicle of Higher Education):
From the Chronicle Review (of the Chronicle of Higher Education):
Free will has long been a fraught concept among philosophers and theologians. Now neuroscience is entering the fray.
For centuries, the idea that we are the authors of our own actions, beliefs, and desires has remained central to our sense of self. We choose whom to love, what thoughts to think, which impulses to resist. Or do we?
Neuroscience suggests something else. We are biochemical puppets, swayed by forces beyond our conscious control. So says Sam Harris, author of the new book, Free Will (Simon & Schuster), a broadside against the notion that we are in control of our own thoughts and actions. Harris's polemic arrives on the heels of Michael S. Gazzaniga's Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (HarperCollins), and David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon), both provocative forays into a debate that has in recent months spilled out onto op-ed and magazine pages, and countless blogs.
What's at stake? Just about everything: morality, law, religion, our understanding of accountability and personal accomplishment, even what it means to be human. Harris predicts that a declaration by the scientific community that free will is an illusion would set off "a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution."
And don't forget the folks most recently studying the genome (which prescribes those neurological, biochemical processes), or the classical and operant conditioning folks, the last-generation students of learning, behavior and acculturation. All have had their reasons and their proofs why so many of our behaviors, including thinking, preferences and choices, are a function of genetic prescriptions or predispositions, or what in one way or another is conditioned or learned in our cultural, social environment. As individuals and as communities, can we work at all well with the notion that an array of deterministic forces render us more complex, but self-deceiving automatons than crafters and directors of our own destiny?
Let's take a look at some excerpts from those recent articles, and try to sort out what neuroscience now adds to this dialogue--and what remains of notions or experience of freedom of thought, choice and behavior. Or does it all depend on what we mean by "free will," the nature, context and focus of the inquiry, the purposes and designs for its conclusions and applications? Of course, I have some thoughts on the subject which I will offer at the end.
First, from Jerry A. Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago:
Let's take a look at some excerpts from those recent articles, and try to sort out what neuroscience now adds to this dialogue--and what remains of notions or experience of freedom of thought, choice and behavior. Or does it all depend on what we mean by "free will," the nature, context and focus of the inquiry, the purposes and designs for its conclusions and applications? Of course, I have some thoughts on the subject which I will offer at the end.
First, from Jerry A. Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago:
The term "free will" has so many diverse connotations that I'm obliged to define it before I explain why we don't have it. I construe free will the way I think most people do: At the moment when you have to decide among alternatives, you have free will if you could have chosen otherwise. To put it more technically, if you could rerun the tape of your life up to the moment you make a choice, with every aspect of the universe configured identically, free will means that your choice could have been different. [But there are other meaningful conceptual understandings and definitions of "free will." GH]
Although we can't really rerun that tape, this sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics. Your brain and body, the vehicles that make "choices," are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by your genes and your environment. Your decisions result from molecular-based electrical impulses and chemical substances transmitted from one brain cell to another. These molecules must obey the laws of physics, so the outputs of our brain—our "choices"—are dictated by those laws. (It's possible, though improbable, that the indeterminacy of quantum physics may tweak behavior a bit, but such random effects can't be part of free will.) And deliberating about your choices in advance doesn't help matters, for that deliberation also reflects brain activity that must obey physical laws.
To assert that we can freely choose among alternatives is to claim, then, that we can somehow step outside the physical structure of our brain and change its workings. That is impossible. Like the output of a programmed computer, only one choice is ever physically possible: the one you made. As such, the burden of proof rests on those who argue that we can make alternative choices, for that's a claim that our brains, unique among all forms of matter, are exempt from the laws of physics by a spooky, nonphysical "will" that can redirect our own molecules.
[...] Recent experiments in cognitive science show that some deliberate acts occur before they reach our consciousness (typing or driving, for example), while in other cases, brain scans can predict our choices several seconds before we're conscious of having made them. [Some behavior scientists would cite their own research proofs that many such phenomena are a function of classical (Pavlovian) or operant conditioning triggered by conditioned discriminative stimuli--which, of course, is just another deterministic process and force. GH]
[...] So what are the consequences of realizing that physical determinism negates our ability to choose freely? Well, nihilism is not an option: We humans are so constituted, through evolution or otherwise, to believe that we can choose. What is seriously affected is our idea of moral responsibility, which should be discarded along with the idea of free will. If whether we act well or badly is predetermined rather than a real choice, then there is no moral responsibility—only actions that hurt or help others. That realization shouldn't seriously change the way we punish or reward people, because we still need to protect society from criminals, and observing punishment or reward can alter the brains of others, acting as a deterrent or stimulus. [This is what some behaviorists have called "vicarious learning," a demonstrable phenomenon which also implies that as behaviors can be learned or conditioned, they can also be changed or extinguished, even by just observing the context, conditions and results of a situation. Of course, this is no revelation; we've all observed it, even experienced it. GH] What we should discard is the idea of punishment as retribution, which rests on the false notion that people can choose to do wrong.
The absence of real choice also has implications for religion. Many sects of Christianity, for example, grant salvation only to those who freely choose Jesus as their savior. [There is very much in question the concept embraced here, and what is meant by any particular Christian or Christian tradition when referring to "free will." There are differences and ambiguities. And then there are the many confusing, antithetical, yet authoritative Biblical references to a more deterministic, "predestined" path of faith for the "elect" among professing believer--whether from various Calvinist understandings and supporting Scriptures found often in Paul's Epistles, or other sources like Psalm 139. GH]
And some theologians explain human evil as an unavoidable byproduct of God's gift of free will. If free will goes, so do those beliefs. But of course religion won't relinquish those ideas, for such important dogma is immune to scientific advances. [Yes, and it is also likely immune because of the ambiguities in teaching and understanding I last referenced, and the insulating mystery in the faith teaching that God's ways and understandings are not our ways and understanding. GH]
[...] Although science strongly suggests that free will of the sort I defined doesn't exist, this view is unpopular because it contradicts our powerful feeling that we make real choices. In response, some philosophers—most of them determinists who agree with me that our decisions are preordained—have redefined free will in ways that allow us to have it. I see most of these definitions as face-saving devices designed to prop up our feeling of autonomy...
That's one clear, direct point of view, even if it does not deal with the alternative arguments or views sufficiently. Next is Alfred R. Mele, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University. He is the director of Big Questions in Free Will, an investigation of the science, philosophy, and theology of free will, supported by a $4.4-million grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
Is free will an illusion? Recent scientific arguments for an affirmative answer have a simple structure. First, data are offered in support of some striking empirical proposition—for example, that conscious intentions never play any role in producing corresponding actions. Then this proposition is linked to a statement about what free will means to yield the conclusion that it does not exist. [As in the first essay. GH]
In my book Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (Oxford University Press, 2009), I explain why the data do not justify such arguments. Sometimes I am told that even if I am correct, I overlook the best scientific argument for the nonexistence of free will. This claim, in a nutshell, has two parts: Free will depends on the activity of nonphysical minds or souls, and scientists have shown that something physical—the brain—is doing all the work.
As the majority of philosophers understand the concept, free will doesn't depend at all on the existence of nonphysical minds or souls. But philosophers don't own this expression. If anyone owns it, people in general do. So I conducted some simple studies.
In one, I invited participants to imagine a scenario in which scientists had proved that everything in the universe is physical and that what we refer to as a "mind" is actually a brain at work. In this scenario, a man sees a $20 bill fall from a stranger's pocket, considers returning it, and decides to keep it. Asked whether he had free will when he made that decision, 73 percent answer yes. This study suggests that a majority of people do not see having a nonphysical mind or soul as a requirement for free will. [Is that satisfactorily proved by this study uncontrolled for whether the participants have fully accepted and internalized the notion that brain equals mind completely? GH]
If free will does not depend on souls, what is the scientific evidence that it is an illusion? I'll briefly discuss just one study. Chun Siong Soon and colleagues, in a 2008 Nature Neuroscience article, report the results of an experiment in which participants were asked to make simple decisions while their brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. The options were always two buttons, and nothing hinged on which was pressed. Soon and coauthors write: "We found that two brain regions encoded with high accuracy whether the subject was about to choose the left or right response prior to the conscious decision," noting that "the predictive neural information preceded the conscious motor decision by up to 10 seconds." The science writer Elsa Youngsteadt represented these results as suggesting that "the unconscious brain calls the shots, making free will an illusory afterthought."
In this study, however, the predictions are accurate only 60 percent of the time. Using a coin, I can predict with 50-percent accuracy which button a participant will press next. And if the person agrees not to press a button for a minute (or an hour), I can make my predictions a minute (or an hour) in advance. I come out 10 points worse in accuracy, but I win big in terms of time.
So what is indicated by the neural activity that Soon and colleagues measured? My money is on a slight unconscious bias toward a particular button—a bias that may give the participant about a 60-percent chance of pressing that button next.Given such flimsy evidence, I do not recommend betting the farm on the nonexistence of free will.
There appears more than enough flimsy evidence to go around in that point of view. Next up is Michael S. Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author, most recently, of Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (HarperCollins, 2011).
Neuroscience reveals that the concept of free will is without meaning, just as John Locke suggested in the 17th century. Do robots have free will? Do ants have free will? Do chimps have free will? Is there really something in all of these machines that needs to be free, and if so, from what? Alas, just as we have learned that the world is not flat, neuroscience, with its ever-increasing mechanistic understanding of how the brain enables mind, suggests that there is no one thing in us pulling the levers and in charge. It's time to get over the idea of free will and move on.
Understanding the mechanisms of mind is both daunting and thrilling, as well as a central part of modern knowledge and life. We humans are about becoming less dumb, and making better decisions to cope and adapt to the world we live in. That is what our brain is for and what it does. It makes decisions based on experience, innate biases, and mostly without our conscious knowledge. It is beautiful to understand how that happens.
But brain determinism has no relevance to the concept of personal responsibility.The exquisite machine that generates our mental life also lives in a social world and develops rules for living within a social network. For the social network to function, each person assigns each other person responsibility for his or her actions. There are rules for traffic that exist and are only understood and adopted when cars interact. It is the same for human interactions. Just as we would not try to understand traffic by studying the mechanics of cars, we should not try to understand brains to understand the idea of responsibility. Responsibility exists at a different level of organization: the social level, not in our determined brains.
Viewing the age-old question of free will in this framework has many implications. Holding people responsible for their actions remains untouched and intact since that is a value granted by society. We all learn and obey rules, both personal and social. Following social rules, as they say, is part of our DNA. Virtually every human can follow rules no matter what mental state he or she is in.
[...] We should hold people responsible for their actions. No excuses. That keeps everything simple and clean. Once accountability is established, we can then take up the more challenging questions of what as a society we should do about someone engaged in wrongdoing. We can debate punishment, treatment, isolation, or many other ways to enforce accountability in a social network. Those are truly difficult issues. Establishing how to think about responsibility is not.
---"Free Will is an Illusion, but You're Still Responsible for Your Actions," by Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Chronicle Review (3.18.12)
Okay, that one was more about the notion of personal responsibility assuming the neuroscientist are right than the reasons why they are; but a conversation worth having. Next is Hilary Bok, an associate professor of philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Freedom and Responsibility (Princeton University Press, 1998).
As a philosopher, I often find speculation about the implications of neuroscience for free will perplexing. While some neuroscientists describe free will in ways that I recognize, others, including some distinguished and thoughtful scientists, do not. Thus Benjamin Libet: If "our consciously willed acts are fully determined by natural laws that govern the activities of nerve cells in the brain," then free will is "illusory." [Ah, more definitions, conditions and conclusions. GH]
Most philosophers disagree. [With what, exactly? That last statement, and only that? GH]
Among philosophers the main division is between compatibilists, who believe that free will is compatible with causal determinism, and incompatibilists, who believe that it is not. Almost all compatibilists think that we are free. Most are not determinists, but they believe that we would be free even if our actions are fully determined.
With the exception of those who work within a religious tradition, philosophers tend to be naturalists who see individual mental events as identical with events in our brains. When we say that a person's choice caused her action, we do not mean that she swooped in from outside nature and altered her destiny; we mean that an event in her brain caused her to act. On this view, the claim that a person chose her action does not conflict with the claim that some neural processes or states caused it; it simply redescribes it.
For compatibilists, therefore, the problem of free will is not that neuroscience reveals our choices as superfluous. It does not. Nor do compatibilists deny that our choices cause us to do things. The problem of free will for compatibilists is not to preserve a role for deliberation and choice in the face of explanations that threaten them with elimination; it is to explain how, once our minds and our choices have been thoroughly naturalized, we can provide an adequate account of human agency and freedom.
How can we reconcile the idea that our choices have scientific explanations with the idea that we are free? Determinism does not relieve us of the need to make decisions. And when we make decisions, we need some conception of the alternatives available to us. If we define an alternative as an action that is physically possible, then determinism implies that we never have more than one alternative. But since we cannot know in advance what we will choose, if we define "alternative" this way, we will never know what our alternatives are. For the purposes of deciding what to do, we need to define our alternatives more broadly: as those actions that we would perform if we chose them. [Hmm. More conceptual and conforming to our perceived experience, this is also a more welcome and comforting treatment. GH]
A person whose actions depend on her choices has alternatives; if she is, in addition, capable of stepping back from her existing motivations and habits and making a reasoned decision among them, then, according to compatibilists, she is free.Whether this view provides an adequate account of free will is not a problem neuroscience can solve. Neuroscience can explain what happens in our brains: how we perceive and think, how we weigh conflicting considerations and make choices, and so forth. But the question of whether freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with free will is not a scientific one, and we should not expect scientists to answer it. [Ah, but that very statement is very much at the heart of the different understandings of the questions, context, methodologies, purposes and implications. GH]
Whatever their views on the compatibility of freedom and determinism, most philosophers agree that someone can be free only if she can make a reasoned choice among various alternatives, and act on her decision; in short, only if she has the capacity for self-government.
Neuroscience can help us to understand what this capacity is and how it can be strengthened. What, for instance, determines when we engage in conscious self-regulation, and how might we ensure that we do so when we need to? If the exercise of self-government can deplete our capacity for further self-government in the short run, what exactly is depleted, and how might we compensate for its loss? Does self-government deplete our resources in the short run while strengthening them over time, like physical exercise, or does it simply weaken our ability to govern ourselves without any compensating benefit?
Neuroscience can answer those questions, and it can provide causal explanations of human action, but it can't resolve the question of whether or not such explanations are compatible with free will.
---"Want to Understand Free Will? Don't Look to Neuroscience," by Hilary Bok, The Chronicle Review (3.18.12)
Not bad; not adequately responsive to the points of the scientists, but relevant and worthy considerations. Not bad. Next, Owen D. Jones, a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University. His book Law and Neuroscience, with Jeffrey Schall and Francis Shen, is forthcoming from Aspen Publishers next year.
The problem with free will is that we keep dwelling on it. Really, this has to stop. Free will is to human behavior what a perfect vacuum is to terrestrial physics—a largely abstract endpoint from which to begin thinking, before immediately moving on to consider and confront the practical frictions of daily existence.
I do get it. People don't like to be caused. It conflicts with their preference to be fully self-actualized. So it is understandable that, at base, free-will discussions tend to center on whether people have the ability to make choices uncaused by anything other than themselves. But there's a clear answer: They don't. Will is as free as lunch. (If you doubt, just try willing yourself out of love, lust, anger, or jealousy.)
All animals are choice machines for two simple reasons. First, no organism can behave in all physically possible ways simultaneously. Second, alternative courses are not all equal. At any given moment, there are far more ways to behave disastrously than successfully (just as there are more ways to break a machine than to fix it). So persistence of existence consistently depends on one's ability to choose nondisastrous courses of action.
Yet (indeed, fortunately) that choosing is channeled. Choices are initially constrained by the obvious—the time one has to decide, and the volume of brain tissue one can deploy to the task. Choices are also constrained by things we have long suspected but which science now increasingly clarifies.
For example, human brains are not general-purpose processors, idly awaiting culture's activating infusion of consciousness. Evolutionary processes pre-equip brains in all species with some information-processing predispositions. Generally speaking, these increase the probabilities that some combinations of environmental circumstances—immediate physical and social factors, contexts, and the like—will yield one subset of possible (and generally nondisastrous) behaviors rather than others.
Also, we now know that brains, though remarkable and often malleable, are functionally specialized. That is, different brain regions have evolved to do different things—even though they generally do more than one thing. As a consequence, impairments to specific areas of the brain—through injury or disease, for example—can impede normal human decision-making. And those impediments can, in turn, relax inhibitions, increase impulsive and addictive behaviors, alter the ability to make moral judgments, or otherwise leave a person situated dissimilarly from the rest of the population.
Which brings us to law. How will insights from the brain sciences affect the ways we assess a person's responsibility for bad behavior? Answer: only somewhat, but sometimes significantly. Many people assume that legal responsibility requires free will, such that an absence of free will necessarily implies an absence of responsibility. Not true, as many scholars have amply demonstrated. Full, complete, utterly unconstrained freedom to choose among available actions might be nice to have, but it is not in fact necessary for a fair and functioning legal system.
This is not to say that degrees of freedom are irrelevant to law. Science hasn't killed free will. But it has clarified various factors—social, economic, cultural, and biological in nature—that constrain it.
The existence of constraints very rarely excuses behavior, as when a person in an epileptic fit hits someone. But evidence of brain-based constraints—which can vary from small to large—can be, and indeed have been, relevant in determining the severity of punishment. For example, some jurors in a recent Florida case reported that evidence of abnormal brain functioning warranted a murderer spending his life in prison, instead of being executed.
All behaviors have causes, and all choices are constrained. We need to accept this and adapt. Brain sciences are revealing complex and interconnected pathways by which the information-processing activities of multiple brain regions coalesce to influence human decision making. But this poses an advantage—neither a threat nor a revolutionary transition—to the legal system. In the near term, these complexities are more likely to inform than to utterly transform law's justice-driven efforts to treat people fairly and effectively.
I have a genetic condition. People like me are prone to violent fantasy and jealous rage; we are over 10 times more likely to commit murder and over 40 times more likely to commit sexual assault. Most prisoners suffer from my condition, and almost everyone on death row has it. Relative to other people, we have an abundance of testosterone, which is associated with dominance and aggression, and a deficit in oxytocin, associated with compassion. My sons share my condition, and so does my father.
So, yes, I am male. The neuroscientist David Eagleman uses this example to illustrate how our genetic blueprint partially determines our actions, including our moral behavior. The rest is determined by our environments; by the forces that act upon us throughout our journeys from zygotes to corpses. And this is it—we are physical beings, and so our natures and our nurtures determine all that we are and all that we do.
This conclusion does not feel right. Common sense tells us that we exist outside of the material world—we are connected to our bodies and our brains, but we are not ourselves material beings, and so we can act in ways that are exempt from physical law. For every decision we make—from leaning over for a first kiss, to saying "no" when asked if we want fries with that—our actions are not determined and not random, but something else, something we describe as chosen.
This is what many call free will, and most scientists and philosophers agree that it is an illusion. Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.
I agree with the consensus, but it's not the big news that many of my colleagues seem to think it is. For one thing, it isn't news at all. Determinism has been part of Philosophy 101 for quite a while now, and arguments against free will were around centuries before we knew anything about genes or neurons. It's long been a concern in theology; Moses Maimonides, in the 1100s, phrased the problem in terms of divine omniscience: If God already knows what you will do, how could you be free to choose?
More important, it's not clear what difference it makes. Many scholars do draw profound implications from the rejection of free will. Some neuroscientists claim that it entails giving up on the notion of moral responsibility. There is no actual distinction, they argue, between someone who is violent because of a large tumor in his brain and a neurologically normal premeditated killer—both are influenced by forces beyond their control, after all—and we should revise the criminal system accordingly. Other researchers connect the denial of free will with the view that conscious deliberation is impotent. We are mindless robots, influenced by unconscious motivations from within and subtle environmental cues from without; these entirely determine what we think and do.
I think those claims are mistaken. In any case, none of them follow from determinism. Most of all, the deterministic nature of the universe is fully compatible with the existence of conscious deliberation and rational thought. These (physical and determined) processes can influence our actions and our thoughts, in the same way that the (physical and determined) workings of a computer can influence its output. It is wrong, then, to think that one can escape from the world of physical causation—but it is not wrong to think that one can think, that we can mull over arguments, weigh the options, and sometimes come to a conclusion. After all, what are you doing now? [Hear! Hear!]
I and my views find more compatiblity and comfort with Mr. Bloom and his take on it all. But, as threatened, I reserve the last word for myself. Since a good friend finds it irksome when I use pullquotes from something I've written before, here I will just share with you some long-held views, although you will find very similar ideas and language, but more of it, in two pieces called "Choices" and "The Limits of Merit & Choice" written by someone or other some years ago.
Your freedom and choices, it appears, may be more limited than you think. What remains to you is the constant drumbeat of scholarly research that informs us we are each bound in our own Procrustean bed, genetically-defined, fixed more-or-less, and further limited by the environments we were reared in and live in.
That unwelcome, deterministic reality is an earnest finger poked in our chest, demanding to be heard, attesting repeatedly to the inherited and conditioned responses and qualities that characterize what we do, what we think, who we are. A more euphemistic sentiment might allude to the limits and conditions on the freedom of man. A more direct and fatalistic disposition might charge that what the genes don't dictate, the environment will. And if the genetic brand of determinism is incomprehensible or unacceptable to you, don't expect to find more comfort in the world of conditioned behavior and beliefs. Or do you believe that the realities of family and cultural conditioning are any less powerful than your genetic endowment?
So do not deceive yourself or be deceived. The power of our genetic endowment and the behavioral conditioning of our environment are great indeed. With compelling research in hand, science would reasonably advise you that your very personality and many of your personal traits and predilections are influenced significantly by your genes. So is your predisposition to pursue certain types of vocations or interests, or fall prey to certain illnesses or diseases. And the ubiquitous power of the environment, the impact of family and culture as explained by the learning and conditioning sciences, has been well understood much longer.
Of course, many are simply in denial. They would wish it all away, dismiss it as exaggerated in impact and import. But that's a fool's errand, whether born of intellectual ignorance, emotional defensiveness, or worse, a stiff-necked, misguided mission to carry water for various ideological, religious or social agendas. They greatly underestimate the near uncontrollable, deterministic power of genetic inheritance and environmental conditioning. But operating under a self-constructed illusion of freedom—denying, distorting or reshaping the truth—has never been the right answer, or even a workable answer. Then you are working with a lie, and have no chance at all.
You might well conclude, then, that the natural condition of man is an utter lack of freedom, the absence of real, voluntary personal choices—or, put another way, that any sense of freedom exists only in ignorance.
Moving Toward a Reality of Freedom
If all this is just too emotionally confining and personally limiting, too threatening to your notion of freedom and identity, potential and possibilities—it should be. Oh, it's not that this is all bad science, a cruel, controlling hoax, a lie. No, in large part it is too true. And the only real uncertainty is how large a part each factor plays in influencing the understanding of our alternatives and the making of our choices. But it isn't as bleak as it sounds.
In a real sense, you can enjoy and exercise more real freedom. Your freedom is first in knowing what has made you who you are, the way you are—and how. You can better understand your genetic predispositions and prescriptions; more is being learned about such things every day, and you can have your genetic endowment examined and explained to you for a reasonable price at commercial providers of such services.
It is also in knowing how your family and cultural environment has shaped you, conditioned you, to be who you are, the way you are. You can learn more about such processes, which makes alternatives more real--the potential effect on you of different places and people, different thinking and ways of doing things. Your freedom is in that knowledge. You can also read what different people are reading, listen for what they are saying, watch for what they are doing. In this way you can learn more about what you need to know, and better understand.
You can, then, see yourself and others in a different, more interdependent way, a more understanding and sympathetic way. And to the extent you know the ways you and others are a product of your changeable circumstances—family, culture, your time and place, the box you are in—you have a blueprint for personal change.
You can have real alternatives and choices to make. And you can have better-informed reasons to believe in and make your choices. If there is anything more to your notion of freedom than a hollow log, you can know that there are better choices you can make, actions you can take, to access better opportunities to grow—or not.
And the scope of the alternatives you entertain and understand, and the particular choices you pursue with understanding, also define your freedom, don't they? A choice to refrain from expanding your experience, knowledge or ability is, in effect, a choice to limit or deny your future choices—and therefore the future scope of your freedom. So it is also with choices to indulge foolish, anti-social or base desires and emotions. They can threaten life or health, result in imprisonment or legal limitations, or compromise your honor, trustworthiness, or self-esteem in ways that limit your future relationships and opportunities. These acts, too, limit your future choices and freedom. And they can be better controlled.
So, you can plan your way toward readiness to take the first steps out of the behavioral box you're in. You can plan your way to choosing better alternatives and expand your possibilities, that they are real and waiting for you—even calling you.
Move, literally. Change the physical place you are in and the people around you. Seek people and situations that will expect more of what you want to expect of yourself. They can notably change your actions, what you do, change your thinking, and to some extent, who you are. And the more you know about yourself—about those influencing factors—the more readily, competently you will make choices for effective change in your life. And yes, that honest knowledge will also have to acknowledge your limitations as well as your potential. That's important, too. But, most often, there will be some better alternatives, some better choices.
Please make some choices that work for other people, too—people you probably don't know or don't know well. To one extent or another, you share with them some of the same space, even if not the same experiential boxes. Make some choices for tolerance or, better still, acceptance and civility. Or, go crazy: think about respect and caring and serving.
Make some choices for community and your best contribution to it. Consider more charitably the poor, the immigrant, the stranger, the prisoner. Consider again issues of access to education and health care, and stewardship of our environment. Be part of solutions, not problems; building up, not tearing down; caring, not neglecting or, worse still, hating. You can do this. But you need to embrace a new sense of responsibility, some knowledge of the alternatives and possibilities—your possibilities. And you have to make some choices.
The Limits of Merit & Choice
Now, let's take a look at another application in the broad arena of social policy that begs for understanding of these deterministic forces in the lives of individuals and groups of people. It's about how ignorance about such things, or unwillingness to understand, leads us embrace social half-truths that harm us more than help us, both as individuals and as a society.
It's not a fabrication, a lie. It's just not the whole truth. And the part that's been omitted—or is it just ignored?—should provide the basis for us to consider providing better for those most in need. I'm speaking of our unwarranted overemphasis on personal merit and, as we've discussed elsewhere, freedom of choice.
It really does appeal to us, all of us. It panders to our self-esteem, our sense of self-determination and self-sufficiency, our self-congratulatory tendencies. We want to believe that we earned what we have—that we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, mapped out our plans, prepared ourselves, then worked hard, harder than the next guy, earning our way to our definition of success. And in a very real, experiential sense, it is true. (Most of us feel that's exactly what we've done!)
We also want to believe that it's not our fault if the next guy wasn't as ambitious, didn't prepare himself as well, didn't work as hard, wasn't as able. It's not our fault if he was too lazy or irresponsible, lacked discipline, character or interpersonal capability. It's not our fault if he wasn't intelligent, talented or savvy enough. It's not our fault if he was too different, unstable or disabled. We each get what we earn, what we deserve. (Isn't that right?)
And what of the poor, the competitive failures of whatever stripe? Why, they just suffer the natural consequences of their own failings and failure. And that's not our fault, either. How could it be? (So, why should it be our responsibility?)
Of course it's not your fault or mine—at least not most of the time. But most often, neither is it theirs. Notably, in a most real sense, most often we are no more the author of our successes than they are of their failures. Heresy, indeed! But let me briefly explain why, in more empirical terms, this is also true.
You understand the continuing discussion and research about nature and nurture, of course. We discussed it in Choices. You're familiar with the debate about how much of the way we are is the result of the genetic legacy of our parents and forbears, and how much is the result of the way we are conditioned and schooled, what we learn in our families, communities and cultures. What is not in doubt is that the combination of our genes, family, culture and education determines who we are, how we act, and the likely limits of our potential and achievements. And if most everyone still has some alternatives, some choices, those afforded the least able of our brethren, the least fortunate, are so many fewer and so much narrower, and their ability to act on them is so much less.
The irony is that we discuss it, make casual affirming observations about it in everyday life, even ponder it with personal satisfaction or dismay, but then go about our lives dealing with each other, making personal and organizational decisions and crafting public policy as though we didn't know it or didn't believe it. The truth is that the power and perceived importance of our public, cultural half-myths trump what we instinctively know and what science more resoundingly than ever confirms. The truth is inconvenient and unwelcome to our sense of independence, accomplishment and self worth. It can coexist only uncomfortably with those cultural values.
So, just how right, how defensible, then, is that laissez-faire foundation on which we stand? How fair or egalitarian, how ethical and moral, how humane and intelligent are our assumptions about getting what we earn or deserve? How even is the playing field, how just the result? Is it not true that there, but for the deal of the genetic cards, the spin of the birth-place roulette, go I—dross in the crucible of our competitive society, failed or failing, and much in need of the help and support of my community, my more fortunate brethren? Shouldn't the integrity of an accountable, civilized society demand a full understanding and honest acknowledgment of this reality? Wouldn't it respond honestly, responsibly, and effectively to the needs of the innocent poor, infirm and unable? Wouldn't health care, education, and subsistence living be their right as it would everyone's?
(My Christian faith informs me that we are each just who God intended us to be based on the dictates of our singular spiritual paths, and the genetic endowment and life circumstances that deliver us there. And more, we have responsibilities and accountabilities for one another. That is the signal characteristic of faith community, and any real community. No one left behind.)
Compiled and Edited, April 2012
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