Standing before a crosswalk at an intersection, what determines whether you proceed? Suppose there is a car signaling to make a right turn into your path. Another car is signaling to make a left turn from the opposite direction. Both drivers show their intent to cross your path. And, further, two cars are stopped, facing each other on the same road you intend to cross. Who has the right of way? And what do you do? Perhaps you have always felt privileged. You might assume you have the right of way even if one or more cars have entered the intersection. So you walk assuredly into the crosswalk forcing the drivers to brake. Or perhaps you trust your previous experience and training. You might proceed as you normally would at a crosswalk, perhaps maintaining eye contact with the drivers and assuring they grant you right of way. Or perhaps you could care less. You might just proceed oblivious to the drivers and their willingness to grant you the right of way. Your mind might be elsewhere, as if you were not alive in that moment. Whatever you choose to do, at a crosswalk or in life, you always act from a personal perspective. But who is responsible for the choice made and why?
A fatalist would say that you have no choice in the matter. Your course in life was preset before you were born. Further, you are not only programmed at birth by your genetic inheritance, but also by the circumstances of your life, by socially prescribed behavioral norms, by the necessity of natural laws, and perhaps even by divine providence. This predetermination explains why some people are born into rich families where they garner fame, wealth, and every possible pleasurable experience, while others seem doomed to live wretchedly in war torn conclaves, in ghettoes, or in segregated communities where all hope and opportunity are absent. The less fortunate do not deserve their fate; it just is what it is. The elite, in like manner, have what they have as a birthright, not as something earned. As a result, the privileged have no reason to pity the less fortunate, for “those people” are just not “one of us.” But, being so blessed can make a person feel superior and justified. Righteousness is the only morality left for those fortunate few who believe their success was predetermined. They may feel gratitude, but likely no compunction for the less fortunate. The unfortunates may become resigned to their plight, but likely with some measure of envy or resentment. If you are a fatalist, you face any crossroad in life either with supreme confidence or extreme dread. Whether you walk safely through a crosswalk or suffer injury, your course was set before you ever took a step forward. No one is responsible for whatever happens in that crosswalk—or in life.
Determinists, unlike fatalists, do believe in choice. If you are a determinist, your choices are caused by the conditions of your birth and your genetic inheritance, as well as your interactions with everything and everybody throughout your life. The decisions made and the habits formed in the course of your life are all factors that determined your future choices. In other words, there is a cause and effect explanation for every choice you have ever made. Whether you wait at the crosswalk or step confidently forward, your choice will be based upon your previous experience in like circumstances, your knowledge of the right of way provisions of the motor vehicle code, and your familiarity with drivers’ proclivities at intersections. Oddly, if you were consistent in your determinist beliefs, you would not be able to hold responsible a driver who ran you over in the crosswalk. Instead, you would be forced to recognize that the driver was merely adhering to a personal causal network different than your own. Morality in this instance is nobody’s responsibility for everybody does what is determined by the circumstances of their individual lives. No one is responsible for whatever happens in that crosswalk—or in life.
Besides fatalism and causal determinism, there is another related perspective that is less prevalent, but even more dark. For want of a better term, it might be called nihilism. A nihilist gives no credence to any explanation for what happens in the world. For the nihilist neither providence nor a causal chain offers a rationale for what happens. The actual course of events simulates gas molecules in a closed system colliding and crashing until they reach an end state of utter chaos. Or, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth proclaims, “life’s but a walking shadow . . . a poor player . . . upon a stage . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In the nihilist’s view, it makes no difference if a person steps in front of a car or dons a suicide vest to prove that life itself has no meaning. Life is not lived, but endured. Its context is meaningless, unpredictable, and amoral. Simply, it is just random nonsense. Nobody is responsible for anything—ever.
Fatalists, determinists and nihilists all believe humans incapable of creating their own future. Our choices are predetermined, are caused by the circumstances of our birth and individual lives, or are meaningless in a world controlled by chance and condemned to entropy. These are the ultimate protagonists for pessimism. They explain the present and the future in terms of the past. They fail to recognize the human organism is by definition a counterpoint to entropy. Further, humans create systems and organizations that build new futures. They simply are unable to make a case for optimism because they lack an understanding of its key ingredient: free will. Now you might fairly argue that everybody has likely experienced pessimism at some point in their lives without being a determinist. And you would be right. But in those moments of despair, anxiety, or depression, we show the same disregard for free will. The case for optimism is the same as the case for hope: both depend upon the courage to both develop and act on our goals, our dreams, and our future wellbeing. We are always free to create a better life for ourselves, for our families, and for our communities. If we abandon hope, we lose purpose. In this way, we fall into a future determined for us, forego the precious ability to act freely and creatively, and absent our power of personal responsibility. We then are only responsible for our irresponsibility.
For those who see the world as so many gas molecules, chaotically colliding and bouncing off each other into new trajectories, their analysis of cause and effect seems to make a case for determinism. But they fail to account for purpose. Chaos theory does explain how things react to each other, but it only demonstrates how patterns persist in nature and the law of inertia works in a closed system. There is a broader perspective that explains why we consistently theorize the underlying laws in nature. Humans have a propensity to discover the “why”—to unearth the meaning that explains why things happen the way they do. Our theories evolve as we uncover new evidence that helps us explain the world around us. But the one constant in the development of scientific theory is the human imagination and our endless curiosity to find meaning and a way to explain the world and our place in it. In other words, there is a constancy of purpose. And purpose or goal setting is a function of free will. Neither science nor any human endeavor can advance without our curiosity, purposeful action, and the persistence of our free will.
Sometimes our very empiricism leads us down a path where we lose the significance of the unique wholeness of our mind body connection by mistaking the mind with the gelatinous organ of the brain. Our thinking then is just a reflection of neural patterns captured like the shutter flashes of a camera. Memory is the database we search for the patterns that may direct us through the mirage we see before us. Our sense of direction and purpose is no more than the stored images of the world we have already encountered. Our free will then is just our reaction to the firing of neurons in the brain; and the emotional content of our “decisions” are just the interaction of our gut to the brain’s neural messaging. Or perhaps the reverse is true: our gut spawns a reaction in our brain; and intestinal gas spurs our dreams. In this argument, empirical science can give cover for determinism or for those self-serving folks who prey on other’s weakness. The world of manipulation through advertising, branding, political slogans, and demagoguery is a byproduct of deterministic calculations based upon real science. But we are capable of being more than consumers, believers in “group think,” or the blind followers of bombastic leaders. These are the forces that want to take away our freedom to satisfy another’s self-importance or craven self-interest. Revolutions have been fought over personal freedom. But its importance far exceeds day-to-day choices like crossing a street.
Free will embraces free choice and more. Our choices can extend beyond predetermined options. We are capable of inventing our options or setting goals that will open the future to perhaps better options. We can solve problems before they are even present to us, that is, future problems not yet experienced but foreseen—like climate change. The ability to create something new in the world does not follow a strict causal chain, although there may still be preconditions. For example, Einstein may not have proposed his theory of special relativity without the work of previous physicists whose experiments uncovered the surprising result that the speed of light did not change. Rembrandt would not have painted the Mona Lisa without Lisa del Giocondo, his model. I would not have written a poem about my daughter, if I did not have a daughter. Theories, paintings and poems do not arise inevitably any more than from chance. They are human creations. They are not “options” presented for us to select according to presuppositions conditioned by our past. Instead they are products of imagination and free will. We have the ability to create options and freely choose amongst them. We can define our future. Many among us have chosen what may seem illogical, anti-establishment, socially unacceptable, personally embarrassing, scientifically unsupported, or, in other words, wholly undetermined. These choices are solely the products of free will. Ask yourself: if it were otherwise, how would our civilizations evolve.
Now suppose you are standing in front of a voting booth, instead of a crosswalk. Let’s make the candidates on the ballot hypothetical representations of a fatalist and a determinist. Do you vote for the candidate who makes you feel superior to the less able or to those of another race or religion? Or do you vote for the candidate who promises lots of stuff—tax breaks, good paying jobs, free tuition, and so on—in exchange for your vote? One candidate makes you feel righteous and vindicated in your abhorrence for those unlike yourself. The other seems to offer much in return for your vote. The choice is either joining the cult of the fatalist or yielding to the deterministic manipulation of the panderer. Fortunately, not all political candidates make promises without proposing policies to fulfill them. These candidates do not fall into one of these hypothetical categories. But those that can be so categorized justify cynicism within the electorate. And that cynicism can become even more intensified if it yields to apathy or the belief that election results merely reflect the chaos in our electorate. But neither the fatalist nor the determinist show much regard for our humanity because they are convinced that they can either command your support or subdue you into apathy. In their mind, you are weak and will bequeath your responsibility for the future to them. In a previous blog I argued for a self-determined future (reference, “We Become the Future We Seek”). If you do not agree, then to whom or to what do you assign responsibility for the future? And what case can then be made for optimism?
Nineteen days after the armistice was signed, on September 2, 71 years ago, the Japanese surrendered, officially marking the end of World War II. Since then, we have not seen the end of bloodshed and violence. But many countries have come together to prevent another debacle of the magnitude of that war in which somewhere between 50 and 80 million people died. Perhaps it is time to remember how the hopelessness of a world depression and the privations of the previous war’s aftermath gave birth to the Third Reich and how Jews were massacred, Korean and Chinese women were enslaved, and American Japanese were herded into internment camps. The leaders of the Axis powers were, respectively, imperialist, nationalist and fascist—all three advocating their version of nativism. They believed their authority was fated, their cause righteous, and their victims deserving of their plight by birth. The world these men created was almost unfathomably vicious and dark. Somehow men and women chose to defeat these nativists and their proclamation of supremacy over others and of their self-righteous brutalization of those they deemed unfit or less human. Since their time, the world has chosen a better path forward. This is not the time to stumble. Try to remember the joy of V Day and the hope that day instilled in our parents and grandparents. They have passed the baton of responsibility for our future to us. We need to carry it forward for our sake and for our posterity. It alone makes the case for optimism. For there really is no other alternative.
