#57: Determinism & Neo-Determinism; Freedom-Handicaps; and Liberalism

I’m talking about the philosophical theory called “Determinism,” a doctrine that is as at home in the European Enlightenment as Socialism is. The notion usually shows up as one half of a problem, 0ne of the most popular and enduring philosophical chestnuts with which to entertain and puzzle undergraduates: the free-will/determinism conflict.

The Determinism in question is usually called “Causal Determinism” because it emerges from reflections on nature and the way it is governed by causal laws. Once people became aware of science as an accumulation of related laws, they also drew the conclusion that there exist no exceptions to law-governed behavior. The underlying faith of science is that all natural change is law governed, whether we happen at any point in time to know which laws are actually in play or not. A further implication of this faith, some have thought, is that human behavior, no less than that of the planets, is itself fully law-governed and therefore fully determined. It would seem that this line of reflection inexorably leads to the conclusion that there is no free will.

The reason lies in the strong, if cryptic, intuition that “being free” means “being able to have done otherwise.” Was I free when I chose my Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks? On this intuition, I was free only if it’s true that I could have done other than I did, by buying, let’s say, a Cafe Americano. But, argues the causal determinist, since each of us is a machine and thereby governed by immutable causal laws, we could no more refrain from the Caramel Macchiato than a ball rolling down a hill can arbitrarily choose to stop or a clock arbitrarily change the time it is showing.

I think that I’m not going too far in saying that, all things considered, Causal Determinism has not taken any damage in this 400 year conflict. It has a very strong case. At least a part of the reason for this is that the increasingly powerful secular-scientific lobby has successfully pushing the view that Causal Determinism implies some very specific moral, social, and political positions. Among these are the following two BIG ones:

1) The law should only be an instrument of protection and rehabilitation, not punishment or justice. The law should protect all of its citizens, law-breakers included, from each other. Law breakers are not to be punished, since punishment presumes that the criminal had choice, which enlightened people understand is not the case. Law breakers are broken or maladjusted machines, to be repaired or readjusted, not made to suffer.

2) Since people could not have done otherwise, they are never free, and, since never free, never responsible for what they do.

Now, the move from Causal Determinism to the moral, social, and political policies is, I think, completely unwarranted. The former can be true, which I think it is, and the latter still be bad policies. This is not a new idea, it was already argued very well near the end of the 17^th c by John Locke. The view is called “Compatibilism” because it holds that freedom and Causal Determinism are compatible.

A Compatibilist maintains that people can in fact be free. They are free, he says, whenever they could do other than they do, given that they want to do the other thing. Being free, he argues, is simply nothing standing in your way of doing what you want to do. He doesn’t care why you want what you want, just that nothing is stopping you from going after it. When that is the case, he says that you’re free. The causal determinist does care about why you want what you want, and he doesn’t care whether it’s true that nothing is stopping you from going after it. All he cares about is that your past and your body are determining what it is that you want.

I think that Locke is in the right on this, but Hume, some 75 years later, elaborates and clarifies his point. We never ask whether a ball rolling down a hill is free or not. And, more specifically, we never complain that a ball lacks freedom because it is incapable of suspending or violating the laws of motion. That is, where an inanimate object is concerned, we don’t think that the object’s leaving the control of the laws of nature would constitute “freedom” for it.

The reason is that balls rolling down hills don’t have goals or objectives. The ball is not, as Aristotle thought, “trying to get to it’s home” (his explanation of gravity). We do, however, speak of “setting an animal free” and of animals being in “captivity.” Perhaps this is no more than anthropomorphization, perhaps not, but it indicates that we apply the notion of freedom only where we believe there exist wants, desires, goals, or objectives. “Freedom,” thus is a very limited notion, applying only to one’s ability to satisfy one’s wants or achieve one’s goals. As Hume puts it, freedom is either this or it is nothing (meaningless). It is true that our wants and goals are the causal results of our personal histories, our genetic endowments, and our others physical inheritances, but to say that we are “free” is nothing other than to say that nothing stands in the way of our satisfying those wants and achieving those goals.

But Locke and Hume don’t have to be right on this question, since I’m quite willing to grant Causal Determinism to the Enlightenment’s Liberal descendants for the moment because what puzzles me is not their being Causal Determinists or even their extending this theory to moral, social, and political doctrines, but rather their apparent inconsistency.

Conservatives are constantly disturbed and offended by what they perceive to be “double-standards” being applied by liberals. What is a “double-standard”? It is applying one set of expectations for, say, moral behavior or rationality to one population, while applying another lesser one to another. Here are some obvious examples:

1) The rich and the poor. Characteristically, rich criminals are excoriated with the entire vocabulary of blame, while the poor are exempted from any responsibility.

2) The white and the black (or Hispanic or gay; strangely, Asians do not seem to benefit from this application of the double-standard as the former).

3) The male and the female.

4) Israel and the so-called “Palestinians.”

5) And, lately, we have noticed the same phenomenon occurring with respect to the Tea Party and the vocal Left.

Not least, it is very apparent in 6) the different treatment being accorded to Bush and Obama.

One half of this double standard is perfectly understandable in terms of the Enlightenment legacy of Causal Determinism. People who are the causal products of their histories are not responsible for what they do. Blaming these people would simply be unfair. One could see these positions already explicitly stated in Julien de la Mettrie’s The Man Machine, as well in as in his other writings. Nothing new, nothing unexpected.

But the other side of the double standard is really difficult for these descendants of la Mettrie to defend. Are not the rich, the white, the male, the Israelis, the members of the Tea Party, and, of course, Bush, not equally products of their histories?

The existence of this difference in treatment is so dramatic that it would seem that even the most ideologically brain-damaged Liberal would find herself suffering some cognitive dissonance, but this does not seem to be happening. How can this be? I have a modest answer here.

I think it is because Liberals are not traditional Causal Determinists at all, they are what we might call Neo-Determinists. But, you say, if this is true, why have they not come out and published their new doctrine, the philosophy of Neo-Determinism? The reason, I think, is that while this new doctrine does have some significant political advantages, it also has serious disadvantages that would become quite obvious once the doctrine was brought to the surface. More on this below.

Now, I do believe that Liberals hold, along with everyone else, that responsibility varies directly with degree of freedom; but I think that Liberals also harbor an unspoken commitment to the view that personal freedom and responsibility together actually vary with membership in certain select populations. This barely visible theory, if it can even be called that, is that freedom (and responsibility) varies directly with 1) money, 2) race, 3) sex, 4) education, 5) intelligence, and 6) political affiliation. This means that people with more money are more responsible for what they do, white people more than “people of color”, the better educated more than the less, the smarter more than the stupid, and Conservatives more than Liberals. The precise size of the responsibility discount being applied for each category will vary with the Liberal involved, and these degrees are never very precisely identified, but they are definitely there. And lest you think that “being more responsible” is a “good” thing, for the Liberal mind it is not, it only means “being more hateable and blamable.”

Liberals must keep this doctrine unspoken since it has very unflattering implications for themselves and their supporters. While, on the one hand, the protected groups have the benefit of being able to misbehave with impunity (they cannot help what they do), they only gain this benefit at the cost of being identified as handicapped by either their poverty, their race, their sex, etc, etc, etc. Hence, the cost of being a “protected” group is being, in effect, Freedom-Handicapped.

Thus, Neo-Determinism brings with it the embarrassing implication of Freedom-Handicappedness. But the important point to be noticed here is that Freedom-Handicappedness is a price that Liberals are happy to pay for the privilege of being able to hate and excoriate other populations. If the liberals just remained traditional Causal Determinists, then freedom would become simply impossible for everyone equally. But, on the doctrine of Neo-Determinism, freedom becomes apparently once again possible and available, though it happens to be the case that a large portion of humanity does not have access to it.

That most liberals actually do hold to Neo-Determinism is, I think, indirectly confirmed by the remarkable contempt they display towards even their own side. Of course they show contempt for their own: their own are un-free puppets to be manipulated. This follows from their doctrine.

So much for Liberals. As far as traditional Causal Determinism is concerned, here are a few more remarks.

De la Mettrie hit the nail right on the head with his image of the “man-machine,” for it is this image that underlies traditional CD. It is because man is no more than a machine that he is not free, is fully determined in everything he does and thinks. Some philosophers of the time took the most obvious course by simply denying the CD premise, that man is “no more” than a machine. They granted that a significant part of every person is “material” and thus subject to the laws of nature, but, then proceeded to insist, each person also contains a mind or soul or spirit that is exempt from those laws. Our freedom, they insist, lies precisely in our being a “mental” as well as “material” being.

This is, however, a very risky move to make just for the sake of free will. There might, of course, be other reasons for making it as well, but buying free will at the expense of incurring all the risks and problems associated with a commitment to “mind” seems imprudent.

For one thing, in order for “mind” to actually be capable of supplying freedom, it must be assumed to be exempt from the control of causal laws. But what this means is that more exists than just the natural world. Applying Hamlet’s line, according to the “mind” supporter, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We can easily imagine Immanuel Kant making this claim, since he believes that he has been able to leave room for the possibilities of God’s existence, human freedom, and the immortality of the soul. But Kant doesn’t think that Horatio (or any of us) can ever know that these possibilities are or are not realized. The “mind” supporter does think that he knows that mind is real and is the source of human freedom. The mind supporter thus buys human freedom at the cost of expanding the universe into one that is both natural and non-natural, law governed and non-law governed. This is a hell of a price to pay for a freedom we might well be able to get pretty much for free. And it is for this reason that Compatibilism seems such a bargain: human freedom made possible without the overhead expense of maintaining a soul! What a deal!

#56: American Jews: Lookin’ For Love in all The Wrong Places

Hatikvah is Israel’s national anthem, but since the ethos of the Israelis and American Jews is so different, it might be appropriate to find a separate one for the latter. My own candidate for a new Jewish-American anthem is Lookin’ For Love in All the Wrong Places (sung by Johnny Lee in Urban Cowboy).

A lot of people, most of them reflective Jews, have been puzzled by the twentieth century Jewish infatuation with the Left. The excellent periodical Commentary, for example, ran an entire symposium on the theme Why Are Jews Liberal? and there were as many answers, all of them plausible, as there were contributors. We don’t want to get trapped into the “single-cause” assumption, so I suspect that the truth is that all of those proffered explanations are involved in the phenomenon to varying degrees and among different sub-populations. There is, though, one pervasive factor that seemed to have been missed in that symposium, which is what leads me to dip my own oar in the water on this question.

The Jews have lived with the consciousness of being hated and despised wherever they have gone for more than two thousand years. And this hatred crystallized into very specific libels and stereotypes of evil. In particular, Jews were hated for being greedy and money grubbing, for being insular and clannish, and, in general, for being just plain bad. You’ve got to admit, tough or not, this is bound to get you down eventually. Sooner or later, you’re bound to develop neurotic reactions to this treatment. Some of them seem pretty obvious.

The most obvious one, it seems to me, is that Jews would become neurotically preoccupied with persuading people that they were not at all bad, that they were, in fact, good.

As it turned out, since their behaviour was neurotically determined, not determined by a rational assessment of the situation, their efforts at persuasion have always been doomed. Since they were not hated because of the characteristics they were alleged to have, getting rid of those characteristics did not serve to reverse the situation. People hadn’t hated Jews because they were bad; they hated them, and, because of that, believed them to be bad. More specifically, the fact that the hate came first, the rationale second, was given a theoretical foundation during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. While previously the Church and others allowed for a Jewish “redemption” through conversion, this ended with the doctrine of racial, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism. This was a crucial moment in history, since it set the stage narrative-wise for Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The Jews had to be exterminated because, according to the new doctrine, their evil was not remediable. Since one can change one’s religion, a person who is bad because of their religion can become good by simply changing it. But, as the Nazis maintained, if a person is bad because of what they are (metaphysically), they can never be made good. And the only remaining remedy is to exterminate them.

And since people continued hating them (or they believed that people were still hating them), they continued to work even harder at being publicly and conspicuously GOOD. My point is that Jewish liberalism must be, among other things, a psychological reaction to the situation of Jews in history.

Here are a few elaborations on this theme.

First, this strategy was not going to work with the dominant Protestant population. As Max Weber famously argued, the Protestants developed the acquisition of wealth as a theologically based God-given holy task necessary for the doing of good works. There was no way that these money-grubbing Protestants would not see the Jewish acquisitiveness and efforts at philanthropy as anything other than an attempt to ingratiate themselves (which, on my hypothesis, they largely were).

But not all Jews had philanthropy or good works available to them for proving that their hatred was undeserved. Certainly the Jews of pre-revolution tsarist Russia did not. Therefore, these Jews sought the only other option available, they sought to make common cause with the other sub-groups being mistreated, thinking to persuade at least them that Jews are not evil, but actually good.

But they were looking for love in all the wrong places.

The Russian upper classes despised them; but so did the Russian peasantry; and so, to their shock and horror, did the Russian revolutionary class. They tried the same thing later in Germany, with much the same result. The German socialists used the Jews when they were useful, and murdered them when they were not.

As in the case of all compulsions, the American Jews have never learned from their own history. They have continued to seek the love and approbation of their non-Jewish environment through philanthropy and good works. It hasn’t worked.

They desperately tried to make common cause with American blacks during the civil rights movement. They contributed their money, they contributed their brains, they contributed their influence, and sometimes they even contributed their lives. And, of course, predictably, anti-Semitism is nowhere more entrenched than among American blacks. The blacks used (and use) the Jews when they are useful, and reject them when they are not. Think Jesse Jackson and the Rev'rnd Wright.

But, in addition, a habit born of psychological compulsion does not cease to work when either the causes of the compulsion or even the compulsion itself ceases to exist. What was once a mere compulsion can acquire all the trappings of a moral-philosophical mantra, it can become an auto-biographical narrative, and this has certainly happened in the case of the American Jews.

Just as native Americans have become the environment-loving, spiritual, noble victims of European aggression and vice, and American blacks the poor victims of white racism, so the American Jews have become the modern warriors for right and good. Where self-identification is involved, the game du jour is Let's Pretend.

A further point that is consistent with this thesis is that American Jews have seen fit to reject the affection of possibly the ONLY population in history for whom the Jews have been flavour of the month: the American Evangelicals. This should be no surprise, from a psychological point of view.

The mechanism that underlies the Jewish search for love necessarily involves the conversion of hate into love. Freely offered love is worthless; only a love that has been dearly earned through suffering is satisfying. And so the American Jews keep snuffling around the American black population, and keep being harassed and assaulted, and, at the same time, turn up their noses at friendly overtures from the Evangelicals.

Groucho Marx captures the American Jewish neurosis perfectly in his clever quip:

Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.

I end this discussion with this.

The American Jews voted by a vast majority for Obama despite everything that was known about him that should have warned them, including what he explicitly stated. To them I say: How’s that been working for ya?

I doubt that Johnny Lee is Jewish, but any American Jew could sing:

I was lookin' for love

In all the wrong places

Lookin' for love in too many faces

Searchin' their eyes, lookin' for traces

Of what I'm dreamin' of

Hopin' to find a friend and a lover

I'll bless the day I discover

Another heart lookin' for love.

Voting for what is clearly and transparently against your own interests is only explainable in terms of mental pathology.

#55: Obama: Copernicus or Sitchin?

Way back when I was still teaching, I used to tell students that all enduring philosophical questions have the same form: a really powerful intuition that things are ONE way meets an equally powerful theoretical reason why it CAN’T be that way. For example, most people feel totally free in their decision-making, but, yet, the conclusion of an excellent argument (the causal determinist argument) holds that they are not. Most enduring paradoxes belong precisely to this pattern.

Now, in this collision between our strongest convictions and equally powerful contrary arguments we see a conflict that is rarely resolvable by reason. What actually happens is that the positions taken by people on these puzzles is almost always decided by their psychological dispositions. Thus, some people are more disposed to trust their instincts, others to trust arguments, while yet others are most comfortable suspending judgment altogether.

For example, Malebranche took the Cartesian doctrine of the beast-machine so seriously that, according to anecdote, he drop-kicked a little pregnant dog (of whom he was very fond) across the courtyard in the firm theory-determined belief that animals felt no pain (no more than did clocks). Even as there is no way of theoretically determining whether animals, like humans, feel pain or not, most people’s spontaneous inclinations are to believe that they do. But Malebranche was so much the philosopher that reason trumped inclination in his case.

On the other hand, while Hume was convinced that Berkeley’s skeptical arguments concerning the existence of an independently existing material world were irrefutable, he also thought that they couldn’t possibly overrule our dispositions to believe the contrary. He writes:

But that all his arguments, though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical, appears from this, that they admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism.

Moore took the same line in his famous The Refutation of Idealism, in which he made the point, albeit indirectly, that at the end of an argument with an undesirable conclusion, we always have a choice: we can accept the conclusion, or we can reject it on the grounds that its negation is incontestably true. If the proponent of the argument objects that we have not shown how the argument fails, we can respond since we know the conclusion to be false, we also know the argument to be flawed. Precisely how it is flawed is not our problem.

Lest it be thought that this is only an issue in abstruse philosophical controversies, please note that exactly the same issue arises in science. Carl Hempel pointed out (in a book whose title I no longer remember) that when a researcher encounters an unacceptable result (he just doesn’t like it), he can always (in theory) choose to reject the theory underlying some key part of his experimental apparatus. Of course, this can be extremely expensive in that it inevitably also brings into question everything else in science that relied on that theory. Yet, some times people are fully prepared to do just that. And that’s often when we get scientific revolutions.

When the researcher’s bet pans out, we’re clearly happy with him. When it does not, we think he was an idiot for challenging so much of the existing system of beliefs. We still get all giddy about Copernicus, but about Zecharia Sitchin, not so much. Sitchin has been arguing for some time now that we are the engineered products of highly advanced extraterrestrials who came to earth roughly 450,000 years ago. This theory has not done terribly well within the astro-physics community.

What all this indicates is that there is no simple, easy answer as to when or why to opt either for intuition (or the mass of evidence or the mass of acquired belief), on one hand, or for theory-derived conclusions.

The reason I bring up this theme is that I had not noticed before that this paradigm extends even beyond the pale of philosophy and science; it extends to politics as well.

In particular, I noticed this extension when reflecting on the apparent immunity of leftist ideologues to the lessons of 20^th c history.

If there is one thing that seems apparent beyond argument, it is that socialism simply does not improve the lives of the people who live under it. We know this most dramatically from the failure of the Soviet Union, from the fact that Cuba has been a welfare client since its revolution, and we also notice that China is leaving classical communism behind. At the same time we notice that India is booming as a free enterprise economy. All around the world, we see the socialist states creating horrible living environments for their people and capitalist states doing significantly better. And this is as true of Europe, with its social democracies, as well as out and out commie states.

Yet, the true believers, those who live under the aegis of a “great theory”, they proceed as if none of this had ever happened.

As in the cases I discussed earlier, these true believers must do something in order to hold on to their privileged theories. In effect, they must reject 20^th c history or its apparent lessons in some way.

One way, of course, is to deny that those things ever happened. This is a tough one, since the U.S.S.R. is visibly absent, if something can be visibly absent (Sartre thinks it can!).

Another thing is to admit that they happened, but it’s not because the system sucks, but because a) the system was never fairly applied, or b) it was applied, but it was undermined by the evil capitalists.

The true believers are making a BIG bet, just as Copernicus made a BIG bet and Zecharia Sitchin made a BIG bet.

Copernicus’ bet paid off. Sitchin’s has not.

Time will tell whether Obama’s goes the way of Copernicus’ or the way of Sitchin’s.

My money is on the Sitchin way.