The Vicious Cycle

This piece has been sitting almost finished for some time, but given the recent re-creep of religious fundamentalism into our politics, it seems timely and appropriate. The concerted, methodical march to challenge the safe access to abortion services in this country by the Evangelical movement can infuriate and frighten the average unbeliever. Those who value a secular society, especially one that respects the autonomy of women and trusts them to make their own medical decisions, should be rightfully alarmed and beleaguered.

Now, there is a good chance that the reader plans on persevering with existence until the coming of your untimely death (cause really, when is death ever timely?). For those invested in the future of humanity, frustration with your fellow man as we go about determining how to solve the problems of our modern society and what kind of society we would like to have is inevitable (though some of our fellow man are the problem, and this is my point which is to follow). The amount of my lifetime spent screaming at the radio in astonishment at the idiocy of some of our fellow men and women, whether it be over domestic policy or geopolitics, is kind of embarrassing. Naturally, when confounded by the beliefs and decisions of others, we want to know why it is that they hold those beliefs and make those decisions. Often when we learn those reasons, we are still flabbergasted by how those we disagree with could hold so many contradictory beliefs. I am no different. Yet nowadays, when I end up asking the why question, I immediately have an answer: Homo sapiens. We are precisely the type of creature that would be so self-contradictory. This thought initiates what I will call the vicious cycle. Allow me to elucidate in what follows.

The cycle begins by being, once again, flummoxed by how bat shit insane some of our fellow citizens can appear. My mind races towards an explanation of how it is that such a large percentage of our population could be so immature, short-sighted, and idiotic. As a simple example, how tens of millions of people could think that a fat, bald but can’t accept it, adulterous, vile, con-artist, butt of every joke buffoon would make a good leader of the free world (not to say that the alternative was any good either). There are plenty explanations I could offer on the surface level for how it is that so many disenfranchised people thought that a man who, due to a lack of any substantive knowledge, name calls like a middle-schooler, would act in their best interest, but I won’t get into them here. The imbeciles of the world, and even some of the intelligentsia, behoove us to ask, as Michael Shermer put it in a great book of the same name, why do people believe weird things? An answer that might be offered as fundamental is to assert that we are all, every single one of us, a product of our genes and circumstances.

Here is a natural example we all intuitively understand. Boy born into a broken home with low-income parents. Poverty and food stress inhibits development. Boy is abused by stepparent and has violent teenage outbursts. Not quite a man but not a boy individual attempts a robbery to increase his access to resources and, since his inhibitory computational modules are not yet fully developed, ends up violently assaulting someone. Young man faces decades in jail. When being sentenced, the judge takes into account that this young man grew up in tumultuous circumstances, was violently abused himself, and made a bad choice, one that could be rectified over time. He gets a lighter sentence than is prescribed. Most of us, on the surface, agree that this is the type of justice that we want, but in this agreement is a tacit admission that human beings, at least to some degree, are a product of their genes and circumstances.

If you accept the narrative for granting leniency to this hypothetical but archetypical young man, I would then ask what would be any different about the rest of us? I, for example, used to believe many weird things, act in many odd ways due to the fundamentalist Evangelical environment in which I was raised. Being fed a narrative, coinciding with experiences that reinforced it, compelled me as a teenager to witness to strangers voluntarily on Friday nights, praying for healings on the streets of Northern California (spoiler alert, there weren’t any). I spent my weekends in the church, raising my hands and praising a fictitious being in a supposedly heavenly tongue. (the tongues of the Book of Acts fame) If you ask me why do bible thumpers believe such weird things, beliefs that lead them to pass laws that force women to carry their rapist’s fetus to term, it’s because of their genes and circumstances. How are any of us any different? Hippy parents typically yield hippy children, and we never bat an eye. Crazy Jesus freaks tend to produce Jesus freak children predominantly. This I can testify to as most of the people that I grew up with in private Evangelical Christian schools never lost their faith in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Bad decisions are based on bad ideas, and religious fundamentalists had bad ideas beaten into their heads from birth, just as did I. Few have overcome that.

There may be some objections brewing in your mind. All of this is contingent on whether or not there is a way in which human beings are free to generate a set of possible actions and freely choose an action from a set of options for which they could be held responsible. I do not wish to wade too deep into the controversial waters of the free will debate, but there is only one point about the debate I wish to make. When genuinely invested in this fundamental question, you research all of the most famous historical works on the subject. What you’ll find is that it took Immanuel Kant ten years of solitude to produce a work in which he thought he could release human beings from the laws of cause and effect in the Critique of Pure Reason. From a different approach, you are asked to consider if brain state 1 is predictive of brain state 2? Even if it is partially predictive, not quite 100%, the type of libertarian free will that is sufficient for metaphysical moral responsibility is tough to get off the ground. Even one of the most ardent defenders of compatibilism about determinism and free will (compatibilists hold that the dual claims of a deterministic universe and free will are compatible) Daniel Dennett is reported to have admitted that one some level, free will is just a useful concept. I agree it is an instrumental concept, but we can hold it while acknowledging that it most likely does not obtain in the type of creatures we are: again, Homo sapiens. Some propose that it is an emergent property, in the same way that a table is an emergent property of the way in which atoms are arranged tablewise. Yet, we all naturally exempt children from moral responsibility and bestow it upon adults. So we start with an agent not responsible for her actions and at some point later end up with one who does. In charting this progression, one is forced to concede that the line of demarcation, separating not morally responsible from morally responsible, established for any individual is entirely arbitrary. The same goes for the species in general. I will say some more on this line of thought and the metaphysical indeterminacy of moral responsibility in another post.

For another take, the philosopher Alex Rosenberg, and his fellow eliminative materialists, view historians as being mistaken in the way in which we try and reconstruct the past. We ask why is it that people make the choices they did and try to answer those queries with reasons and motivations. This approach is based on a theory of mind, the notion that we view others as having beliefs and desires just like ours, that he thinks was wrong from the beginning. When we go looking for reasons and beliefs in the physical world, nary are they to be found. If physics fixes all the facts, and by something called physical causal closure, then reality is not something that contains, metaphysically, the notions of free action or justifications for our choices. You do not have to get on board with Dr. Rosenberg to acknowledge that if his approach is even somewhat plausible, it yields the question of free will, and subsequently moral responsibility, even murkier.

This whirlwind tour through some of the free will debate was to get to the assertion that our increasing understanding of reality should make it obvious that we are in control of our thoughts and actions. For most of human history, this was a foregone conclusion. Yet, in the Age of Reason, the more we learn, the less some of us (those of us who study the phenomenon) see how this could be possible. For those who’ve experienced them, intrusive thoughts demonstrate that it’s pretty suspect if we are even in control of our own internal dialogue, much less actions. So then, are we to take the manifest image, the one of our phenomenological experience, seriously? Or is it that we have to accept the scientific image of the world as primary? I have been pondering this question for a decade, and it seems that we might just have to hold both to be true.  If this argument gains traction with you, it is hard not to end up in the vicious cycle when we get infuriated with the worst of what humanity has to offer. Unending violence and conflict, vile behavior for profit, and wanton behavior that causes human suffering have been the pattern for Homo sapiens since the dawn of recorded history. Yet, it seems we will persist in thinking the birth of a new generation is going to upend this trend. Philosophers have been at this debate for centuries and which side of this debate any of them are on is still pretty much a coin flip. The only point to all of this discussion, as I alluded to earlier, is that it is not obvious that we are responsible for the person we become or liable for the choices we make, the actions we take. It should be especially obvious if you are going to insist that we will all be judged for our actions after death. If it is not glaringly evident, I would argue it is probably not the case.

This second step in the cycle is realizing that human beings, as products of genes and circumstances, are not in control of our actions or beliefs. If we are not predominantly in control of our actions or beliefs, then who I am really frustrated with instead of our fellow citizens? I guess I have to direct my anger at the previous generations for screwing us up so badly. But then, the same logic applies to them. So then I suppose I need to be frustrated with the machinations of evolutionary biology which molded us into this type of creature. But well, these machinations are just the inevitable products of the laws of chemistry that allowed for the first self-replicating organisms to emerge on this planet, eventually leading to us. But those laws are just emergent properties of the laws of physics. But the laws of physics were laid down at the dawn of our Universe proven by all the supporting evidence for the Big Bang. Soooo, I guess when I am mad at Jesus freaks, anti-vaccer’s, flat-Earthers, religious fundamentalists of all shapes and stripes, the military-intelligence-industrial complex, etc… I guess I am really just upset that the Big Bang happened and led to this silly stupid mess we call existence. But one cannot really be at mad the rapid expansion of a singularity now can one? So the frustration abates, and I move on to other considerations.

Until the next time, when I see the beginnings of future world power, nation-state conflict and I wonder again how it is that human beings could be so fucking stupid to flirt with World War III? Then I remember we are all probably just a product of our genes and circumstances, along with being the type of mammal that we are. Which leads to the second step in the cycle: realizing that human beings, as products of genes and circumstances, are not really in control of our actions or beliefs. If we are not predominantly in control of our actions or beliefs, then who I am really frustrated with instead of our fellow citizens? I guess I have to direct my anger at the previous generations, but then the same logic applies to them. Then I suppose I need to be frustrated with the machinations of evolutionary biology and natural selection. Well but, these machinations are just the inevitable products of the laws of chemistry, the conditions in which the first self-replicating organisms emerged on this planet. Also inevitably, leading to Homo sapiens. But then again, those laws are just emergent properties of the laws of physics. But those laws of physics were laid down at the dawn of our Universe and the Big Bang. So I guess when I am exasperated by selfish politicians, perpetrators of genocide, Scientologists and Mormons, or those responsible for our cycles of boom and bust, I guess I am really just upset that the Big Bang happened and led to this silly stupid mess we call existence. But one cannot really be mad at the rapid expansion of a singularity now can one? So the frustration abates, and I move on to other considerations.

Until the next day when I see that neo-neocons threaten war with Iran, and I wonder again how it is that human beings could be so fucking stupid and careless with human life. Then I remember we are all a probably just a product of our genes and circumstances, along with being the type of mammal that we are. Which leads to the second step in the cycle: realizing that human beings, as products of genes and circumstances, are not in control of our actions or beliefs. If we are not predominantly in control of our actions or beliefs, then who I am really frustrated with instead of our fellow citizens? I guess I have to direct my anger at the previous generations, but the same logic applies to them. Then I suppose I need to be frustrated with the machinations of natural selection. But these machinations are just the inevitable products of the laws of chemistry. These laws led inevitably to the first self-replicating organisms emerging on this planet, eventually leading to us. But those laws are just emergent properties of the laws of physics. But those laws of physics were laid down at the dawn of our Universe in the Big Bang. So I guess when I am mad at racists and homophobes, superficial celebrity culture, radical Muslims and Christian Sharia, anthropogenic climate change deniers, or previous generations and all their ridiculous decisions, I guess I am really just upset that the Big Bang happened and led to this silly stupid mess we call existence. But one cannot really be mad at the rapid expansion of a singularity now can one? So the frustration subsides, and I move on to other considerations…

I think you get the point. A life constantly spent in a furious state because of those who you vehemently disagree with, engulfed in outrage culture, is not one worth living. So is there any way out of this cycle? I suppose we can hope that someday the majority of humanity will come to their senses and put together some semblance of rational thinking long enough to break the, as Nietzsche put it, eternal recurrence of the same, but who are we kidding? I do think holding that human beings are freely acting agents and that simultaneously we are probably not the type of creature that is a freely acting agent goes some way. It is also helpful to take the Stoic approach, which forbids any time spent fretting about things beyond our control. This would include not worrying about the fact that even you and I are probably not in control in the way that we have been raised to believe is the case. Just some great apes caught up in the slow and painful march of human progress (or degression, who knows with all these silly people). Until people stop believing weird things, the vicious cycle continues.