Free Won't

Abridged from https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/summaryData/deaths/byYearManner (click image to enlarge)

As it happens, the book I am reading about Free Will-- Determined, by Robert Sapolsky- has indeed changed my mind.  It's not a case of going from belief in Free Will to disbelief in it.  My mind is not a switch.*  On the contrary, I have gone from disbelief in the relevance of the question in everyday life (and annoyance at the smug, self-satisfied certainty of the "You have no free will" camp) to an understanding of the mechanical basis on which such a belief could be based and acknowledgement of its relevance and usefulness in the guidance of such public policy questions dear to my heart as criminal justice reform and mitigation of inequality.

Right off the bat, Sapolsky softened me up by dismissing the importance to the question of those Libetian studies in which researchers, by reading brainwaves of subjects tasked with randomly choosing whether to push one of two buttons, claimed to detect the outcome of the decision microseconds before the subject was conscious of it, thereby supposedly disproving the existence of conscious free will.  In Sapolsky's formulation, the Libetian timespan-- aside from being too trivial and on account of flaws in the experiment, overstated-- is the end of a chain of events and circumstances in the button pressing subject's life stretching back seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, a lifetime, hingeing on the absence or presence of traumas, advantages, disadvantages experienced in childhood, in the womb, in the culture and society and species that the subject was born into and beyond, back to the very origins of the universe.†  The nature of the universe, given random fluctuations and uncertainties is not such that one could. by calculating the trajectories of each bit of matter starting from the big bang, predict the button that Subject 22 will pick Tuesday morning at 9:43 am, Chicago time says Sapolsky-- indeed, "determined does not mean predictable."   Rather, humans (like all organisms faced with the matter of survival) are decision making machines, the quality of whose choices (indeed of what choices confront them) will depend very much on circumstances of their birth, the place of their parents in society, the stigmas or privileges of their ethnicities, the culture that they were born into (and sometimes, in the case of immigrants, whatever it is that drives them to switch cultures).  

As for cultural questions, Sapolsky notes that the choices of those born in the individualistic cultures of America, Europe and the West will be demonstrably different from those from the collectivist cultures of Asia and Africa.  Whereas someone from Dallas might be expected to opt in a way to gain advantage for himself or his nuclears, someone from Shanghai might be primarily motivated by considerations of extended family,  social group, society as a whole, or indeed global neighborhood, species, planet.  Indeed, the primacy of others in the cultural values of Asian societies is foundational in its religious traditions.  As an extreme example, the practice of self-immolation in Buddhism is considered not suicide but an act of selfless sacrifice-- as Americans were horrified to learn through images and news reports of the monk Thích Quảng Đức's 1963 protest  in the streets of Saigon against  American ally and Catholic South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm's anti-Buddhist persecutions at the start of American involvement in the region.  Indeed, Quảng Đức's was the first of many Buddhist self-immolations which culminated in a crisis from which Diệm could not prevail.  Weakened by the opposition to his out of touch autocracy, Diệm died in the military coup that replaced him by the end of the year. As extreme a choice as the Buddhist monks' was, it is in keeping with a culture that emphasizes sacrifice for the group over glory for the self.

While martyrdom has a rich and glorious history in the west, no tradition of self-immolation exists in Western religions, which prefer meek acquiescence to those at the top of the hierarchy if armed confrontation will not do.  But ever since the potent image of Quảng Đức's act spread across the planet, the practice has been applied to a number of protests in the West over the years, most recently this week, in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, as a protest against the US's enabling of Israel's war on Palestinians in Gaza  by Air Force Cybersecurity specialist Aaron Bushnell who died from his injuries later that day.  Bushnell live-streamed the act on Twitch and prefaced it by saying:

I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

On Facebook, Bushnell had written:

Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.

The clarity of Bushnell's explanation of his act notwithstanding, the image of a US serviceman  in uniform screaming "Free Palestine" as flames consumed his body was such an unwelcome enormity that it was under-reported by being under-explained in the mainstream media.  Instead it was characterized as a suicidal act of madness-- the type of behavior for which an individual cannot be held responsible.  Indeed, suicide has been the annual leading cause of death among Active military personnel for 6 of the last 10 years.  Given the nature of the adventurism that our military involves itself in, the death of American soldiers in combat tends to benefit the owners and ruling class referenced in Bushnell's live-stream.  What sets Bushnell's act apart (though it turns out it is actually the second such protest on American soil since Israel's assault on Gaza began in October) is the collectivist nature of it-- an act undertaken to make flesh the suffering of Gazans before us-- undoubtedly inculcated in him as part of his upbringing in the Community of Jesus in Massachusetts. 

It is tempting to attribute the power of the protest (in this case, the assertion of a 'Won't' rather than a 'Will') to Bushnell's freedom to choose it.  But the degree to which the choice was actually free or one determined by Bushnell's biology, station in life and life story is not necessary in order to appreciate the power of it to change minds. Inspired as it certainly was by the selfless sacrifice of  Thích Quảng Đức's prototype act  60 years prior, it must not be viewed as a tragedy but as a crystal clear communication that it is hoped will be etched in Joe Biden's mind as he comes to grips with what he must do as the world's most powerful man to bring Israel's genocide in Gaza to a close.  Free will or not, though I deeply regret the magnitude and finality of it, I thank Andrew Bushnell for his service.

~~~~~

* Or is it?

† I have never had trouble attributing crime to formative circumstances beyond one's control rather than to freely chosen "criminality" of, say, a person who suffered Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in the womb, was born into poverty and abused by adults throughout childhood, and Sapolsky of course bolsters this view by absolving such persons of responsibility for their crimes.  No problem for me.  But the life changing consequences of the abolishment of free will follows a path along the lines of: if genetics and environment and deprivations and trauma and abuse make a person a criminal, what does punishment have to do with anything?  And if that’s true about crime isn’t it also true about just bad behavior or stupidity or what have you? And if it’s true about someone else’s stupidity and bad choices, what about mine?  And if it’s true about my bad choices what about my good choices?  Etc.

Don't keep me in suspense

By the time I read Bernie Sanders'  It's OK to be Angry About Capitalism last winter, it was clear that he was not going to be making another run for the presidency.  The reason was obvious-- he was not going to challenge Joe Biden who by a year ago had finally decided (to near universal dismay) to run for re-election.  Joe Biden's fault again.  But as I read Bernie's book, it was not hard to see it as a testament for the campaign that never was. I read it with some sadness at what could have been.  

About the same time, I happened to catch the historian Prof Harvey J Kaye of Wisconsin on some program singing praises for the campaign of Marianne Williamson whom he was advising in an informal capacity.  Apparently Williamson, the spiritual author, 2020 also-ran and ultimately Bernie Sanders surrogate, was also something of a student of American history who had a belief that a course correction for the ills plaguing America and the world could start from the unrealized ideals of the American Revolution, particularly as expressed by the radical, Thomas Paine--  a subject of study for Kaye.  As the professor was also an authority on FDR who had urged the revival of the longest serving president's unfulfilled ambition to establish an Economic Bill of Rights for Americans, Williamson had engaged Kaye to advise on how she could make FDR's dream a cornerstone of her 2024 campaign.  Kaye's unabashed enthusiasm for Williamson as the only progressive challenging Joe Biden from within his party piqued my interest, and ultimately won me over.  There was not exactly a clamor among other progressives to join the Democratic race.  I felt sure that an irresistible momentum behind Williamson's campaign was only a matter of time in coming.  

Alas, it never came.  From her initial 10% share in the early polling of likely Democratic voters, she never rose above 15%.  Trounced by Biden and outdone by the only other challenger, the billionaire moderate Dean Phillips in the first three contests, Williamson suspended her campaign.  Several factors worked against her.  First, a near total media shutout limited voter access to Williamson to her social media accounts and those were not exactly catching fire (aside from some reported excitement on TikTok of all places among a constituency she alone seemed to be courting: Gen Z).  The press she did get -- even on left media sites-- when it came at all was negative, often about drama within her organization.  Some of her progressive thunder was stolen by the party hopping picaresque entry into the race of Cornel West.  As other progressives joined the din of longshot candidates outside the 2 parties of the duopoly, there came to be an unspoken but somewhat rumbled and growing consensus among the many fragmented factions of the left that presidential politics in 2024 was not where it was at. If there was any spark for Marianne Williamson left, it could be found only in the uninhabited corners of the web, such as this.

Some chaotic thoughts, then about the obstacles that Marianne Williamson's 2024 campaign could not seem to overcome at the conclusion of her campaign:

Management Problems - A running theme of the explications of left media for the poverty of their coverage of Marianne Williamson's campaign were rumors of mis- and/or micromanagement, insane tantrums, Non-Disclosure Agreements. The candidate was reportedly closed to traditional concerns of the campaign-hardened series of managers she ate through -- concerns like ballot access, endorsements, coalitions. She was on record saying NDA's seemed to her a standard common sense step for an organization to take.   These only seemed to make the scorched earth that disgruntled staffers left in their wake anonymous.  At times, being asked to defend her temper even in friendly forums seemed enough to throw her off balance and bring out the surliness.  She became increasingly unable to conceal her bitterness about both her lack of mainstream media access and the inability of even left media to resist the behind the scenes drama or to focus on the message of her campaign.  Was there plausibility to the charges that the Bernie revolution was being carried on by a flaky high-strung out-of-control diva?  Okay.  Did it matter? I'm not so sure.  No one died working for the campaign.  After a rough shakedown, the organization seemed to settle by late summer.  Were its priorities of the early states of New Hampshire and South Carolina to the exclusion of every of other state malpractice?  It wasn't really that kind of campaign.  Plenty of campaigns that behave exactly as the pundits and experts tell us they should go down in flames before the first primary vote is cast.  Marianne Williamson is not doing it like everybody else has ever done it?  So what?  What kind of outsider does?

Money - There is no good way to fund elections.  Letting billionaires do it gives us the shit hole we live in.  But the alternative-- me and you doing it-- hurts like a motherfucker speaking for myself.  You and I should not be funding elections, so if you have already come to that conclusion, you're not wrong.  Nevertheless those of us who do shell out until we bleed for lack of any better ideas are not being taken.  We are buying a tiny morsel of peace of mind.  MW was not a grifter.  Her funders were not dupes-- if they thought they were getting something in return, I don't think it's MW's fault that they didn't.  But it sure is convenient to fault her.

Primary -  There is a time for complaining about your choices and a time for making a choice.  They can take turns every minute, but it seems to me in this case that the poorness of the choice was exaggerated whereas the reasons for choosing the only truly progressive candidate were aggressively downplayed.  

Given that Joe Biden was never going to lose the primary, I fail to understand how it mattered that an alternative came to be before you as long as you had an alternative. The choice that Marianne Williamson represented was not Perfect Guru in chief-- it was for an agenda sorely missing from the conversation.  I can't blame voters.  But I do blame the media shutout nearly across the spectrum.  I do blame the flakiness of the left in 2024.

What now? - Marianne Williamson is on 31 ballots, 3 of which have already happened.  As of today there are 27 of those states remaining (along with whatever others are left after the Dems are done pre-emptively cancelling them).  As the primaries approached, the decidedly dead momentum for Marianne Williamson or any other human challenger to Joe Biden* inspired some creative write-ins.  In New Hampshire there was a movement to write-in Ceasefire.   In Michigan there is hope that the write-in candidate Uncommitted will give Joe Biden a run for his money.  If it's true that a stick would be preferable to Biden in his toxic, passively pro-genocide, doddering state, then why not a concept like Ceasefire or Uncommitted?

I think it's fine if this is what people do.  Ceasefire got half the votes of Marianne Williamson in New Hampshire though.  It was not listed in the final official results.  As a social media candidate, it turned out to have no advantage that Marianne Williamson didn't.  I believe on the whole the smaller Joe Biden's percentage the better; and the symbolism of him losing to Anything Else has an aesthetic appeal, but it does not call for commitment to any single opponent.  Therefore vote for or write-in who or whatever you choose (including Marianne Williamson in the states she did not get ballot access to) and we'll see what happens.

For myself, an expression of the bankruptcy of the duopoly is not enough to vote for.  I am voting for Marianne Williamson's Economic Bill of Rights.

~~~~~

* And at this stage, the only challengers that matter are on the democratic primary ballot. 

Ear worm

An underreported sign of aging is the development of a habit of watching YouTube Reaction videos.  This is the genre of video in which a young person or a pair -- frequently a married couple-- of millennial age or younger takes requests to watch -- and specifically to "react" to-- a movie, a video or song that they have ostensibly never heard before.  What makes the genre skew old is that in order to increase the viewership, the thing reacted to ideally must have once been popular; and to increase the chance that the reaction is fresh, the requests tend to incline toward the vintage.  The pleasure in watching these for me is vicarious and nostalgic -- it affords the viewer an opportunity to view a fondly remembered song, movie (comedy routine, cartoon, vaudeville act, youtube video) through new eyes as though for the first time.  Done well, it's an addictive art form. An embarrassingly large percentage of my frittering is spent watching these videos, particularly by far most frequently, reactions to songs.

As such, I've observed some features of the reaction genre that the most successful have in common.  First and foremost naturally is the adherence to the premise of freshness.  To this end, the reaction video addict is on the lookout for assurance of a "First Time Watching" for at least one of the hosts.  (In the absence of a first time viewing, the reactor gets points from me for admitting it's a re-watch.)

Second,  the selections or requests that do best are the best songs.  A handful of reactors share my general tastes and interests in songs and artists somewhat off the beaten path; but the reactors I tend to watch the most have a lot of reactions offering a little something for everyone.

Third, the reactions hit harder if they exhibit a little something on the reactor's part that can pass for depth of analysis and sincerity.  Not all reactors get this right, but a surprisingly large number or them do.

But even more important than sincerity, Fourth is broad open mindedness to genres,  styles,  tastes, and appeal of a song-- a gameness for the catchiest hits of the one hit wonders, the most tired workhorses of classic rock, the cheesiest of the cheese, the artiest of art songs.*   Whatever is thrown at them, the most successful reactors are loath to yuck anyone's yum. Naturally,  at times the tension between openness to the redeeming qualities of a song and sincerity of the reaction is going to be stretched to a breaking point.  But the most successful reactors seem to have a consistently open personality to both the song (and for that matter to their partner's commentary.)

One of my favorite channels is hosted by a couple who started two or three years ago barely knowing how to tell a Beatle from a Kink but who have developed into creditable connoisseurs of the popular song of almost any era.  Their output of 3 videos a day is above average in prolificacy.  While watching any of their videos is almost always rewarded with consistently high quality reactions and sophisticated analysis, it's inevitable that not every song they select for a reaction is going to be of the same quality --  or even of any quality.

Case in point, the other day I discovered that my favorite intrepid reactors were honoring a (sadistic?) request for a reaction to Paper Lace's 1974 atrocity "The Night Chicago Died."  I hesitate to name any song the best or the worst of all time.   But The Night Chicago Died which I hated from the first "Glory be" which is to say a minute into the first time I heard it polluting the airwaves in its unaccountably long heyday in my youth, invariably pops into my head as a prime example of a turkey whenever I'm asked to conjure one.  

It starts out promisingly enough with a dark synth siren but takes a sudden jarring veer into icky bubblegum territory and never looks back.   Never mind that the event the lyrics recount never happened, that Al Capone never waged a war with Chicago police in which 100 died, that there is no such place as East Chicago in Chicago.   Never mind that the lyrics are repetitive, inane, lazy and a ridiculous bathetic mess.   If Chicago died it's because it was musically murdered in this song.  The rhythm that it settles into after its spoken introduction is a dull 4/4 but in spite of its presumably heavy subject matter, everything proceeds with the goofy momentum of an uninvited party clown springing into the room unannounced.  The lead singer has an annoying bubblegum rasp (see Micky Dolenz of the Monkees or the lead singer in the fake group The Archies, or the guy from  America, or Steven Stills, or 'How Do you Do?' dropping Mouth & McNeal's Mouth (or is it McNeal?))-- like fingernails on a chalkboard.  The "harmony" when it happens at all is unimaginative thirds above the melody line that are screeched  louder than the melody.  Usually the "harmony" is just a falsetto an octave or two above the melody-- the sort of thing that makes Queen unlistenable to me.  The whole thing is sprinkled with overwrought underthought frills like the boinging twang of guitars that accentuates the second line of each chorus and the ejaculated string of Nanana's before the echoing of the title in the refrain.   (And how many times can you fit the words "The Night Chicago Died" into three and a half minutes?  With 3 codas the song is harder to kill than Chicago.) 

As a child, and even re-listening to it tonight as an adult it's the kind of thing that would make me want to bury my head under a pillow until it's over.  In light of this, I could not help but regard it as an act of cruelty that it was suggested to a couple of innocent reactors.  I wanted to flee when I saw the title of the video but prurient interest got the better of me and I couldn't look away.  I had to see what they would do with it.  To my horror they started bopping to it, seemingly transported by its grabbag of cheap musical gimmicks.  It took me two watches to realize that as per usual they had toed the perfect line between their personal integrity as critics and their code of treating every new musical experience with openness and fairness.  If my need to have my disgust validated was disappointed, I had to admit I was not in the right place.  The reactors took the high road with the suggestion.  Their secret, I discovered, was in focussing not on the quality of the song as song, but on the novelty of the song as experience-- "This one took me by surprise." "I was not expecting this."  Props were given sparingly, but I could tell from the mysteriously abundant fans of the song in their comments that they had navigated the rocky shoals with aplomb.  I had to hand it to them.  They did not let Paper Lace win.

~~~~~

* A Fifth element of success for reactors is apparently resisting requests for the videos of Don Henley who is notoriously surly about the uncompensated use of his music by those who would profit from whatever clicks such reactions would generate.  As many qualms as I have philosophically about intellectual property and copywrite assertions (and I do not make money from my own writing let alone from the videos I feature), I might be somewhat more sympathetic to Don Henley (another bubblegum rasper come to mention it) if I hadn't had more than my fill of his music over the years.

Free Will

Whether or not we humans have Free Will is an interesting topic that might be extremely consequential.  Then again, it might be merely a parlor game.  Whatever the case, you should not take my word for it. Like you (probably), I've given the question some thought over the years, and have even read about it.  I'm about to read about it again, but before I do, I thought I would summarize my feelings about it at this juncture of the space time continuum.  I would venture that my thoughts about it have not changed yet in just over 6 decades (including time contemplating the mystery in utero), but I pledge that in the event that the reading I'm about to do changes my mind in some interesting way, I will at least briefly acknowledge it in a later post (or a postscript).

It seems and has always seemed almost self-evident to me that the question of whether or not your will is free is, when you get right down to it, rather meaningless.  So much is constrained around any of the thousands of "decisions" that face me in a given day-- how did this particular choice get before me?; am I not limited in my options? ; what knowledge and prejudice do I have going in about any of my choices? how much control do I have over my inclination to choose one way or the other? am I really choosing or just trying to avoid the consequences of a bad choice?-- that if there is any wiggle room for freedom (could I have chosen otherwise?) it is itself highly bound by materialistic and probabilistic limits.  

On the other hand, who gives a shit?  It certainly seems like I have free will, especially when I least want to choose.  But in the cases where I am most aware of my apparent obligation to participate in a decision, my appreciation for the benefits of freedom if it only existed are probably at their lowest.  The question of whether what I ultimately choose is really my choice especially in the generally mundane cases that confront me most often seems like the domain of the pedant.  Not really my choice, you say?  Not really relevant!  Not really helpful!  But here's a cookie for you for recognizing it!

On yet another hand, if free will does not exist, is anyone (including me) responsible for the bad choices we make?  Is the effort to change someone's mind worthwhile?  If we're not responsible, do we deserve punishment for the decisions that hurt others?  Now it's interesting at least.  We seem rather bound as a species to punish the source of a bad choice as though there was agency and authorship behind it.  In the history of decisions about whether someone is guilty of a crime of choice, there are plenty of examples of minds being changed.  In deciding the punishment of a criminal by choice, at least in principle we are willing to lessen the severity if there is evidence that the person would now choose differently if they could choose again.   From my perspective, if criminal justice were to be suddenly predicated on an understanding that none of us is free to avoid the circumstances we find ourselves in, including those which all but guarantee that we will choose to commit crimes, and that we all thereby deserve a break for the sins we are bound to perpetrate,  that would be preferable to our present blind (unfree) devotion to seeking punishment for every transgression we are compelled to prosecute.

The mechanics  of what changes a mind-- of bringing about a mind that would choose differently-- are basically the mechanics of choice.  The fact that minds change is our primary sensory evidence that-- illusory freedom or not-- choice is the hinge on which human progress swings. Slavery was a choice that kept getting chosen for scores of years of our country's history, until it wasn't.  It seems at this stage, we are stuck in a rut of the worst choices at every turn.  But if choice one day becomes disposed to get me health care, peace in the Middle East and the restoration of the planet, let it be chained.