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.