a bonobo humanity?

I’m still feeling anger, after all these years, at the free will proponents who, I feel, have benefitted from a cushy upbringing and have no idea what it’s like to have had nothing like the opportunities they’ve had. Of course, it’s always a worry that we can just attribute our relative failure to that lack of opportunity, but facts are facts, and it’s simply a fact that our macro world is determined.

And so to Steven Pinker, who, in his 2002 book The blank slate, ventured a few remarks on free will. I’ve written about Pinker before, and I consider it amusing to compare my life with his. We were both born in the mid 1950s’ – he’s a bit older – but that’s just about where the similarities come to an end (though I, too, have quite a big personal library – just saying). On the free will issue, I’d be inclined to make the small point, and I think Sapolsky makes it too, that successful career people would be more inclined to believe in free will than more or less abject failures – which of course isn’t saying anything about me. 

Chapter 10 of The blank slate is titled ‘The fear of determinism’, and in it he starts looking at determinism from what I would call the wrong end – what he calls ‘molecules in motion’. My own thinking on this always starts from ‘thrown-ness into the world’, at an unchosen time and place, and as an unchosen living specimen. From there we get to our own parentage, our genes and our pre-natal and antenatal development, and their epigenetic effects. 

Pinker also jumps quickly into the confusion I always find when I speak to people about this topic – that between determinism and predeterminism/fatalism:

‘All our brooding and agonising over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains’.

Pinker highlights the fear of determinism for a reason, claiming that ‘it is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time’, though it seems to me that few people suffer such fear – and this appears to be borne out by experimental evidence. When we’re primed by tricky lab-coated types to reflect on ‘victims of circumstance’, there is an effect, but it appears to be minimal and short-term. 

Of course, it isn’t the fear of determinism that concerns me, but the lack of acknowledgment of its factual basis. Pinker goes on a long and rather facile discourse about lawyers, medicos and neurologists seeking to get wrong-doers off the hook on the basis of defective genes and/or brain processes. Note that Sapolsky admits to having offered his services in this way, generally to no avail. I would note, just in passing, that the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the WEIRD world, by a huge margin. It’s the land of free will after all. No excuses.

Some of Pinker’s ‘analyses’ here really miss the mark badly. For example, he references Dennett, who…

points out that the last thing we want in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires. If behaviour were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn’t hold people responsible for their actions.  That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, or be ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, or even feel the twinge of guilt that might inhibit a sinful temptation in the future, because it could always choose to defy those causes of behaviour….

And so on. But this is obvious bullshit – even if you fully believed in free will, the threat of imprisonment would be a massive deterrent, especially given the horrific private prisons of the US. And so would the opprobrium directed at you for your wrong-doing, given that we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet. Others’ opinions of us massively matter. Free will doesn’t preclude a sense of right and wrong. It should also be obvious that we are determined, by evolution, to survive and thrive as best we can – so in a world of severe punishments, such as exists in the USA, we’ll obviously be determined to avoid such punishments as best we can, even given a deprived background or a shrunken amygdala. 

But where Pinker goes wrong in a way that is, to me, more offensive, is in his mockery of what he calls environmental determinism. It’s the typical upper middle class response, I must say: 

The most risible pretexts for bad behaviour in recent decades have come not from biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defence, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores….

This little parade of glibness doesn’t, of course, begin to address any real issues. Firstly, there’s little real difference between biological and environmental determinism. Our biology evolves in adaptation to changing environments, as every evolutionary biologist knows, and, to be fair to Pinker, there has been a revolution in our understanding of environmentally-induced gene expression (epigenetics) in the two decades since The blank slate was published. Even so, my experience of growing up in a profoundly working-class environment, in which classroom illiteracy was commonplace, as well as vandalism, neglect and police harassment, makes me flare up when I hear the life-shattering experiences of kids in the street where I lived being dismissed in terms of ‘the abuse excuse’. I also note that in mocking these ‘excuses’ his target is invariably the lawyers (his own class) that bring these claims, rather than the accused themselves, about who’s background he appears to be indifferent. It’s the same clubbish elitism that I found in the dated Berofsky collection I re-read recently, but more focussed on law than philosophy. 

Another of the irritations I found in revisiting Pinker’s determinism-free will piece, is that he focusses almost exclusively on crime, ignoring the much larger issues of lives lived in struggle because of determining forces beyond their control – a Palestinian in modern Israel, a woman in Afghanistan, a Dalit in India, an Australian Aboriginal at the time of the British colonisation of that island, a Jew growing up in Germany in the 1930s, the Tainos visited by the Spanish horror in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the Scots massacred in the reign of Edward I, the East Timorese massacred by Indonesian forces, the isolated old women burned as witches… millions of people who found themselves members of the wrong gender or ethnicity at the wrong time – murdered, raped, enslaved, or simply deprived of the means to live a life in which there’s some hope of an upward trajectory. None of us got to choose our ethnicity, our class (yes it does exist), our early upbringing, our parentage, even our level of intelligence, and this is so obvious, and so overwhelming a fact, that it seems to me almost embarrassing to have to point it out. And all of this is profoundly determining. That’s why reading history, as I often do, can be such an affecting experience. It is so full of innocent victims. And of course it continues…. 

So, finally, it isn’t the fear of determinism that should concern us – it’s the very fact of determinism. 

I’ve been lucky, on balance. I was brought, as a five-year-old, to live in one of the richest and most peaceful nations in the world. I can’t praise or blame myself for this. Certain aspects of my treatment both at home and at school resulted in, for me, a fairly extreme anti-authoritarianism, and something of an over-self-reliance, which has its positives and negatives. But I benefitted from a world-full of books in our house, which took me to places of wonder outside myself. And I’ve benefitted from a nation with a strong social safety net, a minimum wage which is the highest of any nation outside of Luxembourg, a justice system that eliminated the death penalty nationwide almost 60 years ago, and a political system that was the first in the world to grant votes, and the right to stand for parliament, to women. It also rates as one of the least religious nations on earth – which for me is a godsend.  

More on determinism from me, no doubt, as I plough into the second half of Sapolsky’s Determined. 

References

Steven  Pinker, The blank slate, 2002

Bernard Berofsky, Free will and determinism, 1963

Robert Sapolsky , Determined, 2023