a bonobo humanity?

Hobo libertarianism at its finest?

I note that when I come out with the ‘free will’s a myth’ argument it rarely goes down well. Some people seem to feel personally offended. One has to approach the subject slyly, or at least slowly.

For example, yesterday I visited my step-grand-daughter and her five month old daughter. The baby had just woken up and was being bounced in her mum’s arms. She stopped smiling when she saw me, but I gave her a big smile and she started smiling again.

Normal everyday interactions. But what if, instead of smiling, I’d started shouting and snarling at the baby and/or her mother, due to my being a drug addict having a bad trip, or being just a terrible curmudgeon who’s having a really bad day, or whatever? And this kind of behaviour was a regular occurrence, something this child experienced for the first couple of years of her life?

Or, to come at the free will issue more obliquely, what if I point out that we don’t get to choose our early childhood experiences, or our parents, or our ethnicity, or the time or place of our birth? Surely nobody could disagree. Or our genetics? Or our epigenetics, if we understand what that means?

These early impacts on our lives, from our parents and siblings, are surely all-important. Remember the Dunedin Longitudinal Study of personality types, which I’ve written about before, and which provides evidence that those types tend to be fixed at an early age….

Strangely, these thoughts about free will, or the lack thereof, have come to me now partly because I’m reading, for a book group I’m a member of, On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. I’m not particularly enjoying it. It seems to be extolling what could be called ‘hobo libertarianism’ – get up and get way from it all, seize the day, be spontaneous, create your own party atmosphere, dogs help those who help themselves, leave all your fuck-ups behind in the dust – and if she’s attractive enough, don’t take no for an answer.

The USA is surely the grand stomping ground for libertarians, rich and poor. The land of the free, the home of the brave. You too can become a billionaire, and of course anyone – any male, at least – can become the President. Which is definitely NOT a good thing.

It’s also untrue. There are many millions of United Staters (I love calling them that, I’ve found it really pisses them off), who have absolutely no hope of ever becoming their country’s President. The USA’s massive rich-poor divide is one factor among many obvious others.

But let me return to On the Road and its assortment of characters – Sal the narrator, Dean, Mary-Lou, Carlo, Terry and so on, and I’m only half-way through the thing. If Sal, or I should say Jack Kerouac, had not narrated the book, but Mary-Lou (or the actual real person presented as Mary-Lou), it would of course have been very different, not because she would be free to do so in her own way, but because she would be determined to do so in her own way, assuming that the determining factors in her life permitted or inclined her to write such a narrative, or any narrative, at all. The charm, for many, of Kerouac’s novel, is that the ‘bad’ characters aren’t terribly bad, and/or the consequences of their bad or simply hapless behaviour are left behind as their next magicked-up vehicle heads for the next town. And of course Kerouac, or his character Sal, doesn’t dig into consequences too much – though other characters seem even more light-headed in that regard.

Anyway, hobo libertarianism might provide some fun reading, but political libertarianism is something else.There are many slogany terms associated with it – a free market, individual sovereignty, limited government and the like, but I’ve mostly found it be very much associated with the ‘already rich’. It would presumably be impossible to convince advocates of such a political system that their ‘freedom’ philosophy is entirely a product of their generally cushy upbringing. I’m reminded again of Margaret Thatcher’s inane comment that ‘there’s no such thing as society’, as if the very language she spoke, the home she lived in, the Prime Ministerial position she occupied, the Parliament she worked in, the education she received, the clothes she wore and every other job she ever had were not products of her society. And her particular position in that society, from an early age, was one of the key factors that enabled her to attain the PM job she managed to hold for eleven or so years.

In fact, it can hardly be emphasised enough that our understanding and accepting of determinative factors in all our lives will lead to the very opposite of libertarian ideology. I would argue that it should lead to a greater humanism or humanitarianism. I often find this in my own thinking, when I encounter someone with views or preoccupations contrary to my own. After initial irritation, I wonder – why is this person so preoccupied with astrology? Why does this 19-year-old describe himself as a Thomist – in 21st century Australia? Why am I always, or often, so tongue-tied or passive in group situations, yet given to writing and writing and more writing? All of this can be attributed to experiences in early life, and when it comes to that less language-based stuff, what we might call our temperament, that probably goes back the furthest, before language, and maybe even before birth, when we’ve already been alive and absorbing stuff for nine months or so. Bearing all this in mind, acknowledging all the causes and influences behind people’s behaviour, even though we don’t know and can’t know what they all are, should make us more tolerant and less judgemental. So getting people to acknowledge all this should be a real priority.

I will finish by saying I’ve grappled with the free will issue for three decades at least, but I must acknowledge that my reading of two big books by Robert Sapolsky, Behave (2017) and Determined (2023) have clinched that issue for me while providing much food for thought.

References

Robert Sapolsky, Behave 2017

Robert Sapolsky, Determined 2023