Superstition, sustention, & sanity. .

I am headed to Ireland tomorrow.

I have a lot of things I want to write about regarding the "either - or - us - them" weirdness that seems to be invading the American consciousness. I'll hit all that when I get home.

In the meantime I wanted to share this piece written by Thomas W. Clark. I think it points to a really important debate that is the hidden force behind the so called "culture war" that is raging in the USA at the moment.



The age old battle between superstition and science, progress and stagnation, patterns and freedom, left and right, all comes down to a single point of contention. . .the irrational belief in a certain kind of individual 'free will'. And understanding the distinction between these two models is, in my own opinion, the most important social issue all of us will deal with in these next few generations.

Underneath arguments about crime and punishment, overseas policy, warfare, education, poverty, and "values", underneath all of it, exists this one simple distinction in understanding. And I believe firmly that it will, in the end, be the decisive shift in thinking that will move us all, entire societies, forward to a more enlightened, loving, and happy place.



Here is the passage from Thomas Clarke's article:

"In his book The Moral Animal. Wright predicts that the increasing success of scientific explanation will compel us to admit that "we are all machines, pushed and pulled by forces that we can't discern but that science can." But, he argues, it is through understanding these forces, not denying them, that we might become truly moral animals and responsible citizens.

Virtue, like crime, has its roots not in a mysterious freedom of choice, but in concrete social circumstances which we can learn to control. While making his case, Wright points out that Charles Darwin never bought the free will myth either, although he kept quiet about it.



Not surprisingly, however, Wilson and Wrights prescription to abandon free will is a very tough sell, since most of us resent the seemingly drastic drop in status implied by full-bore determinism. Few of us want to concede our souls to mechanism.

For example, consider that commentaries on the new genetics often include reassuring references to a human exemption from causality. On these accounts, the environment, or character, or perhaps some non-physical personal essence, gives us a special freedom. Determinism is restricted to what is clearly biological, leaving wiggle room for the self-made self.

Cases in point: At a conference on genes and society in Cambridge last year, a speaker worried that we are succumbing to genetic determinism, the idea that DNA shapes nearly everything about a person. But such determinism is false, he argued, since the environment too contributes heavily to behavior and personality. The soothing implication was that environmental influences are somehow less constraining than genetics.*

*(Ask yourself does the idea that 'environmental influences are somehow less constraining than genetics' make sense?)



Similarly, in a Time magazine profile of DNA researcher Dean Hamer, J. Madeleine Nash wrote that "What people are born with, says Hamer, are temperamental traits. What they can acquire through experience is the ability to control these traits by exercising that intangible part of personality called character." Here again, experience (read environment) and character come to the rescue, overriding the mechanistic clockwork of our genes.

However, its been clear for some time that environmental influences are no less determining than genetics, and that character is set by circumstances as much as biology. As B. F. Skinners work in behaviorism showed, the molding effect of the environment is powerful and often predictable, and recent research on the neural "reward pathway" in the brain has laid the groundwork for understanding precisely how the self is shaped by experience.



Science holds that we are, in toto, the products of a prodigiously complex dance between nature and nurture, which means that it banishes the self-originating self just as surely as ghosts and goblins.

But even scientists who realize that the environment offers no refuge from determinism will sometimes flinch, and offer the traditional reassurance that we might be miniature first causes.

Speaking at another conference on genetics, Francis Collins, director of the National Center for Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health, said "Even when we completely understand all of the genes, what happens to us will be a result of interactions of genes, environment, and free will, which wont go away as a consequence of understanding our biology" (emphasis added).



Some hope to find free will lurking in the indeterminacy of quantum physics, or in the unpredictability of chaotic systems, but it seems strange to suppose that people should be held responsible for what befalls them haphazardly.

Others will insist that, like God, we have powers of self-creation that transcend science and the natural world. But as British philosopher Galen Strawson reminds us in a recent Times Literary Supplement piece on free will, no finite creature whether material or ethereal can literally bootstrap itself into existence.



Even though determinism presently disturbs us, as science progresses we might eventually get used to the idea of being very complex, but non-mysterious organic mechanisms, or "meat machines," as artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky, Stephen Pinkers colleague at M.I.T., so unpoetically puts it.

Well see, following Wilson and Wright, that we are still gripped by morality and that the law doesnt lose its teeth. Nor, just because we admit that we havent built our motives and character from the ground up, will we become any less unique, or creative, or committed in what we do. Cravings, ambitions, and altruistic concerns will still have their way with us.

However, we might become a little less egocentric in taking credit for our accomplishments, and a little more wary of piling on blame for "failures of will."



By dropping the idea that people essentially create themselves, well likely pay more attention to fostering the social and economic conditions which bring out the best in us.

And to the extent that the notion of uncaused free will fuels the desire for retribution, support for the death penalty and other needlessly harsh punishments should diminish.



Of course there is no telling exactly how things might change, were we to accept the fact that its not just genes that determine us, but our surroundings as well.

But if we find ourselves regretting the loss of what now seems an illusory freedom, we are more than compensated by knowing that to have what we want . . . even poetry . . . we need not be more than we actually are."

- Thomas W. Clark



Questioner: One seer speaks in the terms of Christianity, another in those of Islam, a third of Buddhism, etc. Is that due to their upbringing?

Ramana: Whatever may be their upbringing, their experience is the same. But the modes of expression differ according to the circumstances.

Questioner: Last night you said God is guiding us. Then why should we make an effort to do anything?

Ramana: Who asks you to do so?



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