freedom and reason

Consider the rhetoric and tone of the right-wing and conservative memes we see every day on social media. Love of country or admiration for the teachings of Jesus Meek and Mild are not behind the energy expended. There really isn’t any love in these memes. They are, for the most part, expressions of belligerence, chauvinism, and jingoism. Staged photos of soldiers and police praying, saving puppies and kittens, buying a random poor (black) child a toy. Kids pledging allegiance or praying in a public school setting. Confederate flag waving and wearing. All dressed in chintzy wear and sappy sentiment.

Beneath all the flailing symbolism is a desire fueled by hatred for those who love humanity, oppose war and imperialism, choose not to participate in mindless expressions of obnoxious loyalty to flag and deity, are down on their luck, want to give those who are down on their luck a hand up, are different. These memes are really a reaction to the acceptance, compassion, justice, love, and peace expressed and practiced by the “bleeding hearts,” “commie scum,” “hippies” and “treehuggers.”

Humanist values deeply irk the conservative personality, which is, beneath all of it, an authoritarian personality in wait, the seething tendency of a perverse collective psyche (and I use perverse here in its intended meaning). We have seen it before. At its core, superpatriotism and hyper-Christianity represent loathing of rational thought, intellectual pursuit, artistic adventure, and ethnic and racial and sexual diversity. In sum, and ironically (if we take them at their word), conservatism is contemptuous of individually differentiated attitudes and conduct.

The fascistic character of these expressions – authoritarian, conformist, disciplinarian, patriarchal, pro-corporal punishment, pro-gun, pro-hierarchy, pro-masculinity, pro-police, pro-war, pro-warrior – becomes self-evident with a bit of historical awareness. And a willingness to accept truthful comparisons. Authoritarianism, wherever it manifests, is a controlling and destructive tendency. Its desire is see people under the thumb of a rigid ideology. Tragically, good people get sucked into the irrational hatred and resentment because they want to be good patriots.

True unity is not obtained by rallying around flags, but by rallying around each other. We all know which social class benefits from dividing working people. We need to collectively focus our attention on the real enemy.

On June 26, I was interviewed by Sarah Berger for the International Business Times concerning the attack on tenure and faculty governance in the University of Wisconsin system by Governor Walker and the state Republicans. Berger used a small part of what I said in the published report (which is fine, because many others were interviewed). Here is rest of the interview: 

SB: What is your stance on Scott Walker’s proposal to remove tenure in the university system from state statute, leaving it  up to the Board of Regents, which has 16 members appointed by the governor subject to the confirmation of the State senate?  Also, what is your position on Walker’s proposal to change state law regarding shared governance? Do you think this change will discourage recruitment of potentially valuable faculty members to the University? 

AA: Wisconsin is unique among states in upholding the institution of tenure in statute. Some see that uniqueness as an argument in favor of taking it out of statute. I disagree. Tenure protections set in law tell the rest of the country that Wisconsin is committed to upholding academic freedom and sees tenure as a crucial asset in attracting the best professionals around the world and keeping them here in Wisconsin. Why shouldn’t we be a model for the nation? Retaining the same tenure language in Board of Regents policy is essential if it is taken out of statute. Still, the citizens of Wisconsin should be very concerned about these developments. The state is already losing some of its finest faculty, which means an exodus of research moneys from the state. It will lose a great deal more if tenure protections are removed or weakened. If economic and social development are valuable things to Wisconsinites, then retention of strong tenure language is essential.  

Many observers critical of this move by the governor and legislature are relieved that the Board of Regents is adopting the original tenure language. However, there is some troubling language in all this concerning an expansion of the reasons for terminating faculty positions, language that allows the administration to “…terminate a tenured faculty member, or layoff or terminate a probationary faculty member prior to the end of his or her appointment, when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection.” This language severely weakens tenure protections and will cause the  system to lose a lot of fine faculty members to other states that continue to observe strong tenure protections.

Remember that tenure is not a guarantee of a job, contrary to the rhetoric we often hear. Tenure is about due process, making sure that faculty are not dismissed based on unpopular ideas, the whims of administrators, or the wishes of wealthy donors. Tenure is only earned after years of rigorous evaluation and assessment. Many talented people are in fact denied tenure. Moreover, tenure give faculty an investment in their jobs, a strong incentive to stay, in light of the fact that a university position often earns less income than a comparable position in the private sector.  

SB: Another colleague talked about the negative psychological effect that the proposal will have on the faculty and the university as a whole. Would you agree with that? 

AA: The psychological effects of this are palpable.  Morale is down across the system. The faculty here put in long hours, meeting with students not only in the classroom, but individually, working with them on projects, arranging internships and independent studies, advising and providing career advice, writing letters of recommendation. When not teaching and working with students, faculty are engaging their research projects and the campus and larger community in service. I know of no faculty member who works less than forty hours a week. Act 10 hit faculty hard. And now they are being asked to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, which will affect families across the state. On top of this, faculty are having to endure the insult of being told they are overpaid and underworked. So, yes, it is having a damaging impact. All this is also having an impact on the reputation of the system worldwide. I hear it from faculty at other institutions.  Wisconsin is increasingly sounding like a place that talented professionals should avoid. 

SB: Do you think there is potential for the proposal to cause a chilling effect on academic free speech? Don Downs suggests this in his piece in Politico.  Do you think tenure protected professors feel as if they have more freedom to choose how and what they teach? 

AA: Weakening of tenure and faculty governance does carry a chilling effect. Faculty become concerned that if their research projects or teaching methods offend powerful special interests, especially those with financial ties to the institution, that positions and departments may be put in jeopardy. With these pressures, faculty self-censor. They may be hesitant to pursue this or that research interest which may be of great benefit to the larger community, interests such as environmental and labor concerns. The impact is hard to gauge, but it is certainly greater than zero.

SB: Do you believe the proposal, if passed, will affect non-tenure track and non-tenured professors? If yes, how so?  

AA: Very much. The loss or weakening of tenure and faculty governance puts non-tenure track and probationary faculty in a precarious position. Tenured faculty can operate from a position of strength and protect their junior colleagues who do not have tenure. There are administrators who look out for the interests of our junior colleagues, but in a system without strong protections for academic freedom and faculty governance, depending on the good will of administrators is not the security that a successful public university should afford to its employees, particularly if you want them to be about the pursuit of the truth. Non-tenure track and nontenured faculty are professionals, and if the state is concerned with keeping the best people in Wisconsin, then it shouldn’t weaken the traditional protections all faculty have enjoyed in the state. 

I’m sharing the talk I gave tonight at the event “Free Will and Determinism,” held at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The event was organized by Psi Chi Honor Society and Philosophy Club.

“The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.”

This is a quote from the fictional F. Alexander book A Clockwork Orange, which appears in Anthony Burgess 1962 dystopian novel by the same name, a work the author himself characterizes as too didactic to be good fiction; but it’s its didacticism that makes it a useful entry point into the free will versus determinism problematic.

Set in a possible future British society, in the context of a subculture of youth violence that is sweeping the country, A Clockwork Orange tells the story of a teenager, Alex, who is convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. There Alex learns about an experimental behavior-modification treatment based on classical conditioning – the Ludovico Technique – and secures, in exchange for commutation of his sentence, and against the wishes of the prison chaplain, a spot as a research subject. Showing film clips that graphically depict sex and violence, and pairing these with a nausea-inducing drug, the principal investigator, Dr. Brodsky, uses aversion therapy to “teach” Alex’s body and mind (same thing?) to abhor sex and violence.

After the treatment regimen is complete, Dr. Brodsky tests Alex’s new character before an audience of government officials and other interested parties, including the prison chaplain. Standing on a stage, Alex is confronted by an aggressive male, whom he wishes to destroy, and a partially nude female, whom he desires to seduce. In both cases, Alex becomes violently ill and cannot carry out his will. The audience is impressed – except the prison chaplain.

“Choice.” Rumbles the prison charlie. “He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

“These are subtleties,” smiled Dr. Brodsky. “We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime —’ “And,” chipped in a bolshy well-dressed government minister, “with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons.”

In essence, what matters to them is that the technique works, not whether it tramples sacred moral high grounds.

The rationalizations of authority depicted in Burgess’s novel reflects a longstanding assumption of human nature in the behavioral sciences, going back at least as far as the psychology of John Watson. The greatest behaviorist of them all, B. F. Skinner, punctuated this line of thinking in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), writing that individuals are no more to be blamed for their bad behavior as they are to be praised for their good behavior (except where such praise can bring about desired behavior), since there is really no such thing as free will; nearly all behavior is a collection of conditioned responses; and so free will is an illusion (or delusion, as neuroscientists Sam Harris characterized it at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in 2012).

There is something that feels right about the prison chaplain’s complaint. In the realm of criminal responsibility, Western society does require that the person who will be made to pay for her wrongdoing will have done wrong voluntarily. How can a person who cannot control his behavior be held responsible for his actions? Indeed, to be responsible for one’s actions, one much have free chosen them. Philosopher Peter Millican asserts: “The basic problem of free will comes down to the notion of moral responsibility.”

And so, in the classical theory of criminal justice, resting firmly on the liberal conception of liberty, which holds that freedom is the absence of coercion (hence its characterization as a negative definition of the metaphysical entity in question), there are allowed numerous justifications and excuses negating mens rea– that is, the general intent to break the law, which includes to some extent not only purposeful action, but acting with knowledge of the outcome, negligence (crimes of omission), and recklessness. Self-defense and defense of others, necessity, duress, mistake, provocation, insanity – these are some of the justification and excuses available to a person who seeks to escape punishment. For if the guilty mind requires that individuals have the ability to make reasonable decisions about right and wrong and to choose between alternatives of conduct, then the defense must show that the individual either did not have the ability to know right from wrong or the freedom to choose the blameless course of action.

Authorities should not – if justice is to be had – hold me to account for robbing a bank if my wife and children are being held hostage and threatened with death by the real bank robbers who drafted me for their conspiracy; for I would not have robbed a bank otherwise. And, certainly, there is a sense in which we feel we know that our actions are the result of choices we make (although we sometimes have to admit we do not know why we do what do) – or that at least we believe they should be. Most of us stand with the prison chaplain of Burgess’ novel in his desire that people choose good over evil.

On the other hand, there is something odd about the language we use to talk about freedom in the positive sense. Such concepts as self-control, self-directedness, self-discipline, and self-actualization assume causal language. Our actions are controlled, directed, disciplined, and so forth, not by others but by our selves. But our actions are not free in the sense that they are undetermined. They are only nototherdetermined.

Of course. If by some random physical event, assuming there are such things, my fist were to lash out at my neighbor, and I was incapable of mustering the power to inhibit this action before it occurred, I could not be held accountable since I did not in any sense intend for this to occur, nor could I stop it. It is precisely because such an action is entirely uncaused that I am blameless for it. As Peter Millican points out, “It’s hard to see how ‘free will’ can be morally relevant if it simply involves an element of randomness.” 

When somebody does something, we ask them: “Why did you do that?” because we assume that some idea or desire or purpose caused them to act in that way. If they say they acted with no cause, that their actions were completely free, then perhaps they mean to say that their action was random, in which case, they are not responsible for it. I can only be responsible for things that I will – that is, some thing that my selfhas done.

And, so, the traditional rhetoric of free will as “that thing that is not determined,” either absolutely or by degrees, becomes problematic. We should perhaps look for an answer to the question German Idealist Georg Hegel asked: Whence the self?What caused that? It is not enough to say a person is free to act, or that she is free to choose; we must ask: Why does that person choose to act in one way and not another? (The entity in social science that corresponds to the will in political-philosophical thought is the self. The assumption is that that the self is in control of voluntary action. The self is associated with conscious life, although it is not thought to go away when we are unconsciousness or in altered states of consciousness, such as dreaming.)

There is something to the Watsonian/Skinnerian view that our behavior is the result of conditioning (classical or operant). For many organisms, their behavioral repertoire is the product of natural selection, dispositions handed down intergenerationally via genetic transmission; but natural history has also left a (variable) space in animals for within-subject acquisition of habits that aid the survival of the individual (and thus the species). As animals, we are natural learning machines. All animal life is, in fact; if it has a nervous system, no matter how few in number its neurons, it can be conditioned to behave in predictable ways under appropriate conditions. These habits, born of experience, are, for some animals, for humans, for example, transmitted through the mechanisms of socialization and enculturation. All the ways in which the habituation of learned behavior is set within the organism in complex and subtle, but it happens. In so many ways, we become who we are. We do not unfold into our present selves.

Perhaps in this regard we are unique. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm writes in Fear of Freedom:

From the beginning of his existence, man is confronted with the choice between different courses of action. In the animal there is an uninterrupted chain of reactions starting with a stimulus, like hunger, and ending with a more or less strictly determined course of action, which does away with the tension created by the stimulus. In man, that chain is interrupted. The stimulus is there but the kind of satisfaction is “open,” that is, he must choose between different courses of action. Instead of a predetermined instinctive action, man has to weigh possible courses of action in his mind; he starts to think. He changes his role towards nature from that of purely passive adaptation to an active one: he produces.”

However, there is considerable evidence that even in a creature such as us, unique in reflective awareness, symbolic interaction, and creative action, the choices we feel we consciously make are actually the result of habituation. Decision making, and, more broadly cognitive processing, occurs not as a conscious activity, at least not in their initiation, but rather occur at the level of preconsciousness, with the conscious mind becoming aware of the choices the preconscious mind is making.

Max Velmans, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of London: “We commonly experience wishes, desires, decisions to act, or not to act, and take it for granted that it is the conscious experiences themselves that exercise control over our consequent acts.” As MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, in summarizing this area of research, noted in a recent discussion with physicist Lawrence Krauss: David Chalmer’s “hard problem” of consciousness may not be a problem nearly as hard a problem as that of preconsciousness.

When in the mid-1980s Benjamin Libet, a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco, found that a person’s brain prepares the person to act not merely before one acts but even before one experiences the wish to act, a tremor was felt in compatibilist households. So much for free will? Libet’s research was questioned because of the brief time delay between brain activity and the conscious decision. Sure, awareness of the decision follows the brain activity that gives rise to the decision, but it soon follows. However, John-Dylan Haynes and associates, working at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, found that brain activity predicts – up to seven seconds ahead of time – how a person is going to decide.

What does this say about responsibility? Max Velmans has wondered, “I feel responsible for my voluntary acts and am likely to be held responsible for them by the courts,” Velmans writes. “But, if my conscious self is not responsible for my acts, and if the act is determined by preconscious processing, can’t I plead that I could not have chosen to do otherwise as the acts were controlled by my preconscious brain?”

Perhaps we should expect Velmans to work on impulse control. After all, Libet argues that “that the volitional process is merely initiated unconsciously.” There is still “an opportunity for the conscious will to control the outcome of the volitional process by blocking or ‘vetoing’ the process.” But this poses its own problem. “Why doesn’t the veto decision have its own unconscious antecedents?” Velmans asks. “If the veto were developed by preceding unconscious processes, that would eliminate conscious free will as the agent for the veto decision.” This problem recalls more the relatively closed intrapsychic struggle of Sigmund Freud’s “Id” and “Ego” than it does the more open play of George Herbert Mead’s “I” and “me.” 

Indeed, how can we suppose the preexistence of a thought which requires a brain to produce it? The causal linkage seems rather backwards when the thought that tells the brain to tell the body to act in this or that way precedes the activity of the machinery that makes the thought possible. As Sam Harris put it, “We can’t think thoughts before we think them, because that would imply that we think thoughts before we think them.” I don’t like the idea that I am not the author or my own thoughts. But then, I am the author of my thoughts. Obviously.

So, then, what do we mean by the will? It can be thought of as a sense of presence, that is the organism being aware of itself and its capacity to act, to affect things. The will, if you like, can be thought of as the puppeteer. One may sense her free will as the feeling or the experience “of making uncaused, uncompelled choices, or initiating uncaused action.” This experience or feeling (and we put it this way because our personal understanding of it is through introspection of the phenomenal) is usefully stated in this form: “free will” is “the feeling that, given the same circumstances, I could have done otherwise than that which I did in fact do [or] that alternative courses of action are open to me at any given moment and that the future is not fated.” It is, perhaps, in this sense that free will and determinism seem so oppositional.

 But there is a problem with the theory derived from this experience or feeling. If “free will” is “the belief that acts of free will are caused by inner mental states of an agent but not by material changes in the brain and not by external stimuli,” then the cause of action becomes completely mystified – granted from the point of view of materialism. For the classic understanding of “free will” is summed up by the following statements: “Free will” “is free in the sense of not being caused or determined by anything else.” “Free will” “is independent of antecedent physiological, neurological, psychological, and environmental conditions.” “Acts of free will are… uncaused events, such as uncaused assents, dissents, choices, decisions.”

Here we enter the realm of indeterminism, which has two aspects: either the epistemological, that is the observation that we lack sufficient information to determine causal relationships in their totality, or the ontological, involving either real randomness or chance, or an entity we cannot define or of which we cannot even conceive, in which case, like the concept of “god,” “free will” is not a cognitively meaningful construction.

I don’t have the answer to this problem. But I recognize it is a problem. I can begin to see that the metaphysics of free will had better give way to the scientific theorization of the self if the humanists is to appeal to freedom and not vanquish it. If we hold individuals accountable for free actions, and those actions require a cause (since random events are nobody’s responsibility), then a scientific definition of freedom might usefully derive from concrete materialist understanding of human behavior rather than being derived from a metaphysical view of things.

In Genesis, Chapter 1, God creates light. God separates the light from the darkness and calls the light “day” and the darkness “night.” That is on the first day. Then God creates the sun, the moon, and the stars to give light to the earth. This is on the fourth day. God creates the animals, including people, on the fifth and sixth days. God also creates plants for the animals to eat. Then on the seventh day, God rests because he is tired.

If God makes light on the first day, then why does God need to make lights on the fourth day? God makes light before making any lights; but God has to make lights to give light. This sounds like a contradiction. But God can do anything. Then why does God get tired? He can’t not be tired?

In the next chapter, the reader is told that there are no plants on the earth because there is no one to work the ground. God fashions people from the ground and breathes life into them. God plants a garden and makes plants grow there. Two of the plants are the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The first tree would be unnecessary but for the second tree, which brings mortality; however, as the reader later discovers, access to the tree of life is barred eternally. God tells man not to eat the fruit of the second tree or man will die, but God does not bar the way to the tree.

God creates plants for the animals to eat. However, there are no plants because there is no one to work the ground. But God makes a garden for man so man does not have to work the ground. 

In Chapter 3, the reader learns that, among the animals, there is the serpent. The serpent is cleverer than all the other animals—even man and woman! The serpent talks the woman into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. His argument is that the fruit will not kill her, as God has said (God lies), but that it will open her eyes and allow her to know good and evil. At this point, only God possesses this knowledge. The man, who was with the woman, eats the fruit with her. 

God makes woman from man’s side. At that time, man and woman were naked and unashamed. The first consequence of the man and woman knowing good and evil is discovering their nakedness. To cover their shame, they make clothes out of fig leaves.

The man and woman hear God walking in the garden and hide. God asks why they are hiding. The man says because he is naked. God asked how the man knows this. The man says because the woman gave him fruit from the forbidden tree. God questions the woman. The woman says the serpent tricked her into eating the fruit. God curses the serpent for this deed. God then curses the woman for listening to the serpent. God then curses man for listening to the woman. After cursing them, God makes clothing of animal skin for them to wear and banishes them from the garden. 

God laments that man has become “like us.” The man is fated to work the ground from which he was taken. (Now there can be plants.) In front of the garden, God places a human-headed winged bull and a flashing sword to keep the man and woman from entering the garden and eating fruit from the tree of life. (Now the way is barred.) 

If God is the only god, why does God keep referring to “us”? Why is “gods” plural? Why does God put the knowledge of good and evil inside fruit? Why does God put this fruit in the garden? Does it not seem that God wants the man and woman to eat the fruit? Does God want the man and woman to become like gods? If so, why punish them? Why does God have to look for the man and woman in the garden? Does God not already know where they are? Why does the man tell God that he is naked when in fact he is clothed in a garment made of fig leaves? Did God not know they were naked before they ate the fruit? 

Again, why does God allow the serpent to talk the woman into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Why does God punish the serpent, the woman, and the man for actions they take in a situation God created? (Is this not entrapment?) More importantly, why does God punish people for actions that God can prevent? And if God cannot prevent these actions, then how is God powerful enough to create light and light-emitting things in reverse order?

Chapter 3 informs the reader that the woman God made, who is named Eve, is the mother of all people. She and the man, who is named Adam, have two children: Cain and Abel. At this time, there are four people in the world. Cain kills Abel because God tells him not to. To punish Cain, God drives him out of the land Adam, Eve, and Cain inhabit. Cain complains to God that he will be killed if he is forced to wander the earth. God reassures him that this will not happen. 

If there are only three people in the world, then why is Cain worried that he may be killed? Why does God not remind Cain of this fact? Why does it seem that even God is not aware of this fact? Later, Cain makes love to his wife and has a child. Where does Cain find a wife? Surely it is not Eve. Cain builds a city and names it after his son. But how can there be a city when there is only Adam, Eve, Cain, Cain’s wife, and Cain’s son? Then Cain’s son has a son. Where does Cain’s son’s wife come from? Was a sister we do know about?

Adam and Eve have a third son. They name him Seth. Seth has a son. But who is Seth’s wife?

In Genesis 2:18-19, the Bible says that Yahweh feels that it is not good that man should be alone and so, out of the ground, Yahweh formed the animals and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. But in Genesis 1:25-26, it says that the Elohim (same god?) makes the wild animals, the livestock, etc., then makes mankind. 

In the first chapter, the story is that the gods (Elohim) create men after creating all other life. Note the plural language. In the second chapter, Yahweh (a war god who later becomes god of the cosmos) creates one man then creates all other life. These are two (relatively) independent myths, each developed during different times and places, which the person or persons who produced the book of Genesis combined into one story.

Why would the author(s) of Genesis fail to manufacture a consistent story of creation? Perhaps, in unifying a Jewish kingdom or government, competing tribal factions had to be brought together through compromise, part of which resulted in one book retaining key differences in alleged cosmological and historical events. One finds similar contradictions throughout Genesis, each seemingly traceable back to either the followers of the Elohim or the followers of Yahweh.

In my house, the Bible sat alongside Bulfinch’s mythology. The events of the Bible had the same quality as events in Greek or Norse mythology, fictional accounts that everybody around me knew could only be mythic, in part because of the obvious contradictions. Yet, as far as I knew, everyone around me believed the Hebrew mythology was true and that the other myths were false. The rejection of the many myths in favor of the one, despite the fact that none of the myths were consistent or plausible, told me that religious belief was the result of something other than rational thought. An irrational cognitive style allows believers to manage contradiction.

I now know that religious belief is a product of time and place, socialization, and life experiences. People believe what they believe because they are part of a community that compels a certain set of beliefs and/or because belief has brought them some peace. Part of liberating one’s mind from the force of the community and bad inference is learning to see all religious systems as merely myth and ritual. There is nothing specially profound about the Christian, Muslim, or Jewish myths. They occupy our space and time because of historical trajectories and the power of certain groups to define realities.

I realize that many of you already know these things. I don’t write these things believing that I am articulating novel arguments. My readers are smart people. I do this because we are all in need of arguments when we go about the task of enlightenment and maybe something I write will help somebody.

I also know that readers of my posts sometimes wonder why an atheist spends any time at all discussing religion. I wish I did not have to. But if future generations are to be free of supernatural belief and superstitious action, then I am obliged to critique that which has been forced on me and my children. Religion is very damaging to human freedom and the cause of much sorrow and suffering in the world. I have to openly oppose it—and tell people that I do.

The truth is that you were born an atheist. All babies are born with no belief in the supernatural. Social forces made you Christian or Muslim or whatever else you may think you are. Experiencing a great injustice, most people had no choice in the irrational beliefs that occupy the deepest regions of their minds. Somebody made that choice for them. And that somebody likely had no choice, either. Believing they were doing the right and necessary thing, they forced their children to be religious, too. Generations reflexively denying children their right to grow up free of the necessity of irrational and self-limiting idea.

The need for religion that some have supposed exists innately as a product of our natural history is not really a need for religion. It is a universally felt need for community and love. Alienating social conditions and an inadequate understanding of the truth of the world confuses people about the source of their anguish. Human beings are social animals and as such require loving social relations to thrive – social relations necessarily rooted in equality and fairness. Religion is not only unnecessary for acquiring these things, it has proven to be a barrier to building a world community in which these conditions obtain.

There is a better way, a universally meaningful and rational moral system based on objectively given human rights. To be sure, secular humanism may mean giving up the hateful belief system put into you by those who socialized you or that you adopted to fill the emptiness you feel mired in the alienating social conditions of an unjust world. At the very least, it requires you to divorce your belief in the supernatural from your social actions and your judgments about morality. But this is a desirable end; the prejudices of religion carry so much of the hatred that has poisoned the world.

Sunil Dutta, the cop who tells us to follow orders and we won’t get brutalized, defines excessive force this way: “The moment a suspect submits and stops resisting, the officers must cease use of force.” By “excessive” he means force applied beyond the moment of compliance. What is not excessive is what he will do to you if you do not comply: “if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?”

But excessive force is not only force beyond what is required to gain compliance (a different definition than he uses), but also force that may cause significant physical discomfort or injury. Dutta’s definition implies that any degree of force can be used to gain compliance as long as it stops when the subject stops resisting. Remember, as a matter of principle, a person is presumed innocent. Detention and arrest are thus already problematic actions as they are forms of coercion being used against innocent persons (otherwise subjects under police control would be free to go). Coercion that causes discomfort to or injures the person being detained or arrested must be justified in every case, in a court of law, beyond a conviction (which justifies only the facts of detention and arrest and prosecution); unjustified, such actions constitute assault.

It makes no sense for a free society to allow police officers immunity from simple and aggravated assault laws. They are citizens subject to the same laws as civilians. We all have the burden to show why we do what we do at every point that is legally problematic if we mean to justify or excuse our actions. Of course, at the same time, the state has the burden to prove an individual did what he did not for the reasons he said he did if the reasons given differ from what the state claims. But cops cannot claim any legitimacy as an authority if they are permitted to break the laws they are obligated to enforce. Emancipation from having to justify actions that are considered criminal is the ethic of the police state, not of a free society.

There are those who think that (especially when the suspect is of a certain race) no force should be used in affecting an arrest, as if, when a suspect resists, the arresting officer is suppose to say, “Oh, you don’t want to be arrested. My bad. Be on your merry way.” The police have a duty to take a criminal suspect into custody. They are permitted in reaching this end to meet resistance with force. Force carries with it the potential for injury—as does resistance. If one is resisting lawful arrest, then the injury suffered may very well be that person’s fault. Resisting is not the police officer’s fault. He’s doing her job. If we are going to make policy that police officers can’t use force, we might as well give up and let criminals do what they want. The question is not whether force is necessary. The question is when force is excessive and unnecessary.

Update (August 15, 2021): If you read Freedom and Reason, then it will likely already be clear to you that I no longer subscribe to the argument presented below. I will not rehash in any detail my reasons for rejecting the claim that black people cannot be racist against whites. Read my blog entries over the last few years to understand why if you do not already. I hope it will suffice here to note three objections: (1) the problems of reification, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which falsely presumes as real abstract categories either assumed or induced from evidence, (2) the ecological fallacy, which involves drawing conclusions about concrete individuals and their relations based on abstractions generated by empirical generalizations; (3) an ideological redefinition of racism meant to substitute for traditional civil rights discourse a superficially radical discourse based on notions derived from critical theory.

In the process of migrating Freedom and Reason from Blogger to WordPress, a process in which I am still involved, I had left this entry private for many years because I have felt rather embarrassed that I so boldly made an argument that is so utterly wrong, especially since I should have known it was wrong all along given that it stands in contradiction to the principles that have guided me throughout my life. I know what some will think: I was wrong then. Why am I not wrong now? How can the reader trust my judgment if I make a bad argument or believe a false thing? But the alternative is worse. A man who knows he is wrong and as a matter of habit fails to acknowledge it, and fails to address the reasons why he was wrong, denies himself the opportunity to grow. More than that, he denies others an example of how a rational person is supposed to conduct himself. How does a man expect others to be open to persuasion, to change their minds, if he himself refuses to change his own mind?

* * *

In this essay I want to lay out an argument that stays true to a particular conception of power that, on its logic, defines the terms of accusations of racism—that is, in what situation or relations one can legitimately be said to be racist. The conclusion of the argument, which I present here for clarification, is that black people cannot be racist against white people. The conclusion depends on a particular definition of racism, which hails from, among other places, sociology, which in turn informs critical race theory on the matter. 

For an argument that claims that anybody can be racist to be valid, two things have to be true: (1) all racial groups must a priori exist in a state of equality and (2) racism must be reduced to race prejudice and/or purposeful action, the goal of which is the oppression of a racialized group. Concerning (1), it’s an empirical fact that racial groups exist in a state of inequality. This alone is enough to proceed. However, concerning (2), racism is more than prejudice and purposeful action based on race. Racism is discrimination based on race in a way that negatively affects—and this can be relative across class and gender structures—all members of a group defined as such. This means that racism concerns institutional and, more broadly, structural power and outcomes that systematically disadvantages a racial group.

The argument rests on the fact that not all groups have the same access to institutional power. If I am a member of a racial group that does not control the dominant social institutions, if I do not enjoy structural power, then I cannot translate my race prejudice into racism. My acts of discrimination are not systematic. They cannot affect an entire group. When we say racism is institutional, we mean that there are patterns of discrimination in which racialized groups are affected, with one group (in the present case, white people) benefiting from these patterns, and other groups (in the present case, black people) suffering from these patterns. By discrimination, we mean patterns of oppressive behavior—which require no prejudice; thus actions that suppress oppression are not discriminatory, even when taken up on the basis of race and come with coercion, for this would make liberation something like the equivalent of slavery.

I emphasize that institutional patterns do not depend on purposeful action (or positive racist motive, or whatever you want to call it), what some people mistakenly call “intentional”; rather, these patterns are determined/identified by results, by biases inherent in their operation. As feminist scholar Jo Freeman puts it: “institutional discrimination is built into the normal working relationships of institutions, its perpetuation requires only that people continue ‘business as usual.’ Its eradication requires much more than good will; it requires active review of the assumptions and practices by which the institution operates, and revision of those found to have discriminatory results.”

The patterns of institutional racism clearly run in the direction of white privilege and black disadvantage. Whites enjoy better and higher paying jobs, better educational outcomes, lower rates of unemployment, longer lives, fewer diseases and illnesses, lower rates of infant mortality, lower rates of poverty, lower rates of incarceration, greater home ownership, better homes, and so forth. All of these are empirically rooted in patterns of institutional discrimination. This is why affirmative action is not an example of racist discrimination; the intention of the policy is to restrict white (male) privilege, privilege given by the patterns of discrimination in US institutions. When we say racism is structural we are talking about the overall context in which these institutions function. Because of accumulated wealth in white communities, institutions systematically enrich whites and impoverish blacks.

Why did I a moment ago say that people mistakenly use the term “intentional” when they really mean purposeful? Intentionality is a legal concept which has four levels of legal and moral responsibility. The first is purpose, which means that I wanted to something to happen and I acted in a positive fashion to achieve it’s outcome. The second is knowledge, which means that I knew something would happen and I did not act to prevent its occurrence. The third is negligence, which means that I had a responsibility to know about and make sure something did not happen, but failed to meet that obligation. The fourth is recklessness, which means that I acted in a manner that caused something ill to happen, something that I did not mean to happen, but something that happened nonetheless because of something I did. Understanding intentionality is the key to understanding who is responsible for institutional racism, since white people intentionally perpetrate patterns of discrimination, even if they do not purposefully set these patterns in motion, even if they do not carry race prejudice in their thoughts. This is why there is no such thing as non-racism. Either you are racist, which includes failing to act to end racism, or you are anti-racist.

If one takes the “perpetrator’s perspective”—the perpetrator being those who benefit from the patterns of discrimination and express reluctance to act in ways that will end the circumstances that benefit them—then one will demand that the victims of discrimination prove that the perpetrator had a racist purpose in acting. On the other hand, if one takes the “victim’s perspective”—which rests on the basic moral position of sympathy—then what matters is what is actually happening. When a people are suffering oppression, they don’t wait to find individual perpetrators (which will likely never happen); they act to change the conditions of their existence.

Black nationalism and Afrocentrism are responses to white supremacy. Blacks in Africa developed nationalism as a form of resistance to European imperialism. Blacks in the United States developed nationalism as a form of resistance to white supremacy. And blacks around the world developed Afrocentrism as a means of understanding that their suffering has a common cause: eurocentrism, that is an ordering of the world on the basis of the ideas, wants, and needs of white people. In both instances, and with Afrocentrism in general, these are forms of anti-racism not racism.

It follows from the logic of the argument that it’s a basic error to treat resistance to racism as racism. It’s not racist for Africans to recognize that white people invaded their continent and ruled over them, and to realize that, for freedom to be possible, the mechanisms of racial oppression must be overthrown. Likewise, it’s not racist for black American to recognize that white people kidnapped their ancestors and brought them to the Americans to toil in forced labor camps and, in response, to develop their own political identity and to organize to overthrow the conditions that result from those circumstances. Some might find it nice that if and when white supremacy is ever overthrown that racial consciousness will also disappear, but we exist in a reality created by hundreds of years of white supremacy. Black people did not choose to be black, but they are taking control of that category to improve their lot in life. If whites say black is ugly, then blacks say that black is beautiful. Why should their children continue to believe what white people want them to believe?

This is the fundamental difference between white power and black power: white power is used to oppress black people; black power is used to liberate black people. It would be racist for me as a member of the oppressor race to tell black people to stop being the sort of black they want to be. I don’t believe Robert really believes that white people ought to be telling black people how to conceptualize themselves. Isn’t one of the reasons why we strive to overthrow white supremacy so that blacks can have self-determination?

Black nationalists do not systematically deprive whites of access to necessary resources. They are not in a position to do so. If ever black nationalism was the ruling force in this country and systematically restricted white access to necessary resources, then I would oppose black nationalism in the same fashion that I oppose white nationalism. One cannot ignore the issue of institutional and structural power. Self-determination is consistent with democracy if and only if it does not oppress other groups. I am in sympathy with black nationalism as an anti-racist strategy. This does not mean I support creating a society in which blacks rule over whites. A just society is one in which people rule themselves.

Affirmative action is a policy that suppresses the discriminatory patterns of institutions that historically and presently privilege white people. Because we are dealing with different groups, applying the same standard is discriminatory. Equal treatment is fair only if there are no group inequalities. Indeed, as Hayek took great pains to point out, classical liberals embrace strict equal treatment because it reproduces inequality.

There’s no such thing as black and Latino racism in the United States, if by this one means racism against whites (blacks can be racist against other blacks when they advance/defend white supremacy). To be sure, blacks can be bigoted against whites, but they cannot be racist against whites because they don’t have the power to do to whites what whites do to them.

Blacks operate with a double consciousness; they are racialized and operate in a white man’s world. Because whites rarely operate in the black world, they are much more ethnocentric; whites are far more white than blacks are black. For blacks not to be racist, they would have to think like white people. But majority group demands that minorities think like them is one of the hallmarks of racism. He has assumed the white man’s point of view in all of this. Whiteness, which is the racial consciousness associated with racism, blinds white people to the structural logic of racism. There is no effectively difference from the whiteness embraced by white nationalists (whom he deplores) and the whiteness embraced by those who condemn people for thinking like nonwhites.

In order to end racism, we must abolish white privilege. With the racist’s definition of racism in play, the racial consciousness and purposeful action based on race necessary to carry out this radical restructuring will itself be judged racist. Thus anti-racism becomes racism. The purpose of the argument, however fallacious, is to perpetuate an unjust state of affairs. In other words, don’t so anything to end racism lest you be racist. But, in reality, failing to end racism is racist. The is only an apparent paradox.

With the establishment of detailed rules governing its practice, the Bible is explicit in its endorsement of slavery. Yet this fact does not undermine faith in the sound moral character of the Hebrew god Yahweh (Jehovah, in the Christian tradition, or Allah, in the Muslim tradition). In rationalizing these passages, apologists argue that, in addition to being a moral guide, the Bible is also an historical document; the slavery described in the Bible reflects the social relations of ancient Hebrew society, not God’s will. Slavery is regulated by tribal law; it is not God’s law. But when the rules of slavery are discussed in Exodus, chapter 21 (the chapter immediately following the presentation of the ten commandments), the context makes it clear that slavery is God’s law. Through Moses, God conveys the rules that govern slavery.

The context is a conversation between God and Moses, which occurs between the two of them in a thick darkness. The Israelites are terrified by God, whom they cannot see in the smoky blackness, and ask Moses to tell them what God says. Moses punctuates the moment. “God has come to test you,” he says, “so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” (According to the Abrahamic traditions, people cannot be good for goodness sake but must terrified into a moral life.) So Moses goes off into the darkness to receive God’s law. There, God instructs Moses: “Tell the Israelites that you have seen for yourselves that I have spoken to you from heaven.”

Right away God gives Moses instructions on how to build an altar (unworked stone with no steps so that no genitals are exposed). You will recall, if you have read the Bible, that the first half of the ten commandments God gives to Moses and his followers concerns devotion to him. God asserts that he is lord, that Hebrews can have no other gods but him, that they cannot manufacture idols, that they cannot insult him, and that they are to devote an entire day of every week worshiping him, a day on which they are not allowed to work. (So important is this worshiping business that the first capital case under the new law was the stoning of a man to death for collecting firewood on the Sabbath.)

Then God says, “These are the laws you [Moses] are to set before them [the Israelites].” First on the list? slavery. 

God tells Moses that a Hebrew can buy another Hebrew, but he has to free him in the seventh year. However, there is an exception to this rule. Unlike chattel slavery in North America, Hebrew slaves are allowed to marry. If a slave marries a woman while he is a slave, his seventh year release does not cover his wife. The master retains her as his property. This is true for the slave’s children, as well; they, too, are the property of the master. Only a woman who marries a slave before he becomes a slave can be freed with her husband. The married slave will look to his seventh years with dread, since this will be the time that he will either have to leave his family and be a free man or stay with his family and be a slave for the rest of his life. The latter is an option as long at the Hebrew slave chooses it for himself; “the slave may plainly declare, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children. I would rather not go free.’” If he does this, then his master will publicly brand him by piercing his ear with an awl, and the slave will be a slave forever. Otherwise he will have to leave his wife and children, since they don’t get the seventh year release deal.

One hell of a dilemma, no? How is it not wicked to make a man choose between freedom and slavery by exploiting his love for his family? Only cruel and immoral men make rules like this. But this is the one true and perfect God making the rule. How Christians can continue clinging to their faith in the goodness of God given the reality of this passage is a useful illustration of cognitive dissonance.

The horrors of God’s slave law do not end there. “When a man sells his daughter as a slave,” God tells Moses, “she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are.” This is an important part of the law, since this is what allows the master to manipulate his male slaves into lifelong slavery. However, the man who buys the woman may sell her back to the father if he doesn’t like her (buyers remorse). But the owner cannot sell the daughter to the gentiles. Jews can own other Jews, but non-Jews cannot own Jews under God’s law. If the master of the female slave gives her as a wife to his son, then she becomes his daughter, which frees her from slavery. This presents another dilemma: if a woman wants to be free, she has to marry the master’s son – or marry the master himself. As long as he sleeps with her, he can keep her. There is one other way for a slave woman to become a free woman: she can buy her freedom if she has the money and the master is willing to take the money in exchange for her freedom.

What happens when a man sells his daughter as a slave who then becomes the buyer’s wife and the husband finds out that she is not a virgin? The husband and the other male villagers are to bring the woman to her father’s house and stone her to death (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). This cruel law applies to marriage generally. What happens to a husband who is wrong about the virginity question? He pays a fine. That’s right: he pays a fine for attempting to incite a mob to stone a woman to death.

Are there any regulations on how slaves are to be treated? Yes. A Hebrew slave master is permitted to beat his slaves with a rod. But he must be careful not to beat the slave to death on the spot; beating a slave to death is a punishable offense. But if he is clever and beats his slave such that he or she dies the next day, then he cannot be punished. Why? Because the slave is his property. The idea here seems to be that it is unreasonable to suppose a man would destroy his own investment, so the death must be unintentional.

We established using text from Exodus (21:2-11) that gentiles can’t own Jews (the beating rule comes from same chapter, verses 20-21). What about Jews owning gentiles? That is permitted. God tells the Hebrews that they “may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you.” What about children? Yes, they can buy children to keep them as slaves. “You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way.” The rule concerning purchasing gentiles is found in Leviticus (25:44-46). We have to assume that, in the case of Hebrew slaves, as discussed in Exodus, that the awl through the ear ritual is an exception to the rule that you must never treat “the people of Israel” as you would gentile slaves.

The explicit use of the designation of people as property tells us that this was chattel slavery. In other words, God tells Jews that it is okay to own other human beings, to sell them, to beat them, to even kill them (as long as you don’t look like that it what you intended).

Christian apologists often say that this is Old Testament law and that God, in establishing his new covenant in the New Testament, through the human sacrifice of Jesus, negated much of the obviously troubling ancient Hebrew law. It is unfortunate for their argument that the New Testament do not condemn slavery. Quite the opposite. In Ephesians 6:5, God instructs slaves to “obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear.” Indeed, they are to serve their masters as “sincerely as you would serve Christ.” One would think that Christ would command the most sincere servitude from his followers, but God puts slave masters at the same level. 1st Timothy 6: 1-2 also instructs slaves to obey their masters.

Apologists will say that these commandments are not coming straight from Jesus. However, in the gospel of Luke (12:47-48), Jesus tells a parable in which the following verses appear: “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” Here, Jesus is asserting the righteousness of slavery and of severely beating disobedient slaves. The man who is the truth and the light, the glory through which all must pass if they desire eternal life in heaven, tells his followers that it is right to own slaves and beat those who displease their masters, even the ones who did not know they were displeasing their masters. This is the man that Christians have chosen to follow.

If a realized action is the result of a gun being pointed at somebody’s head, and the action realized was desired by the person possessing the gun (or the force he represents with his armed presence), then the action realized is understood not to be the result of free will, but of coercion. Indeed, forcing somebody to do something at gunpoint is the paradigm of coercion. Of course they could make a choice to take a bullet, so there is wiggle room, but life is precious to the person possessing it, and so they are very likely to do what they are told on pain of annihilation.

Assuming both are real for the moment, the chief difference between the gun and Hell is that the consequence of disobeying the gun wielding man is immediate, whereas the consequence of disobeying the Hell wielding god is imminent. A man is more likely than not to behave in the manner prescribed by the religion that has convinced him of the realness of this terrible place. In the final analysis, the threat of Hell is no different that the threat of the gun. 

Now, most of us know that the consensus on the substance of the free will concept is that it is not implying sociopathy, but is closely associated the idea of moral (that is, social) responsibility. When one  acts with free will, that person is manifesting the social (often sublimated as metaphysical) obligation to accept responsibility for one’s actions. This represents a very real problem for religion; the metaphysical obligation supposed by the various religions is highly culturally and historical variable; no universal standard—beyond perhaps something like the golden rule—obtains. Only secular humanism, with its morality based on a scientific understanding of the material needs of humanity can produce a universal standard of moral obligation, or human rights. 

When one acts properly because it is the right thing to do, and what is right is acting to enable the material well being of persons, which includes the actor both in the way he can expect others to treat him and the way he treats himself, then one acts with free will and exercises moral responsibility. But if one acts in this way because he is fearful of the consequences of failing to act as such, then he is not expressing moral responsibility, but rather manifesting the will of another who believes he can only achieve the desired outcome with coercion.

To be sure, the view that punishment is necessary for proper moral conduct is found in history; but it is not ubiquitous in history. The alternative, which sees the harmful actions of individuals as opportunities to strength group solidarity and thereby reinforce the values that promote proper moral action, is associated with most of the human experience in a temporal sense. It is with the rise of social segmentation that one sees the rise of punishment as control and then the rise of religion as a means of justifying coercion.

Hell is nothing more than a human creation designed to coerce people into obeying a doctrine established by small groups of men for the purpose of making others do their bidding. Hell is a more efficient gun, one you hold to your own head to make you do the bidding of men for their sake—all the while believing that the mystical sublimation of their power is a real and independent and transcendent thing who cares about you. Nobody who cared about you would throw you into Hell. Only an evil thing would do that. You can avoid the inevitable conclusion that God is evil by rejecting religion and embracing universal morality.