freedom and reason

“The General Assembly…calls upon all Governments to pay constant attention to educating the young in the spirit of respect for international law and fundamental human rights and freedoms and against Fascist, neo-Fascist and other totalitarian ideologies and practices based on terror, hatred and violence….” (Measures to be taken against Nazi, Fascist and neo-Fascist activities and all other forms of totalitarian ideologies and practices based on apartheid, racial discrimination and racism, and the systematic denial of human rights and fundamental freedoms)

The United States has failed in its duty to educate its youth about the essential character of moral commitment to fundamental human rights.

It is the essence of fascism to see moral action as primarily dependent on power and ambition. As such, fascism is the paradigm of moral relativity. Yet large portions of conservative and liberal communities also practice moral relativity. For them, determining whether something is right or wrong depends on what the goal (complicating the matter is false consciousness about whose interests are served by concrete policies). They do not really base their moral understanding on the “dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small and [the need] to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom….”

While fascism is not the only ideology that teaches people to disrespect international law and fundamental human rights and freedoms, it does seem to be the least hypocritical of the lot. We should end the hypocrisy by reaffirming the necessity of human rights and democracy to advancing human freedom and dedicating considerable time in our classrooms to the matter. And we must insist that our government adheres to a standard of conduct befitting these ideals.

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.”

This quote, attributed to journalist H. L. Mencken, should immediately prompt a contentious person in a sufficient state of cognitive arousal to ask: What is the degree of morally uncertainty about genocide, rape, and slavery? Are those of us who are horrified by the sight of starving children culturally inferior? Are we uncivilized for objecting to this situation? Will we really make moral progress when we question whether it is truly wrong to starve children?

I must count myself among the uncivilized who cannot tolerate genocide, rape, and slavery. I cannot even bring my-culturally-inferior-self to be skeptical of the moral demand that we never fail to be intolerant of such things.

What is the source of H. L. Mencken’s view that civilized and culturally superior men must be uncertain of moral truths? The answer to this question is an easily discoverable and unambiguous one: Mencken was a committed social Darwinist. Like the sociopathic Ayn Rand of Atlas Shrugged fame, and any thoughtful fascist, Mencken believed that morality and democracy were tools that inferior men used to hold back superior men. For Mencken, what should determine right and wrong is the “will to live” (Schopenhauer’ notion which Mencken conflated with Nietzsche’s “will to power”), a judgment to which only a handful of superior men should be entitled – and perhaps will if a succession of supermen appear and save the world from democracy.

Pressing the philosophy of his idol Nietzsche into his own hyper-individualist and anti-democratic worldview, Mencken writes, “There must be a complete surrender to the law of natural selection – that invariable natural law which ordains that the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish. All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak.”

To preempt the convenient delusion that Mencken is expressing only a possible interpretation of Nietzsche’s views and not his own, one should recall that Mencken said on his own account: “The great problem ahead of the United States is that of reducing the high differential birthrate of the inferior orders, for example, the hillbillies of Appalachia, the gimme farmers of the Middle West, the lintheads of the South, and the Negroes. The prevailing political mountebanks have sought to put down a discussion of this as immoral: their aim has been to prosper and increase the unfit as much as possible, always at the expense of the fit. But this can’t go on forever, else we’ll have frank ochlocracy in America, and the progress of civilization will be halted altogether.” (For those unfamiliar with the term ochlocracy, it means “mob rule,” which is how Mencken viewed democracy.)

“Linthead” was Mencken’s favorite term to refer to southern textile workers, a reference to the fragments of fabrics that clung to their hair even after their always arduous and sometimes deadly day in the factory. It was hardly a term of endearment. Mencken said of Southern whites, “Only a rare linthead girl remains a virgin after the age of twelve. Her deflowering, in fact, is usually performed by her brothers, and if not by her brothers, then by her father. Incest is almost as common as fornication among these vermin, and no doubt it is largely responsible for their physical and mental deterioration.” Working people – to a civilized and cultural superior mind like Mencken’s – were inbred mentally retarded and physical deformed vermin.

He was hardly kinder to African Americans. On the contrary: “So long as we refrain, in the case of the negro loafer, from the measures of extermination we have adopted in the case of parasites further down the scale, we are being amply and even excessively faithful to an ethical ideal which makes constant war upon expediency and common sense.” To Mencken, black Americans were not as evolved as whites of his own social caste. “In any chance crowd of Southern Negroes one is bound to note individuals who resemble apes quite as much as they resemble Modern Man, and among the inferior tribes of Africa, say the Bushmen, they are predominant.”  

Is there any hope for black Americans? “I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.”

However much one might credit Mencken with having, along with Mark Twain and a handful of others, established a unique U.S. literary tradition (Mencken’s lasting claim to fame), uncivilized people cannot allow a man with such repugnant opinions (and I have here provided but a sampling of his vileness) to stand among those luminaries who are so easily quoted as if their words reflect some deep wisdom to be heralded or emulated. Mencken was an antidemocratic, antisemitic, classist, negrophobic snob. So crude was the man that Dorothy Parker, having come to Baltimore with great interest in its literary scene, was compelled to leave Mencken’s presence when he turned to his pastime of making derogatory racial remarks. 

We should likewise be compelled to leave the presence of the myth of Mencken’s greatness. His legacy should instead serve as an example of how even moral degenerates can possess a knack for phrase-turning.

Tim Groseclose’s methodology is an ideological contrivance (Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind). Consequently, his results are unsound. For example, Groseclose categorizes the right-wing pro-military RAND Corporation as liberal. This begs the question: what does that word “liberal” mean?

If we grant the classification, then just about everything to the left of RAND is liberal. It will follow that journalists more often cite liberal sources than conservative ones. In other words, Groseclose’s measure is designed to find liberal bias. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And not a very clever one.

Here’s another example of squirrelly methodology: Using Groseclose’s criteria, we can rank the American Civil Liberties Union as conservative, with the National Rifle Association as only slightly more conservative. Self-evidently, this is a useless metric.

The statistic given that 93 percent of Washington DC reporters vote Democratic may be correct, but meaningless in light of the way institutions actually work. Journalists are workers. Like most workers, managers and owners dictate their work, designing the product and telling them when and in what amount to make it.

In the media, the managers are editors. Editors control the hiring of reporters and the news that is reported. Studies consistently find that the editors’ bias in these matters reflect the sensibilities of the owners and advertisers (see Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality to learn more about this).

But the 93 percent figure is misleading. What studies consistently find is that roughly 40 percent of journalists across the nation describe themselves as being liberal (around 30 percent describing themselves as just “a little to the left”), which means that 60 percent describe themselves as “middle of the road” or leaning towards the political right. Groseclose not only leaves out the political character of journalists across the country as determined by scientific polling, but he uses Washington DC journalists to illustrate a general media bias. This is a choice driven by ideology.

Even if we were to suppose that party loyalty represented actual bias (a case of the prisoners running the prison), the claim of a left-wing bias on account of support for Democrats is misleading because the claim assumes, first, that the Democratic Party represents a left-wing politics and, second, that liberalism is a left-wing philosophy. If the Democratic Party is a center right political organization, and if liberalism is a center-right political philosophy, then 100 percent of journalists can vote Democratic and self-identify as liberal and there will be zero left-wing bias in the media—unless the editors and owners are leftists, which would be an absurdity in a capitalist society.

Socialism is an example of a left-wing political philosophy. Support for the social democratic Green Party would indicate left-of-center orientation. What was the degree of attention given to the Green Party by the corporate media during the last election? Slightly greater than zero? What mainstream journalists are socialists? I cannot think of any, but a handful would hardly prove the claim.

What scientific studies of media bias generally find is that journalists, while relatively liberal on social policies, are significantly to the right of the public on domestic economic and foreign policy issues. Why? Because this is a capitalist society. There is no mainstream left-wing journalism in the United States. Claims of left-wing bias is rhetoric designed to dissimulate right-wing corporate power.

Groseclose doesn’t hide his right wing ideology very well. Consider his prediction that eliminating left-wing media bias (by which he must mean social liberalism) would shift the political spectrum to the right. Obviously he desires that collective American thought move from right-of-center to far right. He also admits that the corporate media is an effective tool of thought control.

* * *

Van Jones has never denied, indeed he has always been quite open about the fact that he, like a lot of young Americans, tried out various ideologies during his early political development before settling on his current pro-capitalist stance. A number of influential conservatives began their political lives as Marxists (a fact conservatives never seem to find troubling). David Horowitz, a favorite among conservatives, is a case in point.

However, the claim that the mainstream media did not cover the Jones scandal is false. I recently performed a search of LexisNexis (a database of all major media) and it returned more than sixty hits on the story. To be sure, the mainstream media didn’t dwell on it like rightwing radio, but they covered it extensively.

For the sake of accuracy, we should note that Groseclose’s desire to red-bait Jones overwhelms any obligation to get the controversy right. What Jones actually resigned over was for having called Republicans “assholes” and for having signed a petition calling for an investigation into 9-11, complaints that hardly seem resignation worthy.

For the record, Van Jones’ comments regarding environmental racism are well-founded. Blacks tend to live in poor parts of the city, and elites do in fact steer land fills and other toxic repositories away from their neighborhoods and into the poorer neighborhoods, which disproportionately affect blacks. As a consequence, the impact of environmental pollution is substantially greater in the majority black neighborhoods than in majority white neighborhoods. This is true for a range of social facts, from how food is distributed to how the police operate.

* * *

The video uses a standard trick typical of conservative anti-tax rhetoric. The pie chart shows the percentage of income taxes paid by the rich as a proportion of all taxpayers. If the rich have more money as a result of a tax cut, then they will pay a greater proportion of the income taxes by virtue of having a greater share of the income.

By every measure, the Bush tax cuts benefited the wealthy more than other classes. They also wiped out the largest budget surplus in history. Combined with military spending, this resulted in a massive fiscal deficit. Who finances the national debt? Rich people. Who collects the interest?

I expect most mainstream media outlets refrained from reporting this “fact” because the corporate media tries, for the most part, to appear objective and fact-minded. To present a meaningless chart would be self-discrediting. However, plenty of guests interviewed by the mainstream media made the spirit of this argument and their hosts did not object. Conservatives did the same thing during the Reagan years. It’s not a new story.

As for debt creation, this is intentional on the part of Republicans. It’s called “starving the beast.” By ramping up the debt, they can then justify cutting social programs for ordinary people. It’s part of the neoliberal privatization scheme. Does the “left-wing” media dwell on this? Not at all. Mainstream media is largely supportive of the privatization of everything. Why? Because they also are mega-corporations that benefit from the extraction of public wealth.

* * *

I have to say something about the source of the video. Groseclose is a real professor (of Economics at George Mason University) but Prager University is not a real university. It’s a right-wing propaganda site run by conservative Dennis Prager.

Among the secular leftists Prager says are conspiring to undermine America’s alleged Judeo-Christian foundations are labor unions, which have almost disappeared from the American scene, the ACLU, a libertarian organization defending the Constitution from authoritarian state policy, and civil rights organizations, that is, those organized groups of oppressed minorities trying to make America a more just country. 

We find a useful instance of Prager’s bigotry in his demand that authorities prevent Keith Ellison from swearing his oath to office on the Quran, the Muslim holy book. Such a remark should lead conservatives to wonder how committed Prager is to the US Constitution. (The Constitution states: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”)

In defending his position, Prager claimed that every president since Washington took the oath on the Bible. This is a false claim. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, did not swear his oath on the Bible when assuming office in 1901. John Quincy Adams also did not swear his oath on the Bible when he assumed office in 1925 (he used a law book). In fact, there is no hard evidence that any president from John Adams to John Tyler used a Bible.

Christian bigots are going after our homosexual brothers and sisters with renewed vigor. The forces of acceptance, love, and justice really need our liberal and progressive Christians friends to step up and stand with us against the hatred and intolerance in their ranks. They have to show the courage they showed against the racist bigots who spoke for Christianity in the past.

Some of you are old enough to recall that Christian bigots made the same arguments against race mixing. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix,” said Judge Leon M. Bazile on January 6, 1959. US Senator Theodore Bilbo wrote in 1946: “Purity of race is a gift of God…. And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.” There “is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God,” he said.

I could continue for quite a while sharing quotes about how race mixing is un-Christian. But you are familiar with the arguments. Growing up, we all heard – and some of you, sadly, and hopefully regretfully, uttered – the same self-serving rhetoric against interracial marriage. I heard it from Christians all the time. “Andy, I got nothing against black people, in fact, some of my best friends are black, but the practice of interracial marriage is against God’s and natural law. It’s just wrong. But I still love everybody.” No, you really don’t. Racist bigotry in Christianity is still alive.

However, the Bible cannot legitimately be used to justify sexist bigotry any more than it can be used to justify racist bigotry. The Bible cannot be the moral and ethical guide for society. The Bible declares slavery to be a moral right and prescribes the rules by which one man can own another (Exodus 21:2-11,20-21; Leviticus 25:44-46). The Bible declares honor killing to be a moral right and prescribes the rules by which a father can murder his daughter (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). God of the Bible instructs his followers to perpetrate genocide (Deuteronomy 2:34, 3:6, 13:15, Joshua 6:21, 10:40; 1 Samuel 15:2-3) and rape (Deuteronomy 20:10-14; Judges 21:10-24; Numbers 31:7-18). All decent people condemn these terrible acts and commandments.

It is the moral duty of all Christians, if they truly bring the love they claim to bear, to reject the bigotry and hatred and terrorism of the scripture and work together with people of other faiths, and of no faith at all, to advance the universal humanist values that will finally bring us together in beloved community. Tolerance is not enough. We all must accept our brothers and sisters if we really mean to get away from irrational hate. We have to condemn bigotry. And, Christians, it would be most helpful if that condemnation occurred in your spheres of influence.

The labor theory of value is not a substitute of supply and demand. To my knowledge, no significant political economist – certainly not Smith, Ricardo, or Marx, whose work I have closely examined – argue that supply and demand explains value. That would theorize in the wrong direction. Price is a specific form of value, a function of commodity-capital over against money-capital. Supply and demand is more effect than cause (allowing for feedback, of course); when in equilibrium, supply and demand explain nothing.

Concerning structural unemployment, the best way to measure this (short of doing a scientific survey of the workforce) is by calculating the rate of surplus value, the chief indicator of the organic composition of capital. The US government makes that calculation easy by periodically conducting a survey of manufactures. My calculations in the past have found that the rate of exploitation has increased, which means fewer workers generating the same amount of surplus value. This is occurring across sectors.

Over against the shrinking proportion of labor in agriculture and manufacturing (even while output in these sectors has skyrocketed), as well as the delinking of income from production, government and services took up the slack in much of the second half of the twentieth century. But government employment is dwindling – three-quarters of government workers are now private contractors in for-profit companies – and services are rapidly automating.

For the same reason that we have seen dramatic increases in agricultural and manufacturing output with fewer workers, we are seeing a secular decline in service sector work relative to the expansion of that sector. Just as it was the industrialization of both agriculture and manufacturing that eliminated most labor from those sectors, the progressive industrialization of services will eliminate most labor from that sector. Since the dawn of property and social class, there have always only been four (with only the mix changing). What sector will appear to soak up the army of redundant labor to give the enumerated work?

Far from the ideological picture of production portraying workers doting after machines, the empirical picture finds consumers doing the work workers used to do – and not getting paid for it or questioning why they are performing free labor. That the economy continues to appear to grow is a function of states pumping up the credit economy to compensate for the fall in real income and the associated development of financial products. But we are reaching the end of an epoch.

No herald of the end of work argues that this happens overnight or that it must happen in a complete way to precipitate crises. We already experience the crises – and they are worsening. The intermediate stage, with rising labor redundancies and declining real incomes, is marked by transfers of surplus value between capitalist-intensive production employing fewer workers existing alongside low wage, labor-intensive production. The impending collapse of late capitalism is forestalled only temporarily by this, the dynamic that identifies the last and terminal phase of capitalist globalization.

This dynamic, combing with the overgrowth of finance-capital, and the socialization of productive ideas, is sufficient to predict the end of the current global system. And the capitalist class knows it, evidenced by the frantic pursuit of enclosure, a desperate attempt to stave off post-capitalism. With it we see structural adjustment, the erosion of civil liberties, the intensification of surveillance, the expansion of police and military apparatuses, and the arming of reactionaries with arms and ideology. It’s called “neoliberalism.”

Will the collapse happen tomorrow? In the time scales of history, when we say something is rapidly approaching, we don’t mean literally tomorrow. Or next year. We mean sooner than later and inevitably. And don’t forget overshoot-and-collapse; we are threatening to exceed the planets carrying capacity. The cancer of capitalism will kill us one way or another. It will serve the people well to drop panglossian delusions that technology will create new opportunities for the continued exploitation of labor (an attitude that, even if true, is immoral) – or allow us to live sustainably. Instead, we need to organize to democratize the economy and turn it to different purposes.

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.