A few days ago a friend sent me this interview with Robert Sapolsky on free will. It was well-timed. I had already been thinking about the impact of my ancestor’s varied experiences on my own life and the two together clarified some ideas.

First of all, I believe in free will. I’m aware of the scientific arguments against it, both in the form of the interview above and in Sam Harris’ book that I read a few years ago. But my purpose isn’t to argue against those ideas per se—not least because I’m unqualified. I just want to develop a few ideas of my own here.

I grew up believing in what I would call a naive version of free will. In this version, a human makes wholly independent decisions that are thoughtful and purposeful. In such a view, a person might take into account other views or influences but does not necessarily need to. It’s a sort of radically free-floating free will. Homo economicus, in short.

This idea didn’t survive very far into my adult years. Buddhist ideas of interrelatedness, Wendell Berry’s ideas about community, and scientific ideas I learned from Sam Harris made it nonsensical to me.

Yet while I understand and appreciate the scientific arguments against free will, I don’t accept them—primarily because I don’t share the materialist assumptions behind them. Why should we believe that consciousness (a nonphysical phenomenon) bubbles up from sufficiently complex arrangements of neurons (a physical reality)? Far smarter folks than me have asked this question and have come to no satisfactory answer (see: the hard problem of consciousness).

I’ve said before that I think a person is a nexus of intersecting forces—parents, ancestors, friends, environment, culture, etc. There is no person apart from these forces. Nevertheless, it still seems apparent from human experience that free will remains, to some extent.

We often talk about free will as if it is an absolute possession—humans either have it or they don’t. What if, instead, it is a quality that has degrees?

I’ve been thinking about this recently in connection to my ancestors, particularly my dad’s side of the family. While I don’t know a lot about them, as far as I can tell they were–for at least two generations and very likely more–poor, unhealthy, uneducated, and addicted to various substances. Dad’s childhood was hell for him and everyone else in the house—including the ones perpetrating the horrors, I’m sure.

Based on what we know about these patterns in families, it’s hard to imagine that this hell was created ex nihilo by my grandparents. For people in such situations, how much free will do they have? Sure they have some choice, especially in the mundane details of daily life. But how free are they in a larger sense? Not very, in my opinion. It is typical in these situations that the trauma is passed on, generation after generation.

Yet there is not zero freedom: my dad got out. He left that town and, for many years, his family of origin also. Nevertheless, some demons followed him out and he was not always successful in beating them back.

And so some of that intergenerational trauma lives in me. I hope now that my daughter, two generations from hell, will inherit still less of that trauma.

What makes the difference between being entrapped in circumstances and moving beyond them? I don’t know. I’m entirely unsatisfied with any variation on the boot-strap theory, which feels derived from the naive view of free will. I’m also uninterested in moralistic takes on these matters, so eager to assign blame that compassion is forgotten.

What if the key to a greater degree of free will is something like interior spaciousness? (That phrase is from Attuned by Thomas Hübl.) Again, how some people in the worst circumstances manage to attain that interior spaciousness while others do not is a fearful mystery. Nevertheless, it happens. Some people manage to cultivate a sense of curiosity and inward development. Some manage to see other possibilities than the ones immediately before them and the will to pursue them.

I agree with Sapolsky’s desire for a more compassionate world—but I do not agree that we reach that goal by denying free will and framing humans as biological machines. Interior spaciousness has the salutary effect of greater clarity and compassion. What if we arranged society in such a way that more people had the ability to cultivate it?

My local writing group’s prompt this month was to write about a dream. It’s a fiction-focused group but I’m far more comfortable with and interested in nonfiction. Nevertheless, I wrote about my favorite dream and drew on the ideas of James Hillman. So here’s my essay-pretending-to-be-a-story.

A thought experiment:

Imagine consciousness as a tiny seed of light, and that multitudes of them are spread throughout the universe. These seeds of light do not have personalities; they are awareness as such. They are, possibly, the way the universe comes to know itself.

These seeds of light draw physical forms around themselves like magnets. They cannot be unphysical for long. The seeds take on a new physical form in infants of every species and they leave at death—and then go on to draw another physical form around themselves, which may be of any species.

The purpose of these seeds of light is to gather experience in all its forms. A person—to look at this from the other direction—is a nexus of parents, physical and emotional environment, ancestors, friends, history, everything. A person is a temporary wrapper around a particular and unique intersection of forces, which are continually changing. There is no such thing as a separate individual. There is no person apart from the intersection of these forces.

The seed of light draws these forces around itself, wraps itself in particularity, in order to experience the world as that new person. For one person, their environment is unhealthy, their parents are angry, and that person will live, for example, as an angry and unhealthy person. The seed of light learns what that experience is like. For another person, they may exist in bad circumstances but some force intersects in their life that allows them to find their way out. The seed of light learns what that experience is like. The seed of light is, in this way, neutral; it does not influence or direct the life of the person. It is pure awareness experiencing life.

Earlier today, @ReaderJohn posted a link to a Joseph Campbell quote, which was behind a paywall. The quote was:

The role of the community is to torture the mystic to death.

That’s a tantalizing enough line that I wanted to find the source–which is A Joseph Campbell Companion, a collection comprised mostly of a talk he gave at a seminar, along with additional material added for context.

The chapter begins with Campbell telling the story of a tiger raised by goats who grows up believing he is a goat, until the day he meets a tiger who tells him who he really is.

Now, of course, the moral is that we are all tigers living here as goats. The right hand path, the sociological department, is interested in cultivating our goat-nature. Mythology, properly understood as metaphor, will guide you to the recognition of your tiger face. But then how are you going to live with these goats? Well, Jesus had something to say about this problem. In Matthew 7 he said, “Do not cast your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet and turn and tear you.”

The function
of the orthodox community
is to torture the mystic to death:
his goal.

You wear the outer garment of the law, behave as everyone else and wear the inner garment of the mystic way. Jesus also said that when you pray, you should go into your own room and close the door. When you go out, brush your hair. Don’t let them know. Otherwise, you’ll be a kook, something phony.

So that has to do with not letting people know where you are. But then comes the second problem: how do you live with these people? Do you know the answer? You know that they are all tigers. And you live with that aspect of their nature, and perhaps in your art you can let them know that they are tigers.

The quote, then, seems to be saying that the orthodox community–that is, the dogmatists; those who have the form of godliness while denying the power thereof; the whited sepulchres full of dead men’s bones–serve as the sword that makes the martyr. They are the villains in the superhero’s origin story.

Anna Havron has a really wise post today on how to function in a crisis. I’m not in a crisis right now but I am in what I have discovered to be a regular, low-energy cycle. My main struggle in cycles like this is putting aside feelings of guilt for not doing … whatever. For example, we’ve now experienced several days of reasonable temperatures and I just couldn’t muster the energy to go outside after work.

Also, I’ve also just come out of a time that felt intellectually creative (new books, new ideas, increased writing in response) and that seems to have just collapsed in the last few days.

Another thing: Over the past few months I’ve been listening mostly to folk and Americana style music. That’s also shifted recently, as I’ve been listening to more heavy music and rap. Weird, that shift to more energetic music when I’m feeling less energetic. Maybe a spot of yang in my overall yin.

The cause of this is, I think, that I’m very busy at work along with it being the dog days of summer. It’s okay. As Anna says and as I’ve experienced over the years, these times pass.

As in other low-energy cycles, I am again drawn to those who talk about the wisdom of withdrawal and silence. I’ve been thinking about Bill Porter’s Road to Heaven again and might re-read it.

In any case, thanks to Anna for the post. And to echo her, when you’re in a crisis or just a time of low-energy, be patient with yourself. Everything moves in cycles.

A friend sent me a link to the No Labels organization and asked if I had any thoughts. I replied:

Personally, I’m a leftist so I’ll never be particularly interested in such a centrist organization. I can appreciate what they’re trying to do—ignoring partisan divides by taking mediating positions on issues—but my feeling that ours is a time of great change. No Labels is trying maintain the old order, to play it safe. I’m interested in what’s on the other side of the crisis.

To elaborate on this (and to make a point larger than reacting to No Labels), I do feel like we are in a time of crisis. We are already living in a post-apocalyptic world and none of the usual rules seem to apply. And for that reason, there’s something of the inevitable about all of this.

As Bayo Akomolafe says, “what if the way we respond to a crisis is part of the crisis?” We are told, for example, that we must take part in street protests and direct action; yet those very actions often entrench the opposition and become tools used against the protestors themselves. The levers which we have used in the past appear to be broken.

What if the crisis that is upon us is one in which humanity is being told to sit down and listen to teacher? That it is precisely our usual reaction—reaching for levers with which to work our will on the world—which is the source of our problems and what we must unlearn?

There has been some welcome talk here on micro.blog about practical actions people can take to reduce their contribution to climate change and our ongoing ecological disasters. There’s also, inevitably, been a lot of discussion about what “works,” whether it is wise to make demands on individuals when what we need is systemic change. And we most emphatically do need systemic change. Nothing I’m about to say should be interpreted as political quietism, though I won’t deny I’m pretty pessimistic in that regard.

I would like to add this to the conversation: right behavior does not calculate. This is something that is found in many wisdom traditions, from the Bible to the Stoics to (all hail, Tolkien!) Lord of the Rings. Is there anything more stirring than a person who does the right thing, damn the consequences?

I wonder if the spirit of calculation continues to assert itself in these conversations because climate change is consistently framed as a STEM problem by the technocrats. The whole discussion becomes one of a technological problem with technological solutions, rather than a moral failure that must be addressed by repentance and amendment of life followed by the establishment of right relationship with the more-than-human world.

What sort of person do you want to be? What do you love? These are the questions that should drive our behavior with regard to climate change and other human damage to our planet. Do you want to contribute to that damage? How will your ancestors and descendants judge your actions?

Now, I will not prescribe what “right action” will look like for you. I do things I wish more people would do—and I do things other people wish I wouldn’t do. I don’t know the circumstances of other people’s lives so I’m uninterested in judging. I can only say, as the torso of Apollo said to Rilke, you must change your life.

Listen to your conscience. Do what you can—and maybe a little of what you think you can’t. Meet the challenges of your time in such a way that you can, like Théodon, stand among your ancestors without shame.