I repeated a previous design this year. The star eye is a little lopsided so I’ve decided that’s him winking at you.

The saddest mummy/archaeologist love story you’ve ever heard. 🎵

Planning to carve a pumpkin today, so I’ve been looking at some of the ones I’ve done over the years. I know there are nifty tools and patterns and such now, but I still love the traditional Jack-o-lantern carved with a kitchen knife.

I did some grave visitation today ahead of Allhallowtide. I’ll be busy on the actual days and I have some local graves to visit this weekend, so today seemed like a good day for the not-so-local graves. Today’s route:

What an absolutely beautiful day for a drive in the hills around Patoka Lake. The fall colors were delightful. A corner of Patoka Lake:

I mentioned recently that I’ve been thinking about my dad’s side of the family recently. I never knew them well, for reasons that are obvious from that post. Some bad stuff came through that family line and a lot of my recent spiritual practice has been working toward understanding and integrating that pain and hopefully transforming it.

It turns out that generations worth of my dad’s family are in two cemeteries: Crystal Community Cemetery and Bethany Union Chapel Cemetery. (The Find a Grave website has been invaluable, by the way.)

Four generations worth of my paternal grandfather’s side are in Crystal Community Cemetery, all the way back to my great-great-great grandfather (b. 1834) who was a private in the Union Army in the Civil War. I have a letter from him that has been passed down the generations. (It’s at the print shop being scanned right now but I’ll post a picture when I get it back.)

Three generations worth of my paternal grandmother’s side are in Bethany Union Chapel Cemetery. The oldest ancestor there was born in 1872 but there are others in nearby cemeteries which I did not have time to visit today. Another time, for sure.

When I got to Crystal Community Cemetery, I was tempted to stand in the middle of it and say, “okay, y’all, who started this shit?” But I didn’t. I did talk to them all, particularly my paternal grandfather who I know did some bad stuff. I was very honest with him about my anger about what he did to my father.

I was honest with my folks in both cemeteries, actually. But I also told them that I and my family are doing well, despite it all. Obviously I still have some things to work through (else why am I traveling miles to gripe at my dead grandpa) but, on the whole, the wounds are closing and I have decided to act in the role of healer, not victim.

Speak softly and carry a big stick. (I cut a limb from a recent oak fall and now I’m lugging it back home to make a walking stick.)

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?

Alan Jacobs:

If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated.

It appears that the president will be making a case for more war funding tonight. Remember: he may be on death’s payroll but you don’t have to be.

So I’ve been using Kagi for search and I like it. Unfortunately you can’t make it your default search for Brave so I thought I’d try Orion, Kagi’s own browser. It’s too buggy for me. Freezes a lot. Switching between tabs doesn’t always work. So back to Brave for me.

Hopefully I’ll get back to the “These Weird Times” series at some point soon. When I said a few weeks ago that I was about to do my annual post-audit reboot, this one ended up being more extensive than usual. I’m working on some personal issues that have me doing some very useful exploring–and the more theoretical exercise of something like “These Weird Times” would be too tempting to use as an escape from the more emotional and spiritual work that I need to focus on for now. I don’t know how much I’ll write about that work but hopefully I’ll come through the other side a bit more integrated than I have been. Sacrifices of goats to chthonic deities welcome–or whatever is more your style.