An integral aspect of the Left’s Ethos is the belief that we do not have Free Will, that our beliefs and values are determined for us by factors beyond our control or understanding. Several recent books endorsing this hypothesis come to mind, including Francis Crick’s “The Astonishing Hypothesis” [1994], Sam Harris’ “The Moral Landscape” [2010] and Robert Sapolsky’s “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” [2023]. Having read Harris’ work more than once, I can assure you he tries very hard to show that the death of Free Will does not necessarily mean the death of Truth and Morality. But you can’t have it both ways. If everything we believe and do is dictated to us by random circumstances beyond our control, Truth and Morality cease to have any meaning whatsoever.
Robert Sapolsky is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University. A recent N.Y. Times review of his work by Hope Reese is instructive. She says: In his latest book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refutes the biological and philosophical arguments for free will …….. There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. Dr. Sapolsky sees this as “liberating” for most people, for whom “life has been about being blamed and punished and deprived and ignored for things they have no control over.”
The inevitable effect of this “liberation” is to justify such abominations as the destructive rampages of B.L.M. throughout 2020, the burning of multiple Catholic churches by the Indigenous here in Canada, and indeed the general conviction among the poor that they have the right to pillage retail outlets of every sort because their poverty is in no way a product of their personal failures. Sapolsky’s book purports to be a scientific validation of Marx’s Materialistic Determinism, the hypothesis at the very heart of “progressivism.” But like most every aspect of Leftist Ideology, it is fraught with “certitudes” that are both Scientifically and Philosophically debatable, if not outright erroneous.
The subtitle of John Horgan’s “The Undiscovered Mind” [1999] is self-explanatory. It reads: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication and Explanation. It is a wonderful book which exposes the gross inadequacy of various deterministic attempts to explain human consciousness, from the hypotheses of Freud to the more recent theories of behaviorists, geneticists, evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists such as Sapolsky. The Mind, Horgan insists, remains an amazing mystery able to transcend the various “deterministic” factors cited by those who see it as just another human organ.
Spurred on by The Society for Neuroscience, the U.S. Congress declared the 1990s the decade of the Brain, implying it would be more or less fully understood by the year 2000. On pg. 19, Horgan cites the outraged reaction of Nobel winning neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel: The idea was “foolish,” he grumbled. “We need at least a century, maybe even a millennium” to comprehend the brain. “We still don’t understand how C elegans works,” he continued, referring to a tiny worm that serves as a laboratory for molecular and cellular biologists.
A few pages later, Horgan quotes Patricia Goldman-Rakic, a now deceased neuroscientist who taught at the Yale University School of Medicine: “Humans have lots of habitual responses, automatic responses, reflexive responses. But that’s not what makes them human. What makes them human is the flexibility of their responses, their ability not to respond as well as to respond, their ability to reflect, and their ability to draw upon their experience…..”
Her comment would seem to be simple common sense and Horgan’s book proceeds to supply a good deal of evidence impugning the Scientific validity of the notion that we humans lack Free Will. But as Hope Reese says in her Times article, Sapolsky also attacks the Philosophical basis of this traditional, Western, Humanist value. While I have scanned several reviews of his book, I have no intention of reading it. But I can say unequivocally that anything he says on any issue is, by his own criteria, just another subjective, pre-determined utterance of no Objective Value! The ludicrous result of the Postmodern belief that the concepts of Free Will and Objective Truth are delusions of the Western Patriarchy, is that it nullifies its very own validity, in essence reducing every human valuation to a mere matter of opinion and making every exchange of ideas an exercise in futility. And of course it also spells the death of Morality, the disgusting disregard for human life recently displayed by Hamas being perfectly acceptable in the “opinion” of many on the “enlightened” Left.
Two inarguable Facts: Science has in no way proven unequivocally that we are incapable of legitimate insights into the nature of Reality and of acting in accordance with those insights. Yet however incomplete our understanding of the Brain and Human behavior in general, it is Pragmatically mandatory that we do the very best with the tools at our disposal, indeed that we accept this mandate as a fundamental Moral Obligation. This is but to say that without the traditional Western belief in the legitimacy of Reason and Man’s capacity for Free Will, the species is doomed to a future of unending conflict rooted in self-indulgent bias devoid of any significant trace of Moral or Intellectual integrity. Such is the world bequeathed us by our Neo-Marxist “intellectuals” over the last several decades in their effort to validate their master’s belief that radical disparities in the socio/economic status of people across the planet really have very little to do with Intelligence, Merit, Achievement, etc..
But even more appalling than the negative impact of this Epistemological Skepticism on Rational, Civil, Human Discourse, is the assumption by its proponents that they are somehow exempt from the deterministic factors crippling the rest of the species. No, their version of Reality is unequivocally True, while everyone else is utterly incapable of Freedom of Thought.
Dominated by those of a Leftist bias, both Academia and the Mainstream Media are rife with such hypocritical Double Standards. Sadly, those given to trusting their pronouncements, accept them without hesitation. But that our species is in fact capable of Rational Thought, capable of transcending the cynical vision of Man which informs the Neo-Marxist Left, is wonderfully evident in the world-view of the individual I shall cite in my next blog.