Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  In my introduction to Llorente’s book, I wrote, “Writers of aphorisms or fragments eschew the idea of systems, and prefer to snipe at those who do. Their power lies in their small ambitions, and the intention is to wage a kind of guerrilla war against the massed ranks of powerful but unmanageable ideological armies. They can only win by wearing the enemy down over a long period, but their actions are crucial.” I was suggesting that the aphorism is well suited to our conformist times, when there is little hope of dramatic change. A lot has changed since 2010, particularly in Scotland, and when change starts to appear a genuine option, the essay comes into its own. How Scotland votes on 18 September will decide the relevance of either the essay or the aphorism. If the No wins, we will jot down aphorisms when we pause from the central task of weeping into our beer over a lost opportunity.

  Did My Father Have Free Will?

  I’m not an expert on my father, perhaps he wasn’t either. Of one thing I am sure, he believed strongly in his own will – in his ability “to create his own luck” and mould his life as he intended. To put it in Sartre’s words, he created his own essence.

  He overstated his claim, of course: he was as much a product of his own time as the rest of us. And his time was one when the personal room for manoeuvre was restricted, although people pushed hard against those restrictions and sometimes broke through. I would not say that he did, but he came close.

  My father was very much in the Western go-getting tradition and said that he wished he had been born at a time when there were still parts of the globe “to discover” and he could have been an explorer. On the other hand, he cultivated a more meditative side and dabbled in Eastern religions purely out of curiosity, practising meditative yoga long before it became a fashion. He had a penchant for random acts of kindness and, to his credit, he would never acknowledge them as such. They came from the heart without the heart noticing. He had utter contempt for many professions, starting with doctors who were always referred to as “perishing quacks”, and then in descending order, accountants, civil servants, lawyers and teachers. He was middle-class but more hostile to other sections of the middle class than he was to other classes. This was a residue of two conflicting and mutually exclusive influences on his life. The first was his upbringing in what we now call a one-parent family: his mother was a war widow, and the Indian Army paid for his education. He mixed with the rich, but was from a family in which money was in short supply. The second was a brief shift to the left as a result of the war. In this he was following a widespread trend in post-war Britain, and he voted Labour in the first two post-war elections – for, as it happened, the winning side, only to follow the next trend – this time to the Conservatives and then like a weathervane back to Labour in the sixties (in 1970 he voted Liberal and continued to do so for the rest of his life, clearly having lost his instinctive olfactory skills for seeking out the prevailing political odour). Is the floating voter an example of a free spirit or a herd instinct? This was a question he posed himself later in life, without finding an answer or one he was willing to share with the rest of us.

  He was, I think, both of those things. On many occasions, he clearly acted impulsively and recklessly but not without an intellectual process. He was definitely capable of making considered moral judgements that produced eccentric results, and then acting upon them with complete disregard to the risks he was conscious of. He was also capable of following the herd. He once signed a petition to prevent the opening of a home for children with psychological disorders. When my mother came home and he told her, she was furious. With a curl in her lip she asked, “So you did this to protect house prices?” This apparently had been the principal argument of the petition organisers, and my father, deeply ashamed, rang them to have his name removed from the petition (I’m glad to say the home was opened without any delays). In this episode, he was little more than a marionette – or was he? He was acted upon by various forces, but in the end had to decide whether he was going to stand his ground or humiliate himself, but by humiliating himself, correct a wrong. At its centre there’s a tiny space in which a human mind has to make a decision, and that decision is, at least in part, the result of a rational assessment that takes into account moral and contingent factors that are quite complex. Even in his herd-like moment, he was still himself.

  I listened on the radio to a neuroscientist called Dick Swaab, who claimed that “we are our brains”, which seemed arguable: at the very least we also our bodies, as our bodies clearly affect our brains and their performance. If we exercise, our brains seem more effective, and if we loll around and eat too much food, they feel about as active as a sloth’s on a bad day. If brains are machines, then they’re of the clapped-out kind that need a good kick or shove in a particular spot for reasons that are not at all clear. The secret method was only discovered because someone got so frustrated that they administered the kick or shove in a moment of hopelessness that turned out to be inspirational. Brains are erratic, and the product, no doubt, of evolution’s clumsy and equally erratic process. Thank God they’re erratic; that’s their splendour. Brains are probably going out of fashion, now that computers can take over and be so consistent. We’re told they are, at least, and surely they must be, because they really are machines.

  The clever neuroscientist also defined himself as a neuro-Calvinist, because we are predestined by our DNA1 and very early experience of life. He is right to some extent. No one can deny the influence of inherited traits and the early years of life, but that does not mean that we are without will. There is another factor, also extraneous to ourselves and our brains, which the good doctor failed to mention, and that factor is reason and rational ideas. If, for instance, Dick Swaab were able to convince me of the correctness of necessity or predestination, I might start to behave in a different manner from what I do now. Necessity and predestination release us from moral responsibility, as we cannot fight against our natures and our environment. If we apply our belief, we have to let ourselves go, and float with the current.

  Some people might argue that only a very moralistic person would believe in free will, and the determinist, whether scientific or driven by faith, is determined in turn by his or her self-assurance. The ideas reflect the traits of the people who hold them and are determined by external factors, thus assisting the arguments in favour of either necessity or predestination. The neuroscientist rightly pointed out that Calvin was the archetypal exponent of predestination, but he fails to see that this did not stop Calvin from hectoring people and trying to persuade them of their moral duties as he saw them. Again, some people might object that this proves nothing but the inconsistency of human nature and our inability to implement our rational analyses. This is also quite true, but … isn’t it the case that we have to engage with those rational ideas to some extent – badly perhaps, stupidly perhaps, inconsistently no doubt – and that involves some considered decisions that are principally formulated in rational terms, and not because we’re suffering from indigestion or our grandfather had an eccentric gene that we’ve inherited – particularly if we’ve been trained to think rationally and assess the always unreliable information put before us?

  This is why education liberates. Most of us are like my father: we are often on automatic and simply following our instincts, almost unaware of our existence, and sometimes we’re generous from the heart for no apparent reason and that behaviour can almost by-pass the brain, but we are also capable of making decisions after having carefully pondered a difficult problem and making those decisions by using the brain to get outside ourselves and into the abstract, where the abstractions are in control. The more educated we are, the better we are at doing this. In fact, isn’t Professor Swaab living proof that his theory is wrong? He may be the product of the extremely high IQ he inherited from his mother and father, and all their forbears, he may be the product of influential teachers and lecturers, and he may be the product of an extremely well thought-out diet and strenuous runs at six o�
��clock every morning, but eventually when he sits down to think out how the brain works, he is free to move about amongst ideas and decide at will or at least on his own impartial assessment of the data. And this is crucial, he has to want to do it, rather than want to please his superiors, university funders and other external forces. He may also be affected by fashion, because there are fashions in ideas too. We have free will, but we don’t have to use it. We can find our own way, but we need to get self-confidence or some self-confidence. We learn to use our will, because often during childhood, the will is not given a free run, and perhaps that’s a good thing. It may be that too much freedom in the sense of lack of obstruction is, particularly in childhood, restricting on our natures and not liberating at all. Physical brutality and psychological bullying usually restrict a person’s autonomy, but the impediments placed before us by living and sharing with others teach us to emerge from the claustrophobic company of our most obsessive and tiresome needs. In other words, society makes us what we are, and can enable us to interact with it as individuals with a margin of free will.

  What is it that restricts us? Principally it is our own talents or lack of them. The tone-deaf cannot become opera singers and the badly coordinated cannot play for their national football team. We’re restricted by the limitations of youth and old age, and deficiencies in our culture and education. But these are not the restrictions that have caused so much ink to flow over the centuries; it is the moral implications that most concerned writers in the past, although I think we should widen the argument here. It is also about creativity – about not only the will to stand up to power on the basis of reasoned argument, which may of course be mistaken, but also about the will to create meaningful things for a society which may not be ready to understand them or may even be hostile. This can be as true of a mathematical theorem or scientific discovery as it is of a painting or a book. This is probably the case in almost any walk of life, as there are many ways in which we can be creative.

  We should start with the moral arguments, which leads us to religion and much theological wrangling, some of it very foreign to our own times, but these arguments come from afar. Saint Augustine of Hippo in the fourth and fifth century ad is the important early proponent of predestination – the idea that God has predestined all our actions, and we cannot act in any manner other than the one we choose to, which effectively means we do not choose. This is not an easy argument to defeat empirically. The idea had been around for some time, and was a dogma of the cult of Isis, once an important rival to Christianity. Saint Thomas Aquinas came along much later, in the thirteenth century, to become the most famous proponent of the counterargument. The relatively liberal medieval mind had few difficulties with these competing arguments, which ran in tandem. With the Reformation, however, Protestants ran off with the idea of predestination (while paradoxically rejecting the Marian cult, which was the other legacy of the cult of Isis), and Catholics, perhaps as a reaction, embraced the idea of free will (there were Protestant heretics who believed in free will and Catholic heretics who believed in predestination, thus creating a perfect symmetry). One outcome of this wrangle, which we will mostly leap over, barely looking down, was a wonderful dispute between Erasmus and Luther, which is fascinating not just for the arguments they articulate but also and perhaps mostly for the tone and polemical, methods the antagonists deployed.

  In reality, Erasmus was not just arguing for free will, but also for tolerance and scepticism, while Luther, more virile and aggressive, was not merely the proponent of predestination but also of unquestionable revelation and therefore the absolute truth, exactly as he understood it.2 Erasmus adopts the central argument for those who support free will: if human beings have no free will, they are in essence no different from an animal, a plant or even a piece of rock. This argument can also be used against the scientific theory of necessity, but Erasmus is arguing against the religious concept of predestination. He asks what the point is, “if man in his good as well as evil is just a tool of God’s, like the hatchet for the carpenter.”3 This is not by itself a very convincing argument, as it is a posteriori: human beings are not like animals or stones, so their actions must be caused by something different, and the only other possibility is free will. This is effective against predestination, but not against scientific necessity, which is not concerned with the moral question. The Bible was the most important weapon in this battle, and on the whole Erasmus comes out of it slightly better.

  Quoting Jesus in the New Testament, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thou killest the prophets and stonest those who are sent to thee! How often have I gathered my children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but thou wouldst not!”, Erasmus poses this question, “If all happened merely through necessity, could Jerusalem not have been justified in answering the weeping Lord, ‘Why do you torment yourself with useless weeping? If it was your will that we should not listen to the prophets, why did you send them? Why do you blame us for what you willed, while we have merely acted out of necessity?”4 The problem from a moral point of view is quite clear.

  Erasmus also quotes the Apocrypha, “Let no man say when he is tempted, that he is tempted by God … But everyone is tempted by his own passions.”5 Here we have an argument that resembles more secular ones. If we have free will which distinguishes us from the animals, we must be able to govern our desires, which clearly we do to varying degrees. However, if we are programmed by society – by our superegos – we still haven’t gained free will. If society trains our minds to behave in a certain manner, then we are merely animals with an added mechanism which gives the species greater flexibility and adaptability. No one would deny that societies do these things, but the degree to which they can do these things can be argued over. The question is, “Do we refrain from murder because civilised society teaches us not to?” This could be followed by another question, which implies a different interpretation, “Do we refrain from murder because we fear the consequences in a civilised society?” But against both these arguments there is another one, which is quite popular amongst neuropsychologists at the moment, “Is there an innate morality that is hardwired into all human beings, unless they’re suffering from some psychotic disorder?” All these arguments have some truth, but together they do not explain everything.

  While Erasmus examines the counterarguments and seeks to find common ground, although firm in his underlying belief, Luther sermonises ferociously and his occasional politeness is overlaid with sarcasm. This dramatic clash of different personalities strangely endears the reader to them both – not strangely in the case of Erasmus who still stands out as a great figure of tolerance and intellectual rigour, a forerunner perhaps of the better-known Voltaire. Strangely because the gentleness of Erasmus makes you feel slightly sorry for Luther, truly a product of necessity – his social background, the harshness of his life and the politico-religious reality of the early sixteenth century. Erasmus shows that you can rise above your upbringing and your time, because both men came from very lowly social rank. In the case of Luther, you can sense that behind the wretched dogmatist there is at least a man of principle, though you’re forgetting perhaps that such individuals can be the most dangerous of all. He says, and you can envisage him on stage or in the pulpit declaiming madly these thunderous, menacing words,

  Therefore let me tell you, and I beg you to let it sink deep into your mind, I am concerned with a serious, vital and eternal verity, yes such a fundamental one that it ought to be maintained and defended at the cost of life itself, and even though the whole world should not only be thrown into turmoil and fighting, but shattered in chaos and reduced to nothing.6

  Surely even the most magnificent and well-proven truth that humanity ever encountered could not possibly be worth such a price. Luther clearly thought that an argument won is won forever, whereas an argument won has actually initiated its decline, as the exceptions and provisos start to appear.

  The terrifying illogicality of Luther’s bli
nd faith is starkly revealed in his response to Erasmus’s mention of moral responsibility: “You say, Who will endeavour to reform this life? I answer, Nobody! No man can! God has no time for your self-reformers, for they are hypocrites.”

  And yet there is more than a trace of elitism in Erasmus’s position, which suggests that morality is not only a good in itself but also a means for maintaining order, an instrument of power, and this put him on this point alone in the company of Machiavelli, someone who would have disturbed him even more than Luther. He wrote that it is “better not to cavil and quibble about such matters, especially not before the common people.”7 Luther also believed in the importance of maintaining order but, as we have just seen, it came second to the absolute reign of religious truth as he perceived it. His response: “It matters little to you what anyone anywhere believes as long as the peace of the world is undisturbed.” Luther is clearly wrong in claiming that Erasmus does not care what people think, but perhaps senses that Erasmus fears the people, not because they are poor and want his property as he has none, but because they lack his erudition and therefore cannot reason as reliably as he can. Many a liberal has been secretly happy that other, more illiberal clerics and state officials keep the people in their place and don’t excite them with ideas they are incapable of understanding. The road to democracy had a long way to go – and still has – so we should not be scandalised by Erasmus’s nervousness, because he had experienced the fierceness of hostile crowds – both Catholic and Protestant – and in old age had difficulty finding a place to live in peace.