Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  Another famous dispute on this subject was between two Englishmen, but it originally took place in Paris. One of them, John Bramhall, is remembered now because he was the antagonist in a debate with Thomas Hobbes, which had been organised by another exile from the uncertainties of the English Revolution, the Marquess of Newcastle. This was not a happy affair amongst exiles, as they were not comrades in a political struggle but intellectuals inconveniently displaced by events. Bramhall was an Anglican bishop and so there was again a certain amount of quoting from the scriptures, as well as the classics, but with the exception of God’s omnipotence I will only mention the philosophical ideas, as this is the interesting part (and their religious ideas could not upstage Erasmus’s and Luther’s).

  It will come as little surprise that Hobbes argues for necessity. As a protestant cleric, Bramhall was more unusual, because mainstream Protestantism is associated with predestination, but he was what is called an Arminian after a Dutch Calvinist who rejected the dogma. It is not such a good read, and it mainly demonstrates an interesting problem in this particular debate: differences are often not of substance but of definition.

  Generally speaking the argument over free will is never about free will in all things. There are, as already suggested, enormous constraints on our lives and actions, which can then be divided into different categories. One fundamental distinction has always been between instinctive actions and reasoned actions (“spontaneous” and “voluntary” in seventeenth-century usage). Instinct belongs to the realm of necessity – even the bishop does not challenge that and writes, “the order, beauty and perfection of the world does require that in the universe should be agents of all sorts, some necessary, some free, some contingent [random]. He that shall make either all things necessary, guided by destiny, or all things free, governed by election, or all things contingent, happening by chance, does overthrow the beauty and the perfection of the world.”8 Some of our actions are governed by necessity, while it appears that only humans and the angels have election. Election is usually associated with will, but Hobbes uses the word “will” to denote the final stage of necessity where a degree of deliberation has taken place. Are you confused? Let me increase your pain with a quote from the famous political philosopher which combines awkward sophistry with now unfamiliar seventeenthcentury syntax, when he examines a distinction used by his opponents:

  I am not ignorant of the usual reply to this answer, by distinguishing between will and permission, as that God Almighty does not indeed sometimes permit sin, and that he also foreknows that the sin he permits shall be committed, but does not will it nor necessitate it. I know also they distinguish the action from the sin of the action, saying that God Almighty does indeed cause the action, whatsoever action it be, but not the sinfulness or irregularity of it, that is, the discordance between the action and the law. Such distinctions as these dazzle my understanding. I find no difference between the will to have a thing done and the permission to do it, when he that permits can hinder it and knows it will be done unless he hinder it. Nor find I any difference between an action that is against the law and the sin of that action.9

  Here we have so many threads to unravel that we have to go slowly. If your head is in a spin, don’t worry; so is mine, and I am probably taking longer to write this than you are to read it. I will not go into all the inconsistencies on both sides because they are now only of historical interest, but I think it fair to say that the argument Hobbes uses here is not against Bramhall, who does not distinguish between the action and the sin of action, and if he distinguishes between an immoral act (sin) and an illegal act, he is very sensible to do so. Both men have very similar positions, but are arguing to justify their own ideas rather than analysing in order to formulate their own ideas. This is a posteriori argumentation and there’s a lot of that going on when it comes to this subject.

  Bramhall accepts the existence of necessity in some of our actions and Hobbes quite perversely identifies “will” with necessity because, as I think it becomes clear, he has his reasons for organising the celestial realm in accordance with his own interpretation of the terrestrial one. He writes, “The last dictate of judgement concerning the good or bad that may follow from any action is not properly the whole cause, but the last part of it; and yet may be said to produce the effect necessarily, in such a manner as the last feather may be said to break a horse’s back, when there were so many laid on before as there wanted but that to do it.”10 We can all agree that a great deal of external factors lead to our being in a situation where we have to make a decision, but this has no effect on whether that final decision is produced by free will or necessity. Bramhall writes, “An autonomous power of the sort the will is is a free power, because its operation is not necessitated by causes other than itself.” This may be very restrictive, especially now we know more about how the mind works, but Hobbes does not appear to challenge this, and instead argues tautologically that in choosing between various possible actions which will be most agreeable to an individual, an individual will becomes necessity. The action becomes the only possible action because it is the only action taken. There are a couple of very interesting ideas here, which would become important in the development of English philosophy. The deliberation leading to the will in Hobbes’s concept is, like Bramhall’s “free power”, sealed off in the self, although Hobbes admits that it aims at the individual’s self-interest which could be in its relationship with the world around. Hobbes sees this as an amoral decision. “Power irresistible justifies all actions, really and properly, in whomsoever it be found.” The individual must obey the laws of God and the state, but beyond that the individual can and should decide on the basis of self-interest. Luther disliked “self-reformers”; Hobbes doesn’t even take their existence into consideration. Did the Anglo-Saxon idea of benign self-interest start with the man who is most famous for arguing the essentiality of the state and its dominion over the individual? There is a curious incongruence here, though this is not an inconsistency, such as the following one in his definition of the will:

  Now for his argument, that if the concourse of all the causes necessitate the effect, then it follows Adam had no true liberty. I deny the consequence; for I make not only the effect but also the election of that particular effect to be necessary, inasmuch as the will itself, and each propension of a man during his deliberation, is as much necessitated and depends on a sufficient cause as anything else whatsoever. As for example, it is no more necessary that fire should burn than that a man or other creature, whose limbs be moved by fancy, should have election, that is liberty, to do what he has a fancy to do, though it be not in his will or power to choose his fancy [instinctive action], or choose his election or will [reasoned action].11

  This convolution on will almost destroys our will to live. Election is the power to choose a certain action, but Hobbes argues that we do not have the power to choose our election.

  Bramhall argues that there is a difference between propensity and necessity, which is a useful distinction, although few of us would go quite so far in curbing our desires if they come too powerful for us:

  … concupiscence and custom and bad company and outward objects do indeed make a proclivity, but not a necessity. By prayers, tears, meditations, vows, watchings, fastings, humicubations [lying on the ground in an act of humiliation], a man may get a contrary habit and gain victory not only over outward objects but also over his own corruptions, and become king of the little world of himself.12

  Like Erasmus and Bramhall, I think that human beings are essentially moral beings, and therefore I too am predisposed to the idea of free will. Hobbes and Luther are not interested in ethics, and therefore argue for necessity alone. One recategorises the will, and the other creates an equality of iniquity amongst all men, denigrating in particular those who attempt to behave more morally and possibly seeing this as a form of blasphemy. Free will has always been a battleground between a moral and amoral view of humanity, but should
it be? Or should it only be?

  Before answering that question, it should be clarified that believers in free will are not all moral people and believers in necessity are not all immoral people. People are not consistent with their beliefs, and this assertion can be used in favour of either free will or necessity.

  As suggested, morality for Hobbes cannot be separated from the law. A person is moral if they obey the law and God; all the rest is necessitated “fancy”. This is an important concept in the philosophy of law, as some believe, sometimes for good reasons and across a wide range of political credos, that the only rights are those enforceable in law. Again we have not so much a difference of opinion as a difference of definitions and distinctions. The very clear distinction is between those who believe that we have moral duties outside the law and those who don’t. This is closely linked to the distinction between those who believe that human beings are naturally moral beings although, like every other facet of our natures, it can be nurtured or atrophied, and those who believe human beings are only capable of unselfish acts if obliged to carry them out by socialisation or the law, in which case they cease to unselfish acts. The question of free will is therefore a fundamental one that concerns our interpretation of human nature with considerable implications in both politics and religion. No wonder so many people argue this one backwards, and I wouldn’t say that I am wholly free from this crime against logic.

  The argument over free will has always been distorted by the problem of an omnipotent God, and the tetchy debate between Hobbes and Bramhall is no exception. Hobbes might be expected to secularise the debate, but this subject probably could not be secularised in his time, although the process was certainly there in other fields. What is interesting is how much the debate continues to be about morality.

  The shift is from predestination to necessity, and necessity is much less damaging to deism than it is to theism. The God of the deist is the Big Bang (or whatever other first cause), and it is no surprise that Voltaire and Einstein were deists. The Big Bang, tantalisingly credible though it may be, remains a mystery. How could an event of this kind occur and is it in fact the first cause? Matter is energy, but where did all this energy come from? Where is the anti-matter? Of course, there may be further scientific discoveries that provide definitive answers, but they might just as easily produce many more questions. The God of the theist can no longer be omnipotent, as he turns his face to us and, as it is very difficult to believe in an interventionist God capable of overriding the laws of nature, He is becoming as dependent on humanity as humanity is on Him. We find however that the exclusion of God from the debate does eliminate some of the distortions, but it does not eliminate the moral question (which because of this does hint at the existence of some kind of God).

  If everything could be perfectly calibrated and there is no free will, the process triggered by the Big Bang must lead to the inevitability not only of the history of the universe (relatively uncomplicated when physical forces were alone at play) but also the history of our planet and humanity. We are all a collection of chemicals interacting with each other and producing our decisions with only a semblance of autonomy. The immense instability of this model renders it impossible to understand: if Marx had died of pneumonia in his late teens, the working class movement would still have developed but possibly in different ways; if Archduke Ferdinand had died in a car crash on his way to Sarajevo, the First World War may not have started, Europe might not have lost so much power, many technological innovations might not have occurred, and I might be typing this book on a typewriter rather than a wordprocessor (but then I probably wouldn’t exist, because my grandfather would not have died when my father was an infant, and my father’s life would have been very different). The list could go on forever.

  It would be easy for me to say that only the addition of the unpredictable free will of human beings could justify this chaos of our human world. It would make my job easier, but it would be wrong. Nature itself is the child of chaos. Randomness drove the origins of evolution and has continued to this day. Moreover, humanity’s desire to rationalise production and minimise costs may well destroy this planet or certainly many of its species, including ourselves. We should not be that too ambitious in our claims for free will.

  We are subject to a thousand forces acting upon us externally and internally. We are most definitely not in control of our lives, although we are in the West seemingly more in control than ever before, because we have eliminated some of the risks of ill-health, we do not work so many hours and we have more reliable information on which to base our decisions. Illness can change our nature: we might become more accepting of the world in our illness or we might – in the case of strokes, for instance – become grumpier or even aggressive. Our selves are constantly changing realities governed by dominant forces. We cannot argue with this, but the human does occasionally demonstrate great independence, resilience and moral judgement, so the existence of these things cannot be denied either. The question is, what motivates them?

  As mentioned, some argue that we are motivated by our socialisation, which includes our religion or ideology. It seems to me unlikely that punishment for our sins will be meted out in another existence or in another incarnation, but it does seem quite possible that moral behaviour does bring more pleasure in this life than does immoral behaviour. I don’t mean a moralising life, which is just another form of immorality; I mean an ability to make decisions not based on self-interest. This may just be the product of our evolution as a social animal or it may be something of a more spiritual nature. Society needs people or some people to make decisions on a moral basis, so in genetic terms a population that produces a percentage of altruists will be more likely to survive. Worker bees work altruistically for the good of their small republics, as many Renaissance thinkers observed. I am unconvinced by this argument, because our altruism is much more complicated, and takes on different forms in different ages. It is surely in this area that human beings act with the maximum free will. And it is rightly called “free will”, because we must will ourselves to it quite consciously, unlike most actions taken on the basis of self-interest, which may involve more instinctive or learnt reactions. Self-interest may well involve quite complex and even devious intellectual processes, but then we are, as Hobbes argued, totally trapped within the dictates of the external world (this was not a good or bad thing for Hobbes; it was the only way decisions are made). Most people eventually find self-interest to be a rather cramped dwelling, and perhaps after establishing themselves they look around for other motivations to fill their lives and make them meaningful. They want to do this, but they have to will themselves to it. It is a conscious decision. It may not in fact be that complex. Simplicity is often more generous.

  I have answered my first question. Free will is about morality. And I have occasionally implied that it is not only about morality. It is quite often about creativity. Returning to Walter Kaufmann, we recall that he defined the relationship between academics and their subjects as an It-It one. Academics, it was implied, turn both themselves and their elected area of study into something a little dead. There’s a touch of humour in this, and it should be added that Kaufmann was a talented academic and translator, who brought a great deal of life to his studies and translations. It could be said that the writer and painter have a thou-I relationship with their books and paintings. There is a dialogue between the artwork and the artist, but once the idea has suggested itself, the artwork becomes the primary interlocutor. The writer or painter has to accept the dominion of the artwork and work to meet its needs. The artwork appears to have autonomy but the artist dealing with the unexpected problems the artwork produces enters a world in which there is free will to respond and respond inventively. Artists have to purify themselves of all their resentments, rivalries and desires for self-justification (not unknown in the art world), because the work will consider these to be alien and inappropriate. This may look like arty-farty self-importance
and perhaps it is, for no artist can approach their work without at least a touch of arrogance, but it also looks like arrogance because our societies communicate the idea that most of us have no access to the arts and we are obliged merely to consume them and consume them in the manner they dictate.

  The example of el sistema demonstrates that any group of children chosen to learn an art can do so and do so extremely well. I’m sure that a sistema literario could produce just as good results; we are all born with talent, and while it is still possible to develop our talents in adulthood, it is much easier in childhood. An old Gaelic proverb says, “Learn young, learn well.” This is why we should weep at the terrible waste of our children’s talents in our current educational regimes: once, in the time of the “mass society”, working-class children had to learn a degree of competence, because work required a minimum level of instruction and perhaps more importantly states became aware that an army with a higher rate of literacy could easily defeat the army with a lower one. These mass armies are no more, and most of the working-class and quite a few of the middle-class jobs are now unskilled. With all our smart technology, who needs a smart population? Thatcher’s government first introduced the utilitarian approach to education: schools should only teach subjects that have a practical application in the jobs market. The barbarians had taken power.