The Fate of Free Will
Kevin Mitchell

Organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says. “Living organisms are adapted for the sake of only one thing — their selves. This brings something new to the universe: a frame of reference, a subject. The existence of a goal imbues things with properties that previously never existed relative to that goal: function, meaning, and value. And yet…no one would say that (a single cell organism) has will, free or otherwise.

Rejecting the reductionist view does not mean resorting to mind–body dualism—positing some extra, nonphysical entity, like a soul or a spirit. There is no ghost in this machine. “Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physical brains,” Mitchell says. They are the holistic sum of that continuous, dynamic, distributed activity. The brain is material, and its parts are increasingly well understood.

Free will, as distinct from agency, implies consciousness and self-reflection. Yet so much of what we do is involuntary. 

Yet unconscious decision-making is still decision-making. And sometimes we do think. We reflect, ponder, dither, weigh alternatives for some time before choosing to act.

Still, when the occasion requires, we can gather our wits, as the expression goes.

Thought involves continual feedback and self-correction, and the individual components cannot be teased apart. Mitchell writes:

The various subsystems involved are in constant dialogue with each other, each attempting to satisfy its own constraints in the context of the dynamically changing information it receives from all the interconnected areas.

Agency is what distinguishes us from machines. For biological creatures, reason and purpose come from acting in the world and experiencing the consequences. 

The Proud Boys and the Long-Lived Anxieties of American Men, Adam Hochschild.

“…But one wonders if what groups like the Proud Boys are really worried about is the replacement of men by women.

A similar sense of precarious white masculinity underlay the earlier vigilante groups…

A future U.S. administration may more tightly seal the country’s borders and claim to stop the Great Replacement. But despite recent efforts by the Supreme Court, it will have a far harder time rolling back advances by American women. Which suggests that the Proud Boys — who have misogyny “baked into the rules,” Campbell writes — won’t vanish from our streets any time soon.”

[read more — behind paywall]

Posted in Gender/Articles.

The Holy Thursday Revolution, Beatrice Bruteau.

A pioneer in interspirituality and contemplative thinking, Bruteau offered a worldview that features the incomparable value of each person and the community dynamics of mutual respect and care that follows from that view. In her last book, The Holy Thursday Revolution, Bruteau addressed, How can the world evolve from a culture of war and domination to one of friendship and communion? She wrote:

In saying that the domination/submission paradigm lies at the basis of many of our contemporary ills, I do not say that all of our ills can be traced to it, nor do I say that it is productive only of ill.

In fact, I hold that certain versions of it can be useful and appropriate in various limited, specific, functional situations… However, in our culture we have tended to award to the functionally dominant persons and institutions a total value of superiority, privilege, and power that has often led to injustice, damage, and suffering.

I am suggesting that domination is basic to a great many ills from which our culture does suffer and that it may be possible to replace it with an alternative paradigm that would afford some improvement. I think that each of these paradigms lies at a sufficiently deep level in our consciousness to be a unifying principle for a great many particular behaviors, and therefore if we deal with the matter on a deep level, we could thereby effect alterations in the relatively superficial attitudes and actions much more efficiently than by trying to change those feelings and events piecemeal.

Posted in Systemic/Books.

• Quotes

  • 2018: “Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age … by weaponizing pretty much everything that could be weaponized. They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized social media. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”
    Kara Swisher, Aug. 2, 2018 (behind paywall) (Posted in Big Tech)

• Realistic conflict theory, wikipedia.

  Realistic conflict theory (initialized RCT), also known as realistic group conflict theory (initialized RGCT), is a social psychological model of intergroup conflict. The theory explains how intergroup hostility can arise as a result of conflicting goals and competition over limited resources, and it also offers an explanation for the feelings of prejudice and discrimination toward the outgroup that accompany the intergroup hostility. Groups may be in competition for a real or perceived scarcity of resources such as money, political power, military protection, or social status.

  Feelings of resentment can arise in the situation that the groups see the competition over resources as having a zero-sums fate, in which only one group is the winner (obtained the needed or wanted resources) and the other loses (unable to obtain the limited resource due to the “winning” group achieving the limited resource first). The length and severity of the conflict is based upon the perceived value and shortage of the given resource. According to RCT, positive relations can only be restored if superordinate goals are in place.

  History

  The theory was officially named by Donald Campbell, but has been articulated by others since the middle of the 20th century. In the 1960s, this theory developed from Campbell’s recognition of social psychologists’ tendency to reduce all human behavior to hedonistic goals. He criticized psychologists like John Thibaut, Harold Kelley, and George Homans, who emphasized theories that place food, sex, and pain avoidance as central to all human processes. According to Campbell, hedonistic assumptions do not adequately explain intergroup relations… (Posted in Social/Realistic Conflict Theory)

We Can’t Even Agree on What Is Tearing Us Apart (behind paywall), Thomas B. Edsall, May 25, 2022.

Today, even scholars of polarization are polarized.

This was not always the case.

…They haven’t yet related it to the wider literature or explained why so many centrist voters seem unable to elect centrists, or why it is when there is a national tide running against a party, it’s mostly moderates who lose.

Fowler and his co-authors, on the other hand, contest the view that voters are deeply polarized:

We find that a large proportion of the American public is neither consistently liberal nor consistently conservative…

There are, Fowler and his collaborators point out,

many genuine moderates in the American electorate…

Orr contended in an email:

Several experiments have successfully manipulated feelings toward people from the opposing party and found no effects on anti-democratic attitudes or other predicted consequences of affective polarization.

…There is another key factor underpinning growing polarization and the absence of moderate politicians.

“Most legislative polarization is already baking into the set of people who run for office,” Andrew Hall, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote in his book, “Who Wants to Run: How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization”: “Indeed, when we look at the ideological positions of who runs for the House, we see the set of all candidates — not just incumbents — has polarized markedly since 1980.”

This trend results from the fact that since “the winning candidate gets to influence ideological policies” in increasingly polarized legislatures and the Congress, “the ideological payoffs of running for office are not equal across the ideological spectrum.” As a result, “when costs of running for office are high or benefits of holding office are low, more moderate candidates are disproportionately less likely to run.”

In other words, polarization has created its own vicious circle, weeding out moderates, fostering extremists and constraining government action even in times of crisis. (Posted in Politics/Partisan Divide)

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• U.S. democracy is in grave danger, a new Economist report warns, Amanda Erickson.

  “Democracy is in under siege around the world, according to a new report by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

  The annual Democracy Index tracks the health of the world’s governments. And the results for 2017 are depressing. In 89 countries, democratic norms look worse than they did last year, the report’s authors write. Just 4.5 percent of the world’s residents live in fully functioning democracies, down from 8.9 percent in 2015.

  That precipitous drop is thanks, primarily, to the United States…”

• A Socialist in Canada

• Foreign Policy Books:

  Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Reeve.

  Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker J. Palmer.

  The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. Jon Meacham.

  The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, Robert B. Reich.

• The Guardian World News

• Amanpour & Co. with Christiane Amanpour. Fascism and Human Rights interviews. April 7, 2022: Scroll to: Bosnia-born Dunja Mijatovic–the human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe and Author Jason Stanley talks about fascism and the dangerous spread of autocracy. November 11, 2023: A new report says U.S. democracy is backsliding. A look at why and the dangers of polarization.

• Threat to Democracy, Fareed Zakaria interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham.

• Interview with Masha Gessen begins at [10:40:42]

• Fareed Zakaria: Columns and Global Public Square on CNN

• Cultural Complementarity, Hector E. Garcia,

  “…All humans see only a small part of reality, which brings about a sense of insecurity (this is one of the assumptions of CC). Our tendency is to subconsciously allay anxiety by acting as if what our group sees in our time is all of the true reality; consequently, all other groups must be totally or partially wrong. Since all groups are doing the same, conflict easily develops and grows. We then try to validate our position, and often our aggression, by showing current and past evidence for that position. This is not difficult for any group to do since the present and the past hold multiple facts and human errors to pick from and take offense. (The time I have spent as a consultant has taught me that you can usually select from an abundance of facts to validate most positions you want to sell). Parties in conflict will continue to assign fault to each other until the more powerful one puts an end to the never-ending argument by exercising its power; as a victor, it will acquire the credibility to gain support for its position…” READ MORE

• The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare, Thomas Homer-Dixon.

  “The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?… Once a hardline doctrine is widely accepted within a political movement, it becomes an “infrastructure” of ideas and incentives that can pressure even those who don’t really accept the doctrine into following its dictates. Fear of “true believers” shifts the behaviour of the movement’s moderates toward extremism. Sure enough, the experts I recently consulted all spoke about how fear of crossing Mr. Trump’s base – including fear for their families’ physical safety – was forcing otherwise sensible Republicans to fall into line…” READ MORE

• renovations after surviving the worst of covid, devorah major. (Posted in Personal Growth/Poetry)

• Howard Thurman on Jesus and the Disinherited.

  While he was Professor of Spiritual Resources and Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965, Dr. Howard Thurman became a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is reported that when he traveled King carried with him Thurman’s small book, Jesus and the Disinherited. This Boston University resource presents twelve 1959 sermons by Thurman on the theme, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” (The sermons are numbered but they aren’t listed in sequential order.) (Posted on Personal/Spirituality)