Choice vs. Predestination

1) There is no one who can be blamed or credited for the situation humanity finds itself in, for good or bad, except humanity and nature.  If you don’t like the way the world is you can either rail against nature (our biology, limited resources, etc…) or you can rail against ourselves—what we have done with the hand nature dealt us.  (You could also blame God or Gods, but this amounts to blaming nature.)

Humans are responsible for human society

2) Some humans are more responsible than others.  Duh.  Nonetheless, as a group, we are responsible.  If the 99% rose up against the 1% tomorrow, it’d be over for the 1%.

Some Humans bear more responsibility than others.

3) Unless you posit a universe without free will (an entirely intellectually respectable position), you must allow human agency.  Technology changes the optimal strategies, but within each technological framework there are kinder and less kind options.  Looking through the vast varieties of agricultural societies, one would have far rather been alive in early Tang China or certain long stretches of Roman history, even as a member of the lower classes, than in Early Norman England.

Technology and Nature Constrict our options and set up incentives.

We choose how we respond to the incentives created by technology and nature.

4) Humans are neither innately hierarchical, nor innately egalitarian.  They can be either.  For most of human existence, the best evidence is that we lived in very egalitarian societies.  For most of agricultural history, we lived in non-egalitarian societies, with a few exceptions: but those exceptions existed.

5) Character is created by circumstances, and circumstances constrict what character types are successful but we have a great deal of control over circumstances, especially those who are most powerful.  The men and a very few women who voted to get rid of Jim Crow were almost certainly mostly racist themselves: it was virtually impossible to grow up in that society and time and not be racist.  They voted against their own racism.  You can look at your own character, find it lacking, and act in ways that are contrary to it.  I may want to beat someone to a pulp for an insult and figure I can, yet decide not to do so.  We could have decided to allow developing states to keep their agricultural sectors and food subsidies, we chose not to, for what amount to trivial gains in money which are offset by larger losses in markets in the not very long run (poor people, as has been observed, are shitty customers.)

We Can Act Good Even if Not Good.

We can change the circumstances people grow up, changing the character of the people.

The argument of free will versus pre-determination is ever-ongoing.  To deny the effect of circumstances is to be inhumane: to be the type of fool who blames poor blacks for being poor blacks and not pulling themselves, en-masse, out of poverty thru sheer willpower.  It is to blame Bangladeshis for being born in Bangladesh, stupid people for being born stupid or getting inadequte nutrition as children; many psychotic adults for being sexually assaulted as children.

There are injuries and circumstances which most of us will never rise above.

But to assume predestination is all is to deny any hope of improvement that is not determined by what amounts to blind fate: it is to deny human agency.  It is to say that if we invent a weapon (like effective ground combat robots – about 10 years out) which tilts the playing field towards a small elite oligarchy (or does it?) then there is nothing we can do about it.  It is to say that because monopolies and oligopolies naturally form, there is nothing we can do.  It is to say that we can’t choose to create the circumstances in which racism, neo-imperialism, and sexism don’t harm billions.

If most of us assume predestination, assume, in effect, that we can’t make things better, then it is a self-fulfilling prophecy for those people.

Either we are responsible, or we aren’t.  If we aren’t, then we admit, in effect, the impossibility of any change which wasn’t already predetermined; wasn’t already going to happen.

In some ways that’s a comforting world to live in. It allows us to say “not my problem” and go about our lives–building our McMansion, trying to snag the Homecoming King or Queen as our mate; doting on our children, and ignoring the world beyond the reach of our arms.

The choice, really, belongs to each of us.  As the years go by, more and more I am inclined to shrug.  People complain, but are unwilling to do what it takes to live in a different world, a kinder world.  That might be predestination, that might be choice, but either way it is what it is.

The rule for living in a better world is simple enough, and virtually every sage has told us what it is: to love others as we love ourselves, or at least act like it even if we don’t.

We might start by feeding the hungry, since we throw away far more than enough food to do so, and then go on to house the homeless, since we have more empty homes than homeless people.  But you know, and I know, that we won’t do either of those things.

Predestination?  Choice?  Some of both?

It doesn’t matter to the people who are starving and dying of exposure; it doesn’t matter to the men and women being systematically raped in the Congo; it doesn’t matter to all the children in Iraq being born with birth defects due to American weapons, nor to their despairing parents.

Predestination?  Choice?

Shit either way.

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