I am nearly done with (yes, the ever-ready pun) The Mirror and the Light,(2020), the third and final installment of the late Hilary Mantel’s trilogy (the first trilogy ever to win Booker prizes for two of its installments), following Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012).
It is a masterful work, offering an entirely credible depiction of a man of action engaged in his daily tasks, both in the “backroom offices” of Henry VIII’s administration and in intimate give-and-take as Henry’s most trusted advisor (for the time he was that).
The Author
Thomas Cromwell: as Bad as We Think?
Was he or wasn’t he?
The mind you enter into is the mind of a man born a commoner in Putney, a district of South London bordering the Thames, to an enterprising, physically powerful, but brutal father, a blacksmith and brewer, and to the world of workingmen, chancers, toughs and street brawlers.
Fleeing abroad, he comes under the civilizing influence of Italian warlords and Antwerp merchants, learning discipline, soldiering, accounting and trading, learning also multiple languages, scholarship in works worldly and liturgical, the governance of materials and manufactures, of productive and organizational processes, and, most importantly, the fine art of controlling the expectations, fears and hopes of men — equally of those who stand below him and above him — in other words, the fine art of persuading and deceiving, enlightening and directing the thoughts of those around him, his peers, his followers and his overlords.
He does all this knowing that he is resented by anyone of noble blood who feels he has put them in the shadows, whether by deliberate act or simply by comparison, all of whom are ever watchful of a stumble of his that might bring them back into the royal light, at cost of little more than Cromwell’s head.
One or two voices have accused author Hilary Mantel of being too sympathetic to Thomas Cromwell, who was a cruel and efficiently ruthless man.
I’d need to research this farther than I have time for, but I have three reasons to resist that view.
1. He came from the largely illiterate working class, while our knowledge of him comes almost entirely from the 1% of his time, the literate classes of the nobility , the clergy and the gentry.
2. He headed the more moderate and cautious wing of the Protestants in the Protestant/Catholic struggle for the throne of England. So when he was overthrown, his successors had every political motive to vilify him.
3. Anyone exercising powers like his in a time of polarization and sectarian persecutions– like that of all the Cromwells known to history — would have to be cruel and ruthless, as any astute reader of Machiavelli, or history, for that matter, would know.
I have never read a better representation of how the inner thoughts of a man weave in and out of his actions — especially of a man whose historical impact overshadows whatever private life went on behind the composed poker face of a royal minister and diplomat.
Author Mantel depicts him as walking a tightrope and surrounded by enemies who would cherish his downfall and friends whose lightning disfavor would separate his head from his shoulders.
And yet, in his occasional moments to himself, he is flooded by memories of his wife and daughters, lost to the English sweating sickness that plagued London and Henry’s court, and yet farther back, memories of the brutal attentions of his drunken brawler of a father, Walter, and of mentors and lovers on his path from then to now.
Oliver Cromwell, first among English republicans, but not the kindest…
Henry VIII: A Man I Love To Hate
A man I love to hate
Henry VIII was a clever, well-educated, contentious and self-indulgent man, with a changeable temperament and a charming whimsicality that turned quickly into seething anger when rebuffed, for who dare rebuff a king born and bred?
His art of governing was to find someone thoroughly competent to become his right-hand man, and then — too vain and proud to admit his own mistakes — to cut off his own right hand (Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell) when he came to feel a course of action no longer served him.
Lesser courtiers were pieces on the chessboard, to be shuffled into and out of exile at Henry’s whim, discarded or beheaded when they grew inconvenient to his purposes.
He came from the usurping line of the Tudors, Welshmen resented by the remnants of the Plantagenet line of Norman invaders, and saw — perhaps rightly — potential usurpers all round him.
He finally created, after much toing and froing — and entirely by unwitting accident — his perfect successor, the wily Elizabeth, who thought and acted like one born with her head in a noose or, more precisely, with her head laid out cleanly on the headsman’s block, ever anticipating the downward stroke of the axe.
Elizabeth the Unwanted, the bastard daughter of headless Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, whose right to rule Henry despised, who took England into its golden age, as Henry himself never could have done.
It is our birthright as biological systems designed for self-replication, the baseline condition of our existence, at the macro level of the organism and the micro level of its cells.
But the self which we serve admits of vast variations occasioned by individual differences in capacities and temperaments and by societal differences in cultures, some acquired by birth, some acquired by choice.
Culture acquired by choice can be a renunciation of one’s culture by birth, accessories to it (as are the subcultures of occupation, profession, vocation or hobby interest), or adornments of it (as are the subcultures of dress and lingo, association and lifestyle).
Selves to be served also differ in the degree to which they are anchored in needs and desires that are asocial and atomistic, social and group-oriented, or idealistic, that is, expressing an allegiance to a code of conduct purer than any real society, a higher law.
One can think of this third, most abstract, ideological category as a self defined by a virtual community (e.g. the community of the saints, men of science, voices in the dialogue of thought). One can also think of this as a community of two, the moral agent and their ultimate all-seeing and all-knowing judge (whether that judge is conceived of as a personal God or as the judgment of History).
So, of these three most fundamental kinds of selves, the first is a selfin the individual context, the second in the social context and the third in a virtual social context.
In each case, self-determination, also known as freedom, would mean the subjection of the needs and desires of that self to no external force or authority (autonomy, in Kant’s terminology).
In the first case, we would call the person selfish.
In the second case we would call the person either fair-minded, just or righteous (accountable to more than their own self-interest) or socially conformist or opportunistically amoral, depending on our evaluation of the moral worth of the community to which it adheres.
In the third case we would call the person selfless, meaning that their ultimate loyalty is to a creed or code of ethics, above any real-world community, all of which are likely to be flawed.
Only the third case are fully realized moral agents in the strictest sense of the word, assuming, of course, the moral worth of the virtual community to which they aspire.
Presumably, everyone who sacrifices for either a real or virtual community assumes that that community has moral worth.
But real communities are inevitably flawed because they include many flawed moral agents and some defective ones — often in positions of authority, for authority and the consequent power over others draws ambitious souls.
Only virtual communities can be perfectly moral (think of them as composed of the all-stars of the league of moral agents).
But that is not to say that anyone claiming — or indeed, thinking — themselves to be perfectly moral is so. Fanatics assume their own infallibility, yet fanaticism comes from a weakness of character resulting in a need to dominate those around them.
The first case produces persons characterized by vices (bad actors, defective moral agents) and possibly even lawlessness (criminals).
The second case produces heroes, that is, persons willing to make sacrifices for their society, up to the ultimate sacrifice of life itself. Honored by all in their society, imitated by few.
The third case produces martyrs, that is, persons willing to sacrifice not only life itself, but also their social standing in their real-world community, even to the extreme of being mocked and derided as criminals. Some obvious examples of this are Jesus Christ and Alexei Navalny, alongside such fictional characters as Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or movies like Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Hello, who is this?
What’s In Your Self?
The me I want to be?
The self is a fun-house hall of mirrors.
Every aspect of the self, each of the big three, and all of the subordinate facets, is its own mirror with its own distortions.
What’s in your self?
Which of these many mirrors reflects you as you really are, in all your complexity and your changeable moods, in the limitations of your present, the baggage of your past, and the dreams of your future?
And is the self you think you are the same as the self you really are? Is it the same as the one you appear to be to others, friends and enemies, intimates and strangers, the perceptive and the oblivious?
And, if you have a God, does your God — who alone sees into the hearts of men — see you as you would wish Him to? or does he see through a whited sepulcher to the corruption inside? or maybe just to a boastful, harmless phoney, a pretend do-gooder, faking it until they make it, but never quite making it, salvageable after a stint in Purgatory.
Alternatively, taking the secular perspective, does your image of yourself — the star of the show in your own inner moral telenovela— play a real and constructive role in the world at large? Or are you in a siloed theater, you and your tribe, playing to the home crowd but no closer to a goal than when the play started, and no more in search of a common ground with the fellow citizens sharing your Constitution than are your bitterest political foes?
And sectarian red voters are doing the same thing, while thinking of themselves as marching in the vanguard of God’s earthly army, which just may be a contradiction in terms — if Jesus is the model of God meant for imitation by man.
For what weak mortal vessel has the presumption to model himself on God the Avenger, a God full of wrath, looking down scornfully on lesser beings, the smiter of the Old Testament? (And how very attractive to a certain turn of mind!)
For those who march in the Vanguard, whether millenarian Christians or loyal cadres of the Communist Party, see themselves as so immersed in a life-and-death struggle of Good against Evil that none of the usual rules apply to them.
All is permitted in a cause so absolutely just. None of the constraints and compromises of little r republican government — with its tedious separation of powers, its painfully slow consensual procedures for establishing facts and vote count and verdicts, its universal franchise and one-man one-vote districting — none of that can be allowed to slow them in their righteous advance toward goals that leave no room for any other authority, any other voice!
Extremists and fanatics are the enemies of republics — which live by compromise between distinct parts permitted to flourish as best they can, each in their own way, and by the shared constitutional consensus that holds them together as a nation and a people.
In our time, the ultimate alternative to fractious but stable and united republics, and federations of republics (like NATO and the EU), are tyrannies of the nationalist Russian type, the Communist Chinese type, or the theocratic Iranian type.
Whatever kind of self you decide yourself to be, which of these delightful paradises would like like to park that self in?
And what, fellow citizen and voter, do you intend to do about it?
Kant, in his ‘speculative’ historical writings, dictates a transcendental gunshot marriage between the realism of Machiavelli and the idealism of Rousseau (though not by name), improving on them both by revealing them as the two interpretive poles of historical interpretation, and of man’s understanding of his capacities and limitations, as they emerge over time from the real life and practices of mankind, in its two-pronged and utterly ambiguous foreseeable history.
That ambiguous future is the core bit of dark humor lying at the crux of the generally humorless Prussian’s short work Perpetual Peace. The inspirational and aspirational title is accompanied by a Dutch tavern sign, with that name lettered over a picture of a graveyard.
The crux of that dark joke is this: the unstoppable advance of man’s powers can only lead to one of two destinies. We shall either, having accumulated the powers sufficient for mutual annihilation, proceed to do just that, or we shall find a way to live together in peace and mutual respect.
Should we go the path of destruction, it will not be calculated and deliberate, but the result of the mad scramble of all to preserve themselves as best they can against the looming sense of threats from every direction. In other words, it would only be the predictable and inevitable result of world anarchy.
Should we go the path of Enlightenment — enlightened self-interest, really — it will be the result of a long sequence of gradually improving half-successes and half-failures, glacially approaching, without ever fully reaching, a world of perfect justice.
It can only take the form of a consensus acceptable to all, whose political form is the social contract and whose individual or personal form is the categorical imperative.
I’ll leave the reader to research those two complex ideas as far as they wish, but if you don’t at least Google them, what can you have to do for the next 3 minutes that’s more important?
Kant’s gunshot wedding of Machiavelli and Rousseau was the high-water mark of the Enlightenment.
To see this, read Perpetual Peace (38 pages) and the brief but brilliantly condensed “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (@13 pages). Both can be found in Kant, The Political Writings,ed. Hans Reiss, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK; 1970.
The Counter-Enlightenment
From there’s a clear and simple point to all of this toNo exit. We should have stopped at perpetual progress toward a distant and perhaps unreachable goal.
The forces of the Counter-Enlightenment now loom large.
On the Left, they take theoretical form in postmodernism and various forms of moral relativism.
On the right, they take practical form in MAGA, the Tea Party and the Freedom from Responsibility Caucus in the increasingly extremist Republican Party.
In the center, they take practical form in the narrow focus of Independents on short-term financial advantage.
So much for domestic politics.
In geopolitics, they take form in the repressions, invasions and assassinations of the Putin regime and the New World Order espoused by rogue states like Russia, China and Iran, and exploited by the complacent mid-level powers narrowly focused on expanding their own local prestige and power: India, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and Egypt heading in the same direction. The New World Order is just the Old World Order — essentially, might makes right — that dictated most of history until the end of WWII and the pax Americana.
It was an imperfect peace — although, unlike the world orders promoted by autocrats, it allowed peaceful change, generally raised living standards, and spread voting rights, making governments more accountable.
It was limited in other ways as well. Its mandate never reached beyond America, its allies, and awkwardly independent or unaligned states like ex-NATO France, Franco’s Spain, Orban’s Hungary, pre-Modi India, Switzerland, and the like.
The New World Order is accepted by both middle and rogue powers because it frees then to pursue local hegemony.
Good for them, bad for their smaller neighbors.
It is entertained by the Global South because they focus on past injustices rather than those that the New Order will bring; by the time they realize their mistake, they will be victims, unless they rank among those with the power to exploit their smaller neighbors.
And the Global South will play both ends against the middle to maximize their own short-term advantage, which they can rightly point out was all the Global North ever did for them.
But this fence-sitting attitude — the attitude of a watchful scavenger — always comes home to roost, as the predator finishes its current meal and looks around for its next victim.
Victor and victim… unless — they say it’s happened before — the victim were to rise again (perhaps as a movement rather than as a man))
Identity is bipolar, and its chicken-and-egg poles are culture and self, reflecting each other back into infinity, like the facing mirrors in a barber shop.
mini me, many me
Afterword, whether Ill-advised or Not
From this perspective, the culture wars begin to look like a pissing match between two kinds of selves, each disrespectful and dismissive of the other, when not busy demonizing them.
That kind of crap should stay in bars — and by that I mean dives. It has no place in the politics of a republic and anchor of the Free World, which for the moment looks like it’s on the ropes.
Speaking of which, someone’s been playing Rope-a-dope with the West, reform KGB officer, now prince of peace — if J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are to be believed.
And that would be forgetting about the GOAT cheapshot artist, Donald Trump, who would happily address your kind inquiries, if he were not busy stumping up funds (and converting political donations into payments for legal fees) to placate judges and juries who are now being heard from as the slow wheels of justice (precede by investigation, evidence, testimony and unbiased reflection by jury and judge, after the caterwauling of advocates on either side ceases)grind to a conclusion.
Too bad elections are held with just time enough for viral cheapshots to hit home, eh. I mean, who needs evidence? We know what we know, right? And who has the patience, or the stamina, to wait for careful, considered deliberation? Why, it would make politics a dead bore!
Sorry for that outburst, but it’s hard to watch the possible sinking of the Republic without a twinge of emotion.
We as a nation have spent too much blood and treasure in the making of the republic to see its degradation and decline without the occasional outburst. And I just finished watching Band of Brothers, all about how we made that golden era that the MAGA crowd of America Firsters celebrates by undermining its chief and underlying basis.
But, there I go again!
What I really meant to say after apologizing for going all soapbox on you was that the original Thought was intended as a psychological and social insight, not a partisan jibe.
So, if you prefer your insights straight with no chaser, kindly disregard my subsequent lamentations.
[Revised and improved, Thursday, February 8, 2024, 2:32pm]
Some words are worth a thousand pictures; some moves are worth a thousand random steps.
Science & the Forces of Nature
Science says the world is determined by causes acting relentlessly as dictated by the universal laws of nature, impervious to worthy human ends and values.
Realism says the world of human affairs is analogous, with the situational requirements of national survival dictating conditions that limit the range within which suitable policies are found, regardless of the internal constitutional form of government.
From that follows the notorious claim that nations are as identical in their geopolitical imperatives and policies as billiard balls (Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 18).
Both claims are true, so far as they go.
No human agent — whether an individual man or a collective agency like a nation-state — can act against the laws of nature.
There are no such things as superheroes, and nations are even farther from idealized agents free from limits than are real people.
So, scientific reality must be deferred to, even when sects arise that deny the evidence of science because it undermines claims upon which their ideology’s support rests.
But reality can be ignored for a while, if the consequences are long-term. Those lacking foresight or a deep understanding of the accelerating changes going on around them may not see or recognize the consequences in their lifetimes. Sometimes a generation can pass before the consequences become apparent to all. People and nations can argue and dither, delaying effective measures until the late innings.
The risk here is that by the time the signs of trouble are too evident for even the most resistant observers to ignore,the threat may have become lethal, the cancer metastasized, leaving he who hesitates trapped in an untreatable condition (Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 3).
If the threat is grave enough, science will steamroll public opinion, in its own sweet time.
So, science wins in the end, winnowing out all those who cannot or will not adapt to shifting empirical realities.
History and Its Underlying Currents
Geopolitical realism works similarly.
As with the relentless and incessant forces of nature, so with the irresistible undercurrents of history.
Leaders and nations that fail to perceive changes to which we must all adapt — whether for lack of understanding or a contrary will –will be winnowed out by the sifting processes of natural selection and its social equivalents in demographics, economics, geopolitics, and the technological advances and social reactions that drive or follow them.
They will decline or disappear, leaving standing the survivors of the old order and the emerging powers of the new order.
Evolutionary competition eliminates those unprepared for what is coming, whether natural or historical events. Those who cannot or will not adapt to changing circumstances leave the world to those who do.
But when ill-informed and unprepared leaders run nations, they can take whole nations down with them.
Both scientific and geopolitical claims about what’s coming can be disputed. Such claims, whether true or false, can win or lose the battle for public opinion.
But underlying causal forces will grind on regardless.
Sadly, in the arena of politics, manipulation, rhetoric and persuasion are more powerful than knowledge or understanding.
Wrong decisions, whether formed in free nations by public opinion, filtered through the election process, or by the proclivities and obsessions that lurk in the inner chambers of an autocrat’s mind, the causal forces at work in nature and history, not mistaken perceptions about them, determine outcomes.
Room for Maneuver; Room for Hope
So, there are causal limits against which one cannot fight. One can only adapt to them, preserving human values as best one can.
But as an agent/agency adapts to changing circumstances, it can leave room for human values, both pragmatic and moral, within its range of feasible choices, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always to some degree.
In the most extreme cases, choice may be limited to the scope of a prisoner in a concentration camp holding to their nature and their principles despite all that is done to them which they are helpless to prevent.
So, there is room for moral agents to maneuver in this relentlessly causal world that envelops us. They may not always be able to prevent undesirable outcomes, some of which are inevitable (given the circumstance that lead up to them), but they can always show the strength of their nature and their principles as they struggle against the odds.
And there are some inevitable outcomes — death and taxes among them — that cannot be prevented, but only deferred to our own advantage.
But, by deferring the inevitable, moral agents can build a life worth living — and worth having lived, when it comes to that.
…and multiply their net worth with tax deferral and the magic of compounding growth.
And, honestly, life works pretty much like that, too.
I’m not talking about geopolitics, although that is increasingly multipolar as well, as you must already know, unless your head is lodged firmly in the sand or up your nether regions.
I mean instead that no single analytical perspective unlocks all the treasure chests of knowledge.
Different perspectives, and the methods they employ, are suited to different purposes.
The Scientific Method
angles and measurements
The most obvious perspective fitted out with its own, defining method is the scientific perspective and its scientific method.
This has established itself beyond all doubt — which is not to say that the world isn’t crawling with people diving into the worldwide communal soup bowl (into which con men, cultists, social influencers, ideologues and demagogues are constantly pissing).
Anyone who doesn’t want to face facts, whether of science or of credible news reporting, has record-breaking spreads of viral gossip and nonsense laid out for their effortless consumption.
It’s a feast for burnt tongues and a sight for sore eyes!
Nonetheless, those who build their futures on firm foundations know they can’t credibly interpret data, make claims or offer explanations unable to withstand the evidence of measured and controlled experiment and observation.
Not if you have self-respect, in the deepest sense.
For the scientific method imposes standards on what one can claim with the badge of science.
But to impose standards is to place requirements and limitations.
And this is done prior to weighing any particular evidence. In other words, this is a precondition required for the practice of the method to live up to its own standards.
Such preconditions suit the method and its perspective to some matters, while unsuiting it for others.
The scientific method essentially forces all practicing scientists into a universal consensus perspective that accumulates over time a body of knowledge based on proven and repeatable results of experiments, carefully measured, and reduplicated by all who attempt reduplication while following the standards.
The universal consensus is achieved because it is built into the method as its prerequisite conditions and approved procedures.
Of course, there are disputes and divergences at the stage of hypothesizing, but the scientific method is designed to force decisive showdowns between rival hypotheses, namely, experiments for which the rival hypotheses predict conflicting measurable outcomes.
The scientific perspective is that of cause and effect. For outcomes can be predicted with certainty only where one independent variable determines a precisely measurable effect (that effect being a dependent variable wholly dependent on the variable being tested for its causal connection to the effect) when that independent variable is isolated from the other conditions (which are held constant) in the effect’s matrix of causal conditions.
Thus the scientific perspective, the perspective of cause and effect, depends upon the ability to vary one single variable — deterministic, when so isolated — from among the complete set of variables, establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the two variables by directly varying the independent variable and observing the effect of that on the dependent variable.
Here, determinism is less a claim about the world in general than an engineered condition required if the scientific method is to work properly.
Put differently, this engineered relationship of independent and dependent variables critical to the workings of the scientific method of experimentation would necessarily be correct (if the method were to be reliable), whether or not the world outside the experiment ran solely in accordance with the causal perspective.
The world, of course, run according to that perspective in at least some domains, if the scientific method were to be at all applicable. So, we can rest assured of that.
But the assumption that it is the only perspective applicable to the world is an assumption external to the scientific method itself and not necessary for that method to produce valuable results, result that are definitive in areas where the object character of event is sufficient to understand it.
The Historical Method
One obviously opposed perspective is that of the historical method, the basis of history, credible journalism and juridical verdicts, all of which require the continuous cross-referencing of the often conflicting accounts of different witnesses.
But in all of these applications, the trail of evidence is seldom alone enough to determine all we need to know to render a judgment. We must also construct interpretive narratives, making conjectures about motives, means and opportunities. Any competent investigator constructs a plausible hypothesis– a provisional or working theory — as a way to direct their search for further evidence.
Whodunnit? and Why?and How?
The Work of the Working Hypothesis
Come to think of it, working theories (working hypotheses) are crucial in the scientific method, where they are also the organizing principle used to gather evidence. For every experiment is designed to put to the test a suspected cause, which becomes the independent variable that the design of the experiment is engineered to isolate from the other variables that might add static to the measured effect attributable to the independent variable.
In science, negative results are almost as valuable as positive ones, for they eliminate rival causes, narrowing down the suspect pool. Indeed, most positive results ae preceded by a long process of eliminating alternative hypotheses, and this is especially the case where the true hypothesis is counterintuitive or (which may be much the same thing) runs counter to a dominant paradigm of the discipline.
However, the great advantage of the scientific over the historical method is that the scientific method can always hope for a decisive experiment that ends a rivalry of hypotheses for good.
For the historical method, certainty is a mirage as often as not, and its certainty is mostly certainty ‘for all practical purposes’.
So, history must live with perpetual uncertainty, and with the perpetual threat of new evidence, revisionist theories or changing social norms, any of which can overturn old judgments.
And all this uncertainty leaves much more room for advocacy which, like power, abhors a vacuum. And advocacy, if one needs reminding, is cherry-picking the facts — when not distorting them outright — to better suit one’s preconceptions.
While this creates a bias in favor of one’s pet theory, especially if it leads to further evidence, it should remain one hypothesis among many being entertained, until its rival hypotheses are excluded beyond reasonable doubt, a criterion as indispensable as it is inexact.
But, to turn Hume on his head, one cannot derive an Is from an Ought.
so, putting historical facts to use always requires a series of judgments, which can always be challenged or overturned.
But, for just this reason, it’s not enough to dispute facts without providing a viable alternative theory — and conspiracy theories with unsourced or dubious support, the classic recourse of know-nothings, don’t count.
The Historical Method & Witness Perspectives
Thus, the historical method is beset by ineradicable inexactness and uncertainties, in any case that is not a forensic slam-dunk.
This first uncertainty follows form the required method of investigation. A second uncertainty follows from the nature and character of what is being investigated.
The historical method is by nature and definition multipolar because its task is to reconcile the differing perspectives involved in a dispute.
Further (excepting any metaphysically infallible witness), the witness accounts are all, in principle, both limited in perspective and subject to bias.
Thus, the historical method cannot begin, as does the scientific method, from the presumption of possible completion in a single perspective enjoying a universal consensus among all qualified observers.
Put in positive form, the historical method involves reconciling irreducibly multiple perspectives by continuously cross-referencing them against one another and against forensic evidence, that is, evidence provided by the scientific method, in the limited, but often decisive, areas where it can be applied.
Joining the scientific and historical perspectives, one can build an assessment of the actions comprising human events, past and current, that is less certain than a purely scientific analysis, though more useful for analyzing human events than laboratory science.
The Causal Perspective
One can produce, by combining historical methods with scientific methods, a purely causal account of human events. One does this by viewing human actions as instrumental and technical, and choice as simply a matter of choosing the most effective means to ends given by the natures and situations of the historical agents.
But such a purely causal account is devoid of moral judgments as to the worth or goodness of actions and motives, for it only assesses their instrumental effectiveness as means to ends.
A vivid illustration of what this would look like is Machiavelli’s Prince, and the perspective known as realism in the field of international relations, though the perspective is applicable to all human events.
The Moral Perspective
If you balk at accepting the realist causal explanation as the final word on a human act, hesitating to leap onto the winner’s bandwagon in full acceptance of the winning tactics, you have discovered a third perspective, the moral perspective.
You may still accept the realist explanation as the causal explanation of events, yet insist that another judgment from another perspective is still called for.
Whether it is the 10 Commandments, the Golden Rule, or some other moral standard, your hesitation in joining the victors’ celebration of their deed marks you out as a human agent with a moral conscience, a moral agent.
The moral perspective is not bottom-up and data-driven like either the scientific or historical perspectives.
It is a top-down perspective, a trait caught well in terms like commandments, rules, laws, scruples, virtue, character or Kant’s categorical imperative.
The moral perspective looks to the evidence — since all human acts have precedents, customs, habits, enabling conditions, provocations or invitations, that is, they all arise with an ongoing context of personality formation and social interactions — but that is only its secondary determinant.
The primary determinant of the moral perspective is the unifying system of laws and customs or character of virtues and habits that define the acting agent, the moral subject.
Causal explanations view agents as objects caught inescapably in causal chains and causal matrices. And this we all are. but not only this.
We are all also subjects imprinting our personal character and our social culture — our individual and our communal choices — upon an environment that is, if not simply indifferent to them (i.e., existentialism, stoicism, fatalism, nihilism), then at least resistant to them, if for no other reason than because we are not the sole agents trying to impose our own character and culture upon the world.
And that’s what the moral perspective is all about: whose character and which culture should be imprinted the world, on how much of it, and through what means?
And should the world allow multiple perspectives, multiple cultures and multiple kinds of personality?
And this is what the war in Ukraine is about, and the war in Gaza, and the threat of war in Taiwan, and the culture wars raging across that part of the world free enough to permit open dissent, not to mention our daily struggle to do right by others, and be done right by them, as we all struggle to make our way in the realist’s world of researchable facts and accessible but limited resources and the current and future distribution of property and status, of skills, capabilities and powers.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. (Sun-Tzu)
Locked by Birth into Singular Perspectives
We are all mortal beings, born into a precarious life that must be defended, if it is not to be lost.
We must continually win our survival, pitted against the long arm of natural selection, until death do us part.
We cannot help but view the world as would survival-machines, for survival is the indispensable condition of our existence.
Noteworthy exceptions: the sheltered nestlings of the affluent classes in affluent nations. But this inherited condition comes with its own risks and pitfalls and, anyway, it seldom lasts a lifetime.
So, we lean into surviving. Or we don’t survive.
So, we support loyally those that helped us survive. We take for granted the goodness of all that helped us survive and thrive — the people, partners, family, friends and allies, and the customs, traditions and institutions as well.
We all want to preserve all that preserved us, even when that came at the expense of others.
Friends and foes is the first political distinction recognized by survival-machines.
And it persists — in disguised forms — even in the thoughtful, even in those who have worked to broaden their horizons (i.e, liberals).
Postmodernists call this perspective a grand narrative, claiming, correctly, that it pervades every culture, every cultural institution and every mind.
How could we not take for granted the conditions under which we flourished, under whose shelter we received, developed or strove to achieve all that makes us what we are: our personalities, our personal histories, our social networks, our careers and achievements?
If conditions were favorable to our flourishing, we owe them a great debt; this is the basis of family feelings and blood obligations.
If conditions were unfavorable, we look for the obstacles that inhibited us and attack them with all our force. (This is the peephole from which many postmodernists take their bearing.)
Those are the extreme cases, but most origins fall into the middle range, the range of mixed blessings.
In sum, individual perspectives are inescapably shaped by our peculiar circumstances, producing perspectives at least as various as the conditions that shaped them.
What, then, can truth be? If, indeed, it is anything at all?
The Origin of Perspective
But no perspective, standing alone, is reality or truth.
Truth must either reject all perspectives by superseding them all, or comprehend them all by incorporating all of them — more precisely, all of them that can accommodate other legitimate perspectives.
This works much in the way that journalists, detectives, and researchers sift and validate eyewitness accounts, by using methodical procedures, governed by rules.
Where possible, we should use explicit methods and procedures that can be reduplicated for confirmation or falsification, as in the scientific method.
But methods and procedures are their own keyholes, for conditions must meet certain requirements before they can be applied.
A crucial example of this is the scientific method, which applies most readily to objects whose movements are accounted for entirely by causes externalized in space and time, rather than objects engineered internally — and thus, locally and individually — to process external inputs of forces or itsensory stimuli in ways whose traits are determined by locally established types: species, psychological profiles, or the massive processing of internalized data (as in human experience and the incorporation and processing of massive data sets in Large Language Models (LLMs), the current vogue in AI.
Such local centers of ordered change — identities, one might call them — can be produced by natural selection, advanced natural cognition or the simulated cognition of the emerging deeper AI.
Blinded by Perspective
Most perspectives assume that the truth supersedes all mere perspectives.
They further assume that their inherent perspective is no mere perspective but the truth entire.
And, if they even bother to consider what their “truth” looks like to every other perspective — namely, just another mere perspective different from their own truth — they find ways to discredit all other claims, exhibiting healthy doses of confirmation bias as they do so.
They do this with little or no justification. And they all, or nearly all, do it.
How can one ever escape the trap of perspective?
The Outsider Perspective
The most readily occurring way is to stumble into the outsider perspective.
This can occur in ways that are idiosyncratic, like the daimon of which Socrates speaks in the Republic ( Book VI, 496a-e) or of the socially withdrawn or aspirational types depicted in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger or James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Or it can arise from the outsider status of ethnic or other minorities, as in the pre-WWII writings of the Jewish-born Kafka or the wartime resistance activities of the White Rose network, whose members’ religious affiliations were overwhelmingly with minorities in predominantly Protestant Germany.
Yet outsider perspectives can become just as insular and blinding as mainstream ones.
Two Paths to Escape
Beyond the outsider perspective, a largely involuntary response to exclusion and discrimination, I know of two other ways to escape the limitations of perspective, orthodoxy and dogma.
First, disillusionment with ideological fervor born of successive conversions. Like the outsider perspective, this too is an accident of history. But, for disillusionment to occur, one must at least have some kind of built-in bullshit-detector that lots of people lack, as exposed by today’s social media and their unforeseen but destabilizing consequences.
Soapbox Interlude
And to think, technophiles initially foresaw a new era of spreading enlightenment enabled by easy access to all of mankind’s knowledge. They forgot to consider that lies spread faster than truths in the rumor mill, and that the viral characteristics of mass communication — partly just the age-old social accelerant called gossip, partly the techno-profit engine of algorithmssensitive to the viral potential of thoughtlessly virulent posts — magnifythe distorting effects of the age-old rumor mill, effectively putting it on steroids.
The truth of the Internet is this:
Those who use it intelligently, as humanity’s most accessible research tool, will grow and prosper,
while those who use it as an amplifier for biases and prejudices and as a platform for misinformed ignorance and spite, frothing at the mouth and flaming in the cloud — will first, damage society as a whole, and then condemn themselves to ever-increasing irrelevance.
For their refusal to adapt makes them less and less fit for the knowledge economy just now revealing its real potential.
Irrelevant, but dangerous.They are a large and powerful near-majority, able to slow down needed change, and — in their recurring short-sighted isolationism — either run the ship of state aground or make it much more brutal and costly to salvage the geopolitical mess they are on the verge of leaving to us… and to their children.
This is not the time to sit on the fence and count up short-term gains or costs.
If you have a vote, use it now, and use it wisely, with your eyes on the long-term consequences.Run-of-the-mill politicos, old fogeys, even, come and go, but it takes a divisive demagogue to ruin a republic.
And, now, off my soapbox and back to my topic.
Dialogue and Dialectic: Multiple Perspectives in Dramatic Form
The second, more general and more procedural escape from the limitations of perspective is the discovery of the multi-perspectival processes of dialogue or dialectic.
The dialogue form can be a facade, of course.True dialogue must be dialectical in both form and substance.There are no shortcuts, no royal road, to real dialectical examination of the interplay of thesis and antithesis, of hypotheses and alternatives.
It’s hard work, and the pitfalls are legion. There may be no perfectly perspective-free perspective. We are, after all, limited finite and mortal beings, not gods.
Yet dialogue and dialectic both preserve opposed perspectives as they present and examine controversies.
Each begins by acknowledging that persuasion — and any chance of the emergence of consensual truth — must address all perspectives willing to submit to open debate and rational scrutiny.
It is similar to the consensus — the agreement to disagree, but to find common ground for forward movement, nonetheless — that well-constructed republics require in order to act in unison, united behind policies to which all have consented, at least procedurally.
Policies, in a balanced and functional republic, can split the difference between distinct interests, by finding a middle position, by balancing trade-offs between disparate interests, by sharing the spoils or by uniting against the threat of a common enemy.
Dialectical thinking, by contrast, must preserve incompatible perspectives within its discourse, in something like the alternative branches that arrive at different outcomes within a flow-chart.
Dialectical thinking must retain incompatibles and unresolved issues, incorporating them within its all-encompassing flow-chart of possible lines of thought.
This will include both the defensible lines of thought and the dead ends, because knowledge crucially includes knowledge learned from prior mistakes.
It will also include junctions which alternative lines of plausible argument leave undecided.
Aristotle called such junction points aporeia (undecidables), such as the one in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he considers the different senses in which we can be said to have choice and not to have it. His point there is twofold: 1) neither opposed answer by itself fully captures the matter, and 2) whichever way we answer the question changes the ethical dilemmas of a thing not at all, so it doesn’t matter for practical purposes.
Kant’s most noteworthy preservation of incompatible perspectives are the four antinomies (literally, anti-laws, by which he means paired and offsetting proofs using reductio ad absurdum (i.e., assuming the contrary thesis and exposing it as self-contradictory).
The 3rd of Kant’s antinomies is the very same aporeia of Aristotle’s mentioned above. (The other three are: 1st) that time and space are bounded/unbounded, 2nd) that matter is/isn’t reducible to simplest parts, and 4th) that there does/does not exist an absolutely necessary being (i.e., God).
Self-Image & Social Standing
If the survival-machine in man is dangerously limited in its perspective, so is the social ape in him.
We are social animals, our survival dependent upon the success of our troop — competing with other troops and other species for scarce resources — and upon our standing within our troop.
The inner reflection of social standing is self-image.
Self-image is a double challenge, to accurately appraise our world and our standing within that world. We can be wrong on either account.
Social standing and self-image matter to all social animals –they set the pecking order, among other things, and together they determine our ability to access resources,to gain allies and to pass on our culture, history and genes to succeeding generations.
But for beings able to think abstractly, to ponder what is not currently present to the senses and to imagine altered futures, making plans to bring them about, self-image assumes an even more commanding role than social standing. Outsiders, though generally at a disadvantage, sometimes upset the apple cart, becoming the new masters of new states or industries or cultural fashions.
New allegiances and alliances build upon blood ties and trials of brute strength to realign, in great part, around shared beliefs about the nature of the world we live in, and to attempts to capture that nature in systematic observation and analysis of the world, and of how best to conduct ourselves in it.
Put differently, culture is a shared communal self-image built upon learned competencies and knowledge.
Between them, society-wide culture and personal self-image add new levels of organization — anthropological, historical, sociological and psychological — variable structures atop the invariable structures of physics and chemistry, where universal laws control identical units, both simple and complex, as well as the halfway house of biology, where local environments and distinctive species lineages matter.
“Different strokes for different folks” is my half-jesting summary of human cultures and the social sciences that probe them, where perspective is ineradicable.
Biology, the middle way, is deterministic in the mechanisms of genetics, while natural selection can never be reduced further than the opposed perspectives of predator and prey — or, more generally, of competition for scarce resources.
And resources are perpetually scarce among all organisms in need of the same resources, because biological organisms reproduce and colonize to their limits, a continuation of the self-replication that sets in motion the chain-reaction of biology.
Conclusion
I conclude then that perspective is endemic to the big picture biological aspect of natural selection, and far more so to the big and kaleidoscopic picture of competing cultures, and of individuals within cultures competing for that culture’s resources and social standing.
That being the case, my position is this: truth must incorporate all perspectives defensible in open dialogue and able to withstand critical scrutiny.
Bar this, and thought can never be more than discord (the world as seen by postmodernists and by those who disparage the core desiderata of the Enlightenment).
Bar this, and communication and conciliation can never be more than a temporary armistice in the rhetorical war of words, each successive provisional consensus simply setting the terms for the next outbreak of war.
Bar this, and action can never be more than war (or the maneuverings of future belligerents in preparation for war during unstable armistices).
Bar this, and the future of humanity holds nothing but more of the same, as reflected in history and captured in realism.
There must be common ground, however multi-faceted and multi-perspectival, if the survival-machine and social ape homo sapiens is to avoid self-extinction, one prong of the fork in mankind’s destiny foreseen by Kant in Perpetual Peace.
But he foresaw another prong as well.
Our future is a choice that we will, collectively, make or — by failing to make a deliberate choice — make by default as we slide by degrees to our doom.
We will then be like the fabled frog who, never noticing the gradual rise in temperature of the stewpot in which it sits, does nothing until it is boiled alive.
Through a glass darkly, and through a keyhole narrowly.
Voters always vote for money for themselves, preferably disguised as funding for God, King and country, or their latter-day equivalents.
When hard-pressed in the pocketbook or when they feel their social status and privileges slipping, voters want money to buck those trends.
They will denigrate other needs and other priorities — especially other people’s priorities.
They will ignore obvious risks, if those risks loom just beyond the short-term horizon.
When this mood grips a political faction with legislative power, no other priorities are safe from the axe, not even those of God, King and country.
In the Trump era, red voters are failing to recognize how crucial the support of allies is to restoring the Pax Americana.
Shifting global balances of power mean this will have to be on a broader, not narrower, footing.
Yes, America first, but first among peers, not CEO over executive staff.
And, yes, America will pay more of the bill. (If you don’t understand why, read some history, in particular research who made up the wings of every Roman army, and where the lion’s share of Roman legions were stationed).
The hinges of any effort to restore the Pax Americana in 2024 are Ukraine first and Taiwan second.
If we fail in this, the Pax Americana, founded in 1945, goes from frayed to collapsed.
And then, the return of history… good, old history, like it always was before.
Determinismcan mean no single thing in a creature as divided (multi-faceted, to show it in a more flattering light) as the human being, which has, at the least, three parts providing motivations, each in its own way and in its own direction.
Each of these directions may interfere with or amplify the directions of the other two.
1. Survival-Machine
The most deeply rooted mover is the survival-machine, driven by a set of motivations common across all life, plants as well as animals.
Animals differ from plants because in animals data is not simply collected or registered to trigger mechanical, chemical and other strictly deterministic chains of cause and effect.
Animals add a middleman, the neurological system.
Animal senses — in a wild variety of kinds, ranges and sensitivities — collect inputs (as do plants) but process them as inputs to a nervous system, that is, as sensory inputs. Sensory inputs are always incomplete because they are but samples of the surrounding environment filtered through a single nervous system, and limited by the sensory parameters of its species, and of any defects or surpluses in that individual.
The nervous system works like a clearinghouse or a switchboard, matching certain combinations of sensory inputs with certain combinations of motor outputs.
Plants respond to chemical messages within their network of tissues — and, we are now discovering, within underground mycorrhizal networks in which fungal filaments connect the roots of communities of plants, passing chemical messages between plants so networked.
An animal’s sensory system differs from a plants system of electro-mechanical signals, for the sensory inputs are treated as data in some virtual workspace, and assembled into an image or model of the outside world to which the animal reacts. The animal reacts, not to an objective reality directly, but to its image as assembled in the animal’s nervous system, whether correctly or incorrectly.
For example, the human immune system reacts directly and in causally deterministic fashion to pathogens tagged as invasive. But the human, unable to perceive the microbes, reats to them only through an acquired knowledge of symptoms, leading to a diagnosis, always in principle fallible, for it is but a model assembled in the mind through experience, education or reasoning.
Here enters error, a form of divergence from reality that can only occur in a nervous system, and only in reference to an internal model of external reality that misses the mark widely enough to be a strategic liability if acted upon.
In short, animals react to their environments through the medium of a sensory image or internal representation of the external world. And the testing and refining of those models becomes part of the tactics of survival.
Thus nature selects for camouflage in prey and in ambush predators. Camouflage is not not just the camouflage of form and color but also of behavior, both instinctive and learned. Thus the low to the ground creep of a stalking cat is a camouflage of behavior.
The relevant conclusion for our purposes is that plants are survival-machines that operate through strictly mechanical causal triggers, animals operate the same way in what we call their autonomous functions (breathing, digesting, discharging waste, immune system responses, and so on) but also with voluntary motion, by which we mean motion initiated by a combination of four elements.
First, an image assembled from sensory data forms, representing approaching threats and accessible opportunities.
Second, perceived threats provoke fear and flight, while perceived opportunities provoke desire and pursuit.
Third, a counterfactual image is formed of a future state enjoying desired outcomes or suffering painful ones.
Fourth, the animal follows a course of pursuit or avoidance, which may be driven by a reflex (at the less voluntary end) or an imaginable response or a multi-stage plan (at the more voluntary end).
Fear and desire (respectively, of pain and pleasure) are the instinctive, pre-rational motives to animate action.
The greater the foresight and rationality of the animal, the more reasoning about long-term consequences can override instinctive feelings of fear and desire.
In sum, animals differ from plants in their capacity to assess sensory inputs through images and feelings constructed from sensory data in a virtual space provided within the nervous system in which fallible models of the external world are constructed internally to guide the animal’s reactions to events affecting it.
So, the most primitive level of voluntary determination in a human being is that of the sensory or image-activated survival-machine, which I will hereafter shorten to survival-machine.
Survival-machines are guided by the survival of the individual animal, without other considerations.
The iconic survival-machine is the praying mantis. It begins life folded in half , covered in a sticky gelatinous substance, one among several hundred falling to the ground beneath the egg-case from which they all hatch simultaneously. After flopping around as they slowly unfold themselves, the fastest among them stand erect and immediately begin killing and eating their nearest siblings. Looking ahead, it’s hard to see how ethical behavior could ever arise among such creatures, although John Scalzi, in the later books of The Old Men’s Wars, a 6-part series, gives it a go, in a narrative that is both entertaining and thought-provoking.
Survival-machines are driven, in their first stage, by fear and desire, up to and including obsessive forms of each.
In the second stage, they are driven by the ruthless calculations of survival famously expressed by Niccolo Machiavelli in the West and by Sun Tzu in the East.
And, since survival is a long game — not a constant barrage of life-and-death crises — the survival-machine in daily life is an advantage-seeking-machine, with self-interest its guiding light.
The more advanced the culture, the more self-interest is softened by the social veneers of polite society.
But it still erupts in its more naked forms in politics, especially in times of change and stress, like the ties we live in. We live in such times.
But human beings have two more levels of organization, built atop that first and most primitive level.
2. Social Animal, Social Ape
The second level of organization (or aspect of human behavior) is the social animal, specifically, the social ape.
Social apes are effective survival-machines — at their best, not in isolation, but as members in good standing of a troop.
The power of the troop is decisive, so troops must consist of sufficiently effective members and in sufficient numbers to fend off predators and compete with rival troops — for troops of social apes, having all the same needs, are in direct competition with one another — and they must be led by sufficiently effective leaders.
The social ape is thus driven by its status within its troop, a sort of group-determined self-image, that determines its membership, qualifying it for the basic benefits of membership. The more assertive members, typically alpha males, are driven to seek leadership rank, which determines access to special benefits and privileges within the troop.
These drives manifest as peer pressure, conformism, solidarity , and the like, but also as nobleness and belongingness — and even redemption of sins — as Shakespeare’s Henry V has it :
The social ape surges with passions, noble and ignoble, lofty and base.
It is a precarious platform upon which to set one’s moral compass, a platform open to your stoutest friends and your most unyielding enemies; it is the dynamic of conflicts and wars.
The ancient Greeks embraced it, and their constant internecine wars made them easy prey for the Romans, who were inclined to admire them more than conquer them. But the fratricidal and quarrelsome Greeks left the Romans little choice, for their quarrels would have undone the Empire.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,…
3. Rational Being
The last and highest level, but also the least compelling and importunate, is the rational being.
In survival-machine terms, rationality can be thought of as a tool for survival, culminating in Machiavelli’s new prince or Sun Tzu’s general with the way of Tao.
It can also be thought of as partly extending and surpassing the survival-machine, rising to a more long-term, even universal mindset. Put differently, rational beings can look beyond mere survival to pursue instead an idealized survival of the best aspect of human beings, even when that may require individual sacrifice in hope of a better future. In more familiar language, rational beings can choose the risks of heroism or the price of martyrdom, not an ordinary choice for a survival-machine.
Make no mistake, the willingness to self-sacrifice is not unique to rational beings.
It belongs as much — and, by the numbers, likely more) to the battlefield bonding of the bands of brothers discussed above.
The downside of this wider reach of striving for “something bigger than” one’s mortal self is that this kind of courage is just as potent when serving genocidal, racist and bloodily sectarian causes as when serving praiseworthy ones.
Armed with an ideology that screams for authority and justifies any action that spreads its power, many will set no limits to what they will do.
And a classic tactic of tyrants is to make the populace, and its leading figures, partners in their crimes, for then the people’s destiny is tied to their master’s, for should the victims of their crimes ever gain the upper hand, reprisals will come.
So, the wrath visited upon a defeated enemy becomes the chains linking blind followers to their masters for life.
The Rational Being Not a Species, nor a Tribe of Blood and Soil, But an Aspiration Open to All Who Can Will It
The rational being is also not a species but an abstract category defined by a general capacity. If species, as products of natural selection, are locked in competition for resources and survival, then rational beings, defined not by blood but by a shared capacity, are able to be guided by the defining characteristics of that general capacity, rather than by blood and lineage.
In other words, shared capacities inherently offer a common ground, although many motives, biological and social, may work against this impulse toward the universality inherent in the mutually recognizable recognizable likeness to one another of rational beings, of beings willing to “listen to reason”.
Free Will: the Multifaceted Nature of Being Human
Each of these three levels “determines” outcomes in foreseeable ways (thus, rivals, followers and enemies can all think strategically about which of these levels will best explain an agent’s likely actions (and thus how best to anticipate their actions or react to them), but none of them is, by itself, simply predictive.
In other words, free will, like strategy, maps out scenarios, not certainties.
And that is the scope and measure of free will in beings capable of rational action.
It does not mean that they are absolutely unconditioned.
To be unconditioned in that sense would be to be a god, not a human being. Their every act would be a miracle, an act independent of the laws of nature that govern all physical objects.
Free will can not and does not mean that.
Any act of a human being can be free, not in the sense that it follows from no prior circumstances (of birth, upbringing, culture, personal influences or personal experiences) but only in the sense that it is not mechanically predetermined but instead determined by its nature and circumstances as either a survival-machine, a social ape or a rational being.
For an agent to be free of all determining preconditions, including education, beliefs and personal experience, would to be a rudderless amnesiac without commitments, loyalties or responsibilities.
Far from being a model to aspire to, anyone in that condition would be shunted into an institution as a danger to themselves and others.
In conclusion, then, free will, when examined in abstraction from the context within which it arises and derives whatever meaning it has, can only be a nonsense concept, an empty word devoid of meaning, a term of magical thinking.
What it can be, considered within that context, has just been outlined.
[Note: This title presents this escape in methodological terms.It can also be presented as a shift from theory to practice or as a shift from universal laws acting on identical units to information-guided choice within unique local configurations (i.e., strategic scenarios).]
A new wrinkle!
With biology, information is transformed from being structurally implicit (a simple readout of the interplay of universal laws with initial local configurations) to being encoded and transmitted through local lineages that begin to develop characteristics partly determined by the local determinations of species-specific DNA, and not simply by universal physical and chemical laws.
Biology creates local conditions that uniquely determine local configurations, namely those determined by the DNA of distinguishable local species and the habitats with which they interact.
Now, information of merely local significance matters: habitable planets, environmental habitats, lineages — and, where lineages face bottlenecks, even individuals can matter.
Biology oozes out of the zone of determinism by purely universal laws acting on identical units of matter or energy into a gray zone where unique local configurations partly determine outcomes.
But that’s not all, folks!
The next stage in the development of information is the emergence of biological species that survive within their habitats by decoding information.
In animals, motor capabilities allow the organism to react to decoded information about its environs (sensory stimuli) in real-time and (for practical purposes) with an immediacy beyond the reactions of plants (even Venus fly-traps are just vegetative mousetraps, not sentient hunt-enabled predators).
Initially, this animate hunting and fleeing behavior is only the decoding of transient information regarding obstacles, dangers and resources, predators and prey. But, more advanced neurological systems, respond not only to sensory stimuli, but also to stimuli not currently present but remembered, imagined or foreseen.
And with human-level cognitive powers, organisms construct mental generalizations about classes of objects, and arts and crafts for dealing with them. Later, such beings can develop the methods and powers to decode both implicit physical information and encoded biological information, amplifying their powers by first creating scientific knowledge and then engineering its technological applications.
The View from the Top Down
I will now depart from bottom-up analysis to give a top-down view of the matter, to give the reader some idea of where all this is headed
Two caveats:
1) I’m not trying to pull a fast one here, but you’ll be the judge of that.
2) In critical thinking, the exploratory journey matters more than the destination, which too often becomes ossified into dogmatism.
In reality, all you have is the journey, the successes and mistakes made along the way, and what you’ve learned from them. So, take from this exploration what works by the light of your highest standards of critical thinking. Treat the rest as leftovers, to be reheated, doctored or dumped, as you see fit.
I will begin by defining two polar extremes of definition in the free will vs. determinism controversy. My own position is best categorized as compatibilism, the halfway house between the two extremes, influenced by such bright lights as Aristotle, Kant, and Daniel Dennett (the last of whom still breathes as of this writing; I cavort with a somewhat larger society than that of dead white men). In particular, see Dennett’s Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting.
AristotleKantDennettHey!We got a live one here!
Free will (arguably better designated by the Aristotelian proairesis, in English, choice) must be understood in reference to determinism, more precisely, the absolute determination of effects by their causes in the classic sense of physical causation. This conception evolved from the sense of efficientcause— one of four causes in Aristotle’s schema for analyzing changes, both mechanical and mental, physical and historical — to the mechanical causality envisioned by early modern empirical science. That conception relied heavily on the analogy of clockwork (a cutting-edge artifact and mechanism of the time, geared to produce precise and predictable results, namely, an accurate model of the passage of time).
In either conception, the common element was that causation in the sense of an immediate trigger of physical motion was devoid of any indirect causation, especially that of purpose or intention.
(As modern empirical science first emerged in largely Christian lands, indirect intentional and purposeful causation was allowed, but only to God or his agents, and only by suspending the laws of causation that would otherwise apply, in the performance of a miracle.)
The world we know at the levels of physics and chemistry, the two most basic levels, is effectively described by modern empirical science.
In part, this is because the characteristics of physics and chemistry seem reducible to measurable units of space and time.
In part, this is because the scientific method — the method whose practice generates modern empirical science — was explicitly and intentionally designed to register as cause and effect only what could be observed and measured.
Consistent and recurring measurements, when observed, can be expressed as mathematical expressions (e.g., ratios, formulas, constants) which, in the more complex case of formulas, correlate variable inputs to outputs determined by them.
So, hypotheses expressible as formulas can be tested and verified or refuted by measurements which do not vary from one observer to another. This allows confirmation between observers, and thus reduplication of observed results becomes the standard of proof.
This is all possible because the scientific method assumes, in order to operate, that observations are themselves determined by universal laws that apply similarly to all similar cases; this outcome is guaranteed by the method’s requirement that all credible results must be reduplicable by independent observers in independent labs.
And the similarity — strictly speaking the identity — among observed cases is underpinned by the assumption that all complex things observed can be reduced to ultimate units that are identical (except for their location on the grid of space and time) and not further reducible.
Caveat: Kant argues (Critique of Pure Reason, “The Antimony of Pure Reason, Kemp ed., pp. 384-484) that science can proceed empirically while leaving unresolved the question of whether matter reduces to ultimate indivisibles or not (the 2nd antinomy), along with 3 other unresolved questions: whether space and time have limits (the 1st antinomy), whether conditioned causality is without limits or free will exists (the 3rd antinomy), and whether the world is without limits or whether God, its Creator, exists (the 4th antinomy). Having broached this perspective, I’m not entirely sure where it leaves the thrust of this whole essay, which argues that free will has a meaningful use in a conditioned world. Let’s just say that multiple perspectives can be brought to bear on the matter, and leave it at that!
Physics and chemistry are almost totally explicable within the methodological limitations of the scientific method, as above described, which amount to the parameters within which the scientific method is operationally competent and effective.
Put differently, physics and chemistry are the foremost disciplines for which the paradigm of empirical science — defined, powered and limited by the scientific method — is both necessary and sufficient.
Put yet another way, those two disciplines need nothing beyond the scientific method to complete their observational and predictive mission, and thus to serve their practical mission — producing applied science and technology — the primary reasons that the practice of science is permitted and often subsidized by governments (power) and societies (money).
However, never forget that regimes (and demographic subcultures) that feel threatened by science have little compunction about controlling, directing, adulterating, ignoring, and even outlawing and punishing ,the practice of science itself or of those parts felt as threatening.
Physics and chemistry are fully explicable by the scientific method — geared, as it is, toward expounding universal laws producing the same results wherever they can be observed and tested — because they study the causes and effects that work upon aggregates of simpler units that can, in principle, be analyzed and reduced to identical units subject to universal laws. Physics studies and expounds the universal laws that control the observable behavior of particles/waves/probability-distributions and force-fields in the aggregate. The laws predicting outcomes of controlled experiments are universal laws because they apply to every simple unit, subject to identical forces and conditions, over the entire field of units being observed.
Chemistry is similar, except that it deals with larger compounds (atoms and the molecular compounds of atoms) even though these compounds all follow, in some sense predictably, from analysis of the simples (protons, electrons, neutrons, and the ever-growing zoo of lower-level sub-atomic particles) of which they are composed.
Chemistry is thus merely a higher level of organization of the objects observed in physics, adding nothing unprecedented, just organized in more highly structured configurations, and following the limits inherent in those configurations (e.g., the number of electrons that can tolerate one another within a given orbital shell).
Whether the epiphenomenal characteristics of atoms qualify as emergent properties – not fully understandable except in terms unique to their level of organization — is a matter of fine semantic disputation that need not concern us here.
Locally Significant Contexts
If this one shoots first, then that one goes down, but if…
Biology, however, represents a true break in this bottom-up explanatory chain, not because it escapes causal determination but because it, by its very existence, creates locally significant contexts, captured in and carried forward by self-replicating structures like genes and DNA.
For the first time, it matters where, and with what species, and under what conditions of habitability calibrated to those species, the observed events are occurring. Local differences are decisive, and very few universal laws apply in determining the rise and fall of species and of the individuals that comprise them.
Now the process by which all biological development occurs — its ultimate causation — is the thoroughly deterministic process of natural selection.
Crucially, however, the replication part of that process is imperfect, producing the DNA-transcription errors known as mutations, without which evolution would not produce the permutations that allow it to explore every possibility within the matrix of possible combinations that define the open pathways for evolutionary experimentation or exploration.
Whether these transcription errors are themselves predictably deterministic or not, is another semantic complexity we need not here concern ourselves with.
All that matters here is that such errors, when they by chance produce traits that survive natural selection, create viable new species with survival-enhancing new characteristics, and that these new traits, much like advances in military equipment or doctrine, determine the strategic outcome of the ongoing competition (both strategic and evolutionary) between biological species for available resources, and thus, for survival.
The introduction of a strategic element changes everything irrevocably, for now the accurate accumulation and processing of data is the biological weapon of mass destruction, and thus the key to survival and dominance.
Thus, homo sapiens made short work of megafauna, which survive today only in the ocean depths.
This strategic element may be more crucial for predators than for prey and for social than for solitary animals. Social omnivores may be the optimal showcase for natural selection for strategic capacities.
For the first time in the history of the planet, information and analysis, foresight and strategy, become the crucial factors in natural selection. More precisely, the history of the competition between human cultures displaces the biological chronology of competition between species as the fastest driver of biological changes on the planet.
When All Is Said and Dunn 