We recently finished watching Bodies on Netflix and it’s premises have continued to creep into my mind when I least expect that to happen. The story is a mashup of detective genre , mystery and science fiction that posits several theories about the nature of being human. The main question lies in two arguments. One is that our history is a repetitive loop in which we are only players with predetermined roles. The other is that we have the free will to determine and change our destinies. We are not just puppets doomed to mistakes not of our own making.
It’s a thrilling and thought provoking series that suggests the kind of search for answers that have fascinated humans for thousands of years. Only recently a Stanford professor claims to have proven that free will is a myth. His hubris fascinates me only to the extent that thinkers have tinkered with such ideas for a very long time and yet the discussion of what drives us seems to continue.
I for one vote with team “free will” not just because of my religious upbringing, but because it makes sense to me that the very essence of the difference between humans and animals is that we have the ability to think about our thinking. If we were only bit players in an historical play in which our parts were carefully scripted it would not account for heroes who courageously opt to toss the playbook aside in a quest for justice. We humans actively seek to be virtuous even as we often fail in our efforts. I do not believe that these failures result from some vast eternal plan over which we have no control. Instead I am certain that every single day in every way we have opportunities to decide our own fates.
While our situations and our opportunities may vastly differ, we always have moments in which we choose how we will think and act regardless of how difficult doing so becomes. I understand that enslaved people had little recourse but to follow the commands of their masters, but inside their hearts and souls the same dreams and desires that anyone has were very much alive. If our destinies were indeed pre-programed we would be dullards without thought. Since I have never met anyone who did not consciously think about things, I tend to believe that our skill in that regard is the driver of our free will. We may not make the best choices and we may even be limited in those choices by cruel circumstances, but we have a higher calling than being simple minded and obedient.
The question then becomes why and how some people use their free will to be virtuous and some choose evil. Those are conundrums that I don’t think we yet fully understand even as we study such things in attempts to unlock the keys to human behavior. We are certainly influenced by the sum total of our experiences and the people we encounter, but we all know of those who react differently to the same situation. John McCain might have used the influence of his father to be freed from captivity faster than those who shared his fate. Instead he chose to wait his turn even though he was being tortured. Not everyone would have done so. In fact we see people all the time taking advantage of others because of their wealth, status or power.
Why do some of us become profiles in courage while others bow to temptations? These are questions that we humans often contemplate. I suppose that everyone wants to be good but our human frailties often get in our way. Sometimes we even have difficulty deciding what is actually good and what is evil. The complexities of life are daunting and they create doubts that sometimes freeze us into a state of inaction.
Even with the gift of retrospect we realize that it is not always clear what might have changed the course of history for the better. Would things have turned out peacefully if the German citizens had never voted for Hitler and his henchmen or were the nation’s problems so deep that another bad actor would have evolved anyway? We can never really know how one change will affect the whole. The “what ifs?” of life do not always lead to better outcomes.
I often wish that my father had not chosen to go driving down an unfinished highway in the middle of the night. The fact is that my thoughts are moot because it is exactly what he did. I might have been a very different person had he decided to stay home. My own way of interacting with the world would have changed. The people that I encountered would have been different. All of the influences that molded me would no longer have been there. It is fruitless to even attempt to contemplate a different theme to my story.
As I have recounted I nonetheless find thinking about our thinking to be an exciting endeavor. I doubt that anyone will ever find a universally accepted way of explaining why and how we humans operate in the moral sphere. Still I hold fast to the theory that each of us has the free will to decide how we wish to behave. Therein lies both the glory and the shame of humankind.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 