The Clockwork Scorpion

Oliver Burkeman recently asked "Is free will an illusion?" in a Guardian long read. I've framed it that way round (i.e. ambiguously) because what I'm interested in is the freedom he was exercising in writing the piece. His subject is philosophical determinism, the idea that everything that happens is determined by a prior cause, which leads him to employ the clockwork metaphor of Newtonian physics in the article's full title. But that means winding the clock back and marginalising more modern developments, most obviously quantum mechanics. That famously introduces a probabilistic dimension to the universe by which the possibility of free will might be maintained (at least in the view of some physicists and philosophers). Though it underpins our current understanding of reality, it earns only a brief mention in the online version of the article and was wholly missing from the print version (to the confusion of some readers). Perhaps just as oddly, Burkeman doesn't bother to marshall other established philosophical arguments that support the notion that free will is illusory, preferring to rely solely on determinism. 

For example, the simulation hypothesis provides an elegant explanation as to why the universe may be largely deterministic but it also explains why the belief in free will exists. Essentially our choices are simply the product of a random variable, much as the behaviour of an individual "sim" is in a video game. In other words, we rationalise chance as choice (it's worth contrasting this to the idea that we can release ourselves from the burden of free will by relying on chance, as in Luke Rhinehart's counterculture classic, The Dice Man). This probabilistic wrinkle is also the element of quantum mechanics that gets round the obvious problem of determinism, namely that there must be a first mover at the beginning of the chain of causation. While this doesn't necessitate a supreme deity, the argument that the universe randomly popped into existence but then inexorably followed a rigid process in which nothing was truly random is obviously unsatisfactory.

Another, older example is the principle of parsimony (aka Occam's Razor) - i.e. do we actually need free will to explain the operation of the universe? Though he describes determinism as "a longstanding position in an ancient debate", Burkeman is curiously reluctant to excavate this lineage, at least prior to the Enlightenment, preferring to present determinism as an awful truth that has only recently come to public prominence. On Twitter, he has pleaded journalistic necessity for some of these omissions, which if nothing else highlights the limitations of the newspaper "long read". Perhaps the biggest omission is any reference to religion and its grappling with the problem of human agency, from the pre-Christian notions of nemesis and doom - i.e. the idea that we are fated to carry out certain actions - to the free will paradox of Christian theology: that if God is omniscient, then we are compelled to act as he knew we would. There is no mention of predestination or antinomianism and what these imply about our freedom to choose, nor of their persistence in the history of thought. 

This ignoring of religion is all the more strange because Burkeman's essay opens with an anecdote about the philosopher Galen Strawson receiving hate mail for having advanced a deterministic position. Apparently this view constitutes an "existential catastrophe" for many people. But a handful of green-ink missives is hardly representative and once you acknowledge that determinism in various forms is central to most religious traditions then you struggle to present it as surprising let alone shocking. A hint of what is going on here is provided by another philosopher, Saul Smilansky: "On the deepest level, if people really understood what's going on – and I don’t think I’ve fully internalised the implications myself, even after all these years – it’s just too frightening and difficult. ... For anyone who's morally and emotionally deep, it's really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here". In other words, most people are blissfully ignorant - and should be left that way - while a moral elite must grapple with the burden of knowledge.

This is an example of the rational occult: the idea that there are hard truths that must remain hidden from the mass if we are to maintain social order. The corollary is Plato's "noble lie": the public myth that provides social cohesion. Ironically, this is much the same as the utilitarian arguments made for religion, such as the famous parable of the return of Jesus in Dostoevsky's poem The Grand Inquisitor that appears in the novel The Brothers Karamazov. It should come as no surprise that such a patronising attitude should appear in the pages of the Guardian, but why now and why is the topic so unmoored from its historical context? As ever with newspaper attempts to grapple with fundamental principles, there is more ideology at work here than actual philosophy. I am going to argue that the contemporary prominence of free will scepticism is an epiphenomenon of the broader reaction to political populism. I think the timing reflects a belief that the tide has been turned with the "return to normal" under Joe Biden in the US, while the lack of historical context reflects a determination to obscure the anti-democratic impulse of that scepticism.

In the Republic, Plato distinguishes between the people and the philosopher at two levels. In the allegory of the cave, the people are chained prisoners who imagine reality as the shadows cast on a wall by the light of a fire. The philosopher is a released prsioner who exits the cave to discover the true reality of the world outside. So challenging is this truth that when he returns to the cave to enlighten the other prisoners, he is rejected. The parallel here with Strawson and Smalinsky in Burkeman's telling is obvious. This is the level concerned with the perception of reality. The other level is concerned with political practice and centres on the allegory of the ship of fools. Here, the philosopher is the skilled pilot of the ship of state, the quarelling crew are demagogues, and the people are the ignorant ship owner who must rely on the philosopher's wisdom if the ship is not to come to grief. Together with the simile of the people as a beast whose appetites are satisfied by the unscrupulous, this metaphor is central to Plato's argument against democracy. 

While we pay lip-service to popular democracy now, the assumptions that underpin its form and practice (e.g. parliamentary representation and hierarchical parties) are still those of Plato: that only the skilled elite should manage the affairs of the state, that some aspects of reality should be kept confidential to that elite, and that qualification for the elite is a matter of virtue. The latter does not mean some innate personal quality but a learned behaviour - in the same way that philosophy was a practice for the Greeks that required rigorous training. In this worldview, any form of populism is essentially illegitimate, hence the willingness to bracket such otherwise incompatible outsiders as Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. Where this elitist view intersects with free will scepticism is in the idea that the mass of the people are incapable of exercising true free will because they are in a state of ignorance and incapable of judging the good from the bad. In other words, what is being denied is the universality of free will. The value of determinism is that it provides a blanket excuse for being sceptical about the ability of the mass of people to exercise choice without recourse to the more overt class discrimination of Plato.

Having established that determinism is a credible proposition, Burkeman proceeds to the ethical implications, specifically "that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces". But this is just a rhetorical device to make us step back from the vertiginous brink and seek a middle way. The synthesis that Burkeman offers is the idea that free will and a deterministic universe are compatible, so long as we modify our understanding of the former. In the compatibilist view our choices are constrained by prior cause but we are free to a degree, and it is relative freedom that matters. We can all distinguish between making a choice and having a choice forced upon us, and it is in the space between the two that we can locate free will, even if we also accept that our choice is the product of many prior causes. Ultimately Burkeman remains sceptical about free will scepticism ("it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life") but he sees its benefit as "an antidote to that bleak individualist philosophy which holds that a person’s accomplishments truly belong to them alone". 

So what is the point of this essay? If I'm right, the unspoken subtext is the collective "errors" of the people, rather than anything to do with personal responsibility, and particularly the election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit in 2016. Where determinism plays a part in this is the idea that the demos might have been subject to forces beyond its control for which it can't be held responsible, such as foreign interference, irresponsible newspapers and TV channels, and toxic social media. You can see why the Guardian might choose to run such a piece, touching as it does (albeit in a more sophisticated way than usual) on such hobby horses as democracy's failings, the conspiracy against rational liberalism, and the malign ignorance of the mob. As for the timing, this appears to reflect not just the victors' magnanimity consequent on Biden's election, but also an attempt to let bygones be bygones over Brexit and, in the words of Keir Starmer, "move on". Oliver Burkeman was fated to write this article and the Guardian, like the scorpion that drowned both itself and the frog, could do no other than publish it.