Last week, I wrote that arguments against free will are absurd. I wrote that free will is the human condition.
I don’t take it back. Everything I wrote is true. But there is another side to the story. There is evolutionary programming. There is biological determinism. There may be a collective destiny.
Arguments from physics that deny free will are mistaken — I’ll stand by that. But the line between what we decide for ourselves, what we decide collectively, and what beliefs we acquire through propaganda are not so clear.
Biological compulsions
Every morning, I do yogic breathing (kapalbhati) for several minutes, then hold my breath for two minutes. Usually, I make it to two minutes, but not always. I could decide to hold my breath for three minutes, and I would succeed on a few mornings but not others, with much more discomfort. I could decide to hold my breath four minutes, and that would be a training program, with many failures before I succeed. I could decide to hold my breath for five minutes, and no matter what I do I won’t succeed.
Today is Friday, and I haven’t eaten since Monday dinner. To what extent has fasting been an act of will? I’ve been fasting since 1997, and I learned early that fighting with myself is not just unnecessary anxiety — I couldn’t do it. So for all these years, I’ve been coaxing myself gently to fast when it feels right. My schedule for 24 years was one full day a week plus occasional longer fasts of 3 or 4 days. So after reading this article last month, I began suggesting to myself that this summer was a good time to do three 5-day courses of Fasting-Mimicking Diet. I woke up Tuesday morning, realized I wasn’t hungry, and thought it was a good day to fast on water (not FMD). I let go of productivity, and spent the whole morning walking in my local wooded park.
By the end of the day, I was thinking that a multi-day fast was possible. I thought I would eat before teaching yoga on Thursday, just to make sure that my head was clear enough to speak fluently to the class. But when Thursday came, the power of words had not yet left me, so I extended the fast and resolved to eat Friday noon. I noticed Friday morning (as I interacted with our nation’s most intransigent bureaucracy) that I was irritable and behaving erratically. Time to eat…
I was 23 years old, and I had never been able to sustain a relationship with a woman. Once again, I was spurned in love, and rambling on about my misfortune in my diary, I had an epiphany — could it be that women I was attracted to are rejecting me because I’m attracted to unavailable women? I thought about my mother. I thought about my many failures in love. I resolved to fall in love henceforth only with women who were attracted to me. You might think that deciding whether or not to fall in love might lead to misgivings and relationship woes, but this resolution (while not perfect) actually served me well. Within a few weeks of my epiphany, I was beginning my first real love relationship. Marsha and I grew together, and we were lovers for five years. When she broke up with me, I was devastated. But we resolved to preserve a friendship, and we were still communicating fondly until Marsha died in 2021.
I have come to think that love is rooted in pheromones. After my 2002 divorce, the woman I most wanted to fall in love with was a scholar, a musician, and well-informed. She never failed to interest me in conversation, and she had a 10-yar-old daughter who made me feel like a daddy again. The only reason I couldn’t get close to her was olfactory incompatibility. We gave up. With my present girlfriend, I have been together and apart for almost 16 years. We have enjoyed an unprecedented sweetness since our most recent reunion this last February, a reunion engineered by the gods of synchronicity when my flight from O’Hare to Philadelphia was canceled, and a seat opened up on a flight to DC. We are beginning to talk openly about having surrendered to breath and saliva and the magnetism in our bodies.
Socialization
I carry the values of my parents, of my Jewish heritage, of the suburban, middle class culture in which I was raised. By the age of 11, I was already a flaming atheist. It felt to me like rebellion, but I later realized that I was inferring my parents’ true beliefs from a layer deeper than what they professed explicitly.
In a freshman college survey course, I learned to give a name to my philosophical take on morality; I found out that I was a utilitarian in the tradition of John Stuart Mill. I believed in kindness and pro-social behavior in the context of isolated individuals, whose welfare was linked by a social contract. There is no such thing as “good for the community”, apart from the aggregation of what is good for each individual member.
Only much later did I suspect that utilitarianism, like atheism, was a belief system that I had derived unconsciously by distilling the ethical and value judgments in everything that I read and learned in school. Only after I realized that utilitarianism was “not my own” was I able to think about community as an organism with its own health, its own desires and needs.
By the age of 23, I committed to a path freeing myself from unconscious cultural prejudices. I began by auditing a Chinese language course each morning at 8:00 before my physics classes. Two years later, I spent a semester in Taibei (the PRC was not yet open to cultural exchanges). I lived with a Chinese family and had private lessons in spoken Chinese two hours each day. I was not in Taiwan a week before I discovered a paradoxical truth: The very idea of freeing myself from cultural prejudices was very American, probably born of the melting pot. Chinese people generally identified with their proud heritage, and I knew no one who aspired to “rise above” his tradition.
Self-organized social values can grow organically; they can be essential for community coherence and promotion of social goods. But social values can also be manipulated. Older than history is the trick that leaders play, fomenting fear of a competing tribe or race or nation in order to rally the population toward war.
This trick became exponentially less transparent and more powerful with the researches of (Sigmund Freud’s double nephew) Edward Bernays in the early part of the 20th Century. In his classic book, Propaganda, Bernays takes a position derived from the venerable authority of Plato: It is the duty of the philosopher-king to promote the beliefs and values that will hold his nation together in good times and especially in crisis. But in practice, Bernays’s first success with the rebranded science of “public relations” was to sell cigarettes to suffragettes, the feminists of their day. The techniques which Bernays pioneered became the basis of Madison Avenue’s hundred year winning streak. Even more dangerously, Hitler’s success was built on mass psychology. The science of propaganda has been applied by our CIA, by Operation Mockingbird and MK-Ultra. Wikipedia has become a mouthpiece for the Deep State. The New York Times is in a class by itself, having perfected the science of manipulating people through their smug identification with the intellectual elite, while avoiding (for the most part) statements that are provably false.
In the 21st century, scientific campaigns to distort public perceptions with fear have been devastatingly effective. The “war on terror” was made up from whole cloth after 9/11 and other “terrorist attacks” were engineered by the Bush Administration. The COVID deception was another large step in the audacity of the Big Lie. Good people followed what they were told was “the science”; but in truth, there was no science behind social distancing or face masks or shut-down of cultural and educational and religious institutions, or the suppression of repurposed drugs or the mRNA genetic interventions marketed as “vaccines”. The next pandemic may be scheduled soon.
The Orwellian campaign against “online misinformation” is part of the cover that the Big Lie needs in order to keep The Lion at bay. I wrote about this in March. It’s chilling to realize how many people have bought into the idea that they are in danger of wrong-think if the gummint “experts” don’t protect them from ideas that are just too seductive for their limited brains. You see how far propaganda has taken us when you realize how many people are willing to abandon the First Amendment in order to protect American Freedom.
Dr Robert Epstein at the Tech Watch Project has documented the bias intentionally inserted in Google searches and even search suggestions. Biases are pro-war, anti-Trump, pro-vaccine, and dismissive of the truth about the Kennedy assassinations and the 9/11 attacks. His surveys and experiments also document (1) that Google bias has the power to shift public opinion and change election outcomes, and (2) that most people are unaware that they are being psychologically manipulated.
Destiny
I’ve gradually come to a belief system that melds science with mysticism. I call myself a Daoist. There have been events in my life that look like random coincidences that turned out to be turning points. From a Western, reductionist-material perspective, I would say that the world is a chaotic system, and small details can occasionally have global effects. But Carl Jung would call these “synchronicities”. They feel like destiny, especially in retrospect. Daoist scriptures would say that when we accept these signs, when we hone our intuitions and align ourselves with the direction the world is flowing, then we experience harmony and we are powerful. The power, of course, is not my individual will, but the fact that I am intuitively aligned with a cosmic purpose.
In 1972, I was looking for a summer job just when Camp Timberlake lost its waterfront director at the last minute. The camp culture included an incongruous mix of organic farming, nude soccer games, and morning Quaker meetings, 7 days a week. I used to sit on the grass with my legs crossed during Quaker meeting, and campers would ask me, “Is that yoga?” I had no acquaintance with yoga at the time, but the idea lodged in my head. In September, I returned to classes at Berkeley which, in 1972, was one of a handful of places where you could find a yoga class. I enrolled out of curiosity, but quickly yoga grew on me and changed me deeply. I still have a daily practice, and there are a thousand or more of my neighbors who have learned yoga from me over the 40 years I’ve lived in this section of Philadelphia.
In 1985, my wife and I were not getting pregnant. She recognized this reality before I was ready to give up on fertility, and she came home with a brochure from the Pearl Buck Foundation, which connects adoptive parents with babies from Korea. I wanted to slow her down, throw an obstacle in her path, so I said, “I don’t have any connection to Korea. But I have lots of Chinese friends and I speak Chinese. Let’s adopt from China instead.” Neither of us knew that this had never been done before. But, through a series of synchronicities, this turned out to be a fateful decision. No American had adopted from China since the 1949 revolution. But my wife, a civil rights attorney, had a client whom she had treated with respect and empathy, which was her wont, and for whom she had obtained a very satisfying legal result. She happened to have associates in Shanghai, party members who owed her a favor. The result for my wife and me were two daughters who are close family members to this day as full adults. Like other adoptive parents whom I’ve talked to, we feel that these girls were meant to be our daughters since the dawn of time; it could not have been otherwise. The result for a hundred thousand other families and for international relations generally was that the diplomatic dam had broken. Chinese adoptions have been the most successful inter-racial adoptions in America for the last 30 years. Millions of Americans no longer demonize the Yellow Race because the family next door includes a sweet Chinese daughter. (In recent years, I worry that race-baiting of Chinese has begun to return, but the politicians who want to promote the insanity of a war against China do not have an easy time with their PR.)
When I read Richard Weindruch’s Scientific American article about caloric restriction and life extension (1996), I came to realize that this phenomenon represented a challenge to the predominant selfish gene version of evolutionary theory. I came to think of this as a mystery that might be resolved with computer modeling, a problem that had my name on it. At age 47, I launched a new career, without an employer, without academic credentials in the field, without any means of support. But the science of aging has become my primary expertise. I feel I have helped to turn academic evolution away from the selfish gene, and my ideas have had ripple effects in dozens of biotech start-ups that seek medical interventions to slow aging.
The message I get from Lao Tzu is this: The universe is taking us for a ride, and when we align ourselves with the sweep of destiny, we act powerfully; OTOH, when we try to push against the river, our efforts come sooner or later to grief. This sounds like vacuous mysticism, perhaps the oriental equivalent of Biblical morality; but the scientific method is not the only way we may know truth.
In May, 2019, I passed by a neighbor’s sidewalk book exchange and picked up a copy of a volume with an epigraph from the I Ching. It came to me immediately that it was my job to write a sonnet for each of the 64 hexagrams. Five years on, this project is almost ready for release. A beta draft of our web page is at I-CHING.GURU.
Like gravity, the Dao is weak but firm.
We’re bound for paradise at end of day,
But we may choose our path along the way —
We walk or crawl or dance or march or squirm.
The Dao conveys a message, deep and true
Without prescribing what we are to do.
In 2021, I had what I call my Date with Destiny. I was bicycling fast, head down, ears in an audiobook, no traffic on my side of the street, when an SUV on the other, crowded side of the street pulled out to pass and gunned the engine. By the time I looked up, the only thing that registered was that there was no time to avoid a head-on, high-speed collision. 8 surgeries, 4 months flat on my back, slow recovery of my strength…it’s certainly not an experience I would have chosen for myself. But many transformations came from that time. The first miracle was that I survived. A team of surgeons worked furiously, methodically for 8 hours to stop the bleeding before my life was out of danger. Somehow, my spine, my brain, and all vital organs came through intact. My legs have come back to life, through bone and muscle and skin grafts, through my own stubborn efforts, and through a preternatural resilience which my body evinced when I needed it most. I lost my fear of death, and regained a relationship with my girlfriend. I learned that there was a life-saving, even heroic side to the Western medical establishment that I had been reviling in my blog. I came to a faith that the Universe is taking care for me, and a commitment to find my calling, to read the mission statement engraved on my heart, and to follow where that led. (I wrote more about this experience here.)
Habits
Meditation is a decision: toward what shall I direct my attention over the next so-many minutes? The mind wanders in every which direction, into realms that are enlightening and realms that are perseverative. And each time, I remind myself of the decision to mind my breath (or a mantra, or a candle, or ….) Meditation is training in the process of consciously developing habits rather than falling into haphazard patterned behavior.
I’m learning a piano piece this month, the piano part of Dohnanyi’s sonata for cello and piano. I can’t make decisions about which notes to play in which millisecond as I perform the piece next month. But I know what habits I need to have in my fingers, and how to train my fingers to play them. The decision to learn this piece was partly mine — I love Dohnanyi — partly constrained by the Settlement music school and by my friend the cellist.
I have consciously cultured habits of healthy diet, morning yoga, bicycling for transportation, listening when friends ask for my ear… I confess to having passively acquired other habits that don’t serve me well, and of which I’m not proud.
We don’t exercise free will most of the time, but when a light arises inside and we know we have a choice, we can use each choice point to culture habits that serve us when the light is not available. Over the course of a lifetime, this may be the most powerful exercise of free will that is available to us.
Diverse conclusions
This body and brain which I inhabit have their own predilections, programmed by evolution — desires for air, water, food, sex, comfort, rest, touch, companionship.
These are irresistible instinctive forces that act on different time scales. Minutes for breathing, hours for wakefulness, days for food.
In the short term, moment to moment, I am free to choose — what word will I type prochain?
But most of life is ruled by habits. I can choose what habits to develop, and this is perhaps the most powerful way to apply what freedom I have.
All my choices are made from within a social context which affects me in some ways that I understand and in other ways that are beneath my awareness. Self-reflection on unconscious influences can be a powerful discipline for political and personal liberation.
Most controversially, most mystically, I’ll say this: There is a destiny, a direction to the large events of this world (and perhaps beyond). It acts through what Jung called synchronicities — events that look like coincidences and that occur at critical junctions that are seen, with hindsight, as forks in the road.
Life proceeds more smoothly and with more satisfaction when I align myself with these directions.
Though mind is not a thing you might eschew,
Your mind and heart must never be at war.
Your actions will, of course, accord with fate,
Though you may never know what they were for.
Thanks Josh. This must have taken some time. :-)
"I’ve gradually come to a belief system that melds science with mysticism. I call myself a Daoist. There have been events in my life that look like random coincidences that turned out to be turning points. From a Western, reductionist-material perspective, I would say that the world is a chaotic system, and small details can occasionally have global effects. But Carl Jung would call these “synchronicities”.'
FREE will is much more limited than we like to think.... reflexes, instincts of various types,survival instincts, societal or species induced trauma to trim the brain and induce fixed or at least behaviors hard to change, environmental conditions.... if we can see the extent of our limitations we can make better use of our efforts to even maximize what freedom we have.