Sort of political Monday

The liberal surrender on free will
 Whenever discussions of free will come up, it is a good idea to keep this quote in mind:

It is impossible to conceive anything in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without limitation, save only a good will. 

That's Immanuel Kant. This idea lingers at the root of a certain kind of modern liberalism. And if you believe this, rationalism becomes something of paramount importance. Because it becomes nonsense for someone who believes what Kant believes to speak of morality or politics at all if your moral and political decisions are not fully conscious, rational and independent decisions. For any action at all has to be a conscious, rational act of the will to even count as moral if you believe this.

Consider Ron Bennington (C/O Partial Objects) who took up photography after 9/11 and later lost interest. But he later discovered that a lot of people had done likewise.

... then later on I’m reading the New York Times and I find out that right after 9/11 a lot of people had taken up photography, and it ended up being this thing where after you’ve suffered a huge loss, you try and find some way to document things, keep them alive…what was weird about is that when I did it, I didn’t have any of this in mind, I just thought it would be this neat little thing to do. It just shows you that just when you think you’ve got this free will, it turns out you’re really just plugged into your culture.

That is an odd leap. My first instinct is to say, get a sense of proportion man. (I can't find this quote anywhere else on the net, presumably it's something he said on air.)

It's not that such leaps are unheard of. We see this patter of thinking in children all the time. Five-year-old Jill has a fight with her best friend Zoe and says to her Mummy, "I'll never be happy again".

The loss of any sense of proportion isn't in the reaction. It's in the thing that the reaction is meant to hide. Confronted with the revelation that he wasn't making independent, rational decisions but floating along driven by a lot of habits that were framed within a specific cultural context, Bennington only had two choices. He could abandon his believe that real moral life consisted only of independent, rational decisions or he could give up on the idea of a free will. That he made the bizarre move he did make, and that he made it so casually, tells us that he has a deeply held—superstitious even—faith in independent, rational decision-making.

A useful thing to do here is to turn around and ask ourselves what it would take in Bennington's view for his decision to count as free. What would the free will hero have done? For starters, he would have been conscious of the cultural influences in that he would have realized that he was interested in memorializing things as a consequence of 9/11. And then he would have sat down and rationally assessed first the feeling—Do I really need to document stuff?—and then the means—is photography a good way to do this? And he would have reached an independent decision.

I don't think it would be essential that he make the right decision. That he might later realize that he doesn't like photography or that documenting things is not a useful thing to do could have been easily accommodated to Bennington's free-will heroism.  No, what troubles him is suddenly realizing that there were factors at play in his choice that he wasn't aware of.

Of course, we all do such things and sometimes even do them as entire societies. Consider, for example, the fact that it is now obvious that President Obama is, at best, an average public speaker. There is nothing that should trouble us a whole lot in that fact. The overwhelming majority of modern politicians are only adequate public speakers. An awful lot of good politicians including some very good presidents (Abraham Lincoln, for example*) have been poor public speakers. What is troubling is not the fact but that we once all believed otherwise about Obama. Even staunch Republicans who devoutly wished to see Obama defeated in 2008 believed he was an exceptionally good public speaker.

And we believed this right from the beginning before anyone even began to invest any special hope in this man. When Obama made the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention no one had any terribly special investment in him yet. He was just another rising politician who might or might not amount to something. And yet everyone heard a magnificent speech.

Except they didn't. You can listen to it online. It's an okay but nothing to get worked up about speech.

And yet, everyone believed it was great. I know I did. There was something like a mass delusion at work here. We all believed he was a great speaker and—this is the aspect that will really bother someone with a lot invested in a rationalistic liberalism—we were utterly unaware of the forces that drove us to believe this. We couldn't have stepped away from these things and made an independent, rational assessment because we weren't consciously aware that these forces were affecting us in the first place.

Like photography after 9/11, there was something in the air that we were all looking for a great orator and we all found him in this same guy. Why? I don't think it matters. But if you think like Ron Bennington, it will matter a whole lot to you. If you think like Ron Bennington, incidents like this will make you despair of politics.

I'll wrap up on Kant again.

It is impossible to conceive anything in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without limitation, save only a good will.

Unless, of course, Kant is wrong. Could there be other things that are good without limitation? Or is the good will good but only within limitations? Both of these possibilities, especially the second, are anathema to some kinds of modern liberal thought.



*That Lincoln is now remembered as a great communicator is a reflection on what he said and not how he expressed it. At the time the Gettysburg address was noticed because it was better than people had expected of the President.