At that age I was starting to read philosophy and it's the sort of thing trotted out in introductory texts as one of the enduring 'problems' of philosophy. The basic idea is that either we are, as we tend to believe, free in our actions, as sovereign beings, or we are a kind of automaton, whose actions are inevitable given the sum of all our former actions and the causal factors in our environment, etc., right back to the Big Bang. The related question is, of course, whether we are really in control of, and therefore responsible for, our actions - not just in extreme cases, like murdering someone, but in mundane ones, like whether we could really have resisted eating that whole packet of chocolate biscuits.
I thought this whole question was stupid (since, obviously, I had free will) and while it's the sort of thing that cropped up again when I studied philosophy at university I never really gave it much more attention. It seemed like a classic example of a logical problem that wasn't really a problem in the real word, like Zeno's paradox about the infinite sub-divisibility of space 'proving' that movement is impossible. While I have only learned more recently to articulate it in this way, as long as I can remember my sense has been that we are not ruled by reason, but by our passions (as David Hume called them) and that, while it is immensely powerful, our reasoning ability is also rather limited in terms of its sphere of application. We are quite prone, I think, to mistaking the limitations of our power of logical reasoning or expression for problems in the real world.
As befits a believer in free will, what was more interesting to me at that age, and for many years afterwards, were ideas about truly radical self-transformation. I was fascinated by Robert Anton Wilson's work, particularly as set out in Quantum Psychology, Tim Leary's eight circuit model of human consciousness, Aleister Crowley's Magick, Carlos Castaneda's Teachings of Don Juan, Nietzsche's idea of going beyond the human, science fiction that re-imagined what we are, and later I got beyond reading and tried yoga, meditation, and even Karate. These ideas and experiences led me to believe all the more that we are creatures of free will who can transform ourselves almost completely through various techniques and self-imposed disciplines. And that our everyday realities, while certainly grounded in a real, physical universe, are unnecessarily ruled by rigid habits and inherited beliefs that constrain us and strangle our innate potential. Of course, most people regard these thinkers as crackpots.
This perspective made Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Marlowe's Tamberlaine irresistible to me when I studied them at university. These plays imagine the power of War carrying their eponymous protagonists beyond all conventional morality or identity, cutting loose all tradition and ties, unbound by God, the nation state, family or even a sense of common humanity. But both plays end with (as I saw it then) a betrayal of this radical potential, each telling us that even this path leads back to the traditional and conventional values that seem undone earlier in the play. Hardly surprising for two plays from the early sixteenth century, of course. The Italian Futurists provided a less tempered vision in the early Twentieth Century, embracing industrial modernity with a manic passion and determined to break with every tradition they could find, with spectacular results in painting, sculpture, poetry and music.
I can't locate the point at which my thinking changed and things appeared differently, but they now do. I don't see crackpots, but I do see a cul-de-sac. What is most curious to me, in retrospect, is that none of the supposedly repressive forces of tradition and convention really had much of a grip on me when I was growing up. As for many people of my mid-1970s middle class UK generation, no one really forced religion or any other tradition-bound aspects of cultural identity on me. In fact, this was true to the extent that I feel a little envious when I read or see representations of a family life of this sort: where parents impose traditions that must be maintained, whether in belief, behaviour, food, or clothing, and the children, being individuals with free will, resist and break free, seeking the temptations of modernity. None of this ever happened to me, so I never really got the chance to break free from it. My evidently strong desire to break free of constraints, to overcome the supposed tyranny of society's conventions, seems to have been lacking an object.
This is nothing to complain about. But this freedom from tradition has given me, I think, a basic sense of being rootless and unable to find a place in the world. There is a certain feeling that I find returning to me and it is, I think, that I cannot stand anywhere and say: This is where, for many generations, my ancestors lived. Of course, they must have lived somewhere. But while my family history contains many strands of tradition - from more exotic-sounding Sephardic Jews in Aleppo, Baghdad, and Calcutta to more local French Hugenots and Cornishmen, all eventually bringing my parents together in London's grand cosmopolitanism, those strands, it feels to me, had been cut before I arrived on the scene. I cannot trace a line from me to these ancestors and say - and this is why we do this, this is why we believe that, this is why we eat these on this day.... My own migration from the UK to NZ has of course increased my own sense of dislocation. But, given what seem to have been endless migrations by my ancestors, within the UK and between countries, this feeling of dislocation has also given me something more in common with them.
It seems to me now, at 38, that I was quite mistaken as a teenager to believe in the idea of human nature as endlessly mutable (for that is what it amounts to, even though it denies that there is a fixed human nature). I do not think that I was entirely mistaken, but mistaken nonetheless. I feel, imagining my younger self, that he would be immensely disappointed to hear this, and view it as a defeat. Luckily, he is no longer here, and I hope my explanation might seem less inglorious to you.
My first doubts about the thinkers I mentioned above, and their trajectory, came when I read French post-structuralist philosophers like Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. In many ways their ideas chimed well with, say Robert Anton Wilson's deep skepticism about conventional ways of seeing and knowing, especially when it came to the non-referential way language functions and the fabled fixity of the self. But they also made it clear to me that a consideration of the way the individual is shaped by society, history, and unconscious desire, which is sorely lacking from many thinkers of self-transformation, was needed. And, while the post-structuralists also pushed at the limits of conventional ideas about being human, and at times seem to envision a utopian transformation of humankind, they saw this as a collective, communitarian change not as a case of the individual experimenter, somehow outside of society and culture like a Coriolanus or Tamberlaine, re-engineering themselves for new futures. Importantly, they show that rather than being repressed or oppressed by social conventions in the way we tend to think in the Western tradition, we are so profoundly shaped as individuals by these necessarily social forces that talk of escaping from them is, ultimately, nonsensical.
What this difference has made me realise, over a fairly long period of reflection, is that the radicalism of the 1960s gave us two visions of a more positive future: one based around individual self-transformation, the other around collective, social transformation. The former cannot help but be aligned with a free-market ideology, while the latter of course reveals its socialist/Marxist genealogy.
Both visions have floundered in subsequent decades (John Gray's Black Mass provides a compelling analysis of this). The often ecstatic promise of self-transformation is entangled with a consumer-driven society, where each product promises to make a better, different you but of course does not deliver this individualised utopia. What it has done, though, is erode the appeal of a collective, communitarian society in which the importance of the self is secondary to the social good. Smart phones don't deliver utopia but, in the West, they represent as well as any consumer product the apparent end of the once lofty power of the crowd to challenge the social order.
In other words, the promise of boundless freedom and self-transformation that captured my imagination as a teenager now appears as, at best, hopelessly complicit with the free-market ideology that, in most Western nations, has driven a wedge between the richest and the poorest and broken society in the process. It may, at worst, even be an instance of its ruling ideology. My sense as a 15 year old that my own free will was self-evident was, in fact, a sign of a subjectivity constituted within a society in which meaning is determined by (the dream of) free-market capitalism and an ideology of consumption. Of course, this conclusion is a deeply deterministic one, reducing my individual consciousness to an epiphenomenal puppet of the social order. But I doubt that it is wrong.
My second set of doubts about the philosophy of radical self-transformation have arisen from the experience of leaving the UK and living in New Zealand for the last seven years. While New Zealand shares many things with the UK - not least a language - that reduce any deep sense of culture shock, being in a different place, with a different history and different cultural norms, has slowly changed my perspective on many things.
In terms of 'free will vs determinism', there are two main aspects to this shift in perspective. The first is my own experience as an immigrant in NZ in terms of how it has led me to rethink my own sense of identity, to interrogate and recognise my 'Britishness' in a different way. The second is learning about the experience of NZ's indigenous people, culture, and history.
As a white, British immigrant in NZ I have not experienced many of the things that are, sadly, associated with migration - things like social exclusion, structural discrimination, racism, and social inequality. What I have experienced has been a subtle shift in perspective. I noticed soon after arriving in NZ that, due I assume to the relatively recent date of mass European colonisation of the country (and I suspect, due to the importance of whakapapa or genealogy in its indigenous Maori culture) people are in general much more interested in tracing their roots and heritage than in the UK. For many people in NZ of European descent, Europe or elsewhere remain within living or extended memory, with their parents and grandparents arriving as immigrants, not just their great-greats. NZ also has a healthy flow of new immigrants, like myself, adding to this public discussion and interest, and New Zealanders are a well-travelled people, with Europe as a common destination.
As someone who found my own interest in my family history to be generally unreciprocated in the UK, I rather liked this. Over time, what has struck me is a difference between a younger country, with relatively high ethnic diversity, that treats immigration and diversity as core to its identity (though not of course uniformly or without extreme tensions existing, including white extremists for whom the most logical conclusion would be for them to 'go back where they came from'...) versus a much older country where these differences of race and ethnicity are under much greater pressure to disappear, replaced by a discourse about class.
Enjoying an unfamiliar sense that my interest in my family tree was legitimate, at the same time as finding myself in a new place where I had no connections, has led me to think more and differently about how my background has shaped who I am. Rather than thinking about future possibilities of self-transformation, I have become more focused on understanding how the person I am already has come about - what genetic, environmental, and historical factors have and continue to actively shape me? How much am I like, and a continuation of, my mother and father, or my grandparents - not just genetically, but in terms of my sense of identity, my cultural capital, my assumed world-view?
Where my younger self was keen to dismiss these things, more recently I wonder how much they are acting, without me realising it, to determine my thoughts and behaviours. The arrival of our first child has of course given this reflection an obvious focus, not just the experience of observing my daughter, but also observing myself as a parent and thinking, from a new perspective, about my own parents. Our second daughter, just born, changes things again - how similar or different to her older sister will she be?
In terms of the indigenous people of NZ, don't worry, I am not about to claim any insights about their experience, or perennial wisdom gleaned from their culture. Rather, what I have realised is how localised and specific to the UK some of my own assumptions about race, ethnicity, and culture within society really are. In the UK, these questions are usually framed in terms of immigration and 'ethnic minorities' (with Britain's former Empire as the elephant in the room) but in NZ the more recent immigrants are largely from the UK and Europe and they form a white ethnic majority, albeit in a very different proportion to the UK (about 65 percent of NZs are 'of European descent'). In this sense, the whole dynamic of race relations in NZ is completely different to in the UK, despite a superficial similarity in terms of poorer health, education, and economic outcomes for non-white people.
Historically, there is no getting around the fact that this difference in outcomes comes down to colonialism. Where Maori as a group are over-represented as members of an underclass and, in aggregate, of lower socio-economic status, it is because of the legacy of colonial encounter and the violent dispossession visited upon them by Europeans. This is different to the history driving the experience of ethnic minorities within the UK, even if that history is also an Imperial one. And it also throws into question, I think, the nature of issues usually less examined in the UK due to the dominant discourse of class. In a UK context, this suggests to me that current poverty and social disadvantage may have a similar history. In fact, it suggests that class in the UK has been produced by the same movement of colonialism that brought British rule to NZ, with the difference that, unlike in NZ, the racial and ethnic divides involved in this process have been eroded away in the UK. (I think John Gray touches on this history in his book False Dawn when he emphasises the importance of the land clearances in Britain and the way these created new social configurations of class and also effectively ended many traditional British ways of life.)
This creation of modern classes, which brings me back (finally) to free will and determinism, is part of the bedrock of the UK's current cosmopolitan culture, with a middle class that holds a view of itself as modern and progressive, and views tribal affiliations and local traditions as fundamentally oppressive and repressive relics to be thrown off at the earliest opportunity in favour of us all finding whatever eclectic mix of cultural pot pourri tickles our fancy. That is, the British middle class sees itself as a society of individuals who have free will.
I am of course describing the UK that I grew up in, which is distant in time and space, and may only exist in my current recollections. But this is how I now understand the UK that shaped me and made it self-evident to me, at 15, that I was possessed of free will. 23 years later, that self-evidence is gone, both theoretically indefensible and no longer squaring with my own lived experience. Rather than seeing a break in Western culture in the 1960s that opened up boundless opportunities for self-transformation, as I once did, I see a continued ideology of exploration and conquest, a colonial frontier mentality seeking out inner and outer space; rather than restriction and repression of dammed-up human potential, I find myself wondering what in me these historical, cultural strata supports or determines, and which bigger patterns, always remaining outside my view, I continue.
This does not mean that I have consigned free will to the dustbin of (a rigidly deterministic) history. Rather, the opposition between free will and determinism has, at long last, become an interesting one. Like all philosophical oppositions, this one is too logical and binary and its potential 'resolution' has no purchase on reality. But I now see that there is rather a lot is in fact at stake in the apparently stale philosophical debate 'free will vs determinism'.
In a conclusion that culturally (being British) and individually (as the son of English teachers) seems highly pre-determined, it seems I have come to believe that Shakespeare and Marlowe were right after all. We might want to break free from social conventions and traditions but in the end these things shape us in ways beyond our control and return to claim us. Moreover, our desire to break free is a sign of forces that exceed and shape us. Going back to David Hume's opposition between reason and passion - and the more recent psycho-analytic expression of this notion as the difference between our conscious and unconscious - desire itself heads the list of shaping forces that we cannot consciously comprehend.
This all makes me want to understand better how I have been shaped rather than how I can shape myself- but just as I cannot know my own unconscious, I can't repair the broken strands that would link me back in any real way to the traditions, experiences, and places of my ancestors. The movements of social change associated with the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and capitalism have foreclosed the possibility of me ever 'rediscovering my roots'. Meanwhile, paradoxically, my own sense of free will, however illusory, remains.
Location:Parklands Drive,Karori,New Zealand
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