DETERMINISM, EMOTIONS, EMPATHY, TECH CHANGE: MY PERSONAL CLUMSY APPROACH TO DEALING WITH POLARIZATION
For the next three days I will puzzle about how to deal with social and political polarization in the United States. We are caught in a time of great polarization with one half tending in the MAGA direction and one half tending in the Liberal direction. No one seems to be able to resolve this tension. It appears that we will just fight it out at the ballot box, hoping that we don’t give up on democracy and fall into authoritarianism.
So any attempt on my part, an ordinary American sitting in Greece by himself trying to figure this out, can only be for myself. I keep putting off writing about it because I don’t want to make a fool of myself. But there is no way out. We each are dropped here on earth and make our way along the best we can and finally have to settle on the foolishness that suits us best. So this is what I will do. This is how I’ll deal with the MAGA/Liberal tension for this week at least. I have enough trouble dealing with this issue in my own way, so doubt that my clumsy way of dealing with it will suit anyone else. These are my assumptions about human nature from my own experience. All I can do is to be as aware as I can of my own passage. My solutions to this tension are mine and mine only.
DETERMINISM
In my confusion about this issue I read about a book that I thought might help me, DETERMINED: A SCIENCE OF LIFE WITHOUT FREE WILL by Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist. His argument is that science shows us that everything we do is determined by our genetic makeup, by our nurturing, by our culture and by our own experience. We feel we have free will, Sapolsky argues, and yet all our choices are determined. If we act in a criminal or violent way we are no more responsible than a baby who cries.
I am not going to apply his book to my self analysis because I can barely understand it. But I find I agree with its basic premiss. My choices, I feel, can be explained by my genetic makeup, the way my parents nurtured me, the values of the communities I was brought up in and my own often chance experience. I am a liberal by birth, nurturing, culture and experience. And I believe the same must be true of MAGA people.
It seems so obvious. One example for me is that people’s basic values and identity seem largely determined by geography. Rural areas trend MAGA and urban areas trend liberal, the coasts of the United States trend liberal, the sparsely populated middle of the country trends MAGA. This wasn’t by choice. And of course the entire country is bound together by traditional American values along with common language, foods, religion generally, clothing and shared history. Our common history has made us Americans.
But while all these factors seem to determine our identity, in our daily lives we feel as if we have free choice and are responsible for our identity and our actions. I certainly do.
I am not going to deal here with the degree that each of our lives are determined and the degree to which we have free will. But what matters to me is the dawning realization based on my understanding of science that almost all of my actions and beliefs are determined and that my feeling that I have free will is largely illusory. And because this is also true for MAGA people then I can’t find MAGA people wrong and Liberal people are right or the other way around. We are who we are because of how we grew up and have to accept each other in that way. And because our basic identity, which is who we think we are, is both not something we came to rationally and is at the same time very intense, it is almost impossible to argued out of our basic identity. Both sides are unpersuadable.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 