SCIENCE VERSUS THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC
THE MISSING DEBATE
NOVEMBER 16, 2010. To the degree that physics, biology, and chemistry wish to assert that all human processes are physical processes, one major question remains: what is freedom?
There are a significant (perhaps overwhelming) number of hard scientists who claim that every human thought and action should be attributed to chemical changes or the motion of sub-atomic particles.
Therefore, what we normally think of as choices, decisions, alternative possibilities are illusions. There are no true alternatives.
Human actions, no matter how they look, are always and nothing more than the irresistible effects generated by prior material causes.
If so, then what about the entire effort to form a Republic on these shores based on individual freedom?
But, you see, this debate never takes place. Opponents don’t convene and state their basic cases. They don’t engage in a philosophical argument in these terms.
They sidestep the crucial issues.
Is the individual pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness a fragrant sentiment that actually has no meaning? Is it just another deceptive slogan?
If you believe that all human thought and action is the predetermined result of involuntary physics, then yes, it is just another delusory bit of nonsense.
The Founders might just as well have fought the British for the right to bow before the king without removing one’s hat.
The Constitution might just as well have been written as a command to submit to Allah or a theocracy of the Roman Church.
If freedom is an illusion, what difference does it make?
As I’ve written before, the history of Western philosophy crashed on the rocks at the end of the 19th century, because these questions were never seriously debated.
In the present technological age, the debate is more important than ever, because, increasingly, the means to alter brain processes are at our disposal. If freedom means nothing, if it is a hoax, then the right to manipulate the brain without limit, for any purpose, is a given. And if you don’t find a problem in that, you aren’t looking.
Scientists who are philosophical materialists are faced with this problem: if individual freedom is real, if choices are real, then those choices are NON-MATERIAL.
Choices proceed from something other than what can be found in the human body.
They proceed from something other than what can be found in chemicals or sub-atomic particles.
They proceed from the individual.
That was surely the essence of the documents on which the American Republic was founded.
One of the major political implications of philosophical materialism is the burying of the individual in the mass; and the mass is the group, the herd, the population, the collective.
The individual becomes a passé concept; a quaint, old-fashioned way of looking at the world.
In its place come the needs of the group. And these needs can be measured and calculated and spun out on to charts, so that an overarching bureaucracy can distribute whatever items will best accommodate Everyone, according to some unchallengeable algorithm.
With the demise of the individual “as an object of concern,” wealth, property, ideas, and ambition can be ruled by Central Planners.
If you look around you, you will see that this is happening at an accelerated rate.
It may seem that the deep philosophical questions are of no importance to us, but that is not the case. The failure to argue at that level leaves the playing field wide open to opportunistic encroachments on our natural rights as individuals.
Furthermore, it is clear that, were a real debate to take place, philosophical materialism could be dealt a severe blow—by an old Socratic strategy, called reduction ad absurdum, in which the implications of an argument are shown to lead to an untenable position.
For instance:
If all human action and thought are the result of involuntary chemical and physical changes, then we have no freedom to choose to act on what we hear, read, and understand.
Therefore, the very proposition that all human action is invariably dictated by, for example, brain chemistry is of no value. Why bother to announce that, since knowledge of it would make no difference—since none of us can choose our responses to such an announcement?
And as for attempting to manipulate the brain in order to create “a better society,” why propose or defend that strategy, since the strategy is already being enacted on a purely deterministic basis, without free choice?
All those scientists seeking to find out more about the brain are doing what they do without the freedom to choose. They are simply playing out the string in their laboratories, robots programmed for certain actions.
The concepts “better” and “worse” have no meaning at all, in any context.
The very notion of considering alternatives in any sphere is meaningless, since we don’t have the ability to make choices.
Since the beginning of time, if time ever began, a second-by-second inevitable course was set in motion for all species everywhere.
If no choice in any realm is really possible, then how do we understand the meaning of “understanding?” Isn’t understanding surrounded and illuminated by the notion of possibility, of various choices that can be made based on that understanding? What is there to know or understand if freedom is a delusion?
What I doing writing these words, and what are you doing reading them? They mean nothing; they are nothing. My action in writing, and yours in reading, are predetermined and unfree.
Philosophical materialism leads us to this untenable position, this reduction to absurdity, and on these and other grounds, it should be rejected.
And instead, freedom should be reinstated to the place where it belongs.
As should its explication in the founding documents of the Republic.
And then we can discuss what the “non-material basis of freedom” might mean.
Everything in this article is for people who can think and reason. Just because many people cannot engage in such activity doesn’t mean those of us who can should abandon the field to them.
If we do, they will act in accordance with materialistic considerations, whether they understand them or not.
Just as those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, those who don’t understand philosophy are doomed to act as if they do.
Freedom has philosophic context, and it burns brightest for those who know what that context is.
On that basis, both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated and drafted. The founders were not men who merely acknowledged freedom and grunted in affirmation of it, as if it were a pork chop lying in the sand.
JON RAPPOPORT
Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults. To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com