How to Save the World

If you spend enough time thinking about instinct, and culture, and genetics, and language, and love, you begin to get pretty skeptical about 'free will'. As the diagram above shows, we are the product of:

Nature, nurture, and what we've been through make us what we are. The following poem by Montrealer Kezia Speirs, which I read today on the Toronto subway's 'poetry on the way' poster, makes this point more lyrically:

We love as though we know not

better. A trick, biology, it claims

more worthy selves and gentler aims

and still this doom is ours. We sought

late wanderings and soft light, dim,

and then the first embrace, the touch

as if those hands were all the world -- for such

their beauty seemed; he carried gods with him.

And these loves, so celebrated, sung

so painted, danced, idolatrized, these scenes

are but the tantrum of our genes,

which we their slaves embellish -- strung

like puppets, till they break their strings

and all that's left are our imaginings.

If our actions are indeed "the tantrum of our genes", then where, in the 'product' that is each one of us, is us? If we are, as I would posit, simply our knowledge, our beliefs and our imaginings, figments of reality, and if these three fragile, fleeting figments are determined by our genes, our culture, and our senses, experiences and memories, and if in turn these figments determine what we do, and don't do, during our too-long, too-short 'lives', what control do 'we' have over any of it?

And if we are fortunate enough to have the capacity to think, say and do what 'we' want, regardless of what 'everybody else' thinks, why do we value the 'freedom' to do so, so highly, when we are in part a product of the culture that is 'everybody else'?

So if, say, our culture tells us that, for some specified reason, we have to do something (e.g. work hard for a living at a job we don't like) or tells us that we cannot do something (e.g. travel to Cuba), why do we rebel at this? And then do (or not do) what we're told?

Or if, say, we are seduced by someone to whom we are intuitively and/or hormonally drawn, and our culture tells us that it is inappropriate to act on that impulse (e.g. because we, or they, are already committed to someone else), by what logic can we say that our 'ability' to resist the temptation is an act of 'free will' or morality, rather than merely a resolution of the forces that control us, make us who we are, by sheer strength of that superior force, and not in 'our' control whatsoever?

And if 'we' want to save the world, is it a matter of defying the culture that normally tells us what to do, and trusting instead the other two forces: (a) our instincts & emotions, and (b) our senses, experiences and memories, both of which tell us, increasingly, that our culture is killing us? When our culture makes us so much who we are, can we even do that? Are we the gatekeepers, the honest brokers between the three forces in the diagram above, who decide which one(s) make 'more sense', and get paralyzed into inaction when they are in unresolvable conflict? Or are we merely their instrument, blown like leaves in the wind by all three forces in their combined vector of velocity?

For once, I'm not going to proffer any answers to these (admitted loaded) questions. They aren't rhetorical. They may be recursive. They may be unanswerable. Perhaps how we answer them tells us who we really are. And who we thought we were, but are not.

Category: Being Human