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The Radical Boy Manifesto: Teach the heart humility
Free will doesn’t exist.
Just kidding! I got a rise out of you, though, didn’t I?
Kurt Vonnegut has a great little story about Free Will. In it, God creates a world with just one inhabitant, and he endows that inhabitant honestly and truly with complete free will. Every day, that one man, wakes up in the morning, jumps in the river and when he comes back out, he yells something different. Every day, and every day God is watching intently because he can’t wait to hear what new and crazy thing his free man will say.
I think most people believe they are living that life now, that’s how far the notion of individuality has gone. Tony Judt wrote about the effect this sort of worldview has had on us as a world community in his recent essay, “What Have We Learned, If Anything?” in the New York Review of Books. He writes that at other moments of great social change, people continued to spelunk the past for lessons as they plodded into the future, even if it felt like the terrain had very much changed.
Now, though, he writes, we seem to believe that we have entered a new dawn, such that there is not need to do anything with the past but memorialize it, because it’s all so different now. He was struck, for example, after 9/11, by the readiness to “proclaim novelty on every possible occasion.”
Here’s one piece of the explanation he gives:
Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears.
… What is significant about the present age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have abandoned not merely the practices of the past but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.
He goes on to dig into some of the implications of this reticence, and I recommend exploring them. It makes for more comfortable going, after all, if History hiccups hard enough that study may be set aside as entertaining, at best, but no longer usefully informative.
I’m glad Judt’s essay came along, because it does a good job of making the point that when we as individuals let our individual hearts mislead us into a false sense of uniqueness, it has consequences for a whole community. See, the only way you could really truly ever have free-free-free will is if we did live alone on our own planet with our own food supply and our own cool little river to jump in (yes, you would have to have the river), otherwise, your will can’t ever completely be your own. You’ve got others to think about and others are thinking about/influencing/controlling you.
See, you and I are not really the organism. We’re just organs in the real organism: humanity. If we fail to internalize the lessons of the old, old stories, if we fail to reach each other, if we fail to understand that just because there is space between us that doesn’t mean there is that much difference, we’re going to hurt ourselves. If we hurt ourselves, we hurt each other.
We need to teach our solo, prideful little hearts humility. We are very, very much not alone.
Radical Boy Manifesto