That Which Compels
On the Psychological Phenomenon of Free Will
Free will, as a theological or traditionally philosophical concept, is a profoundly useless preoccupation. Yet there is some moment of meaning in the idea—there is something that draws us curiously in. And if we could just a little gather what the concept itself might mean to us, we might get to the truly useful question: how do we respond to free will?
If the concept of free will has any meaning at all, it is as a psychological ideal, approached best as a phenomenon. We may find an experience of being compelled, of having made no real decision at all—the deficit of free will. More likely, though, the owl flies at night—one doesn’t know about the fog until the fog is lifted—a magical grace of consciousness. The phenomenon of free will is a taste of emergence.
The psychologists foraged and distilled a most fascinating phenomenon regarding freedom. To name the compelling—that which compels—dwindles her power. Simply find the source of your compulsion, the cause to your effect, and you are less likely to effect. Why? What witchcraft is this?
I don’t presume to know the source of this mystical power, but I do think we can wrap it in a neat, useful little mythology. Perhaps that’s all there is to it—perhaps the mythologizing itself is the power.
When we map out the causes to our effects, we enter into a world of new decisions. If someone says to me that I compulsively eat ice cream at nine o’clock every night because of some atrocious hidden thing in my infantile nine o’clock history, I suddenly know about forces in my world which I could never see before. The forces emerge from the darkness of unknowing into the known. The power of the atrocity and the force that it created may not reduce to nothing, but merely knowing how to replay the steps which get us from there to here transforms the step into a marker a map—a thing to be known and observed. A thing to be known is a thing to make decisions about—to use.
Of course the power of the compelling does not dissipate entirely simply with knowledge. In fact, the desire which compelled us might become something now of interest. Perhaps the most powerful moment is when we come to accept the desire, the movement within, as something given which might now be brought into the arena of free play in the deepest sense.
There is also some factor of time in this newfound freedom. Recognizing the cause as it emerges into our experience allows us, if we are lucky, to pause. That which compelled becomes that which is in the world—that which may be manipulated—that which might be for us an object of power. From the psychologist or the knowing friend, the right words are anti-incantations—spell-breakers. We suddenly see, and maybe for the first time. A new quadrant of the world is open to us. We taste freedom.
In many cases, this taste of freedom leaves a nearly unquenchable thirst for more. How can one not desire more world to exist? Yet there is also a burden to freedom. Every new bit of reality, every new decision, makes us culpable. We are no longer children who know not what they do. We now have the responsibility of vigilance. We are free to choose, but that freedom requires us to watch and wait for the moment of choosing. Each new emergence into freedom creates within us and around us a bigger and heavier world. The easiest response, sometimes, is to fall back into unknowing—to simply forget that part of the world exists—to forget we have a choice.
G.K. Chesterton mentioned once or twice that humans are born with the desire to ‘bend the knee’—a disturbingly accurate observation. One might even see it in the most grandiose visions, even in those rising from their dusty shoes onto the marble floors of modernity and beyond. Darwin gives us a magical dream of the stark, beautiful, ravenous forces of forever carrying us forward. Hegel saw the Spirit rising forth, almost of it’s own accord—some strange, majestic paragon sweeping us along through pendulum arcs of inadvertent reasons. Marx followed suit—the next stage must come. Even Foucault follows a similar vein, albeit giving it post-modern overtones—our collective spirit rising to bring forth the known. Some part of us wants to be compelled. Some deep part of us wants to see free will dethroned.
Perhaps we are simply creatures of habit. We may have emerged into self-consciousness by visualizing the idea of responsibility and placing it onto external, higher beings. Without freedom, we had to place it into the world somewhere around us to even recognize her; we may have simply mythologized freedom into existence, and by necessity, that existence was outside of ourselves. Who would not be reluctant to let go of such a wonderful and productive child? When the child moves away, we are left only to deal with ourselves.
We continue to strain against our freedom, our culpability. The story of modernity is the story of a hard retreat into mythologies of we-must-because. We break our boring mythologies and then strain to make new ones. Tired and lost, we create mythologies of solidarity or rights or atoms—and we barely have strength to erect their statues. No wonder the wild and dimwitted mythologies of the autocrats are so compelling for so many: they capture the essence of the desire itself—to fold back into the pleasant current of unwitting purpose.
Thus is the continual choice set before us: we have the choice to choose free will. We will likely stray once again away from freedom if we continue to erect freedom herself as a god in our mythology, but we might instead simply create a mythology in which creativity and culpability are good. We might instead find home in a place where we wish to see the world expand.