I want to discuss here one of the oldest and most persistent problems which presents itself to both philosophy and social science: the freedom versus determinism debate. How much of our behaviour is authentically free choice and how much of it is determined by social, biological or other factors? I speculate that many people have thought about this question at some time even if not in a particularly systematic manner. Is life like a complex chess game with all moves pre-determined or is it simply a matter of chance? Classical Newtonian mechanics, with their image of a world run like clockwork in a precise and controlled manner, could be interpreted to give support to a fairly deterministic view of the universe. In contrast, quantum mechanics and Chaos theory, even to a complete lay-person such as myself, present a perspective of the universe which, at least in part, is highly random and problematical.

Of course, complete determinism and complete autonomy are the extremes of the spectrum of debate and most of our behaviour may fall somewhere in between, being neither fully determined nor totally free. Is there anyway of deciding on what part of the spectrum particular aspects of our behaviour lies? Most people, for example, will be attending this lecture in a different way and for different motives than they attend work: the element of economic compulsion is absent. Freedom is such an all encompassing concept that an agreed definition is not possible but we can at least consider some aspects of the phenomena.

Here I take scientific determinism to mean the level of predictive accuracy available in various areas of scientific discourse. Following John Searle we can identify three major headings.

Hard science.

These are the physical and natural sciences. The type of science, if you will, that the "man in the street" conventionally means by science. The very word "scientist" is used to conjure up someone who is concerned with rigorous levels of proof as against those who offer commonplace assertions or religious dogmas. This conventional wisdom has some basis in fact. Hard science is orientated towards the controlled conditions of a laboratory where extraneous variables can be controlled and experiments carried out which are repeatable with a high level of predictability of the result. To put it rather simplistically, it is legitimate to think of hard science as being law governed. If one thinks of the hardest of hard sciences, mathematics, then this becomes clear. (In the rarefied abstractness of pure mathematics arguments about causality become more interpretive but this qualifies, rather than negates, the argument here.) Mathematics is so acknowledged to be law governed and internally consistent that one often sees attempts to seek status reinforcement via mathematics in such areas as economics and applied psychology.

It is possible to say that a./ eating too much has a direct causal relationship with b./ obesity. However, the precise manner in which this occurs is not easily traceable because "there's a rather complex series of processes by which food is converted into fat deposits in living organisms". (Searle, 1984,a) Whilst this particular example from biology exhibits a significant level of causality between action and consequence the actual pathway is obscured by the multitude of variables in play. It is interesting that Searle still considers biology to be a hard science despite the term "organism" having "no echo" in physics. Maybe it would be legitimate to say that biology is at the soft end of the hard science spectrum?

Science of a special kind.

Meteorology is a good example of science of a special kind. Using modern techniques, satellite photographs, radar, balloons, high flying weather aircraft etc. a vast amount of hard data can be obtained. Most importantly, the means to correlate this information is now available via powerful computers. Statistical inferences can be made and past weather patterns minutely compared. Meteorological measurement, then, can use all the techniques familiar to us from hard science. Yet, the weather forecast is often incorrect in the short-term and it has proved almost impossible to provide reasonably reliable long-term forecasts.

The number of inter-dependent variables: wind speed and direction, temperature, rainfall, humidity, etc. mean that the meteorologist is dealing with a constantly changing scenario of events. Extremely small initial differences in weather patterns become magnified over time eventually leading to entirely different weather patterns. This is Lorenz's butterfly effect" or more precisely "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." Reiteration done on the simplest of calculators deftly illustrates the point.

Science of a special kind, then, has some correlations in terms of research methodology with hard science but differs from it in the impossibility of controlling variables. In meteorology we are talking about a fairly low level of predictability of phenomena, non-repeatability of patterns (although Chaos theory notes that quasi-periodicity is not unusual), and generally a scientific method that is subject to tendencies rather than governed by laws

Social Science

Social science deals with a myriad of variables which simply cannot be accurately measured in the same way as in meteorology. Obviously, laboratory type experimental research methods are out of the question because to break up a social group is to destroy the social interaction and, indeed, even to observe social activity may be to modify it.

But, it is not simply the number of variables present which makes social science alien to the natural sciences but the fact that the object of study can, and often does, exhibit subjective intentionality: i.e. human beings have mind and therefore consciousness and possess the ability to act upon the world in order to modify it. As Lukacs would term it social praxis.

The radical discontinuity between the social disciplines on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other derives from the role of the mind in the social disciplines. (Searle, 1984,a)

This has some important consequences.

Phenomena in social science are, at least partially, created because people conceptualise them. So, to elaborate on one of Searle's examples, a Muslim in Britain who had undergone a Registry Office wedding would not think of themselves as married, even though legally they are. They would think of themselves as married after undergoing the religious service. This is unlike the natural sciences where if you jump off a skyscraper you will fall to the ground whatever you believe will happen. In the biological sciences you may not know you have Cancer but you will still have it irrespective of your ignorance.

Predictions can themselves alter behaviour.

As Searle says "if somebody predicts that I'm going to do something, I might just damn well do something else." (Searle, 1984,b) On the other hand a projection of behaviour may reinforce a possible recurrence of previously enacted patterns. For example, media predictions of crowd violence at certain football matches may almost compel the hooligan element to live up to their image.

Because the presence of mind, as the very existence of psychology implies, is not identical with consciousness an unreal understanding of real social phenomena can develop. Indeed, the understanding of reality of even those who are diligent, prescient and schooled in scientific discourse is notoriously schematic and unreliable. From such concerns does an ideological understanding of society arise: using ideology to mean a distorted representation of social reality, which tends to conceal contradictions.

In a class based society the problems are compounded because ideologies work on at least three different levels. At the level of false consciousness: the unreal understanding of real social relationships (and the real understanding of unreal social relationships). At the level of pragmatic acceptance: sometimes critical of the social system but enmeshed in the view "that nothing can be done about it anyway". Finally, ideology operates as a context of lived experiences: it is impossible not to be in society no matter how much one critically attempts not to be of society. How many people really did not want to be part of the commercialised Christmas extravaganza yet are almost forced to take part in it? It is important to note that these components of ideology are intertwined and separated here only for purposes of discussion. The struggle against ideology, in whatever form it takes, has got to be seen as a real contribution towards intellectual freedom.

Intentionality

At an individual level of behaviour Searle puts forward the concept of intentionality as a guide to human activity. The concept is devoid of the subjective idealism present in many psychological explanations.

There is not always a simple explanation for our actions and the consequences arising from them. The range of freedom of manoeuvre can be quite varied. If a drunken driver kills a pedestrian it can certainly be said that he or she created a physiological state where this was more likely to occur than if they had not been drinking, but there may have been no intention to kill. Now suppose that a business person decides to run down their partner who they suspect of fraudulent dealing. The brakes on their car fail and they succeed in killing the victim. The intention to kill was there but the intention did not result in the death.

Someone drives a car to this meeting. Their intention was to get to this meeting. It was not the intention to enhance the "greenhouse" effect or to contribute towards the level of pollutants material in the atmosphere which statistically increase the risk of asthma and cancer. The intentions of the serial killer who kills under orders from 'voices in the head' has to be decided legally in court. One could go on but I have no time here and refer to a comprehensive discussion. (Searle,1987, p.135-140) The point I want to make is that theories of intentionality enable us to think logically about individual behaviour and that this is a significant difference from other doctrines of individual behaviour which promise to deliver a lot more information but actually provide much less.

In his earlier works Herbert Marcuse conflates happiness and freedom (MacIntyre, pp.36, 65) but this is an unhappy connection. Freedom may be a necessary prerequisite for the attainment of happiness in a society governed by rationality, but in a non-rational society this freedom may be intensely frustrating. What reasonably responsible human being, for example, who can exercise some critical thought would not like to do something real and imminent about poverty and exploitation in the imperialised sectors of the world economy? In such a situation of dis-empowerment ignorance really could be bliss.

The humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, in his hierarchy of needs, provides a more taxonomic explanation but the basic idea is the same. (Medcof and Roth, p.244)

However, the fulfilment of basic physiological needs is only a necessity for freedom not freedom itself. This is a precursor which two thirds of the worlds population are not privy to. For real freedom only begins when the labour necessary to sustain life ceases. A major orientation of the Marxist project is a high level of labour productivity structured in such a way as to allow a radical diminishment of time spent in labour. To this extent, free time is a prefigurative requirement before one can begin to talk about genuine freedom. (Heller, p.119)

Caudwell puts it quite well when he says of Bertrand Russell that, "...Russell, who writes In Praise of Idleness, praises rightly, for he is clever because he is idle and bourgeois, not idle and bourgeois because he is clever." (Caudwell, p.4)

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. (Marcuse, p.21)

Of course, much of our freedom of choice is curtailed by economic factors but Marcuse is making a more subtle point. Even when economic factors are equal, or are not a consideration, why is it that the mass of the people consume products, music, the mass media, sport, politics, education or whatever, which tend to reinforce their subordinate role in the structures of domination? The point is that the general cultural level of the economically advanced capitalist societies is so impoverished as to constantly diminish freedom by promoting and enhancing the lowest common denominator in all areas. There are many reasons why a market system is incompatible with authentic freedom and this is just one of them.

A democratically organised and centrally planned economy with a high level of labour productivity, based on exponential gains in the automation of production, is an essential prefigurative requirement for freedom. There are two potential problems here.

Firstly, the attempts at central planning so far have basically been a mixture of non-planning at the micro level allied to profoundly bureaucratic command in the heavy industry sector. Whether this problem is historically inevitable or whether it is one which is attributable to a specific historical conjuncture, as I would argue, is a question of first order importance which I simply do not have time to deal with here but which I hope will be expanded on in discussion. 

Secondly, the manner in which the free time would be used is important. Marxists and all manner of radicals have, perhaps naively, simply assumed that people would use free time to somehow "improve the human condition": reading, travel etc.? Whether this is so with the impact of the leisure industries and electronic media is at least questionable. What would be chosen? 

It is worth mentioning that there is a view that the nature v nurture debate is valueless because over time the two factors become inextricably intertwined and it is not possible to achieve any realistic separation of them. This is a view with which I concur. The only reason for dealing with the nature v nurture debate is because it is constantly thrust forward as a quasi political explanation for behaviour. The present Conservative government, for example, strenuously resists all attempts to attribute youth criminality to deprived environmental circumstances.

If we focus on intelligence for a moment within the wider discussion. It may be that so many different factors contribute towards what is termed intelligence that a definition is hubristic. For example, the ability to recall data - memory, and the ability to accumulate data - knowledge are obviously necessary for intelligence to function yet they are not intelligence itself, although the former is often sufficient to obtain good educational results. Furthermore, if it is the case that intelligence is composed of many, possibly dozens, of different yet interrelated abilities, verbal, numerical, spatial etc. then a definition of intelligence in any narrow sense becomes even more muddied.

The only way to provide evidence which could legitimately be regarded as at the level of proof for either genetic inheritance or environmental conditioning of intelligence would be to separate monozygotic twins at birth and to bring them up in widely different but strictly controlled environments. This procedure could be used to test personality also. To test for aggression we could separate female twins at birth in order to test whether aggression is due to innate factors or differing socialisation processes. The above are impractical both for ethical reasons and probably organisational ones also.

Arthur Jensen argues that intelligence is overwhelmingly biologically determined: an 80% to 20% split in favour of genetic inheritance. (Jensen, pp.396-7) If this is the case then nothing can be done to enhance the majority proportion of a persons intelligence. It is fair to note, however, as Jensen himself says, that the 20% which can be attributed to environmental circumstances is important when intelligence is supposed to confirm to a normal distribution curve. The problem occurs when work such as Jensen's is interpreted, he would say misinterpreted, to mean that the inferior position of working class people, women and black people in society flows from their lack of intelligence. For instance, Jensen notes that American Negroes typically score 15 I.Q. points lower than American whites on the intelligence tests. (p.247) Those at the top are there because they are more intelligent than those who inhabit the lower reaches of the social structure. It is a marvellous argument for supporting the status quo. Of course, the alleged relationships between intelligence and social position are not usually put as starkly as this but the implications are always extant.

One of the best short critiques of the I.Q. debate is still Leon J. Kamin's The Science and Politics of I.Q. (Wiley, 1974)

Kamin points out that Sir Cyril Burt's results, which purported to show that intelligence is overwhelmingly due to biological inheritance, were so remarkably mathematically consistent as to be hardly credible. In a 1943 paper Burt presents a large number of I.Q. correlations. Where are these from and what tests were used to obtain them? The "majority remain buried in typed memoranda or degree theses Burt reports. It is perhaps pertinent to note that Burt was not satisfied with "crude", i.e. actual test results but used "adjusted assessments" which gave him an extraordinary high level of correlations.

In a 1955 paper the entire description of Burt's procedure is relegated to a single footnote. In the footnote it says, "For the assessments of the parents we relied chiefly on personal interviews." Kamin says of this procedure, "clearly the intelligence of adults was simply guessed at in the course of a personal interview. The spectacle of Professor Burt administering a camouflaged test of intelligence to a London grandparent has considerable comic merit but it does not inspire scientific confidence."

Kamin goes on to note that the intelligence tests used in the 1962 Shields Study are somewhat questionable. One of them, for example, is a British Army job category test which has no standardisation data for females. The 1963 Erlenmeyer-Kimling & Jarvik figure purports to show no less than 30,000 correlations. Kamin shows that 15,086 of these pairs do not concern either monozygotic or dizygotic twins and it is not clear why they were included at all. Fifty two studies from which data was supposedly extracted were never published as promised and after obtaining data from Jarvik, Kamin considers their emphasis on hereditary factors as decisive to be "highly exaggerated."

In short, there seems to be so much concern to determine genetic factors as offering major explanatory primacy in the intelligence debate that one can only assume that a right wing bias exists which means that it is not politically acceptable to factor in realistic accounts of environmental circumstances. In terms of the freedom v determinism debate it is the case that if environment does play a substantial role in the determination of intelligence then there must also exist a degree of freedom to enhance, or attenuate, its potency.

'Soap operas' achieve the top television viewing figures with an inevitable regularity. There does appear to be a definite audience for the escapism of momentarily living out ones life in a mediated representational format. Virtual reality technology offers a significant enhancement of the escapism because of its interactive nature. Soon it will be possible not only to watch a film but to play a role in it.

At the moment V.R. technology is somewhat limited by the tremendous amounts of computer power it requires. It is at a fairly primitive stage of historical development. Perhaps by the end of the century, it will be possible for at least the wealthy to live - more or less permanently - in a completely artificial environment deliberately disconnected from even the remotest connection with reality. This could be termed a prison in paradise. (Those of lesser financial circumstances will have to make do with visits to V.R. arcades for a total V.R. experience with perhaps partial V.R. experiences at home.) The tactile body suit is already under development and when this reaches fruition the need for other people will be minimised even for sexual activity. Sex with the interface of a computer: the ultimate in alienation?

Virtual reality offers interesting, and potentially liberating, possibilities for disciplines such as archaeology and history, it will be possible to recreate the past, but it also offers the prospect of a brave new fantasy world. Ultimately V.R. may offer not only the opportunity of interacting with the medium but of becoming integrated with it.

I have mentioned that virtual reality relies for its existence on an enormous computing capacity but computers themselves present severe problems. Carchedi talks about what he terms "software reasoning". This deals in:

formalized conceptual models in which the whole is seen as the simple and mechanical addition of its parts; the relation between the parts is seen as harmonious and complementary interdependence; contradictions are perceived as dysfunctions; supersession is experienced as decay; dialectical relations are reduced to mechanical relations of feedback. (Carchedi, p.239)

The machine has chained us to its own mode of operation almost without us noticing it.

Software reasoning, then, is a step by step logical progression of thinking which annuls the creative aspects of human thought. It must explicitly place profound parametric constraints on one's mode of thinking. Cognitive structures are pre-defined entities with no room for a creative input. Knowledge is reduced to arithmetical additions. The complete antithesis of dialectical thinking.

Carchedi notes other negative aspects of the computer where it is profoundly antagonistic, at least under capitalism, to human freedom.

Computerisation "depersonalizes the individual labourer." In the ultimate case the individual is reduced to a terminal number.

Computers are injurious to health. Carchedi mentions injuries to the eyes and to the central nervous system. In addition the evidence against exposure to (even minute) electromagnetic fields, such as those emitted from the cathode ray tube of computers, (like the one used to produce this document!), is becoming ever more categorical.

The computer allows a continuous and contemporaneous control over the workforce. In the former case, the office secretary has lost the aspects of 'informal employee mobility' and control over the execution of work tasks which previously allowed some autonomy over the job. In the latter case, the store manager has an instant and continuous record of the checkout operators output.

Computers make it much easier to increase the levels of worker supervision envisaged in Taylorist work practices and to further accentuate the division of labour by deskilling work.

Archaeology indicates that wine has been produced for at least ten thousand years and mead for some centuries previously. Doubtless, naturally occurring plant drugs have been used over similarily protracted periods. Alcohol and tobacco are widely used in many contemporary societies both as mood enhancers confined to specific social situations, and as a fairly constant stimulant which enables one to cope with the vagaries of everyday life. Generally, alcohol performs the former role and tobacco the latter. Indeed, the constant use of alcohol is rather frowned upon, not least because of the negative effects, physical and financial, it can induce both upon the user and his or her significant others.

Alcohol and tobacco, and of course all the illegal drugs, demand a payoff in terms of a loss of individual freedom: in extreme cases a complete disfunction between behavioural activity and an ability to control that activity. The payoff may be short term but extremely intense in the case of, say, alcohol or protracted and attenuated in the case of tobacco. If the drug usage is long-term and intense, as in alcoholism or drug addiction, then it is conventionally labelled as a medical problem.

"Soma", then, the drug which promotes contentment in Huxley's Brave New World is more of a fictional exaggeration and partial caricature of the way in which we use drugs in this society rather than a complete disjunction from it. New "psychodrugs", such as Prozac, threaten to radically narrow the demarcation between fiction and everyday reality. If psychopharmacology can provide us with a permanently taken drug which is reported to make one feel both physically and psychically, better than "normal": i.e., it creates a new normality, then this, obviously, has radical implications for human freedom. Already some corporations are looking, albeit tentatively, into the potential use of psychopharmacology to create a satisfied, and thereby productive, workforce.

If normality becomes equal to a permanently drugged state then at least three major questions arise. Firstly, dependency on the drug. It could be argued that this is no different from a diabetic who is permanently dependent on insulin but there is a distinction between constant use of a drug for genuine medical reasons and voluntary use as a personality modifier. How long would the usage be voluntary?

Secondly, the everyday use of a psychodrug produces the question who am I? Is the real person the undrugged or drugged entity? It could be argued that this is a trivial question. For example, our personality may change daily, in fact hourly, simply with the intake of food which alters the blood sugar level but there may be a large difference in degree between effects experienced by the natural functioning of the body and the effects of modifications due to drug usage.

Finally, what are the possibilities for human creativity under the influence of psychodrugs. Possibly, such drugs will enable human beings to experience new insights but angst has been such an integral part of the human condition that one wonders what its absence would mean. It can be surmised that psychopharmacology has an inbuilt bias in favour of sustaining the status quo. The removal of dissatisfaction suggests a consequent lack of interest in promoting or even thinking about social change. There would be no need to worry about social inequality if those at the bottom end of the social scale were happy with their life.

In the end drugs are about controlling people. When one considers that a country that can organise the immense logistics necessary for the Gulf War supposedly cannot interdict the flow of drugs into its national territory, then it is legitimate to suggest that the US ruling class has an interest in sustaining illegal drug use amongst the underprivileged sections of its population. The fact that the US state wants the policing control that illegal drugs gives them is emphasised by the outcry of protest heaped upon the proposal, by US Surgeon General Joyce Elders, to decriminalise drug use thereby destroying the profit motive for the criminal gangs and the violent crime which they generate. (Spartacist, p.6)

Having argued the case for making illegal drugs legal it is important to note that some major companies are starting to erode their employees freedom by making legal drugs illegal for employment purposes.

"CNN - the news agency - refuses to employ anyone who smokes, even if they smoke out of working hours and only in their own home. The Ford Meter Box Company in Indiana carries out urine tests to find out whether their staff have been smoking at home - and sacks them if they have. U-Haul, a haulage company, fines its employees if they smoke OFF the job and USG, a Chicago based firm, carries out "lung tests" on its employees. The degree of discrimination against workers who smoke has become so serious in America that over half the states have now passed anti-discrimination laws - like sex and race discrimination laws - to safeguard the rights of those employees who smoke." (FOREST, p.1-2)

In Britain The Royal Liverpool Victoria Hospital is attempting to impose a total no drinking and no smoking ban on all its employees "from medics to porters". (Ibid)  

Conclusion is something of a misnomer because the question of freedom and determinism is a very substantial one. I noticed, in Gillian Hawtin's, A Century of Progressive Thought: The Story of Leicester Secular Society, that "determinism and free will" (p.7) was one of the topics discussed by the Society in the last century. No doubt it will come up for discussion in the next! I am only able to cover here what I believe are some key areas and I hope to have raised more questions than given answers. We can probably sum up the debate by saying that we do indeed have some individual decision making capacities but that these are severely restrained by material circumstances. "Men make history but not under circumstances of their own choosing" as Marx eloquently suggests. At one level our behaviour is both completely free yet completely determined.

What makes the mediations so difficult to define is that neither individual behaviour nor material circumstances are in anyway rigidly set and social actors cannot be allocated their activities in advance. There is a massive jump, then, from understanding the general methodological point: individuals have some freedom of action within the parametric constraints operating upon them, to identifying specific instances. Who would have thought, for example, that during the 1984/5 miners strike that men would have been prepared to lose jobs, houses and in some cases marriages to struggle for a principle. I doubt that many of the miners, if they had thought logically about this before the strike, would have been prepared to do so. However, after a certain point they had gone so far that the social/financial constraints that usually restrict behaviour had been overcome.

* A Lecture presented to Leicester Secular Society, 23-1-94.

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HELLER, Agnes, The Theory of Need in Marx, Allison and Busby, 1976.

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SPARTACIST PUBLICATIONS, Workers Vanguard, No. 590, 17.12.93, Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116.