“Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on it”

Thus, according to Boswell, spoke Dr Johnson in response to some specious statement. Our great savant clearly didn’t anticipate the arrival of Edward O Wilson two centuries later.

Edward O Wilson, RIP

Prof. Wilson, who died at 92 on Boxing Day, wasn’t exactly the founder of sociobiology, as some describe him. But he certainly was its tireless populariser and glorifier.

His original field was myrmecology, the study of ants, and he made seminal contributions to that science. How seminal, I can’t judge. But judging by the 150-odd scientific prizes Wilson won, he was highly rated by his fellow professionals.

Being a rank amateur, I’m more interested in the second phase of his career, when he extrapolated onto humans his knowledge of ants. Essentially, he found that all animals, from ants to us, have their behaviour not only skewed but indeed predetermined by heredity.

Free will is then a dangerous illusion propagated by the likes of Dr Johnson, ignoramuses who had never studied the social behaviour of ants. And they get their cue from religion, that dangerous exercise in deception.

“So I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths,” Wilson said in 2015, displaying refreshing ignorance about the history, and also the meaning, of progress.

Prof. Wilson didn’t suggest expedients by which that laudable end could be achieved. Experience, however, suggests that the best, if short-lived, way of eliminating religious beliefs is to eliminate religious believers, but to his credit Prof. Wilson advocated no such measure.  

He famously used a photographic simile to make his point. A man’s personality, and consequently his behaviour over a lifetime, he explained, is like an undeveloped photo negative. It contains the whole picture, with no detail omitted.

In the course of his life, a man may develop all of the negative, some of it or none of it – but he can neither add anything to it nor take anything away (Wilson was writing in the pre-Photoshop days). He thus added his name to the list of determinists who have had a founding, and pernicious, effect on modernity: Marx, Darwin and Freud.

When Wilson first unveiled that theory in 1978 he became a target for vicious attacks from the Left, especially ‘progressive’ students. They were appalled by any suggestion that human behaviour is in any way affected by biology.

They gobbled up Marxist determinism, hailed Darwin’s and especially welcomed Freud’s because it dealt with their itchy naughty bits. But Wilson’s genetic determinism smacked of racism too much for their liking.

Wilson himself never even hinted at the possibility of some races being inferior to others, but the noses of enraged youths possess nothing short of bloodhound acuity. Prof. Wilson started to be cancelled long before the term was coined.

He was a Nazi, personally responsible for genocide! A racist! A eugenicist! So screamed those progressive students, as they picketed Wilson’s lectures. “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” sang the chorus of young firebrands.

One girl emptied a jug of water over the scientist’s head, and I’m only amazed he was never subjected to a less symbolic but more wounding attack.

For it’s an article of faith for the progressives that every person starts out as a tabula rasa, on which economics and sociology then scribble their messages – and progressives have been known to kill defending their right to that patently unscientific opinion.

Now, I don’t mind dismissing scientific theories, but dismissing scientific facts betokens the kind of stupidity that doesn’t even merit a refutation. That we are all, to some extent, a product of heredity is one such fact, and one doesn’t have to be a scientist to know it’s true.

But ‘to some extent’ are the operative words. To claim that we can’t act against our genetic predisposition isn’t just to deny our religion. It’s to deny our humanity.

Wilson’s determinism reduces people to puppets whose wires are pulled by their ancestors’ traits, or else to fish swimming in their genetic pool and lacking both the need and the ability to come up for air.

It’s from this intellectual premise that one could launch a devastating attack on Wilson’s soulless determinism. Accusing him of genocide is so perverse that it’s hardly sporting to aim one’s slings and arrows at those who mouth such gibberish. They should be told to shut up and stay silent until they’ve extricated their brains from the cesspit of bubbling emotions.

Yet it’s that unsporting target that Daniel Finkelstein has picked in The Times. Wilson, he writes, “was achingly, obviously right. How likely is it that human beings are the one species whose capacities and behaviour aren’t largely influenced by biology? If every other animal’s behaviour demands an evolutionary explanation, how can it possibly be that ours does not?”

Do you notice a copout? Wilson didn’t just maintain that our capacities and behaviour are “largely influenced by biology”. According to him, they are so influenced wholly.

That is a folly as glaring and, if you will, ‘progressive’ as the insistence on the genocidal nature of genetics. This folly springs from the materialist obscurantism involved in treating man as just another animal.

An animal man may be, but he is “achingly, obviously” not just an animal. Unlike a cat, a dog or for that matter an ant, man isn’t a walking replica of his genetic make-up. He is “achingly, obviously” endowed with faculties that transcend materialism.

Christianity uses terms like ‘soul’ and ‘free will’ in this context, while neuroscientists prefer talking about consciousness. They have spent untold billions in any currency you care to name on all those Genome Projects and Decades of the Brain, trying to find a material explanation for that extra-material factor – and predictably failed.

If anything, they’ve uncovered new barriers on the way to that destination. It was like a desert mirage: the closer neuropsychologists got to the oasis of knowledge, the farther it moved away.

Tarred as they are with the brush of our materialist, deracinated modernity, those scientists resort to the cardsharp’s trick of saying that yes, unfortunately they can’t yet prove that consciousness has a purely material explanation. But since we all know that’s the case, they’ll find the truth sooner or later.

The only thing they’ve found so far is that sometimes their scanner screens light up, and sometimes they don’t. It’s political bias, not scientific integrity, that prevents them from acknowledging that Dr Johnson, unburdened as he was by oscillographic technology, was right in his a priori statement.

Lord Finkelstein is commendably merciless to those brainless youngsters who didn’t see much difference between Wilson and Hitler. Yet he doesn’t realise that, by accepting the premise of man being just a bigger ant or a cleverer ape, he is one of those ‘progressives’ in every way that matters.

“We must defend good science against bad politics,” he writes. I agree. So do let’s start by defending good common sense against crude, hare-brained, demonstrably defunct materialism. As exemplified by Edward O Wilson, his gonadic detractors – and Lord Finkelstein.

11 thoughts on ““Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on it””

  1. What kind of boy grows up wanting to study ants for a living? I’m working on a thesis about the correlation between autism and materialism.

    1. My wife works with autistic children. Most of them are wonderful children who just have issues with focus and responses. I would hesitate to call them all materialists. (He said with a wink and a smile!)

  2. Back on 1 January I lamented (under “We are all Pontius Pilates now”) that philosophy is no longer taught. Another commentator then questioned the “social utility of philosophy”. Well, any first year student of philosophy, logic, or rhetoric would see right through these specious arguments and comparisons.

    Biologically I should have been in the construction trade. My father, his two brothers, and my grandfather were all in construction. Somehow I ended up sitting at a desk with a keyboard in front of me. Let’s see an ant do that!

    How can any rational person can think that man is just another animal? Their thoughts and actions are incongruous. I know people obsessed with helping animals who would never in their wildest dreams consider helping children in an orphanage or at a community center or picketing an abortion clinic. Imagine the outrage if I started rounding up pregnant animals and ripped the fetuses from their wombs! “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Which “animal” needs more help: a one-year-old feral cat (that can find and kill its own food) or a one-year-old human?

    I seem to have gotten off track. Any person holding to the “man is just another animal” argument is covering for something.

    This also remind some of Mr. Boot’s article on the study of apes moving their lips. Some moved their lips, some started talking – humans! No big deal.

    1. Humans tried raising a chimpanzee as if it was a human child. Tried to make it talk as a human but at some point about that of two year old the progress just stopped. The entire mouth and throat structure of the chimp unlike that of a human. So no good.

      Nor can we forget Koko the talking gorilla. Talked in sign language so we are told. I am not sure.

      Wilson his theories based on the fact that ants do not have brains but do have a very complex social structure. All their behavior the result of chemical reactions in the body [as small as their bodies are].

      1. “Humans tried raising a chimpanzee as if it was a human child.”

        I think the problem is the reverse: some so-called human theories that imply human children be raised like chimpanzees. Never mind that children are traditionally not “raised” but “reared”.

    2. I agree with you on everything, except your romantic view of philosophy students. Never mind first-year ones — I know philosophy graduates who don’t even know what an argument is, nor probably know the meaning of ‘specious’. As to teaching philosophy at schools, they do that in France, with results that can only generously be described as mixed. One can hear school leavers arguing which of them is Cartesian and which is Pascalian, in a way that makes one realise they’ve read neither Descartes nor Pascal. This vindicates Alexander Pope, who said “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Our pupils will do well if they emerge out of secondary school able to read without moving their lips.

      1. Of course you are correct. Perhaps I was thinking of how philosophy was taught (and argued) before I was born. When the topic of education is discussed my favorite argument is to compare soldiers’ letters home during our Civil War and text messages from today’s youth. I think that sums it up quite well. Soon we will do away with written words and will communicate via pictographs. Progress! Within two or three generations the ability to speak will be lost.

        1. Another useful exercise is comparing police reports of yesteryear with today’s. 100 years ago, cops wrote better than most of today’s philosophy graduates. Actually, I know such an American policeman even today, who writes better than most of today’s journalists. But he is rather an exception.

  3. Just a thought: If I say that in ten seconds time I will put my hand in the air and then in ten seconds i do exactly that then would that mean either free will exists or it doesn’t exist but I can predict the future.

    Thank you Mr Boot for your wonderful, insightful and thoughtful articles. Have a very happy new year.

  4. I hear that one can, however, learn much about communists by studying ants. Or vice versa.
    I have been watching recently the excellent Attenborough animal series, whose various titles could all be summarized aptly into one: Who Eats Who, How, and When.
    It fares badly were these lunatics right.

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