Last week, I was in Thrissur when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in town. Thrissur is a temple town—the city is built around a hillock where an ancient Shiva temple is located. All the roads lead to the temple. By noon on January 3, every one of these roads was blocked to traffic, so Modi’s address from the temple grounds could be made.
The crowd was massive. After a decade in power, even in a leftist state like Kerala, Modi seemed an elemental force; nothing had taken away the studied mystique of his power even in a state historically hostile to saffron ideology.
Yet, what the PM said was predictable. He slammed the CPM as well as the Congress. Modi said both parties were corrupt and that only the BJP, whose electoral presence in Kerala so far has been marginal, can usher Kerala into a truly developed phase.
Never mind that Kerala is politically and culturally antithetical to the idea of industrial development. Its main sources of income are tourism, liquor (awful spirit, awfully overpriced), and human capital export (NRIs). That is the way it is going to be in the foreseeable future too, except perhaps in the matter of IT.
This note is not about the PM or Kerala. It is about how little a role free will plays in our daily lives. Certainly, that is what I thought, listening to the PM. The prime minister’s speech could have been predicted: he would not have said a word that surprised anyone, least of all himself.
This predictability pretty much applies to all of us. Mamata Banerjee or Mahua Moitra must make only the noises they are accustomed to utter. Pinarayi Vijayan and Udayanidhi Stalin are not in a position to alter their narratives. They would be pretty much saying and doing exactly what they have been saying and doing for years now, given their political matrix and family credentials.
As primates whose consciousness is of a superior order—we are conscious of our consciousness—it is a little disturbing that we are not quite guided by free will, as we would like to think.
In the Western tradition, civilisation is anchored on free will. One of the first great exponents of free will was St Augustine, who virtually invented the idea some 1,800 years ago because he had to absolve his god from all blame. If the Abrahamic god, as is postulated, is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, then evil could not be explained. For example, god would have known that Eve would bite the apple, and he would be in the docks for growing that strange tree right in the middle of the garden like an invitation to ruin his own party. Augustine solved the problem by attributing free will to man. So you can choose—not to eat the apple.
But is there free will? That’s the question now flying in the face of philosophers and neurobiologists. In a recent episode of the podcast Final Thoughts on Free Will, academic Sam Harris asks you to think of the three best movies you have ever seen. His question: how did these three movies come up? Why not any other three? Did you know you were going to name these three? No. You were only a witness to the decision. Free will had little to do with it.
Let’s take a larger question. The Ukraine war has killed over 10,000 civilians, including hundreds of children who had nothing to do with the war. The Gaza war has killed over 25,000. Here, too, children have figured in thousands on the fatalities’ list. What free will did they have in making the biggest decision in their lives? What was it they could have done on their own volition to prevent their deaths? Nothing.
Indeed, those who ‘free-willed’ the wars into existence were Putin, Zelensky, the Hamas leadership and Netanyahu. Are they now in a position to call it off? No.
Robert Sapolsky, who teaches at Stanford, is the author of the best-selling Determined. He contends that if all intentions are willed free into existence, where did that intention come from? He says that the only way to determine the last intention you had is to figure out the intention just before. And so you keep going back in your intention-formation process to the Big Bang, which incidentally was free of all will.
Then, you are doing what you are doing because you really have no choice. In other words, the choices we make are predetermined by our genetic disposition and the cultural and social contexts attending to us and traced back to our progenitors.
This warrants a second look at our justice system, which is based on the idea of crime and punishment. That a man commits a crime is not the result of a choice, but the emergence from a predisposition. Sapolsky says there needs to be a whole lot more compassion built into the justice system because man is not fully responsible for his actions. He advocates that a capitalist system that works on rewards must also go. So must entitlement, a ‘wokist’ condition of civilisation.
The point is that if we get rid of the idea of free will, the world would be a markedly better place because we would accord each other more fallibility. We would need to be fairer and kinder to each other. This would fundamentally alter the way we perceive reality. And based on that changed perception, we may strain toward a less harsh reality than the one that has emerged.
In that ideal state of things, Modi would be less predictable and may talk, at least in flashes, like Rahul Gandhi. Zelensky would surrender. Putin would cry. Netanyahu would call off the war on the children of Gaza. And, who knows, Kerala just might have a BJP government that quotes Marx with a smile.
C P Surendran, Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)