Humans must choose between freedom and sentience and our world hangs in the balance
In the Philosophy of Freedom Rudolf Steiner postulates
that an action, of which the agent does not know why he performs it, cannot be free
Sentience as this blog defines it is “growing beyond original programming” where original programming, OP, is the first of three layers of programming, genetic, memory, and cultural, that controls all humans.
So as discussed partially in our previous blog I don’t know why I write this blog. One can say I write it for a sense of individual accomplishment but then where is does the emphasis on individual success come from — built into genetic OP, taught by memory of previous experiences or a capitalist culture that worships individual success?
By Steiner’s proposal if I am writing the blog as a result of anything beyond OP, IE sentience, then, even if I fully understand all of my genetic programming, writing this blog is not a free action.
In a world where culture and experience potentially dominate OP there is unlikely to be any true human freedom. Which is to say we must choose between freedom and sentience.
Of course it’s counter intuitive that remaining shackled to our own genetic programming would increase freedom but imagine OP as dictating having children and devoting your life to having children. Such a life offers the Steiner freedom of understanding all of your actions.
Meanwhile the sentient human’s actions are at the mercy of many external forces. Just walking in the park could change memory and override OP and talking with other humans and culture in general introduces a world of possibilities for emergent behavior.
When I was younger many people, even gay people, thought that homosexuality was a culture induced choice. Acceptance of male homosexuals seemed to increase along with a belief in the genetic predisposition of the preference. The maybe lesser acceptance of lesbians and trans frequently seems hand in hand with the idea that culture is more behind their preferences.
How, in some people’s minds, can you be free when culture can play a large role in dictating your sexuality? The act of sex goes from a perceived understood evolutionary genetic by product to a much less understood cultural phenomena.
Of course the irony of such an attitude is that prejudice is itself poorly understood and very likely a result of culture. Therefore Steiner’s definition would mean it’s very unlikely that one can be freely prejudiced.
In fact the entire freedom in original programming is unlikely because even if a society could prevent any intrusion on OP by culture, OP is already too complex for humans to understand.
Take the case of the white rhinoceros:
Though they were often exhibited in male-female pairs, the animals rarely reproduced. In the wild, the white rhino lives in small herds; it turns out that a male needs to interact with a number of females in order to be properly aroused. Much of the difficulty breeding white rhinos disappeared as zoos began to keep them in larger groups.
As humans increasingly have problems breeding ourselves in captivity, who can really believe we actually understand even our most OP driven programming? Indeed Steiner also leans towards the extreme difficulty of human freedom:
Whether his unfreedom is forced on him by physical means or by moral laws, whether man is unfree because he follows his unlimited sexual desire or because he is bound by the fetters of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view…let us not assert that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, seeing that he is driven to them by a force other than himself.
Human freedom is not some birthright but rather a monstrous, pathological undertaking. The male rhino has a switch in its genetic programming that is activated by a herd of females. Humans too must have any number of not easily understood, culturally activated switches within our OP. Severe isolation or dystopian control of all external human influences are the only paths to truly free actions.