Posted by
JDComments on Monday, January 08, 2007 4:25:32 PM
A remarkable man named Wesley Autrey last week saved someone by an awesome display of heroism which entailed jumping into the path of an oncoming subway and shielding the other man's body with his own. Coming as it did during a season when the spirit is venerated, it inspired even in cynical New Yorkers feelings of good will and admiration, and perhaps even, dare I say, moral righteousness.
Yet the NY Times, in an
attempt to understand why something like this sometimes happens, has managed to reduce this sublime example of man's capability for goodness into a biomechanical and psychological reaction which involves "mirror neurons" and the anterior cingulate of the brain, as well as references to navy training.
In other words, the proverbial Liberal reductionism which defines us as organic machines which can always be understood and even programmed .
This is the same model which views criminals as "victims" of their environment, with no responsibility for what they do, which is just the consequences of what had been done to them.
It is the reason the word "responsibility" carries so little weight with Leftists- they don't really see us making decisions so much as carrying out our internal programming over which we have limited control. This is Man as automaton.
The bigger picture then is the question of "free will" which the Times also addressed last week in an
article which was really quite interesting.
Again , the major premise analyzed is whether man is "mechanistic" in that he is subject to the same physical laws which , through the application of cause and effect, determine all that happens. The piece offers a number of ideas, but pretty much comes down on the side that , while we may seem to have free will, it is probably only an illusion because of the complexity of the Universe, and that in truth everything is predetermined by forces acting according to scientific laws.
It seems to me that this is an attempt to fit into the "scientific box" that men has devised things that do not belong there. As a person with an advanced degree in nuclear physics, I have the utmost respect for forces and actions and reactions, but they do not seem to explain the components involved in moral choices.
As the article explains, there are emergent characteristics which arise from complex systems, and consciousness is one of these. As a result, conscious beings are bombarded with information that nonsentient objects are not even aware of.
For instance a car or mountain would not recognize a "force" from the presence of a crying child, for a force is defined as a push or pull. A human will have a "force" exerted on it by the child, but whether that force causes an effect in the human is determined by that human. One may comfort the child, another ignore it. There is no scientific law comparable to F=Ma which correlates a given mass with a given force and acceleration for determining how the human will react to the crying child. The proverbial cause and effect are not established by scientific principles, but rather by
morality as defined as value choices .Now it maybe that there are laws which determine our reactions, and we really have no free will. But trying to prove that by recourse to , and extrapolation of, the scientific laws we have discovered is just plain silly, for not only are we not dealing with apples and apples [in deference to Newton who gave birth to modern mechanistic determinism], we may be trying to compare apples to the ephemeral and sublime thing we call the
soul , and to treat them the same is worse than a mistake, it is a refusal to acknowledge the limits of our knowledge and the magnificence of what the Universe has given birth to.
It seeks to find banality in what is awesome , and that does not raise us up, but rather impoverishes us all.
Liberalism's blind faith in rationalism reduces the Universe to a sterile, valueless wasteland which blindly enacts an existence which is already written and decided. There is no room here for goodness or heroism, only machines blindly going through their paces, dancing to commands they are not even aware of.
Even the attempts by Liberals to pass laws to "improve" us would have to be deemed useless in this environment, like whistling into the wind, futile efforts to no avail.
Without choice there is really no meaning, only puppetlike acting which carries no lessons, or consequences or rewards. Without choice Wesley Autrey is is just another cog performing his assigned task. I suspect anyone who witnessed his heroic act last week would take exception to that.