Freedom in A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange, an acclaimed film by Kubrick, asks us what it means for man to be free. Its protagonist lives a youth of what he calls "ultra-violence" where during the night he roams around with a gang of friends savagely beating who he pleases, stealing what he can, and generally being a curmudgeon. Eventually he accidentally murders someone, gets caught, and goes to prison. He wins release by agreeing to undergo a fictional two week behavior modification program which uses classical conditioning to force him into associating intense feelings of suffering with any violent or malicious act. He cannot willingly do wrong without excruciation. The film introduces a political dialogue surrounding his treatment where one party calls his state deprived of freedom and will, and the other ignores questions of will and claims that he is a better man as a result.

The question posed by the first party's assertion that he loses human freedom when compelled to action by psychological training is an interesting one. We are inclined to wonder whether he is free when so conditioned.

Several influential philosophers actually adopted views regarding freedom similar to the fictional dissidents of Clockwork Orange who find the protagonist not to be free. Locke for one argued essentially that to be free, we must do as we choose, which consists of picking our action, and also of having the ability to preform that action. This is interesting in the context of A Clockwork Orange because the film implies that were we psychologically trained to hate one act, then we would have our freedom, a freedom that we supposedly innately possess, abridged.

When our protagonist is trained not only to detest violence, but also the music playing while violent images are broadcast to him during his treatment, we are moved to feel outraged at the loss. The doctor overseeing him even has full capability to just flip the switch on the Beethoven, and thus save his subject the loss of something beautiful, but he chooses not to.

But why are we upset? We are upset because we have this belief that innately in us is the ability to, of our own volition, like classical music, hate classical music, and live as we see fit. Our perception of classical conditioning(1) as depriving us of this core freedom should set off warning bells in the context of freedom. Conditioning hardly stops when experimenting does. In the example of the doctor altering the movie's protagonist, we have this active entity that can be faulted for the process, but what of all the other times when we are so conditioned?

As I understand it, when we play a video game, win, receive praise, and then enjoy that game as a result, we are being conditioned. When we do something society conceives of as bad, are yelled at, and then avoid that action or feel guilty about it thereafter, we are being conditioned. When someone makes a comment on our clothing, and we associate that subconsciously into our perceptions of that item, we are being conditioned. This form of input determines how we respond to much of the world, and in this way our behavior is actively shaped by everything around us?

How does the omnipresence of conditioning matter for freedom? As you may have guessed, if we are going to say that an experiment removing someone's choice also takes away their liberty, then we never really were free. It seems that none of ou decision making criteria are free of the influence of condition. In the coming years, as our understanding of the human brain grows, it will be fascinating to find out just how deeply we are conditioned, but certainly to the extent that our sensibilities are purely products of experience, our actions are as inevitably determined as a rock's fall.

(1) As a simplified version, classical conditioning theory holds that when we experience something that innately makes us respond, like a strong flavor, in conjunction with something that doesn't, like someone whistling near us, eventually we will have responses that would normally accompany the flavor from hearing a whistler.

Finals

Hello my small reading populace. I will be on a brief hiatus for term papers and finals for the next week or so.

-Wilder

You've been hosen if you don't get frozen

Philosophers have often asked that, while their ideas may be repugnant, listeners consider them for their substance before rejecting them for being repulsive. Yes, you may hate an idea; yes you may tell its author, anyone who will listen, and everyone who will not about your hatred; yes, you may even reject an idea in time for thinking it dangerous, foul, or downright stupid, but it is hardly fair to do so without hearing it out, and honestly thinking first. This tolerant consideration would suit other areas, say life choices, well, and I ask you to give the following modest proposal its due consideration. I accept all resulting blame should you at least try to see it my way first.

So let's be forward.

Your days are numbered. One afternoon, perhaps soon, maybe later, you will keel over, choke on a carrot, suddenly become the victim of an unthinkable tragedy, or otherwise perish. At this time, assuming no God, your time is up. Swoof, nothing more, Blackness. This is the regrettable human condition.

Or is it?

Blaise Pascal once made a famous and oft cited wager, that he would rather live his life a Christian than not, for if the atheists were right and God did not exist, he would pay only a meager cost in lost prayer time, but if the Christians were right, he would benefit from eternal salvation. Pascal's wager was both too unlikely to yield fruit, and too expensive in terms of actual-life-time commitment for my tastes.

I wish to point out two seemingly unconnected sets of facts.

#1: Modern technology is wonderful.
We are rapidly growing as a technological culture. Mere decades ago, we had no widespread access to computers and the things that came with them, and since then we have rocketed forwards in nearly all fields from medicinal practice, to chemical research, to energy production. Two particularly promising areas of study are those of brain research and alternative fuel. The MRI, among many other recently developed techniques, finally allows researchers to directly sight human brains in action, and make inferences about their function. Moreover, our ability to sequence genes, which seems to be growing at pace with the exponential expansion of digital storage and processing power, is at an all time high. Assuming that we humans don't decide to wipe each other off the face of the earth, soon, perhaps years, or decades from now, but inevitably in the next few centuries, we will have an understanding of the human brain. This may, among other things, allow us to either provide repair, or life support, to a brain, the only thing a human really needs to exist. On the note of alternative fuel, we are rapidly getting closer to effective renewable, and one day cheaper, energy sources. Energy sources are key for powering all manner of things. Industrial freezers are one fine example.

#2: Now is actually a moderately ideal time, financially speaking, to die.
In the US, the tax on your worldly assets as you cease to be worldly is, it turns out, very low right now. The democrats failed to renew it in 2010, and so at the moment it is zero, and even once we renew it, the tax will affect only moderately wealthy Americans. (Those with holdings of US$1million or more)

So how does this affect you? Well, if we are in agreement that at some point you will go kerploof, and also that nothingness, which we prefer to avoid, will follow, then perhaps you desire a way out? Given the present progression of medical technology, it is a safe wager to say that if you remain intact, and in possession of a funding mechanism until we develop more sophisticated medicine, then resuscitation is entirely possible.

How to get there though? Freeze your corpse. Yes, for a tidy sum, you can almost assuredly arrange for your corpse to be frozen once you lie deceased. To do so, create a post-tax endowment sufficient to accrue interest at a rate exceeding inflation by the annual costs of a body-sized refrigerator unit and corresponding site. (1) Attaining this, you lie only a stipulation on your endowment that your frozen effigy be revived as an un-aging robo-cyborg-person once possible away from a chance at immortal life.

You may laugh at first, or shy away over the prospect of leaving your children with nothing, or object on moral grounds, for surely the money could go to charity, or at the very least the energy use will haunt future generations, and you may even simply reject the concept at face value.

But consider that my idea is not so different than Pascal's wager. Once you are dead, your money is obviously doing you no good, so just like the wager, this plan has almost no cost; in fact it costs less because you need not attend church services to implement it. On the other hand, just like Pascal's concept, the potential benefit is immeasurable. If successful, you simply will have more of the only absolutely limited resource you must face, time, and that is worth all of the money, happiness, whatever, in the world, for with unlimited time, you may gain also whatever else you may seek.

Now as for the above objections... If you are a parent, your children have benefited by you enough already; they exist and have been brought up. Should charitable potential hold you back from spending your hard earned funds to buy yourself a chance at living in a future where medicine may provide you with delicious robotic support for your brain, just think of the good you could do with two, three, four and even greater multiples of your present life. It would be selfish not to opt for the robo-option. Have qualms about energy use? Devote some part of your life to the green movement to offset the cost. There is no real excuse for non-participation, so live life fully, meet each day as your last, breathe the fine nectar that is the running juice of the world, and also have a sweet backup plan. (2)


(1)You will have to reach the moderately wealthy bracket to do this, but if you are to kick the can soon, all is well with taxation, and if not, you are probably well off enough for such an endowment anyways.
(2)I have jokingly proposed this idea several times before, but never quite gotten around to putting it into lengthy text. Disclaimed.

Current stance on Saturday night studying

From a broken heart to a broken system

Dearest Postmodernism,

The two short decades since we first met have felt like jolly centuries. I remember with no lack of warm regard our young days together. They would, from across the room, tell me that we should be nice to everyone, be accepting of other cultures, and never hold ourselves in such a pulpit of high regard so as to exclude the voices of others. I saw traces of you around then, bored in my desk, shyly admiring your gentle loveliness.

Later, as we read stories of magical realism, race relations, and cultural connection in high school, we had so much. I felt that you were the end of everything. Just the glimpse of such a shining ideal showed to me that all other aspirations were senseless, that only through rejecting our ability to find truly objective truth could we abandon pretense, that we belonged together, and all the while you twittered along. Ah youth, the flowers, the butterflies, the warm summer days, and foremost, the mental conceptualizations of cultural relativism's latent influence on our ideology.

I knew that things were becoming serious when you followed me to college. We spent long evenings cuddling together in the grass as the smooth sun set, and longer nights struggling through freshman essays, with you helping me forwards all the while. It seemed as if nothing would ever change.

But then you did, or rather, I realized what you really are. One day a close friend asked me about you; he knew we spent so much time together after all; he asked me what you were like, who you spent your time with, what you were all about. That's when the trouble first began. I couldn't tell him. It wasn't that anything was particularly embarrassing, or that there were no stories of the two of us and our time together. No, the problem was that I really don't even know you at all. I stammered, “Well, she likes to talk about Foucalt, sometimes Derrida, she spends her time ensuring that overbearing discourses don't dominate the sphere of life, and she can say something surprising on any topic .” My friend and I looked at each other for a moment, him slightly confused, me horrified that I knew only so little, and with a slow draining feel setting into my stomach. Hurriedly, I looked for a source of my confusion.

Had I been too self centric and never listened while you talked? Surely not, for you were always speaking so much, and I had listened to what you had to say. Were you lying to me, hiding yourself? This couldn't be so, for we had spent enough time together for this to be impossible; I simply would have noticed. What could it have been then? Then the unthinkable quietly asserted itself, that you really had no substance at all.

I thought further on those things that were supposedly so you. In their time, certain literature, criticism of literature, film, photography, music, dance, poetry, policymaking, policy punditry, news, protest, cultural movements, and even fashion movements had all supposedly manifested as products of your self. How could one be so many different things, unless, unless you were really none of these, and just a piece of academic lingo? I tried so hard to tell myself that you were something more substantial than a flashy phrase, than a trend, and really would have been able to find comfort despite never knowing your true self, but this was but the beginning.

I realized that you always hung around with those snooty academic types. Part of our original infatuation was your appeal to the masses. You were open and accepting of all, or said you were, but there you were, spending your time with professor hootensnoot, dancing with doctor debonair, all the while quietly wrinkling your nose at the common man. I noticed how very nuanced were your terms and habits, your technical jargon, and it occurred that not only could no one clearly outline you, but most could not even engage in your dialogue. For a girl who spent her time telling everyone that we ought to sever the dominant discourse, this was a surprise, for it looked very much as if you were perpetuating it. But for you, even this I could forgive.

And then you started to get possessive. I can handle, and actually embrace, some closeness; we did come to college at Whitman in part to be together after all, but what you have been doing lately is frankly disturbing. You sneak into all of my classes, and just sit there, watching me. In English subjects, no one's analysis is wrong, everything is excellent and engaging, a great yarn, and all this for you. In debate, everyone is an evil, ecosystem hating, simulacrum perpetrating, colonialist, anthropocentric, fear mongering, abusively statist, theivingly capitalist, chauvinist, and this is because of your presence. In fact, the only place you don't chase me to is Modern Philosophy, and I don't doubt that you would if you could, but being postmodern, you can't quite slip into modernity. It has been getting uncomfortable.

If this were not enough, certain things you have been saying are, well, a little bit crazy. People talk. I am certain that you mean well, dear, but not every book is Fruedian, not every imaginary tree, gun, walking path, or representation of power phallic, and not every children's book about gender and sex. Your insistence that all things are subjective bothers me even moreso. Certain things, that the sky is blue, that one plus one is two, that Seattle cannot have a respectable sports team in any one activity for more than three seasons at a time, that I am now writing a letter which pains me much, are just plainly true. You act as if everything is this vague societal construct, that we are fully entitled to make the wildest and freest extrapolations, since after all, everything is all false anyways, that probability didn't exist, and it worries me. How can I lay these blatant facts aside in good faith?

Look, I may not know the precise score, but I am no fool. I know that if you poke a bear, the odds are high it will eat you, that certain chemical processes almost always work the same way, and that when authors write a book, they do initially mean something and there is at least one reading that we can find more probable than others. It is absurd to assert that we should talk every which way about everything, as it is to say that dice end up differently sometimes, so a one is as likely to be rolled as two through six combined. I say this as no offhand comment, for at night I lie awake and ponder us. Postmodernity, your disassociation from the real world pains me.

I would tell you that it's not you; however we both know that it is. I read modern philosophy books in class now, and whenever Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume make a reference to the intangible nature of reality, I think of you, and become sad. It feels like reading a story to which I already know the horrible ending. There really is only one way to put this: we both know what has to happen. Postmodernity, I have found something better, I like it, and I am not ashamed. Empericism just feels so right, and with that I must say farewell. I'm sure you'll find many ways to interpret this.

Regretfully, Tim