page 3 - Sleepwalking to Bethlehem

An essay on what we know but do not believe. First published in The Missouri Review, Summer 2026.

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… failed to inculcate prosocial values. It would be caused, instead, by an above-average tendency toward impulsivity, itself caused by factors beyond one’s control.

Sapolsky writes, “The socioeconomic status of a child’s family predicts the size, volume, and gray matter content in the prefrontal cortex. . . in kindergarteners.” Kindergarten is crazy-early to have effects like this show up. But socioeconomic status, i.e., class—human primates’ version of rank among baboons—determines important features of the brain even earlier. The effect is there “in toddlers. In six-month-olds. In four-week-olds. You want to scream at how unfair life can be,” Sapolsky writes. “Actually,” Kelly said, “Sapolsky should be advocating to eradicate poverty not just for all children but for all mothers.” “Oh, yeah,” I said, “you’re right.” For a four-week-old to have a smaller brain, the glucocorticoids must have been present in utero.

*

“You know who doesn’t believe in free will?” I said to Kelly at the next tea. “The tobacco companies, the food industry, the Sackler family, advertising agencies, smartphone manufacturers, and social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok.” Addictive cigarettes and booze; snacks high in sugar, salt and fat; Oxycontin; product placement in movies; the doomscroll: the corporations behind these phenomena know precisely how effective they are in the aggregate with respect to changing the behavior of individuals. The “attention economy,” according to Scott Galloway, celebrity investor, popular podcaster, and marketing professor at New York University, is only a subset of the larger “addiction economy”—made up of companies that have figured out ways to control our behavior by manipulating our dopaminergic reward system. Galloway says—borrowing from E. O. Wilson—we have neolithic instincts, Medieval social institutions, and futuristic, God-like technology, which adroitly pushes our buttons and pulls our strings.

These companies deny free will, at least notionally—i.e., they count on determinism—in their manipulations of our behavior; could denial, instead, help us protect ourselves? Presently, in a culture that believes in free will, resistance to the addiction economy is more difficult than it would be after pervasive denial. Free-will credulity makes it possible to deny disingenuously the phenomena of addiction and manipulation are even happening (“There’s no system of control. People freely choose to eat our unhealthy food product!”) and recommends methods of resistance that might be hopeless (“Just use your willpower!”). Right now, strategies to resist corporate manipulation often recommend increased optionality, so individuals can ostensibly choose a different path rather than the maladaptive, addictive one. “Sure, there’s lots of processed food, but shoppers are free to buy fresh vegetables and whole foods just a few aisles away.” Sure, they bought the object of addiction’s desire, but they could have done otherwise. Yet, if you deny free will, it’d be obvious that the best strategy would be to eliminate or diminish the addictive stimuli in the first place. Research suggests you would increase the probability of healthy choices if veggies were centrally prominent in a store and processed foods were hard to get to. “But, notice,” I said to Kelly, “Free will drops out of the picture when predicting, manipulating, incentivizing, or just explaining behavior.”

*

“Denial seems to be approaching a kind of critical mass right now,” Kelly said at the next tea. “I mean, what’s the historical evolution of determinism’s threat to free will?” Myself, I’d assumed that determinism began to take its contemporary shape with the new mechanistic explanations of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But recently I have begun to wonder if determinism were not older and deeper in our psyches—a feature of explanation per se, not mechanistic explanation specifically. Rather than coming about because of early science’s impressive discoveries of the clockwork-like laws of cause and effect, maybe the first threat to humanity’s sense of autonomy and dignity came from deterministic stories—that is to say, from Fate. Narrative paths and story arcs, imposed on us by gods or divine forces, were taken to undermine something important to us: happiness or meaningfulness, if not also autonomy. Fate, oracles, curses, and the like preoccupied the ancient Athenians especially—as evidenced by their invention of the genre of tragic theater. At Oedipus’s birth, a divine oracle prescribed the inescapable story of his life, its end and its lasting meaning, as clear and unchangeable as if chiseled in the firmament.

Twenty-one hundred years before the Scientific Revolution, Democritus (c. 400 BCE) said that determinism governed the interactions between instances of what he speculated was the basic unit of matter: an invisible, indivisible substance he called atomos. Reacting to Democritus a hundred years later, Epicurus postulated that for there to be leeway for free will, atoms would have to undergo a “swerve” (Latin: clinamen), straying from their predetermined path. In other words, something somewhere would have to diverge from the deterministic causal chain in virtue of no cause at all (otherwise its diverging swerve would itself be part of a deterministic causal chain).

The Epicureans’ contra-causal reaction to Democritus’s determinism seems to presage the position that philosophers today call libertarianism. No association with the specious political philosophy of Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, and Paul Ryan, libertarianism about free will holds that humans have the ability “to have done otherwise”—as its slogan has it—i.e., specifically, to act in a way contradicting determinism. You can do otherwise than outside forces would have you do, or act contrary to internal desires, or even your long-standing character. Any influence can in principle be resisted. Libertarianism says we are always capable of a spontaneous choice between alternative possibilities. Yesterday, you chose soup over salad. According to libertarianism, we could rewind the universe and let it play again, and this time, you could choose salad without any change in any antecedent conditions—for example, without you even desiring salad. This is the sense one has of “could have done otherwise” when one occupies the ultimate perspective. Libertarianism does not mean the weaker proposition that, if I had wanted to do otherwise, I could have done so. It’s not that. It means I could choose to do something even if I didn’t want to, i.e., without there being any particular cause of my choice. It means my decision has causal power (for example, to move my arm) but is itself uncaused. It would have to be uncaused to allow for free will, because causation always comes in chains.

This “uncaused causer” of libertarian free will is called the causa sui, which Nietzsche, the most eminent critic of free-will credence, lambasted as “the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of logical rape and perversion. After 1900, the indeterminacy inherent to the newly discovered quantum realm gave libertarianism a boost, to be sure. There was now a permission structure to endorse the square circle of an uncaused causer. Yet, for close to one hundred years, many philosophers have been going blue in the face pointing out that quantum, libertarian, or any other kind of indeterminacy is no help to friends of free will. If there is a spot of randomness between my intention to lift my arm and the event of my arm lifting, that doesn’t make my movement free. It makes it random. I might intend to move my arm and my leg kick out if indeterminism were involved. Or, if I intend to move my arm and my arm moves, it could only be thought of as a fluke.

And yet, the vast majority of Americans say they believe in free will. Most philosophers do too. According to a 2020 survey of more than seventeen hundred philosophy professors, only 11 percent denied free will in the way Sapolsky and Harris do. Still, Kelly was right that free-will denial is coming into a kind of vogue. The deniers have learned that doing so makes some people furious. Philosopher Galen Strawson received death threats because of his denial, according to a 2021 article in The Guardian. “It seems to provoke some people to an existential crisis,” he said. In my conversations, many people bristle when I rehearse the arguments for denial. On a cross-country flight, a woman in my row—after asking me what I was writing about—stammered, “You . . . should not . . . think . . . that,” her mouth quivering with indignation. Then she proceeded to tell me with composed, clipped speech that “denying my free will means you are denying my godhood.” Suffice to say, the rest of the flight was uncomfortable. I stood for much of it, stretching my legs by the bathrooms. While deplaning, I realized the book I’d been reading was missing from the seat pocket in front of me. The Vohs and Schooler psychology study borne out in the wild!

This emotional reactivity is also present in the academic debate. I’ve observed breaches of scholarly decorum—including accusations of willful blindness, ideological thinking, bad faith, and even moral turpitude. The philosopher Dan Dennett, who was the most eminent defender of free will before his unfortunate passing in the spring of 2024, had said that denying free will causes “real harms”—harms for which deniers are morally responsible. Like Erasmus, Dennett has told deniers to “shut up.” Although, unlike Erasmus, Dennett did it in a YouTube video.

Sam Harris and Dennett were friends—part of the four horsemen of New Atheism, along with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. But after Harris published his short book denying free will, Dennett wrote a nasty review. For all the heated disagreement, Dennett and Harris agree about much, but then they disagree as to the significance of their agreement. Both say libertarianism is false—nobody has the ability to act contra-causally—but Dennett thinks that “doesn’t matter much,” whereas Harris thinks if he can get the general public to admit libertarianism is false, then “that’s the whole shooting match.”

“But wait. What is Dennett’s position?” Kelly asked. “In another unlovely neologism from philosophers,” I said, “he’s what’s called a compatibilist.” Compatibilists assert you can’t solve free will by getting rid of the causal chain. That would be to embrace an unworkable, magical libertarianism. So, compatibilists redefine free will. To be free, they say, an action needs to be not uncaused but caused in a specific way, by the right kind of causes—those meeting certain criteria. For example, University of North…