Social Sciences (part3)

Mine is a high school principal in Fairfax, Virginia, who claimed in court that he was suffering from a "psychosexual disorder" that made him unable to supervise women without trying to force them to have sex with him. The courts were suspicious of that line, but he scored with the Virginia Retirement System, which awarded him a disability retirement of $38,000 a year because his "disorder" prevented him from finding employment in his field.

Because we are all shaped by our environment, a clever defense lawyer can construe any act as the product of a syndrome. And he would be right. We are each the combined set of all our syndromes. A tutor might suffer from tmfp, a serious too-many-freshmanpapers syndrome that drives him into pds, or punish-the-dumbstudent, syndrome when he is unable to alleviate the symptoms with his occasional ale-does-more-than-Milton-can-to-justifyGod's-ways-to-man syndrome.

That we are free to do whatever we want is not the issue. The issue is why do we want what we want. This is why tutor might ask the students what their favorite ice cream is and why. Our likes and dislikes are in us when we come to make decisions; we choose what is already programmed in us to want. If our desire for ice cream is stronger, we order the double chocolate fudge; if our desire to be thin is stronger than our desire for the ice cream, we pass on by. But which desire is stronger is not something we can control. We can only respond. In every decision we make, some prior inclination leads. Nor is this a recent or a leftist idea. Jonathan Edwards said over 200 years ago we no more create the thoughts that come into our minds than we create the sights that come into our eyes or the noises that come into our ears, but for some reason we are blessed with the illusion that we are in control. As Ishmael says in Moby Dick, "Now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased free will and discriminating judgment."

We live in a cause-and-effect world in which every effect has a prior cause. Try to imagine someone choosing his prior desire. Suppose you like chocolate ice cream. Could you change that to vanilla? The very wanting to change must come first. And if you really want to change your wanting, the deed already was done and not by your "free will." We imagine, like Ishmael, that our own discriminating judgment is at the core of our consciousness, but reality seems to say we do not create our own priorities.