Evolution, Freedom, And Volition

We are ready for one version of the photo finish argument using an idea of the ‘evolution of freedom’, the slipperiest of slippery slopes, but worth it as a key to the evolution of world history, and, by suspicion, the earliest stage of man’s emergence. This is an empirical approach, passing through the thicket of ideas of freedom. Our objective, here, is to throw the idea of freedom into deep time, asking for close tracking, then produce closely tracked data in historical time, in the fashion of our photo finish strategy.

One way to see the photo finish difficulty is to consider the ‘evolution of freedom’, as the empirical study of the evolution of volition, free activity, consciousness and more general ideas of (possibly political) freedom. We have seen the Kantian perspective on ‘free will’, and make no claims here, one way or the other. But the ‘freedom grab bag’ as a seminal archetype is more general than free will. We can be free to make choices, on some level of freedom. Choices leave historical traces as ‘one thing instead of another’, whatever the source of that choice. Since the existence of ‘free will’ is not claimed in these assumptions, we can even look at the evolution of the idea of freedom, an idea that can be entertained without a realizable freedom. Note this point: a new potential as self-consciousness could arise as evolution of some kind, armed with the idea of freedom, as a motive to action. This suggests we are still inside such a process, even as we use the idea of freedom, although it is difficult to define it.

We can see that the idea of freedom enters the eonic pattern as the very lack of ‘freedom’ to create civilization without a macro helper. We also see the double emergence of democracy as a significant riddle of the data. Thus, since we have some spectacular evidence of the ‘evolution of freedom’ as a macroevolutionary process in the eonic effect (to developed as distinction of system and free action, and the discrete freedom sequence), we can challenge Darwinists on this score. The interest of this approach is that the idea of freedom must overlap between evolution in the Paleolithic and the emergence of civilization taken as evolution.

Note the contradiction arising as we speak of freedom, its evolution presumes is relative absence. How much more true that must have been at earlier stages of his emergence, as a cultural hominid. We can draw no direct conclusions, but the clear appearance of a macro factor in history severely challenges claims of random emergence. Darwinists say this happened at random. We could just as well claim it happened in a long-range sequence of relative advances that sourced in one area and diffused thence to a greater species environment. We naturally begin to wonder if this sequence would terminate at some point, its job done. We certainly see increasing degrees of freedom in history. Look at the difficulties of history, and consider the helplessness of unorganized tribal systems.

We need more than theories about the Paleolithic, we need histories. We can use this to demand from evolutionists finer grained data, or withdraw their claims, based on an idea of evolving freedom. Darwinists are claiming that a genetic mutation or mutations arose that left man ‘free enough’ to create civilization (however any such genetics that might accompany greater evolution would be of first interest). But we can show that this assumption is false. Note that our basic pattern shows us already the macro factor in the ‘evolution of freedom’, in a sense to be made clear.

We could also think in terms of ‘volition’, perhaps, instead of ‘freedom’ as ‘free will’. How did ‘volition’ evolve, and at what point, if any, did it evolve into freedom, if any? Is there a macro factor involved in the evolution of volition and/or freedom? If so, where’s the empirical proof? This language is fuzzy, but makes approximate sense, and really asks us to define, and find evidence for, what we mean by evolution in terms a whole man, as a self, or agent. This agent must choose between courses of action. All this amounts to is a request for more data on earlier behavioral stages, and their degree of freedom, which to our view needed some extra vitamins each step of the way. And we are required to specify the evolutionary psychology ‘claimed to have evolved’. It is simply an assumption to say that a ‘utilitarian’ account constitutes the bedrock of theory. In fact, man seems to downshift into low gear, and switches between different evolutionary psychologies. He has the problem, altogether appropriate in any account of evolution, of bringing ‘self-consciousness’ to the mechanization of consciousness.

Two questions lurk here, and we will not be dogmatic. One is the genetic issue of man’s ‘human software’ and how it evolved and how it works. Far be it from us to refuse some lucky mutation, if someone can fix its historical coordinates. But we must be sure we know what that software is, and can’t restrict its description in order to make natural selection work. The lurking nemesis of thinking is the possibility of a macro factor associated with ‘freedom’ that operates beyond the genetic level. All at once we have unexpected data for it. Subtract the eonic effect from world history and you lose the birth of civilization, all the great religions, the Greek Miracle, etc… Flat history in long sluggish eternities of no advance.

In general, as one historian of evolution has put it, echoing Wallace, “Here at last volition has taken its place in the world of nature.”[i]

[i] Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 349, “We have spoken of the brain of man as a sort of organ of indetermination”.