of monarchs to spread among their subjects the idea of the divine right of kings, just as it served the interests of colonialists to spread the idea of racial superiority. Today, it serves certain interests to spend billions of dollars a year marketing fast food to children, at a time when child obesity is a major public health problem.
Although the ideological, cultural and religious labels that divide us are not inherent in our nature, history suggests that the capacity to identify with them for arbitrary reasons is. This capacity enables the easy transmission of bias, prejudice and ignorance from one generation to the next. If we are to expand our freedom, we need to question our beliefs and values and the forces that brought them about. Why do we hold the beliefs that we do? Why have we formed the habits that we possess? And, crucially, whose interests do they serve? Questioning the religious, economic, social and political paradigms of our time is as urgent as it has ever been. To shape identities is to fashion the future – but what future are we creating? Today the world is scarred by war, extreme inequality and environmental devastation. If we’re to create an alternative future, we can’t just reproduce the thinking that shaped the past.
Look at these two lines.
If you are familiar with the Müller-Lyer illusion, you’ll know that though the bottom line appears to be longer than the top one, both lines are equal in length. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes:
To resist the illusion, there is only one thing you can do: you must learn to mistrust your impressions of the length of lines when fins are attached to them. To implement that rule, you must be able to recognize the illusory pattern and recall what you know about it. If you can do this, you will never again be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. But you will still see one line as longer than the other.55
For many of us, the psychological experience of making choices feels incompatible with the idea that we are not truly responsible. However much we ponder the philosophical arguments and scientific findings, it may not be possible to overcome this feeling. The illusion of responsibility persists, like an optical illusion, even when it has lost intellectual credibility. Perhaps this is not a problem. We are what we are and must work with what we have.
The experience of an illusion may persist but our beliefs about it can change and our response to it can be modified accordingly. As Bertrand Russell put it, ‘A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgement based upon it.’56 This holds for the cognitive illusion of ultimate responsibility. The perennial debate over the existence or non-existence of ‘freedom of the will’ is fuelled by the cognitive illusion that we make free choices. The fact that the notion of a truly free choice has never been coherently formulated has had little impact on the vigour of this debate. Although we may never be able to break the illusion completely, we can prime ourselves to respond differently by developing our understanding of freedom and responsibility. On issues of real significance we can inform our judgements with a more intellectually and morally defensible perspective, one that takes account of the fact that our will is conditioned, not free. The roots of behaviour go far beyond the will of the individual to encompass the economic, political, familial and cultural conditions from which it emerges.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote that to ‘acquire a more objective understanding of some aspect of life or the world, we step back from our initial view of it and form a new conception which has that view and its relation to the world as its object. In other words, we place ourselves in the world that is to be understood.’57 As we contemplate what we are and the forces that have shaped us, we do just that: we view our beliefs and values, loyalties and prejudices, assumptions and affiliations, not as free choices, but as outcomes of a complex process whose roots predate our existence. Taking this perspective, adopting this ‘objective attitude’ – which is really just an exercise of the imagination, like putting yourself in someone else’s shoes – exposes the arbitrary nature of many aspects of our identity. It provides a rationale for questioning the inevitably flawed maps of reality we hold in our heads, and weakens our ties to the labels, traditions, habits and beliefs that commonly define who we are, at least enough to question, evaluate and reflect on them.
The attempt to view our identity and world from new and challenging perspectives is part of a process that has the power – over time – to profoundly change the self being viewed. It provides a potent antidote to the worst excesses of arbitrary identification; to the sorts of narrow, entrenched, dogmatic worldviews that drive us to kill and die for flags, symbols, gods and governments whose connection to us is no more than accidental.
*
Fatalism is the view that our fate is predetermined, by the gods, the stars in the heavens, or some other external force. It is the belief that destiny is inevitable and that making our own deliberations, choices and actions is largely pointless. To be absolutely clear, this is not the argument being made here. Yes, luck plays a decisive role in all of our lives but neither this fact nor anything else in this chapter implies that we are powerless. This book is not an exercise in submissive resignation. The point of identifying our limitations is to give ourselves the best chance of transcending them. It is through understanding the way we are that we increase the possibility of being as we wish to be.
Later chapters will return to these arguments in various ways, exploring the long shadow cast by the myth of responsibility over politics, economics and the wider culture – and asking how society might look if it escaped this shadow. As we will see, a great deal depends on our capacity to cultivate a more accurate understanding of ourselves and each other. The notion that we are somehow truly responsible for the way we are and what we do has led to absurd beliefs and cruel policies. It legitimises the claim that people deserve the privileges they enjoy and the punishments they receive. It promotes the view that the fates of the prosperous and the poor, the celebrated and the reviled, are merited. It offers a tacit yet powerful endorsement of inequality and oppression. To expose the responsibility myth is to expose these pernicious ways of thinking and place a powerful tool in the hands of those fighting for a fairer allocation of wealth, power and opportunity. It is also a significant step towards creating a more compassionate world, in which the impulse to blame is overcome by a desire to understand, and feelings of entitlement give way to humility. By shattering the myth of responsibility we give ourselves the best chance of expanding the freedom that is available to us, personally and politically. The more we understand the effect the world has had on us, the more we can control the effect we have on the world.
2
Punishment
The idea that people who do bad things deserve to suffer is deeply embedded in our culture. It has been expressed over the centuries through the doctrine of ‘an eye for an eye’. In practice, religious traditions have gone far beyond the spurious equality this implies. The Bible has often been interpreted as prescribing capital punishment for transgressions such as adultery, sodomy, blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, worshipping other gods and cursing a parent. The Koran supports capital punishment for, among other things, ‘spreading mischief’, interpretations of which have included treason, apostasy, adultery and homosexual behaviour. The belief in a divine system of retribution and punishment, that unrepentant sinners deserve to suffer for eternity in hell, remains a core tenet for much of humanity.
Echoing religious doctrine, philosophers, judges and political leaders have for millennia claimed that the primary purpose of punishment is retribution, in which the suffering of the perpetrator is an end in itself.1 This remains a popular view. Opinion polls on the death penalty give a good indication of contemporary attitudes. A YouGov survey in 2014 found more UK citizens in favour of reinstating the death penalty than against, while a 2010 survey showed that 74 per cent would support the death penalty ‘under certain circumstances’, though not for all murders.2 In the US, support for the death penalty hovers at around 61 per cent.3
This cultural commitment to retribution may be rooted in human nature. When someone engages in the act of punishing a perceived cheater or exploiter, brain scans have revealed increased activity in the ‘pleasure centres’.4 There is even evidence