Itch

Free will is an illusion, of course; human beings are just biological creatures subject to the same physical laws as everything else.  We no more “choose” to do things—from deciding to get out of bed in the morning to agreeing that drinking beer and riding bikes on the first Thursday of summer is a good idea—than does the cottonwood tree “choose” to float its cotton-covered seeds onto the evening breeze at the same time.

Nevertheless, it feels, from the inside, as if we are exercising our agency, deliberating between possibilities, and preferring one option over another, like taking the gravel path instead of the busy road, or opting for a six-pack and a bag of beet chips instead of the usual half-rack and Reese's cups.

That’s why many contemporary philosophers find “compatibilism,” or “soft-determinism” to be the preferred option in the debate over free will; the idea is that human free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.  We can distinguish between choices that are compelled, like when we stop for traffic so as not to be run over by a semi-truck, and those that are deliberated, like when, after looking both ways, we pedal through the red light anyway.  The former, we can say, are not free choices; that latter, by contrast, are.

But the proverbial devil is in the details: did we freely choose to bust up the palette and add it to the already-roaring fire or is that just an automatic expression of our animal natures?  And surely, no volition is exercised when fireworks are ill-advisedly set off in the midst of a crowd; there’s no way that’s not going to happen, right?  The itch will be scratched.

Contemporary philosopher David Sosa has argued that in order to maintain a conception of human dignity, we must preserve some notion of individual agency; I dunno; I like being part of a big cosmic machine that just unfolds according to natural laws; happens every Thursday on bikes, after all.

Victory

Given the trying times in which we live, one finds solace is the small victories, like removing the plastic covering on the new cottage cheese container in a single piece, or successfully diagnosing the rattle on your bike and being able to fix it simply by tightening one fender bolt, or finding out that a multi-year struggle to recover a tiny lakeside park from the clutches of a greedy homeowner had been won by the good guys and the land returned to the people.

That’s cause for celebration and celebrate we did by no doubt embodying said greedy homeowner’s worst nightmare with laughter, libation, and a little bit of bare skin; with any luck they’re spending their day worrying that the first night will be every night, and why not?  The people have four years of access to make up for.

The state of the world is just too overwhelming: everything’s going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, so what else is there to do than take comfort in recreational intoxicants and shared companionship?  And if that can be done via two wheels and al fresco, so much the better.  We’re all gonna die soon enough, so may as well live it up while we can and to do so on newly-liberated public property just makes it that much sweeter.

“A man’s home is his castle” goes the old saw but it’s refreshing to see that this doesn’t necessarily mean he gets to illegally seize all the land around it; many of us may often feel we’re no better than serfs to the 1%, so it’s a rare pleasure to witness the public good triumphing over private property interests.  

Now if we could just do something about corporations and hedge-fund managers paying their fair share of taxes and fossil fuel companies that externalize the cost of doing business onto the environment and gun violence, and racism, misogyny, and on and on, we’d really have cause for celebration.