Determinism in the USSR, Part 1: Introduction
Why did the Soviet Union become so invested in free will ideology?
For the next few weeks I’ll be posting a multi-part series on the history of philosophical determinism in the Soviet Union. This is part one.
Ghost particles are a unique exception to the most powerful law in the universe: the law of physical cause-and-effect. As predicted by quantum physics, these tiny subatomic particles appear randomly in the vacuum of space – and then just as quickly, they disappear. Scientists believe that in the first moments of the Big Bang the universe may have been so small that phantom particles were able to affect its large-scale structure. If true, however, this would be the only time in history that they had a significant effect on our world. Since then, they have simply flickered in and out of existence like background static in a universe that completely ignores them.
I note this only to acknowledge in passing the one irrelevant exception to what is, again, nature’s most powerful law. As far as we can tell, everything in the universe is determined by a physical cause. And every physical cause itself has a physical cause, and so it goes in an unbroken chain of cause-and-effect stretching all the way back to the beginning of time. We know this with as much scientific certainty as we can know anything.
There is, meanwhile, no scientific evidence whatsoever of free will. We have seen physical causes have physical effects, but we have never seen a physical effect triggered by some invisible force like “will” or “choice.” Historically, scientists and philosophers have proposed a number of mechanisms that could facilitate free will, but they have all been discredited. St. Augustine, for example, argued that free will animates “the whole body…by a vital tension,” or in other words some kind of attractive force; but since this force is acting on matter it would be detectable, and we have never detected it. Descartes famously argued that free will was exercised through the pineal gland, which was the seat of the soul; how this translated into bodily motion relied on a good deal of speculation and whimsy about anatomy that was even at odds with its known features at the time. Suffice to say that it involved valves and nerves that acted like tunnels, and that none of this is actually found in the human body. So these theories always go.
There are simple ways that you could prove something like free will may exist –for example, by finding a neuron in the brain that fires for no apparent reason, as if some force of mind or willpower triggered it. But no such proof has ever been given. And indeed, were it ever proven that humans are able to exercise something like free will it would overthrow everything we know about causality and implicitly call into question the entire scientific project. How can we build our understanding of the world around the assumption that every effect has a discernible physical cause if it turns out that mysterious forces like free will can intervene?
Once we accept that there is a sharp tension between scientific rationalism and free will ideology other questions come to the fore. Here I would like to explore one in particular: why are two of history’s most scientifically oriented civilizations – the Soviet Union and the modern United States – also so deeply committed to free will ideology?
In the contemporary US, for example, research demonstrates that nearly 82% of Americans believe in free will. And that number includes 70% of our professional philosophers.
The Soviet Union, meanwhile, presents a more complicated situation. In the west, the USSR is often associated not with free will, but instead with deterministic ideas that emerged out of the Marxist tradition. And for its first few decades, Soviet intellectuals did indeed argue for a scientifically-grounded deterministic position that rejected free will as a form of archaic mysticism. But by the mid-thirties that view became completely marginalized as ideas about the agency and responsibility of workers and party leadership took hold; so for most of its existence, the Soviet Union conceived of itself as both a scientifically modern society and one committed to the notion of free will.
To understand how this happened, let us begin where stories about the Soviet Union so often begin: with Karl Marx.
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