In a post last week, I discussed the issue of whether or not people possess free will. The existence or non-existence of free-will is a divisive question in religion - Catholics generally espouse the doctrine that people can voluntarily pick virtue over vice but many Protestants, particularly Calvinists for example, think that free-will is irreconcilable with God's omniscience and believe people are born either saved or damned, that one's innate essential nature predetermines one's fate. The issue of whether people have free will or not is also fundamental to any discussion of sexuality. Left-leaning liberals tend, like Calivinists, to believe that people are born one way or the other although, unlike Calvinists, they refuse to judge people morally for who they are; religious fundamentalists and many right-wingers however, such as here in New Zealand the repugnant Born-Again Christian Ian Wishart, believe homosexuality to be a choice. Right before Easter 2013, a psychiatrist asked me if I would choose to be gay and this had a traumatic effect on me. In the post I wrote last week ("Free Will and Supernatural Causation"), I argued that there is no such thing as free-will, that free-will is an illusion, but that people need to cling to the idea of free will, cleave to the belief that they have agency, because to embrace fatalism is also often to surrender to feelings of apathy and powerlessness. In today's post, I want to talk about the illusion of free will and how it informed a big chunk of my life.
I have talked about my life experiences before in earlier posts but for this post to make sense I need to go over some of them again briefly. In the first part of 2007 I experienced a terrible psychotic episode – a large part of the reason for my descent into a kind of Orphic underworld I believe was that a rumour that I was gay had spread through my immediate milieux. I couldn't be sure about this, sensed that I was being misrepresented in others' minds, but didn't know how to fight it, couldn't even endure it – I reacted to the stress of this situation by forming the delusions that the smoke detectors in my flat were surveillance devices and that my flatmates, of which I had twenty, had divided themselves into angels and demons. Having reached crisis point and having considered walking into the sea, I was rescued from the flat by family and was taken to a Mental Health clinic where, upon first contact, I made the most important declaration of my life, that I wanted "to come out as straight". It seems a bizarre statement to have made but it made sense to me at the time considering how ill I was.
The people treating me, for some reason, didn't believe me and continued not to believe me for the next nine years.
The situation in which I had found myself was inescapable. As a patient of the Mental Health Service, I had found myself in an environment or culture where no-one used the words 'gay' or 'straight'. Shortly after my admittance, I formed the belief that a secret language or code prevailed, in both the Mental Health Service and in the world more generally, in which people were divided not into gays and straights but into 'cats' and 'dogs'. Some people were cats, some people were dogs. I was not privy to this arcane mystery. Were the cats straight and the dogs gay? Was it the other way around? Were the cats closet homosexuals and the dogs openly gay? Was it the reverse? I felt that the world was requiring me to make a choice, impelling me to identify as one or the other but, because I didn't know what either term actually meant, I refused to do so. I wanted to identify as 'straight' – I didn't want to employ the language of the Illuminati or to commit myself to a descriptor the meaning of which I didn't know. The issue of the precise sense of 'cat' and 'dog' in this hermetic secret society bothered me for many years and, never knowing what these codewords signified, I never really committed myself to one group or the other.
All through my illness, I continually felt that I was being asked to make a choice, that if I chose correctly I could deliver myself from madness, that my entire life would rest on the alternative I opted for. It wasn't just a choice between being a cat or a dog. In November 2009, the night the Affordable Care Acts was passed by the House of Representatives, after a year of solid and almost continuous voice-hearing, I came home from work and my brother showed me my nephew's iPod. Two artists jumped out at me – Bruce Springsteen and Faith No More. I decided immediately that this was another choice, perhaps the most important one in my life. I had to choose between these two artists and my whole future rested on whom I selected. But it was a choice almost impossible to make because, as with the choice between being a 'cat' or a 'dog', I didn't know what either band signified, would represent in terms of my future. A couple of nights later, despite my ignorance, I chose to pick Faith No More. In fact, I'd decided I had no real choice. I had always been a fan of Faith No More and had always viewed Bruce Springsteen as someone somehow ridiculous. (I know this opinion may offend fans of the Boss but bear in mind that I didn't then know Springsteen's music well and still don't.)
It felt like I was exercising free will but in fact I had no choice at all. The choice had been made for me. The significance of this 'decision' is still not fully clear to me, although it is clearer than it was. I have written about Faith No More in an earlier post but have never written about Springsteen. I don't know what would have happened to me if I had renounced my own life by picking the latter. But it is interesting to note that Bruce Springsteen is Jon Stewart's favourite rock artist, the musician he most identifies with, and that Springsteen performed here in Auckland just last week.
A month or so after Obamacare passed its reading in the House, back in 2009, I wrote a poem, the last poem I ever wrote. It has relevance to what I'm talking about so I'll quote it here. It has no title although I have sometimes called it "Poem Written When Mad".
The brick asserted its right to be
More than an idea in someone's head,
And soon as the press got wind of this,
A thousand ghouls gathered 'round his bed
And started demanding to be fed.
"We want what's in your brain," they said.
"No point prevaricating, don't try to hide,
Just speak out whatever's on your mind."
So I obliged and they, in return,
Vouchsafed a vision of heaven's domain,
A million bubbles adrift in primordial goop
Endlessly repeating each its own name.
"Open your eyes," said one. "Don't listen to those
Others and their idle chat, that's just noise
Jamming the signal. There's a light at the end
Of the tunnel, if you're wise."
So I chose.
There's a lamp at the end of the tunnel.
There's a life at the end of the tunnel.
There's a seed at the end of the tunnel.
There's a knife at the end of the tunnel.
At the end of the tunnel, there's another tunnel.
In the end there's something still can be said
When I wrote this poem, I was hearing voices almost continuously, so that explains why this poem is somewhat crazed. The line "At the end of the tunnel, there's another tunnel" might be taken as a reference to reincarnation – or it might be taken as a reference to the lesbian practice of tribbing. I wasn't fully intending either sense when I wrote it.
Around this time, I had another choice. I climbed Mount Hobson, a hill near my home, and asked the voices how I could escape my madness. A voice said, "Accept consensus reality." I replied, "Okay." On the way down the hill I encountered a rough-sleeper and heard two voices in my head, one saying "The saved" and the other "The damned." I didn't know which of us was which.
After this I experienced the episode involving Jon and Jess that I have described in previous posts and then gradually, over a couple of months, stopped hearing voices entirely. Early in 2012 I was discharged from the service (although I continued seeing a GP and taking a lower dose of medication). In early 2013 I became psychotic again and decided to re-enter the Mental Health Service, just before Easter seeing a new psychiatrist, a different one to the doctor who had 'treated' me between 2007 and 2012. I became involved in the system again basically because I wanted it finally on the record why I thought I had become sick again in the first place.
At this time I was once again possessed by a delusion that I had first entertained in 2007. I won't spell out this delusion in this blog except to say that it involved sexuality. I described this delusion and the circumstances surrounding my first psychotic episode to the psychiatrist and social worker I saw, something I had never fully done before, in a small and claustrophobically windowless little room. One asked, "How do you identify?" I replied, "Straight." I was asked, perhaps flippantly, "When did you know you were straight?" I said, "From puberty." I told them that, when I first became unwell, I had believed that everyone in the world was gay except me. The psychiatrist seemed astonished. "You thought everyone was gay except you?" (Bear in mind this consultation occurred six years after I first entered the service as a patient.) At this time I was obsessed by Kurt Cobain and I quoted something he had apparently said, "I wish I could be gay just to piss off homophobes." The psychiatrist said, "Would you choose to be gay?" I said, "I'd rather die first."
Although I had perhaps invited this question upon myself, being asked if I would choose to be gay had a devastating effect on me. Asking a thirty-three year old man with no homosexual history at all if he would choose to be gay is like asking a thirty-three year with no criminal history if he would choose to kill someone. That night I had terrible nightmares and suffered a psychological event that I won't explicate in this blog except to say that I suddenly realised that it was indeed possible for a person to choose to be gay. The appointment occurred just before Easter. I was sending song recommendations to Jess via text message almost every day at this time and right before the appointment, I recommended "Let Me In" by REM, a song written for Kurt Cobain. After Easter and this appointment I sent her "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" by the Smiths.
For a long time the idea that sexuality might be a choice haunted me, provoked in me significant distress. I was 'unwell' then and remained unwell for some time. Suppose for a moment that people really do possess free will. If someone chooses to kill someone, that decision is irrevocable – he or she must live with that crime forever. The choice to have killed someone can never be unchosen. I assume, dear reader, that you are not a murderer: presumably, then, everyday you make the decision not to to kill anyone. If sexuality were indeed a choice, it would be similar to this. The decision to turn gay is irrevocable; if sexuality is a choice, straight people, therefore, must choose everyday to stay straight. This was my situation. For a long time, I would have to repeat my choice to be straight every single day.
As time passed, particularly over the course of this year, my fear that I might somehow turn gay abated. Quite simply I am straight and could be nothing else. This is not a choice. It is who I am. But this realisation did not come easily. In the previous post about free will, I gave some credence to Fatalism, a metaphysical position that can seem nihilistic because it seems to deny people volition, self-efficacy. However, Fatalism need not be a negative philosophy. The other day I did some cursory study of the Calivinist doctrine of 'irresistible grace', the credo that salvation comes to people destined to receive it whether they seek it or not. I couldn't be a Calvinist (it seems to me that Calvinists are often assholes) but the notion of irresistible grace seems to tie in loosely with ideas from Gnositicism and Buddhism. The world, it seems to me, is a factory that manufactures souls and suffering is part of the assembly line. For a time perhaps I had to believe that sexuality might be a choice even though I know now that it is not. People don't choose right over wrong; people do not choose to be straight or gay; nor should people opt for virtue rather than sin in the belief that they can in this way reserve seats in heaven. Good people are good and bad people are bad; straight people are straight and gay people are gay. And one does the right thing solely because it is the right thing to do.
It seems to me that if I made a choice at all that would influence the rest of my life, it was the choice to pick Faith No More rather than Bruce Springsteen back in 2009. And yet this was really no choice at all. It was no choice because it was uninformed – when I opted for Faith No More over Bruce Springsteen, I had no idea either signified, what consequences would follow from either alternative. And it was no choice at all because my entire life up until that point had led me to choose Faith No More instead of the Boss. To choose Springsteen would be to renege on my own life. I felt I was exercising free will because I needed to feel at least a little that I had some control over my life, that there was some escape. But really I had no choice at all.
I should finish this post by saying that, although I am making some bold statements, I am still unsure where I stand on many issues. I believe in meliorism, the idea that society can be improved, and this is hard to reconcile with fatalism. If the world is indeed "the Vale of Soul-making" (to quote John Keats), I feel the process should be less painful and less life-consuming. Perhaps as Calvin thought the world can be divided into those eternally predestined for salvation and those predestined for damnation. Or perhaps it is truly possible to help and even save others. I don't know the answer and perhaps never shall.
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