I’m not even remotely religious, but the sentiment holds: I’m a firm believer that it’s a lot more luck & chaos than anything else that I am who I am.
In this particular instance, I’m referring to the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill who live on the streets, in the slums, and in the doorways of our fair city. I don’t understand how people don’t realize how easily it could have been them in that situation.
Let’s take an example: I was not a particularly happy teenager, and had a somewhat hateful step-father who seemed to go out of his way to make my life miserable. My reaction was to hole up in my room and find solace on the internet, turning into a chat room junkie from the tender age of 14. The result? The fact that I can type over 100 wpm (keeping up with 5 conversations at once requires some nimble fingers), my excellent web skills, and hell, my entire career to date.
But let’s play the What If? game. What if I hadn’t had other wonderfully supportive family (ie, my mother & grandmother)? What if I had, instead, gone out instead of going in? Instead of finding some supportive people online who cared about me and helped me through a rough time, what if I’d found some “low life teenagers” to hang around with? Who’s to say that I couldn’t have turned out completely different, and decided that the effects of heroin were better than the shit going on in my head?
Don’t people realize that it’s basically a coin flip as to how they turn out?
We can congratulate ourselves as much as we want for making the right choices, but your choices are based on your environment, your history, your family… and while I don’t quite buy the entire concept of the “no free will” philosophy that Erin has touted before (sorry, I can’t remember the name of it… gah) some of it makes sense, and we are products of our surroundings.
So how can you point at the junkie on the street corner and spout hateful nonsense about what a horrid person they are, and how they’re simply a drain on society… when it could have been you? How can you not walk through the DTES and thank your lucky stars that you don’t live there? How can we be so damned ungrateful?
The vast majority of these people have families, parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, children… junkies don’t grow up in a vacuum, or simply grow in the doorways. They come from somewhere. To deny that is to deny the concept that these are real people. The thought of this denial just makes me ache.
Because there but for the grace of god go I, and if it were me, I’d want to be acknowledged as a real person. Who wouldn’t? Who doesn’t deserve that?
I *heart* you for posting this. I think about this often.
The Transfer Argument, aka the Consequence Argument = no free will. Sorry. :)
Ah! That was it. (Why sorry?)
Well, I certainly agree with your premise that society (and in particular government) should do a much better job attending to the needs of those whose circumstances are worst.
However, in re “your choices are based on your environment, your history, your family,” and “we are products of our surroundings,” I think that’s taking it a bit far. We are not merely computers which have been programmed, and are continually programmed; we have a tremendous self-governed, self-modifying capacity, which begins on day one and continually revises the OS.
At the very basic level, this will involve a change such as “liver tastes bad — I don’t like liver,” which traces directly from experience. But the more sophisticated we become as thinkers on our own self-determined paths, the more subtle and abstract our self-modification can become, and the contribution of the world around us to that kind of thing is… doubtful.
When Darwin dethroned humanity as Nature’s last word, developed an accurate explanation of the genesis of species, flatly contradicted his society’s religious norms and spat in the face of public approval by suggesting we are related to all other forms of life including shit-hurling apes, it seems to me his actions were governed or even significantly influenced not by the world around him, but instead by his personal interests, insights, conclusions, and deliberate actions.
Similarly, Newton was not exactly cooperative with his mother’s plan to take him out of school and turn him into a farmer; instead he overturned the best wisdom of his day, discovered the calculus, established fundamental laws of physics, and laid the groundwork for the scientific method.
Free will seems very clearly demonstrated in all such examples, and therefore, in my opinion, the personal choices of junkies in becoming junkies is not a weensy factor (though it’s not the only one, either).
Wes: How often do you think people wake up and say, “I’m going to be a junkie today.” or… “Hey, you know what would be awesome? Not having a house. That’d be just great. The streets are so much more comfortable than this bed.” Or, “Gee, I wish I had voices in my head to tell me what to do.” How many little girls say “survival sex worker” when asked what they want to be when they grow up?
Like I said — I’m not a full believer of the transfer argument (thanks, Erin!) but very few people fuck up their lives utterly and completely on purpose. How are we any different because we got lucky with the results of our choices?
Newton wasn’t the only one to discover calculus, you know. Also, he was a dick to other scientists/mathematics of his day when he was the president of the Royal Society, preventing others from presenting and publishing their ideas and sometimes outright plagarizing them.
/derail over
I agree with you Donna. Well-written.
so true.
i get really angry when i see these high-and-mighty people who sneer at anyone worse off than them, thinking their own success is based 100% on their delusion that they’re some immaculate genius. while free will definitely plays a part, i think that the luck of the draw is the biggest factor of all. people need to stop being so damn smug, and realize this.