HARDWIRED

“ Success (or failure) in matters of love, money, reputation or power is transient stuff; you soon settle back down (or up) to the level of happiness you were born with genetically.” In Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up

Wolfe predicts that a new Nietzsche will soon come to announce “the Soul (or Self) is dead.” The suspected killer is the neuroscientific world view, which aspires to explain away these entities, along with another old friend, free will. Scientists claim to have discovered that most of the behaviour that makes up our cherished view of ourselves is in fact genetically encoded, infamous examples being intelligence, homosexuality, having criminal tendencies, and how we respond to beauty.

This will bring about a sea change in our thinking, claims Wolfe, as we have long been used to ideas of social or psychological conditioning – from Marx and Freud, respectively. The result could be that many of our everyday notions become quaint artefacts. Personal responsibility is the most important of these, and along with that goes the ability to criticise meaningfully the actions of others.

I doubt the change in the intellectual climate will be so profound.

(1) There is as much evasion of responsibility in saying “I’m socially conditioned – don’t blame me” as in saying “I’m wired wrong – don’t blame me”.
(2) When we praise or blame, for moral wrongdoing (e.g. “Blair was wrong to go to war”) we are not thinking of some absolute freedom of choice at the moment of decision, as if the culprit had flicked the wrong switch. (This kind of existential pause before decisionmaking is, in any case, the exception rather than the rule.) Rather, we are thinking of someone’s whole character that formed the background to the choice made. Blaming someone is like blaming a faulty computer. It doesn’t matter exactly how the fault came about; the point is that it is there now, and worth complaining about, or taking action over.

As for the Soul (or self) being dead, this is old news to Buddhists, readers of Proust, and many philosophers. Don't be too hard on yourself, because you, as a discrete entity, literally don't exist. The notion of your slowly changing and evolving character is preserved, however - it is something akin to a climate. Get used to acting as a collection of events, and seeing statements about you and your personal beliefs in the same category as weather reports - reasonably reliable, but not facts. Your moods are like tropical storms. And if things aren't going your way, wait for a change in the weather.