Free Minds and Hardened Hearts

For those of us who have been around for more than a few Easters or Passovers, Cecil B. Demille’s movie ‘The 10 Commandments' is an enduring feature of the holiday ambience, in ways both quaint and epic. Demille’s film is an entertaining spectacle, portraying the great struggle between good and evil, with God and Moses as the good guys, and Pharaoh and his minions as the villains who get what’s coming. (The movie doesn’t strive for ethical complexity in its telling.) One fine point of the story of Exodus that the movie doesn’t take note of is the assertion that God is actually the one who manipulates Pharaoh’s bad behavior vis-a-vis the enslaved Jewish people. God, it is written, has ‘hardened Pharaoh’s heart’ leading to a series of bad decisions that end in personal and national catastrophe. How then, is this a fair outcome, for a leader whose own will has been overpowered, and who should not therefore be called to account for the actions he subsequently takes? The Jewish scholar Avivah Zornberg, a master of Midrash (the interpretation of Torah in a dialogue with layers of exegetical thought, accumulated in tradition over centuries) took up this enigmatic aspect of the story in a recent conversation with 'On Being' host Krista Tippett. In Zornberg's reading, Pharaoh’s heart condition is an irremediable and intractable state, accompanied by a deafened ear toward any surrounding voices (divine or oppressed) that might suggest an alternative to his hardened state of mind and being. This state is the consequence, she suggests, of a series of decisions and actions that have brought him to an existential dead end. It's a view of human nature as capable of reaching a point of no return. Pharaoh has abdicated his own freedom, by persisting in actions that eventually spring this inescapable trap. The result is a darkened state he can no longer see, hear or think beyond. Leaving questions of irreversible human destiny aside, this view recapitulates the maxim: thought begets habit - begets character - begets destiny, in a gradual process that unfolds over the course of a life. This way of understanding the evolution of human character implies a perspective on freedom that’s not reducible to black and white alternatives - as either completely unfettered or totally determined. It's a view in which freedom is significantly conditioned and constrained by inner circumstances that gradually take shape as experiences accumulate. Furthermore, while the experience of freedom is an essential aspect of subjective consciousness, it can become irretrievably lost in time. In this loss, the moral landscape contracts, hardness of heart becomes the normative inner reality that constrains possibilities for seeing and engaging the world. Who’s responsible for this mess, a God who has ultimate responsibility for the kind of beings we are, or Pharaoh, (standing in for a humanity that is subject to such unfortunate outcomes), who brought it upon himself? Figuring out that problem is about as promising as counting the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. But Zornberg's reading of the story evokes other questions, more relevant to living - aspects of psychological experience that didn’t enter Mr. DeMille’s imaginative depictions of plagues and parting waters. These questions pertain to human will, the transient nature of mind, and the traps they weave around us. All part of the picture of human consciousness, at a scale more manageable than the search for metaphysical scapegoats. 

In considering free will, there’s an impulse to see it, at bottom, as an all or nothing aspect of consciousness in its most elemental form. On the one hand, scientific materialists like neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, claim that it is a phantom in our awareness, an artifact of a neurophysiology that is entirely deterministic, not free in any way. It’s hard to hold this view and sustain any real sense of meaning, but for members of this materialist tribe, there isn’t any. The sizable downside of this vision of human life is in its elimination of all the stuff we find most fascinating and compelling (identity, autonomy, creativity, even love?) The reality of randomness at fundamental levels of physics is a reassuring antidote to this mechanistic perspective. For the most part, we naturally recoil from this materialist reading, as it strikes at the essence of who and how we understand ourselves to be. Subjective evidence is our ammunition - we know what it is to have a feeling of agency when decisions need to be made. 

It's also true however, that a broad range of factors condition our shifting experience of freedom. Information and experiences accumulate over time, then coalesce into habits of thought and being, and perhaps eventually character and destiny. Whether it’s possible to become irretrievably lost in some dark and permanent state, as Pharaoh’s sad story suggests, there are certainly times when we find ourselves trapped within undesirable inner realities that muddy our view of the world.

When the mind is in a bad place, it can have considerable trouble imagining itself anywhere else. Soon enough though, a new disposition or mood arrives, the latest iteration of an enduring reality, at least for the moment. Faith, hope, and the imagination from which they arise can help shed light on the fleeting character of these states. Imagination may seem like a liminal quality, but its capacity to recast subjective experience is 100% real. As someone who has struggled to escape the imprisoning power of some extremely unpleasant states of mind, I'm aware of the escape routes these faculties can unlock. Someone like Pharaoh, caught in a mental trap of his own making, has been deprived of any real autonomy. It's as though he is stumbling blindly around, driven by his dark inner momentum. The natural state of fluidity and responsiveness of mind has hardened in place.

As with individual citizens, so with societies that also possess attributes of habit, character, and perhaps destiny. Sometimes the perspective on one's own country and culture, offered by viewing it through the lens of another culture, can be revelatory, and disturbing. One perceptive witness, The Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, watches closely from the perimeters of our dominant cultural space. He has discerned a casual vocabulary of violence that permeates everyday American speech: 'I bagged her. I owned that place. I went in there, guns blazing.’  Off-color perhaps, but essentially harmless, these commonplace expressions. With keen sensitivity and awareness, Vuong recognizes the dark intonations in this lingo, and tells us otherwise. 

Once, after I’d just returned from a weeklong Zen meditation retreat, I took an evening walk in a busy outdoor market. I found myself amidst a sea of faces, all of whom seemed to be wearing an edgy and unfriendly expression. I was in the afterglow of the retreat, in a mindset of softened attentiveness, that contrasted with the apparent mood of this crowd. From my own transient perspective I could see the subliminal and omnipresent suspicion that shone in the many faces. I know there is something very real in the murmurings Vuong's critique aims to call attention to. 

With the lion’s share of our resources fueling the most powerful military the world has yet seen, in a society awash in more guns than people, it is difficult to deny the specter of latent hostility that resides in our collective consciousness. We might like to imagine ourselves as a warrior society on the basis of our weaponry and military might, but the hardened edges of our national psyche are of a different type. The externals, the proliferation of tools for killing, hint at undercurrents of a society beset by fearfulness and hair trigger aggression. 

How else to describe the psyche of a nation that welcomes machine guns into its midst? And supplies 2000-pound bombs to be dropped on families halfway around the world?

We would rather not reflect too much on such matters, preferring to think of ourselves in simple terms, as good people. Even to glimpse the substrate of confusion and pain underlying our habits of aggression takes a sensitivity, or perhaps just a willingness we seem to have lost. Everyone has suffered but only some know suffering in its oceanic vastness. Ocean Vuong is an extraordinarily sensitive and gifted soul, whose reflections on American society offer a vantage from just above the waterline. 

It can be difficult in the extreme to disentangle our own personal pain from that of the world around us. Ultimately perhaps, there is no separation. Still, the value in trying to recognize the nature of our own psychic afflictions is real, as they carry the seeds of violence in them. They also have a say in shaping our destiny. Doing so, whether in conjunction with a higher power or not, is a service and contribution in itself; both at a personal level, and to the community we are participants in creating.