The conviction persists that freedom and humanity are somehow inseparably linked, and that we cannot hope to understand ourselves until we have some understanding of their relationship. We ask: "Am I free to direct my life, make choices that are genuinely mine, make moral decisions that affect not only me and those about me, but possibly the larger cosmos as well? Or am I without any true volition, simply the tool of destiny--perhaps no more that a creature of blind chance?"

Any assumptions we make in these matters--and they can only be assumptions--are of prime importance, for ultimately they affect what meaning, if any, we discover in human life, and in our separate existence.

If we take the position of the determinist, we will say that individuals are not free in any way, that the whole enterprise (of which each is the minutest part) is out of their hands. The universe is a system of inflexible laws, and every particle of matter, every spark of life, every thought, every act is nothing but a reflex of those laws. Whatever influence people think they have over events is purely illusory--as if a wave were to think it had stirred the ocean into a storm.

Such concepts have their roots in 19th century scientific belief, which in turn affected other areas of thought: philosophy, sociology, anthropology, art, and even religion. Determinism is still a valid position for some philosophers, who doubtless find in it the satisfaction of knowing beyond any doubt that the universe is wholly without meaning in any humanistic sense.

If, on the other hand, we take the existentialist's view, we will say that humankind, cast adrift on a sea of nothing, and inescapably alone, suffers a terrible freedom--a freedom in which each individual's survival depends upon the ability to "create" self, one's own reality of being. No purpose can be attached to the universe except what one painfully fabricates from fragments of experience that in themselves have no meaning. Humankind is absolutely alone--hence, absolutely free.

The world, in the existentialist's view, is a kind of fortuitous dream, or rather nightmare, beset with all the terrors of undifferentiated possibility. Existentialism is unquestionably the headiest brew modern philosophy has yet concocted, though for some it lacks any soothing, any comforting ingredients. To say "man is condemned to freedom" is to say that he is forced into the terror of choosing, and perhaps choosing wrong.

The determinist and existentialist occupy extreme positions in philosophy. Most humanist thinkers, on the other hand, tend to avoid the extremes--certainly in areas as clouded with ambiguity as the subject of freedom is--and to assume that in a field of contending forces or opposing views, the truth, or what can be allowed to serve as truth, stands somewhere near the middle. They see a kind of triadic process at work here: from two opposite, interacting elements, a third, synthetic element is born that represents superior insight.

Modern science, which has provided many new insights into humanity's physical and psychological nature, and into its evolutionary history as well, has also provided bases for new speculations of the problem of human freedom. Among such speculations is the idea that freedom may not be something that humanity either has or does not have, but rather something that it may have the capacity to create. Freedom is seen not as a gift (or a gift withheld), but as potentiality implicit in the evolutionary venture. Freedom is something to be earned.

It is quite possible that for most of its history humanity has not been free in any positive sense of the word. Human actions and thought may simply have followed guidelines inherent in the human condition, the result of a limited power over the environment and the sequence of events. According to one modern savant (Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) mankind before about 3,000 B. C. was not conscious at all in the present sense of the word. Before then, Jaynes tells us, people got their signals from inner voices which they called gods. The inner voices came from the right hemisphere of the brain; the left hemisphere constituted the "human" side of the brain. This meant that ancient people lived psychologically in a bicameral world--that is, their governing faculties consisted of two relatively separate powers. Only the eventual breakdown of this arrangement (and the accompanying decay of the gods) made it possible for people to become conscious in our modern sense--to become self-conscious, self-aware, self-analytical. With consciousness, people gained the ability to deliberate, to pass between stimulus and response, to decide. No longer bound to obey external authority, they now found authority and understanding within their newly conscious self. In short, they began to be free.

Such a radical hypothesis, of course, awaits proof. Its value here is as a dramatic indicator of the direction modern thought may be moving toward: a concept of freedom as a process, a thing to be achieved when people have reached the stage where they can "deserve" it.

It can be argued that we are at that stage now. For have not the enormous powers conferred by science given us enormous freedom to use or misuse them? Through technology, we now have the power to reshape the environment along artificial, and therefore uniquely human, ways; we find ourselves deciding which species on earth we will or will not preserve; we consider how the atmosphere may be altered, how climate and weather may eventually be controlled. Already we envision our ability, through genetic management, to blueprint our biological future; cloning is only one of the more spectacular possibilities hinted at. Most significantly of all, we possess the terrible freedom utterly to annihilate the world in an atomic holocaust.

Of course, there are those who argue that all these "supposed" freedoms are but stages in a predestined plan to have humanity self-destruct at a certain point. Technology is seen as merely the means of carrying out that end.

Such thinking, however, will strike most of us as the counsel of despair. IF humanity can get past the technological crisis, IF we can avoid annihilating ourselves as well as the planet, then the possibility of almost unlimited freedom emerges: freedom to develop our intelligence by learning to use the now-unused three-quarters of the brain, to achieve new levels of spirit and creativity, to make ourselves what we have always boasted we were--the center of our universe--and perhaps the inseminator of other universes undreamed of, light years away.

--Donald Early