Chance, Choice, and Freedom: The Legacy of Darwin, Peirce, and James

262 chance, choice, and freedom: The Legacy of Darwin, Peirce,and James ROBERT D. RICHARDSON When Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked, in a late interview published in the online journal Salon, if he believed in free will, he replied, “Of course I believe in free will. Do I have a choice?” I confess to having had something of the same split response a few years ago when I ran across a comment, from the American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce, that “chance begets order.” Here is the entire passage, from an essay called “Evolutionary Love,” published in 1893. The Origin of Species, says Peirce, “was published toward the end of the year 1859. The preceding years since 1846 had been one of the most productive seasons . . . [in some ways] the most productive period of equal length in the entire history of science from its beginnings until now. The idea that chance begets order, which is one of the cornerstones of modern physics . . . was at that time put in its clearest light.” NONFICTION 263 I am not a physicist, a biologist, a psychologist, or a philosopher; I was trained as a scholar of literature and the humanities, and I subscribe to William James’s definition of the humanities, which states that anything studied historically is the humanities. My initial trouble with the notion that “chance begets order” lay in my assumptions. I had and still have a strong feeling of the rightness of the Newtonian world. Nature is governed by laws, which can be discovered. Falling bodies, for instance, are governed by the law of gravity. In a modern version, Buckminster Fuller says nature is the law. The orbits of the planets can be computed, and we can send spacecraft out to observe and even use those orbits. We can put a space probe into a planet’s gravitational field, where the probe accelerates, like a stone in a slingshot, and is then flung farther out into space. Things are connected; physical laws are universal. From watching an apple fall, Newton was moved to consider that the moon obeyed the same force as the apple. Gravity shapes the moon’s orbit. There was not much room for chance in the Newtonian world. What appeared to be a chance event always turned out to be obeying a law we hadn’t yet discovered. Early astronomers, assuming the earth to be the center of our system, observed that one of the planets did a little loop-the-loop once a year. But once the earth’s own orbit around the sun and the phenomenon of elliptical orbits were factored in, the planet in question was seen to move in a smooth, predictable orbit, as did all the other planets. What had seemed to be chance turned out to be a new order. In the Newtonian universe, chance was sometimes granted a small role, but it was always as a spoiler, a perturbation, an upset, something wrong or out of place. One eighteenth-century thinker—William Paley—considered the human body the result of a divine plan, but was willing to concede that warts might be accidents, due to happenstance. I can see how this could seem reasonable. This assumption of an orderly universe had been deeply held and was difficult to dislodge. Emerson writes, in his essay “Nature” (1836), “Any distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature.” In some ways we are all still in that mind-set. None of us brings a strap to a lecture to tie ourselves to a seat just in case the Supreme Court declares the law of gravity unconstitutional in the next half hour. It goes a lot deeper than a joke. I think of myself 264 Ecotone: reimagining place as ecologically minded, and I find myself thinking and trying to act as though there were a balance in nature. One tries not to upset the natural balance, as we call it. But there are serious problems about this natural balance. When Kansan conservationists, for...