Gods of Riverworld (27 page)

“It’s only temporary,” Burton said.

The androids, Ronnie and Dicky, brought more drinks. Frigate and Burton, perhaps inspired by the presence of the androids, began talking about free will versus determinism, a favorite subject. Frigate insisted that free will played a larger part in human lives than mechanical, chemical, or neural elements. Burton was equally insistent that most people’s choices were fixed by their body chemistry and early conditioning.

“But some people do change their characters for the better,” Frigate said. “They do it consciously and with effort. Their will manages to overcome their conditioning and even their basic temperament.”

“I’ll admit that free will sometimes plays a part in some people,” Burton said. “However, only a few do use their free will effectively, and they often fail. Even so, most people are, in a sense, robots. The nonrobots, the lucky few, might be able to exercise their free will only because their genes allow them to. Thus, even free will depends upon genetic determinism.”

“I may as well tell you now, perhaps I should have told you sooner,” Frigate said, “but I’ve asked the Computer if the Ethicals had done any work on free will and determinism. Not in a philosophical but in a scientific sense. The Computer told me that it had an enormous amount of data because the first Ethicals, the people preceding Monat’s, had worked on that subject as had Monat’s people and their successors, the Earthchildren raised on the Gardenworld. I didn’t have time to review all the data or even a small part of it, and I probably wouldn’t have understood it if I did have time. I asked for a summary of the conclusions. The Computer said that the project was still going, but it could give me the results as of now.

“The Ethicals long ago charted all chromosomes, fixed their exact function, and analyzed the interrelationships of the genes. Charted their individual and interacting fields. Which is why, when they resurrected us, our malfunctioning genes had been replaced with healthy ones. We were raised in perfect physical, chemical, and electrical condition. Any faults from then on were psychological. Of course, our psychic and social conditioning were not removed. If we were to get rid of these, it was strictly up to the individual. He or she had to use free will, if he or she had any or wished to use it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Burton said.

“Don’t get angry. I just wanted you to express your opinion and then show you the truth.”

“You wanted me to go out on a limb so you could cut it off!”

“Why not?” Frigate said, smiling. “You’re such an overpowering talker and so opinionated, so dogmatic, so self-righteous, that … well, I thought that for once I could make you listen instead of trying to dominate the conversation.”

“If it helps you get rid of your resentment,” Burton said, also smiling. “There was a time when I would have been very angry at you. But, I, too, have changed.”

“Yes, but you’ll make me pay for this sometime.”

“No, I won’t,” Burton said. “I’ll use my free will to learn this lesson. I’ll keep and treasure it.”

“We’ll see. Anyway…”

“The conclusions!”

“I’ll try to put them into plain English. We are not complete robots, as Sam Clemens and that writer I told you about, Kurt Vonnegut, claimed we are. They said our behavior and thoughts were entirely determined by what had taken place in the past and by the chemicals in our bodies. Clemens’ theory was that everything that happened in the past, everything, determined everything in the present. The speed with which and the angle at which the first atom at the beginning of the universe bumped into the second atom started a chain of events in a particular direction. What we were was the result of that primal collision. If the first atom had bumped into the second at a different velocity and angle, then we would be different. Vonnegut said nothing about that but claimed that we acted and thought the way we did because of what he called ‘bad chemicals.’

“Both Clemens and Vonnegut railed against evil, but they ignored the fact that their own philosophies removed blame for evil from evildoers. According to them, a person couldn’t help the way he or she acted. So, why should they write so much about evildoers and condemn them when the evildoer was not at all responsible? Could murderers be held responsible, could the rich help themselves if they exploited the poor, could the poor help it if they allowed themselves to be exploited, could the child-beater be blamed for his brutality, the Puritan for his intolerance and narrow and rigid morality, the libertines for their sexual excesses, the judge for his corruption, the Ku Klux Klanner for his racial prejudice, the liberal for his blindness to the openly declared goals and obvious bloody methods of the communists, the fascist and capitalist for using evil means to achieve supposedly good goals, the conservative for his contempt for the common people and his excuses for exploiting them? Could Ivan the Terrible and Gilles de Rais and Stalin and Hitler and Chiang Kaishek and Mao Tse-tung and Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat and Genghis Khan and Simon Bolivar and the IRA terrorist who drops a bomb into a mailbox and blows legs off babies, could any of these be blamed? Not if you accept Clemens’ and Vonnegut’s basic philosophy. The murderer and child-abuser and rapist and racist are no more to blame for their actions than those who do good are to be praised. All behave the way they do because of genes or their chemical or psychosocial conditioning. So why did they bother to write about evils when they themselves could not blame the evildoers?

“They did so, according to their own philosophy, because they had been determined to do so. Thus, they get no moral credit.”

Burton had been waiting patiently for the results. Now he said, “Those two said, then, that we are just billiard balls waiting to be struck by other balls and so sent into whatever pocket is determined for them?”

“Yes.”

“I’m well aware of that philosophy. As you know, I wrote a poem about it. However, even those who don’t believe in free will always act as if they had it. It seems to be the nature of the beast. Perhaps our genes determine that. Now, would you mind getting to the point?”

“There is more than one,” Frigate said. “First, the Ethical studies prove that mental potential is equal among races. All have the same reserves of geniuses, highly intelligent, intelligent, fairly intelligent, and stupid. In 1983, when I died, there was still a lot of controversy about that. Intelligence tests seemed to show that the average Negro intelligence was a few points below that of the Caucasian. The same tests also indicated that the Mongolian IQ was a few points higher than the Caucasian. A lot of people claimed that these tests were not accurate and that they ignored social conditioning, economic opportunity, bias against race, and so forth. These objectors were right. The Ethical tests prove that all races have an equal mental potential.

“That goes against the grain of your observations on Earth, Dick. You claimed that the Negro was less intelligent than the Caucasian. Oh, you admitted that perhaps the American Negro might be capable of becoming more ‘civilized’ and brighter than the African Negro. But the implication was that, if this was so, it was because the Yankee black had a lot of white blood, that is, Caucasian genes from racial mixing.”

“I said many things on Earth that I now admit were wrong,” Burton said heatedly. “After sixty-seven years of intimate, though often forced, socializing with every race and every nationality and tribe you could imagine, and some you couldn’t, I have changed my mind about many things. I’m perfectly willing to call Sambo my brother.”

“I wouldn’t use ‘Sambo’ myself. It shows a lingering trace of bad thinking.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I remember a line in your poem, ‘Stone Talk,’ where you criticized the American white because he wouldn’t call … ah, Sambo … his brother. You were in no position to throw stones.”

“What I was is not what I am. Rubbing elbows with many people causes you to rub in some of their skin. And vice versa.”

“You did a lot of elbow-rubbing on Earth. Very few people traveled as much as you did and came into contact with all classes, rich and poor.”

“It wasn’t long enough. Not only are conditions different here, I wasn’t only just
rubbed
here. I was shaken and knocked about. That does something to the machinery, you know.”

“Let’s not use mechanistic terms,” Frigate said.

“Psychic machinery is perfectly appropriate.”

“The psyche is not an engine but a subtle and complex field of waves. Many fields, in fact, a superfield. Like light, it can be described as being both wave and particle, a psychic wavicle, wavicles forming a hypercomplex.”

“The results.”

“All right. Every person is a semirobot. That is, each is subject to the demands of the biological machine, the body. If you hunger, you eat or try to find food. No one can rise above himself enough to go without food and not starve to death. Injuries to the cerebroneural system, cancer, chemical imbalances, these can cause changes in mentality, make you crazy, make your motives and attitudes change. There’s no way the will can suppress the effects of syphilis, poisons, brain damage, and so on. And everyone is born with a set of genes that determine the particular direction his interests take. His tastes, too, I mean in food. Not everybody likes steak or tomatoes or Scotch.

“Also, some are born with chromosomal complexes that make them more emotionally rigid than others. I mean, they can’t adapt to new things or changes as well as others. They tend to stick to the old and to the cultural elements that affected them when they were young. Others are more adaptable, less rigid. But sometimes reason, logic, can affect the will and the person can overcome his rigidity, defossilize himself, as it were.

“Take as an example a person who’s been brought up in a fundamental Christian faith. That is, a sect in which he believes that every word of the Bible has to be taken literally. Thus, the world was created in six days, there was a worldwide deluge, a Noah and an ark, God did stop Earth’s rotation so that Joshua and his bloodthirsty genocidal Hebrews could have enough daylight to defeat the bloodthirsty Amorites. Eve was seduced by a snake and in turn got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Jesus did walk on water. And so on. Like others in his sect, he ignores the vast accumulation of data establishing the fact of evolution. He reads the Bible but does not see that, though the Bible nowhere states that the Earth is flat, it clearly implies that the Earth is flat. Nor does he take literally Christ’s injunction to hate your father and mother. He ignores those. Puts them in a separate compartment of his brain. Or erases them as if they were on a tape.

“But some fundamentalists do come across evidence that they’d like to ignore. Iron strikes flint, and the spark falls on inflammable material. The fire is off to the races, as it were. He reads more of the evidence, perhaps loathes and curses himself for his ‘sinful’ curiosity. But he learns more and more. Finally, his reason convinces him that he’s been wrong. And he becomes a liberal Christian or an atheist or agnostic.

“Something in his genetic defenses made a hole or the hole already existed waiting for water to pour through it.

“In any event, he was able to use his reason only because his genetic makeup permitted him.”

“I thought you said that
Homo sapiens
was a semirobot,” Burton said. “You’re describing one hundred percent robots.”

“No. Robots don’t have reason. They can use logic, if they’ve been programmed to do it. But, if presented with new evidence that says that their program is wrong, they can’t reject the already installed program. Humans can.
Sometimes.
Nor do robots have to rationalize their reasons for the way they behave. They just do, but humans have to explain why they’re doing such and such. They construct a system of logic to excuse their behavior. The system may be founded on wrong premises, but it’s usually logical within its own frame of reference. Not always, though.

“What the Ethicals claim, and they can prove it, is that even the most genetically rigid, the most severely conditioned person has the ability to free himself—partially, anyway—from these constraints, these molds. That a few can do this but most don’t … the Ethicals say that this is a demonstration of free will. The restrained, the strait-jacketed, don’t
want
to change. They are happy in their misery.”

“They can prove this?”

“Yes. I’ll admit I’m not educated enough to validate their findings. I don’t understand the higher mathematics or the extremely involved biology. I accept their proofs, however.”

“There is no such thing as absolute or final certainty, is there?” Burton said. “Unless you can see clearly, as through a crystal, exactly what evidence they present, you won’t ever really know if they have the truth, will you?”

“Put that way, no. Some things have to be accepted on faith.”

Burton laughed uproariously.

The American, red-faced, said, “Unless you’re competent to do the research yourself, how do you know that what you read in a chemistry or astronomy or biology book is true? How do you know that anything is true unless you duplicate the research? Even then, you may be in error or clinging to the opposite viewpoint because…”

“Because you’re genetically inclined to it?” Burton said scornfully. “Because you’re predetermined to believe in one thing and not in another?”

“An attitude like yours makes a man believe in almost nothing.”

“Right,” Burton drawled.

“You certainly voiced enough opinions based on the observations of others while you were on Earth. Often very wrong opinions.”

“That was on Earth.”

They were silent for a while. The women were talking about their mothers. Frigate could tell, however, that Sophie was listening to them at the same time. She winked at him and made a gesture that he could not interpret.

Frigate picked up the subject again as if it were a football and he was going to make a ninety-yard run. Doggedly, he said, “About 1978, I think it was, I read in a psychology book that one out of ten men seemed to be a born leader. It was implied that this trait was genetically determined. The Ethical study has validated that and moreover pinpointed the genetic complex responsible.