Are we responsible for our actions?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/13/raoul-martinez-writing-creating-freedom-artist

Raoul Martinez on writing this year’s essential text for thinking radicals

If we are shaped by everything from politics to genetics, can we really be held responsible for our actions? In his book Creating Freedom, the author says we must change our attitude to society’s losers

“If our choices are produced by a brain we didn’t choose, I don’t think it makes sense to say we are truly responsible for our actions,” says Raoul Martinez, pausing to sip from his glass of stout. I eye him over my cappuccino. If I spilled his pint now, would I deserve punishment for this action, in the form of a punch on the nose from the 33-year-old author of this season’s must-have text for thinking radicals? Apparently not. “If that is true,” resumes Martinez, “then the moment we blame or say certain actions deserve punishment seems to be incoherent.”

This may seem the stuff of a million undergraduate philosophy essays on the free will versus determinism puzzle. Perhaps you wrote one – I know I did, even if it was not as well argued as Martinez manages in his first book, Creating Freedom. Martinez tells me of an epiphany he had walking home from school with a friend when he was aged 12 or 13. “He was religious and wanted to convince me that I should be, too. I wanted to convince him that his position wasn’t well grounded. Had he been born to a different family he would be arguing with exactly the same force for the opposite perspective. I don’t think the argument changed him, but it did change me. I realised my genes, my inheritance, being born in a particular point of history all made me. I keep returning to the question: how can we be free if we can’t control the forces that shape us?”

What makes his arguments unusual is that they lead to some chastening conclusions. Here are a few: prisons need to be emptied of all but those who pose a threat to society. Elections must be exposed as a shabby trick on a deluded populace, a lie of democratic choice in a system controlled by money. The media must be revealed as what it is – a corporate capitalist machine to mass-produce stupidity (with the happy exception of this article). The planet needs to be conceptually reconfigured as something other than a resource to be despoiled to keep us in lifestyles that don’t make us happy or fulfilled. The pursuit of economic growth, profit and consumption must be shown up as a damaging value system that, as he puts it, “drives us to chase things that don’t matter and disconnect from things that do”.

The book comes at a timely moment. If Jeremy Corbyn is looking for philosophical underpinning to his manifesto for a more egalitarian Britain, he could do worse than Creating Freedom. Certainly, its author is a fan of the Labour leader: “We’re in desperate need of the politics advanced by Corbyn – anti-austerity, redistribution of wealth, a new approach to climate change rather than being at the behest of the short-term interest of corporations.”

Creating Freedom is, in part, a mashup of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Karl Marx’s Das Capital, David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, Owen Jones’s The Establishment and Simon Baron-Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy. It has already been translated into six languages and is published with dust-jacket encomia from Russell Brand, Susan Sarandon, Brian Eno, Helena Kennedy QC and Paul Mason. The safe money says the Daily Mail won’t be putting it on its Christmas reading list.

What makes it exceptional is its sophisticated philosophical argument, one that is all the more intriguing in that it was developed by someone outside academia (Martinez came to writing after establishing himself as a successful portrait painter). Consider, he suggests, the case of a paedophile called John. He has a tumour in his brain, but when surgeons operate to remove it, his paedophile tendencies cease. Later the tumour grows back, and his paedophile tendencies return. The point of Martinez’s story is that the discovery of the brain tumour makes John seem to us more victim than moral deviant and deserving of our compassion. In a sense, we are all Johns, luck’s playthings, doomed by our genes and our upbringings to be sinners, saints, have nots or have yachts, or, most likely, bumblers in a world we didn’t create and can’t imagine mastering.

Rousseau argued that man is born free but is everywhere in chains: Martinez denies the first part of that claim. His point is logical: freedom and responsibility only make sense if we chose our own genes and inheritance. But we didn’t. So we aren’t free and can’t be held responsible for anything. QED.

Now imagine if John never had a tumour. “Would you feel more justified in blaming John if, say, his addiction had been the product of childhood abuse rather than the abnormal growth of brain tissue?” Martinez asks. “If so, why? We no more control our upbringing than we do cell growth in the brain and formative experiences have a profound impact on the way we develop.”

But the blame game is rooted deep in our religions and our criminal justice systems, not to mention the way we judge people for how they look.

Consider Fiji. In 1990, Martinez reports, eating disorders were unheard of there. In 1995, television was introduced, most of it American and teeming with food ads. Within three years 12% of teenage girls in Fiji had developed bulimia. Martinez’s inference? “Consumption habits, like all habits, are shaped by forces “beyond our control”. In the case of food, they are formed at an early age and are lifelong – the $10bn spent annually on marketing food to children is clearly a long-term investment. The ideas, values and images we encounter in our environment shape our dietary habits.” But such corporate conditioning masks itself: instead of excoriating Don Draper’s successors and US corporations for the rise in food disorders, we blame Fijian girls.

What Martinez calls the responsibility myth is, he suggests, the basis of the American Dream, namely that anyone can become rich and that those who do – even Donald Trump – deserve their money, while those who don’t have only themselves to blame. The political corollary of that myth is that we have no obligation to help the poor, the obese, the disabled, the refugees, the homeless or the unemployed. They all deserved it, so screw them.

One of the perverted twists of the past few years has been that those responsible for economic austerity have gone largely unprosecuted, while the poor have got deeper into debt, in part thanks to government cutbacks, and punitively pursued for their indebtedness.

He cites American anthropologist David Graeber: “Mafiosi understand this,” wrote Graeber. “So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something.” Viewed thus, debt management, as performed by banks or George Osborne, has the same moral basis as Tony Soprano’s business model.

Martinez’s exploding of the responsibility myth undermines justification for punishing criminals as we currently do. There are two leading reasons for jailing law breakers, Martinez argues, and both are unconvincing. First, there’s retribution; but those who are punished are often victims of awful circumstances, he argues. “Many people who are incarcerated are people who have already been dealt a poor set of cards, often suffered from abuse or neglect, have mental health problems. So they’re doubly punished. They need our help not retribution.”

The second reason for punishing offenders is that it supposedly deters people from committing crimes. But as well as being morally dubious, that strategy doesn’t work. Martinez reports that the top five countries with the death penalty average 41.6 murders per 100,000 people, while the top five without the death penalty average 21.6 murders per 100,000 people.

Martinez argues that the vast sums we spend locking people up, to the benefit of shareholders of corporations that run private jails, could be used to reduce inequality. If that happened, people’s lives would be improved and many of the conditions that breed crime eliminated. “Every crime is in part a crime against society. What governments of left and right have done is to wrap a cordon around the individual,” he says. “That exculpates other social pressures – racism, lack of representation. It’s not just profoundly unjust but blinds us to the conditions that caused injustice and inequality and crime, and makes it more likely we’re going to reproduce those conditions.”

Should all jails be closed, and rapists and murderers allowed to roam free, I ask? “No! If someone poses a significant threat to society we have every reason to remove them from society. We do that to protect society.”

We also do it to make criminals suffer, I suggest. “Yes, but I don’t think prisons should be places where people suffer. Prisons inflict a form of torture – including beatings and rapes – and no one seems to give a damn.” The aim must be rehabilitation, he says. He cites Bastøy prison in Norway as an example of how jails should be run. There, each inmate is offered high-quality education and training, lives communally in comfortable accommodation with five other men and prepares food for themselves funded from an allowance of £70 a month and the £6 a day they receive for a variety of jobs such as repairing bicycles and doing woodwork.

An inmate at Bastøy prison in Norway sunbathes in front of a wooden cottage where he lives in the prison grounds. Photograph: Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images
But offering prisoners good conditions, education and rehabilitation courses causes outrage, not least from law-abiding people who don’t have such largesse lavished on them at the taxpayers’ expense? “I understand that people might be bitter when prisons offer educational programmes when they don’t have anything like that, no means of bettering themselves,” says Martinez, “but the sufferings of one section of society doesn’t justify the sufferings of another.”

Surely not all criminals can be rehabilitated? “There are some people who won’t be rehabilitated but we can still make it a dignified life in prison for them.”

If Martinez’s ideas for prison reform sound bracing, his diagnosis of what’s gone wrong in education and what should change are even more so. He worries that formal education is a machine producing willing functionaries for an oppressive system rather than, as he thinks it should, helping students develop with critical faculties. To achieve with the latter, we need a new school curriculum with courses that, you’d think, would make the likes of Michael Gove and Justine Greening bring out their blue pencils. He recommends that alongside traditional subjects there should be others provisionally entitled “equality and oppression”, “empathy and dehumanisation”, “war and peace” and “climate change and survival”. Such classes would help students reflect on the “innately political character of whatever is studied”. In the war and peace class, for instance, Martinez envisages students would reflect on how different governments have cajoled their citizens into supporting war.

Martinez’s proposals for education are especially intriguing given that he left formal education aged 17 to train as a portrait painter. He talks as though he dodged a bullet. “I think doing that enabled me to slow down and think about the issues that obsessed me.” Arguably, it spared him the constraining exposure to tertiary education that, he argues, produces graduates to prop up capitalism rather than have the intellectual sensibilities to destroy it. He’s particularly harsh on economics as academic discipline. “Economics functions as a way to legitimise class rule. It’s a way of making it seem to the public that decisions about wealth distribution and investment are technical decisions rather than moral or political ones.”

How did Raoul Martinez become the man he is? Thanks to forces beyond his control, no doubt. One was his ancestry. He is the son of Barcelona-born London-raised novelist and playwright father Alex and half-English, half-Swedish environmental campaigner and writer mother Christina. “My dad said to me when I was seven or eight years old that the most important word in the language is why.”

When the teenage Martinez wasn’t immersing himself in books, he also spent two and a half years developing his talent for painting as an apprentice with British portrait artist Paul Benney. His work has been selected three times for the BP Portrait Award. In 2013, for example, his portrait of one of his heroes, Noam Chomsky, was shown in London’s National Portrait Gallery during the 2013 BP Portrait Award exhibition. The following year, though, he used his increased notoriety to protest against BP’s sponsorship of the prize.

Creating Freedom developed from an ongoing film of the same name co-directed and written by Martinez. Episode one, The Lottery of Birth, was nominated for best documentary at London’s Raindance film festival and won the Artivist Spirit 2012 award at Hollywood’s Artivist festival. Episode two is in production.

Martinez is clearly an enviable overachiever, but isn’t he also a contradictory thinker? He spends the first part of Creating Freedom denying we can be free, then devotes the rest of it to imagining how we can create freedom. But how can we create what can’t exist? Martinez denies the contradiction. “We may be less free than we think, but only through understanding the freedom we lack can we enhance the freedom we possess,” he writes. He’s calling for a different kind of freedom from the delusive sort that makes us seem responsible for actions beyond our control, or the neoliberal inversion of the term that surreptitiously enslaves us to a system we should despise. “Freedom as I understand it is to use values that are most inspiring to us to create the circumstances in which they can be realised,” he says. It is then, an artist’s conception of freedom, one that involves ideologically enslaved humans imagining and then creating what they value.

To explain, he goes back to his granddad Paco, who wound up in a Franco concentration camp. “He managed to survive through the capacity to exercise his imagination. Even if it was just imagining being in Hollywood making love to Marilyn Monroe while he was in prison.” This echoes a passage in the book in which he quotes the Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, who recalled men in Nazi death camps who would walk through the huts comforting others and giving away their last pieces of bread. “They may have been few in number,” wrote Frankl, “but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

What Martinez takes from this is that we can use our imaginations to create the values we live by, rather than live in thrall to what he calls “that very strange concept of freedom that privileges those who have wealth over those who do not”.

He also insists that creating freedom involves something he sees lacking everywhere: empathy. Planning to build walls to keep refugees out, assuming there is something exceptional about our homelands, are all symptoms of the selfish, individualistic, hubristic subjects that neoliberal polities produce, he argues. “We dehumanise those beyond our group – that’s the function patriotism fulfils. This sense that our nation or our culture is inherently morally superior is very dangerous.”

Creating such a world as the one Martinez wants sounds hard, particularly when the forces of control have erased themselves from scrutiny so effectively. Why not despair of realising political change, as some of the Frankfurt School did? Martinez smiles across the table at me. “What’s the point of being despairing? Optimism is a political strategy. Many people wouldn’t identify as activists because they fear their capacity to change things is limited, but it isn’t.” In fact, Martinez says, just as there is a kind of freedom that he wants to defend from delusive ones, there is also a different kind of responsibility that he insists we should accept. “The responsibility to change things rests with us.”