Can we override our programming?

I’ve been watching a couple of TV series recently – East of Eden and Lanterns – and a strange juxtaposition happened yesterday as I switched from an episode of one to an episode of the other. Both shows have a running theme exploring how we become the people we eventually are and how much choice and agency we can exercise in the process. But the episodes I watched last night had an even closer parallel: both had characters expressing the desire to “override their own programming” (one of them explicitly using that wording). In both cases, the character expresses a conscious wish to be kind and good, while recognising that their own nature is neither of those things.

This is, more generally, a perennial theme in literature and also a constant in our personal lives. Most of us recognise that we have some set of deep-rooted dispositions, tendencies, proclivities, and motivations from which our inclinations and impulses issue. There may be arguments about where these dispositions come from, but whether you fall down on the side of nature or nurture (or some combination of both), the end result is that we all become persons with certain characteristic ways of being. The question then arises of how much control we really have over our own behaviour. Are we really in charge or are we merely playing out our programming?  

As it happens, in both the shows I’ve been watching, the argument is heavily slanted towards nature. In East of Eden, a strain of psychopathy runs through the family, with the character in question recognising that he’s inherited an inclination towards “badness”. In Lanterns, a similar dynamic is at play, with a different origin (which I won’t spoil here). Both these characters recognise their darker nature and rail against it, while doubting that they really have the capacity to fully contain it.

I’ve written about these themes of innate nature and what it means for our own agency and free will in two books: “Innate” and “Free Agents”. In fact, part of the reason I wrote “Free Agents” was to counter the possible impression from “Innate” that our having innate predispositions really does strip us of any agency. It’s true that we’re not blank slates, but that doesn’t mean that those innate tendencies and dispositions control everything we do. They certainly shape the way we encounter and experience the world and how we become the persons that we are, but not in a way that precludes our exercising our own agency along the way.

At any moment, all kinds of factors are impinging on us, both external and internal. That doesn’t mean that our behaviour is narrowly or strictly determined. It’s clearly influenced by those personality traits, but also by our learned habits and attitudes and policies and commitments, by how we have come to adapt to the world, by what we know, by the relations we’ve formed with others, and, of course, by the exigencies of the specific situation we find ourselves in. All of those influences still leave some aspect of our decision – within this admittedly constrained possibility space – that is truly up to us. We’re not free to do just anything and we wouldn’t want to be. An essential aspect of our agency comes from being ourselves – from you doing you and me doing me.

(Image from Free Agents).   

As Cicero put it, in letters to his son: “Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone else’s traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a man’s character is, the better it fits him.”

Another quote – attributed apocryphally to the ancient Taoist figure Lao Tzu emphasises the idea that the control of our actions in any moment shapes the person that we become: “Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

So, we’re not just shaped by our innate nature and by the experiences that have happened to us, as if we were completely passive objects being pushed around by forces internal and external. We’re involved in shaping those experiences and our reactions to them. The active exercise of our own agency is itself a habit that we grow into, with the person we become reflecting that history.

But what’s really interesting about the two TV shows is that they highlight a deeper aspect of our agency that doesn’t get much attention – metavolition. It’s not just that in any moment we can exercise some degree of rational control over our behaviour – overriding urges or impulses in the service of some longer-term goal. It’s that we can examine those urges and impulses. We can ask whether those are the motivations that we should have, that we want to have. We can and do think about the kind of person we want to become.

Schopenhauer’s claim – often repeated by commentators on free will like Sam Harris or Robert Sapolsky – that “we can do what we want, but we can’t want what we want” (i.e., we can’t decide what we should want) just seems fallacious. We do in fact think about our own motivations all the time.

This is, in my view, the basis of morality. Those meta-desires are not arbitrary. The things that we call virtues are inherently pro-social: kindness, generosity, temperance, fairness, honesty, selflessness. They are encouraged, fostered, inculcated through social experience – with our parents, siblings, teachers, and peers. Sometimes they are explicitly and formally imparted (some might say imposed) through religious or philosophical education. A person who asks “What would Jesus do?” is exercising metavolition. But it doesn’t have to be so explicit or tied to any particular tradition. Just thinking: “I really shouldn’t do that”, “I don’t want to be that kind of person”, “I don’t want to want to behave that way” is an expression of the same capacity to examine and evaluate and reshape our own motivations.

I’m not saying that’s easy – it’s not. It reflects a habit of introspection, a discipline of checking ourselves that can be learned, but that still requires an effort to exercise consistently. And there may even be a meta-meta phenomenon at play: some people may be better at exercising metavolition than others. Some may be more naturally inclined towards it than others. The characters in the TV shows I’ve been watching at least wanted to be good. But that inclination – what Dungeons and Dragons players may recognise as moral alignment – may also vary between people.

The capacity to override our programming may vary independently from the willingness and desire to deploy it. Some people may rail against the surrender of their autonomy to the strictures imposed by society. Others may see it as the ultimate act of free will – the voluntary ceding of our own agency to further the aims of the collective. Whatever your view of it, the capacities of metavolition and moral reasoning – and the inclination to exercise them – are the things that enable pro-social behaviour on the scale that humans exhibit. They are, to put it bluntly, the very basis of civilisation.