Greek Plays and Gallup Polls

Twice in my career I have had to stand up for free will, when teaching Greek Tragedy to Cambridge undergraduates and before that when working for the statistical bureau of a London newspaper. Have I used the right sort of arguments? To start with Fleet Street: colleagues would come up to me and say in effect, if you maintain that you can tell from questioning other people how I am going to vote, you are denying that I have free will. No, I said, you are perfectly free to vote as you choose, but your effect on the national result is cancelled out by the equaland-opposite freedom of someone else to vote another way. If a floor is absolutely level, balls dropped on to it from vertically above in principle spread out equally in all directions, there is mutual offsetting of their individual vagaries. What opinion polls look out for is symptoms of a tilt in the floor: of some factor such as, say, mass unemployment which is inclining a significant percentage of the electorate towards the same direction, the same corner of the floor. To be subject to some of the same influences as other people in no way rules out being a free agent. One is not saying, you had to be influenced by that factor, simply that a vote swing can only be due to factors influencing a large number of people nationwide, large enough to show up in a cross-section, and not to private factors which would cancel out. Why they cancel out, for persons and dropped balls indifferently, is to my knowledge not wholly self-evident. The large number requirement is of course vital. If Cambridge had just a tiny number of inhabitants, they could all happen to decide independently to go to Birmingham tomorrow, and private factors would empty the city. But coincidence really has a short arm; because there are so many inhabitants, the unquestionable freedom of any one of them to go to Birmingham tomorrow coexists with the rational certainty that not all of them will go. The certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow seems to be of the same kind; its atoms may be free as individuals to cast minority votes, but each is less than a quantum, their micro-initiatives have no linking principle by which to build up to a force which could sabotage the whole system. One gathers it is not thought to be a matter of logic that the universe has to be as stable as this: that there are any deductive reasons why micro elements could not add up arbitrarily without a