Elbow Room

"After all, if determinism is true now, it always has been true. While many people’s lives in the past have been quite horrible, many others have led lives apparently well worth living – in spite of their living in a deterministic world. Modern science isn’t making determinism true, even if it is discovering this fact, so things aren’t going to get worse, unless it is believing in determinism rather than determinism itself that creates the catastrophe."
-Dennett’s 1984 Elbow Room, page 15.