Gore Vidal and the Fate of Fate

Julian

50 years ago Gore Vidal, whose brilliant career was celebrated in a recent documentary film, published an unlikely best seller called Julian, a novel based on the life of the 4^th century Roman emperor who attempted to revive paganism or, as he preferred to call it, Hellenism.  For those who, like Vidal, view Hellenism and the Greeks as the essential and vital strand, the core of Western Civilization, and the Judeo-Christian strand as the Johnny-come-lately interloper, the perennial thorn in the side and obstacle to cultural self-realization, Julian may only be seen as a quixotic hero.  Still, it’s hard to credit Vidal’s contention, through the character of Julian, that Hellenism was more rational than Christianity.  The latter, after all, made exhaustive attempts to render itself at least somewhat coherent, whereas Hellenism was always quite heterodox, more of a mythic atmosphere than an internally consistent belief system: different towns and different people worshipping different gods in different ways.

In rereading Vidal’s novel this time I decided to accompany it with one of his primary sources for the history of the period, Ammianus Marcellinus, the last historian of the Western Roman Empire.  The 4^th century, when Christianity was striving to gain control of men’s minds and the empire that had endured for half a millennium was coming apart at the seams, is a fascinating, pivotal era: corruption and greed were endemic, decadence rife, and the barbarians closing in on every side.  Julian was certainly the central figure of this period and his attempt to restore Hellenism might have succeeded had he not been skewered with a spear while fighting the Persians near Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, (now Iraq, that cemetery of so many dreams).  Marcellinus is clearly a partisan of the old gods, yet takes pains to suppress this partisanship and, cognizant of the new religion’s ascendency, avoids saying anything overtly critical of Christianity.  Nevertheless, he provides a pagan perspective that is contextualized by an awareness of Christian doctrines.  Every once in a while it’s intriguing to listen to someone who’s been dead for over 1600 years tell you about the world he lived in.

Ammianus Marcellinus

What you notice reading Marcellinus is that ancient societies were saturated in fate.  The belief in fate was of a piece with the importance ancient men assigned themselves, a part of their position at the center of the universe.  The belief in destiny is another aspect of their conceit, their delusional vanity.  Greek tragedy depended on its immutability.  The arts of divination and astrology plumbed its nuances.  Much of the actual practice of paganism had to do with efforts to divine the future and virtually everything in nature, the flight of a bird, the appearance of a meteor, the shape of the entrails of a sacrificial animal, was seen as having an occult meaning.  Legions of soothsayers were employed to divine these secret meanings and reveal what everyone wanted to know, namely, what was going to happen tomorrow, next week, next year.  In this sense, the world was experienced as full of import.  Things were not merely what they appeared to be, they were also full of hidden significance.  Reality was overwhelmed by the imagination.  Compared to this all-encompassing superstition, Christianity seems relatively rational.  Marcellinus calls it “a simple religion,” and it is, compared to the diffuse, unstructured complexity of Hellenism, which was pluralistic and tolerant and had no creed to swear allegiance to.  Hellenism had an inchoate quality, like childhood.  And this, perhaps, was what made it such a fertile milieu. 

Constantine

In the period before Constantine the Great, Christianity was one of a number of competing monotheistic cults whose relative orderliness may have been called up as compensation for the chaos of the times. Mithraism, whose adherents were baptized in the blood of a bull, was popular in the army. The cult of Dionysus emphasized the imbibing of wine and the notion of a world savior. Christianity was opportunistic and syncretic, picking up elements of its doctrines and practices from these competitors. The effect of these cults was to concentrate the mystery of divinity within a set of rituals, draining it from the world at large. In paganism the natural world was permeated with meanings, chock full to overflowing with them. These meanings were all imaginary of course, completely spurious, but nevertheless subjectively the world felt numinous and full of purport, whereas in Christianity transcendent meaning was restricted to the church and its rituals and could only be experienced through the mediation of a priest while the natural world was seen as fallen and thus emptied of purpose, since the divine no longer infused it to the degree it had in pagan experience.

It took a long time for pagan numinousness to be scrubbed from the world.  In the early days of the scientific revolution science and magic, astronomy and astrology, chemistry and alchemy, were all mixed up.  People were interested in astronomy because they thought it would enable them to do astrology better; that is, enable them to predict the future, and not just the astronomical future.  But nowadays science and magic have separated into 2 distinct entities.  Science has become serious business while magic has become entertainment, and consequently the pagan notion that the natural world is full of hidden messages, occult significances, has come to seem a child’s game.  I still hear people say “it wasn’t meant to be” or “everything happens for a reason,” but such statements sound like leftovers from an archaic, pre-scientific mindset.  In the scientific universe there is no author, no plan, no destiny.  There are merely competing natural powers, like gravity and centrifugal force, working through time.  These workings may resemble fate, but they do not constitute intentionality, and they are not oriented around human desires.  Fate now appears as a shelter and refuge from this terrifying specter of randomness.  The old fated world lacked the scary freedom of our fateless one.  Now the tragedy is not, as it was in Hellenism, that you cannot escape the rule of fate, but rather that there is no fate. The world has been drained of transcendent intentionality, and thus, in Hellenic terms, rendered meaningless, and Christianity, it turns out, was just a phase and instrument of that process.  Perhaps the proto-science of Epicurus couldn’t really take hold until Christianity had purged the material world of pagan animism.

It was against the background of Hellenism that Thales of Miletus, around 600 BC, became the first human to emerge from the mists of mythological thinking and see the natural world as explicable without resorting to the supernatural.  It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this achievement.  It is monumental.  But neither the Greeks nor their heirs the Romans were able to take the next step of establishing the experimental method for determining scientific truth.  Hellenism, it would seem, lacked an essential element for that.  Perhaps because educated men were not supposed to work with their hands? 

Gore Vidal

Vidal, our American Voltaire, loved to sound the call to “Ecrasez l’infame!” His wit and irreverence are sorely missed. He suggested that we would have been better off had Julian succeeded, because his success would have precluded the darkness of the Middle Ages. But perhaps Christianity was a necessary phase, scrubbing animism from the physical world, freeing educated men to apply their hands to physical experiment and, with its concept of the equality of souls before God, undermining the ancient institution of slavery and laying the groundwork for a more compassionate civilization.

Just Doubt It

Nietzsche at about 30

Nietzsche, as is perhaps inevitable for anyone attempting a radical critique of modernity, particularly someone who slays sacred cows so wantonly, is controversial and aimed to be.  A lonely man, he craved attention, and wanted to show off his talent, his daring, his outrageousness.  Startlingly original, he shared few of the common prejudices of his time.  His willingness to shatter taboos (“philosophizing with a hammer” as he called it) is a big part of his fascination.  His thought, like that of Socrates, whom he both admired and criticized, could be seen as a training in doubt, and he hoped to be remembered even longer than this mentor.  He so clearly yearned to transcend his time and place that I feel embarrassed for him whenever he shows himself too much a product of it (so German, so 19^th century). 

He was an amateur who made no more off his writing than Van Gogh did off his painting. Now, I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the work of professional writers now and then, but their motives are mixed, after all, their integrity is compromised.  To put it crudely, they’re whores.  Not to say you can’t have a wild and wonderful night with them on occasion, but it’s the amateurs, the ones who do it for love, that I return to again and again.  Nietzsche considered the corruption of culture by money to be far more pernicious than the like corruption of politics, because culture is more important than politics.  

After his breakdown

There’s a great deal of provocative material in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, he challenges your presuppositions, makes you think.  But the core of his interest is the Death of God, his melodramatic, even hysterical, metaphor for the spiritual impact of the Scientific Revolution on Western civilization, our migration from a metaphysical to an empirical worldview.  He believes this to be such a momentous event (“the great noon”) that it will inevitably result in the breakdown of society into chaos and anarchy, because the destruction of the foundation of all our values must inevitably lead to nihilism.  There’s no way to avoid this, according to him, because it’s an event that’s already occurred, even though many may not yet realize it.  He seems to fear that the knowledge of this event, our murder of God, will suddenly break over humanity like a massive wave and sweep everything before it.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that it could, instead, gradually percolate into human consciousness over a long period of time, and that those who recognize it do so because they are ready.  Some may succumb to nihilism, but their numbers may never be large enough to swamp society.  Others, lacking the acute metaphysical need he felt, may accommodate the news without such an extreme reaction.  After all, in terms of metaphysical beliefs, non-believers are already the third largest group, globally, after Christians and Muslims.  There are more secular humanists than Buddhists, Jews, and a number of other religious persuasions thrown together and, given the number of human societies that, over the millennia, have managed to survive without the Christian God (including some nominally Christian ones), the idea that we can’t seems, well, a bit parochial.  In fact, human societies have always determined their own values, invented them ex nihilo.   It was just a common delusion that a god had done it.  And anyway, few ponder the philosophical underpinnings of their lives with the same obsessive rigor and seriousness that Nietzsche did, most just believe whatever some authority tells them, so it’s a little difficult to credit his hysteria about this.   

Science derives from the Greeks.  Not just the line of Democritus and Epicurus, but also from Socrates: the Socratic Method is the forerunner of the Scientific Method.  While admiring the ascetic devotion of science to truth, Nietzsche, a classical philologist by training, criticizes its innate optimism, which is based on faith in the explicability of nature and belief in knowledge as a panacea, and these it derived, ultimately, from Socrates.  The innate optimism of science, Nietzsche believed, results in a delusion of limitless power.  In his own philosophical practice he eschews scientific method, preferring the poetic approach of aphorism.  (He refers to himself as a “Dionysian Pessimist.”)  Given his ambivalence toward science and his view that it has led to a crisis in human affairs, you might imagine he would have some sympathy with beleaguered Christianity, the main victim of science’s corrosive, anti-metaphysical effects, but in fact he attacks it mercilessly, holding it to be bankrupt and, in any case, dishonest and nihilistic in nuce.  (He is a champion of honesty, the “youngest virtue.”)

In the end Nietzsche’s perspective is, overall, too strident, stringent, stern, too strenuous and strepitous for my taste; and too male-adolescent: he wants to attack and destroy everything, and takes a little too much glee in wreaking havoc.  The various eras of our lives foster different perspectives, each with its own set of assets and liabilities, and each of these outlooks has an equal right to exist.  Nietzsche’s is a youthful perspective, rash and impulsive, full of itself.  I enjoyed it more when I was younger.  Like Mishima, his youth partisanship painted him into a corner from which he could not easily exit into middle-age.  His over-valuation of youth would have caused him, as it did Mishima, unbearable self-contempt at its loss.  So, like Mishima, he had to die (at least mentally) at 44, in the last glow of life’s summer. 

Nietzsche created a mythos that elevated him to super-shaman and psychopomp of this transition and tried to impress it on the world.  That was his ultimate will to power.  He claimed to be writing the history of the next 2 centuries, but 125 years since he penned his last jottings and lapsed into mental torpor, the calamity he prophesized has yet to arrive, so the jury is still out on him.  If he turns out to be right and the Death of God does bring on a massive crisis in human affairs, a major nervous breakdown, then he will be seen as a towering figure, the greatest Old-Testament-style prophet since Isaiah.  If, on the other hand, humanity manages to swallow the Death of God with little more than some mild indigestion, he will be seen more as an hysterical kook, a megalomaniacal Chicken Little with some crazy ideas, who, nevertheless, wrote some interesting commentary and philosophical poetry, embraced his inner lunacy, and will likely retain a modest measure of immortality as a master of the bon mot, the pithy epigram, and an inspiration and road map for readers longing to become who they are.  

Unamuno

As a young man

Frieda had an assignment in a class she’s taking to translate a poem of Miguel de Unamuno, so we got into a conversation about him.  Perusing the bookcase I spotted a copy of his magnum opus: The Tragic Sense of Life.  It was one of those books that I didn’t recall where I’d picked up but kept around thinking well, maybe I’ll read that some day.  Inside the cover was the name “Tanya,” the sister of a girlfriend I had back in the early 80s. 

Unamuno was a Spanish writer who lived from 1864 to 1936.  In addition to poetry, he wrote plays and fiction, but The Tragic Sense of Life is his philosophical testament.  He was raised a devout Catholic, but in college discovered science, and this set up a lifelong conflict for him, because the knowledge of science lacked the promise of personal immortality that had so comforted him as a boy.  Unamuno really, really did not want to die, a sentiment with which I have some empathy.  He considered the longing for immortality to be the essence of human striving, as illustrated by our positing, across cultures, immortality as the core of divinity, the basic quality of godhood.  He felt it was the primary secret that our thirst for knowledge ultimately seeks.  But, although he was dissatisfied with science due to its failure to unearth this secret, he also knew he couldn’t go back to the simple faith of his childhood, and this was the root of the tragic sense referred to in the title.  

Middle-aged

His thoughts document an early-20^th century Spanish variation on a long phase of Western intellectual development through which we are still passing, albeit in a later stage, the struggle between reason and faith brought on by the Scientific Revolution.  Ever since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution Western thought has concerned itself with the collision of the new perspective with the old religious one.  The new perspective, I would argue, really goes back to the Greeks, their idea of the individual thinking for himself.  Toward the end of the Roman Empire an alien, Levantine mysticism bled into Europe, an intoxicating ideological drug known as Christianity that called, in exchange for the promise of immortality, for submission to authority (all monotheistic religions are, by nature, authoritarian and thus hostile to democracy), and the West fell into a narcotic trance for a thousand years.  In the Renaissance Greek thinking, the individual, reawakened, and science grew out of this uniquely European perspective.  Consequently this is really a struggle between our native inclinations as Westerners, as the heirs of Greek civilization, and a foreign ideology that has overlain them.  But Unamuno didn’t look that far back.  For him, Catholicism felt like his Spanish nature. 

Part of Unamuno realizes that there is no going back to childish beliefs, to superstition and fairy tales; that religion is part of the childhood of our species, a childhood we have outgrown.  Yet his emotional longing for immortality will not allow him to completely let go of it.  At times his desperation is so great he seems to imagine that immortality is something he can just conjure out of thin air, as if wishing for it would make it so, rather than something that must be clawed from nature bit by bit. 

 

Old

While longing for immortality, he nevertheless recognized that the Christian vision of it is absurd.  What would we do in Heaven: would there be TV and sports teams, film and music, food and relationships—sexual relationships?  Would there be anything at all of what we know and love about life?  Or would we just sit on a cloud strumming a harp for eternity?  There is nothing plausible about the Christian promise of immortality.  Doctrinally, virtually everything about Christianity is, by turns, outlandish, preposterous, or ridiculous.  It’s a relic of an earlier age; ultimately, a con.  Nevertheless, like many today, he couldn’t shake it off.  He was caught between reason and faith, unable to commit to either.  The book is a self-contradictory, rambling record, rife with rhetorical questions, of his attempt to wrestle these incompatible perspectives into some sort of reconciliation. 

It was a hopeless endeavor, of course.  Despite mighty efforts, he could not definitively shake off Catholicism because it was such a deep part of his personal and national identity as a Spaniard, and he was unable to rise above the latter to become a fully fledged European thinker.  Ironically, had he been able to manage this he would have secured a greater degree of literary immortality, because he would have been seen by later generations as having been ahead of his time, rather than of a piece with it.  In the end he fell back on one of the great resources of Spanish culture, the figure of Don Quixote, as a symbol of his own impractical pursuit of an unreachable goal. 

What makes life tragic for Unamuno as well as the rest of us is, of course, that we all must die, and cannot go on learning and growing.  No one is going to be saved no matter who they submit to.  Unamuno went through enormous mental contortions to try to circumvent that conclusion, but they were to no avail.  A blood clot in his overworked brain laid him low at the age of 72.  Alas, all we can do about this is to grant him a posthumous shadow of life by reading him.

So, anyone want a copy of The Tragic Sense of Life?  Tanya?

Epicurus

Epicurus

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) anticipated much of the scientific worldview 3 centuries before Christ.  Following his teacher Democritus (460-370 BC), he was a materialist and an atomist, believing the world to be composed of tiny, invisible, indivisible particles in constant motion, combining in various ways to form all substances.  With astonishing intuitive insight in the face of scant evidence, he concluded that all things come to be through random deviation, and that living beings had evolved through a long process of trial and error.  The universe was not created for humans, he concluded.  Rather, we are just another creature of the world different from the others only in degree, not in kind. 

Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve tells the story of how the philosophy of Epicurus managed to cross the sea of time to impregnate the modern world.  Like so many important events, it was an unlikely fluke.  The vehicle of the voyage was a long poem called De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by the Roman Epicurean Lucretius (99-55 BC) which, in a 9^th century copy, happened to wash up in a German monastery where it chanced to be discovered in 1417 by a Florentine book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini.  Recognizing it as a rare find, Poggio, an exceptionally talented scribe, immediately copied the manuscript and sent it back to Florence where it was recopied and began to circulate among the leading humanists of the day. 



Lucretius



The survival of Lucretius’ poem was a miracle in the 1^st place because, given the chaos of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the attendant rampages of illiterate barbarians, it is miraculous that any literature of the ancient world survived.  But then came the rampages of a Christian orthodoxy bent upon rooting out and destroying any nonconforming text, and De Rerum Natura was not merely nonconforming, it was heretical down to its bones, because it posited pleasure as the highest good, whereas for the Church the highest good was suffering and pain.  There was no place in De Rerum Natura for notions of Christian Providence, no place for a creator or designer.  Instead it held that human society began in a brutal struggle for survival.  The soul died along with the body; there was no afterlife.  Organized religions were superstitious delusions.  There were no angels, demons, or ghosts.  Such fallacies were considered the greatest obstacles to happiness, which was the goal of Epicurus’ philosophy.



Poggio Bracciolini



Recognizing the threat, Christianity attempted to stamp out Epicureanism, yet somehow Lucretius’ manuscript survived.  Perhaps the elegance and grace of his Latin had something to do with it, or maybe it was just pure chance, but not long after it was rediscovered Gutenberg came along with the printing press (1440) and then there was no stopping it.  Soon there were just too many copies for the Christian thought police to find and destroy them all.  In the centuries since their rediscovery these ideas informed the Enlightenment and shaped the modern world.  Isaac Newton, Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi tried to reconcile Epicureanism and Christianity, but later figures of the Enlightenment (Diderot, et al.) realized the two were antipodal and came down on the Epicurean side, because it had been validated by science and passed the test of Occam’s Razor.  Subsequently Thomas Jefferson seeded the founding document of our country with the Epicurean concept of the pursuit of happiness. 

Today people are still loath to give up the ideas of divinity and the afterlife, but otherwise in practical terms they increasingly live their lives as Epicureans, pursuing happiness, seeking to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  When you consider the amazing insights Epicurus had so long ago, it’s difficult to avoid feeling that in the form of Christianity a Levantine mysticism overwhelmed Grecian clarity and clouded the collective consciousness of the West for 1500 years, and the result was a long, dark, and fruitless detour in our intellectual history.  You have to wonder where we might have been by now had we not taken that fateful turn into darkness and superstition. 

The Evolution of Thought

For countless millennia humankind lived in a mythological world.  We thought about the origins of things with a mixture of dream and fantasy.  Shamanism, the most primitive religion, was invented as a means of gaining some influence over the forces of a mysterious and frightening world.  When different shamans or, later, different religions came into conflict, the winner was the one whose advocates won the physical battle, because that victory supposedly demonstrated their power to influence real events.  That’s how Christianity came to rule the Roman Empire. 



Copernicus



Afterward, the European Mind languished in the Christian torpor for over twelve hundred years.  Then, suddenly, the roof fell in.  Less than half a millennium ago, in 1548, arguably the most important year in human history so far, an amazing thing happened.  A couple of men somehow gained the courage to think about the nature of themselves and the world in a more disciplined way.  Without preconception, they tried to look at the physical evidence and draw rational conclusions from it.  These men were Nicolaus Copernicus and Andreas Vesalius.  Their books, respectively, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and On the Fabric of the Human Body, kicked off the Scientific Revolution.  They were followed by other fearless warriors of truth like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who all carried forward the torch of empiricism against Christian opposition.  Descartes (1596-1650), the first philosopher since ancient times to not be a theologian, established skepticism as the intellectual starting point, and the scientific method in his Discourse on the Method (1637).

This thought revolution was epochal and continues to be a traumatic psychological event as the successive blast waves from it have shaken the Western Mind to its foundations.  It undermined and challenged everything that had been held true to that point. 



Diderot



The Enlightenment is the name we give to the period in the 18^th century when this change in perspective began to percolate through the non-scientific intellectual community in Europe.  By then science had already displayed far more success at predicting the future than religion ever had, and had begun the relentless process of technological innovation that would enable us to manipulate the physical world to an unprecedented degree, and consequently there arose an eagerness to apply it to every aspect of life, including the social, the moral, and the political.  That was largely Denis Diderot’s (1713-1764) project in his Encyclopedia. 

I’ve been reading about the best minds of the Enlightenment.  The more radical members of this movement, those at the cutting edge (Diderot, Baron d’Holbach, Claude Adrien Helvetius, David Hume, Julien Offray de La Mettrie), drew out the scientific approach to its logical conclusions.  Even though they didn’t have the greatest immediate impact, because they were too far ahead of their time, they are the ones who now seem most akin to us.  Better known figures like Rousseau or Voltaire, who had the bigger initial impact, now seem dated, even antiquated.  The radicals saw human beings as basically hedonistic: pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain.  Dismissing metaphysics, they were empirical and utilitarian, and believed in applying reason to the evidence of their senses.  They were pragmatic materialists, proto-evolutionists.  They viewed mind and body as two aspects of the same entity, and death as the end of consciousness.  They were atheists, even though in their day its open profession was a capital offence.  



Holbach



Patterns of thought are parts of culture that take a long time to percolate through the population.  An idea starts with an individual and slowly spreads.  Given the tremendous intervening success of science, one might have expected that in the 250 years since these intrepid thinkers blazed the trail, the ideas they pioneered would have permeated society and become the dominant way of thinking.  But that hasn’t happened, at least not in the United States, not yet, because against this progressive line of thought a powerful regressive pressure has arisen.  In the Enlightenment these people were excited about the triumphs of science and rushed to apply the scientific method to all aspects of life.  Now it is the reverse.  Many people are shell-shocked and frightened by the pace of technological change and seek to limit the scope of science as much as possible, and pull the wool of antique mythologies and superstitions over their heads.  We might call this the Benightenment, the flight from the light that illumines too much. 

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since the time of the philosophes, but opposed to it we have the blowback of fundamentalism, the resentment of its relentless pressure on the solace of the superstitious.  Many people are still having great difficulty making the transition to the new way of thinking, even though the process of waking up from the old way began 463 years ago, because in terms of the grand tides of culture, this is a relatively short time, less than 7 lifetimes.  Most people are still living in a pre-Cartesian, mythological mental world.  Ordinary people accept the boons of science as if they were magically generated, rejecting the materialist worldview that makes them possible.  The most likely to be atheists are the highly educated, who have studied the intellectual history of the past few centuries and, of course, scientists, who have had their whole lives to get used to the idea.  Meanwhile most people (some polls say as many as 90% in the US) still have their heads buried in the sand, their fingers in their ears, and are singing “La la la la la la!” as loudly as they can.  How curious that people can drive cars, fly in planes, talk on phones, watch TV, surf the internet, get their MRIs or CT scans, accept all these fruits of a materialist world view, and yet continue to profess belief in a preposterous, primitive mythology without a shred of evidence to support it.  But it just goes to show how slowly some things change, and how reluctant people are to give up old sources of comfort.



Mettrie



A kindly grandfather running the show, the survival of the ego after death, these are comforts people desperately wish to be true.  But as my mother used to say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”  Wishing doesn’t make it so and, indeed, our longing for the truth of any proposition ought to make us extra-suspicious of it.  The afterlife is a bill of goods the church has sold to buy worldly power, a power it doesn’t deserve.  This snake oil is not going to cure our mortality.  Science tells us that nothing lasts forever.  Stars (including our own sun), galaxies, even the universe itself all have finite life spans, are all mortal.  Chances are our little bodily egos are no exception.  Isn’t it better to accommodate ourselves to the truth, rather than shut our eyes and live in the darkness of a lie?  The sooner we forsake rhis fictitious immortality, the sooner we can fully focus on the practical matter of trying to lengthen our life spans as much as possible.  We're not going back to the dark dream of the Middle Ages, so the regressives' foot-dragging is just wasting time. 

 





 

Fate vs. Free Will

In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus life is ruled by fate.  Try as he might to escape the destiny the Fates have spun for him, of killing his father and marrying his mother, it nevertheless comes to pass.  This notion of a master plan, as uncomfortable as it was for Oedipus, was yet comfortable for the ancient Greeks, as it was for all primitive peoples, because it put their lives into the context of a greater meaning (although what higher purpose Oedipus’ fate served remained unclear). 

Many millennia later we know that events are not the products of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos hunched over their spinning wheel.  The dinosaurs were extinguished not by the Fates, but by the orbit of an asteroid crossing that of our planet, as a matter of random chance, and crashing into it.  Their demise, and the consequent rise of the mammals and us, was an accident.   The notion that our lives are ruled by chance is not as comforting as the idea that they are being scripted by some master planner, but part of the maturation process over the millennia is the triumph of reason over wishful and fanciful thinking.  Perhaps ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in this, as I too was a fatalist in my youth, and even now an event that seems just too perfect may temporarily resurrect that feeling of destiny, but fatalism is a childish notion, an atavistic remnant of an earlier era, and the wisdom of maturity soon returns me to sanity and the uncomfortable truth. 

In the TV series Fringe, as well as the current film The Adjustment Bureau, based on the Philip K. Dick story Adjustment Team, the writers want to have it both ways: everything is fated yet free will is still possible.  The Observers or Adjusters intervene to correct an action that threatens to derail the master plan.  This, however, is nonsense.  If events are predetermined, then there is no room for free will, and vice versa.  The two are logically incompatible.  Once variation is introduced anywhere into the system, all determination is threatened.  That means you cannot travel to the future for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist yet (except, of course, insofar as we are all already travelling to the future).  Ironically, if fate existed, and everything was predetermined, then life, the actual playing out of these predetermined events, would become redundant and absurd; we, as individuals, would not exist, we would be mere notations of another hand, and original thought would be impossible, since all of our thoughts would have been, as it were, pre-thought.  This way lays madness. 

Unlike what you might infer from this movie, I don’t think Dick was a determinist, either.  Rather, he used fate as a metaphor for chance, to suggest the way randomness impinges on our lives.  But this issue is treated much more effectively in the German film Run Lola Run, in which a sequence of events is replayed repeatedly with slight variations so that we can see how contingency affects the outcome.