The Return of Fate

Our attempts to build a world we control has led to much that is out of our control

The aftermath of the Marshall fire in Superior and Louisville, Colorado, 2021

The challenge of our time out of joint has become envisioning the forward movement of history as advancing and improving the human condition. These are all contentious words, I’m well aware. But they’ve been hijacked by identity politics on both sides of the aisle.

The left sees linear history has been nothing but the march of imperialism that has left nothing but victims in its wake. Tearing down so-called oppressive identities is the only moral vision. On the right, linear history has been the triumph of the welfare state that is guilty of holding back capitalism from its full potential. Tearing down this state is the only political answer possible. Morality has nothing to do with it.

The inability for our political parties to orient to a better future—their fundamental purpose IMO—has left us with a strange time out of joint. Individuals can be quite optimistic about their own futures, making plans, saving money, looking down the road and seeing personal prosperity. That same individual may quite likely hold a powerful pessimism over the direction in which the country as a whole is going.

This separation of optimistic individual time and pessimistic cultural and political time can have many odd effects. What I’d like to dive into today, is how this time out of joint leads to the return of fate and the creation of literal gods.

Fortuna

Writing as a mentor to Lucilius in the first century CE, Seneca lays out the classic Stoic understanding of fate, humans, and the gods. His vision is that all the events of the world are in the control of the gods, and the human good is to accept fate with a calm tolerance:

You admit that the good man must of necessity be supremely respectful toward the gods. For that reason he will calmly tolerate anything that happens to him, for he knows that it has happened through the divine law by which all events are regulated. If that is the case, then in his eyes honorable conduct will be the sole good; for that includes obedience to the gods, neither raging against the shocks of fortune nor complaining of one’s own lot but accepting one’s fate with patience and acting as commanded. (1)

This morality is born of a world where most everything is beyond human control—fires, floods, earthquakes, wars, enslavement at the hands of victors, chronic pain, disease and all the other risks of living that come along with being human.

Elsewhere Seneca will make clear that gods is just another word for natural causes. In either case, Seneca is reminding his readers that most everything is beyond our control, and we might as well accept that our power is limited. Gods, natural causes, divine law, fortune are all words that place a strict limit on what the human can aspire to and what he (mainly a he) is responsible for.

In the ongoing struggle between man and nature, nature has all the power and all the control. The only thing that Seneca believed we could be responsible for, as he continually makes clear in his Letters, is our honorable conduct—the acceptance of the inevitability of what happens, and that one should never get too upset about it.

In the end, he offers a morality that is voluntary because the human is not responsible for anything but his own reactions.

Control Sequence

In many ways our world resembles Seneca’s. Fate seems to have returned in the form of nuclear weapons, climate catastrophes, global pandemics, software making decisions at computational speeds well beyond human perception.

But the sequence is different. For Seneca, the world exists with its own natural causes that are completely separate from human activity. To attempt to control these natural causes is a fool’s errand. At best, one can cope with them, or, as the Romans were famous for, engineering their way into greater and greater control of fortuna.

In short, Seneca’s world is what it is, and humans are merely thrown into it as bit players. Without humans, the world would be pretty much the same. Therefore, we are only responsible for controlling our own reactions to circumstances that are not of our own making.

We live a different control sequence. If we face out-of-control circumstances, these are usually the byproduct of our attempts to control fate.

The 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado does not fit Seneca’s worldview. The control sequence is different. Suburban neighborhoods in Louisville and Superior were designed for stable and predictable lives. On December 30, 2021, the cities faced one hundred mph winds on a bone-dry day with temperatures in the mid-50s. Sparks from an underground coal seam and a nearby property became flames. Residents had only minutes to flee as more than a thousand homes were reduced to ash in a few hours.

Where does one draw the line between natural causes and human action? The engineering meant to facilitate stable and predictable lives fueled the fire’s speed.

Even if we stare inside the flames, we find an incandescent mixture of nature and human action.

. . . when human-made materials like these burn, the chemicals released are different from what is emitted when just vegetation burns. The smoke and ash can blow under doors and around windows in nearby homes, bringing in chemicals that stick to walls and other indoor surfaces and continue off-gassing for weeks to months, particularly in warmer temperatures.

Imaginary Gods

When Seneca writes to Lucilius, ‘You admit that the good man must of necessity be supremely respectful toward the gods’, his use of ‘gods’ can be understood as figurative language for natural causes. Elsewhere, we find Seneca more perspicuous on this point. In ‘On Earthquakes’ he writes: ‘. . . neither the sky nor the earth is shaken by the anger of divinities: these things have their own causes.’ (2)

To think of the gods as divinities with human emotions and intentions is a sign of one’s ignorance: ‘When we are ignorant of the truth, everything is more terrifying, especially when rarity increases the fear.’ (3) Seneca typically uses gods positively, but only as a figurative way to describe more literal natural causes.

We have inherited this figurative view of gods from Seneca. Our self-described secular age sees all gods as imaginary. Any expressed belief in God is treated as a delusion, the result of irrational ignorance.

The problem for our current era is this: we are ignoring the literal creation of new gods. Because our secular age lacks the theological sophistication of the Middle Ages, we are missing this crucial development, which risks creating an actual, literal class of humans that look more like Homeric gods than we should want:

The gods have spun for all unlucky mortals
a life of grief, while nothing troubles them. (Iliad, 24.525-26, Wilson trans.)

Literal Gods

Let’s bring this back down to earth.

When in 1968 Stewart Brand launched The Whole Earth Catalog, he captured its mission in what would become a mantra:

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. (4)

Is this a figurative invocation of gods? Yes. Is this a literal invocation of gods? Also, yes. This single sentence concentrates the transition to a new era that is easily missed in our secular age.

The transition might actually come down to a single word—as versus like.

If Brand would have written ‘We are like gods’, the figurative would have been left in tact. But I wish to see deliberate intent in his use of as. In English, as has many grammatical operations: comparative (‘as tall as’), synchronizing actions (‘he was dancing as it was raining’), and prepositional (‘as teacher, she guided us through the math lesson’). None of these meanings are figurative or metaphorical. As makes a literal connection among the parts in the sentence.

In Brand’s phrase, as can be replaced with ‘functioning in the capacity of’ (‘as the teacher’), and we could easily translate the sentence inelegantly as ‘We are functioning in the capacity of gods and might as well get good at it.’

The actual phrasing turns Seneca’s world inside out while leaving it relevant and recognizable today. It feels to me like the older worldview is being pulled through a keyhole, and in the process a new worldview emerges that has the power to deify some individuals as actual, literal, living gods.

Theodicy

In an era where we are deifying literal gods, it seems prudent to rejuvenate some theological concepts that have been shunted to the sidelines in our atheistic Modernity. Theodicy is one such term.

Theodicy is the attempt to justify how a loving God created a world that allows evil and suffering to exist. In a worldview that imagines God and can only experience Him through faith, this remains an intellectual undertaking. When gods are real, however, theodicy comes down to earth.

When some living, breathing human beings are suddenly ‘as gods’, we are in the realm of the literal, and theodicybecomes questions that can be posed to those on whom this power has been conferred.

1 Seneca, Letters on Ethics, No. 76. I’m using the recent University of Chicago edition, translated by Margaret Graver and A.A. Long.

2 Natural Questions, ‘On Earthquakes’ 3.1.

3 Ibid, 3.2

4 The full citation of the title page of the first edition, Fall 1968, reads: ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.’ This text can be found at the Whole Earth Archive.