philosophy – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Fulfilling your destiny

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

Currently, I am obsessively plugged in to an audiobook, the latest release from my favourite author, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty writes what is often scathingly referred to as “chick lit”: a genre which at its worst can be undeniably vacuous, but no more so than the two-dimensional thrillers churned out by authors marketed to men. The withering contempt with which “chick lit” is viewed says a lot more about how society treats the everyday lives and concerns of women than it does about this particular genre of popular fiction.

It is undeniable although perhaps a little depressing that Moriarty is an author unlikely to be read by vast quantities of male readers. Her stories revolve around people – mainly suburban women – and the thoughts inside their heads. Often there is an unfolding plot, but the focus is on the development of character and relationships rather than on action or suspense. Moriarty is an absolute master of the genre and writes with an effortless charm that belies her talent; the best authors make it look easy when it isn’t. It’s a great shame that more men aren’t interested in some of the things which interest women, and a truth that I have pondered the reasons for on and off. I speak as someone who has read quite broadly and have flirted with books categorised in modern times as “lad lit”: I am a huge fan of Martin Amis and if you haven’t read David Baddiel’s forays into novel writing in this genre then you should – they are annoyingly good. So if I, as a woman, can enjoy books written from a male perspective and read by men, I find it somewhat irksome that so few men have the desire to show any kind of interest in the fiction favoured by women. Anyway, I digress.

Much as many of Moriarty’s books (perhaps most famously Big Little Lies) focus on the lives of suburban women, some of them are intricately plotted and follow the lives of a complex set of characters, all of which cross paths in various ways and with a myriad of consequences. Because of this, I was greatly surprised when I heard the author interviewed and she revealed that she writes without a plan. Prior to her most recent release, the last novel she wrote called Apples Never Fall followed the tensions and anguish within a family from whom the matriarch has disappeared: most of the novel we spend wondering what has happened to this character (including whether she has merely walked out of her life or has been horribly murdered by someone within it), and Moriarty reports that she too spent much of her writing time wondering the same thing. She had not, by her own account, decided what had actually happened to this key character when she began to write the book. She started with the idea of the disappearance and discovered the truth behind it along with her characters. It is perhaps this very unconventional approach to plotting that enables her to write with such authenticity – she’s not dropping hints or trying to plant red herrings in relation to the real outcome, for she has no idea what that outcome will eventually be.

I am around one third of the way through Moriarty’s latest and am gripped as ever by her writing. Here One Moment is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet as it circles around the idea of free will and destiny. In summary, the scenario is that a group of people on a flight from Hobart to Sydney are each pointed at by a woman on board the flight and told the supposed time and manner of their death. Some passengers are given what amounts to welcome news by most people’s standards (heart failure, age 95), others – inevitably – are told that they will die very young. Some are even told that their death will be as a result of violence or self-harm. The rest of the novel is about the fall-out from this thoroughly alarming and unscheduled in-flight entertainment.

One of the ideas explored in the novel is the impact that such an experience might potentially have, not only on the feelings of those receiving the predictions but on their actions too. One of the passengers pays a visit to another “psychic” after the flight, and this “psychic” points out to him that he will not be the same person after the reading as he was before it. He points out that whatever he says to his client will make him act differently and that this will then potentially have an impact on the outcome of his life. Moriarty refers constantly to the idea of chaos theory throughout her writing – the idea that one small event in nature has a ripple effect that causes huge impact in other areas. At the point in the novel where I am right now, a mother who has been told that her baby son will die by drowning while still a child has elected to take him to swimming lessons. He takes to the lessons like the proverbial duck to water and it becomes clear that he is going to become a huge lover of swimming. As readers, we now sit with our hearts in our mouths and await the inevitable: will the mother’s decision to take her child to swimming lessons, sparked solely by the psychic’s so-called prediction, end up leading to the death of her child in the future?

The same thought experiment was run by a Greek playwright called Sophocles almost 3000 years ago. He wrote what I would argue is perhaps the most influential work of literature ever published, in the form of the tragedy called Oedipus Rex. Most people know the name “Oedipus” only as a result of Freud’s early 20th century ramblings about motherhood and sexual repression; very few people have any idea what a frankly brilliant and chilling story that of Oedipus was when it was written. It is emphatically not a story about motherhood, nor is it a story about sexual repression; to be honest I don’t think I can ever forgive Freud for making it so. Oedipus Rex is a story about destiny, about free will and about the extent to which we have control over either of those things. If you don’t know the story, it can be summarised as follows …

In ancient Greece, a king and queen are horrified to be told by an oracle that their baby son will grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Terrified by this ghastly prediction, they send the baby away to be exposed on the hillside and die. The kindly old shepherd gifted with the unhappy task cannot quite bring himself to do the dreadful deed, so he ends up passing the baby to another ruler and his wife in a far-distant land who are childless, and they bring the baby up as their own. The baby is named Oedipus. He has no idea that he is adopted.

When Oedipus grows up, like all curious young men, he too consults the oracle and asks his destiny. The oracle tells him that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he does the only sensible thing: he removes himself from his family home and goes off on his travels, thus removing any possible risk of somehow murdering his father and marrying his mother. Oedipus believes that he has taken control: he is the master of his own destiny and he has cheated the oracle. Trouble is, remember … he doesn’t know he is adopted.

Several months into his lonely travels, Oedipus gets into an altercation on the road with an arrogant older man who tries to tell him what’s what. Long story short, Oedipus does the only thing any decent red-blooded young male would do, he kills the old fool. Afterwards, he continues on his travels and eventually comes to a kingdom which is in a bit of trouble because it’s being harassed by a nasty monster. Clever Oedipus defeats the monster by solving its riddle and – would you know it – it turns out that the king of this particular dominion has recently died and they’re in need of a chap to take over. What a stroke of luck! Oedipus marries the widowed queen – who is granted a little older than him but still young enough to bear children – and becomes King of Thebes. The rest, as they say, is a truly horrible history.

The whole point of Oedipus’ story is exactly the thought experiment that Moriarty is playing out in her novel. To what extent does a sense of destiny itself predetermine our actions? To what extent do people inevitably fulfil the path that they are told lies in front of them? It is easy to point out that if the oracle had not said what it said – on either occasion – the story of Oedipus would not have unfolded as it did. In the ancient world, the story was taken as a morality tale about man’s arrogance: humans are convinced that they can outwit the gods and cheat their destiny, and that arrogance begins and ends with asking the question. If nobody had asked, would nothing have happened? Does the asking trigger the event?

It is easy to assume that these big philosophical questions don’t affect our lives on a day-to-day basis, but in fact this loop of thought is inescapable and resonates in daily life. During my career, a trend came and (thankfully) went of sharing what were laughably called “predicted grades” with students. These grades were not teacher predictions (although teachers are indeed asked to make such psychic predictions and that nightmare continues) but based on a crushing weight of data that looks at “people like Student A” and attempts to make a mathematical prediction about how “a person like Student A” is most likely to perform in an exam. All sorts of data get included in the mix, from prior academic performance to socio-economic background. The happy news that a bunch of data analysis that hardly anybody fully understands “predicts” that Student A is likely to get a Grade 3 or below was – until alarmingly recently – shared with Student A. What an absolute travesty. I will never forgive the system for sitting a child down and telling them that the computer says they’re likely to fail. Likewise, I have seen children who are “predicted” a line of top grades spiral out of control under the pressure. For heaven’s sake stop telling kids what “the data” (our new name for the divine oracle) says about their destiny. It’s a seriously grotesque thing to do.

For similar reasons, I know parents who are understandably jumpy about their children being labelled as anything. Who doesn’t remember well into middle age having “he’s shy” or “she’s anxious” being said over their head, while they were going through an entirely normal phase of being wary of strangers? Before you know it, the label of “shy” or “anxious” or whatever the grown-ups have decided befits you becomes you. I am absolutely in support of my friends who will not have their children referred to in this way: if history teaches us anything, it’s that people tend to fulfil their destiny. So be careful what path you pave.

Following the Herd

At primary school, I rarely played with other children. For me, playtime usually meant a walk around the edges of the playground, observing others and thinking to myself. There were lots of reasons why I found it difficult to connect with my childhood peers, none of them particularly interesting or unusual, but I have always wondered whether my early childhood experiences have shaped my temperament: to this day, I’m not much of a joiner.

More recently, I have begun to ponder whether in fact my own biology has had more influence on my personality than I would like to admit: as someone who suffers with extremely poor eyesight and less-than-perfect hearing, I am naturally quite cut off from much of the world. In recent years, I have begun to realise how this has in many ways defined how I relate to others and in turn how others respond to me. Motivated by a desire for acceptance, I have always tried to disguise my disablities, to the extent that many people are genuinely surprised when I admit to them. The price I have paid for this – ironically – is that I have gained a reputation of being “stand offish”, with many people firmly convinced that I have ignored or blanked them over the years. So, for anyone reading this who is convinced that I have overlooked them in the street or in the corridor (especially to whomever it was that made me aware of it by writing a rather nasty comment on this blog): the truth is, I probably didn’t see you or hear you. I’m sorry. It wasn’t deliberate.

Large scale groups have always made me feel uncomfortable and I hate the idea of “losing myself” in a crowd. The thought of going to a football match terrifies me. I did a few big concerts in my youth but struggled with the sheer number of people around me and I would not do it again now I’m older. A crowd takes on a mind-set and a force of its own, one that’s both independent from and beyond the control of the individuals it contains. Recent events have served as a horrific and tangible reminder that herd mentality – in all its forms, both ancient and modern – is something that should frighten us all.

Experience has certainly taught me that being part of a group is not in my nature and broadly speaking I am proud of the fact that I won’t play ball for the sake of staying on the team. It may not be my most attractive quality, but it’s one that will drive me to raise the alarm whilst everyone else stays silent. It makes me the kid who will shout that the emperor’s got no clothes on. Some employers have thanked me for this, others have not: it takes a robustly confident leader to tolerate being told that they’re naked in front of the world. There are times when I have reflected that I could have led a somewhat easier life – certainly professionally – had I been more willing to march in time, but generally speaking I quite like being an outsider. This is not to say that my failure to merge cohesively with a group has not caused me some anguish over the years – it can be a lonely existence. In the past, it has meant being kicked out of a group of writers with whom I shared many values, due to my innate inability to agree with them on everything – or at least, to pretend that I did. It meant the Editor of the magazine blocking all contact with me as “no longer an ally” because I asked questions and defended other people’s right to to do so. As a lifelong supporter of social justice, the increasing phenomenon of these kinds of activists, who denounce all forms of debate or discussion, has come as a genuine shock to me.

Until a few years ago, I believed that the fight for equality would usher in a new era of empathy, diversity and understanding – a new age, in which our ability to relate to each other would be improved by our ever-evolving understanding of how human rights intesect and – at times – conflict. It is what being a liberal is all about. Yet it seems to me that most of my so-called liberal allies have been taken over by a collective fear of rejection. Like the teenagers I have worked with over the years, they constantly check in with each other to affirm whether or not what they think is acceptable – and who can blame them? The consequence of dissent these days is excommunication from the tribe. Man, as Aristotle said, is a social animal: rejection is frightening and dangerous.

In the past, I found myself briefly drawn to people who described themselves as “libertarians” – only to find once again that there was a hymn sheet of horrors that I was expected to sing from if I wished to be initiated into the tribe. According to most of the Americans that I met online, to be accepted as a “libertarian” then one must be in favour of guns. Lots of guns. One must agree that the act of carrying a gun is a liberating experience (I mean – what?) and certainly that the act of carrying one is none of the government’s business. Every time I tried to propose a different line of thinking (held by most sane individuals on this side of the Atlantic), I was simply told that I was “not a libertarian”. So there we are. Another crowd to watch from the sidelines as they descend into madness.

Another “libertarian” approach that I struggled to respect was the puerile desire to offend, bolstered by the dubious claim that this is somehow a noble and worthwhile antidote to the equally tedious culture of taking offence. Certainly, I relish challenge and debate, and I also believe that free speech is more important than the inevitable risk of causing offence to some. As Salman Rushdie said following the horrifying attacks on the staff at Charlie Hebdo in 2015, “I … defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.” But in an article on what he has termed “cultural libertarianism,” Breitbart author Allum Bokhari argued that “deliberate offensiveness plays an important role in the fight against cultural authoritarianism, … showing that with a little cleverness, it’s possible to express controversial opinions and not just survive but become a cult hero.” This surely sums up the unambitious and self-seeking aims of the internet-famous shock-jocks, who make it their business to offend – preening contrarians, whose sole function is to cause shock and awe, their online communications a heady mix of clickbait, worthless insults and self-aggrandisement. There is no evidence whatsoever that anyone’s personal liberty is furthered by such infantile sneering, yet swarms of self-proclaimed free-speech advocates rejoice in this toxic effluence with excited applause.

Maybe I’m still that little girl on the edges of the playground, the one with the problem joining in – but as I stand at the periphery, I see the herd mentality all around me. At its best, it gives us a sense of solidarity as we strive for the greater good or find our feet in the world. At its worst, it gives us mindless savagery, the kind of collective violence exemplified and explored in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. On a day-to-day level, however, it results in something much more mundane and insidious: it endorses mediocrity and prevents us from thinking.

This is an updated and adapted version of an article I wrote originally for Quillette magazine in 2016.

False judgements

Emotions got a bad rap from ancient philosophers. Most agreed that the ideal state was a kind of calmness that the Hellenistic philosophers (most famously the Epicureans and the Stoics) called ataraxia. There was even talk of apatheia – a detachment from the chaos of feelings and overwhelm. This is perhaps unsurprising if you understand the birth of western philosophy; if you’re trying to formulate, define and distil the key to the perfect life and the perfect society (which is what the early founders of western philosophy were trying to do) then it probably doesn’t include your citizens experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions. Once you’ve admitted that emotions are a bit of a distraction and often cause issues both on a personal level and for society, it’s not much of an overreach to find yourself arguing for a state of detachment.

The term “stoic” these days is synonymous with having a “stiff upper lip” but this is based on a crucial misunderstanding of the Stoic position. The Stoics did not advocate for iron-clad self-control or suppressing your feelings. Rather, they believed that all emotions were what they called “false judgements”, which meant that they were based on a misunderstanding: if you’re feeling them, you’re still getting it wrong. In the ideal philosophical life that they strove for, a person would have such a great understanding of himself, the world and his place within it that he would not suffer at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: he would simply nod and know the right thing to do. One example given is that a Stoic would run into a burning building in order to attempt to save a child because that is the right thing to do; they also argued, however, that a true Stoic would feel no distress when his mission failed. Weird, isn’t it? Interesting, though.

One of the frustrating things about this period of philosophy is that much of the writings that we have are general “sayings”, snippets or purported quotations which appear in the works of later authors, usually writing in Latin rather than in Greek, and reporting on what a particular thinker or school of thinkers believed. The reality of this of course is that they may be wrong. For example, there is a famous quotation attributed to Epicurus that states “the wise man is happy on the rack”. Quite how this works within a school of philosophy that was dedicated to the avoidance of pain is puzzling. If the quotation is correct, our best guess is that the Epicureans certainly spent a lot of their time considering the correct attitude towards unavoidable pain, for this was one of the biggest challenges to their philosophical position; presumably the “wise man” – someone at the pinnacle of philosophical endeavour – would know how to cope with pain in extremis.

Most people see Epicureanism and Stoicism as polar opposites and they were indeed rival schools of philosophy at the time. As so often, however, there was more that united them than divided them. Both schools were arguing and aiming for the perfect life and the state of detachment that philosophers before them had explored; both schools were concerned with how to manage our responses to pain and distress. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the Stoics believed in proactive, conscious and deliberate involvement in society and its structures, whereas the Epicureans were a bit more lethargic about the whole idea – getting involved with politics is painful and distressing, so is it really rational to bother?

One philosopher, writing before the Stoics and the Epicureans, was unusual in his take on emotions. Aristotle argued that emotions were appropriate and necessary: the trick was understanding when and how you should be feeling them and what to do with them. He spoke of “righteous anger” and argued that a good philosopher would indeed feel such a thing. It is difficult to explain how truly radical this position was, when the way the philosophical movement was drifting was towards ataraxia and apatheia. Aristotle also smashed through the Socratic idea that philosophical ideals such as “courage” and “justice” could be defined in one way and that if one could not do so then one lacked an understanding of them. Aristotle argued that there were multiple forms of “courage” and “justice” and that nobody could define them in one simple way nor apply their principles in individual cases without discussion, debate and compromise. What a genius he was.

Why the hell am I writing about this? Well, I spoke to a friend yesterday who has taken a decision about which she feels guilty. I cannot divulge the details of this decision as I do not want to betray her confidence. Suffice to say that it was a professional decision, the right decision and one which the people affected will hopefully benefit from in the long-run. There is no doubt – in my mind and even in hers – that the decision was right and good. Yet she still feels what she describes as “guilty” about it.

This reminded me yet again of The Greeks and the Irrational by ER Dodds, a book written in the 1950s, which I mentioned in another blog a few weeks ago. One of the chapters in the book argues that the Athenian world was a “shame culture” and that later ancient societies – the Hellenistic world and the Roman worlds – began the shift towards a “guilt culture”. I have thought about this on and off all of my life. The very thought that the nature of one’s emotions can be dictated by the society in which one grows up is fascinating to me. Dodds argues (rightly, I think) that modern society is more person-centric and hence feelings such as guilt can be internalised; in Athens, one’s personal standing and engagement with society was more relevant (a symptom perhaps of living in a small and emergent city-state) and therefore a sense of shame before others was more powerful than any kind of internalised guilt.

As I listened to my friend who left me some WhatsApp voice messages (I love them – it’s like receiving a personalised podcast!) I found myself wondering whether the Stoics had it right. Sometimes emotions truly are false judgements. My friend has no reason to feel guilty about her actions and she should strive to release herself from the false state of mind in which this feeling distresses her. According to the Stoic ideal she has prevailed in her actions but has not yet achieved the ideal state of detachment. So how should she achieve this goal? Well, I guess it depends on your approach to these things. A Stoic would advocate for rigorous rational analysis and say that this will eventually lead to release from one’s feelings. This is not, in fact, a million miles away from cognitive behavioural therapy, the therapy model supported by psychiatrists and many psychologists, who would say that she needs to question why she feels guilty and challenge her reasons for doing so. A psychologist with leanings towards the psychodynamic model would argue that she needs to explore where her feelings might stem from – does the situation remind her of experiences in her past, during which she has been made to feel or to carry guilt that perhaps should not have been hers? (Pretty sure the Stoics wouldn’t have been up for that one).

Whatever the answer in this particular circumstance, personally I find myself returning to the Stoics time and again. They were a fascinating turning point in philosophical history and paved the way – I believe – towards modern psychiatry. After all, what is the difference between sanity and insanity if not the difference between the rational and the irrational, the true and the untrue, the controlled and the uncontrolled? I will leave you with the Stoic image of how the individual should relate to society – not because I advocate for it, necessarily, but because it’s a classic and a model I have never stopped thinking about since I first learned about it in the 1990s. The Stoics believed that individuals could not control fate but they also argued that individuals had free will. So an individual person is like a dog tied to the back of a wagon. Whatever the dog’s actions, the wagon will go on its way. So how does the dog have free will? Well, he can resist the wagon and be dragged along, impeding the wagon’s progress and damaging himself along the way. Alternatively, he can trot along like a good dog and help the wagon to proceed smoothly.