That Jugular Vein

And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than his jugular vein. [Koran 50:16]

Last year about this time the subject of “fate” surfaced and I wrote a note on the subject (here). That day  vast amounts of ice were melting; now the snow is decently frozen all over. In any case, the subject seems to belong to the month in which the blessed spring is but a month away. It occurred to me in the course of a morning conversation (that first cup), that fate, at the personal level, is all about temperament—and temperament is very much an expression ultimately of the body type. The verse I cite from the Koran is illuminating. It speaks of God’s nearness to us—but what about that jugular vein? Symbolically it is the carrier of life—but it is distant from us, you might say. It belongs to that region of reality over which we have very little control—the “given,” the material order.

Part of our conversation also involved laughing at the review of the movie If I Stay which deals with a teenage girl’s near death experience. Mia, the lead character, spends her time in an out-of-body state tracking her own body and her family and friends. The review ends on this note: “So does Mia stay or go? Let’s just say that she’s a child of her generation with an unshakeable sense of empowerment. Never mind what God or random-chance may have in store for her. ‘I’m running the show,’ she declares toward the end. Deathless words from a near-death decider.” [WSJ, August 22, 2014] I cite this snippet by way of indicating the modernist view of reality: “I’m running the show.” But the truth is otherwise.

We’re running the show in the same sense as a deep-sea diver is inside a massive diving suit—linked by lines and pipes to a boat and oxygen supplies—the boat itself linked in countless ways, not least by radio waves, to the greater world on shore. The surrounding “suit” is much more real, in the practical sense, than the self inside it. Just as our body must constantly exert itself against the vast influences which the world exerts so also the soul must exert itself, at times, against the temperament which we can manage but never really control. If it weren’t so, the concepts of body-type and temperament would not have so clear a meaning to us, and fate would have no meaning. Yet it is continuously invoked when our splendid running of the show starts fraying or even runs aground.

Even when it’s not a snowy February, such morning thoughts keep me humble—because mornings are hard on those who’s temperament is stained with the melancholic dye.

Fatum est Datum

There are three forces which operate in the history of the world—God, fate, and human freedom. That accounts for the complexity of human history.

     [Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End]

Berdyaev does not define what he means by fate in a particular way—beyond meaning what I suppose we all think fate might mean. Pondering this statement, and the meaning of fate—and also that of complexity—made me think that fate, in this context, is that which resists our will, which is matter itself, the given. The phrase used as my title came spontaneously with the thought. Fate is the given you can’t do much about.

Or not very much—and even that only with lots of effort. Behind that title, furthermore, is the fact that I’ve just spent two hours removing a vast accumulation of built-up ice which, melting, caused a generous flow of water in our basement as is bypassed poor caulking between brick and concrete and then followed the necessary, fateful force of gravity down to our red-painted basement floor.

Half-Visible Fate

Fate is a word that signifies the outcome of a life, of a society, and is the sort of thing altogether beyond the control of the individual or of a collective. Not surprisingly, in our democratic age, it is much less used in books today (three times less frequently in 2000, according to Google’s ngram program, than it was used in roughly 1805). We don’t believe in fate. If it doesn’t have an arbitrary quality—thus the idea that it is meted out by gods who have a mind of their own we cannot in the least influence—what is left of it is determinism. (Determinism, by the way, while still less used than fate, increased in usage by a factor of 1,842—also per Google—in the same period.) We believe in our power to observe and, by calculation, to project.

Now arguably a large component of fate is to some extent measurable—provided that the data are available for making calculations. If Europeans had had effective world wide news coverage and demographic statics in, say, 1205 AD, they should have been able to predict the Mongol Invasion certainly by 1234 (when the Mongols had already conquered Siberia, China, and parts of Persia) some 50 years before the Mongols reached the borders of Hungary.

My guess is that, in today’s Information Age, we are capable of predicting at least half of Fate quite accurately if we simply focus on two aspects of collective life: energy and demographics. Quite similarly, if we know something about an individual, we shall also be able to predict half of his or her fate based on such measures as intake of poisonous substances, physical activity and body-weight, genetic profile, and criminal record.

That still leaves the arbitrary element inviolable. The government might be able to record in a vast database what we do with a little Verizon phone. But, thank heaven, our data collection has not yet advanced to such an extent that funeral homes, for a fee, can get notification of my future passing years, say, in advance, guaranteed to happen within, say, a three-month period in such and such a year.