Unexpected Consequences

We live inside the modern idea that, as an individual, we should be able to chart a course that gives us a chance to realize our hopes and dreams. At least the idea that we can form this intention and begin to work toward its achievement feels fundamental to the democratic ideal. So why are so many of us living “lives of quiet desperation”.

Perhaps there are two distinct ways to define a life path for ourselves. We can position ourselves to receive the material benefits that our society makes available: wealth, renown, power; all the benefits that allow us to do good in the world but which can become an objective in their own right. The other kind of path arises in spite of the intentions we were pursuing at the time; we recognize something neglected inside us that feels more important than those material concerns.

When did this ideal of setting our own course in life first appear in the Western world? Was it in the Socratic dialogues, when Socrates guided young minds to find within themselves the truths that seemed inaccessible until Socrates’ questions led them to it? It seems a fine idea that the truth can be found inside each one of us once our capacity to discover that truth is awakened; but after reading Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, I also question whether logical analysis is really a path to the most important truths of human life.

Many years ago, I was influenced by Edmund Wilson’s “The Wound and the Bow”, which celebrates examples of how what seems like a disability is sometimes connected to a special gift. His examples are collected from life (Beethoven composing some of his greatest works after he was deaf) and from literature (a man with a severe stutter in Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” has children in a small, isolated community completing his words for him so that he can keep playing the piano and sharing his love of sublime music, instead of getting stuck on “c-c-c-c”).

I read the play by Sophocles, after which Wilson titled his book, and discovered in it a clairvoyant anticipation of the modern view of the individual, springing forth from an Ancient Greek vision of immutable fate.

In Sophocles’ play (“Philoctetes”) the most powerful archer of his time has been marooned by General Odysseus, because his cries of pain—caused by a chronically festering foot—were demoralizing the crew on their way to the Trojan War. Now, seven years later, the Delphic Oracle has prophesied that the walls of Troy will only fall when the son of Achilles (Neoptolemus) and the bow of Hercules (given to Philoctetes, who is the only mortal who can even bend it) are brought together there.

In compliance with this prophesy, Odysseus has returned to this island with the plan to persuade the marooned archer to step onto the ship by telling him that the Greeks have already won the war and are now returning to his beloved homeland. Odysseus knows better than to show his face to Philoctetes, who has had seven years to nurture his hatred for the general who marooned him here. Instead, Odysseus sends Neoptolemus to lie to Philoctetes.

Neoptolemus starts to tell the story that Odysseus has rehearsed with him. One imagines that this strategy could succeed, but then something unprecedented happens. It would not be unprecedented in a modern play, but it is in the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, in which characters struggle against their fate but cannot escape it, once prophesied by the Oracle. The most famous example of immutable fate is Oedipus who marries his mother and kills his father, even though he has done everything within his power to evade that fate.

Under the open sky above an island in the Mediterranean–seagulls wheeling overhead, the surf crashing onto the beach below, while General Ulysses crouches behind a boulder–Neoptolemus stops talking mid-sentence. Today we might call it a pang of conscience. Looking at the man who had lived on this island for seven years with no other human being to share his thoughts and feelings with, his heart must have felt that pain as the words tumble out of him.

“We have not won the war. We are not returning home. We are here because the Oracle has prophesied that without Hercules’ bow and Achilles, we cannot defeat the Trojans.”

In an instant, Philoctetes has strung his bow and is searching for Odysseus. If the general had lifted his head a fraction of an inch he would have been scalped by an arrow travelling at the speed of sound. But that isn’t what happens.

Instead, Hercules steps out of a giant boulder and explains to Philoctetes the order of things (which, like in any other ancient Greek drama, is what the Oracle has prophesied): that he must go with his countrymen to Troy and only after the walls of Troy have fallen, can he return home.

What a breakthrough moment! A young man follows his conscience, speaks truth to the powerful Odysseus, challenges the pronouncement of the Delphic Oracle, and instead of being ignored or obliterated, Hercules descends to calm the moment and to confirm the truth that has been spoken. How different this feels from the fate of Oedipus in several ancient Greek plays. Oedipus has spent his adult life scheming to evade the fate of a prophesy under whose black cloud he has lived; yet, when attacked by vagabonds determined to rob and kill him, he kills the man and marries the widow (who he then discovers are actually his own father and mother).

How different is this new arriving world from that old one, in which fate cannot be avoided no matter what defenses we erect, and which leaves no room for the honest utterances of the heart.

. . . . . .

And here we are now, more than two millennium later, in a world where the individual is courted by every new upgrade of a few products, where presumed individuality is mockingly corralled into polar allegiances that are mirror images in one respect: in the anger they arouse in their tribe.

But in recent decades, we have seen a return to the view that the whole is not only larger but more coherent than the individual. In this relatively recent realization, destiny is not an immutable reality to which an individual can only bow and seek makeshift accommodation. The view currently gaining currency in our society is of the world as a living whole in which every individual is a resonant resident and participating partner.

The vision of Planet Earth celebrated in this evolving view is not of an unresponsive and unchangeable reality to which individuals must submit, but of a mutually supportive, interwoven whole which each of us inhabit, because there is nowhere else for us to be.

There may be a corollary to this given-togetherness of everything. When the human mind more fully accepts and understands the inclusivity to which we belong, we may find a purpose to which we have been heading all along.

It may be humanity’s destiny to finally understand why Mother Earth has appeared in the cosmos with the amazingly diverse family of beings living upon her.