{"id":21006,"date":"2013-07-08T10:54:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T15:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21006"},"modified":"2013-07-08T10:54:20","modified_gmt":"2013-07-08T15:54:20","slug":"the-return-of-the-fickle-finger-of-fate-non-humour-category","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/07\/08\/the-return-of-the-fickle-finger-of-fate-non-humour-category\/","title":{"rendered":"The return of the fickle finger of fate (non-humour category)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In sp!ked<\/em>, Brendan O’Neill<\/a> discusses the unlikely comeback of “fate”:<\/p>\n

Fate is making a comeback. The idea that a human being\u2019s fortunes are shaped by forces beyond his control is returning, zombie-like, from the graveyard of bad historical ideas. The notion that a man\u2019s character and destiny are determined for him rather than by him is back in fashion, after 500-odd years of having been criticised and ridiculed by humanist thinkers.<\/p>\n

Of course, we\u2019re far too sophisticated these days actually to use the f-word, fate. We don\u2019t talk about a god called Fortuna, as the Romans did, believing that this blind, mysterious creature decided people\u2019s fates with the spin of a wheel. Unlike long-gone Norse communities we don\u2019t believe in goddesses called Norns, who would attend the birth of every child to determine his or her future. No, today we use scientific terms to argue that people\u2019s fortunes are determined by higher powers than their little, insignificant selves.<\/p>\n

We use and abuse neuroscience to claim certain people are \u2018born this way\u2019. We claim evolutionary psychology explains why people behave and think the way they do. We use phrases like \u2018weather of mass destruction\u2019, in place of \u2018gods\u2019, to push the idea that mankind is a little thing battered by awesome, destiny-determining forces. Fate has been brought back from the dead and she\u2019s been dolled up in pseudoscientific rags.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to overstate what a radical idea this was at the tailend of the Dark Ages. It\u2019s this idea that gives rise to the concept of free will, to the concept of personality even. And it was an idea carried through to the Enlightenment and on to the humanist liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the words of the greatest liberal, John Stuart Mill, it is incumbent upon the individual to never \u2018let the world, or his portion of it, choose his plan of life for him\u2019.<\/p>\n

But today, in our downbeat era that bears a bit of a passing resemblance to the Dark Ages, we\u2019re turning the clock back on this idea. We\u2019re rewinding the historic breakthroughs of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and we\u2019re breathing life back into the fantasy of fate. Ours is an era jampacked with deterministic theories, claims that human beings are like amoeba in a Petri dish being prodded and shaped by various forces. But the new determinism isn\u2019t religious or supernatural, as it was in the pre-Enlightened era — it\u2019s scientific determinism, or rather pseudo-scientific determinism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill discusses the unlikely comeback of “fate”: Fate is making a comeback. The idea that a human being\u2019s fortunes are shaped by forces beyond his control is returning, zombie-like, from the graveyard of bad historical ideas. The notion that a man\u2019s character and destiny are determined for him rather than by him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,16],"tags":[39,822,139,42],"class_list":["post-21006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-science","tag-junkscience","tag-mythology","tag-psychology","tag-sociology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5sO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21006"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21008,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21006\/revisions\/21008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}