Fate, fatalism, fateful moments

To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk, the inevitable concomitants of a system geared to the domination of nature and the reflexive making of history. Fate and destiny have no formal part to play in such a system, which operates (as a matter of principle) via what I shall call open human control of the natural and social worlds. The universe of future events is open to be shaped by human intervention -- within limits which, as far as possible, are regulated by risk assessment. Yet the notions of fate and destiny have by no means disappeared in modern societies, and an investigation into their nature is rich with implications for the analysis of modernity and self-identity.

Sweeping though the assertion may be, it can be said with some confidence that there is no non-modern culture which does not in some sense incorporate, as a central part of its philosophy, the notions of fate and destiny. The world is not seen as a directionless swirl of events, in which the only ordering agents are natural laws and human beings, but as having intrinsic form which relates individual life to cosmic happenings. A person's destiny -- the direction his or her life is due to take -- is specified by that person's fate, what the future holds in store. Although there is an enormous variety of beliefs which could be grouped under these two terms, in most of them the connecting point between destiny and fate is death. In Greek thought, fate (moira) was the bringer of doom and death, and was thought of as a great power -- more ancient than the oldest gods. ¹

Given the nature of modern social life and culture, we tend

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now to counterpose fate and the openness of future events. Fate is taken to mean a form of preordained determinism, to which the modern outlook stands opposed. Yet while the concept of fate does have the connotation of a partly `settled' future, it typically also involves a moral conception of destiny and an esoteric view of daily events -- where `esoteric' means that events are experienced not just in terms of their causal relation to one another, but in terms of their cosmic meaning. Fate in this sense has little connection with fatalism, as this term is ordinarily understood today. Fatalism is the refusal of modernity -- a repudiation of a controlling orientation to the future in favour of an attitude which lets events come as they will.

A main connecting point between pre-existing ideas of fate and those of the post-medieval period was the concept of fortuna, which originally derived from the name of the Roman goddess of `fortune', and came into uneasy tension with the dominant Christian beliefs. The idea of Divine Providence was clearly a version of fate but, as Max Weber pointed out, Christianity introduced a more dynamic role for human beings on this earth than was characteristic of the traditional religions of Greece and Rome. <sup>2</sup> The goddess was frowned on by the Church, since the idea of `fortune' implied that one could achieve grace without having to work as God's instrument in the world. Yet the idea of fortuna remained important and often outweighed providential reward in the afterlife as a feature of local cultural belief. Machiavelli's use of fortuna marked a significant transition between the traditional use of the notion and the emergence of new modes of social activity from which fate is excluded. In The Prince he says:

Many have held, and still hold the opinion that the things of this world are, in a manner, controlled by fortuna and by God, that men in their wisdom cannot control them, and, on the contrary, that men can have no remedy whatsoever for them; and for this reason they might judge that they need not sweat much over such matters but let them be governed by fate.... I judge it to be true that fortuna is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but that she still leaves the control of the other half, or almost that, to us ... I say that one sees a prince prosper today and come to ruin tomorrow without having seen him change his character or any of his traits ... a prince who relies completely upon fortune will

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come to ruin as soon as she changes; I also believe that the man who adapts his course of action to the nature of the times will succeed and, likewise, that the man who sets his course of action out of tune with the times will come to grief. ³

It is not surprising that the study of politics should provide the initial area within which notions of fate become transformed, for although the propaganda of nations may see them as driven by fate to a specific destiny, the practice of politics -- in the modern context -- presumes the art of conjecture. Thinking how things might turn out if a given course of action is followed, and balancing this against alternatives, is the essence of political judgement. Machiavelli is celebrated as the originator of modern political strategy, but his work gives voice to some rather more fundamental innovations. He foreshadows a world in which risk, and risk calculation, edge aside fortuna in virtually all domains of human activity. There seems to have been no generic word for risk in Machiavelli's time, however; the notion appears in European thought about a century later. (In English until the nineteenth century the word was usually spelled in its French version, as risque. For some while the French spelling continued to be used alongside the new Anglicised word, which was first of all employed with reference to insurance. The term risqué, meaning a joke that risks giving offence, still retains the old form.) ⁴

The notion of risk becomes central in a society which is taking leave of the past, of traditional ways of doing things, and which is opening itself up to a problematic future. This statement applies just as much to institutionalised risk environments as to other areas. Insurance, as we saw in chapter 1, is one of the core elements of the economic order of the modern world -- it is part of a more general phenomenon concerned with the control of time which I shall term the colonisation of the future. The `openness' of things to come expresses the malleability of the social world and the capability of human beings to shape the physical settings of our existence. While the future is recognised to be intrinsically unknowable, and as it is increasingly severed from the past, that future becomes a new terrain -- a territory of counterfactual possibility. Once thus established, that terrain lends itself to colonial invasion through counterfactual thought and risk calculation. The calculation of risk, as I have mentioned previously, can

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never be fully complete, since even in relatively confined risk environments there are always unintended and unforeseen outcomes. In milieux from which fate has disappeared, all action, even that which sticks to strongly established patterns, is in principle `calculable' in terms of risk -- some sort of overall assessment of likely risks can be made for virtually all habits and activities, in respect of specific outcomes. The intrusion of abstract systems into day-to-day life, coupled with the dynamic nature of knowledge, means that awareness of risk seeps into the actions of almost everyone.

A more extended discussion of risk, and its relation to self-identity, will be given shortly. First, however, it is necessary to introduce one or two other notions connected with that of fate. We have to say a little bit more about fatalism, a term which, as mentioned has more to do with modern social life than with more traditional cultures. Fatalism, as I understand it here, differs from stoicism, an attitude of strength in the face of life's trials and tribulations. A fatalistic outlook is one of resigned acceptance that events should be allowed to take their course. It is an outlook nourished by the main orientations of modernity, although it stands in opposition to them.

Fatalism should be separated from a sense of the fatefulness of events. Fateful happenings, or circumstances, are those which are particularly consequential for an individual or group. ⁵ They include the undesired outcomes faced in what I have termed high-consequence risks, risks affecting large numbers of people in a potentially life-threatening way, but they also figure at the level of the individual. Fateful moments are those when individuals are called on to take decisions that are particularly consequential for their ambitions, or more generally for their future lives. Fateful moments are highly consequential for a person's destiny.

Fateful moments can be understood in terms of the broader traits of consequential activities that an individual carries on in day-to-day life and over the course of the lifespan. Much of the daily life, so far as the individual is concerned, is inconsequential, and is not seen to be particularly fateful for overall goals. However, some avenues of activity are usually thought of by the person in question as more generally consequential than others -- such as activity carried on in the sphere of work. Consider the phenomenon of `dead' or `killed' time, analysed with characteristic

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brilliance by Goffman. ⁶ Time that has to be killed is also, interestingly, quite often called `free' time -- it is time which is filled in, in between the more consequential sectors of life. If a person finds she has half an hour between one engagement and the next, she might decide to spend that time pottering around or reading the newspaper until her next appointment, rather than putting the time to `good' use. Killed time is bounded off from the rest of an individual's life and (unless something unexpected happens) has no consequences for it.

By contrast, many more consequential activities of life are routinised. Most `time on' activities -- whether in the formal or more informal sectors of social life -- are not problematic, or are so only in terms of the ordinary management of the tasks concerned. In other words, difficult decisions may often have to be taken, but they are handled by strategies evolved to cope with them as part of the ongoing activities in question. Sometimes, however, a particular situation or episode may be both highly consequential and problematic: it is these episodes that form fateful moments. Fateful moments are times when events come together in such a way that an individual stands, as it were, at a crossroads in his existence; or where a person learns of information with fateful consequences. ⁷ Fateful moments include the decision to get married, the wedding ceremony itself -- and, later, perhaps the decision to separate and the actual parting. Other examples are: taking examinations, deciding to opt for a particular apprenticeship or course of study, going on strike, giving up one job in favour of another, hearing the result of a medical test, losing a large amount in a gamble, or winning a large sum in a lottery. It often happens that fateful moments occur because of events that impinge upon an individual's life willy-nilly; but such moments are also quite commonly engineered, as, for example, when a person decides to get together the whole of her savings and start a business. There are, of course, fateful moments in the history of collectivities as well as in the lives of individuals. They are phases at which things are wrenched out of joint, where a given state of affairs is suddenly altered by a few key events.

Fateful moments, or rather that category of possibilities which an individual defines as fateful, stand in a particular relation to risk. They are the moments at which the appeal of fortuna is strong, moments at which in more traditional settings oracles

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might have been consulted or divine forces propitiated. Experts are often brought in as a fateful moment approaches or a fateful decision has to be taken. Quite commonly, in fact, expertise is the vehicle whereby a particular circumstance is pronounced as fateful, as for instance in the case of a medical diagnosis. Yet there are relatively few situations where a decision as to what to do becomes clear-cut as a result of experts' advice. Information derived from abstract systems may help in risk assessment, but it is the individual concerned who has to run the risks in question. Fateful decisions are usually almost by definition difficult to take because of the mixture of the problematic and the consequential that characterises them.

Fateful moments are threatening for the protective cocoon which defends the individual's ontological security, because the `business as usual' attitude that is so important to that cocoon is inevitably broken through. They are moments when the individual must launch out into something new, knowing that a decision made, or a specific course of action followed, has an irreversible quality, or at least that it will be difficult thereafter to revert to the old paths. Fateful moments do not necessarily mean facing a strong possibility that things will go awry, that is, circumstances with a high probability of losing out. What tends to make the risk environment difficult to confront is rather the scale of the consequential penalties for getting things wrong. Fateful moments disclose high-consquence risks for the individual comparable to those characteristic of collective activity.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 812