Weekly Technetic #25: Fate and Free Will
(This week is going to be a little different. Usually, I try to split these posts into two sections, whether theoretical/practical or personal/social. Today, I feel the subject is best discussed as a whole.)
What is the technetic view of fate? This question came about from another discussion with my boss that touched on philosophical matters, so I contemplated until I found my answer. This may not be your answer, but I ask that you consider it to have some weight. I am, after all, the first one to explore technetism.
It's not a question with a simple answer. Technetism is a humanist philosophy built on Enlightenment principles, so it's understandable and expected that free will plays an important role in our school of thought. Our power of cognition is what separates us from lower animals, and what purpose does all that intelligence serve if we are no less puppets to fate?
On the other hand, technetism is an inclusive philosophy. Because we do not reject religious beliefs which are compatible with our tenets, we must be willing to accept that some among us believe in some form of fate. And that should be a learning experience for us all. Why do some believe in fate? If we look at that question, rather than the superficially deeper question of whether free will exists, we may be able to learn more about human nature and what we believe.
For some, of course, belief in fate is just something they grew up with, something they inherited from their parents and their community. "Everything happens for a reason," they'll say, never considering that they might want to know that reason. "It is what it is," they'll recite, without ever giving thought to the words. These people, then, serve as mirrors: they are ourselves, but before we accepted the introspection that technetism demands. But that's all we can really learn from them on this topic.
More interesting are those who have seen the world, who have considered the options, and still believe in human fate controlled by the divine. There are two forms of this, what I'll call "strong" and "weak" fatalism.
The strong form, most often called predestination, is commonly associated with Calvinism in the West. In it, a person's destiny is fixed at birth, or even before, at the creation of the universe. Human agency is reduced to little more than playing a role, reciting lines and following stage directions written by another. Some are fated to die early, others to live a long and fruitful life. In the strongest variants of predestination, even a person's eternal disposition is decided beforehand.
It shouldn't take long to see that this kind of fatalism is at odds with the technetic tenets. There are many reasons, but the most important is that predestination robs us of our humanity. We can absolve ourselves of all responsibility, all blame, by saying, "I was going to do it anyway." We can ignore the plight of others because, well, they deserve it. All our progress and creation is nothing more than doing the bidding of another. In short, predestination implies slavery, but a spiritual form of slavery from which we cannot escape even in death.
The somewhat weaker form of fatalism that most Christians would say they follow is a little more palatable. Instead of our choices being fixed at creation, we still have those choices, but we have the opportunity to take a different path than the one laid out for us. We can stray, then come back, but we always end up "where we're supposed to be."
That's a very nebulous claim, one that's obviously impossible to prove, yet it isn't incompatible with technetism. The technetic can accept that he made his own decisions while still believing that he was meant to make these specific ones. He has the power to decide against the path laid out for him, or to look back and hypothesize that the decisions he made in the past were necessary to get him to where he is now. Agency, in this case, is more pertinent than free will.
Disregarding the spiritual world for a moment, there is also a debate over whether free will can exist in the physical sense. The Enlightenment struggled with this question, as Newton's laws—among others—seemed to turn the entire universe into a clockwork construction. If everything from atoms to galaxies moves according to certain rules, why would humans be exempt? More distressingly, this also implied that, if one were to know the positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, would he not be able to predict everything that would happen? In the end, how is that any different from the contemporary Calvinist belief in an omniscient God and a subset of humanity as the heavenly elect?
Now, we know that there are some truly random physical processes—radioactive decay, for example—as well as builtin obscurity through the Uncertainty Principle, that prevent this full omniscience to anyone within the physical world. While those only directly affect the microscopic scale, their miniscule effects can have outsized influence on our "macro" world. Thus, even if we were mere creatures of stimulus response, we would still not be beholden to fate.
Technetism, then, takes these two strands and combines them. In the physical world, free will is unavoidable, because the universe is not a timepiece with perfect precision; some things cannot be predicted. In the spiritual sense, agency is necessary, because we are not lesser animals. We make decisions and sometimes act irrationally. Hindsight may show us a deeper meaning behind the decisions we made, a pattern that lets us see the path we walked to where we are today, but no one else can walk that path for us.
Conversely, we must remember that free will implies responsibility for our actions, whether good or bad. If a murderer was fated to commit his crime, how can we justly punish him for it? Does the Nobel Prize winner deserve to be rewarded for an idea that wasn't his to begin with?
We are human. That means a lot, and technetism is all about understanding how much it means. This week's lesson, then, is that part of being human is being active in the world. That's not necessarily physical action, mind you. It simply means being an agent. You can have an effect, and that is not because you were destined to. It's because of what you do, what you say. It's because of who you are.