By the early date of 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville had already uncovered the tensions that lie within democracy. He saw that although the gap between rich and poor was smaller than ever, the new closeness bred hatred where there had once been mutual respect. Now, only force could keep the peace. He concluded in despair: “Each feels the ill, but no one has the courage and energy needed to seek something better . . . we have destroyed an aristocratic society, and having stopped complacently amid the debris of the former edifice, we seem to want to settle there forever.” As Teslas glide past tent cities in Los Angeles, the West still stands paralyzed at the end of history.
It can be difficult to admit that something was lost in the headlong rush of revolution. After all, the self-satisfied ideology of endless progress makes it seem as though humanity has only just emerged from eons of savagery. As a homeschool teacher, I’ve found that this narrative shapes the minds of my high schoolers long before they set foot in class. It is as if the only thing worth knowing about the past is that one should not learn anything from it.
Yet this is delusional. The only thing passing into the future is the past—embodied in human form, enthroned in the mind, satisfied only when its will is made manifest. The voice of the self is nothing but history speaking in the present. Its success is so total that even its victory has been forgotten.
Then again, the debris of revolution still clogs the gutters of modernity. One might suppose that the most highly educated generations ever to walk the earth would be flourishing. Similarly, one might expect that a rational age would produce rational politics. If only!
Like all who came before us, we too are bound; but unlike our ancestors, we cannot see our chains. To find them we must reckon with the myth that built the modern world.
The Modern Myth
My history students are sure that mythology is a thing of the past. They stare blankly when they hear of the class system of Tocqueville’s aristocratic society. How could anyone think that social order was a matter of fate? Their eyes don’t light up until we reach modern times and discuss the social contract. Autonomous individuals creating political authority through an act of pure will—why, yes, that’s more like it.
Americans are steeped in this story. It echoes in Jefferson’s famous assertion that “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In contrast to the fated inequality of the class system, the American republic proclaims the original equality of all citizens. It appeals to my high schoolers with all the force of a foregone conclusion.
Yet with a few gentle reminders, a class of young people can see that this, too, is a myth, and a rather unbelievable one at that. After all, people vary in size, shape, strength, and intelligence. When citizens affirm that all men are created equal, they adopt a view of human nature that has been stripped of everything that binds human beings to this natural world. This liberal ideal is the true origin of transhumanism, which reduces the body to an avatar of the will.
The shape of the will, says Wendell Berry, is a straight line extending to the horizon of possibility like a highway traversing a barren countryside. The mythical force of material progress now aims that line beyond the earth’s atmosphere and into the abyss of space. Nature has no place in the great emptiness of this ambition.
Unlike the will, fate has curvature, bending and flowing over time’s topography. Living well was once thought to be the art of adapting to her demands, much as a river winds through a landscape.
It is high time to rehabilitate this ancient notion.
Looking Back
There can be no doubt that societies ordered by fate chafed and constricted dynamic minds. The very same aristocrats that beautified Paris and Prague often abused their privileges to maintain their powers. Though it is true that democratic societies have yet to produce cities of equal splendor, it would be absurd to mourn the end of the class system.
Yet it would also be a mistake to dismiss it without reflection. The relationship between the classes of a feudal order was one of mutual obligation: serfs sacrificed their labor in the fields and knights sacrificed their lives in battle. This was no mere technicality. Rather, it provided the sort of vital meaning that binds a community together. Those who think noblesse oblige was a medieval myth should consider that the British nobility suffered a higher casualty rate in World War I than the commoners. Has there ever been an American war in which the rich died at higher rates than the poor?
The question answers itself. Perhaps this is because the democratic myth provides no guidance as to what members of a free society might owe one another. In democratic societies, the reciprocity of feudalism has been replaced by the equality of liberalism. Yet equality is a state in which all responsibilities have already been discharged, in which parents no longer owe anything to their children and the young have been liberated from the burden of caring for their elders. If we are, indeed, all equals, then we should be free to go our separate ways.
Against a Politics of the Will
Before moving forward, a warning: it would be a mistake to read this as a denunciation of democracy, or capitalism, or America. Americans are, both absolutely and relative to income, the most philanthropic people on the planet. Is the answer to our problems as simple as a cash infusion? Unlikely.
Nor is it a simple matter of policy. If there is a political lesson to draw from this issue, it is cautionary, for much of modern history is a textbook case of the will run amok. Totalitarians trade on a well-worn promise to replace the distinctions of fate with the decrees of the will. When Marx (and Hitler and Mussolini after him) denounced the “anarchy of production,” he was articulating a common distaste for that which lies beyond our direct control.
It is this disaffection that animates modern democratic life. In 1920, the liberal economist Ludwig von Mises observed:
Princes and democratic majorities are drunk with power. They must reluctantly admit that they are subject to the laws of nature. But they reject the very notion of economic law … economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.
By extending fate’s domain into human action, economic laws limit the dominion of the will. This has earned economists the sneers of despots and the resentment of demagogues—and not a few democratic majorities. Yet if government agents were to, say, print and spend money without constraint, the results would be no mystery. They would be just another indication of how lost we have become.
Where We Stand
Our position is unenviable. We cannot go back to reinforcing the arbitrary decrees of fate, but neither can we march on toward some ‘triumph of the will.’ We are left with the entrenched divisions of a great battlefield, one strewed with the shattered ambitions of broken minds. To make peace, we need to understand where we are.
The most gripping account of the will at war with fate is Milton’s Paradise Lost. In his reimagining of Genesis, Milton personifies the will in the character of Satan, who is, tellingly, the most intelligent of the angels. Lucifer falls because he refuses to be bound by divine decree. Instead of submitting to fate, he thinks it “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” Armed with considerable powers, the dark angel sets out on a course of eternal war. As he assumes control of the underworld, Satan proclaims:
Receive thy new possessor—one who brings
A mind not to be changed by time and place.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same?
It is no accident that Satan refuses to recognize the bonds of time and place, clinging instead to the comfort of his own mind. Those who wish to live only by the light of reason have long desired the annihilation of the flesh and liberation from all its tiresome constraints. The body, that fleshy corpus of coincidence, is a humbling reminder of our subjection to law. Why not strip it away on the operating table? Soon, we will all be free to make a heaven of hell in cyberspace.
Yet even as we plod toward immortality, it’s curious that those who surrender to fate have a firm claim on our admiration. In fact, no one is regarded as a hero if they do not willingly accept the end that awaits us all. We’re still left breathless by Achilles’s response to death:
I know my Fate: to die, to see no more,
My much-loved parents, and my native shore—
Enough—when heaven ordains, I sink in night:
Now perish Troy!” He said, and rush’d to the fight.
Little has changed since Homer’s time. For all the talk of transhumanism, we remain captivated by the heroic pattern. Only one modification has been made to its ancient form in the intervening years: our greatest heroes no longer wield the sword. As Mohandas Gandhi said after visiting the Sistine Chapel, “Joy comes not out of infliction of pain on others but out of pain voluntarily borne by oneself.” The strength of his nonviolence—and that of Martin Luther King Jr.—came from peaceful sacrifice.
When they reframed the lynch as a crucifixion, civil rights leaders transformed an image of hate into an icon of glory. They did so because of their confidence in fate’s enduring power. Even in the modern age, people continue to be transfixed by the one who
Sweat blood in the Garden of Gethsemane—
“Father, take this cup from me.”
Fate even came calling on God’s only son—
“Not my Will, but Thine, be done.”
Fate always brings us down to the ground. To walk with her, one simply shoulders her mortal burden. Yet the ancients would never characterize her as some grim reaper. Though she measures out the end of days, she metes out life by the same token. And even the most ardent devotees of the Will must grudgingly admit her influence over their own lives.
An Unnamed Truth
The struggle between fate and the will echoes throughout all great moral and artistic traditions. Yet one has only to reflect upon daily life to see that the will is not the primary fact of human nature. Even in a rational age, it seems impossible to eradicate the idea that some things are meant to be. The comfort it brings to mourners is as profound as the assurance it provides to lovers. This may be because death and love are among the most powerful reminders of our own temporality.
Love makes this especially clear. To fall in love is to accept fate’s demands without knowing where they lead; if love is true, its truth lies in the future. Perhaps the experience of love conveys knowledge that would otherwise be out of reach until the very end. Indeed, popular romances like Romeo & Juliet endure because they unite the revelation of love with the finality of death.
Should they marry after the preliminaries of courtship, lovers pledge to remain faithful “until death do us part.” Few contracts are closed with as little due diligence. This might be why democratic citizens struggle to maintain durable relationships—every surrender to fate is a loss of autonomy, and the bonds of matrimony have a feudal air about them. The marriages that do last are rarely preserved from the will’s disregard for constraint.
Yet in its attempt to prosecute love, the will is out of its depth, drowning in a mutual obligation that takes decades to discharge. Even the symbolism of courtship makes this clear. When a man kneels to propose to a woman, the will bows before fate. There is no level playing field here.
Rehabilitating Fate
The myths of the ancients helped them navigate the world. Ours have blinded us. In our attachment to literal truth, we have become illiterate wanderers of an artificial and increasingly inhospitable landscape. What’s more, we are the source of the chaos that surrounds us. The struggle against fate that was unleashed with the Enlightenment has reached its crescendo in the war on nature.
We are so far gone that we cannot even make sense of what was lost. When we try to imagine fate, we can’t help but see a capricious goddess intervening in the laws of the universe to satisfy some inscrutable whim. She is, in other words, a more powerful version of what we envision ourselves to be: emancipated individuals.
Yet this is just the will in disguise. For though fate has been personified by many cultures, her role is constant: she orchestrates the fundamental patterns of the creation. Who is it but fate that determines the course of the seasons, the swell of the tides, and the gifts of the harvest? Who sets the rhythm of budding and blooming, calls the birds to song, and invites rain to replenish the fields? The perennial mysteries of life, death, and rebirth have always been recognized to lie in her domain.
We read the old stories about three blind women meting out string, of God sending plagues upon the Egyptians (for what is fate to a believer but the logos of the Almighty?), of lords and ladies feasting in their manors, and we pity the superstitious cultures of days long past. Yet no historic people was superstitious enough to ignore the immutable regularities that structure the world. To them, fate was no arbitrary meddler in an otherwise lawfully ordered cosmos. She was the embodiment of order itself.
It was once popular to claim that the West has entered an epoch in which society can be guided by the abstract laws of science alone—that we need no further reminder of our contingency. This sounds reasonable enough. The only problem is that it’s 2024, and the evidence is in. It suggests that no society is in greater danger of falling under the sway of destructive mythologies than a society that believes itself to be free of myth.
As we are buffeted about by the death throes of late-stage liberalism, it’s not yet clear what will take its place. A straightforward return to mythos seems unlikely. But perhaps one may hope that after the great fall that seems certain to come, the pride of the will might be shaken. Then it may become easier to see that we are lost without fate.
The funniest thing about teaching history is to see it living through the students. Rousseau, Laplace, Descartes, and Marx walk into my classroom every year. So do Jefferson, Kant, and Locke. The myths they created shape my students’ minds far more than any teacher ever could.
In the end, the question is not whether my high schoolers will grow up believing in myth or not. It is whether the mythology that informs their lives will help them live gracefully, or lead them into the abyss.
