Sunday, May 2, 2010
Picking sides
On which side of the fence do you currently fall: Team Inevitability or Team Capriciousness? For the sake of discussion, do this little exercise. Pick an event or moment that you think best represents your position, then argue against it, that is, take the other side of the debate and make--genuinely, not passively--a brief case for why your example provides evidence of your "new" position.
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Team capriciousness. I tend to think very little is inevitable, though capricious may not be the exact word I'd use to describe my approach. What each of us does matters, it is just that there are so many variables no one is in control of them all. To my mind that is not capriciousness, though there is a certain amount of chaos theory or complex systems theory involved. The important thing is that what we do matters. Then we have to deal with however everything falls out.
ReplyDeleteI find myself by nature being an inevitability-kind-of-guy. I'm not sure that deep down I really believe in free-will of any sort (for JSMill reasons...though science tends to also support a lack of free will).
ReplyDeleteBut i think the best argument against this (and perhaps this is part of the inevitability, as well) for me is done by a terribly off color joke of Sarah Silverman's (though a joke that I believe holds a lot of truth within it).
She comments in her movie, "Jesus is Magic" that if another (racial) minority had been in Germany at the time, the Holocaust never would have happened.... to the Jews.
What this says to me is that the historical forces had blown so hard in the direction of blame-politics, that SOMEONE was going to get the brunt end of this stick. As the large minority in Germany, it seemed logical that it would be the Jews.
So i guess I'm not really arguing against the inevitability argument....
I mean, if Hitler had not come to power, if he had instead died as a child or some such, I don't think that the Final Solution would have happened. But this strikes me as a silly place to go, sort of a 'butterfly flapping its wings in America causes a tzunnami in Japan' type of thing.
Ok--i give up.