The history of philosophy is a history of extremes. Rousseau believed humans are inherently good. Hobbes saw them as innately evil. Rene Descartes believed the mind, or “soul”, is a different substance to the body. Gilbert Ryle said only physical matter exists – there is no “ghost in the machine”.
This love of dichotomies stretches through the ages. Polarisation may be problematic in politics but it’s a necessary part of philosophy. Creating a dichotomy helps to draw out key concepts or buried assumptions.
A personal favourite is William James’s distinction between “tough-minded” and “tender-minded” thinkers. The former are irreligious, pluralistic and empiricist (going by “facts”), the latter religious, dogmatical and idealistic. Think of the Social Democrats versus Independent Ireland and you have the gist of it.
Key intellectual fault lines globally today centre on morality and the rule of law. But there is another dichotomy that is relevant to our current predicament. It can be expressed as a standoff between the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche and Great Blasket Island folklorist Peig Sayers. In one corner, an advocate for self-determination through the “will to power”. In the other, an embodiment of fatalism.
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I hadn’t realised just how fatalistic Sayers was until I recently reread her famous memoir. I had studied it in school, of course, Peig being a mandatory part of the curriculum for decades. But my Irish was never at a good standard. So this time I read her in the English translation by Bryan MacMahon. The book vividly conveys the hardship that many endured in Ireland’s coastal communities, long before Dryrobes or flat whites arrived. It also captures a way of thinking about how to deal with suffering and uncertainty.
When Peig learns she is to be sent away as a child to take up work as a domestic servant, she reasons: “Whatever God has in store for me – that will come to pass.” When she is separated from her mother at Christmas due to economic necessity, she proclaims: “The way of the world is strange.” (Today, we would say “unjust”.) On another occasion, Peig’s mother takes her aside and tells her, “fate exists, child”, while her friend Nan has the same trust in providence: “Whatever is in store for you, you’ll get it.”
Peig herself summed up the philosophy: “We accepted the kind of life that was ours and never wished for any other.”
This kind of fatalism can be juxtaposed with Nietzsche’s celebration of “self-overcoming”, rebelling against circumstances to impose your will on the world.
Each philosophy has something in its favour and each can be taken to extremes. Being too fatalistic feels like a cop-out from politics. Being too Nietzschean can lead to egotistical fancies.
Today, there is evidence of new forms of fatalism. Feelings of powerlessness and alienation abound. But the driving factor is not economics, as it was in Peig’s day; it is technological.
The smartphone, big data and artificial intelligence are shaping our future in ways we don’t understand and with a force we seem to have no control over. Strangely, this fatalism extends from ordinary citizens – many of whom are disengaged or cynical about societal reform – to wealthy tech bosses in Silicon Valley.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is so certain AI will displace humanity he is already designing a “succession plan” to surrender control of his own company to the algorithm. “We have entered the Singularity,” Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk proclaimed earlier this year, referring to the “end of history” moment that is forecast by computer programmers.
Last week, US spytech company Palantir published a 22-point manifesto representing the views of chief executive Alex Karp, arguing that the United States has no choice but to build AI weapons that could plunge the world into uncontrollable wars since “our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates” about safety.
It is no coincidence that self-help books in Stoicism have become fashionable in Silicon Valley in recent years. A key tenet of Stoicism is that the world is subject to a divine order and we have “free will” only within the parameters of a predetermined universe. So frequent do tech bros pepper their utterances with the words of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius it has become known jokingly as “Broicism”, or “Stoicism for the manosphere”.
Stoicism offers a comforting balm for the modern oligarch vulnerable to market fluctuations, just as it offers consolation to the manual labourer trapped in the currents of a cost-of-living crisis. Conveniently, it also minimises the responsibility any individual might have in trying to make the world a better place.
For these and other reasons, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky described Stoicism as “a lifelong experiment in endurance”. More bluntly, the English philosopher John Gray calls it a “listless way to live”. Stoicism represents “not an affirmation of life but a pose of indifference to life”, he says.
Whether you are rich or poor, it is tempting to adopt Stoic or fatalistic thinking as a short-term coping mechanism. In psychotherapy, “acceptance” – acknowledging reality without wishing change – is promoted as a way of making yourself happier.
But, as long-term policy, why should we just resign ourselves to how things are? As Peig reminds us, our ways of thinking are influenced by societal conditions. A public realm awash with fatalism is the sign of a sick planet.
