BTS: Gronk, the Deterministic Caveman

Behind the scenes ... Cut by The Missouri Review editor during the final edit—i.e., this section was in the submission draft of mine which got the acceptance.

Whence our intuitive notion of causal determinism?

I’d assumed that determinism began to take its contemporary shape with the new mechanistic explanations of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But recently I have begun to wonder if determinism were not older and deeper in our psyches—a feature of explanation per se, not mechanistic explanation specifically.

Rather than coming about because of early science’s impressive discoveries of the clockwork-like laws of cause and effect, maybe the first threat to humanity’s sense of autonomy and dignity came from deterministic stories—that is to say, from Fate.

Narrative paths and story arcs, imposed on us by gods or divine forces, were taken to undermine something important to us: happiness or meaningfulness, if not also autonomy. Fate, oracles, curses, and the like preoccupied the ancient Athenians especially—as evidenced by their invention of the genre of tragic theater. At Oedipus’s birth, a divine oracle prescribed the inescapable story of his life, its end and its lasting meaning, as clear and unchangeable as if chiseled in the firmament.

During the Scientific Revolution, Medieval explanations (which had been Aristotelian, teleological, purpose-based, and qualitative) began to lose esteem and were replaced by quantitative and clockwork-like explanations, as in the mathematical equations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.

But the success of scientific explanations from the 1600s up until the advent of quantum mechanics (around 1900) only cemented a deterministic understanding of the world that was already conceivable without the walloping, world-historical success of Newton.

Indeed, the kind of determinism that could threaten humanity’s sense of agency would have been conceivable by a caveman observing the regular trajectory of his spear. He would have found that if he threw it with a certain effort, it reliably flew a certain distance; if he added some amount of effort more, then it would go some amount of distance farther.

There were regularities to be discovered everywhere. Our prehistoric ancestors saw the repeating paths across the sky of their projectiles, the sun, the moon, and the stars. They endured the relentless repetition of the seasons. Any regular pattern—physical or narratological—could take root in the early human imagination and begin to seem like a prison of the endless repetition of the same.

“Gronk, we sit around this campfire, as we have always done, and you say you are stronger than our clan leader, Thogson, which is what so many untested youngsters have always said. Upstarts like you are destined to try and fail. You are like Snarp from legend, who challenged the dragon and was killed. Thogson is like Thog of legend, who challenged the dragon and defeated it. But you cannot help yourself. It has always been thus.”