Chapter 5

I have been told I pointed at passengers while repeating these four words: “Fate won’t be fought.”

I was always taught that pointing is bad manners, so I was skeptical about this, until I saw the photo, the one that eventually appeared in the papers, where I was most definitely pointing, in a rather theatrical manner, as if I were playing King Lear.

Embarrassing.

I noticed my hair looked very nice in that photo.

Obviously that doesn’t excuse anything.

Anyhow, the phrase “fate won’t be fought” was my mother’s phrase, not mine. She was always saying things like that: You can’t escape destiny. It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be.

Supposedly that means she was a “determinist.”

Or so I was told by a bearded man at a dinner party in the summer of 1984. I do not remember his name, just his magnificent lush brown beard. He caressed it tenderly and often, as though it were a beloved pet curled up on his chest.

We were eating overcooked apricot chicken and undercooked brown rice in a blond-brick house in the northern Sydney suburb of Terrey Hills. It was a hot evening and our hosts had set up a rotating fan in the corner of the room. Every few seconds a violent gust of air whooshed back our hair so we resembled dogs with their heads stuck out of car windows and the bearded man’s beard flapped to the left like a patriotic flag.

It’s amusing, in retrospect, although as I recall, nobody laughed. We were young, so we took ourselves seriously.

I had accidentally shared a deeply personal story about my mother. I sometimes share personal stories when I’m nervous and drink too much and obviously both things are likely at dinner parties.

The story I shared prompted the bearded man to remark that my mother was “obviously a determinist,” as was he. Nobody knew what this meant, so he delivered a benevolent mini-lecture (he was a university lecturer, he enjoyed lecturing even more than the average man) while our hosts argued in bitter low voices over whether brown rice was meant to be that crunchy.

The idea of determinism, he said, is that everything that happens, and every decision or action you make, is “causally inevitable.” Why? Because everything is caused by something else: a preceding action, event, or situation.

Well. None of us knew what the heck he was talking about. He was ready for this. He made it simpler.

He said people can only act as they actually do. A murderer, for example, will inevitably murder because his childhood, his genes, his brain chemistry, his socioeconomic situation, his fear of rejection, the convenient proximity of a defenseless woman on a dark street corner, will all lead him, inevitably, to murder.

Someone said, quite passionately as I recall, as if we were speaking of a specific murder and not a hypothetical one, “But he chose to murder! He had free will!”

The bearded man said he himself was a “hard determinist” and therefore did not believe in free will. He had a grain of brown rice stuck between his two front teeth and nobody, not even his wife, pointed it out. Perhaps she thought it was causally inevitable.

This is what I wonder; this is what I would like to now ask the bearded man: If free will doesn’t exist, if all your decisions and actions are inevitable, are you still required to apologize for them?