Feraco Search for Human Potential 12 December 2012

Beowulf: Run Fast for Your Mother, Run Fast for Your Father, Run for Your Children, For Your Sisters and Brothers Feraco Search for Human Potential 12 December 2012

Over the past few months, we’ve debated the importance of choice and free will. When we finished Siddhartha’s first chapter, we asked ourselves whether we’d be OK without the freedom to make choices – and whether our answer to that question depends on whether our “outcomes” are positive. When we discussed Macbeth and the Weïrd Sisters, we debated whether our control is limited (whether by deities or destiny), or whether choice and destiny can somehow coexist.

Macbeth also raised thorny questions about morality’s relationship to free will: should an individual be held accountable or responsible for the consequences of an action he or she didn’t mean to take? Can life be meaningful if our choices aren’t ours to make? Should we try to resist our human nature (if it’s even possible)? Is a talented artist still worthy of respect if a divine being guided her hand – or even simply provided conditions that allowed her to take advantage of her talents? Should she be rewarded if her actions aren’t completely free?

These relationships between action and reward, between choice and consequence, provide a bunch of the course’s framework because the Search for Human Potential requires a Searcher to consider the point of said Search before embarking on it. To look for human potential is to examine the possible, maybe even the probable, but not necessarily the actual: it’s about figuring out what to want, then how to get it. Siddhartha, Tom, Macbeth, and Carl each have some idea of what they’re looking for, but each eventually discovers – for good or for ill – that they want something else.

And if you look closely enough, you’ll notice each character ends up hungering for two things: the freedom to do what they want (personal satisfaction of desire) and the chance to connect with other humans (interpersonal satisfaction of desire). That combination of choice and connection gives them purpose, and removes it when one or both of those things go missing (Siddhartha turns to gambling and wine, Tom ambles downstairs to buy Twinkies and whiskey in his robe, Macbeth goes on a killing spree, and Carl sits miserably beside an empty chair in an empty house).

In many ways, Beowulfis no different: he, too, seems to need freedom and people in equal measure. But the poem has a very interesting spin on a lot of things we’ve previously touched on this year. Take, for example, social hierarchies and societies. We’ve already studied several, from Siddhartha’s village to Macbeth’s Scotland.

But we’ve really only looked at characters who, for one reason or another, end up as bad fits within those systems: the elderly Carl being forced into a nursing home, or a younger Tom compromising his ambitions and getting stuck in a dead-end greeting card job, where he manufactures emotions he can’t really feel anymore. With Beowulf, we’ll study someone who embodies his culture’s values instead of clashing with them, and who reaps a great deal of glory and renown as a result.

As an ancient warrior, Beowulf belongs to a patriarchal meritocracy. The men rule the state, fight to defend it, etc., and rise on the basis of their accomplishments (as well as those of their fathers). The principles behind a meritocracy are fairly simple: All humans make choices. In most situations, human beings will make the right choices. In some situations, one or more right choices and one or more wrong choices will be available; individuals will have reasons for making both correct and incorrect choices. Individuals who resist the temptations of bad choices and consistently make wise ones will be rewarded for their virtues – which are, of course, demonstrated by their choices.

Now look closer. A meritocracy purports to reward one thing: virtue. We may claim to care about the end result of something more than the motivation behind it, but we do value that motivation greatly. If someone gives you a genuine compliment, and another person gives you that same compliment later in order to manipulate you into liking them more, we could claim that they’ve done the same thing.

But in your eyes, those actions certainly aren’t equivalent. The thing that distinguishes them – motivation – gives them meaning, because we believe that those motivations reflect the “core” of a person. In theory, meritocracies function the same way, and for the same reason: to reward a man for his goodness.

But they can’t function that way. Who walks around in today’s society measuring virtue – capabilities, capacity for goodness, or potential, really, since that’s all undemonstrated virtue really is? We measure action, not virtue. As a culture (or a mishmash of different ones), we’ve learned to obsess over actions, deeds, results, even at the expense of caring about what someone could do.

It’s why so many of my students, whether my freshmen in years past or my seniors from this year, list a desired grade as one of the primary things they want out of my class on their Great Expectations assignment: the grade represents a tangible demonstration of their capabilities. An A isn’t meant to just be some letter: it’s a reaffirmation to the larger world that Student X is an exceptional Y. It’s also why Kamala is less concerned with Siddhartha’s potential for greatness and more concerned with whether he can pull himself together and wear nice clothes like a proper gentleman.

And that’s all well and good, really. I care less about whether you’re intelligent than about whether you a) actually learned something and b) were able to use what you learned. On the other hand, if I made it impossible for you to learn, it’s not exactly fair for me to condemn you for your failure. This is why Gladwell spends the bulk of Outliers savaging what he sees as deeply flawed excuses for modern meritocracies. By his arguments, we shouldn’t spend our time reflexively praising the advantaged or condemning the handicapped; doing either presupposes we live in a society that provides people with equal opportunities, and Gladwell’s able to show – fairly convincing – that on a lot of levels, we really don’t.

Beowulf’s meritocracy, on the other hand, is somewhat purer. True, it’s not always fun to be held responsible for choices you never made; I’m not sure how many of you would enjoy being accountable for actions your fathers took. But the system we see in Beowulf not only follows the aforementioned “meritocracy principles,” but makes the distinction between “good” and “bad” choices exceptionally clear. You almost always know exactly what to do in order to earn a reward, and almost always know how you be punished if you choose unwisely.

Gladwell doesn’t like that we deny people opportunities for arbitrary reasons, and neither do I…but honestly, Beowulf’s society doesn’t really have that problem. They don’t have the equivalent of our college admissions system, where you can spend a childhood working towards a goal, fulfilling every prerequisite that’s asked of you, only to be denied a rightful place at the table because the school doesn’t have the money to make room for you. In Beowulf’s time, if you thought you could fight, trust me – you’d be given the chance to prove it. And Beowulf’s entire involvement in the business that goes down at Heorot Hall is a combination of repaying societal/familial obligations and the satisfaction of personal desires – the combination of interpersonal connections and personal choice, in other words.

When it comes to those personal choices, we’re taught – and we teach – some very basic lessons. For the most part, we teach our children that our choices determine our actions – that most things don’t “just happen,” or happen by mistake. After we make it clear to our kids that they can decide, and that their decisions determine what they do, we also make it clear that the things they do have consequences; the easy follow-up lesson, of course, is for them to consider the consequences of their actions before deciding to act. Ultimately, we urge our children to make choices that improve their lives, that improve the lives of friends and family members, and that benefit our society and environment.

We teach these things because we’ve been taught they’re valuable. But you can see that these teachings rest on the assumption that we live in a universe in which choices matter, in which free will reigns supreme. That doesn’t go for all things, as we act instinctually or automatically in many ways. Obviously, you don’t have to choose to breathe, or to make your heart beat at a certain rate; those things are just unconscious responses to stimuli.

Yet those silly examples perfectly illustrate why we think choices should have value: we don’t much like the idea that we’re pawns, that we’re carrying out actions like automatons. Choice is what allows the “actor” (i.e., the person making the decision) to do something that exceeds/differs from an automatic response: we believe we’re superior to other animals because we can govern our instincts. But what if we, like Macbeth and Siddhartha before us, are working with incorrect assumptions?

Universal causality (which I’ll abbreviate as “UC,” and also call “determinism”) questions those assumptions, as well as the idea of free will in general. UC proponents (such as Albert Einstein) assert that every effect has a cause, which is in turn the effect of another cause. (One wonders what the original “cause” was!) Because cause/effect sequences aren’t isolated, they bleed into one another continuously – hence the “universal” in “UC.”

Therefore, everything that occurs (including every “choice”) simply represents the inevitable after-effect of some seen/unseen cause; there’s no such thing as an “uncaused,” spontaneous event. If that’s the case, UC proponents continue, we actors aren’t making choices; we’re simply vessels for cause/effect delivery, the means by which the universe maintains itself. We’re deceiving ourselves if we believe our “choices” allow us to do something other than we were “meant” to do via cause and effect.

Most UC proponents base their arguments on the assumption that we live in a secular universe. Another school of thought, however, questions the idea of free will using the “deity” argument. The deity in question is omnipotent and omniscient (all-powerful and all-seeing), which makes said deity infallible. As an all-seeing being, it sees the future – and as an infallible being, it sees it unerringly. But since the deity can’t possibly be wrong about the future, we are only capable of what it already sees, and can’t possibly do otherwise; our concept of freedom of choice, in short, is a fiction that blinds us to the very real limits placed upon us.

One of the many aspects of Beowulf that interest me is the way the Old English Poet (henceforth abbreviated as the OEP) relates to the divine. The absolute age of the poem is indeterminate, but we’re fairly sure it’s from the late seventh century, just around the time Christianity was really starting to make headway amongst the pagan cultures of mainland Europe. The OEP was a scop, an oral poet who would deliver his poetry without notes (which is why only one Beowulf manuscript survived to modern times), and we can hear his voice even when Beowulf speaks.

You’ll note that Beowulf is a fairly confident fellow (to put it mildly), and that he’s continually boasting. His boasts feature a few elements that will quickly become familiar to you (the invocation of family ties, the highlighting of his past accomplishments, blunt statements of his worthiness to face X, Y, or Z), and they’re often in narrative form. This makes sense when you consider Beowulf’s era: if you live in a meritocratic culture with an oral tradition, you had better get very good, very quickly, at talking about the things you’ve done. Your words, and the words of others testifying to your claims, are your proof.

But even in the same breath that he’s spending talking about how awesome he is, Beowulf consistently extolls God’s greatness. In all things, Beowulf seizes the credit, then passes it to God – but still gets praised for his own actions. He has his cake and eats it too: his victories are evidence of God’s greatness, which in turn is evidence of his own. (In this sense, Beowulf’s just a much, much cockier version of Tim Tebow.)

Those who advance the “deity” argument, on the other hand, say that Beowulf’s an instrument of the divine. It’s awesome that he won, but once God saw that he’d win, he couldn’t lose. This, by the way, is the same argument that those who believe the Weïrd Sisters were truly prophetic would make. Once they saw Macbeth would be king, there was no way he couldn’t become it. (Of course, one can quibble about whether his approach towards that outcome could’ve been different…)

The final broadside against free will comes in the form of the “logic” argument. It rests on the Excluded Middle and Noncontradiction Laws. The former states that absolutes exist for every proposition; either P or Not P is true, with no middle ground (hello, Baselines!). The latter merely states that P and Not P can’t logically be true at the same time.

Let our proposition (P) be “Chris, you’re going to fail your final tomorrow.” He either will or won’t; obviously, he can’t fail and pass simultaneously. If P is a true statement, nothing that happens between now and tomorrow will stop him from failing; if P is untrue…well, nothing that happens between now and tomorrow will stop him from succeeding.

Now, it looks like Chris has two “options.” Either he’ll pass, or he’ll fail. However, we’ve already established that only one can be true. Therefore, one of the “options” is necessarily false – a fake choice. And since only one of the options is really present, Chris is powerless to choose the other. In order to be free, you have to have choices – and Chris doesn’t really have them. Scary!

Obviously, people have plenty of arguments for the existence of free will as well. For the “deity” argument, we assume the being can perfectly see the things it controls. Because it knows its creations, it can accurately predict any possible choice one could make in response to a given situation. But that, the rejoinder goes, is exactly why it can still grant us free will.

Think of someone who’s really good at chess: he still sees the endgame, predicts the actions of the other player, and brings about the steps to make that endgame real…but doesn’t need to absolutely control the actions of the other player (i.e., reach over and move his pieces for him) in order to make it happen. Instead, he does his best to influence the conditions that affect his opponent’s choice…even knowing full well that his opponent could suddenly behave differently. As Martin Luther King, Jr. puts it, “we are responsible human beings, not blind automatons; persons, not puppets. By endowing us with freedom, God relinquished a measure of his own sovereignty and imposed certain limitations upon himself.”

As for the “logic” scenario, let’s say that Chris really, really, really doesn’t want to fail his final. Let’s also say he’s “destined” to pass. (Whew.) Does this really mean he has no choice? After all, there are different ways to pass: Chris can study alone, study with friends, speak with his instructor (always a good idea), or even cheat (tsk tsk). In any case, Chris still has choices within his outcome! You know you’re going to eat – you can’t choose not to, at least not forever – but you don’t necessarily know what you’ll eat…and that decision could very well be yours after all! Is that, in the end, our true definition of free will?

Finally, the Determinists argued that your only free actions are ones you do without cause; since the Determinists believe in UC, everything has a cause – so, in short, you can’t do anything freely. Indeterminists also argue that your only free actions are ones you do without cause – “uncaused” free actions. However, they say, we’re obviously free, so why buy into any argument that tries to convince that what you know to be true isn’t – especially since UC isn’t really a scientific principle? (I’m going to be honest: I don’t like the incurious attitude of “Well, this is obvious, so I’m going to ignore everything to the contrary”…but your mileage may vary.) Compatibilists, who argue that free acts can be taken as long as their cause lies in the inner state of the person – a desire, an intention, etc. – are perhaps a better alternative to the unyielding arguments of the Determinists. Since they assert that our inner choices/causes determine our will, and that we, rather than other forces, power the cause/effect mechanism, the Compatibilists can get free will to line up with UC quite nicely.

This may look like one of those philosophical talks that turn boring because there’s no conclusion in sight. But the discussion of whether we have control over our actions – over the course of our own lives – remains a pertinent one, both for Beowulf and for ourselves. The questions it raises force us to evaluate just how we wish to go through life – not simply whether we can decide what we do, but whether we live while doing so.

The right to choose may be valuable, but it also gives us a tremendous amount of responsibility. If the choices Tom, Siddhartha, Macbeth, Carl, and even Beowulf prove anything, it’s that true happiness can’t be obtained passively. We owe it to ourselves, in other words, to place ourselves in positions where we can earn our happiness.

We must build societies that don’t deny people the ability to make the choices that would bring them happiness for arbitrary reasons that we don’t even fully consider. And if we can choose between right and wrong, that means we can make moral judgments – and disagree over moral matters. You’ve matured to the point where the mere recognition of relative morality is no longer sufficient: you must learn to navigate it.

When most people crack Beowulf open for the first time, they’re arrested by the plot. It’s not a complicated one, but it’s pretty thrilling in its own right, with several battles against demons and dragons that (thanks to Heaney) translate extremely well to standard English. On some level, it’s easy to recognize the whole chronicle as one long struggle of good against evil. But that, I feel, misses the point somewhat.

Beowulf is a tale that greatly rewards moral examinations, particularly if you’re aware of the values and traditions of the time. The first two lines set the tone for the entire poem: planting us in the distant past, remembering courage and greatness (note this carefully). We also know that we have “heard” of their “heroic campaigns,” a quick nod to the oral traditions of the dominant culture and a reminder that one’s reputation was of paramount importance. After all, what are legends but stories of men with larger-than-life reputations?

Our first figure, Shield Sheafson, is a “god cyning” – a “good king.” One of the things that marks him as such is his practice of making people “pay tribute,” and if you’re wondering why this is a good thing, know that this was an expected part of the social contract. The king provided leadership, protection, and stability for his people: the population could trust that he knew what he was doing (he sat on a throne because God chose him), and that he wouldn’t involve them in dangerous conflicts rashly or unnecessarily.

The people provided the king with the forces necessary to defend the kingdom if necessary, and gave him the wealth necessary to keep its economy humming (which, in turn, removed some of the incentive to wage war for resources: it was easier to trade regularly for what you needed than to storm the borders of a strong rival). This wasn’t just true of the tributes the king collected, either. During wars, the losing army would (at a minimum) need to pay substantially in defeat.

Rather than hoard the treasure for his own use, the king shared the spoils of victory – and tribute – with his subjects. In fact, kings were called “ring-givers” because of the rewards and titles they shared and bestowed on loyal subjects. If you fought bravely, the kingdom would prosper and you’d receive what was your due – and because you’d receive what was your due, you’d fight to the death to defend the one who ruled you so justly and fairly.

As you can see, both subjects and rulers entered into complicated relationships, both giving and receiving simultaneously. A bad king hoards treasure, or spends it wildly and poorly, or endangers his people needlessly or dishonestly. In rare cases, a king could fail the way Macbeth would have failed – not through moral compromise, but through his inability to sire a son. When this happened, the king would need to establish a clear line of succession outside of his family; neighboring nations would surely test the new ruler, who wouldn’t have had time to establish a familial dynasty of his own, so the king needed to choose very wisely.

In Beowulf, we’ll see all kinds of kings – the good, the bad, the doomed, the dead – and with every one, we find ourselves looking at our own leadership. Regardless of your political persuasion, no one can argue that we haven’t abandoned this compact. These societies functioned on the basis of trust, courage, and selflessness. How many years has it been since we’ve been able to apply those terms to our upper political class? We have lost, perhaps, more than we readily realize.

Before Shield passes on, he sires a single son – Beow, who has no relation to Beowulf. We see Beow’s birth as the reward for a suffering people, as the Danes’ hardships had stemmed from a lack of leadership before Shield began filling the void. (Remember this!) Shield and Beow also provide us with the “beginning” of our family tree – a source for the text’s twin fixations on lineage and reputation.

Finally, we see why good behavior is important, and not just because kings could earn tribute that way: “Behaviour that’s admired/is the path to power among people everywhere.” We begin the poem in earnest, however, with Shield’s funeral – the death of the “good king” (Foreshadowing!). Afterwards, we see his people thrive under the rule of his descendants And Beow, like his father, sires a single son, Halfdane, who then fathers four children of his own (Heorogar, Hrothgar, Halga, and an unnamed daughter). Thus we see that by having a single son, Shield’s ultimately stabilized his nation and done the last thing a good king has to do.

This takes us to the “present” day, when Hrothgar (whose name means a combination of “spear” and “glory”), Halfdane’s second son, has taken the throne. He is a good king, and “the fortunes of war favor him”; with the spoils of successful warfare, Hrothgar builds Heorot Hall – the greatest hall around! He marries Wealhtheow, an intelligent and virtuous woman who serves as an excellent queen, and the two of them have three children.

By building a hall, continuing his family line, and ruling judiciously, Hrothgar has done everything he can to provide his nation with a future. But nothing can come so easily to the Shieldings. Heorot is soon besieged by a terrifying creature named Grendel, which attacks by night and murders Hrothgrar’s men. The king proves unable to stop the attacks, and as the killings continue for the next twelve years, his citizens grow demoralized and fearful.

Grendel is quite the interesting villain, and not only because books showing these events from his perspective have popped up over the years. Careful readers notice that the residents of Heorot Hall don’t do anything to intentionally antagonize him; the sound of music and celebration that emanate from the hall infuriate him until he snaps and attacks. That seems like pretty flimsy justification for slaughtering warriors and striking fear in the hearts of all who survive, and the OEP uses Grendel to symbolize sin and wickedness; Beowulf’s victory over him is supposed to represent the triumph of God’s will over evil.

But the question of whether Grendel is evil or not is a little thornier. He commits some truly horrific murders when he storms Heorot, and torments its citizens for twelve years before Beowulf defeats him. However, it’s worth noting – as the OEP ever-so-slightly does – that Grendel was cursed by God because of his family’s legacy, not because of his own actions. In fact, Grendel was punished long before he even had the chance to do anything wrong.

His distant ancestor, Cain, killed his own brother – and his descendants have paid for that original sin through continued banishment. He’s even been twisted into something inhuman – a symbol of his family’s past, but not of his actions. So Grendel, who had done nothing wrong, was born as something warped and removed from any semblance of society, then forced to listen over and over again to sounds of happiness and togetherness – the very things he’d been unfairly denied.

Note that this isn’t to excuse his actions; murder is murder. But just as we did with Macbeth’s killings, it’s important to explain and give context to why they happen. And if we’re going to demand free will in order to be justly rewarded for our actions, if we’re going to stand with Gladwell in condemning flawed systems that place people in positions where they’re destined to turn out worse than they should, if we’re going to demand that we be judged on our own merits and not those of our fathers, mothers, sisters, or brothers… …then perhaps, as with Macbeth, it’s useful to have a little sympathy for the devil here.

Feraco Search for Human Potential 12 December 2012