Part Fifty-One

Now seems as good a place as any to insert a pointless sidebar about fate, and Preacher Haywood's disbelief in it. Haywood called himself as a "free-will extremist," and said that people who claim free will is an illusion have it completely backwards: "we have more options than we even know," he said.

There was a typical Haywoodian caveat, of course. He said that the combination of history and ignorance can act like fate, and deceive us into believing that we have destinies instead of choices. He said that the concept of fate was like the solar model of the atom: completely false, but a useful fiction for understanding something much more complicated.

His belief in a whole universe of unrecognized choices led to a rather strange email exchange with a Worshiper in Minneapolis, not long before he vanished from St. Michael's. Someone asked him to explain what he meant by options we don't know about, and he said that "I predict that in the future, we will discover that some things we now thing are immutable laws will turn out to be entirely optional. But we have two obstacles: first, we have to figure out that we have a choice, and even if we realize that much, we have to figure out how to exercise it." He then gave a long and convoluted metaphor about voting for president without anyone to tell you how: you had to know you could vote for president, then figure out that it was on one day, every four years, and then figure out where to go, and who the candidates were... So the person in Minneapolis asked him to give examples of the things that we would discover were optional. Preacher said he didn't know, otherwise it wouldn't be a prediction, it would be a fact. But he said they would be surprising to us: "maybe," he wrote, "the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or blastomas, or Avogadro's Number, or the speed of light, or geriatric cell damage, or 9.8 meters per second per second, or something like that."

Preacher was joking. But a fair number of Worshipers have no sense of humor. Which brings me to a sidebar within a sidebar: ril-lit, the especially sad and pathetic version of Worshiper fan-fiction. ril stands for "res ipsa loquitor," and the reason that name got stuck to it is not worth going into. At any rate, there is this subculture of Worshipers who want to be the Worshiper equivalent of Ayn Rand, and write these really bad, preachy, stories with Worshiper code-heroes and heroines. There's lot of sex, and they're usually sci-fi, and quite often the futuristic societies are based on the notion that people can opt out of the speed of light, etc. Not only can I not fathom why one would want to write Worship fan-fiction, I can't fathom why one would want to be considered on a literary plane with Ayn Rand. I am not going to disparage Objectivism -- it's a very useful philosophy for arrested adolescents who need to find an excuse for the fact that they live in a one-bedroom apartment and bag groceries for a living, despite their obvious superlative qualities. Have you ever noticed that no actual Randian is one-16th as successful as the Rand literary heroes? Have you ever met a really successful, accomplished Objectivist? Me, neither. (Then again, I was a drunk living in a flophouse motel, so who am I to make fun of grocery store baggers devouring Ayn Rand and living in one-bedroom apartments?) But I am going to disparage Ayn Rand as an author to be emulated. I mean, please. Have you READ Atlas Shrugged?

OK, let me step back one level of irrelevancy. Preacher didn't believe in fate, but I think it's hard-wired into human beings. The first time some homo erectus was self-aware enough to think about the fact that the erectus standing next to him just got struck by lightening, or eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, or something like that, the concept of Fate was born. We've had a million years of Fate programmed into us; Preacher's disbelief in it isn't going to change that. But that's not to say that I agree with the "free will is an illusion" crowd. That's just far too... convenient. It's far to easy to let yourself off the hook for your own general shittiness with that attitude.

My philosophy is this: we have some choices, but only the bad ones. We use our free will to fuck things up.

I point to my own examples. Just to name two: it was luck, or fate, or destiny, that I met my wife; it was my volitional acts of drinking and sleeping around that lost her. It was my choice to write a book about Schuyler Colfax, because I had to publish SOMETHING if I wanted a shot at tenure, and Colfax was sufficiently uninteresting that his bones hadn't been completely picked over by other scholars. That was a choice that should have doomed me to obscurity. But if was fate that led to Clinton being impeached right when "Colfax" got published, making me rich and famous (by small college history professor standards).

Consider, then, the antics of Preacher Haywood after leaving the desert. It's still an open question, I think, as to whether leaving the desert was a good thing or a bad thing, and I can't decide if his leaving of the desert was entirely his choice. Having Finch and Harding show up on his doorstep was certainly not his choice, and I suspect that once they did, his departure from Kerith Ravine was inevitable. But I suppose he might have just walked them to the highway and then turned around and gone back... I'm not sure how to categorize this one.

But once he was out, it was one bad choice after another that led him to St. Michael's, which -- in retrospect -- was a bad move. He was offered a choice to return to his old life as the world's happiest itinerant laborer, but when he finished his summer with the tennis-court people, he didn't take that option; instead he went to San Francisco and hooked up with Cassidy Harding. There, he was presented with the option of contented, anonymous domesticity. That could be his beautiful house on the hill; his charming, accomplished children; his sexy, rich, intelligent wife. He chose otherwise.

Then he was in LA and had a chance to be a celebrity guru. Lots of money, lots of sycophants, lots of sunshine and big fake boobs. He could have spread his message to disgruntled Scientologists and bored Kaballahists. I think he actually considered that choice pretty seriously. The fact that he took Finch's motorcyle to San Diego indicates, to me, that he was considering coming back. But he made a different choice, and the motorcycle came back in a moving van.

And even in San Diego he was given another option: he discovered (if Parks is to be believed) that he was rich. Not blind stinking "buy my own island" rich, but rich enough to live comfortably off the interest. But that didn't divert him, either.

Which brings me to his last chance to do something different: Deliah Harper.