Meant to Be

We have been reading Sophocles. First Antigone, which is the more interesting play, in that it gives voice to the idea of resistance to civil law. Civil disobedience in 442-441 BCE. Why? The gods were out of favor; the plebs was questioning the established values of oracle/fate/prophecy, and intriguing new ideas came into play: individualism, personal choice, and an unpredictable factor -- chance, or randomness. Antigone resists her uncle Creon's decree; she honors her family; she insists on burying Polyneices, and defies civic law. That Sophocles assigns resistance to a woman is quite interesting.

Her mother Iocaste also represents a "new" idea. She scoffs at the power of fate, and asks her husband/son Oedipus in Oedipus Rex to abandon his reckless course of action in determining the the cause of the pollution in Thebes. Of course Oedipus himself is the cause of the plague. He is the murderer of his father Laius.

Now the idea of fate has great appeal still....There are those who like to sum up life's twists and turns with this pat phrase: "it was meant to be." But what exactly do we mean by this phrase? Two recent books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggest that the world is more random than we like to recognize, and that we tend to attribute causality, where perhaps there is none. It is comforting to attribute rationale to the random. In fact, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan suggest that our reliance on statistical data and diagnostics is unfounded.

So how could Oedipus have defied his "fate"? How might he have proved the oracle wrong?

By exercising mindful choice. By choosing restraint over impulse. By not killing anyone who might possibly have been his father. By not sleeping with older women. By accepting advisement in the form of Teiresias, Iocaste, the Shepherd, the Choragos.

His fate was only "meant to be" because his interpretation of information was shoddy. And because his hubris isolated him from attunement.