Tao cannot be mocked - II

I Tragedy

It seems that the dramatists of classical Greece and possibly their audiences and the philosophers who throve in that culture believed that an action occurring in one generation could set a context or set a process going which would determine the shape of personal history for a long time to come.

The story of the House of Atreus in myth and drama is a case in point. The initial murder of Chrysippus by his stepbrother Atreus stars a sequence in which the wife of Atreus is seduced by Atreus‘ brother Thyestes, and in the ensuing feud between the brothers, Atreus kills and cooks his brother‘s son, serving him to his father in a monstrous meal. These events led in the next generation to the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father, Agamemnon, another son of Thyestes, and so on to the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her paramour, Aegisthus, brother of Agamemnon and son of Thyestes.

In the next generation, Orestes and Electra, the son and daughter of Agamemnon, avenge their father‘s murder by killing Clytemnestra, an act of matricide for which the Furies chase and haunt Orestes until Athena intervenes, establishing the court of the Areopagus and trying Orestes before that court, finally dismissing the cases. It required the intervention of a goddess to conclude the sequence or anangke, or necessity, whereby each killing led irresistibly to the next.

The Greek idea of necessary sequence was, of course, not unique. What is interesting is the Greeks seem to have thought of anangke as totally impersonal theme in the structure of the human world. It was as if, from the initial act onwards, dice were loaded against the participants. The theme, as it worked itself out, used human emotions and motives as its means, but the theme itself (we would vulgarly call it a “force”) was thought to be impersonal, beyond and greater than gods and persons, a bias or warp in the structure of the universe.

Such ideas occur at other times and in other cultures. The Hindu idea of karma is similar and differs from anangke only in the characteristically Hindu elaboration which includes both “good” and “bad” karma and carries recipes for the “burning up” of bad karma.

I myself encountered a similar belief among the Iatmul of New Guinea. The Iatmul shamans claimed that they could see a person‘s ngglambi as a black cloud or aura surrounding him or her. The Iatmul are a sorcery-ridden people and it was quite clear that nnglambi followed the pathway of sorcery. A might sin against B, thus incurring the black cloud. B might pay a sorcerer to avenge the first sin, and nnglambi would the surround both B and the sorcerer. In any case, it was expected that the person with black nnglambi would encounter tragedy – perhaps his own death, perhaps that of a relative, for ngglambi is contagious – and the tragedy would probably be brought about by sorcery. Ngglambi, like anangke, worked through human agencies.

The present question, however, does not concern the detailed nature of anangke, ngglambi, karma, and other similar conceptions that human individuals attribute to the larger system. The question is simply: What are the characteristics of those mental subsystems called individuals, arising from their aggregation in larger systems also having mental characteristics, that are likely to be expressed by generating such mythologies (true or false) as those of anangke, etc.? This is a question of a different order, not to be answered by reification of the larger mental system nor by simply evoking motives of the participant individuals.

A piece of an answer can be tentatively offered, if only to show the reader the direction of our inquiry.

Anangke, karma, and ngglambi are reified abstractions, the last being the most concretely imagined, so that the shamans even “see” it. The others are less reified and are perceptible only in their supposed effects, above all in the myths – the quasi-miraculous tales that exemplify the workings of the principle.

Now, it is well known in human interaction that individual beliefs become self-validating, both directly, by “suggestion,” so that the believer tends to see or hear or taste that which he believes; or indirectly, so that the belief may validate itself by shaping the actions of the believers in a way which brings to pass that which they believe, hope, or fear may be the case. Then let me chalk up as a characteristic of human individuals a potential for pathology arising our of the fact that they are of a flexible and viscous nature. They clot together to create aggregates which become the embodiment of themes of which the individuals themselves are or may be unconscious.

In terms of such a hypothesis, anangke and karma are particular epiphenomena brought about by the clustering of flexible subsystems.

Tao cannot be mocked - I