A peripatetic list of words I've looked up #6.

ineluctable — unable to be resisted or avoided

I struggle with whether or not I believe in free will. On some level, it doesn’t really seem like it matters: whether or not my will is free, it certainly feels as though I’m going about my life making choices, and I feel about it how I feel about it, whether I chose it or not. My instinct is to say that those who write off free will are simply trying to make themselves feel better about their mistakes and foibles: I didn’t have any choice, you see. But then, sometimes, it really feels that way.

I first looked up ineluctable when reading Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the epochal volume of criticism in which Stephen Greenblatt advances a sort of secular Calvinism as part of the larger project of codifying what would eventually become the New Historicism. His argument is essentially that all choices are dictated by societal forces, and my initial reaction to it was to see it as bunkum. I’m certainly not a believer in the right wing hocus-pocus about the essential bootstrapiness of the American “entrepreneur”; that seems to me pretty obviously a load of shite designed to get people to vote against their own interests. But I couldn’t escape the feeling that Greenblatt was a bit of an old fraud.

As time went on, this feeling calcified into an iron-clad conviction, which then spread to my feelings about the entirety of what might broadly be called “The English Department.” To wit: The New Historicism, which held The English Department in its sweaty grip for nearly twenty years after Greenblatt’s assertion of its primacy in the late 70s. That school of thought is deeply, obviously fraudulent to anybody who isn’t emotionally invested in its perpetuation, and yet it was ascendant among America’s smart set for so long that its fingerprints linger on everywhere. Open the pages of a journal these days and you’ll still find academics doing a sort of veiled mind-reading exercise on historical texts. It’s ludicrous.

At the time, I was on an academic track in graduate school, and going crazy from it. It just made me so profoundly sad to see so many bright people wasting so much time on stuff that seemed like bushwa to me. It didn’t take that long for me to run screaming from that program, back into the comfy arms of a degree in creative writing, which is where I had thought I would end up years before, anyway.

Now, is that a choice that I made? It certainly feels like it, to me. But then there are other things that I’ve done, things which sound like choices, but seem to be fore-ordained. It seems to me like there’s something in my programming that causes me to choose the wrong romantic partners, for one thing — especially because they so often end up being wrong in exactly the same way, viz., fresh out of a thing with someone else and thus incapable of even quite hearing what I have to say, let alone wanting me in the way that I want them.

Feh. Now I’ve devolved into bitching about my life again. I suppose I’ll have to tag this one petulant whining.