Category: Writing

I’ve been too busy to write. Ugh. Now I hope to get back to it.  This entry was written by my student who wishes to be known only as Will.  With his permission, I’m posting the story because I’m most proud of his writing for this assignment.  The specifics of the assignment really don’t matter.  Just read and enjoy.

All Things Determined

In this paper, I will tell a scattered story. It is the story of a boy and a girl, the boy’s heritage, upbringing, trials and tribulations, and ultimately, his redemption. The story will demonstrate the philosophical theory of hard determinism and how it wholly directs every outcome in human life- be it good or bad. The idea of one having free will is entrenched, enticing, but illusory. It is incompatible with what I’ve found to be the true nature of existence- that our actions and inactions are bound by a ceaseless spiral of causes, and that we are hostages to forces that aren’t always evident.

In the beginning, there was a couple. A man and a woman, both plagued and gifted by various effects stemming from innumerable causes stretching back generation to generation into the ether, are compelled to get married. The husband’s genetic baggage was depression and alcoholism, and to an extent, the wife’s was comparable. However, the magnitude of these blights wouldn’t fully be known to either party until further down the road of life. So, with youthful zeal and newlywed gusto, they birth a daughter. Four years pass, and a son is born- the boy of the story. To all, life seemed good until suddenly it wasn’t. Even at a young age, the boy notices that a kind of unease makes itself known- his father and mother tend to talk very loudly to each other. Mom smokes a lot, and dad sleeps a lot. Over time, the unease meanders into tension, then controlled chaos. Time out. A piercing whistle is blown- divorce.

Now there are two houses, two states of mind, and two newly separated parents for the two children to contend with. It was the typical child-of-divorce story from there on out, only with a not-as-typical tragic twist soon to follow- death. It was during a perfectly bizarre occasion, Christmas morning, that the mother chose to break the news to her two young babes. Sitting amongst the shredded mounds of wrapping paper, and now, childhood, the son and daughter learned of their father’s demise. The daughter cried, but the boy was numb- somehow, he had figured this to be an inevitability and only now realized it. The cause? ‘Drinking too much’ was declared by the mother. Many years would pass until the boy would come to learn that this was the highly-abridged, most child-friendly explanation that his mother could honestly confess that day.

Alright, now here’s the problem with compatibility. Compatibility, or soft determinism, is the idea that free will can co-exist with the binding, purely material, strictly causal concept of hard determinism. Individuals are surely predisposed to certain conditions that are out of their control, it is argued, but with that comes the ability to choose- to act or not to act (a person is the sole cause of their own actions, rather than the cause being any forces outside of their control). The only truth I can ascribe to the idea of free will is that it can very truly seem real- it seems that while I have chosen to do one action, I could’ve just as easily done any other. However, in a free will scenario, not all possible actions/choices are made equal. A married couple, when contemplating divorce, don’t ‘choose’ to separate- the ratio of positive to negative aspects of the relationship were always present, and needed only to be brought to the surface upon reflection. Upon weighing the ratio, with all kinds of factors present (compatibility, affection, money, staying together for the kids, the negative perception Catholics hold towards divorce, etc.), the greater of two forces will always prevail. The parents in my story didn’t choose to separate- they succumbed to the power of a greater force. Following the divorce, while continuing down the path of least resistance, the father’s ‘choices’ quickeningly became less equal. It was once believed that he chose to nurture his alcoholism, that he chose to expand his addiction to other, more nefarious substances, that he chose to isolate himself from others around him, and that he chose to not seek help in some way. But the boy knows that his father didn’t choose to lose his job, his house, and to die alone from a heart attack – why would anyone choose that?

Years after his father was compelled to die by a still mysterious whirlwind of over-powering forces, the boy is enrolled in Catholic school. Gradually, as most things are, he begins to exhibit signs of ‘the old family curse’. This was the name given the cocktail of mental maladies, primarily depression, passed down like a kind of morbid heirloom from generation to generation on his mother’s side of the family. It first manifested itself in quietness, then moroseness, then apathy, then despair. It was over the course of four years that the affliction steadily grew like a larva, creeping and festering until the boy was encased in its cocoon. Once one of the brightest pupils in his elementary school, the boy now plummeted to the earth alongside his grades, further and further. A healthy mix of pride and shame prevented him from speaking out, from doing anything a rational person ought to do in times like this. He expertly honed this craft, hiding the disease from all eyes, most precisely his mother. She implored him ceaselessly, week after week, for an answer as to why he was the way he was. Why are your grades suffering, do you need a tutor? Why do you spend so much time alone on the computer, what are you looking at? Why do you always have such a stoic look on your face, are you being bullied? Always, in the back of her mind, must have been the answer- the old family curse. Please, please, don’t let this be the answer. Maybe the real answer is this, or that, or dark phase soon to be phased out. Any other possible explanation was more palatable at the time- she was a stressed, single mother raising two kids on a teacher’s salary. The cessation of her primary vice, smoking, left her with only one other- denial. The boy was more than fine with this, it meant he wouldn’t have to face the truth either. Instead, half-way during his senior of high school, the truth faced him. It was all over- too many second chances, half-promises, and squandered opportunities. The boy was expelled due to insufficient grades. Since around a month prior, he had been prescribed anti-depressants that truly did make a difference on his outlook, but it was too little too late.

Thrown into limbo (a new, different type of limbo than the one he was accustomed to), it was time for the boy to deliberate. In what seemed to be the first time, his two realms of ultimate competing forces, good and bad, were fluctuating around equilibrium. Stuck in the crossroads of this holy suspension, he knew that the morally correct option was to press on. This meant to live, to love, to eke out some then-unknown positive meaning. And yet, the inverse, negative alternative was well-known and tempting. If the competing force of darkness, his old friend, the seductress, the corrupter and destroyer were to prevail, he knew fully that it would consume and end him. All it took was just one moderately powerful force on either side of the spectrum to tip the scale and determine the boys fate. He found the force. By a miracle of a god he didn’t believe in, he was redeemed. His angel came in the form of a girl- a once-classmate. The two happened to share a quiet, private, mutual admiration for each other that only came to surface after the boy took a wild shot at asking her to be his date for the senior prom dance. The soon to be discovered fact that boy was barred from attending due to his expulsion was no more than the mildest of inconveniences- he now had an overwhelming force in his life, a reason for all the madness.