Determinism

My sleepy drooping lesson-planning eyes have stumbled across a word beginning with D and rather than give myself the rest that I crave, I instead will stumble around my thoughts and attempt coherence on the subject. The word is determinism and it is the philosophical idea that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. There are a number of different branches to determinism, but the essential nub of it is that life is mapped out on an unalterable course. Do we have no free will in this deterministic worldview? Well, that is a complicated question with further complicated words such as libertarianism, compatibilism, incompatibilism and indeterminism all getting involved. Determinists seem to disagree on whether free will is a myth or not and a simple answer is that determinism complicates the possibility of free will.

I came across this word because it is a word that has been thrown critically in the direction of John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men, a book that has resided on the GCSE syllabus for many a year. Critics say that Lennie's fate is deterministic in that there never seems a viable alternative with Big Len careering unerringly towards his final tragic demise. I guess determinism as a criticism is something that could be thrown at many simple plots with characters often stumbling headlong into tragedy. As I tappetty-tap-tap, Phil Mitchell is slurring nonsense in a drug-induced haze in the background and this is surely also weak determinism, but the criticism is only valid if it doesn't reflect life, so do these tales bear an accurate image of life? My personal stance is that the existence of God who grants us free will creates a paradoxical situation where a determinism of sorts and free will both exist. The criticisms of Of Mice and Men, I think, are misplaced: the plot's simplicity is part of what makes it beautiful and poignant and the apparent lack of free will for the protagonists feels like an accurate reflection of the limited free will the poor and disadvantaged were given in 1930s America.