A script, and the effort to rewrite it

Laplace, building on Newtonian mechanics, treated the universe as one unbroken chain of cause and effect. In A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities he imagined a “super-intelligence”—later called Laplace’s demon—that knew the position and momentum of every particle in existence. Armed with the laws of physics, such a mind could compute every past and future state of the world. Under classical mechanics the universe is a flawless clock: what happens is fixed, and randomness has no place in it.

I hold this view as firmly as I hold the Poincaré recurrence theorem. Everything that exists was settled in the instant the universe was born. Even the small, stubborn acts by which we try to wrestle with our fate have already been calculated, down to the last detail, as part of the history that was always going to unfold. We never actually change anything. We only follow the script while struggling against it, and in the very act of trying to step off the path we write the next stroke of the sentence that was waiting for us.

Seen this way, Qin Shi Huang’s unification of the Six States was decided at the Big Bang—or at some still more remote layer of reality that no human knowledge can reach. He was both a great man and a tyrant; neither quality was his to choose, yet both were shaped by the choices he made. He was born to live precisely that life. Each of his victories and each of his defeats was at once the result of his own will and the working-out of a course already fixed.

The mandate of Heaven is vast and cannot be rewritten. Yet human effort can still be said to overcome it. Heaven sets the trajectory of every thing, but the trajectory is walked by people. Because we do not know the mandate, do not believe in it, and will not submit to it, we climb against the current in search of even half a chance to outrun it. The ending may be written in advance, but the process of trying to rewrite a life can itself count as a victory of the human over Heaven.