On Ants and Atomization in the 20th Century

Reading Sosiak & Barden 2020, Multidimensional trait morphology predicts ecology across ant lineages has me thinking.  First, a brief overview of the paper: taking a large sampling of ant species from across all major groups the authors: 

a) Classified each species into niches based on their nesting habits (e.g. underground, in wood), foraging habits (e.g. arboreal, subterranean), and functional role (e.g. generalist predator, fungal farmer).  

b) Measured many morphological traits such as leg segment lengths and eye placement and entered them into a database.

c) Used machine learning to see which traits, or suites of traits, correlate with different "ecomorphs" (distinct combinations of nesting, foraging, and functional niches). 

Now, the findings themselves are of debatable value; although the program can predict with some 77-85% accuracy which ecomorph category an ant belongs in just based on morphological data, in some ways these simply corroborate what had already been observed.  However, this is really all just a preamble to frame something else I want to talk about. 

Figure 3 from Sosiak & Barden (2020)

Binned Findings

"Across our analyses, we find that ecomorphospaces overlap in a core region, where a large proportion of species are clustered. These ants reflect a generalized platonic ant morphology, where they are not strongly morphologically specialized relative to other taxa."
-Sosiak & Barden (2020)

I want the phrase "platonic ant morphology" inscribed somewhere.  I do not know if it is serious or tongue-in-cheek but I admit I found it distinctly funny.  Forget horse-ness, ant-ness was where it was at all along, for as they note despite having some 14,000 different species most ants nonetheless cleave to being close to ideal proportions.  Myrmidons truly were the Greek ideal.

Okay, setting aside my amusement, this phrase also happens to be the one that tipped me into writing this post.  What is interesting is that although in the end the authors only use ten ecomorph categories, there could have been up to 120 (6 functional niches x 5 nesting niches x 4 foraging niches), or at least the 35 that were contained in their sample of some 166 species.  However, instead they found:

"Collapsed or summarized ecomorph syndromes improve prediction by simultaneously considering multiple ecological niche aspects and accommodating some plasticity."

Why do I find this interesting enough to write on?  Because at first glance it is counter-intuitive that a smaller number of categories would be more useful.  We would expect that a process which paid attention to every feature and most finely delineated categories would be ideal.  After all, isn't this getting closer to the truth?  Yet instead their own preliminary results led them to conclude otherwise.  Trying too hard to differentiate didn't work because their data itself had imperfect categories, and so it performed better when simplified into fewer groups which assumed wiggle room.

Yet this is, of course, precisely what we do as humans.  In a world full of variation we are forced to make arbitrary, but useful, distinctions.  It reminds me of Donald Hoffman's "fitness beats truth" theorem, that what natural selection has pushed us for as beings with limited time and processing power is an ability to make generalizations.  Useful generalizations.  That's the key here.  The validity of categorization is linked to outcome, and there is no clear rule for determining how finely it ought to be done except that the two extremes are equally useless: if everything belongs to one category or if everything has its own category we may have perfect predictive power... but it is useless.  And in the vast middle area is left us to decide when and were to subsume particulars to a larger classification as we make the universe as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Supremacist Composition: White on White
by Kasimir Malevich, 1918

Family Resemblance

"We find that multidimensionality greatly aids in the characterization of ecomorphs... Ecomorphs are often defined by integration of traits moreso than individual measurements."
-Sosiak & Barden (2020)

I sometimes have this feeling that we are getting back to where we once were a century ago in terms of appreciating the complexity of the world.  That may seem to be a strange thing to say in light of the vast advances in science in this time, but it is a thought that has particularly been on my mind since earlier today as I read a paper involving the history of ecological development.  The author notes that nineteenth-century scientists were well-versed in the impact of environment on development, but that later advances in genetics and molecular biology drove such observations from the center stage.  That what they offered, and what we wanted, was a clear sort of mechanism, one made only of the simplest parts that would allow us to ignore all the baffling variety and circumstance in natura to reach the real truth underneath.  That would satisfy us.  

I am hardly the first person to observe or critique the trends of reductionism, but as I thought on it I wondered just how great its breadth and impact was.  It is true that science inherited from its physics roots a propensity for breaking things into their components, and it achieved much success with it, yet I feel as though that element of success carried another overtone.  A sense of liberating simplicity that cuts through the morass of existence:

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light."

As I read Art Through the Ages what struck me was how art in the 20th century was distinctly atomized.  Rothko's color, Mondrian's composition, and so forth.  They were not mature narratives but single thoughts.  Another book I was reading (Janson's History of Art for Young People) called Picasso's Bull's Head "a visual pun" and I thought the phrase was incredibly apt.  We cannot deny that puns are comedy, yet they are only a fragment of it.  A shard of humor.  The smallest piece before it ceases to belong to that category.  Yet so many of the twentieth-century works fixate on these small pieces so strongly as if desperate to grasp a truth in it, or behind it; that it is only complete simplicity which allows for certainty.  There is a quote from Naum Gabo which summarizes this mentality perfectly:

"Such artfully constructed images are the very essence of the reality of the world which we are searching for."

Another, from Kasimir Malevich:

"The essential thing [in pictorial art] is feeling - in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked."

Context again, or rather its absence.  I think there was something at work, an essential drive that ran through the twentieth-century mind to blast away everything and get to the bottom of it all in a frenzy of disgusted disillusionment.  In his brilliant essay Iconophobia, Kenneth Clark notes that pure monotheisms are hostile to representational art for they are a form of beguiling idolatry.  They aren't the real thing, just something's fake of it, and all they can possibly do is lead one astray.  It is the result of feeling that they are in the service of the one core truth of the universe which makes all else distraction.  He then goes on to observe that much of modern art is also iconophobic.  It detests representation in favor of abstraction, and that it is perhaps for much the same reason: a desire to purify one's vision and so draw closer to the truth.

It causes me to question the place of reductionism in all this.  I had always assumed that it, being part and parcel with science, was the driver.  That all wings of the human endeavor were attempting to copy science in all its success.  Yet that may only be part of the story.  Perhaps rather reductionism in science wasn't maintained on the basis of results, but because it appealed to the need we increasingly felt to ground ourselves after having unchained the Earth from the Sun.  That truth would be found in a forcible negation of the old view which dissolved all the contextual stories and left us with certainty once again.

To return to ants here at the end, I am reminded of when I read William Morton Wheeler's The Ants.  What struck me was his assured holism, that he took it for granted he was observing an organism in its entirety, and that organism has a reality all its own.  Like he wasn't looking over his shoulder, afraid that its reality would dissolve into a meaningless assemblage of organic chemistry coded by nucleotides.  He knew from hours of long observation that he had a sense for these insects, and that such knowledge, though not quantified or rooted in a lower stratum, was nonetheless real.  I do not believe that this is merely because he did not yet have access to those findings but because he was assured of his world and its context.  

Yet even as I praise this, his own writings validate the suspicion that led to their demise.  His observation was acute, but it was in the service of certain values that have proven untenable.  He compares types/stages of human societies to those of ants; that Ponerines are hunter-gatherers, leaf-cutters the agriculturalists, and slave-makers the barbarians.  He particularly regards inquilline ants as "degenerate," a phrase he uses not just to denote their reduced morphology but as an indictment; little advanced from Aesop in this manner, there was a cosmic lesson from an animal in how a loss of upright self-sufficiency is ethically reprehensible.  I think it is realizing these mistakes, among a thousand others, that conferred on us such a desire to not be fooled again.  As a price for stripping away the old beliefs we also stripped away the habits of thought that would see value in context, contingent categories, visual representation, and as the paper puts it, "multidimensionality," the "integration of traits" and "accommodating some plasticity" in our understanding.

I do though have some optimism that we are beginning to return to an acceptance of fuzziness.  That after being estranged from categories we have realized they are indispensable, but now we are better aware of their nature.  Similarly, that having buried ourselves in a sense that the only thing that mattered is the selfish gene, the simplest unit we can envision, we are crawling out and seeing that it is not a failure when it takes multiple factors in order to contextualize an organism (or a truth).  Perhaps even that they can have value in themselves.  That, I think, is a good direction to go.

On Active Learning

Richard Feynman, 1988

Earlier this week I had to respond to the following prompt in pedagogy class.  I admit I wandered off course a bit in my passion, but I thought it would be worth sharing here:

----

1. How do you define active learning? How do you think teachers and education researchers define it?

2. What are some misconceptions about what active learning is and isn't?

3. Describe an instance of active learning that was valuable for you. What were the elements that made it valuable?

4. What are your constructive criticisms about the Freeman et al. paper?

 

It seems to me that the idea behind active learning is to standardize and make widely available the process that would normally go on within a single engaged student’s mind.  That is to say, recognizing that a large portion, perhaps most, students do not naturally make connections, pursue questions further, or seek out application of material they encounter in class the pedagological answer has been to give them assistance in doing so.  In essence, to facilitate learning, because that is what the aforementioned habits do.

As such, I think the common misconception about active learning is that it is about the methods rather than the goal.  It’s easy to see the flashy changes, converting lectures to discussion groups, slides to activities, and see that as the core (although to be fair, being apes just touching things does help on its own).  In a way, it’s kind of like what I feel is the misconception about lecturing – that it was all about the memorization of the facts, rather than listening to the person and the mind behind the presentation.  But of course facts are important, for we have to build models out of something.  I think of it like a stream cutting a canyon, or perhaps a bamboo scaffold that is used to erect a building; long after the creative materials are gone, the individual facts that described the Krebs cycle or stages of ecological succession, a broader pattern of thought remains.  That is, assuming that the students engaged with the facts, and so learned them, truly, which is what is at stake here.

Now, I’m not sure this is how it is commonly viewed in the educational community but I will take a stab.  It seems to me that how it is generally approached now is that active learning is aligned with how people learn, based on psychological and sociological principles, and therefore is the correct, I would say almost the moral, way to teach.  That by comparison the older method of lecture is inherently exclusive, sustained only by tradition, habit, and ignorance of what constitutes true learning.  Once revealed as mere information regurgitation, active learning may sweep it and its many follies away in a fundamental change of focus.  Teacher- to student-centric, external to internal, absorptive to creative, that sort of thing.  But in large part this is merely a response to trends.

Increasingly in our civilization education is the gateway to comfortable lifestyle, and the result is that a higher proportion of the populace is motivated to attend post-secondary school whether they have an interest in learning or not.  Unfortunately, while lecturing may be a fantastic way to rapidly expand the knowledge of and provide role models for those so already inclined, it is woefully inadequate for producing interest and belonging de novo.  So it must be supplemented, or supplanted, by another approach which does so: active learning.

An aside: Under this there may seem to be a fallacious assumption on my part, that people are easily categorized by ability or attitude.  A sort of sinister judgementalness with regards to human nature, and perhaps a secret glee of superiority as well.  I wish to take a moment to dispel that.  I have no objections to the general findings of Freeman et al. 2013, that students, especially students who traditionally perform worse, can be genuinely helped by active learning.  That attitudes of indifference can be addressed, lacunae in knowledge filled, and that many who would have abandoned the field for the wrong reasons can be retained through better course design.  I think it’s wonderful, that less and less in education we must say, “There but for the grace of God go I.”  But I also want to put it in its place in recognizing what it does, and also perhaps what it costs.

When I was growing up I loved the Discovery Channel.  It was a fantastic network, full of highly-educational series that mixed visuals with much information.  Aside from the biology pieces, which I always adored, I had a special fondness for the history programs.  The old-style where as a narrator talked there would be images, old footage or graphics, shown on the screen; perhaps a conversationally-framed speaker sitting comfortably in a stuffed chair as they were interviewed.  You were there because you wanted to know; its presentation for better or worse determined its effectiveness.  In particular certain presenters, such as David Attenborough or Kenneth Clark, were an inspiration for how their mere existence hinted at so much more.

Nowadays those are gone, replaced by programs that target a broader audience.  Simplified storylines, creations of fictitious “discovery” narratives for drama, cutout personalities, and so forth are the mainstays. “Reenactments” are the worst.  Flashy, empty spectacles that soak up screen time but which convey almost no real information; and because they are more expensive than archival footage, you can be guaranteed they will be used repeatedly in order to pad the time and get full bang for their buck.  Recognizing that more people are attracted by immediate entertainment than patient exposition the old style has been lost.

Now, I do not compare active learning directly to this, for as I noted above I am sold that it works in helping people truly engage and get more out of a class.  Perhaps even change the direction of their life for the better if we are lucky.  Active learning isn’t an empty stunt.  But in the process what you have done is redirected effort away from one pure purpose that could assume the learner coming to the teacher with another that divides its energy with enticing them forth.  For many this is a gain.  For a few this is a disservice.  One of the references in the Freeman paper, Burgan 2006, expresses it well:

“Recordings of Feynman’s lectures are still available; he delivers complicated ideas in a brash Queens accent, punctuated by jokes, ingenious analogies, and a friendly eagerness to accommodate undergraduate limitations. Like many other faculty, Feynman had gifts that were forensic and dramatic as well as intellectual. Such teachers thrive in lecture halls, and their classes are over-subscribed and overflowing… Lecture courses by such teachers can be as exciting as hearing a great violinist play the Beethoven concerto. Gaining admission to their performances is one of the reasons to go to college. Rarely do students have the chance to observe intellectual mastery and excitement in their daily world. When they find it on a campus, it validates the life—the liveliness—of the mind.”

I believe that there is something to this, that the opportunity to partake of such experiences are transformative to the right person.  Obviously not all, or even a majority, of lecture classes are like this.  Many are desperately dull readings of PowerPoints whose only saving grace is that they keep the student aware of where they ought to be in the book.  But nonetheless, above is what is aspired to, just as I’m sure when/if active learning takes over it will be found there are professors who conduct their class and others who let it conduct them.  Educational programs are sort of like pots that way: before they exist they are flawless.

Now, I’m not trying to set up a false dichotomy, because I think all but the most avid proponents of active learning recognize that at some point or another information has to enter the equation.  Lectures don’t have to vanish because people are doing more activities, and teachers don’t stop being inspirational because they aren’t talking most of the time.  But I do believe that these are curtailed inevitably, for time and energy must be spent elsewhere. 

At this point a natural objection arises: but the findings also demonstrate that high-achieving students are either not impacted or even improved by active learning as well.  That this is a win-win transition where everybody achieves “success.”  Well, the primary measure in Freeman, as in most others, is of course grades and other assessments.  It can be clearly recorded that A-students don’t suddenly stop being A-students when transitioning from lecture to active learning, and that they often do better on competency tests before and after.  Again, I think the statistics are convincing on this point and I’m not arguing against them.  Yet as I hope the quote above impresses, it isn’t all about that.  It is about appreciating a dimension of human experience, and that while it is true that everybody passes, for some they do not know what “success” might have truly been.

In any case, that is my roundabout critique of the Freeman paper, not from a methodological perspective but a philosophical one.  It bothers me when all the lines on the graph point upward in a way that almost seems to beg what is being missed or redefined in order to make it so tidy.  Also it bothers me from my own experience, that I know that at least one person, myself, feels at home in a lecture by a passionate expert but excluded when comporting with fellow novices.  Neither of these things is an argument against active learning and its implementation; as I started above, the majority sentiment is not my own, and as universities must now not only foster learning but turn out a product the result is inevitable.  But I do wish to at least occasionally ask of people, “Do you not hear the call?”

 

The Iliad #2: A crossing cable of strong discord

Attic lekythoi depicting two women at a standing loom, 6th century BC

"It often happens, however, that in attempting to convey the impression of a work of art a critic is forced beyond a straightforward description of the subject, and must have recourse to allusion, metaphor and analogy.  The most famous description of a work of art in the English language, Walter Pater's evocation of the Mona Lisa, is of this kind, and we may argue that with an image so complex, a simple description of the subject would have been meaningless.  Pater's accumulation of associative images - the rocks, the vampire, the diver in deep seas, the sound of lyres and flutes - may seem rather far-fetched; and no one supposes that they were in Leonardo's mind when he was at work; but to the nineteenth-century reader, with his rich, elaborate mental furniture, they did to an extraordinary degree convey the mysterious power of the original painting."
-Kenneth Clark, Art History and Criticism as Literature

Since my last entry on the Iliad I've continued to mull over certain thoughts which never quite found full expression there.  There is something about reading this book, one written by a mind familiar because it is human but alien because it is so ancient, that brings about clarity in contrast.

Above I had to quote a whole paragraph just to get to a single phrase: mental furniture.  It is a striking metaphor to me, and one that has self-referentially become a fixture of my own since first reading.  It is the image of a mind populated by set pieces, bought elsewhere and brought here in order to enrich the surroundings, organized for particular effect, yet together creating a proper living space, each one the result of some individual effort of craftsmanship.  For Clark, it is the great artists and cultural figures who have been the main contributors and who have left their visible and invisible mark all around us.  It is the deepening of the human experience by bringing it to viable expression.

Homer, coming as such a dawn-author, does not have this.  True he draws on his own elaborate Greek mythology and epic tradition, but these have not yet had the time and complexity to conceal certain problems of human existence.  They are a first pass at addressing them, and in their primevalness reveal habits that have long been covered up, like a bare stool versus our motorized stuffed armchair.  I don't make the comparison to diminish the former, for this simple seat has a beautiful elegance all its own, but because in its spareness it reveals components of construction.  The essentials for making the space in our head livable as we try to make sense of it all.

It is an intuition of mine that the world is mysterious and that we must strip back the known to know it.  Here some outcropping is exposed, a mind that is more complex than unhewn animism but not yet stuffed by abstraction, and perhaps through it we can learn something of ourselves.

Sacrifice of a pig in ancient Greece (tondo from an Attic red-figure cup, 510–500 BC, 
by the Epidromos Painter, collections of the Louvre)

Deeply-Moved Movers

"God does not play dice." - Einstein

As I was formulating my thoughts for this section, I realized that we never really ask why something doesn't happen.  We may ask why something different happens, why events unfold one way rather than another, but that is really just offering a different explanation.  Not-things do not not-happen, so there is no need for not-explanations.  And we don't believe in chance.

Or, to be clear, we don't believe in true randomness, and hence true un-caused-ness (notice we don't even have a word for it).  We may recognize that from our perspective things may appear random, but that is not really our fundamental attitude.  Even the rarefied modern scientific outlook, with all its emphasis on contingency as opposed to a directed cosmos, fundamentally reaffirms a caused order.  When we reach the edges of this, either in quantum mechanics or the beginning of the universe, where our causal "Why?"s stop, we are deeply dissatisfied.  Whether it be the nature of our brain, that supreme pattern finding machine, or some deeper impulse, we are never truly settled with the explanation that something happened for no reason.  For patterns are pleasantly self-confirming but as of yet we have no mathematical test for randomness.  We do not even know if it exists.

Now, that is a topic that extends far beyond the scope of this essay, but it is an issue that I wanted to bring to the forefront before looking back.  That one of the core elements of the human experience is building up a corpus of explanations using mechanisms we understand, and that these "Why?"s are a prerequisite for any culture.  What awoke this train of thought for me in the Iliad was a mundane passage where Agamemnon sacrifices lambs to consecrate the oath between the Achaeans and Trojans (quotes from Lattimore):

...the life breath going away,
since the strength of the bronze had taken it from them.
-Book 3, p108

It is an innocuous passage, but the wording stuck with me.  It was the strength of the bronze which had allowed it to accomplish its purpose.  Now, this is of course a translation so I would not wish to put too much stress upon a single word choice, but after many mentions of "pitiless bronze" and spears seeking to find their targets it seemed to me to hint at the thought process behind it all.  We are several centuries out from Aristotle, but nonetheless it has a sense teleologically striving for a goal or end.  That is, the blade did not mechanistically cut the lamb by overcoming the hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces.  It cut the lamb because it was mightier, because the blade could exert its will and take away from the victim something the lamb did not want to give up, the same way a stronger man may overcome a weaker one and force him to do as he wants.

In fact, I would guess this is almost exactly it.

A theme which guides much of my thought, and which I bring to the discussion here, is that in order to truly understand humans we must recognize that we are physically-embodied, visually-oriented social apes, and that a shocking amount of our thought is constructed from these building blocks.  While there is some debate over the full validity of the social brain hypothesis, I nonetheless am something of a believer, if not that the raw size of our brain correlates with social size but that many of our most complex mental models are built on social ones.  That is, the most elaborate problems we had to solve evolutionarily were dealing with other people, and now that we have expanded our horizons we nonetheless fall back on such habits.  That transitive logic habitually arises in unrelated social creatures as macaques, jays, and wasps would seem to support this view, and I suspect this is why I could use words such as "overcoming" and "force" in both a scientific and social sentence above without appearing inconsistent.

So long before there was any notion of law or mathematical regularity in the universe, there were humans interacting.  They jostled for position, wheedled for desires, and fought and cooperated to get what they wanted.  Central to this is will, the teleological concept above, one which ties together what happens with what was desired to happen.  It is the cause we are first and foremost familiar with, for nothing is more natural than the sense that we will our body to move and it occurs (unless "the strength is taken" from us, as so often accompanies death in the Iliad).  In fact, it is so obvious it deserves an aside.  

The idea we have is that when we envision our arm to move we have a final position in mind and perhaps a purpose.  Yet curiously this bears no resemblance to what must actually happen to bring this about; there is no nerve that carries position or purpose, just varying levels of muscle recruitment.  Somehow one must be translated into the other (and we have no idea how).  But of course the Greeks did not know this; the order to move the arm moved the arm, and the position that was desired was the very thing that proximately controlled the action.  That is, unlike us, it is not the will that set into motion a series of events that ended in the movement of the arm, it was the will that moved the arm.  The will and the event is the same.  In turn this logic can be run in reverse: when things move there is a will behind it somewhere, and that if something is prevented from moving it is due to an even greater will opposing it.

...'Why then,
child, do you lament?  What sorrow has come to your heart now?
Speak out, do not hide it.  These things are brought to accomplishment
through Zeus: in the way that you lifted your hands and prayed for...'
-B18, p377 

But there exists a conundrum at the heart of this outlook: sometimes we get what we will but it is not what we find we want.  Above is the passage where Thetis comes to comfort Achilles as he mourns Patroclus.  To us as moderns it is simple enough: Achilles was a proud fool and spitefully wished disaster on Agamemnon and everybody else to prove they needed him.  Whether or not we think it just desserts that he now lose his best friend after praying for his countrymen to suffer, we can at least understand that's not what he wanted.

However, I'm thinking that for the Greeks it may not have been so separate.  The Iliad has shown us through its narrative that the chain of willful causality leads back to Achilles; it was his prayer which swayed Thetis to intercede on his behalf with Zeus, and his prayer was fulfilled completely.  But he certainly didn't wish for this outcome... did he?  How is it possible to will something so fervently only to have it betray him?  It would be as though he told his arm to hug a friend and instead it slapped them; it simply makes no sense.  So if Achilles' own volition is out then the only option which remains is that the causal power of another being, one with a will greater than even his, overruled his intent and he just didn't know it.  This is precisely the angle Agamemnon takes in his own "apology" later:

'This is the word the Achaians have spoken often against me
and found fault with me in it, yet I am not responsible
but Zeus is, and Destiny, and Erinys the mist-walking
who in assembly caught my heart in the savage delusion
on that day I stripped from him the prize of Achilleus.
Yet what could I do?  It is the god who accomplishes all things.
Delusion is the elder daughter of Zeus, the accursed
who deludes all; her feet are delicate and they step not
on the firm earth, but she walks the air above men's heads
and leads them astray.  She has entangled others before me.'
-B19, p394

I found this such a delightful passage to read for many reasons.  For one it is a situation we can recognize: Agamemnon is playing politician, trying to slip out of being held accountable for his terrible leadership choices.  His selfishness and spite have cost everybody and needs to figure out how to blunt their ire.  It is so eternally human that we can still hear in it the same refrain that sounds whenever a miscreant today tries to deflect blame.  It's never their fault; it's always somebody else's.

Yet at the same time, it should be noted that Agamemnon would not offer up to his listeners an explanation they would not accept.  To us it may seem contrived, but for them it is not.  I think it is a bad habit of modern thought to believe that the ancients were utterly credulous because their superstitious beliefs always overwhelmed their critical faculties if only the gods were involved.  That undersells them and blinds us to what is actually happening here: Agamemnon is attempting to convince his listeners that he didn't will this.  Everybody has been murmuring that he chose his own personal gain over the good of the Achaean force, that he weighed the two and decided in his own favor, and that hence the disasters that have unfolded can be laid at his feet.  After all, in retrospect he should have seen this coming.

Once again, I must emphasize that there is no idea of the divided mind or cosmic law that can come to the rescue here.  The resolution to this problem in the minds of his men lies solely with assigning malicious intent to the correct being.  And he wants them to know it assuredly isn't him.  He thought that what he was doing was befitting a king, but that was only Zeus through Delusion working out a different plan.  And since Zeus is assuredly the mightiest will of all there's no way he could have resisted.  Such reasoning has a certain soundness within this worldview, and indeed Achilles accepts Agamemnon's defense:

'Father Zeus, great are the delusions with which you visit men.
Without you, the son of Atreus could never have stirred so
the heart inside my breast, nor taken the girl away from me
against my will, and be in helplessness.  No, but Zeus somehow
wished that death should befall great numbers of the Achaians,'
-B19, p399

With this, Achilles has his answer too.  The reason people can intend for one thing to happen, only to have it come about with unforseen consequences is that they are overruled by another being who has more power than they.  Achilles got exactly what he asked for, but his asking for this was manipulated in him by Zeus, because there's no way he could actually desire what happened in the end.  That'd be an incomprehensible thing for Achilles, hero of the Greeks, to do under his own volition.  But events don't happen unless somebody wants them to, and who is left to blame but the gods?

Or fate.

From NICHD Exchange Recap: “Genome Editing: Rewriting Fate”,
https://science.nichd.nih.gov/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=142411766

Fated Conclusion

'For my mother Thetis the goddess of silver feet tells me
I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death.  Either,
if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,
my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;
but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
left for me, and my end in death will not come to be quickly.'
-B9, p209, Achilles

We now reach the place I willed this essay to arrive from the beginning.  Last post I concluded with remarks on the Greek outlook toward the uncontrollability of the world.  That fate was not inevitability but chance, and that they were united into a single concept by the inevitability of chance.  It is still a good piece of writing, and in fact I'm a bit proud of how that segment turned out, but I recognize that in light of such passages as the one above, fate cannot be adequately summed up in a single statement such as that.  After all, we abhor chance.

'Now, since I am not going back to the beloved land of my fathers,
since I was no light of safety to Patroklos, nor to my other
companions, who in their numbers went down before glorious Hektor,
but sit here beside my ships, a useless weight on the good land...'
-B18, p378, Achilles

I believe we have all experienced regret similar to Achilles' upon discovering what had happened because of his wishes.  Probably not so tragically, but still where having seen how events turned out it is obvious in retrospect that our actions led that way.  That the germ of the future was always contained within the past, but that we were unable to appreciate it until it was too late.  We could have acted differently but, almost by definition, we had acted in line with who we were and what we knew at that moment.

Achilles, through the power of storytelling, has been given knowledge that mortals do not normally possess.  He can see the juncture at which his life splits, where the Achilles of either future could trace back in memory what had brought him to that place.  Achilles on the farm thinking back in his old age to how he ran from the greatest battle of his life, and that with that the flame of his passion went out.  Achilles dying on the battlefield reflecting on how if only he had left he might have saved himself and his friends.  Everything clear in hindsight.  

This to me seems to be the origins of the problem.  Our immediate experience of the world is imbued with a sense of free will, that first cause that somehow allows multiple possibilities to exist and that although in the end the world unfolds one way, it could have unfolded another.  The future in this view is indeterminate.  Yet we can also see clearly how one thing leads to another, and that in retrospect we can grasp that there were forces at work which brought about the final ends.  Especially forces in ourselves, our own nature and our own ignorance; if history were repeated we would do the same thing again.  The future, then, seems fated too.  It is paradoxical, that both seem defensible in our experience, and though modern science has largely ousted older explanations (for the better), we've yet to truly encompass what this all means.

So these two had looped over both sides a crossing
cable of strong discord and the closing of battle, not to be
slipped, not to be broken, which unstrung the knees of many.
-B13, p280

This is the passage which grants this page its name, a scene around the boats where Zeus, supporting the Trojans, is secretly undermined by Poseidon, bolstering the Achaeans.  They are some of my favorite lines of the Iliad.  While the poem is replete with similes, which often go on far longer than seems reasonable, this is one of its few metaphors.  It gives a particular immediateness to the comparison, a vivid image of a chaotic tangle of invisible bonds, one that interlocks everybody on the field, unaware, into a single mesh under the sway of wills greater than they.  It is not called fate, but it has the same flavor.  

And it seems... lamentable in its haphazard and deadly nature.

"Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing."
-Herodotus, Histories, 9.16

I have struggled with how to end this essay, for I have covered much ground and have few conclusions to offer, except that while the Greek idea of fate is not a consistent one, it is perhaps a more compelling one than I previously gave it credit for.  It seeks to address a problem that has never entirely gone away, and did so in a fashion more resonant than ours does now, caught as we are between an unforgiving determinism and the doom of being free.  I do not believe that going back to the Greeks is the answer, but as always they are a fertile source to mine, I am grateful for the hints that they have given us.