How do people come to accept the inevitable, such as the fact that they will die, or that a girl they love doesn't love them, or that they will never achieve a lifelong ambition? The answer requires specifying what is meant by the inevitable. Some things, like gravity, are clearly inevitable and nobody tries to rescind Newton. In fact, philosophers might say that laws of nature are not things that can be described by such words as “inevitable” or “avoidable” or “preferable” or any other adjectives that include within them the idea of volition. Then there are practices that are clearly not inevitable and, in fact, are --inevitably-- the result of choice, as when consumers choose one brand of detergent over another, however much advertisers will try to condition consumers to choose one brand rather than another. Indeed, in our time consumer choices seems the most essential aspect of human freedom, citizens of both democratic and authoritarian nations having to make multiple choices every day, what they do in the supermarket less constrained, more an expression of the ability to be arbitrary and decide based on taste, than in any other part of their lives, where they know what their obligations are to family and job. Indeed, for a long time, voting, which is supposed to be the final point of choice in a democracy, the election not over until the voters have spoken after they have made up their minds on the way to the voting booth, was also understood as a kind of consumer choice, voters preferring a particular brand of candidate depending on the demographics of the voter, that point modified in recent years to mean that voters will follow their fancies and vote for the candidate that for the moment seems most appealing. Nothing inevitable about that. And then there are matters about which it is uncertain whether to declare an outcome or a choice inevitable or not. So not just peasant people believe that a person to whom one has been married for a considerable period of time was fated for you, was an inevitable choice despite the circumstances that led to make that person a reasonable choice at the time, both psychologically and socially, because so much of your life since then has been framed and impacted by that choice that one does not care to consider that it was not inevitable that you would wind up with this spouse. It was up there, written in the stars, like gravity.
Philosophers deal with such a problem by trying to come up with an essential quality of a word or the concept for which a word stands. Perhaps “inevitable” means fully caused, or else it means subject to universal laws, or perhaps it means whatever is in the past, which means set and fully determined, as it would be in the mind of God. Moreover, philosophers are likely to draw psychological conclusions from the fact that some things are inevitable. It is no use to get angry about things that cannot be changed. So the best response to the inevitable is resignation and Stoicism because the only other alternative is the gnashing of teeth. That does not leave much room for changing what is going on, for altering the inevitable.
A sociological approach is different. It is to look at an individual case and to tease out the circumstances of that case of “inevitable” and then see if those circumstances also hold for other examples and then see if some generalizations can be made. Let’s take up issues that are controversial either for everyone or for a particular group to show that the issue of acceptance is fraught with emotion and consequence rather than ones reserved for the philosopher’s study and see how people actually go about resolving them so that there are solutions to what is inevitable, which seems a contradiction in terms but is in fact what happens in real life.
The simple fact of the matter is that death comes to everyone, and so would seem a good candidate for a phenomenon which everyone has to accept, like gravity. The truth of the matter is that people do not accept it but use two strategies to counter the inevitable. First, they imagine if there are any alternatives to death and they satisfy that requirement by positing that there is a life after death and so people go onto a next world where in some way they retain their identity as distinct beings, unless, that is, a religious person is sophisticated enough to think that being united with God simply means that an attribute one shares with God, such as being good or responsible, will persist even after you are gone and so, in that sense, you have been united with God, the attribute eternal even if your consciousness is not. But, I take it, many people who adhere to religion take the idea of an afterlife as more literal than that, expecting something like clouds to walk on while dressed in togas. It is to be remembered that a belief in the afterlife is not just a leftover from primitive religion which noticed that plants got recycled through the season and so why not people's souls? That is what Plato thought. The idea of an afterlife, in fact, came into play at the time of Jesus in the conflict between the Sadducees, who did not believe in an afterlife, and the Pharisees, who did, and the latter became the main developers of the Judaism that prevailed thereafter. So the idea of the afterlife is adopted by a group with a developed rather than a primitive consciousness and so serves a function for other than primitive minds.
Second of all, people can invent a formula, a sort of law, whereby the benefits of the afterlife are transferred to a person. Some would say that entrance to the afterlife is for those who have done good deeds in the course of their life. Jesus, on the other hand, said that salvation, which can be interpreted as meaning an afterlife, and generally has been so interpreted, rather than as a political victory or simply a transformed soul, comes from believing that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, somehow a statement of belief having an operative effect other than simply making a person a member of the community of believers. Both of these things-- an alternative vision and a performance standard that operates objectively-- are required if what seems to be an inevitability is to be avoided.
Here is a second example. Whether the death of the self Is inevitable or not, the question remains whether the death of an ethnic group is something that can be accepted. American Indians have to face up to that question, decimated as they were by wars, disease and other privations. Do they accept that the best that they can hope for is to become assimilated into the American population and have reservations which are reservoirs for their most downtrodden members, or can they reinvigorate themselves by having loose rules for who is a member of a tribe and press the larger society for cultural recognition? Jews, after the Holcaust, had to face up to the same issue.Should they transform whom they were by assimilating into the Gentile population? That did not seem very likely a choice given the hostility to Jews that existed in the United States. Should they try to repopulate the numbers lost, and so shove a finger into Hitler’s eye? Should they identify with Israel as a nation rather than Judaism as a religion and so allow nationalism to replace religion as the relevant thing to be preserved? All these things were considered, all had their advocates, and I, for one, chose the assimilationist route, the reasons for that being that, first of all, there was in the Western Tradition an alternative culture to Judaism. I could identify with Joyce and Mann and Kafka and the U. S. Constitution rather than with the Talmud-- about which, truth be told, I knew very little, even if I was immersed in the Jewish sense of separateness from Gentile society. And, second of all, I could recognize that culture follows its own laws. Whether Jews would assimilate or not was not up to me but to the dynamics of cultural assimilation in America, where more and more intermarriage would lead to blended ethnicities and great difficulty in pointing out who were really Jews or not, though it was unanticipated that the most distinctive of the Jewish sects, the ultra orthodox who had barely survived the war, would be the most productive of offspring and so in fifty years replenish the prewar Jewish community.
Here is a third case of what seems inevitable that doesn’t turn out to be that. Women have to accept that men are what they are. Men are sexually aggressive and will use whatever line they can to get a woman to come to bed with them. They just can’t help it; it is in their nature. And so even a faithful husband will have to be plied with favors so that he does not stray. Men follow wherever their sexual organ leads them. Pity women for having to put up with this, always having to placate men. (Of course, from the other side, the situation looks very different. Men can see themselves as finding their sexual needs so urgent that they cannot follow good sense but must take whatever they can get. They are the ones, after all, who, most of the time, are the ones who pay for sexual favors with money or engagement rings.)
What can women do about this? What alternative reality can they imagine where they do not have to put up with male sexual domineering? That is the equivalent of imagining an afterlife or a world without Jews. Some Feminists have indeed posited a world without men. Women can do whatever men can do in government or science or any occupation and are, anyway, nicer and more intelligent people, and so it is not hard to imagine a world without men, the male chromosome for some reason expunged from the earth and biological science capable of producing new females. Indeed, some radicals might want to approximate such a situation by taking up with purely Lesbian communities, the men still around to be treated as leftovers even if they still dominate the society. And so there is no need to accept men for being what they inevitably are.
A less radical solution is to rely on social laws to do the job that biology doesn’t do. Men can be tamed by good socialization practices so that they are kind to the women around them, will only press for sexual favors when the woman indicates that such would be welcome. And, indeed, that is exactly what has happened in social life over the past millennium or, as I have argued elsewhere, at least since the time of Samson and Delilah. The women's movement has only intensified that process so that any old time males, malingerers like Harvey Weinstein, are shamed and jailed. Feminists can therefore say that most men, especially their own lovers, are nice and considerate even if there is a vast amount of cheating on the ideal way in which men and women should interact with one another.
This same analysis can be applied to other cases of what seems to be inevitable. People who vote Republican in the past twenty years are just irresponsible and they can’t help being that way. There is no use getting angry about it. Just accept it for the way things are and then act in a way that makes their behavior irrelevant. You can think that the correctness of Democratic views will make themselves felt or else you can think that inevitable demographic shifts will take care of the problem. Global warming even if it is taking place simply (!) means accepting that there will be the end of numerous species and that the breadbasket of the world will move to Canada and Siberia while central Africa and central South America are depopulated. One can imagine such things happening and so don’t overworry it.
The generalization to be taken away from these cases is that there are other alternatives when what seems to be an inevitable event sets in and that even if there are no alternatives, the social laws that apply would make any individual choice irrelevant or else provide an alternative. It was not my job to make up for what Hitler had done and so I could accept the inevitability of the death of the Jewish people, a fate that did not come to pass. Similarly, romance is not just a speculation but a way to transform society and so make men manageable. And death loses its existential sting if you make it just a transition into a better life, even if that is highly debatable, because it fills the imagination with other things than the spectre of death, such as the requirements of morality or obedience to an ultimate father. The inevitable disappears in the imagination, just as it can also disappear by being made unimportant, and also by transforming social life so that it disappears in fact. The resources of the human imagination to rescue people from their fates is formidable, every bit as important as the ability of the imagination to avoid treading on the inevitable so as to safeguard its prerogatives, as when religions don’t really require a person to give up reality just reinterpret it, as when the transformation of the wine and wafer into the blood and body of Christ occurs hundreds of thousands of times every day without at all requiring any actual manifestation in the empirical world, just in “essences”, whatever that might mean. Religion and ethnicity and gender are more clever than we usually give them credit for being.