There are a set of adages that people offer to explain and organize their lives that go beyond whatever are their doctrines or experiences of their religions or their philosophies. These adages, which are foisted by relatively uneducated people as an alternative to religion and philosophy, nevertheless have a persistence which crosses generations. The point of these adages is to provide a natural justice whereby people, in the nature of things, get their just deserts as well as their opportunities to act freely in life. These adages are often harsh and crude and yet satisfying. I want to point out some of them to give a flavor of this subterranean world of understanding that surfaces whenever any of them are needed to articulate what has to be and whatever has always been.These can be considered as the folk metaphysics which is currently present but which we suspect is of very long duration in that people need a metaphysics even if and in addition to more overt and formalized systems that do exist. These constitute what we might call the implicit beliefs to which people adhere and have adhered, and so make up the social glue that sociologists search to find in community or primitive religion rather than these rational if possibly mistaken views of how the social world works.
A first adage to mention, though in no particular order, is the idea that whatever will happen will be for the best. It would be a solace to lose a sense of anxiety about which decision should be made, whether to rent one house than another, go to one college or another, marry one wife or another, and know that whatever choice was made was the right choice. You keep your responsibility but there is no penalty for having made one choice rather than another because somehow it will be the best choice. But surely, however comforting that may be, this adage cannot be correct. There are many instances where people make wrong choices. People get divorced; people wander into a river or a street that lead to death or injury; people are mismatched with their careers. Everyone wonders if a wrong choice was made, if you had been better off as a lawyer rather than a professor or a baker rather than a plumber. You fell into one or the other for circumstantial reasons such as a frenzy to work for civil rights even though lacking a knack for law, or a plumber because a relative gave you a job as an apprentice when you might have studied drafting. Mistaken choices matter.
But, as is the case of such adages, there is a deeper psychology at work which redeems the adage. Choices become best choices because your apprehension of one or another choice is a testament to what you know about yourself whether or not you are willing to do something overtly about it based on those insights. Too much stress might unhinge you and so you find a job that is likely to be more emotionally supportive, and so the avenue of least resistance may be the plumber’s assistant rather than the training of becoming a draftsman. Or at least trials and errors will result in your settling down to what feels best. Moreover, whatever you do is likely to feel comfortable after you adapt to it, and so the feel of a high school classroom is regularly satisfying even if you had dreamed of becoming a doctor. Women, I daresay, may find raising children a burden, but will find satisfactions that make the regularities and even the strains of that life sufficient challenge to fill out their lives, even if they had at one time aspired to being a model or going to college, well aware of those other ways of life also having their limitations. So we calculate quickly even if it takes years and have a sense of what might have gone wrong with a different choice.
In general then, and underlying other such adages, is that there are limited resources in making a decision, that a person is not fully informed about the work or about oneself, and so the person has to rely on the intersecting forces that will move the person from one moment to a choice to do otherwise rather than trust on one’s own judgement. All together works for the best however much any bad part of it might indicate otherwise. The collection of social events determine things, and on that people rely because how could they do otherwise? To claim that a person made a choice all on their own is jejune, naive, superficial. Just get over that and accept the wisdom of multiple social forces intersecting with one another to will its way on every one of us.
A related adage in that it is related to major choices posits that major events are fated. That does not mean astrology nor does it mean, as professional metaphysicians might think, that everything has to have a cause and so the chain is determined all the way back to its initial cause, such as the Big Bang. Fate does not have to play a part in a person moving to the left or the right or going into one department store rather than another. Rather, it has to do with major events, again, like marriage or occupation. You were fated to meet your life partner as it indeed seems to be the case in that the figure becomes so significant, so consequential, so deeply entwined with you, that it might seem inevitable, meeting cute a circumstance that changes everything so that soon after, let us say, joining a dating club and taking a flier on one of the applicants, the person becomes a significant other and the terms under which the two people met was insignificent next to what had become for them. It is like magic, and rather than using that appellation, which seems fey and unserious, the new complementarity is regarded as fate, which means weighty and as if it were destined. Thinking otherwise is to make light of what had occurred and also puts aside whether this meeting was a good thing or not. Even divorcees were fated to have met, not all fates a desirable one. That is why many people they know on the basis of a few encounters that they two will marry. It is not just romance or sexual attraction; it is that they find a reservoir of similarities that ring true quickly enough even if not being able to articulate what those similarities were about and so it is just as well as if they had been fated, though that may happen more in freely chosen marriages rather than arranged ones where the two partners think that over time they will come to accommodate one another and come to feel love for one another because they know their strengths and weaknesses and foibles so well, better than anyone else. What else to call it but love?
This notion of fate is therefore like “being for the best” in that it is the result of the multiple determination of intersecting forces, some mutually supportive, and perhaps not so, as when one feels destined to mate with someone of another race or religion and so falls on fate as what happens despite differences when it is the other things, such as a quick smile or a crusty exterior hiding a soft heart, is the appeal that make the two fated for any number of reasons. You can say your wife was reminded by him of his mother or that she found him to be like a favorite uncle or teacher, but that is to simplify fate as singly caused rather than on multiple psychological and social causes each assigned with different weights. Yes, propinquity leads to wedlock, but some people get away from their neighborhoods or their cities to wander alone until some other set of qualities makes the person sing. Fate, however, is different from the best because it is independent of outcome, only about the process whereby the two are fated or whereby working in a factory to which you retired was the factory at which you started when leaving high school. It had become your nature and so had been your fate, time getting reversed, the mind able to easily reverse time’s arrow to make what came after to be the inevitable of what came before.
Here is a third adage that also has to do with choice but not necessarily with momentous things. People, including my mother, said that your card will turn up. She was a rummy and gin rummy player as well as a poker player and that adage made sense. You need to be patient as you take your turn to turn over a card from the deck so as to disclose the card you need to make at least three cards of a suit in a row or ones that are the same number. The deck goes down and still you don’t find the card, but if you are keeping track, then you know that the card you need has not been discarded and so the one you need is more likely to come up in the declining deck or has already been taken by your opponent. More likely than not, the card you need will turn up unless the opponent is suspicious that this card is needed by you and takes the card for himself when it turns up, though risking messing up your own potential possibilities of making the melds you need for rummy or gin rummy. So be patient.
The same is true in life itself. There are multiple opportunities in life, one occupation rather than another, one girl rather than another, one summer job rather than another, one college rather than another. Something valuable that you need or can use will turn up fortuitously but something that is inevitable or pretty much so and so you have an opportunity to shine. Be patient; play your cards carefully and then pounce on the card when it reveals itself. You become a stockbroker rather than a lawyer, and one girl in your neighborhood rather than another will take a shine on you. And usually the cards you need are in the deck and so you can expect your resources to increase rather than diminish when the time awaits to make your move. This is a more optimistic view of life than the fates which may be beneficial or not, or the other pseudo-theory whereby a person thinks that whatever happens is for the best. And it applies to small things in that any number of books you run across in the library can become momentous to you or any number of people you meet can become lifelong friends or even ones that are pleasurable even if they drift in and out of your lives when families move or change employment, people, after all, drifting apart just as they are also developing new associations.The lesson to learn is that picking a card is like life in that the nature of social life is such that a person makes many achoice and some of then are fortuitous and there is an ultimate limit to choices, when the deck is played out, which is rare, or when life chances have been limited by illness or age or proven incapacity, but there is a lot of life, an only slowly decreasing set of possibilities, to move with.
That, I should add, is a very different view than that presented by most sociologists, who are always limiting the range of possibilities. Weber thinks that your life chances are more or less set by your social class and social status and others think you are restrained by your culture or your childhood environment, while this adage suggests that there are a lot of cards to draw, society flexible enough for a person to manage to navigate to get what he or she wants at least in the short run of having friends and employment, though not perhaps the love of your life, though there are enough fish in the sea that, on retrospect, you will think that this one was the right one. No wonder sociology is a dismal science that emphasizes privation and limitation while the ordinary sense of life lived has a welter of possibility.
Here is a fourth adage of what we call folk metaphysics that has nothing to do with choice and instead deals with social life as a whole. People say that what goes around comes around. The two phrases can seem redundant except for the interpretation that states that customs current in one place or society will circulate and have an impact on others so that what seems adverse only to others will have an impact on your own. People who are like you in that they are contemptuous of people will circulate their animosity and find their way to being contemptuous of you. There is a bit of a bite in this adage in that it suggests that bad deeds are rewarded with bad deeds bitten back. It is an adage that makes sense in that people sink to a common denominator rather than rise to the level of moral ideals. If a worse thing can happen, it will. That is very different from the adage to “pay forward” which advises that a good deed done in advance will eventually have its reward, perhaps in another and perhaps even more beneficent way, as when children treated well will be nice to their elderly parents. You aren’t sure of it and that is not the reason people are nice to their children in that it has more to do with the feeling of forming and helping the young while powerful to do so rather than because of some exchange or contract. It is misleading to say that people have more children so that they can tend to the form even when they are still children. It is because they have children that they can put it to work, not that they had the children so as to make them work. That may be functional but the children come along for their own reasons.
Moreover, the adage that what goes around comes around is not the same as the Golden Rule, which says do unto others as you would have them do unto you which is meant as a standard whereby all people are to be elevated to think highly of people even as highly as you think of yourself, rather than as an exchange of equal services to you and your brothers. And the “go around” adage doesn’t point to the best but to the worst. Let us at least be wary of how badly people might treat you if you treat others badly. A glum and suspicious rather than a heartening feeling. I always thought people who invoked the “go around” adage meant that they were just preventing themselves from stabbing someone in the back, whether by being dishonorable in business or in courtship. But it is a perennial adage because it suggests, at the least, not to be the worst, and the truth of social life is that it often seems to deteriorate, and so to uplift humanity at least a little bit, however often disappointed, is a good thing because otherwise life would be worse in general. And that is the fact of politics and business and not just personal relationships.
There are doubtless any number of adages that could be garnered from the way people ordinarily think about social life that provides them with a perennial philosophy, making up some easily voiced aspects of the way social life works. I invite you to add to the collection even if they might seem to contradict the insights invested in the adages cited, though I think not because, after all, there is only one social nature that operates within mankind, though dolphins and aliens might have different ones. My own perennial point, however, is that there is no need for a culture or a community to bind things together with one another. Rather, there are just the circumstances of social life, those indicated in their adages, whereby people negotiate around and about their social realities, people more or less rational in having more or less insight about how the world works. In my view, sociology is much closer to the primitive understanding of life through its adages than it is to more formalized systems. What is real is close to what is apparently real.