The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [29]
What’s worse, we usually do not recognize these tendencies in ourselves, which leaves us open to manipulation. Sexual titillation makes us want to buy stuff; subliminal association influences our views of political candidates; a primed brain will think one way rather than another.
Does this mean we are not really choosing when we buy stuff when titillated, vote when subliminally influenced, or think the way we have been primed to think? The answer depends on what we mean by “choice.”
On the one hand, influences are only that. They do not dictate behavior, and their effects can be moderated merely by our knowing they exist. On the other hand, our brains are pre-programmed to think and feel in certain ways, and it takes the analytical, reflexive, and emotional parts of our brains all working together to give us a fighting chance at making good decisions. Even when they do, we can fall into traps, and the pathways into those traps are well trod.
What do we do if it turns out that much of what we feel and think is not really intentional? It’s a troubling insight, and one that most of us will rebel against. After all, we do not perceive our decision to buy beer or to prefer one candidate over another as out of our control. You may not experience a lack of free will, and most of the time neither do I. But despite our feelings, brain science is revealing that our decision making processes are much more bewildering than we ever imagined, and that our own perceptions of free will should not necessarily be trusted. Choice is complicated.
Instead of assuming that everyone is completely responsible for his or her decisions, we’d be better off recognizing the complexity of choice, in law and politics and life. We would be more forgiving of our foibles and understanding of others’. We’d be more likely to recognize the limitations we face and the constraints on our decisions, and better able to prepare for the times when decisions really do need to be made well.
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Choice and Culture
We don’t live in a world that suffers from doubt, but one that suffers from certainty, false certainties that compensate for the well of worldly anxieties and worries.
—Les Back, The Art of Listening, 2007
After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.
—Tom Perrotta, Little Children, 2004
AN OLD JOKE: A bird sitting on a branch over a lake looks down and sees a fish swimming by.
“How’s the water?” the bird asks.
The fish answers, “What water?”
Our cultural surroundings, like the fish’s water, influence everything we do but often go without notice. They play a large role in constructing our views of possible and impossible, good and evil, luxury and necessity. Culture instructs us about who we can love, what kinds of jobs are open to us, what kind of family we can have, and how we should understand our environment and human nature. Culture teaches us what is “normal” with regard to the roles women and men should play in the family, how thin or fat we should be, what we should wear, how much we should consume, what sports we should care about, how we should spend our time, and which religions it is respectable to observe.
Culture creates norms. Culture enforces norms. And for many of us, much of the time, culture influences decisions so much that the scope of genuine choice is exceedingly small.
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It is much easier to recognize cultural constraints when they are