The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [33]
Culture has a great capacity to define the possible or the impossible, whether the culture operates at the level of the family, school, business, ethnic or religious group, or society generally. If the culture tells you that you are not equal, valued, empowered, or full of potential, then you can hardly be accused of lacking personal responsibility if you act as if you were unequal, valueless, powerless, or empty of potential.
If we had asked my mother fifty years ago whether she had any aspiration to be an attorney, a doctor, or the president of the United States, she surely would have said no. Her aspirations at the time—like those of millions of women—were formed in a cultural context that narrowed what she viewed as possible. It would not be meaningful to say that my mother “chose” not to become a doctor any more than I “chose” not to become an NFL lineman. It is not a choice when we fail to do something that never occurs to us to do because we think it is impossible.
One implication of this insight is that we cannot base our public definition of discrimination only on whether certain people “feel” discriminated against, or whether they aspire to have different opportunities. Looking back, it would have been a mistake to make the women’s rights movement or the civil rights movement depend solely on whether a majority of the people who eventually benefited from these movements rose up and demanded change. A view of racial and gender equality must be based on views about justice, equality, and human dignity that are not founded only on people’s preferences, because those preferences were developed in cultural contexts of inequality and injustice.
This means that we should not base decisions about, for example, whether burqas are a sign of religious expression or sexual oppression by asking the women inside them whether they aspire to be outside. To convince someone that they have no choice is the perfect coercion, and the most perfect coercion will appear as choice.
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When looking at other cultures, or at our own culture years ago, it is easy to recognize the constraints on choice created by cultural norms. It is harder to recognize such constraints when we look around us. We are fish who do not recognize the water.
What are the mechanisms through which culture affects our choices?
Culture affects us not only by defining what is possible and impossible, but also by influencing how we interpret the world. Our cultural assumptions influence which facts we find salient and convincing, make us more likely to ignore the views of people who differ from us, cause us to interpret contested situations to accord with our worldview, and make us miss our own blind spots while ascribing others’ blind spots to bad motives or ignorance.
In May 1993, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard arguments in the appeal of Robert Berkowitz, who had been convicted of raping a woman when they were both sophomores at East Stroudsburg State University. Berkowitz was convicted after a trial in the lower court, but he argued on appeal that what had occurred between him and the woman was not rape. Appellate courts usually take no more than a couple of months to decide criminal appeals. The Berkowitz case, however, raised such difficult issues that the court could not decide it for over a year.12 To make the point I want to make with this case—a point about the power of culture—I need to set out the facts in some detail.
In the weeks leading up to the incident that brought about Berkowitz’s arrest, he and the woman in question (who is not named in the court opinions) shared a cadre of friends and socialized together informally a number of times. He was twenty, she was nineteen.