The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [80]
The ancient parable of the scorpion and the frog, sometimes attributed to Aesop, and the very modern story of The Crying Game both illustrate the belief that we are who we are, and there is little we can do. The scorpion stings even when it is not in his interest to do so. Dil battles with the differences between her identity and her biology. Fergus cannot kill, and takes on Dil’s punishment even when tremendously costly.
It’s a common refrain. Popeye claims, “I yam what I yam.” In this view, we are our natures. We go through our lives remarkably stable in personality, value systems, and worldview. As the saying goes, “People don’t change, they just become more so.” The more we know someone—really know someone—the less they surprise us. The choices they make in any given circumstance flow naturally from their nature.
Aligned against this notion is the belief that people are products of their environments. We may believe that we make our own decisions based on our character and belief systems, but in reality we are products of situation and circumstance. This is the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate, popularized in movies such as Trading Places, where old tycoons switch the circumstances of up-and-comer Dan Aykroyd and homeless loser Eddie Murphy to see what will happen.
You could also include as an opposing viewpoint the belief that behavior has external rather than internal motivations. If you’re of a certain age you might remember comedian Flip Wilson’s character Geraldine, whose signature line was “The Devil made me do it!” I was reminded of this when I read of a sixty-two-year-old woman who stole over $70,000 from the church where she worked. She told prosecutors that “Satan had a big part in the theft.”2
In this view, the more we know about people’s circumstances and the external forces acting on them, the less they will surprise us. The choices they make will flow inexorably from their situation.
In a way, the view that we are chained to our natures and the belief that we are products of external forces are diametrically opposed. One sees each human as a product of his or her own static character and disposition. The other sees each individual as an object on which circumstances act. But these views have a lot in common. Both see human behavior as constrained rather than free. One can be agnostic about whether internal or external forces are more influential in any given case and still acknowledge that the end result is limit rather than choice. We need not decide the debates over disposition and situation, internal and external, or nature and nurture to recognize constraint.
And recognize it we must. Ignorance of how we are cabined by our biologies, blinded by our cultures, seduced by our authorities, and manipulated by our markets simply makes those influences more powerful, invisible, and intransigent. In a world of limits, an insistence on the rhetoric of choice is, at best, Pollyannaish. At worst, it’s a public opiate.
What, then, shall we do?
We can build choice. We can make it more real, for more people, more of the time. In order to do this, we will have to talk about both disposition and circumstance, internal and external, nature and nurture. Let’s talk about the internal side first.
1.
Choice is good. We all like it; our brains crave it. As Sheena Iyengar explains in her book The Art of Choosing, our brains “respond more to rewards [that we] actively choose than to identical rewards that are passively