I am musing to myself this morning (God help us all) about whether there is enough content there to write a book–very least an Atlantic Monthly length article–on the nature of choice and control. What choice does and doesn’t mean. Not with regards to abortion and being “pro-choice,” just in life in general, as the example of “I want to be a foreign diplomat” versus “I am a domestic public policy analyst.”
Hmmmm. Let me know in the comments whether you think such a book would be interesting, whether it’s been done, etc. etc. Any thoughts at all most welcome.
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I say go for it, Andrea! A lot of my writing for work has caused me to do some musing of my own on freedom and liberty. What are they? How are they being abused or used correctly? Is there a difference between what people commonly perceive them to be and how they work in real life? etc. etc.
I have many of the same questions you do and would be happy to read whatever you come up with.
I’m going to be a (little) bit of a naysayer here Andrea. I don’t think this is a topic for a book or a super-long article. I DO think it is a topic that ought to be explored, though, but I think the way to do it would be a series of essays. (Essays in the Francis Bacon sense of to try to capture a thought.)
This is the kind of topic that is best explored with the input of other people, not expunged on in one long treatise, and then put aside. What I think you ought to do is put out an essay as an introduction to the topic, get a couple of other people to weigh in (think maybe Margaret Sommerville or Barbara Kay), and then put out a revised version of what you think (because, dollars to donuts, your position is bound to change a little bit when you get the input of others). Of course, rabble-rousers such as Heather Mallick and Judy Rebick will have to have their hissy-fits (I won’t even go into what Joyce Athur might say) but maybe you could actually get some reasonable abortion advocates (think Camille Paglia or Naomi Wolf) to weigh in.
The problem is finding a forum for this to take place. Sadly, though, I’m not sure it could be done without ending up in a screaming match between the abortion advocates and the prolifers. There should be some common ground that we could find, and work from there, but I don’t know where that ground is.
That’s just my two cents. Take it or leave it
Choice or perhaps the phenomenon of having the ability to choose is a deep and significant reality. One’s choices have consequence. This is not to say one’s choices always result in exactly what one planned but that they are real and directional. The Eastern thinker points out that if one sticks a finger in water and pulls it out – there is no hole! The Biblical thinker notices that if one sticks a finger in water and pulls it out – the ripples go out forever!
Thinking of specific examples of choices is problematic – we tend to extrapolate from a few results to a general principle. Some times choices don’t work and that may lead to fatalism. One could decide to fly and in discovering one can’t become frustrated. One could decide to be a doctor yet become permanently disabled and become pessimistic. On the other hand sometimes choices do work out and that may lead to arrogance. There are examples of people who wouldn’t change a thing in their life as all they wanted to accomplish they did and at times they can be a bit much as they ‘share’ how to ‘succeed’.
It seems to me that the paradigm for understanding about choices is not so much about some specific end arrangement and more about the nature of what one wants a choice to predicate. One can always strive to achieve and to do good and certainly, certainly, experience joy in effort and accomplishment and in the knowledge that the ‘kind’ of desired result, which is different from the desired arrangement, does and will occur. So, there are some guarantees.
Thanks Mighty Mouse for picking up on ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ as they are intimately associated with ‘choice’ discussion. These two topics refuse to go away and are often all too casually used. One starting point I like is generated by Milton as a he said: ‘None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom but license”. An implication of this thought is that freedom is not license. Flies in the face of present day thought as today we speak of freedom as license – doing whatever one wants whenever when one wants. Besides the fact that just because I may want to do something doesn’t mean I can – like winning Olympic gold, being brave, flying, having the best job, …….. , we also see that we don’t, as a culture, unlike Milton and contemporaries, know what freedom is. Worthy pursuit and it seems to me, though deep and wide, it is not more complicated than The Ugly Duckling’! Being who one truly is is freedom.
“… whether there is enough content there to write a book–very least an Atlantic Monthly length article–on the nature of choice and control.”
Isn’t that a bit like asking whether enough material exists to write a five-page paper on totalitarianism in the twentieth century? 🙂
In my view, what you suggest is indeed a very timely topic, if perhaps an enormous one. Whether you write about it in book form or in some other guise, I hope you’ll have opportunities to keep talking about it. Your last post (the “sermon”) was so good.
Perhaps oddly, the basic themes that you’re conveying make me think of some of the things George Grant said (somewhere in the George Grant Reader–e.g. “The Computer Does Not Impose on Us the Ways It Should Be Used”?) about human finiteness and our deluded belief that we can engineer our own meaning and conquer our world through technique, etc. I imagine a lot of thinkers have delved into such themes, but I take it you’re inclined to examine the question in down-to-earth terms that normal people would actually read, rather than to produce something for the abstractophile demographic.
I liked the idea of a book of essays. Bring together several people who have thoughts on this issue.
Thanks, People. Will continue to muse. 🙂