The (un)arbitrary choices.

I fell today upon a choice rant, in the Christian philosophy magazine Touchstone, about anti-choice. And it's not about abortion: it is about the power to choose things at all. The author goes through a great deal of effort to point out how, awash in a sea of decisions to be made every second, we nonetheless float in the warm waters of ennui, listlessly choosing to visit this website or that, watch this movie or that, knowing that we will probably accomplish very little. He then goes on to extoll a life with fewer choices: adhere to the catechisms of faith, he says, and you'll have guidelines rather than choices. If all you ever do is choose, then the next twists and turns in life are not surprises, because you limited your possibilities with your choices.

What I find unconvincing is that, underlying all of this there is the core choice: the choice to adhere or not. The choice to throw away a set of choices in favor of his guidelines.

And, as always, I come back to the question Greg Egan asks again, and again, and again: Why do you choose? What mechanisms, what physical processes within our minds and bodies, lead to decisions and conclusions? Because either there is something, some set of rules, by which we make choices and decisions and conclusions, some regular, stochastic mechanism that can be studied, discerned, and rereified in a form other than our actions-- or there is not, and we are wholly random creature jittering in a brownian ocean, bumping up against each other.

And I know we are not that.

Reading Edwin Friedman's "A Failure of Nerve"

Edwin Friedman was a rabbi and family counselor who published a highly influential book, Generation To Generation, about family therapy. The book is little known in secular circles, but pastoral counselors and especially chaplains know his work well.

Friedman's biggest contribution to family therapy is the diagnosis of the dysfunctional family as one full of peace-makers, who, by encouraging people to swallow their own wants and needs and instead learn how to "get along," bury rage and anguish and confrontation when those qualities are actually needed. What a family needs in these situations, he writes, is a leader, someone who can stand apart from the rest and say, "This is what we are as a family. This is where we're headed. This is how we'll get there. If you're not with this, tough." The leader, Friedman writes, leads by example, and by stamina-- by never giving in to the sabotage the most codependent members of the household engage in, as they try to suck the family back into the ennui of "just getting along."

What's fascinating to me is that Friedman sounds a lot like family therapy a'la Ayn Rand. "Selfhood" and "knowing where you stand" and "unflinching attention to reality" are big mantras with Friedman. It's very heady stuff.

And yet, his watchwords are about cohesion, altruism and community. He writes about the challenge of being what we would call now "the adult in the room," the mature person who refuses to participate in drama, but remains connected sufficient to both exemplify a principled and mature life and guide those he's trying to reach toward the goal.

How Rand and Friedman, both writing at about the same time, started from the premise the the average individual fails at differentiating himself, his principles, from the drama and emotional miasma of others-- fails at becoming a mature human being-- and arrive at two wholly different conclusions, one tragic, the other humane, is one of the great mysteries of the 20th century.