On Freedom of Thought and Choice

This will be the beginning of my several investigations into the nature of free will, choice and identity.

It is arguably self-apparent that human beings are gifted with free will, by virtue of the fact we appear to be free to do or not do most anything we please within our physical and intellectual limits. There is some philosophical speculation that if fate exists, free will is illusory; it is neither my current purpose nor my current interest to delve into this esoteric discussion. I am concerned with choices we can observe; since I cannot observe my own fate, for this discussion, no such fate exists.

Rather, my purpose in this investigation will be specifically to defend the existence of choice, and to emphasize aspects of our lives where we as human beings in our societies either willingly or unwittingly forfeit the ability to choose our own respective destinies in favor of accepting courses that may have been placed before us by another agent or group of agents, depending on the circumstances of the “choice” in question.

If the passages that are to follow are to be called “Chapters,” this can be considered their introduction.

Proceeding from the initial argument, free will exists. If free will exists, human beings have the freedom to choose between available sets of decisions in almost every instance in which more than one choice is recognized as available. Accordingly, the most significant component of free will is the recognition that alternatives exist to an otherwise given course of action in a particular situation. In other words, in order for choice to exist, there must be an alternative course of action B to some considered course of action A.

Following this reasoning, it is also essential that human beings think critically about situations in which they are not currently aware that alternatives exist, and each person must ask himself (Note: Pardon the gendered language- it is a long-ingrained habit that I hope does not invalidate the premises outlined herein; I simply find as a grammatical matter that choosing a gender avoids certain ambiguities that the use of “one” or “a person” would otherwise generate, and gendered usage also abbreviates a passage in a way that the inclusion of both gendered pronouns in every required instance would not. That being said, I choose “himself” because I choose to define myself as a male in gender as well as sex, and cannot therefore presume to write this piece from the feminine perspective, although such commentary is welcome and encouraged. End digression here.) if alternatives not considered might exist. If the answer is yes, the person must then ask the most important question regarding choice: Why was he not fully aware of the existence of alternatives?

There are several possibilities for the exclusion of the awareness of choice. The first and most obvious is that while alternatives exist, they are precluded by some universal norm. For example, in most (but for extreme and exceptional) cases, choosing to end the life of another is not an acceptable choice by universal norms that dictate the immorality, unacceptability, and consequential punishment of life-taking. In this sense, some choices are unavailable on moral or ethical grounds. This particular context of choice will be discussed and investigated further in one or more future examinations.

However, what about choices that exist that do not seem apparent, not for moral or ethical reasons, but for more specifically socially constructed reasons?

Consider the family: children obey their parents. This obedience is usually a byproduct of fear, love, and a respect born of some combination of the two. Does the child have the choice to disobey his parents? Yes. Does the child often disobey? In some cases, yes, but most normally-socialized humans would say the average socially-adjusted child is disobedient less often than he is obedient, especially beyond a certain infantile age. The choice to disobey exists, but the disobedience itself becomes conditioned out of the child as a function of love and fear, maintained by some additional social conditioning, that which imparts rules (rules to which obedience is given transitively from parent to authority, and from authority to the rules, backed by the same criteria through which parents initially achieve respect from their children: respect born of fear and love).

Now, consider religion in a similar vein. Religion is, for the most part, not a choice as a child. My religion was chosen for me by my parents, whose parents chose their religion, whose parents chose theirs in turn, ad nauseum until the first of my ancestors who first believed in a god of the same kind in whom I was raised to place faith. As an adolescent, I was given again the “choice” of whether to continue following that religion as an adult. This “choice” is expressed through some form of ritualized initiation (Christians call such a thing “Confirmation”; Jews call them “Bar” or “Bat Mitzvah,” among other rituals, and so forth). However, the decision to follow in one’s family’s tradition is also conditioned not merely on the outcome of the choice itself, but on the expectations of an adolescent’s family that he will continue on in the same tradition that has come before in his family, all of which came into play either prior to or at the same moment as the decision itself.

Herein lies the problem. While there existed the appearance of choice, the “choice” was complicated by several factors: the pre-conditioning of the faith determined from birth by the child’s parents, years of indoctrination into that particular faith (thereby disinclining a youth from other faiths, and moreso from the choice of no faith at all), the expectations of the child’s religious community, the expectations of his family, and the expectations of his parents.

Thus, while there existed an appearance of a choice to be made, the “choice” cannot be considered to have been truly free, because at an adolescent age, all these conditions could function in such a way as to obscure or even occlude the adolescent’s potential to come to the realization that there was ever a choice to do not what was expected. The alternatives are wrought with negative future projections that include disappointment, shame, guilt, and other negative reactions to the alternative. Rational choice theory would hold that this decision is calculated. I, however, argue that this was no decision at all. The choice of a future that included the non-choice of religion was never apparent as an alternative that held any positive outcomes for the adolescent. As a result, it is not an undesirable choice, it is literally a non-alternative. There was no calculation, because there was, in fact, no choice.

This brings us to the core assumption of my argument: a course of action may not be called a choice if it is not made freely among at least two desirable and mutually exclusive outcomes. Therefore, a choice without an alternative is not a choice. It is a compulsion, or it is servitude, or it is coerced. Thus, extending the example forward, the example above demonstrates the very real possibility that religious choice is more often an illusion of choice, and more frequently coerced or compelled by social circumstance than freely chosen.

To put it in more obvious terms, if the child of a Muslim couple and the child of a Jewish couple were accidentally switched at birth, would the child raised by the Muslim parents elect to be Jewish; and would the child raised by the Jewish parents elect to be Muslim? It would seem the clear that the answer to both questions is “no;” therefore, the conditions of birth so heavily influence the “choice” of religion so much as to make it almost a completely dependent contingency on the parents. Thus, the “choice” of religion is more often than not, not a choice at all.

Now, I recognize that the implications of this statement, by virtue of questioning a characteristic that is by definition so personal to the individual, might initially cause discomfort and even an involuntary sense of offense. Bringing religion up as an example is unfortunate, because reaction to the subject matter itself is always deeply personal, occasionally visceral. Notice, however, I did use such terms as “seems” and “more often than not.” As this is merely an introduction to the broader subject under discussion, the example is admittedly a crude thought exercise; I can speak in no definite terms until I have more closely examined the topic through the lens of my own experiences, in the realm of the intellect, and with far more numerous and rigorous standards. Further, allow me to provide an additional disclaimer: it is neither the intent nor the argument of this examination to invalidate all religion or any religion at all. Instead, my purpose is to point toward the possibility (and your recognition of the possiblity) that the popular notion that a person freely chooses his faith may not be as true as it seems; and therefore, more careful examination into the circumstances surrounding the “choice” to embrace a particular faith might be necessary in order to validate the existence of freedom of choice with respect to religion.

If, as an objective observer to this argument, you consider the fact that a negative or hostile reaction to the exercise above may very well itself by implication not really have been your own choice, you see the dilemma; further, perhaps you begin to see why I chose this particular example. There are few instances in life where something that so determines our choices is so clearly also a constructed social identity that, but for our parents, we might never have chosen it for ourselves. Consequently, religious freedom more than most other choices in life is one of the clearest examples of where the concept of choice is far more complicated than a cursory glance in its direction would indicate. Factor in the additional possibility that atheism can also be inferred to be, for reasons both stated and implied above, more a rejection of one’s parents than a repudiation of one’s own faith or particular god, and even this apparent “choice” can demonstrate the difficulty of separating the social conditioning surrounding one’s awareness of alternatives from the actual existence of another, completely unrealized and unexplored set of alternatives.

Thus, I become a Pandora, and all the world’s evils spring forth in luminous clarity through the doorway I have now chosen to unlock. With the promise of knowledge comes the risk of the end of everything we believe, a journey for neither the timid nor the ill-equipped. If you continue the journey with me, I promise no fulfillment, no nirvana: I promise only to be honest about what I discover, to hide nothing, and to apologize for none of what I find…because it will be truth.

If choice is more often illusion than fact, where must I go to identify a choice freely made? It is my hypothesis that to fully appreciate the true and painful beauty of human existence requires that I fully appreciate the essence of a truly free choice. In order to do so, I must convince myself that any choice I have made in my life was truly a choice. To prove this, I must attempt to show that every choice I have made in my life has been an illusion, and not truly a choice; I must hope that in the attempt to do so, I discover somewhere a truly free choice, thereby proving my assumption an error and validating the existence of at least one free thought in my lifetime. Once and if found, I must thoroughly examine the choice to discover why it was free, what makes it free, and what defines the unbound thought, which I would call “will.”

Through the following investigations, I will consider some of the most significant “choices” I have made in my own life, choices the likes of which which will not be dissimilar from decisions you have made in your own lives. I must consider these “choices” and deconstruct the socializing conditions that may have mitigated the freedom of each of them in their particular instances. In doing so, I expect to find that most of my decisions have not been free; in joining me on this journey, I fear you may come to similar conclusions about how you view your own decisions in retrospect. However, in order to recognize freedom, one must become free, and in this critique I shall attempt to peel away the layers surrounding my decisions, until a single object remains: a will unbound by condition. It is my hope that in the discovery of my own human will buried beneath the infinitude of motivating forces that attempt to bend, usurp, or otherwise mold my decision-making processes, I will finally recognize a choice that bears no conditions: a free thought.

Thus, this serves as my introduction to the investigation of free will. Over the next several investigations, which may take some time to construct and which will surely be revised many times over in response to commentary (and the possible occasional outrage they evoke when misunderstood), I will investigate how some of the personal identiying markers we hold most dearly- our faiths, our cultures, our genders, our personal histories…indeed, our very identities themselves- are so clouded by the socialization process that almost nothing we do on an everyday basis can truly be a choice freely made.

That being said, the goal of this process will be to better enable myself, and perhaps you, to reject the various motivating forces in life that push us toward decisions that have little or nothing to do with actual choices about who we are individually and how we choose to live. I no longer wish to feel compelled by the rules of systems of which I had no hand in the construction, nor governed by dictates to which I do not acknowledge having ever given consent. In order to believe the systems that govern my behavior are just, I must prove to myself that I have the choice to opt in or out; and if the choice still exists, I must be willing to make it freely again, or else there is little to suggest that existence is anything but servitude to some faceless master.

Thus, one life ends, and the search for another begins. I hope you will continue to accompany me on this journey.