We tend to think of choices – Shakespeare’s “quick bright things” – as instants, moments. Sometimes, our choices are fulcrums that alter our lives forever. Her lips and voice box form a few brief sounds, “Will you?” In a second your choice is made, you say “Yes!” In a single syllable, the history of your life is entirely different. Shakespeare has more to say about these pivotal instants:
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the coiled night
No wonder, when a lifetime can be changed in a second, we find ourselves in a cultural struggle for control of choices. I want to talk with you about choice and why it’s a good place to put our collective feet down as others attempt to overpower our selections of alternatives.
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| By Jan |
Even though we categorize our choices as individual, my key point today is that all choice occurs in a context. When my wife and I said “Yes” to each other all those decades ago, we created an instantaneous intersection of our experiences, our learning, our parent’s values, our divergent genes, our geographical origins. What felt like a fulcrum in our lives was really the culmination of two life streams, going back into unknown time that we brought to converge in that quick bright moment.
No choice can occur outside of context. The spoiled whiny white boys of libertarianism appoint themselves as guardians of personal choice, but they have it dead wrong. In their hubris, they think they stand alone, outside of culture and history, and make “free choice.” This is not only arrogant, it’s impossible. We all had parents, we all have genes, we all participate in a human culture. Choice is determined by – and then determines – those human elements of civilization and biology. No individual choice can be entirely free.
The crypto-fascists in the reactionary religions do a better job of understanding the context of choice than do their momentary libertarian allies. That’s why struggles with them are called culture wars. It’s why some hard right religious groups urge their members to bear huge numbers of children: bio-hegemony. It’s why there is inevitably an undertone of misogyny, homophobia and racism in what they tell us, because they can’t help communicating the values that underlie the choices they wish to impose on us. Reread Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, still the best book on the reactionary right’s true intentions.
Speaking of bio-hegemony, another group to watch out for are the scientists whose reductionist and mechanistic view of life leads them to recast the living world according to their own rationalist and corporatist values. It’s why human cloning is so insidious – it uses a process of embryo splitting that edits the resulting person - eugenics. Since few people will be doing human cloning in their basements, it puts the very nature of humanity under the control not of human choices in a cultural context over time, as has always been, but rather as corporate decisions driven by company values like profit and market share.
We’ve already seen this perilous teaming up of science and the patent system to make fundamental changes in the nature of the food supply. Our food used to reflect the tastes, literally, of the communities that produced it. Now we are forced to put substances in our bodies that express what extra-national corporations, not our families, think is best.
I see the struggle for control of choices within politics, religion and science as a prime setting for contention. If we back away from this complicated and uncomfortable fight, we’ll lose by default. Here are three ideas that can help us:
First, the forces that seek to limit our ability to make life choices are distinct minorities, whether they’re cranky libertarians or squooshy liberals like our President, religious fanatics, or greedy scientists. Most people are not part of those groups; we have numbers on our side, however inchoate.
Second, we should be champions of restraint: we should remember our choices always and only exist in a social and historical context. We are not islands, we are the creators and beneficiaries of human culture. Realization of the humanity of individual choices is what keeps us from being picked off one by one, and it leads to my final point:
Every attempt to constrain or destroy a choice threatens all of us. It’s so easy for a man to see abortion as a women’s issue, or a straight person to push marriage equality into the gay and lesbian community. And indeed, the communities most affected by those attacks should frame and direct their own protective efforts. But all of us can’t rely on the sanctity of our beliefs and the control of our own bodies or marriages, if we permit any people to be excluded from full participation in our society.
Every pro-choice fight is your fight. Every threat to the free choice of one group is a threat to yours. And when we surrender control of the very essence of human life to distant corporations, we are risking political, cultural and biological suicide.
2012 is going to be a political year with a lot in play. We’ll have many opportunities to do the right thing: I hope everything we do this year will protect our own choices as well as the choices others want to make, and our children’s choices for years to come.
