
âBlack Americano, please.â A simple enough request to a barrista. But, oh, its not. Iâm already grumpy. Itâs too early for chat. But the questions keep coming. âSmall, medium or large?â she replies. âMedium pleaseâ I grunt, hoping that will be the end of the matter. âDrink in or take away?â I reply. âWould you like milk with that?â I resist the temptation to refer my chirpy interrogator back to the original request for a black coffee. âNo, thank you.â
Surely thatâs enough information. But, no. âWould you like to try our new Guatemalan blend?â I decline, signalling growing irritation. âWould you like a pastry with thatâŚâ A list of various croissants and muffins follows. My mood darkens further. All I want is a bloody coffee.
Choice is the bane of modern life. âExistence preceeds essenceâ, preached the existentialists. What they meant was that who we are is not given at birth, but is constructed by the series of choices we make about who we want to be. âBecome who you areâ, said Nietzsche some decades before.
From this perspective, life is a never ending succession of choices, a constant work-in-progress of self-definition. We are the authors of our own identity. Mini gods of self-creation. Sartre liked to sit in coffee houses, musing on the meaning of life. But surely even he could not have reckoned with the ubiquity of choice in a consumerist society. I fancy that he, too, would have been broken by the ever-present demand to decide for oneself. As I sip my coffee, a semblance of calm begins to return. Existentialism is too heavy a burden. No more questions, please. I canât take it any more. I donât want to be endlessly responsible for me. I want someone else to shoulder the burden on my behalf.
I was wrestling with this as I read the Childrenâs Commissionerâs comments about the mental health of our children. There has been a sharp rise recently in the number of children self-harming. There has also been a significant rise over the past few years in the number of children seeking help from psychiatrists. Why are our kids so unhappy? Various answers have been touted. The use of social media is an obvious one. So, too, is the collapse of community life. Both of these are important.
But I also suspect that the way we have come to treat children as mini-consumers, little choice-centres, also has something to do with it as well. For nowhere is this choice-inducing anxiety more toxic than in childhood. It used to be that childhood operated under instruction. For the child, life was a series of givens. And this functioned as a sort of emotional security. But now that we are inducting our children into this culture of choice at an ever earlier age, we deprive them of the necessary scaffolding of care, love and support.
Itâs a big claim, I know. But it is worth reminding ourselves of an important aspect of our culture of choice: that it absolves people of a responsibility of care towards others. To put it another way, our culture of choice contains this message: I am not responsible for you because you are responsible for you. Are you fat? Thatâs your choice. Smoke? Your choice. In debt? Your decisions have got you into trouble. Itâs all on you.
It is one thing to take this attitude towards adults. But our culture is so saturated with this culture of choice that it has come to apply even to children. I am ashamed to admit that my two year old could operate a remote control almost before he could walk. And instead of presenting him with his tea, I now ask him what he wants. Itâs almost as if the poor boy has a menu in hand before he can even read it. Choose, we demand. âWhat do you want?â
The truth is, he doesnât really know. And choice is bewildering. Frightening even. Especially if you are asked to bear responsibility for the consequences of the choices that you have made. âYou said you wanted sausages, so now you must eat them.â To make children constantly choose is to abdicate oneâs responsibility for being a parent. To put it bluntly and provocatively: respecting the decision-making autonomy of a child is tantamount to a refusal of love.
The reductio ad absurdum of this overblown culture of choice is the case of a man who is currently taking his parents to court because he didnât choose to be born. Yes, its true. A businessman from Mumbai, Raphael Samuel, 27, is suing his parents because he didnât ask to be born. Apparently, by conceiving him without his consent, they were infringing his ârightâ to choose.
I know his is hardly a serious case, but it does highlight this nonsense of thinking that we can generate ourselves though a succession of our own choices. No, we begin life as if we are already âthrownâ (to use a word favoured by Heidegger) into a place and time, with parents and grandparents, within a particular language and culture. Our circumstances precede who we are. They are a necessary given.
The word they use in theological college about the process of âbecoming who you areâ is formation. In this context, formation is achieved by acclimatising oneself to a tradition that stands over and against oneâs individual choices. Indeed, it is only by recognising that one is situated within a given set of values that precede who we are that we are enabled to make the very choices that have come to define adult responsibility. The unchosen is a precondition of the very possibility of choice. No one makes choices in a vacuum. That makes as much sense as putting your hands on your own waist and trying to lift yourself up.
For the last 30 or so years â at least since Thatcherism â choice has become a sort of cuckoo value, pushing out all other values in the nest. And choice places all the burden of responsibility on the individual chooser. In parallel to this development, paternalist politics is now deemed a terrible imposition upon our freedom. Unfortunately, we have begun to think the same way about paternalistic parenting. Thatâs the crazy. For paternalistic is exactly what parenting should be.
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