On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Michael Dawson -PSU wrote:
> Choice can lead to errors, and, sometimes, it sucks to have too many
> options. Ditto for democracy.
>
> These points, however, are footnotes. The main point is that choice is
> one-half of what's miraculous and precious about human beings (the other
> half being our capacity for altruism).
This is a pretty ethnocentric claim. One of the most dramatic changes in human social life over the past 10,000 years has been the increase in opportunities for personal choice, in almost every social institution: family & marriage, profession/occupation, religious affiliations, economic affairs. Whether or not this is a good thing can be debated; I'm ambivalent about this long-scale social change myself. However, I think it's important to appreciate that many generations of human beings lived happy and "miraculous" lives without the choices we have in modern industrialized societies.
--A question about ideology (those who've been on the list for a while know where I'm going here): to what extent is this glorification and false universalization of choice in human affairs a product of social relations (e.g., capitalist economic arrangements, modern politics, the growth of commodity variety)? To what degree are concepts like freedom and choice tangled up/conflated with the social and political arrangements we'd like to change?
To put it bluntly: is the glorification of individual choice simply an ideology that justifies modern capitalism?
Miles