Choice and Change

Another of the reoccurring themes of my sleeping life is a sort of multiple realities thing. I've basically lived out different versions/subconscious projections of what my life looked like if I had made other decisions than the ones that make up my current life. Different school choices, vocational choices, relationship choices, etc. In one I was a lawyer in Chicago with a wife I didn't recognize. In another I was a small town pastor in the Midwest with a familiar female friend as my wife. In another I was an author and single (and angry), and so the list goes. I live in Chicago, Arizona, Australia, Wisconsin, Europe and elsewhere in my dreams, and strangely, I know my way around pretty well in all those places...you know...in my dreams.

I've mentioned before that I think that our choices fall in a sort of "choice cascade." Each time we make a decision, we close off other paths and lives we might have had and open doors for new things and opportunities in our lives. We choose for one thing and against another, and in so doing, we change our lives each and every time we make a choice. There are no insignificant things in this regard--we have no way of knowing at any given time which choices will open or close the most impacting doors and opportunities in the future. In one sense, our lives are like a huge choose-your-own-adventure book, only infinitely more complicated, because at this moment, there are 6.8 billion of these stories going on concurrently, and all the stories, depending on the choices of the participants, are potentially cooperative/interrelated on different levels. If the scope of the ramifications of that statement don't help you to believe in a sovereign, mighty and powerful God, I can't help you.

(Please note that for the sake of this entry I am bracketing the entire discussion of how much our choices are really the volitions of truly free agents and how much God "causes" the things we label our decisions. I don't have time for that discussion tonight!)

Each time I go through one of these dreams and experience another instantiation of what my life could've been, I wake feeling strangely good about my own life. For years and years, I assumed that this meant that I was pretty comfortable with the choices I'd made. I was right. I am comfortable with my life, and compared to the projections in my dreams, my current life, even with all its foibles and struggles, beats those "could-have-beens" by a substantial margin. But I'd only gone half way with the concept.

I don't think anyone would argue the logic of the choice cascade I mentioned above. I don't think that anyone would argue that if you imagine all the possible scenarios for what your life could've been, and you're happy with it the way it is, that you're probably a pretty contented person (I am.) But there's something else. These two things are intimately related: choice and change. Each choice we make causes a change in the world around us--in other people, in our circumstances, in our attitude. We choose, and the world around us changes. But that's not all: Our choices change us. You are (or soon will be) what you choose. It should come as no surprise at all that the person I've become as a result of my choices prefers my current life to the other options. The choices that led to this point are based on premises and values that prove this life was the one I wanted. The choices we make throughout our lives are first and foremost statements of ultimate value, apart from what we might hope to claim about ourselves. They are the proof of what we really are and what we really believe. Those choices subsequently lead to a life: relationships, hobbies, values, attitudes, and so on, which reflect those values. The choices themselves, whether we make them knowingly or unwittingly, change our view of the world we live in. It shouldn't shock anyone that this version of me--the one who made the choices that led to this life--is happy with the life he's chosen. It would be an unhappy world (and unfortunately is for so many people) where they don't like the life they've chosen, tantamount to saying, "I hate the truest parts of myself--the parts that made this life mine."

Listening to advocates for the poor gives us proof of the validity this concept: they frequently talk about a culture or mindset of poverty which makes poverty in future generations more difficult to overcome. In other words, the choices that people are forced to make because of poverty change people so that they value things differently than those who are not faced with poverty. This mindset/attitude changes those who adopt it so that even if their socio-economic status changes, they are still predisposed to poverty. Money trouble creates poverty. But money alone won't solve the problem for people who only know poverty.

There is another prominent example in America today. All you need do is find a survivor of the Great Depression. People who lived through that period have a unique view of the longterm usefulness of things. My two paternal grandparents, neither still living, kept everything because, I suspect, they wished during the Depression they hadn't treated their pre-Depression possessions so frivolously. When we cleaned out their house after my grandmother passed, we found buckets of rusty nails--pulled from projects after they were done being used. My grandfather straightened them and wouldn't let my grandma throw them away because "they were perfectly good." Their circumstances and the choices they were forced to make changed them for their future. My grandparents weren't bad off--they just remembered not having and the choices it forced them to make and they wished to not be in that position again, which necessitated other choices for them about what was trash and what wasn't. Holocaust survivors are another group whose decisions have changed them. Other examples are everywhere.

I'm sure some people think this thing I've just spilled all these words writing about is pretty obvious. Sure, we make decisions, but those decisions also change our lives and our attitudes. Duh.

Not so fast.

If it is so obvious, why don't we give greater importance to the way we make decisions? I know many people who make huge life decisions with no more thought than just doing it in the spur of the moment. That's a frivolous and irresponsible way to live a life. I know I get criticized for not being spontaneous enough, but there are some things which should NOT be done spontaneously. I think often times this "free spirit" mentality is just another label for a far less good sounding word: sloth. We're simply too lazy or too daunted to take our decisions for what they really are. Fear gains us nothing here. We need to know what we are, and, knowing that, we choose based on what we believe. This knowledge should then give us boldness and confidence to act.

The first step in having a life you'll love tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or in thirty years is to figure out what is truest about you. What do you believe about the world? How did you come to those beliefs? Why do you choose the things you do? In this step, it is important to recognize that you don't gain any points for deluding yourself. If you keep making a choice that is against what you think you want, you need to ask yourself some hard questions. If you're shortcircuiting what you think you value, you have to either change your physical behavior to match your intellectual values, or vice versa.

The second step in having a life you'll love is to handle every decision in your life in a way that is consistent with your beliefs. Once you know what you think, evaluate the options you have for choices, and then pick the one that is the closest to what you actually think. This is so obvious it should be vaguely insulting, but I'm consistently flabbergasted by people who claim to believe something, and then either ignore their beliefs at the moment when they would demonstrate them or act in a way that is contrary to what they say they believe. Let me break the secret: if you repeatedly ignore or violate your beliefs, you're wrong about what you think you believe. Your actions will always tell the truth about what you really think.

So here's the question we all need to ask ourselves on a regular basis: In light of what I really believe, which is proven by what I repeatedly choose, what do I do in this moment or situation that most honors my most deeply held convictions?

When we answer that question, the rest is simple: just do that thing.

We're all changing. What are you changing into?

The War of the Words

I'm sitting in a theology class right now engaging in a discussion about the nature of death. The professor said something which reminded me about the importance of semantics.

In conversation, and especially in conversation on specific topics, we often minimize the importance of semantic arguments. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words. In particular, we revolt in conversation against people who make careful use of words. We think that such care is a violation of one of the common rules of discourse, namely, that we make an attempt to understand communicators on their own terms, trying to discern what they mean by what they say. In other words, people who nitpick definitions often frustrate us because we feel like they're not trying to understand what we're saying, or, if you prefer, that they are belaboring something when they know full well what we mean.

That said, however, I'd like to suggest to you something along the lines of an apology for semantics in everyday conversation. It is critically important. He who makes the definition controls the discussion. A few years ago, I made a list of ways to cheat in an argument. Nearly all of the ways to cheat and turn a conversation have to do with some sort of twisting of the meaning of words. Using the same word multiple ways is a classic way to cheat in a discussion, and in fact, if you're one of those people who constantly loses arguments when you know you're right (there are few things more frustrating), you're probably giving too much ground on the meaning of words.

Philosophers of language have made much of these types of choices. Wittgenstein, for example and his "ordinary language theory" suggests that language has no innate meaning and means only what its user intends and/or what the receiver understands from what is said. In other words, to most modern philosophers, words don't have any meaning--they simply mean what people mean when they use them. There is a common usage for words, and they hold meaning only as they are used: Wittgenstein calls this a "language game." This is a rejection of the idea of Platonic forms and "ideal language" where a word has a meaning, and people can stray from the meaning of it. Any abstraction in word use, at any level, will necessarily be confusing, according to Wittgenstein, because people have no immediate frame of reference for its use. As an example, take modern conceptions and arguments about love or justice. Ordinary language theorists maintain that these words don't "mean" anything other than how they are used. So, people use the words to get what they want or say what they mean, the words themselves hold no inherent meaning.

If you hold to these modern linguistic theories, all conversations become a game, or a means of saying whatever you want, and definitions are dynamic--they change all the time. It then becomes extremely simple to move the way language is used: all you have to do is just use the word in a different way and redefine it, and for you, the word no longer means what it just did. If you can convince anyone else to use your definition (even if it happens only as people talk to you), you have succeeded in redefining the term. At that point, so far as you can get someone to agree with you, you can redefine anything to mean anything. There are benefits to the conscious if you can convince yourself to believe your own definition as well.

If you maintain the ideal theory of language or the correspondence theory of language, namely that words correspond to reality, and the correct usage of the word is the one that reflects the actual state of reality. In this view, ANY departure from this actual reflection of reality is a violation of the language, no matter what we mean when we say it. As it relates to the situation in the paragraph above, the ideal language folks would say that you can call something whatever you want, but it doesn't change the definition. First, they would say you're using the word wrong, and secondly, they'd say that you're deluding yourself and that your doing violence to the language.

There is a war on between these two schools. In short, the "ideal language" people are trying to make a standard definition for words, while the "ordinary language" folks are saying that language is inherently subjective. How you fall on this matter will say much about how you talk and how you expect others to use the language. I tend to be of the opinion that for language to mean anything, we must have at least some common understanding of what the words mean. If language is a game, then every time we sit down, we have to make our own definitions and have out the war of words each time we want to have a meaningful discussion. I think it's easier to simply admit that whether we like it or not, words have meaning assigned to them by society (or perhaps by a force beyond it) and that we should endeavor to use them correctly.

For more on the philosophy of language: see the Wikipedia article here.