Searching through my back-catalogue, I could not find a single poem that even loosely fits this week’s ‘decisions’ prompt https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/31982590/876612823 , nor could I summon up any inspiration to write something new on the subject. I conclude, therefore, that I must believe in destiny of some sort.

I have often looked back over my far from perfect life and wondered, as many people do, whether I might be able to do a better job of it, were I to have my time over again. But I have always come to the, at first grim, then strangely liberating conclusion that I most certainly couldn’t or wouldn’t. Even—and this is an important point—with the benefit of hindsight.

This feeling is akin to what Nietzsche described as ‘eternal recurrence of the same,’ which is as good an idea of the afterlife as any other and, interestingly, not that different from the one that was drilled into him by his Lutheran relatives and schoolmasters. At first blush, Nietzsche’s notion, that we are fated to live the same life over and over again—despite or perhaps because of apparent free will—appears nihilistic; much as Calvin’s doctrine of predestination is; but it is, at root, an invitation to tolerance of difference and a way to ‘say yes to life’ despite its inevitable missteps, accidents and imperfections.

For the second week in a row, therefore, I find myself inspired to respond to this week’s excellent prompt with an essay rather than a poem, even though I know that fellow bloggers, understandably pressed for time, are more likely to read a short poem than a more expansive discourse. Still, I shall persist. I have noticed that, while poems are read by many more visitors in the short term, more extensive posts can attract a slow drip-drip of followers that accumulates over time.

 

Decisions, decisions

 

It is interesting to note that the use of the words ‘decide’ and ‘decision’ to refer to a personal choice between alternative courses of action is extremely recent. It is first attested in the English language only around 1830.

Before that, stretching all the way back to the Roman Empire, perhaps beyond, equivalent terms refer exclusively to a judicial ruling, the settlement of a dispute handed down by a third party, to whom the interested parties necessarily relinquish their volition. The iconic threat of cutting a baby in two.

Decision means ‘cutting’ in Latin and an unrelated word with the same metaphorical meaning was used in Ancient Hebrew for the same pragmatic purpose.

It is easy then to jump to the conclusion that, before the 1800s, most people did not have the freedom or the capacity to make decisions for themselves that we supposedly enjoy today. There may be some truth to this, but it is more instructive, I feel, to see things, at least to start with, the other way round.

The shift in meaning of the term ‘decision,’ from external imposition to internal mental process, may not have arisen from a benign expansion of personal freedoms over time, but rather from a growing tendency to view the workings of the private mind and the behavior of the private individual in externally-controllable judicial terms.

In the modern world, our internal decision-making process is increasingly viewed from a judicial bureaucratic perspective. We are encouraged, often sternly so—by schools, prisons, business corporations, psychologists and hospitals—to imagine our own minds and bodies as if they were internalized courts of law writ small. Tests, parole boards, job interviews, performance appraisals, and medical examinations routinely inculcate this view of the world.

This judicial conception of human mental processes is most clearly—almost cartoonishly—expressed in the terminology of superego, ego and id, developed by the late Freud—a court drama in which ego is plaintiff, id defendant, and superego judge.

This is frequently portrayed in modern cartoons by a demon on one shoulder competing verbally with an angel on the other through the head of the human individual. It is a motif that goes back, mutatis mutandis, to the Book of Job, although the law-court drama is seen back then as going on in heaven rather than in Job’s mind. People in the Bible don’t have minds. That is a modern invention.

The same metaphor runs through much contemporary self-help based psychology and is increasingly the model adopted by the medical establishment to address the growing number of life-threatening afflictions that are deemed to be largely self-imposed.

But what if this application of a model derived from corporate and international law to human individuals were simply wrong—a catastrophic category error? The likelihood of this being the case is certainly raised by the fact that the model does not even seem to have had a very good track record in resolving disputes in the more rarefied, but to some extent, less complicated spheres of international politics.

Let us backtrack a little to the seemingly more obvious notion introduced at the beginning of this article, whereby, before the late 18^th century and the introduction of representative governments, individuals enjoyed little in the way of choices as to how they conducted their lives or the way in which they were conducted by others.

They were born into unchangeable classes or castes; their behavior was deemed to be determined by a war between angels and demons, or later the predetermination of a Calvinistic God. A chain of arbitrary authority stretching from pope to king to lord of the manor to schoolmaster and pater familias held their aspirations in thrall.

This was horrifying and unfair and we rightly reject it now, but our blanket rejection should not blind us to the freedoms pre-modern individuals enjoyed that have been lost with the imposition of the legalistic congress-and-supreme-court God-and-devil’s-advocate model of the mind. It is intriguing that the concepts of the bicameral system of representative democracy and the bicameral anatomy of the brain emerged at around the same time.

Pre-modern authority rarely intruded into people’s private lives, still less their minds. Within the limits imposed by scarcity, people were free to eat and drink whatever they pleased; a blind eye was turned to activities regarded to be sexually deviant so long as they were not actively promoted or flagrantly pursued; unusual behavior could be persecuted but could equally be regarded as a sign of divine inspiration. Galileo’s somewhat bizarre retraction by modern standards reflects the gulf between what he was allowed publically to promulgate and privately believe.

Neither should we overestimate the extent to which the modern world is less cruel in these regards.

In the case of a modern-day Galileo, it would be far easier to suppress his views, by depriving him of access to academic funding and ostracizing him from the closed circuit of academic conferences and publications. Furthermore, he might well be classified as mentally ill and subjected to a whole gamut of psychological, legal and economic tortures to encourage him to change his ways.

The treatment of the mentally ill in the modern world has been a catalogue of atrocities: starting with incarceration in madhouses, through the nadir of Nazi extermination, to the routine lobotomies and electric shock treatments of the 1950s, to the tranquillizing of housewives in the 1970s, to the extensive use of drugs in recent years to steer the behavior of even very young children. I am not a fan of the Church of Scientology, but I can understand why their critique of conventional psychiatry has become such a fertile recruitment ground.

Tolerance of sexual difference has ebbed and flowed over the centuries and often come down hard on certain stigmatized behaviors, often in response to popular outrage through ensuing witch-hunts. Homosexuality, for example, has been, for most of history, broadly tolerated, so long as it is not actively promoted. But, only in the 19^th and 20^th centuries was homosexuality both classified as a disease and treated as a crime. This mentality is perpetuated still on the radical purportedly religious right that insists that sexual preferences are choices that, with the right intervention in the mind of the individual psyche, can be reversed.

Even muddier are our modern attitudes with regard to diet. While, in the past, our food choices were determined by the seasonal availability of produce and certain tribal food taboos and the cycle of religious festivals, we are now judged by our choices of diet, amidst a plethora of options with regard both to consumption and conflicting and ever-changing government advice.

To these ancient prejudices, the modern world has added another that would have been inconceivable to the ancient or medieval mind: that of race. Confused by the discovery of hitherto unimaginable parts of the globe and driven by a desire to further their imperialistic competition for resources, the powerful nations of Eurasia and Northern Africa pursued a policy of enslaving or exterminating people from the New Worlds, on the grounds that they were morally and racially distinct from themselves, increasingly on the flimsy and biologically superficial basis of skin color. This most recent of prejudices clearly persists to this day.

We live in a world of personal choices, but we are judged on them as never before. Our health is seen, in a context of increasingly broad access to medical services, as dependent on our lifestyle choices, based often on dubious and conflicting evidence. Our sexuality is perceived as being inborn and occasional whims that go against that grain are regarded with suspicion. Different mental behaviors are increasingly seen as deviances from the norm that need to be stamped out at an early age through drug-therapy or re-education. Ideas are marshalled into a wide range of nevertheless cramped disciplines and otherwise mocked or left to die. Racial discrimination is still widespread, but little is done about it, on the blithe assumption that it no longer officially exists. A bloated population is expected to compete for the few jobs not taken over by robots or sweat shops.

We have more choices than ever but, at the same time, are judged on them personally as never before. No wonder so many of us are now turning to supposed authorities and new or revived religions in an effort to dispel our confusion. We crave decisions that are not made by courts of law within our own minds that scramble our sense of self, but by clear powers that be; decisions that, therefore, we can abide by outwardly and publically, but, privately and inwardly mock and ignore. This, perhaps, is the way of the neo-Medieval. post-modern, post-Internet world.