We have a Choice

Something We Can Do

I was teaching a tap dance workshop in Barcelona a few years ago when I experienced a first in my teaching career. I encountered an entire class that seemed to be apathetic. In any given class there is often a spectrum of engagement. On one end, some participants will have nothing else on their mind except the class, while others will be completely disengaged. That’s to be expected, but an entire class that couldn’t seem to lock in was new to me. They weren’t distracted, engaged in something other than what was happening in the room. Nor did they seem uninterested, clearly rejecting the offering of the class. They were simply disengaged. The participants were just going through the movements. In a tap dance class, the level of engagement is audible. You can hear it come out in the dancing. If the participants continued in their mode, I knew that the dancing, and their experience of it, would never come to life.

My perception of their apathy wasn’t the only thing at play. There were language and cultural barriers to be sure. But tap dance can normally overcome those things. In the classroom we speak the language of rhythm and movement. When I teach, my aim is to bring everyone involved into a new world ­– introducing them to people, places, and ideas about tap dance that can spark their imagination. The dancing itself was likely challenging, as well. However, a combination of participant engagement, and creative teaching can normally make the challenge at the very least enjoyable, and at most attainable within the time we have together.

I can do what I can as a teacher, including acting a complete fool to bring some humor and levity into a quite serious pursuit. However, there is little I can do to make a participant engage. In this instance, I was outnumbered, and I felt I needed to make a point. I asked everyone to sit down, and I began to attempt to describe the connection between their desire to grasp this dancing and the possibility of it happening. I talked about how the dancing only shows up when we show up. Even deeper, it tends to show up in a manner respective of the way we show up. If we don’t arrive with some specificity, the dancing will be the same. If we come with tension and an overbearing attitude, the dancing will respond in kind. I talked about how each participant’s journey through this craft will be affected by their choices, what captures their imagination enough to pursue, and their access to the means by which to pursue it. For the time in class together it was my job to offer a vision – to spark their imaginations. The context of the class, I counted as a means by which they could pursue this vision. My job was to provide access to the dancing everyone in the room had implicitly expressed that they wanted by paying to take the class. But that was the challenge. Their implicit expression of desire – their presence in the room – wasn’t being matched by their presence while dancing. I expressed my cognitive dissonance on account of this difference. Choices had been made, yet it seemed like folks weren’t showing up.

In all the talking, asking questions, and participants responding, I realized that I had painted myself into a bit of a corner. Everything that I was sharing was predicated on the idea that each participant had the full capacity to make a conscious choice. There was at least one participant who questioned that assumption. That is, the assumption that those in the room were free and creative beings who expressed themselves through actions brought about by conscious choice making. I paused. That was a rabbit hole not everyone wanted to dive into – I could tell. I promised to continue the conversation after class. With most of the participants now thinking deeply about their own engagement with the current context and content, we returned to dancing.

Now, I’ve had many conversations about whether free will exists, and if it does, how to reconcile that idea with an all knowing, all powerful, God. I’ve had more of these conversations than you might think your average tap dancer would (or should). The conversation in Barcelona was but one in a series, and would continue after class, one-on-one, with John. It began with him posing the following thought experiment:

If I present to you a robot, who in all aspects of presentation and interaction is indistinguishable from a human, would you consider that robot still a robot?

With the advent of artificial intelligence, even then, this question was not surprising. However, instead of answering, I asked a question in return. What do you think distinguishes a human being from a robot? We thought together about the parts of the human (I, having yet to encounter the work of Dallas Willard), and John confessing that his beliefs about the thought experiment and his experiences in real life were incompatible. John held the thought that such a robot as he described would be a human, but admitted that in order to go about his day, he found that he had to set that belief aside. There was something inside him that was unsettled about it even though he thought it totally logical. We continued by talking about the soul, the possibility of a spiritual side of a human that a robot could not inhabit, and if all that were true, the value of engaging with God.

I still think about John’s desire for logical integrity. So much so that he was willing to hold to a belief that was being refuted every time he engaged with reality. I was also struck by another fact. When we discussed engaging with God, John framed his question as a value proposition. As in, “What is there to gain from engagement with God?”

Let’s look at the idea of integrity first. Integrity is the idea that an individual’s thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions are aligned. The idea that one should not lie, or can live a life in which there is no need to lie, strikes at the need for integrity in human persons. Without it, we might envision the development of fissures in the person’s soul. A kind of disintegration begins that takes real work to reverse and heal. Integrity may be thought of as a positive trait, in that a good person has integrity. This is true. A good person must have integrity. However, an evil person may also have integrity if they are honest about who they are and what they are doing. This is rarely the case I find, but it is possible. That said, questions may arise as to how change in one area of a person occurs if we are trying to maintain some sense of integrity.

How much information do we need to have before we can say that we need to change our thinking? If my thinking changes, when do my actions follow suit? At what point do we say that our approach to reality isn’t working? My threshold was experiencing the breakdown of every key relationship in my life – hitting my wall. I suspect we each have our own threshold. Beliefs can be difficult to change. Some beliefs will battle for survival. We might even experience grief at the loss of a belief we had held for years – something that had served us and been part of us for so long. However, the pain of leaving a wrong belief is temporary, while the suffering of operating from a wrong belief is ongoing. John shared that his cognitive dissonance was palpable, but he couldn’t defend changing his views. He was in the middle of a battle. What a hard place to be.

The value proposition is also curious to me. John asked outright, “What is there to gain from engagement with God?” In one view, this can be equal to asking, “What is there to gain from engaging with reality?” If God is real, then the two questions are the same. To know if God is real, one must endeavor to engage in interactive relationship with God. This is the journey towards real knowledge. It is a knowledge that comes from being with another through activities, across the spectrum of extravagant and menial, both inward and outward facing. However, John’s formation led him to think about the question of engaging with God (in any sort of way) as something that should benefit him – John, not God necessarily. Of course, there is benefit. However, a relationship with God is not transactional. It is not machine like. It is alive, interactive, and full of surprises (as we often are with one another). This question comes to mind: What in John’s thinking led him to approach this question of relationship as a value proposition? Did he approach all relationships this way? If that is true, the idea of relationships will likely devolve to being vehicles for the sole fulfillment of personal desires (good or bad). Maybe there is a place for that on the spectrum of ways to relate, but in those places, I hope there is also a place for love.

Both of John’s challenges bring us back to the idea of choosing. John, amid his internal battle had some very important choices to make. Would he be willing to release his current belief, and journey towards another? Would he venture to test out a relationship with God, or remain in his current thinking? As I write I am struck that in making such choices, John would be experiencing what it meant to be a free and creative being, able to make choices on their own account. He would be living out another answer to his initial robot riddle in his own journey of possible transformation, in engagement with the spiritual aspects of a person, in the possible experience of God.

How we think about choice, and what we need to ultimately make a choice, is one of the keys to beginning to unpack our own inner world. If we desire any kind of change, there are a series of choices that must be made, often continually, for that change to have some potential of coming about. Thinking about change will unveil parts of ourselves that we may have taken for granted – our thoughts on reality for instance. The parts that show us how we are thinking about things. These parts too can use acknowledging, addressing, and possible change. None of which will happen without choice. In all of this there becomes the question of whether we are free to choose, or not.

In thinking about this question, I’ve landed on a simple yes – followed by a more complex idea about all the things that come to bear on our chooser. There is a lot to take note of. We have our own predispositions, our wants or desires, our personalities, our thoughts and feelings, our bodies, and our social relationships. All these come into play when we make a choice. There is interconnected activity happening between these areas all the time, and namely before we act. There are also pathways that seem to circumvent our awareness of and conscious engagement in some choices before acting. The complexity is a little mind blowing, especially if we think about the idea that we can make a choice about making a choice. It’s a wonder more people aren’t frozen in their choice making abilities. It’s also a wonder how many choices we can make while being unaware of them – and still survive (even thrive). Truly, if we had to think about every choice we made, we’d likely spend all our energy within the first half hour of our day.

It should be said that acting without thinking about every action can be very good in some circumstances. Ask professional athletes and dancers. Think about what it would mean to think about every action while driving, or even walking. The question here is around what is more important to think about, and to have right thoughts about, rather than making some new standard of being conscious about every choice we make.

As I think more and more about these ideas there are a few things that have clarified for me. I can act without thinking. I can think without acting. I can act on thoughts that aren’t necessarily complete. I can be overcome by thinking and never act. I can act on thoughts that are deeply affected by several variables, many of which may seem outside of my control or seem to be controlling me. But the basic truth here, is that I can act. That action is predicated by a choice. While impressed upon by numerous aspects of my person, social relationships, and reality, it is mine. I am empowered for its sake. I own it. I answer for it.

Without getting too much further into the quagmire of the idea of free will (maybe it’s too late already?), I’d like to share this final thought. Sometimes understanding a concept is easier from a negative perspective. That is, saying that such a thing must exist, because I can clearly see the opposite to be true. In such an approach one can say, for instance, that the idea of free will must exist because I have clearly experienced manipulation, restriction, and imposition upon my free will.

There are of course many questions that arise out of this kind of discussion. “What is free will for?” or “Why is it important?” for instance, or “Wouldn’t the world be better if there wasn’t such a thing? If we weren’t allowed to make the wrong choice?” Such questions begin to touch on other deeper questions such as, “Why is there evil?” or “Does love require free will?” These are good questions to address, and to work through. For now, I must leave you with this thought:

Care for your choices. Inquire about them. Journey to discover how you think about them and what affects them. They may lead to outcomes that we can rarely control. But we can do what we can within the empowerment we have to endeavor to make good choices. And we can trust that good choices will ultimately lead to good outcomes.