More Choice is Better for Human Beings
We Can Have the Benefits of Modern Life and the Blessings of Yore
I make no secret of my dislike of some aspects of modern life, including certain technologies.1 Yet despite that, I wholeheartedly believe we are better off today than previous generations. In large part, that is because we have more choices available to us than past generations did. You can live a primitive life today if you want to – it’s just more difficult than it once was. You can forego all of the comforts of modern technology (if you don’t believe me, ask the Amish). You can work with your hands, spend much of your time outdoors, cultivate close friendships in a small community, have a large family, avoid screen time, and have a vibrant religious life.2
You just don’t have to. Our distant ancestors didn’t go primitive camping for fun. They did it every day and they had no alternative. Even relatively our recent ancestors had little choice but to work outdoors with their hands, whether they liked it or not.
It strikes me as very silly when people say that it is impossible today to have a phone-free childhood, or go stargazing away from light pollution, or live a wild life, or get lost. All of those things are still freely available to us. Technology may have made other choices easier and those choices harder, but harder is not the same as precluded from all possibility, and if human beings really want to live a certain way, we will make the sacrifices required to do so. You can find plenty of people in America today who live simple lives and avoid digital technology (or other technologies). You can even find people who live entirely off the land.
Oftentimes, I agree with some of the cultural critics about the problems ailing our society. It would be better if we had more vibrant communities, a revival of religious belief, a fitter and healthier and more active population, and stronger families. It isn’t good that birthrates have declined.
But the solutions often leave me cold, in part because they are premised on the idea that human beings are making bad choices and that therefore it is better to live in a world in which we have fewer options. We may, and often do, make bad choices. But the upside to choice is greater than the downside, and returning to a world with less choice inevitably requires greater downside.
Physical Activity:
It will come as no surprise that I list this first. I could write at much greater length about this subject, but I will keep my treatment short. Those who pine for the good old days lament that the decline in outdoor physical labor and the rise in sedentariness have contributed to an obesity epidemic (among other things). Of course, physical exercise remains free and available to everyone except for the extremely physically disabled. But supposedly, it would be better if we were all doing manual labor, and the prevalence of gyms is a sign of our decline.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Most forms of manual labor are not beneficial to human health. A lot of manual labor involves repetitive motions that predispose individuals to injury, especially individuals who have not learned how to move properly – something about which (moving properly) we know more than previous generations, and something which most people don’t actually “just know,” but have to learn. Many forms of manual labor don’t actually challenge the cardiorespiratory system beyond a limited threshold. Not all manual jobs build any high degree of muscle or strength. Those that do often overdevelop certain muscles at the expense of others, contributing to downstream injury risk. This isn’t to say there isn’t value in manual labor, merely that on the simple question of “what is ideal physical activity for the human body” it falls short of even average exercise.
While not every gym activity meets this definition, exercise is a form of physical activity that is able to reduce injury risk, fix underlying biomechanical issues, promote longevity, and improve health. Proper strength training creates healthy joints that are better able to handle the strains of daily living (and manual labor). High-end aerobic training challenges the lungs in ways that nothing else can (literally). Ideally, physical training teaches people how to move properly – which, incidentally, enables them to perform manual labor more safely than someone who hasn’t learned this skill.
In 2023, we have more and better choices available to us in the realm of physical activity, including the choice to take a manual job if we want to. Those of us who don’t work manual jobs in the outdoors, can choose to exercise at a gym and perform manual work as a hobby. Our ancestors who worked those jobs we idolize did so because they had to, not because they wanted to. Many of them did not want their children to have to work the jobs they did. We should not wish to return to the life they wanted their descendants to escape.
Community:
From Robert Putnam on the left to Yuval Levin and Tim Carney on the right, commentators have been lamenting the decline in American civic (and religious)3 life for decades. And it is a problem. Upper middle-class Americans may not notice its effects as strongly, both because they tend to be more insulated from the negative externalities of the decline, and because they tend to travel in the circles in which community is still quite strong. Their children go to good schools where parents are involved. They participate in sports leagues, attend local events, and have active social lives. And even if they don’t, they’re better positioned to live comfortably without such things.
Many Americans struggle. Their towns are hollowed out. They lack institutions to which to turn when times get tough. They have a harder time adjusting to economic and social change.
There are many factors at play in our loss of community, but one factor is that for over fifty years, when given a choice, Americans have opted for greater privacy, more space, more control, and less friction. We put up barriers, buy houses with bigger yards and higher trees, and no longer accept neighbors’ casual intrusions. The harshest critics of American life blame the rise of suburbs for our loneliness crisis. It would be better, according to these critics, to live in closer proximity to our neighbors, in smaller houses, in smaller towns, with smaller yards, and with the tacit acceptance of the idea that our neighbors have some claim upon our lives and our privacy (i.e., can walk into our houses uninvited).
But as I wrote in a piece this past winter, “was friction really so good?” Maybe there is a reason so many human beings chose to live in the suburbs, chose to have more control over their lives, chose to have more privacy. Maybe there is a reason human beings want to have space of their own. Maybe there is a reason we want big yards and higher trees. And maybe it is a good reason. Maybe, despite the negative downsides that may come of it (i.e., we no longer have community forced upon us by circumstance in ways that allow us to take it for granted), the upsides outweighed the downsides.4
When it comes down to it, what the critics prefer is a world in which human beings are poorer. In which circumstance forces upon us what we do not choose for ourselves, because we supposedly do not know how to choose for ourselves. It is a romanticization of poverty. It is a belief that when human beings are free to choose for themselves, they choose what makes their lives worse. Sometimes, human beings do, to be sure. But a lot of times, when human beings have a choice, they choose the things that make their lives better, even if those things do not make their lives better in every regard or dimension.
And the rejoinder, that we know that human beings choose what is bad for them, merits the question of who “we” think we are and how we claim to know this. Are we not ourselves human beings? Is it merely “other people” who make those bad choices, or is it ourselves, too? And, if so, what ground do we have upon which to suggest that other people’s choices should be taken from them so that they do not choose what we do not wish them to choose?
Some choices are bad. Not all ways of living are created equal, and there are many ways that human beings choose to live that are immoral or harmful or unhealthy. But why should we expect that human beings will be any less likely to do bad things in a world in which they have fewer choices? A cursory reading of history should disabuse us of that notion.
Individual Decision-making:
The hollowing out of American civic life – the decline in institutions, informal associations, and even friendships – is sometimes laid at the feet of individualism (or, rather, a particular misunderstanding about individualism). While there is something to this idea, I find it tendentious, given that the high point for American “rugged” individualism was the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (rather than today).
From before the Founding, America has been an outlier – even in the West – for the individualism that characterized its culture (including our love of the self-made man, our emphasis on economic opportunity and upward mobility, and our celebration of heroes like Huckleberry Finn and Daniel Boone). It was this character of American culture that caused the Soviets to make popular the term “American exceptionalism” to explain why America was uniquely resistant to communism.
If anything, the phenomenon Alexis de Tocqueville found so striking about America in the 1830s – the initiative Americans demonstrated in forming (private, voluntary) associations and institutions to achieve goals and solve problems (i.e., rather than waiting for someone else to take care of them) – was a reflection of the individualistic, do-it-yourself ethos of American culture. Problems were not the collective responsibility of society, but the responsibility of individuals in concert with other individuals who chose to do something about them. Insofar as our culture is now characterized by an unwillingness to take responsibility, and a belief that problems must be (or can be) solved collectively as a society, we are less individualistic.
Those who attack American individualism as the root of our loss of community often do not believe that individuals are capable of making (good) decisions for themselves. For at least some of these critics, one of these decisions they do not like, one which likely is (on some level) connected to the hollowing out of community, is the decision of many women to enter the workforce.
Community takes time. Charities, voluntary organizations, PTAs, clubs, etc. take a lot of work. Naturally, retirees staff a lot of these institutions today, given that full-time workers may not have the time. But in the 1950s, stay-at-home moms were the backbone of a very large chunk of the associations that formed the civic life of towns and cities. A large driver of cultural change in the last fifty years has been the upending of the norm that kept many women out of the workforce.
Like all changes, this one came with upsides and downsides. Like most Americans (but certainly not all Americans), I think this was a very good change. Not because I believe that all women should work (or that they should all stay home), but because I believe they should have a choice in a matter that is deeply important to their lives. The question of whether to work or to stay home should be left up to the woman (or man) making it. To the extent that more women (and man) have a choice in the matter, that is a good thing.
Admittedly, not every woman does have a choice today. Some are forced to work by circumstance and others are kept out of the workforce by ill health, for instance. But more women have more of a say in this personal decision than they did before.
That doesn’t mean it’s an easy decision, or that it doesn’t come with real tradeoffs, or that some women don’t have advantages others lack. We don’t live in a utopian world in which all women (or men) can “have it all” without any risk or downside, or without having to give anything up.
But we don’t live in a utopian world, full stop. All decisions require tradeoffs. All individuals find themselves having to make difficult choices, in which they will have to give something up to get something else, or put up with a less-than-ideal situation in order to achieve a desired goal. It is good that more human beings have greater choice today than ever before, but that isn’t the same as saying choosing is easy.
When people say that it’s “impossible” today for most women to stay home with their kids because men’s wages are no longer artificially inflated by women’s absence from the workforce and that therefore it is very difficult for single-breadwinner families to have a middle-class lifestyle,5 what they really mean is that the cost (in this case, the literal cost) is too high for many to bear the consequence of such a decision (i.e., a lower standard of living). When parents say that it is “impossible” to avoid giving their middle-schooler a phone because every other kid has one, what they really mean is that they are unwilling to deal with the consequence of that decision (i.e., that their kid may feel excluded/left out/unhappy/uncool). When teachers say that it is impossible for them to ban phones in class, what they really mean is that they are unwilling to bear the burden of constantly laying down the law (which will make them unpopular with their students).6
This isn’t a callous point. All of us make decisions almost every day in which we decide we are unwilling to put up with certain costs, and therefore settle for something we may not entirely want. It doesn’t make us weak, or bad people – it’s just a part of living.
Bringing It All Together:
What many people want is a world in which they do not have to deal with tradeoffs, but that is a world that doesn’t exist. Individuals making decisions for themselves will have to deal with the consequences of their decisions.7 In many ways, that is what we have been talking about this entire time.
The calculus for some decisions has changed, making choices that used to be easy hard and vice versa. Choices are rarely between one bad thing and one good thing but rather require accepting some downside in order to gain some upside. But the person who is closest to his or her own situation (i.e., himself or herself) is the one best equipped to accept that downside and upside. The final arbiter of upside and downside for an individual’s life should be that individual, not some technocratic surrogate, not some emperor or king, not some board or committee. Modern life affords us more choice than most human beings ever had. Despite that, we still face a lot of hard choices and sometimes even have a hard time choosing.8
It may be that we are only now realizing the negative consequences of some of the choices we have made. It may be that it was easier in the past to have community, or avoid obesity – although in having to go out of our way to build community, or to avoid obesity, we have the potential to achieve something better than what was previously taken for granted.
It may be the case that the right decision (that is, the moral or virtuous one), or the optimal course for human life, is very hard in the modern world. But that is always true for human beings. It won’t be any less hard if that decision is made for us.
The QR code menu, and the electric scooter among them.
These are some of the things which are generally listed when previous eras are compared favorably to our own, and the decline of these things is often lamented by cultural critics.
Churches and other religious organizations drive something like fifty percent of civic/associational life (including charity and volunteerism) in many locales, so a decline in religiosity is synonymous with a decline in community.
Admittedly, I think that is entirely upside and not downside. The attendant decline in community is perhaps somewhat expected, just as an attendant decline in physical fitness when physical activity is no longer forced upon us in uncomfortable and disadvantaged ways is to be expected. That doesn’t mean we should prefer a world in which people were somewhat fitter in a rather non-ideal way to a world in which everyone basically has a better chance at being fitter than their grandparents, even if they now have to go out of their way to achieve that.
If you don’t understand that sentence, please reread it.
Note: Not every family, parent, or teacher wants to make those choices. Some of those who want to but don’t complain that it is impossible to make the decision they wish they could make.
Some people think it is a cruel or unfortunate circumstance of the world that decisions have consequences. I think something closer to the opposite is true. Morality often requires that decisions have consequences.
This is a reference to the paradox of choice. The “oppression” of the limitless options in the cereal aisle (or the bread aisle) at the grocery store. The notion that consumer capitalism overwhelms us with options and breaks down our ability to make decisions for ourselves. There isn’t nothing to this critique, but it is like saying that human beings shouldn’t drive because when a 15-year-old gets behind the wheel of a car for the first time he or she is overwhelmed by the complexity of it. Sometimes refugees from places where oppression is typically of the boot-on-face variety remind us that “too much choice” in the cereal aisle isn’t tyranny.