Choice: the current mask of nihilism

It is of the nature of evil that it is always presented as the good. How else could we be seduced by it? Recent illustrations of how this happens have been provided by the novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World but this insight goes back to the tempting of Eve with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

The serpent says to her: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Similarly, when Jesus is tempted by the devil in the gospel of Matthew (Chapter 4) he presents him with the desirable things, bread to ease his hunger, miraculous power and absolute political rule. Where Eve failed Jesus resisted.

So when someone wants to convince us of something they invariably dress it up to look like the good. One of the highest goods is freedom, a dominant theme in the Bible. Israel escaped from slavery in Egypt to freedom. Jesus quotes from Isaiah at the beginning of his ministry:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour. (Luke 4:18,19 NRSV)

It is a sign of the moral depravity of a society that they begin to use the highest goods subversively. When the Howard Government labels new industrial relations laws, which swing power in the workplace massively towards the employers, “WorkChoices” we know we are in the area of propaganda. For many, the only choice involved is to shed benefits or lose the job.

We kill our unborn babies under the rubric of choice. Never mind the closure of a future that the new born will bring with it or the haunted mothers and grandparents who wonder about that future. Never mind the sexual and emotional disorder that has brought about the pregnancy in the first case. Never mind the wishes of the potential father. Never mind the fact that we are teetering on the brink of demographic extinction. No, the only thing that is important is the choice of the mother, hence to be pro-abortion is to be pro-choice.

I first knew that the notion of choice could be used to cover up a moral abyss when attending a conference on religious education in Uniting Church schools I overheard a besuited principle tell his colleague that the admirable thing about church schools was that they provided choice. This set me wondering what his sponsoring denomination would have thought of such a weak excuse for running a school.

The celebration of choice is a mask covering the underlying nihilism that our quest for ultimate freedom has brought us. In the absence of God and a seminal story of identity and purpose, the only thing we have to turn to is the desire of the self, epitomised by the notion of the free individual who may choose.

At the end of the modern period freedom is understood as the stripping away of any allegiance. To be truly free is to cancel all authority, escape from any informing story, disband any sense of duty and look to what the self wants, to choose between a range of value neutral options.

We tell our children they must follow their dream while simultaneously removing anything that might form that dream. Anything else would be an encroachment on the child’s right to make up their own mind, so they make it up in a vacuum and we wonder that their aspirations are so shallow and so narcissistic.

Choice has become a word that signifies that we believe in nothing. The theologian David Hart makes the point that Christianity, in its spread through the ancient world, emptied the shrines of all the old gods and adopted and transformed what was useful in the ancient philosophies. In short, it overcame the ancient world, leaving nothing left that still invoked the old authorities.

The thoroughness with which the Christian tradition swept the world of impossible belief left us with nowhere to go but to Christ. As Simon Peter declares, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. (John 6:68 NRSV). Hart concludes that Christianity set the stage for modern nihilism simply by emptying the world of all viable alternatives. So when Christianity is rejected even the old baptised authorities of the ancient world must also be rejected.

There is no one else to go to except to the self, which must then be the autonomous self, the totally free self, but alas the self floating free and directed by whim and fleeting desire. This is the nihilism that is masked by our distortion of the word choice.

In the ancient world Christianity easily toppled the old gods who were in the process of fading away. In our day we have ensured that most people believe in nothing, in the nihil, in the name of freedom. How is this idol toppled? What becomes of a society that focuses on the self above all things, whose concern is with self-esteem instead of virtue, who finds itself in a moral desert and tries to plant that desert around with values that are little more than politically correct affectations?

The only recourse open to a prophet sent to such a people is to wage war on the fortified self. In comparison, the gods of the ancient world were easy. Now we have to contend with the masking of nothingness with the good as never before. Our only option is to attack the false goods that protect the self and to be accused of being haters of humanity.

For this is how we appear when we attack the self-esteem industry that attempts to protect our children from ever feeling bad. This is how we appear when we raise questions about how medical research gobbles up the charity dollar by feeding on our fear of cancer and heart disease. And when we question the basis of human rights that has displaced any idea of a community of justice, we attract the anger of a society that is convinced it knows what is good. The way of a prophet sent to this people is hard indeed.

What has happened is that choice has displaced faith. There is now no room for either Abraham or Mary who, when God appeared to them with the promise of a new and startling future said simply “Here am I”. Mary’s “let it be with me according to your word” jars in our ears. The feminists would protest at her passivity in the face of an obviously male angel. While we are told that we should be the best that we can be, that we should strive to create a life, even make a difference, achieve our goals, strive for excellence, Abraham and Mary were obedient, a disposition that we abhor because it is the abnegation of choice.

When choice displaces faith we begin to wonder why our marriages fail at such an alarming rate. Even faithfulness to a religious tradition is now described as a lifestyle choice. Thus there is no escape from the concerns of the self, even God is subverted to need and from the outside cannot help but look like a crutch. In the absence of God who reveals the depths of the human spirit we choose the holiday of a lifetime.

Our deification of individual choice is a bit like pay TV, a hundred channels and nothing to watch. Life without God has become shallow. We find that our highest aspirations take on the properties of the gods of old, they promise much but they fade away. We find that there is nothing at the centre of life that is worth clinging to, worth dying for, worth dedicating our lives to. Well, of course, anything like that would restrict our freedom and deny our ability to choose.

When choice is enshrined as the greatest good, faithfulness must wither. The faithfulness of God with His people that models the faithfulness between husband and wife, parent and child, friend and neighbour must decrease when choice is celebrated as a good in itself. This means that our society will be torn apart because it is faithfulness that has always held it together. Keeping the faith is the basis of honest work, uncorrupted administrators, careful professionals and a fair judicial system. It is the backbone of society.

Faithfulness has grounds in the Christian tradition in the faithfulness of God. Choice has no ground except the fragile whim of the chooser who thinks (he cannot know because all basis of such knowledge has been stripped from him) that his choice will make a difference to life.

Our petty choices become empty; the market has determined that the quality of most things we acquire may be judged simply by price. So the equations that govern our life become simpler and simpler governed as they are by the size of our income. To alleviate this boredom we have invented “lifestyle”. A new property development near us promises buyers that they can “step into an established lifestyle”. It seems that now not even that is a choice, it is provided for us.

So what do we do in this new era of the absolutely free self? We marry and choose not to have children. We seek ever more thrilling experiences with the aid of drugs and travel agents and adultery. We invent new quests that prove that we are actually here. The growing numbers of Everest climbers report bodies frozen in place and provide a macabre witness to the lengths we will go to in order to demonstrate the triumph of the human spirit.

That we have to invent “firsts” to fill the Guinness Book of Records, no matter how bizarre, bears witness to our desperation. This motivation to be someone has been deliciously illustrated in the ABC comedy We can be heroes. This is the end result or the self-asserting self, foundering in prolixity, feebly striving against inevitable human frailty and death and insisting on the right to choose.

Our word “heresy” comes form the Greek “hairesis” which means choice. The Johannine Jesus tells us: “You did not choose me but I chose you” (John 15:16 NRSV) This is the way of God with us, we do not choose Him, He chooses us. When we choose, as we are forced to do now that spirituality has become a smorgasbord, error lies immediately to hand because our choosing is governed by our agenda, be that a quest for meaning or a moral code.

Biblical epiphany would not have it that way. When God reveals himself we know that we have been chosen and the matter is, thankfully, taken out of our hands. We know that before this One we must give way. To our surprise this opens the door to the only freedom that deserves the name before which all of our sought for freedom is exposed as the rankest slavery.

So be warned. Whenever you come across someone who proclaims the glory of choice as an isolated good in itself, be aware that you are in the presence of a salesman and that you are about to have the wool pulled over your eyes.