Choice
“Make good choices!” is the de facto cry of parents. Which in one way is the same as my parents telling me to have a safe flight … of course we all know I have no choice in the matter. My point being: Telling your child to make a “good choice” really doesn’t actually *do* anything except make a parent feel better via a false sense of control because navigating “making good choices” is sort of this specter that hangs out in the ether throughout years and years of parenting. You hope that common sense just sort of rubs off on them as you model good choice-making, but it’s not like you can role-play or narrate every single situation that a child might encounter. (But of course we all know the general highlight reel…)
I recently finished the novel Choice by Neel Mukherjee a bit after having to return the novel The Known World by Edward P. Jones before finishing it. I hate that I couldn’t finish, but I was still struck by it — and particularly its title, which in my mind alludes to the old adage “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Or obviously, the flipside: What you know is all you know. (Btw, it’s a sprawling novel with lots of characters that’s predicated on the history of free Black people owning slaves in antebellum Virginia. It won the Pulitzer in 2004.) I thought about this while reading Choice, which involves three loosely intertwined stories all exploring the “behavior” of how humans make decisions — and how these choices affect others.
While I found Choice a bit heavy-handed at times — I don’t need characters’ dialogue to openly illustrate the “science” of decision-making, as it reads a bit like someone reciting an economics or psychology textbook — the (sometimes) ambiguity of making ethical choices is fascinating to ponder because as demonstrated in Jones’ novel, your own “known world” is what you’ve got to work with. Is it the best we can do to act with good intent while acknowledging that we can never know how a certain decision will play out over time or geography? Not necessarily, but the tricky part is removing ourselves from what we know to at least try to extrapolate something different. Impossible, maybe, but always worth a try.
originally published on instagram