James Tonkowich
April 4, 2008
Like nearly every modern Westerner I want to keep my options open. The consumer retailing world counts on it. That’s why there are not only more burger places than we can count, but there are fried chicken, rotisserie chicken, and chicken burrito places as well. Not content with one supermarket chain with dozens of Northern Virginia locations, we have at least seven chains all with multiple locations.
The same is true of churches: Presbyterian, Anglican, Methodist (United and other), Lutheran, Catholic, Byzantine Rite Catholic, Orthodox, Bible, Congregational, community, Charismatic, Holiness, and at least 39 varieties of Baptist to name only a few of the options. Their theologies are Reformed, Anglican, Wesleyan, Lutheran, Thomistic, dispensational, Pentecostal, baptistic and each comes in conservative, moderate, and liberal strains. Take your choice—if you can.
The number of choices available is so great that we’ve coined the word “overchoice.” That is, we live in a culture where there are so many options that we can become exhausted trying to make decisions.
And yet, we seem to love it. As the number of choices grows most of us exercise our options, add activities to our children’s schedules, and often utter the words, “Let’s try something new today.”
It was with that in mind that I read a New York Times article by John Tierney entitled “The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors.” Tierney reports on research done by Massachusetts Institute of Technology sociologist Dan Ariely and reported in Ariely’s new book Predictably Irrational.
Ariely devised a computer game experiment in which MIT students could win real cash. The game featured three doors each leading to a room. Students were allotted 100 mouse clicks to explore the rooms. One click opened a door into a room where subsequent clicks scored the cash rewards.
Once students successfully played for a while, something new was introduced. Unclicked doors began to shrink and then disappeared, that is, options closed. To keep those options open, all that was required was to click a shrinking door, but that wasted a click that might otherwise increase the payout.
It didn’t matter. Tierney writes:
They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer—besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee—the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.
Why would these students behave this way? Ariely concluded that students were not trying to keep their options open. Instead they acted out of fear, the fear of losing options. “The general aversion to loss,” write Ariely and his research partner Jiwoong Shin, “implies that the utility that individuals get from simply having the ‘right to choose’ (keeping options open) is not a utility, but rather disutility or pain that can accompany the lost of options.”
The students were afraid of losing freedom as most Westerners defined freedom, that is, as unlimited options to do as I please based on the way I define myself and my purpose in life.
Dr. Timothy Keller, in his new book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism comments that, “This view of ‘freedom’ means that there is no overarching purpose for which we were created. If there were, we would be obligated to conform to it and to fulfill it, and that is limiting. True freedom is freedom to create your own meaning and purpose.” Letting go of options limits this sort of freedom resulting in the pain of loss.
The caveat is that human freedom as Keller goes on to argue is not “freedom to create your own meaning and purpose.” As Christians we believe that thereis an overarching purpose for which we were created and to which we are obligated to conform. Freedom—authentically human freedom—often comes from closing doors and letting options slip away.
Keller uses two illustrations: a musician and a lover. If you have a piano in your house, you are free to exercise one of three options. You can bang on the keys freely, that is, randomly. Second, you are free to ignore the piano altogether. Three-year-olds can’t resist the first and puppy dogs typically opt for the second.
The third option is the one chosen by the musician. You are free to restrict your freedom in order to strive for a greater and a more deeply human freedom, the freedom to make music. Saying, No, to countless options, you discipline yourself to practice scales, exercises, and pieces for hours each day for years. “You’ve deliberately lost your freedom,” writes Keller, “to engage in some things in order to release yourself to a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things.”
The same is true of a lover. “Love,” says Keller, “is the most liberating freedom-loss of all. …you have to lose independence to attain greater intimacy.”
He concludes, “Freedom, then, is not the absence of limitations and constraints, but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.”
That is true of our beliefs and our morality.
G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Heretics:
Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. . . . When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogma. Turnips are singularly broadminded.
The desire to keep one’s doctrinal and moral options open is the root problem in the mainline churches and I fear it is becoming—or possibly has become—the root problem in the evangelical movement. How orthodox belief and practice can be maintained in a post-modern age is an unanswered question.
Orthodoxy demands that we draw lines thereby excluding some options as heretical and others as immoral, a difficult task in a culture obsessed by the absolute freedom of the individual to exercise unlimited options regardless of the price.
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