Choice is, for the most part, an illusion.

However, we maintain the illusion of choice as part of our respective belief systems. This requires some dissection to see the pulpy realities beneath the contemporary infatuation with personal choice and its randy cousin, freedom of will.

If we’re going to build anything, no less a system of ethics, we need a foundation. We need an acceptable premise from which all other ideas and constructs flow. And an ethic rooted in the principles of personal choice and personal freedom runs afoul very early on for a simple reason:

We each come into this world as a function of actions beyond our control.

If you feel that truths must be mysterious, convoluted things, I’m going to lose you here, because I have a bias. I believe that truths are clean, simple, and efficient.

And if I come into the world without exercising any volition, an ethical framework centered on choice has no relation to the existential reality of my inception. Choice is alien to my being.

At birth, we move, like the rest of creation, by instinct. We are governed by internal mechanisms that optimize the possibility of continued survival. There is no choice in our desire for mother’s milk or the need to eliminate. There is no choice in the timing of our rest or our crying for warmth. All of these operations are automatic and without conscious deliberation.

Of course, things change as we get older. We begin to feel volitional awakenings and we practice our will. What parent hasn’t heard their child testing her voice or reaching for the electrical socket?

And in those near ubiquitous parental experiences is revealed another truth: patterns.

As a group, we are so consistent in our growth and developmental experiences that the idea of personal choice continues to ring hollow. Most of us are doing the same things at the same time with such a high level of predictability that if any of us were to deviate significantly from anticipated patterns, it would be grounds for worry and investigation.

Behavioral scientists are keen to point out that the decisions we make are largely informed by early experience and influence. Throughout our life cycle, choice is not a function of a truly liberated will to be exercised across endless options and possibilities. Rather, available choices are grossly restricted by our personal history and social conventions. In fact, those of us who operate outside of those constraints are understood to be sociopathic, utterly without concern for the social impact of our choices.

There is contemporary research to back up the idea that “choice” is a cognitive construct that reorders events in our mind to create an impression of volition when, in fact, decisions have already been made.

With our own experience and ongoing research making plain the illusion of choice, how is it that we persist in building ethical, religious, legal, and political frameworks that hinge on the ideas of freedom and choice?

How can we be held accountable for something that does not exist?

Because we’ve collectively agreed to the terms.

However, in a philosophical schema that does not allow for choice, “agreed” is used loosely here. This is a bigger existential quandary for our secular brothers and sisters, though certainly not without obvious referential precedent.

If we are to gather for a game of cards, for example, we must all agree to the rules before playing. We suspend our ideas about how play might be better or more interesting and we settle into the game as it is. This is what I mean by maintaining the illusion of choice. We can’t very well play anything unless we pretend that there aren’t any other options. If the game actually sucks, we might come up with another game, but those who come to play the improved version will have a similar choice: play as it is or invent something better.

Moving from card games to the establishment of legal systems or the conventions of war, choice, in every case, is predicated either upon mutual agreement or necessity. It cannot be divorced from these prerequisites, both of which are beyond our control. With such obvious constraints, we cannot say that choice has any relationship to free will.

An ethos that respects actual limits as opposed to emphasizing an illusory freedom of choice seems vastly more applicable to the human experience.

The matter is slightly different among Muslims. We believe in a primordial covenant taken in the time before time when all that would ever be manifested in the physical world was gathered before God whereupon He asked:

“Am I not your Lord?”

They replied, “Yes, You are! We testify.”

He cautioned, “Now you have no right to say on Judgment Day, ‘We were not aware of this.’

Q7:172

And that, I believe, is where our choice ended. It was a real choice. An actual choice, but our last one.

All else that has come to pass is a function of Divine Decree. The actions that manifest at our hands are not our choices. Rather they are signs that teach us something about our relationship with that primordial covenant, whether observant or heedless, mindful or distracted.

The Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and give him peace, was instructed on this point:

You are not responsible for people’s guidance, O Prophet — it is God Who guides whoever He wills.

Q2:272

And again:

Then God leaves whoever He wills to stray and guides whoever He wills. And He is the Almighty, All-Wise.

Q14:4

I’m a lay person. I’m not a religious scholar, but I don’t think that precludes me from the contemplation of the terms of of my primordial covenant. The conditions were explained (my Lord is God) and in so agreeing I waive any future claims of ignorance. Further, it is God who guides or leaves to flounder, and that doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for personal choice.

And now I’ll swim over to the deep end and contradict something I wrote earlier about the clear and simple truth. Because, gosh darn it, I have feelings.

Within the Islamic cosmology is the concept of the rūh, some mysterious facet of our person roughly translated in some places as “soul” or “spirit,” though the Qur’an says only this:

And they ask you, [O Muhammad], about the rūh. Say, “The rūh is of the affair of my Lord. And mankind have not been given of knowledge except a little.”

Q17:85

This little nugget puts most of us on a level playing field, the scholar and the lay person. The rūh is not something that can be studied, though we are free to speculate, and that’s what I’m about to do.

Given the Islamic emphasis on the state of the spiritual heart, I wonder that the rūh isn’t somehow connected to our emotional and interpretive dimensions. If an action should proceed from me that contravenes the limits and constraints that were agreed upon in my primordial contract, how does that action register with me? What resonances are felt? Am I proud? Ashamed? Contrite? Repentant?

If there is an element of choice in the human experience, I posit that it may live here, in the mystery of the rūh and in the recollection or dismissal of our Divine covenant as inspired (a word derived from “spirit”) by the actions decreed as our own by Almighty God.

If you ever decide to join us outside, we’d love to continue the conversation and find out what you think.

And there’s always the comments section below.

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