Is Freedom of Choice Really Freedom?

 I write this post equally fascinated and on edge about Andrew Lanham's The Surprising History of the Ideology of Choice (The New Republic), a review of Sophia Rosenfeld's The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. 

First, the book comes across as a fascinating history of its topic.

It seems to also open the view to alternative theories of freedom, which I think may have more to offer than mere choice:

But as Rosenfeld notes in the epilogue of The Age of Choice, some thinkers and activists, especially Black feminists, have long argued that choice is a limited way to imagine liberation. The Black feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, for example, describes how “black feminists at a 1994 pro-choice conference” developed the idea of “reproductive justice,” which demands not just individual choice about whether to have children, but also the socioeconomic resources to raise children “in safe, healthy, and supportive environments.” All choices occur “within a social context,” Roberts writes, “including inequalities of wealth and power.” Those inequalities determine who can afford to raise a child, or who can actually access abortion care. Roberts thus calls for a shift from a politics that emphasizes “choice” to one that emphasizes “social justice” by combating the “intersecting race, gender, and class oppressions” that limit people’s freedom.

Two ideas have me on edge, the review touches on one:

Simply having the right to choose, in other words—especially consumer choice in the economic arena—doesn’t offer real self-determination without the financial resources and social and political power to make meaningful decisions about one’s life. All the consumer options on Amazon don’t make people free. Social structures and hierarchies set the boundaries for choice. For that reason, civil rights and anti-colonial activists across the twentieth century developed rich critiques of oppression and alternative visions of freedom that focused on socioeconomic equality, not just choice. Freedom, such activists insisted, depends on things like the power to form a labor union, the right to health care and housing, and the end of environmental racism. Those “freedom dreams,” in Robin D.G. Kelley’s resonant phrase, are worth remembering today.

Choice depends on someone offering the choices. The review touches on Amazon when I would go further. I listened to an Erich Von Stroheim documentary tonight, which reminded me how American films were hobbled by the Hays Code.  If one listens to "classic" rock radio enough, you will hear how limited is that format (as well, as if you are older, just who is missing from that format). Who decides what is being offered and why are they making these offers. We had choice but only within limits. 

Take Black artists out of rock music, and it is a different music, for a different people, than if you include Chuck Berry. Bo Diddley, and Sly Stone. 

 

Or just listen to Garland Jeffreys:

If we take Hays Code pablum as a realistic history of America, then you have a different culture than what one could get from reading Richard Wright, or John Steinbeck, or Nelson Algren, or Ralph Ellison.

What we also get is a cultural history that is inaccurate for all of its adherents. If we get a manufactured cultural history, do we not get a changed political culture? 

Then there is this feeling that flooding the zone with choices may appear to be an abundance when what we get is actually poverty. This comes somewhat from reading Orthodox Christian writers holding forth that being enslaved to Christ is more freedom than what we get with all the choice of the world. We need an education that teaches us about the beneficial choices for us. That would mean, I think, teaching about what is the good end for one's life. 

Finally, there are these guys:

sch 4/11