I am feeling very called-out by this Joseph Heath essay on the Culture novels.
Given all these options, how do you choose? More fundamentally, who are you? What is it that creates your identity, or that makes you distinctive? If we reflect upon our own lives, the significant choices we have made were all in important ways informed by the constraints we are subject to, the hand that we were dealt: our natural talents, our gender, the country that we were born in. Once the constraints are gone, what basis is there for choosing one path over another?
This is the problem that existentialist writers, like Albert Camus, grappled with. The paradox of freedom is that it deprives choice of all meaningfulness. The answer that Camus recommended was absurdism – simply embracing the paradox. Few have followed him on this path. Sociologically, there are generally two ways in which citizens of modern societies resolve the crisis of meaning. The first is by choosing to embrace a traditional identity – call this “neotraditionalism” – celebrating the supposed authenticity of an ascriptive category. Most religious fundamentalism has this structure, but it also takes more benign forms, such as the suburban American who rediscovers his Celtic heritage, names his child Cahal or Aidan, and takes up residence at the local Irish pub. The other option is moral affirmation of freedom itself, as the sole meaningful value. This is often accompanied by a proselytizing desire to bring freedom to others.17
Because of this, there is a very powerful tendency within liberal societies for the development of precisely the type of “secular evangelism” that Banks described. It acquires a peculiar urgency, because it serves to resolve a powerful tension, indeed to resolve an identity crisis, within modern cultures. It often becomes strident, in part due to a lingering suspicion that it is not strong enough to support the weight that it is being forced to bear.
Yep.
It’s possible to square this circle, though.
We’re not imposing an identity or a way-of-life on you. Ultimately it’s your job to find one that suits you well. But we understand that identity-construction can be difficult, and that some forms of identity work much better than others, and that living any kind of cohesive Good Life is often a lot easier when you have other people – and, ideally, actual social structures – helping you along your path and validating you for your choices.
So we will try to make those things available to you. We will create a bunch of preformed widely-available identities, maybe with some mix-and-match-able modular bits, and then we will actually teach you how to live up to those identities. We will provide forums through which you can find communities of people whose preferred ways-of-life are similar or complementary. We will generally make a point of recognizing you for being what you are, rather than callously ignoring you or trying to change you.
And maybe none of that will be for you. Maybe you’ll turn out to be a real psychological do-it-yourself-er, forging your own nature from scraps; maybe none of the prefab stuff will satisfy. More power to you, if so. But Hard Mode doesn’t have to be the default, let alone the only option.