The Wardman Wire

I should never have gone into Sainsbury’s. Winter in Romania in the early 1990s was a constant shade of grey and brown, from the grimy ice on the Danube to the half-finished concrete tower blocks. In a town of 50,000 there was only 1 petrol pump (the fuel arrived once a week), and the local market in December sold mainly potatoes and bundles of herbs. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the locals resented the kids at the local orphanage getting new clothes, nappies, toys etc. from teary Western donors whilst they struggled on with nothing.

The train to the airport had no heating, and a 4 hour night-time journey in sub-zero temperatures didn’t make for much sleep. The regular sight from the window was truck drivers lighting fires underneath their vehicles to thaw out the frozen petrol.

Orange

Stepping straight out of that into a British supermarket, with its riot of fruit and veg colour, wasn’t a good idea. Hostage Brian Keenan, in An Evil Cradling writes:

“But wait. My eyes are almost burned by what I see. There’s a bowl in front of me that wasn’t there before. A brown button bowl and in it some apricots, some small oranges, some nuts, cherries, a banana. The fruits, the colours, mesmerise me in a quiet rapture that spins through my head. I am entranced by colour. I lift an orange into the flat filthy palm of my hand and feel and smell and lick it. The colour orange, the colour, the colour, my God the colour orange. Before me is a feast of colour. I feel myself begin to dance, slowly. I am intoxicated by colour.”

The explosion of choice seemed to mock the poverty, a deliberate overkill. But we accept it as routine. The average UK supermarket now has over 20,000 product lines, compared with 2,000 in the 1960’s. If you want carrots, you can have them loose, in 1, 2 and 5 kilo bags, diced for salads, frozen, frozen with mixed veg, tinned in 3 sizes, organic and in several other varieties too.

Is there such a thing as too much choice?

We’ve come a long way in a short time. Only 3 generations ago, for most of us life was a ‘given’ - where we lived, what we did, what we belonged to, what we watched. We lived where our parents lived and went straight from school to work without a gap year in Australia. Gender roles were pretty fixed: men worked, women raised children, and marriage was the strong social norm for long-term sexual relationships. There was only 1 TV channel, if you had a TV. We had choices (voting, who to marry), but most of life was patterned by tradition and corporate identity.

With consumer society, choice has not only come to define our supermarkets, but increasingly our lives. What we learn, who we sleep with, how we worship, where we live, who we associate with - the idea that any of this might be determined by someone else horrifies us. The failure of class war campaigning in Crewe is a sign of how weak class identity has become. Identity is increasingly chosen, rather than received.

That’s good - choice is a sign of freedom. But it’s worth keeping an eye on those choices, because they might not be all they seem.

Are they important enough? When more of us are stirred to vote for a winner on Pop Idol than for our local MP, you have to ask whether we’re using our power to choose in the right way. When the first blacks voted in South Africa, the power to choose your rulers was treated as a sacred trust, a profound expression of humanity and freedom. Here, choice has become entertainment, a fake sense of power over a trivial outcome whilst all the important stuff happens somewhere else. And we get fleeced in the process.

Do they deliver on the promise? I’ve chosen not to scour the net to see if the word ‘makeover’ existed before 1990, but I suspect not. The choice myth promises more than it can deliver. Now that shopping is a means of self-expression (Tesco, ergo sum), it’s easy to think that a detox here, a botox there, and a couple of makeovers down the line and we can be a ‘new you’. But that’s not how identity works. If you’ve been a fool for 50 years, you can’t suddenly reinvent yourself as a guru. We reap what we’ve sown. As any Olympian will tell you, it takes time, training and sacrifice to become what you want to be.

Are we staying human? This weeks Embryology Bill raised a series of major moral questions, which by Wednesday were quickly ignored in favour of the football. Can we choose to destroy/kill a 24 week old baby? Can we choose to create one life with the prime purpose of saving another? Just because something is scientifically possible, does that mean its ok? If the wife wants a child (though technically she’s not a wife, just in a civil partnership with her girlfriend) then does that settle the issue?

Is the New You the Real You?

We have become used to getting what we choose, just because we choose it, and the housing slump is a reminder that sometimes this is a mirage. What’s more, a life built purely on choice is incredibly fragile. What if I chose wrong? It’s no accident that anxiety and mental illness are on the rise. A society built on traditions, whilst restrictive, at least had the chance to build recieved wisdom into its social arrangements. But if class, religion, family, work, identity are all up for grabs, and only created as I choose them, then that is a heavy mental burden to bear.

Having walked away from a social model where identity was conferred by structures and traditions, we now look for it in what we buy and what we do. As the Guardian put it last week:

More people are seeking “meaning” in their work. But what is meaningful work? Lots of us would like to find an answer - although meaning, like happiness, may prove elusive if we go looking for it. But it’s a question that could simply not have been asked before relatively recent times. Our forbears a century ago would have been perplexed not only by the colossal hopes invested in work that are so peculiar to our age, but also by the way that work has become saturated with issues of identity in the advanced democracies of the west

In a consumer, choice-driven society, the question of British identity will never be settled. Consumer choice is all about the now, but the present without the past is a place without memory, a social form of dementia as the memories which created and sustained meaning are lost.

I enjoy the freedom to choose, but choice can never fully define who we are, or be the trump card in debates about morality, science, and economics. The Christian vision of identity - people created in love in the image of God - includes free will, balanced by reason, creativity, love, community, and a sense of place within creation. (Interesting that one of the upsides to recession is that we’re told we’ll all get more creative, as we’ll no longer be able to buy a solution to everything.)

In a couple of weeks I’ll be doing my first wedding of the summer. For the happy couples, the most amazing thing is not that they have chosen, but that they have been chosen. It’s in that context that love and identity can grow to their full extent.

David Keen blogs at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor