Something Changed: free will and storytelling
It’s already five years since I sat—somewhat horrified—in the cinema, waiting for a film I’ve long since forgotten, and watched an EasyJet advert which celebrated 20 years of the budget airline to the soundtrack of Pulp’s Disco 2000. Impressionistically tracking the journey of nervous young couple from first meeting, through pregnancy, childbirth, raising a daughter and seeing her leave home, to step off the ferris wheel of life as elegantly greying empty-nesters it was cynically calibrated to speak to the anxious heart of my so-called ‘Xennial’ microgeneration. We who enjoyed our first furtive fumblings to the ironised then-futurism (‘Let’s all meet up in the year 2000 / won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown’) of Jarvis Cocker’s art-poppers, where now being urged “hurry up, please, it’s time” as the track came full circle and embraced its nostalgic destiny, capped off with the tagline, “How 20 years have flown”. What, personally, to show for two decades, it seemed to snort? It’s disconcerting enough to realise you typify a target demographic and that the advertisers know your generational cheat-codes so well, and anxiously irritating to feel ticked off by a crappy orange airline for your generational shortcomings, whilst at the same time honing in on you as the underachieving demographic who’ll be using budget airlines forever—if heading on a foreign holiday at all.
Somewhere within that disconnected transaction exists the process of narrative production: the aspirational story received from one generation ‘lives’ in the culture and is transmitted socially through a wide range of modes of storytelling, including advertising, and the meaning it imparts is clear: responsible adulthood is heterosexual, involves procreation, parenthood, monogamy and social reproduction in a circular form. This story holds for as long as it can, surviving in a sort of cultural natural selection, throwing up mutations through the contingency of the world. And as material conditions shift, so different mutations of storytelling emerge: the fallout from the 2007/8 financial crash has made these signifiers of adulthood more remote; home ownership plummeted; work has become less secure and less well paid; households were reconfigured with a dramatic rise in student-like sharing; the generational distribution of housing and wealth and so did social forms of life. The result of this, at the level of the stories we tell, is the contestation and opening of new modes of being—a ‘queering’ of sexualities that can be openly identified with, a decline in marriage, a greater identification with generational modelling, and a somewhat superficial rise in generational antagonism to the settled order of things. As in evolutionary natural selection, these new stories enter into a competition for survival, downstream from material conditions, and those best equipped to meet them survive, while those which no longer fit recede. And like natural selection, it’s an amoral process, best observed through a disinterested science—but our habit of mind is to view it backwards, and tell a story which makes it cohere, seem inevitable, and endow it with a narrative significance and moralistic texture, after the fact.
At a personal level, this process is explored in the Pulp single which followed Disco 2000, from the same superlative record A Different Class. Something Changed manages to be an archly ironic deconstructed narrative of a couple’s first meeting, a meditation on inevitability, free will and storytelling, and an epically romantic love song, with these competing concerns and discourses somehow sitting side-by-side due to some masterful songwriting and an appreciation, as per Winslade and Monk, that “we are always situated in multiple storylines.” Practicing Narrative Mediation (New York: Jossey Bass, 2008:7).
The song begins:
I wrote the song two hours before we met
I didn't know your name or what you looked like yet
Oh, I could have stayed at home and gone to bed
I could have gone to see a film instead
You might have changed your mind and seen your friends
Life could have been very different but then
Something changed—Pulp, A Different Class, ‘Something Changed’
This is an economical encapsulation of the way we reverse engineer our life stories so that the insignificant becomes significant after the fact. I can personalise this to the extent that meeting my partner of more than thirteen years turned on a decision, aged 15, on where I ate lunch one day at school. Because I went to the music block, I saw a poster for a school trip, ended up three years later working at the youth centre we visited, and five years after that attending the birthday party of friend who had been a colleague from that centre, and so meeting her. Was that lunchtime decision a magical Sliding Doors-type moment on which my subsequent life turned? Yes and no: that decision becomes significant only from the current vantage point, and only because I can isolate it. In being able to identify the contingency—was it the weather? Some other errand? Ringing the changes?—it becomes tempting to endow the random decision with a mystical quality. But that decision, in turn, was built upon an infinite regression of previous decisions, stretching way back through my life and every generation preceding it. In truth, every moment, every decision, every turning point of contingency is such a moment when, in retrospect, ‘something changed’ whether or not we can isolate it in a chain of storytelling. But if this is true of all decisions, all moments, then it is utterly unremarkable and its significance in the eye of the storytelling beholder. The process of storytelling is the artificial selection and ordering of them, creating significance of these turns. If we fail to select, then we fail to have a story. The film Wonder Boys reproduces this tragic possibility.
Grady Tripp is a novelist, much celebrated for his success with his first novel, but many years overdue with his follow up. This unfinished novel has grown to epic proportions and is now over 2,600 pages long with no end in sight. Hannah Green, Grady’s student-cum-lodger discovers the manuscript of Grady’s gigantic opus and is disquieted by what she reads. Tentatively, she offers Grady her verdict.
Grady, you know how in class you're always telling us that writers make choices? [...] And even though your book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it's... it's at times... it's... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. And... I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't really make any choices... At all.
—Wonder Boys, Universal Pictures, 2000
Hannah encapsulates the dilemma of the novelist—that heightened version of the pattern-finding, storytelling animal—which is more generally explored in ‘Something Changed’. Stories operate by selection, by omission, and crucially by choice-making. We know experientially that we exist within this tension: any story moves within its cultures by virtue of choice making and yet it is easy to become intoxicated by detail. We sometimes act in the belief that if we could record just enough of the fullness of reality, we would truly be ready to make a good enough choice. This glutted paralysis, the stasis of those who refuse to choose is a tragic reality.
But this question of choice itself is not unproblematic, as Cocker goes on to explore:
Do you believe that there's someone up above?
And does he have a timetable directing acts of love?
Why did I write this song on that one day?— Pulp, A Different Class, Something Changed
In recognising, with hindsight, the significance of a seemingly random decision in which one could have “stayed at home and gone to bed/[… or] could have gone to see a film instead” is, in fact, a choice upon which everything changed, a double habit of the narrative mind can be observed: it becomes a story, and from a story becomes a destiny and from a destiny, it takes on a moral weight: how things not only are, but must and indeed should have been. To an extent, this is correct: if we are antiessentialists, and so have dispensed with the idea of a soul, or an essential, unchanging self, in order to not only exist here and now, but to be whatever the you that you are, everything that has happened up to now, did indeed have to happen. Change any contingent fact and you would not exist—or at least be a different you, a different node of reality, a differently arranged mystery of consciousness, a different corner of the universe mysteriously aware of itself. It does not require “someone up above [… possessed of] a timetable directing acts of love” because, had contingency shaken out in a different way, we would exist differently and be narratively accounting for each contingent choice with the same wonder. The comic Tim Minchin has created a parallel meditation on the mathematical probabilities of romance (“Look, I'm not undervaluing what we've got when I say / That, given the role chaos inevitably plays / In the inherently flawed notion of fate / It's abstruse to deduce that I found my soulmate / At the age of 17 / It's just mathematically unlikely that at a university in Perth / I happened to stumble on the one girl on Earth / Specifically designed for me”) which despite the refrain “If I didn't have you… someone else would do” ends up being touchingly romantic discounting of all other possibilities and a treasuring of reality as it is, contingency and all. It is a narrative trick to imagine that, because we got here, nothing could ever have been otherwise. The truth is that from where we are, everything that was had to be, but these are not the same proposition—and neither require a cosmic author, because real life is not a story but a confusion, and the story is the retrospective refitting to make that confusion one with which we can live. In one famous formulation,
It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals IV A 164 (1843)
In that forward motion, there is no story. And in the ‘backwards understanding’ of the story we do not divine truths about that life, but create them. To complicate the picture further—in an attempt to answer Cocker’s ‘Why?’ questions, it is worth engaging with Sam Harris’ disquieting and invigorating second book, Free Will. For Harris, free will is a persistent illusion of consciousness. He believes he can both empirically demonstrate its illusory nature (partly through the experience of meditation which he has endeavoured to popularise through his writing, broadcasting, and in the form of his Waking Up app) and that this experience need not lead to a quietism in the world: his proposition is determinism, not fatalism. This is not a world in which nothing can be done, but one in which the primacy of the agency of the individual is undermined (a lesson, somewhat frustratingly, that Harris himself often fails to follow through with in his unrelated work, though that is a whole other set of questions!)
During the live promotions of the book, Harris would regularly take the audience through a first-person experiment which we can re-run as you read this. Harris invites you to think of a city, any city, and pay attention to the conscious process of choosing. With all the cities of the world to choose from, this is “as free a decision as you’re ever likely to make” he claims, so this is where we will find evidence for free will should it be there. Having ‘freely chosen’ we can notice that it’s impossible to pick a city whose name you don’t know, so freedom of choice recedes only to those encountered through the contingencies of your knowledge and experience to date. Then, of all the names of which you did not choose but knew, many of them simply didn’t arise in your consciousness, (you may know the name Bogotá… why didn’t you think of it?) as you weighed up the options. Harris asks, “were you free to choose, that which it did not occur to you to choose? […] Where is the freedom in that?” As you run the experiment in your head, any reason you can offer for why you chose what you chose “I love Paris… I lived in London… I’ll choose Tokyo because I have no connection with it, and that makes it a more wilful act of freedom” is, at the very least, contingent upon non-freedoms: can you choose to love—or not to love—Paris? What complex compulsions of economics, family dynamics, chance led you to live in London? Why is Tokyo even in your mind—you’re not freely or otherwise willing that to mind? And if in as simple a choice, as free from external compulsion as this, does not reveal any sort of freedom of our will when we look for it… where does this leave this most precious commodity of Judeo-Christian culture?
Free will, at least as we usually understand it, emerges from this experiment as another after-the-fact narrative impulse, an imposition on the random chaos of our own minds, a selection which gives order to the uncontrollable. How can we hold a discreet individual responsible for their actions if, rather than a soul, or essential self navigating free choices, in fact everything that was, had to be for them to be this corner of reality reflecting on itself in this moment? If we make history in circumstances not of our choosing, we can only be partially responsible for that history and punitive responsibility becomes senseless. However, we do still make history and—collectively, if not individually—this reinstalls a radical responsibility as it reconfigures it. And to return to our source material, Harris’ simple thought experiment productively undermines the anxieties of the speaker in the lyrics of the Pulp song:
When we woke up that morning we had no way of knowing
That in a matter of hours we'd change the way we were going
Where would I be now, where would I be now if we'd never met?
Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?
I don't know but like you just said
Something changed— Pulp, A Different Class, Something Changed
These doubts are answered not only by Tim Minchin’s cheekier take (“If I didn’t have you/Someone else would probably do”) but further by undermining the ethical usefulness of questions of why. In a somewhat deterministic world, we are living in a narrative tension between what is controllable and what is not. As well as removing punitive blame from our criminal justice system and our interpersonal relationships, a scepticism about free will, as invited by Jarvis Cocker, clears the ethical decks of some of the illusions which storytelling creates, allowing a focus on that which is truly up for grabs and, perhaps, the wisdom to determine this.
Narrators are always unreliable. Stories can only ever be a selection, but examining their structure can help us clear the decks and examine the nature of reality more keenly. The awareness that we live our lives through stories inexorably leads us to an understanding that we do so in a context we did not create. A story, like Grady’s from Wonder Boys, without selection, without choice, is a parody of a story, not one in which we can live. The risk in living a life over-determined by narrative, like Tristram Shandy attempting to capture everything, is that we can wait two-thirds or more of a life and only just be born. These awarenesses, even if a scepticism about free will problematises them at an individual level, affirms and confirms the necessity of reconciling ourselves with our vital choice-making capacity as a species—almost paradoxically, a species comprised of a collectivity of individuals. This choice-making capacity was, for Jean-Paul Sartre, what made humans ‘transcendent beings’ that could move from ‘the real’ to ‘the not yet real’.
Even if, at the level of each individual life we are devoid of free will and live even somewhat deterministic lives, we can still, collectively, alter the context for those unwilled determinations. By telling stories we can create collective possibilities for living that we can imagine, but which do not yet exist. An encultured, storytelling animal—if it is to live in hope—is necessarily a choice-making collective creature.
In foregoing a series of narrative illusions—illusions created through reverse engineering the chaos of contingency into stories—a series of sacred cows begin to dissolve: the stable self, destiny, a divine author, a free-floating subject, even free will, certainly an essential self, all begin to crumble. They become problematics which were only ever contingent on the illusions of narrative. And from there, new collective possibilities in the current, transcendent moment, open up.
Or, to put it another way, we come full circle, to the advice of the lover in the Pulp song.
Why did I write this song on that one day?
Why did you touch my hand and softly say
"Stop asking questions that don't matter anyway
Just give us a kiss to celebrate here today"
Something changed.— Pulp, A Different Class, Something Changed
