I celebrated my fortieth birthday with my family in Door County today. I am resisting the temptation to scribe something particularly moving or insightful about this event. I might attempt to develop a full rhetoric in defense of eudaimonia. However, Aristotle has already expertly articulated the ethics of a life in pursuit of happiness. I won’t expand upon his treatment except to comment on the soundness of his guidance and remark on my renewed agreement with the path. Aristotle argues for a definition of happiness as active virtue in concert with reason: living and doing well. Happiness is not a passive state; it is an active pursuit. A goal to strive for, rather than a reward to passively receive. This approach is the correct one. And this approach results in a life of choice continually made.

In a related but perhaps more culturally relevant reference to this choice — or at least a reference to a piece of work from this decade and not two millennium ago — I’ve had the song “Times Like These” by the Foo Fighters in my mind over the last several days. This stanza, a reference to the Hüsker Dü album New Day Rising, particularly resonates with me on this day.

I am a new day rising.
I’m a brand new sky
To hang the stars upon tonight.

I first came across the term “option paralysis” in the spring of 1992 while reading Douglas Coupland‘s first novel, Generation X. I thought it was brilliant insight at the time. The intervening eighteen years have only reconfirmed my opinion. Coupland included dozens of neologisms in the book’s page margins. Most of the remain thought-provoking and relevant to me today. And I continue to find humor in the irony embedded in many of them. Some of my favorites include:

• Option Paralysis : The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.
• Musical Hairsplitting : The act of classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: “The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska.”
• Knee-Jerk Irony : The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.
• Obscurism : The practice of peppering daily life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular books, defunct countries, etc.) as a means of showcasing one’s education and one’s wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture.
• Status Substitution : Using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: “Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother’s BMW.”
• Ultra Short Term Nostalgia : Homesickness for the extremely recent past: “God, things seemd so much better in the world last week.”

In 2005, Barry Schwartz gave a TED Talk titled “The Paradox of Choice.” While I doubt he is referred to Douglas Coupland directly, it appears to me as if Schwartz expanded the idea of option paralysis from Coupland’s nine curt words into a nineteen minute talk. Schwartz explored the sociological ramifications of the central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. I found it fascinating. When scanning the reactions and comments I think Schwartz is unfairly criticized for the talk being entirely negative with regards to options. The fulcrum lies almost eight minutes into the talk after Schwartz has introduced the topic and is about to head into the meat of the criticism. He says:

So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this. That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. And the world we now live in looks like this. And the question is, is this good news, or bad news? And the answer is yes.

During this section he produces two slides: cartoons from the New Yorker. The first — the summary of world we used to live in — is a cartoon of Moses holding the tablets, addressing the multitude: “Well, actually, they are written in stone.” The second — the summary of the world we live in now — is cartoon of blank tablets, hammer and chisel by its side: “The Ten Commandments Do-It-Yourself Kit.” The cartoons both illustrate his point and provide some levity. Watch the talk yourself to get the full effect.

The counterpoint I want to make to those who criticize the talk as entirely negative with respect to choice. I want to emphasize the last two sentences of that transitional paragraph: is freedom of choice good or bad? The answer is yes. Schwartz’ premise is that freedom of choice is both a positive and a negative force in our lives. He starts into his critique with the statement, “We all know what’s good about it, so I’m going to talk about what’s bad about it.” There’s room to criticize him somewhat for the reluctance to underline the benefits, but he is on a pretty short leash in terms of time for the talk and I think his premise of freedom of choice as a basic beneficial tenet of modern industrialized Western society is correct. We don’t need to hear that part. We know it to be true. And that’s where Schwartz wants to challenge us.

Schwartz goes on for the next ten minutes giving succinct, compelling arguments about how choice has contributed to a form of social paralysis. He draws anecdotes from a number of sources: his experience buying a new pair of jeans, the adoption rate of employer matching monies in mutual fund, a psychology of value based on comparison.

The entire talk is filled with humor. Schwartz is an effective speaker. And like so many good TED talks, his speech transcends that platform of humorous rhetoric to provide voice to a critical big idea. As a society we may take freedom of choice as an unquestioned good. I think it is important to occasionally ask ourselves the question: is it? is it really?

I’ve written some about my college education. I attended Wabash College from the fall of 1988 until I graduated in the spring of 1992 with a Bachelor’s of Arts degree in philosophy and German. Wabash College is a liberal arts college for men. Wabash’s curriculum is designed to impart general knowledge across a broad spectrum of topics. More importantly, the curriculum is designed to foster independent inquiry, critical thought, and clear expression both oral and written. To read purposefully, think critically, and write effectively.

I have relied on this educational foundation in everything I have accomplished since college. More than any particular formula, anecdote or algorithm these principles have served me well. I believe in the liberal arts and I defend them as a true and valued principle of higher education: increasingly necessary in a more complicated, connected world.

I came across Liz Coleman‘s recent TED Talk, “Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education” in the past week. Coleman presents a powerful dissection of the state of higher education and revival of the power and necessity of the liberal arts. I was overjoyed. Liz Coleman is the president of Bennington College. In the mid-1990s she deployed a radical plan to reinvent the college and the liberal arts the college entrusts.

The complaint: “Over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment.”

A solution: Develop a framework of higher education as an active pursuit — a performing art for public good. Include rhetoric, design, meditation, improvisation, and quantitative reasoning alongside the canon of traditional topics. On technology she reminds us that we must acknowledge that the more powerful our reach of our voices the more important the question “About what?”

Specialization obfuscates problems. Specialization constructs a world of silos: people working alongside one another never fully realizing the interconnectedness of what each other does. Specialization creates a world of blinders, or worse yet a world of the blind leading the uninterested. To this end I found this statement one of Coleman’s most powerful:

“The most important discovery we made in our focus on public action was to appreciate that the hard choices are not between good and evil but between competing goods. This discovery is transforming. It undercuts self-righteousness, radically alters the tone and character of controversy, and enriches dramatically the possibility for finding common ground. Idolatry, zealotry, unsubstantiated opinions simply won’t do. This is a political education to be sure. But it is a politics of principle not of partisanship. [….] We the people have become inured to our own irrelevance when it comes to doing anything significant about anything that matters concerning governance, beyond waiting another four years. [….] The problem is there is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators.”

I am encouraged to hear such a powerful appreciation for the generalist, for the soundness of the liberal arts, updated with a call to public action. For too long our culture has turned introverted to the point of selfishness and conceded the spheres of philanthropy, charity and welfare to religion. And perhaps more importantly than concern for our fellow man, but the concession of even thinking about the larger interconnectedness of systems. Particularly as they impact concepts such as justice, equity and truth.

I came across Coleman’s talk just a day after reading the following line from F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and maybe a week before my own birthday. Birthday’s and New Years Day are two moments that bring out a particularly strong tendency toward introspection and self-evaluation: “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”