Another Way of Knowing

Robert Wolff: Freedom Contra Choice

The following is excerpted from Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing by social psychologist Robert Wolff. (Note that the title of this excerpt, “Freedom Contra Choice”, is mine not Wolff’s. However, the subheadings and divisions designated by three tildes (~~~) are his.)

Wolff has a nicely relaxed, rather meandering style of telling stories, so at first you may wonder if he’s ever going to get to something “important.” Rest assured he indeed is circling in on a critical insight, so be patient and keep reading.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Assumptions

My first career position was government psychologist in Suriname, a developing country in South America. I had worked before, of course, but this, I thought, would be the first step on my career ladder. Little did I know that this ladder not only went up, but it also went around the world.

While we were in Suriname, Life magazine photographed the jungles around Paramaribo, the capital city, for what later became the issue on the tropical rain forest in the series “The World We Live In.” The country lies a few degrees above the equator. It is hot and humid and densely forested. Then, there were few roads - one traveled on the rivers in steamboats or dugout canoes.

Suriname had been a colony first of England, then of Holland, and now had a new sort of independence. The original population was Native Caribbean American. They call themselves Arawak. They were displaced by African slaves a few hundred years ago. Because of the dense jungle, a majority of slaves escaped almost immediately and were never captured. Instead, these slaves who liberated themselves established a seventeenth-century African culture in the interior of Suriname. A hundred years ago they made peace with the government of the Netherlands. The Djuka, as they called themselves then, controlled the interior; the Dutch ruled a narrow strip along the coast, with the capital, Paramaribo, and few other small towns. Today Suriname is independent.

The colonists were certain that they were unable to work in that environment. They were probably right - they wore too many clothes for a tropical jungle, but they also thought themselves vastly superior to people who did not have their kind of civilization. So workers had to come from elsewhere. After the abolition of slavery, people from South Asia (now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) and later from Java could be talked into signing contracts as indentured laborers. Although the contracts guaranteed that they would be returned home after their term was served, many chose to stay.

In Suriname all people mixed indiscriminately. The palette of skin colors there is unique in the world. There may be few African blacks (also called blue-blacks), but there is every other shade of black, brown, beige, yellow, and almost-white.

Suriname has aluminum ore that is mined by Alcoa, the United States aluminum company. Some people worked for Alcoa, a few people grew food - and a few even found gold nuggets in the jungle and smuggled them to Miami - but there was not much of anything people could do to make a living except work for the government, the largest employer in the country at that time.

Very soon after we arrived I heard that some of the department heads and other bosses felt that workers were lazy and ambitious. That surprised me because people I had befriended seemed happy, active men and women, always ready to improve themselves. Since there was no institution of higher learning in the country, they wrote away for correspondence classes. It was only later that I learned that my friends often took courses that had little or nothing to do with their work. But the students felt they were improving themselves, not their work skills. They desperately wanted to learn and they found learning where they could.

After I was hired I was asked, What does a psychologist do? I had two degrees in psychology, one of them a brand-new, untested degree in social psychology from a famous American university. I thought I knew survey technology; I was supposed to know how to construct, conduct, analyze, and interpret an “attitude survey.” So when I was asked what a psychologist does, I explained attitude surveys, sampling, research in general, the importance of validity and reliability - none of which was an answer to the question, of course. Then I said that a psychologist finds out what people are really like, not what other people think they are like.

Undoubtedly I explained too much. I got no reaction. I thought the subject closed. In fact, I almost forgot about it.

Someone knew, however, that psychologists also administer tests. I was put to work testing children in a newly established child guidance clinic. My first official action had to be telling my superior that we could not use any of the tests he had ordered because the tests were designed for Western-educated children. Local children spoke a different language, had a very different culture, and could not be expected to be within norms developed elsewhere. We invented other tests and we managed.

~ ~ ~

About a year later, when I had almost forgotten my earlier conversation about what a psychologist does, a notice in the local paper screamed: The Government hereby announces that the Government Psychologist will conduct a scientific study to find out why people are so lazy. All people are notified that they must cooperate!

I protested. I tried to make my superiors understand that under the circumstances I could not do a valid study. They agreed to wait six months, while I carefully and secretly designed a survey and hoped people would forget the notice in the newspaper.

Our survey would ask a sample of government employees questions about their attitudes toward work. When we did a trial run, we discovered that few people had ever taken a multiple-choice test. Our trial run failed miserably. I revised my ideas and designed an interview study. We changed the questions somewhat and trained interviewers.

Through this we discovered that it was not the format after all, but the questions that were wrong. Too many people could not answer the questions our interviewers asked. For instance, after a section in which interviewers asked employees what their jobs were (by jobs we meant careers), we asked, “If you were not doing what you are doing now, what would you prefer to do?” A common enough question in the West, which I expected would lead people to express their satisfaction with their job, and perhaps even their motivation and ambition.

Instead I was met with blank stares.

To our question they responded, “What I am doing now.” They asked, What else would we be doing? Yes, definitely, what they were doing now.

~ ~ ~

At the children’s clinic, meanwhile, I had been trying to use a test that was commonly used in Europe and America at that time. I would give the children a plain piece of paper and some colored crayons and ask them to draw something, anything.

To my astonishment, of the children who were given the test (263, at first), only two produced anything at all. The rest sat with dead faces. Ages varied, but all the children were primary school age. Their average age was eight and a half.

The Draw Something, Anything test had been discussed extensively in psychology books and journal; there were established norms to interpret the work that children would produce. The test was considered to be cross-cultural; it could be used in any culture without bias, the experts said. And yet here was a population where children between the ages of six and ten years old did not produce anything that could be analyzed.

I thought of several explanations. Perhaps paper and pencil were strange to them (I was wrong about that). Or, I thought, they were scared of me because I am white. I got along with the children well enough and had never sensed any fear in them, but in a country of people of all imaginable colors, few were as white as I am. I asked a native teacher to help me administer the test. She asked the children to draw something, anything.

Same result: blank stares.

[…]

The [work] survey was barely limping along when a man came to see me. Although uneducated, he was obviously intelligent and insightful. He said that because he thought I liked the country’s people, he wanted to help me.

“It is very simple,” he said. “People here have not had much choice about anything. We do not think in terms of what we would rather be doing. When a boy reaches the age when it is thought that he’d better do something to stay out of trouble, the first job that comes along is what he does. When it is time for him to get a woman, the first woman that comes along who is willing, is his woman.”

Very simple, indeed.

Immediately I made the obvious connection with the Draw Something, Anything test. What would happen, I wondered, if I asked the children to draw a house, or their mother, or themselves? They all drew with gusto and no little skill. All along it was not that they could not draw, what blocked them was my instruction to draw something, anything. They needed to be told what to draw. The children had no difficulty expressing themselves, imagining, creating, but they had never been given that much choice, that much freedom.

I discussed this with teachers and others. Yes, they all agreed, the way people had been living did not allow many choices, so that such an open-ended direction to draw something, anything, might well be meaningless to the children, perhaps even frightening.

I can choose between carrots and tomatoes if both vegetables are on a dish in front of me. But when there is only one vegetable, and from past experience I know that is all there is, it would be foolish of me to say what I would rather have. I take what is offered.

Now I understand the stares we received when we asked some of the questions on the survey. They had never been asked those kinds of question before. People had never thought about what they would rather do. They did whatever work there was. Because choosing was not something people had much practice with, choosing an imaginary alternative was simply not in their experience.

~ ~ ~

The survey became a much larger project than I had foreseen. I had to reconsider questions that would have been routine if we had done this survey in a Western country. This was not a Western country, however.

We could no longer ask what people would rather do. Instead we read them little stories with the idea that by identifying with the people in the story, they could tell us what they thought the people in the story would choose. After doing some trial tests, that seemed to work well enough.

In the end, when we had rewritten the questions several times, when we thought we had good, reliable information, when we had analyzed all the information forward and backward … I found that it was the questions I had asked myself that were wrong. I had made assumptions about human behavior that might have made sense in a Western society, but they made no sense in Suriname at that time.

Of course, Surinamers were not lazy - far from it. They sacrificed their own time and money to take correspondence courses. True, the courses they took often had no bearing on their jobs, but acquiring new or better job skills was not why they took them.

I had assumed that workers thought as Westerners do: the better you do a job, the more income you will get. Therefore it is to your advantage to learn things that help you do a better job. I assumed that was how people everywhere thought about work. These assumptions are so basic in our society that we are not aware that we hold them. In Suriname at that time, however, your worth was not determined by what you did, or how well you did it, but by your becoming a better person.

Most families we knew wanted the children to become better people. They had not learned that in a Western world it does not pay to acquire a general education, but it is important to have better training for a specific job.

Someone told me, “It is not so much what you have [training, skill, or even money] that determines your worth, but who you are [a good person].”

~ ~ ~

In tribal societies one’s worth comes from the tribe one belongs to, not from individual skills or competence. In Suriname, government employees knew, of course, that they no longer lived in a tribal society, but they felt that they now belonged to the government. They were proud to belong to the government, which they called papa govn’men. It was a prestigious tribe to belong to. And to show their pride as well as their appreciation, they took correspondence courses to better themselves. You did your tribe proud by becoming a better person.

It did not occur to people that an employer might not care whether you were a better person. The employer was interested in hiring a better-qualified employee, or a better-educated employee, or a more ambitious employee who might acquire new job-related skills.

The expectations of employer and employee were very different. Employers grumbled because employees were lazy, they said, or unambitious. But the behavior they judged lazy or unambitious was rooted in tribal thinking. Employers thought as Westerners think. Employers lived in one reality, the reality of the West. Employees lived in a very different reality: the reality of a tribal people.

~ ~ ~

Some years later I met a very sophisticated university professor from Suriname’s neighboring country, Guyana. He was bitter and quite outspoken about what he called the colonial experience: “Their [the colonists] whole culture is designed to imprint on us [the colonized] that they are better than we. They tell us that we must strive to become like them, lords and ladies. But we cannot become lords and ladies. We shall always be less.”

He spoke impeccable, immaculate BBC English. If you had not seen his dark brown skin, you certainly might have thought him Lord something or other.

Surinamers, perhaps, felt less as well, and perhaps believed that improving themselves would buy entry into the civilized world.

~ ~ ~

I learned that I cannot make assumptions about what drives people, nor can I make generalizations about what people are really like, until I can stand in their shoes, so to speak.

My apologies to the blank-faced children whom I asked to draw something, anything. They had not learned to choose. They never had to choose - there had been few possibilities for choices in their lives.

Draw Something, Anything

It is a long way from a world with few choices to our world with too many choices, and new choices emerging every day. Choosing has come to be one of the central aspects of our Western way of life. We cannot do anything, go anywhere, without having to choose. What shall I wear? What do I want to eat for breakfast? We teach babies early to choose from an abundance of toys.

It took me some time to realize that choosing is an activity that is overvalued in our world and causes much frustration. To me, it is not important whether I buy this product or another; it is more important to maintain my sanity. For important decisions I have come to trust my intuition, my dreams, a feeling that I should turn this way rather than that.

We have designed a society that puts choices in our way all the time. We must choose services: a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber. Have you ever moved to a new city and had to choose a doctor at night? Or agonized over how to choose an electrician or a carpenter in an emergency?

How do we choose a profession? What criteria do we use to choose a mate? How do we choose a religion?

Choosing has become the quintessential aspect of Western society. Most other people of this world do not choose often, if at all. Life is what is front of you.

And what do we do when it comes to new choices, choices our parents never had to make? People have always known how to prevent becoming pregnant and in this century it has become feasible to choose the number of children you have, but must we now also choose our children’s gender? Do we want to abort a fetus that is known to carry the gene for Down’s syndrome? Those are choices our parents could not even dream would one day become important decisions. Our forebearers would have thought those choices sinful, or presumptuous.

How do we choose who shall live? Modern medical technology can keep a body living long past the point when, ten or twenty years ago, it would have died a natural death. Keeping a body alive, however, with machines and people to service those machines, is expensive. It costs much more than most of us can afford - and often more than insurance companies are willing to reimburse. Do we expect society to pay for machines to keep a body breathing? Society does not have deep pockets anymore. How must it decide who shall continue to breathe and who shall be allowed to die a natural death? Should doctors decide?

There are so many choices, so many alternatives to everything we do, or want, that we have had to learn that sometimes the best choice is not to choose.

We may not want to choose a doctor, or a lawyer, or a plumber, or a new dress, or another career. Perhaps we want to trust luck, or whatever comes our way, or what is available while staying within a budget, or what is available in our neighborhood, or choose only on days that we feel like it.

Because our world has become a world of chaotic overabundance, we feel stressed. The stresses we feel are in large part the result of the overwhelming number of alternatives we must choose from, but also the result of the fact that we have had no time to develop an ethic to help us choose. The headlong rush into new technologies and new ideas, without the time to consider consequences, makes it almost impossible for us to choose. How can we have an opinion about something that did not exist yesterday?

Do we really want experts to choose for us?

We are learning to be leery of expert advice. All too often we find, twenty years later, that the experts were no more expert that we were, that they too were ignorant of the long-term effects of a new drug, a new chemical to control pests, a new way to generate energy. We are beginning to disbelieve experts, distrust authorities and those who claim to know what is best for us.

We call this mad dance freedom.

We are proud to be a society of free people, by which we mean people who are free to choose, people who, in fact, must choose - endlessly, all day - often making choices from alternatives that are so new that we have not had time even to imagine their consequences. We are choosing in a fog.

~ ~ ~

Not long ago, most people - almost all people - had few choices they could make.

A million years ago I did not have to choose what I ate. I ate what I could find or catch. I did not have to choose whom I married, or where I lived, or how many children I had.

Even a few hundred years ago - almost everywhere in the world, except perhaps western Europe - I spent my life where I was born, with the people of my tribe. I did what my father did, or perhaps what a maternal uncle did. I married the girl next door, or at most a few doors away. I aet what everyone else ate, most likely what there was available to eat. I wore whatever everyone else wore. I belonged to the religion of my forebears. I died and was buried in the same cemetery where my parents and their parents were buried, or was cremated as they were cremated. I did not have to choose much.

How much simpler life was when we had a bard who sang the songs he knew and we knew as well. How much simpler when there was one healer in our village, and she did not expect me to tell her what was wrong because she knew. I did not pay her, although she often expected a gift at midwinter. If the roof leaked, neighbors helped repair it. If the soles of my shoes were worn, the village cobbler repaired them. We ate what was in season. We traded eggs for vegetables, perhaps, or milk for a wool sweater.

Not a bad time, on the whole. A time when a major decision might be whether I should go on a vision quest now or later.

Today we go on a vision quest over the weekend. We take shamanic training at a two-day workshop that is repeated every few weeks for others who want to learn whatever it is that a particular teacher has to say about shamanism. There are a hundred others who will teach us differently what they think shamanism is. There are undoubtedly catalogs that will list the various shamanic traditions we can learn.

Having so many alternatives serves only to devalue all of them.

What has made life in the Western world so stressful is that we think we must choose among a chaos of products and services. Frankly, neither the products nor the services work well anymore - we are in too much of a hurry to give much thought to consequences while we make money, invent new gadgets, start new fads, create new everything. Our very existence on this planet is threatened because, in our haste, we have made - and continue to make - bad choices.

Stress is the price we pay for affluence - an affluence that in the end is little more than a glut of increasingly meaningless choices.

If someone would tell me today to draw something, anything, I too would stare into space with a blank look on my face.

Too many choices.