College Literature

"I WAS NOT TO BLAME"

For the past ten years, I have been co-teaching a course with Morton Schapiro, a professor of economics and the president of Northwestern University. That course led to a book we wrote, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities. We are currently working on a sequel, on what humanists can learn from economics. That book will of course be called: Price and Prejudice.

Our course focuses on a theme many disciplines share: the nature of decision-making. Every model of decision-making is implicitly a model of time or, as Mikhail Bakhtin would say, it presupposes a [End Page 575] chronotope, so our course is also about temporality. For decisions and choices to be real, rather than resembling Soviet elections in which voters chose among one candidate, there must be more than one possible outcome. That is why determinists can offer at best a pale, sickly version of choice. By definition, a determinist is someone who believes that at any given moment one and only one thing can happen. Or, as William James phrased the point, for an indeterminist there are more possibilities than actualities and for a determinist there are not.¹ Choice, chance, and contingency all demand an indeterminist view of the world.

If we do have choices, how do and how should we make them? As we structured the course, disciplines are distinguished by how they answer this question. One can define economics as a discipline about how people choose to allocate scarce resources. Theologians have asked how choice can be real if God foresees what we do and made the world knowing everything that would happen. How then can we be held responsible for our choices? In what sense are they choices (and in what sense are they not choices)?

If one substitutes "natural laws" for an omniscient God, the same question arises. Once again everything is determined in advance. As Omar Khayyam wrote, "And the first Morning of Creation wrote / What the last Dawn of Reckoning shall read" (1120, st. 73). Again we can ask whether people can be held responsible for outcomes dictated from all eternity.

Realist novels, my own specialty, explore the inner world in which choices are made (or avoided). The concerns of several disciplines appear in Anna Karenina when Stiva, caught by his wife in infidelity, thinks: "It's all my fault—all my fault, but I'm not to blame, that's the whole point of the situation" (Tolstoy 1965, 4). How can it be one's fault (vina) and one not be to blame (vinovat)? What Stiva means is that although the act happened through his choice, there was no other choice that he, a healthy, susceptible thirty-four-yearold man, could have made. It's just nature. When people want to excuse their behavior, they argue they could have done nothing else. Determinism is the first refuge of a scoundrel.

Later in the novel Stiva's sister Anna tells Stiva's wife Dolly: "But I was not to blame. And who is to blame? What's the meaning of being to blame? Could it have been otherwise? What do you think? Could it possibly have happened that you didn't become the wife of Stiva?" "Really, I don't know" (Tolstoy 1965, 664) answers Dolly, who recognizes an evasion when she hears one. [End Page 576]

THE HOLY GHOST OF ATHEISTS

One must understand time to understand choice because every choice involves predictions. The chooser entertains what Bertrand de Jouvenal famously called "futuribles," possible futures that could take place, depending on what we do or do not do. We often have a hazy sense of futuribles, and so we must...