Avoiding Decisions

Most of the phobias known to behavioral scientists are relatively rare afflictions. There are, for example, only a few victims of erythrophobia (the fear of blushing) and fewer yet of melissophobia (fear of bees) or panto-phobia (fear of everything). But Princeton University Philosopher Walter Kaufmann says that there is one age-old but hitherto unrecognized fear that is nearly universal. It is "decidophobia" --the morbid dread of making fateful decisions.

In his forthcoming book Beyond Guilt and Justice, to be published next winter, Kaufmann states that contemporary man has succumbed to decidophobia and in the process limited his freedom to mold his character and shape his future. The decidophobe often restricts himself, Kaufmann says, by making one of ten major choices that automatically eliminates the need for many future decisions.

The most popular choice is marriage. "On being married," Kaufmann writes, "millions of women echo Ruth's beautiful words in the Bible: 'Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.' Henceforth they will make no more fateful decisions; they will leave that to their husbands." For men as well as women, marriage is sometimes only a way of avoiding lonely choices. If joint decisions turn out badly, neither partner need feel responsible; each can claim that, left to his own devices, he might have acted differently. In other cases, marital partners make no decisions at all; they just talk "until something transpires," which was "one of the main features of the whole arrangement from the start."

Another common choice or "strategy" is religion, which makes clear distinctions for the faithful between good acts and bad ones. Monasticism, particularly, requires what Kaufmann calls "one great decision, once--to renounce the prerogative of making major decisions." Monks and nuns, he points out, do not even have to decide where to live or with whom. Both inside and outside the cloister, however, the choice of religion as a strategy is becoming less effective; more and more clergymen are daring to reach their own moral conclusions and voice them in public.

Status Quoism. Surrogates for religion, Kaufmann says, include political movements like the New Left, and schools of thought such as analytical philosophy, Marxism and psychoanalysis. Once he has become a true believer, the decidophobe has only the enjoyable decisions to make: "One has chosen the flames and the rules and can have a good time planning one's moves."

Sometimes, decidophobia results in making no moves at all, and that is a strategy in itself. Kaufmann calls it drifting, and says it comes in two forms. One is the "status quoism" common to over-30 conservatives who cling to ancient decisions; the other is the "inauthenticity" of rebellious young people who scorn all traditions, have "no ties, no code, no major purpose," and rarely know in advance what they will do next.

Kaufmann is not opposed to marriage, religion, schools of thought or youthful rebellion. He believes in commitments based on responsible--and revocable--decisions. "The free man," he writes, "does not treat his own conclusions as authoritative; he chooses with open eyes and then keeps his eyes open," admitting, if necessary, "that he may have been wrong even about matters of the greatest importance." Easier said than done; as Kaufmann admits, it is hard to find people who have mastered decidophobia. In the ancient world, he says, Socrates did so; among contemporaries, he cites the Russian novelist Solzhenitsyn.

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