The Road Taken

Robert Frost’s most famous poem (The Road Not Taken) owes its popularity, in part, to its universality: I mean, who has not stood at a crossroads, literally or figuratively, and wondered, “Which path should I take?” 100 times a day every day! Arguably, choice is the paradigmatic human experience. Bewilderment is the essence of who we are.

Frost knows where he is and where he’s going; but he has reached a fork in the road. Two paths lie before him, both going to the same destination. He can’t change where he is, and his destination is predetermined; but everything along the way is up for grabs. ‘Along the way’ – that’s what we call ‘life’, isn’t it? We are en transit. 

Yes…but not so fast. It’s what most of us call ‘life’; but that’s by no means set in stone. Today, we are all about the journey; we read the Odyssey. In times past, folks were more into origins and destinies. They read the Iliad. 

IRL? Your status at birth used to be the principal determinant of your identity and value. First born son or third born daughter? Under the sheets…or atop them? Noble or peasant? Bourgeoise or proletarian? College Course or Industrial Arts? Fortunately, less so today.

Or your status at death! Fame, legacy, progeny. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.” (Shelley) “He who has the most toys wins.” (My parents’ generation)

Plus, the fate of your immortal soul was not settled until your final breath. “…At the hour of our death, Amen.” (Ave Maria) Only then could St. Peter label you sheep or goat, grain or chaff. Everything was about the finale.  

All of this seems rather strange to us today. Now, we regard birth (Alpha) as a lottery and death (Omega) as the inevitable outcome of playing Russian Roulette. 

An aficionado of the Ancien Regime might chime in, “Yes, but in those days the path from Alpha to Omega was less eventful, more of a straight line, varying little from trip to trip or from traveler to traveler. The journey didn’t matter so much; it was more noise than information, more obstacle than path; it was just a means to an end”:

A

↓

Ω

A friend once captured this spirit in me: “For you, a car is just a means of transportation.” Exactly! Call me old school. My trips derive their meaning and value from their launch (purpose) and their landing (result). Everything on the way, the way itself, is wandering. 

Robert Frost offers a different, but still simple, alternative:

A

↙        ↘

x                x’

↘           ↙

Ω

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”  Origin and destiny are hardwired. It’s the chosen path that is undetermined, that generates information. We cannot change our A or our Ω, but we can control, or at least influence, everything in between. That’s called agency, or free will. 

You bristle! “What do you mean, my origin and destiny are hardwired? And how can you say my freedom consists of nothing more than the choice between two pre-set paths? What kind of freedom is that?”

Fair points! But it’s the ‘free’ kind of freedom…by which I mean, it’s all there is, it’s all there ever could be. How so?

First, every choice, no matter how broad, can ultimately be reduced to a finite number of binary choices. Frost’s poem models just one such choice; other decisions could involve hundreds of binary choices. In any event, each binary choice is one quantum of freedom.

Second, “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done!” (Beatles)  Here we need an assist from Sartre: I am always totally free! I can order any flavor of ice cream I want at Baskin-Robbins; or I can decide to forgo ice cream altogether. 

But I cannot order a muffaletta sandwich, “Sir, we’d like to accommodate you, but we don’t have the ingredients.” I can only do things that are physically possible. In the context of Frost’s poem I cannot hack my way through the underbrush with my pocket knife. Freedom ultimately comes down to a finite number of choices between possibles. 

Finally, my origin is hardwired; I have to start from somewhere. So is my destination but this is trickier. Those of you born before 1990 might remember a contraption called a ‘pinball machine’. The origin is a compressed spring, the destination is a hole at the bottom of the ‘field’, but the route from origin to destination is infinitely variable. 

It is the ‘topology’ or ‘tilt’ that makes the outcome inevitable but how you get from A to Ω, how long it takes to get there, and how many points you rack up along the way are totally undetermined. You are 100% free…within the physical limits imposed by the underlying structure. Ditto real life! 

Because a World exists (Descartes), we know that that World must be infinitesimally biased toward certain outcomes, i.e. faintly conditioned by Values known collectively as ‘the Good’. (Aquinas et al.) In infinite time, the outcome is inevitable; in finite time we are free to keep playing, and adding points, for as long as we are ready, willing, and able.

Christian theology provides a similar model. The Parousia, the 2^nd Coming of Christ, is inevitable…but the date and form of that Coming is entirely contingent on the freely determined course of events. All trajectories originate at a common point (Creation, Big Bang) and ultimately converge at a singularity (The Kingdom of Heaven), but the trajectories themselves are otherwise unconditioned and entirely self-determined.

Absolute freedom does exist, as an essential quality or value, but it exists physically only in the context of a given concrete structure. Physically, freedom can be absolute but only with some given mise-en-scene. 

IRL, there are usually a great many intermediate steps between A and Ω and it may well be that there are more than 2 alternative paths converging on each node. Choice along the way is what gives life spice, variety and intensity.

Perhaps, however, we can treat Frost’s ‘diamond’ as a web of quantum processes. It may be that the incredibly complex web of options and choices that form the infrastructure of life can be broken down into Frost Quanta.  

So, it might be useful to see how Frost’s model evolves in slightly more complex situations. This is nowhere near robust enough to mimic real life, but it may help us conceptualize what such a model might look like. Consider the following:

A

↙        ↘

x                x

↙       ↘     ↙      ↘  

x                x               x

↙      ↘        ↙     ↘      ↙    ↘     

x                 x                x           x

↘           ↙     ↘        ↙    ↘     ↙     

x                x               x

 ↘        ↙       ↘      ↙         

x                x

↘           ↙

Ω

Every node (actual entity, event) is an inflection point. In fact, a node is defined as any point at which two or more paths converge and/or diverge.

This is not a Many Worlds Theory! Sue and Sam may begin their journeys with flights from Boston to two different connecting cities, but they will meet again in Seattle and there is nothing to preclude their meeting up for a cocktail at a common hub along the way. In this model, as IRL, chains of events converge as well as diverge. For that reason, we don’t have many worlds (Hugh Everett); we have one world with incredibly many facets and one such facet is our ‘road taken’.

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