WHICH IS A NOTION that has long been central to Western civilization, particularly in its late-blossoming manifestation in the United States. Indeed, the theme of choosing runs through American history and culture at least as deeply as its close cousins freedom and individualism. The Declaration of Independence declares the “pursuit of happiness” to be a natural right, which presupposes that there are choices that would make such a pursuit possible. (To pursue, after all, it is necessary to choose.) John Adams defines individual liberty as “a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice”—a way of thinking that is essential to the democratic process, however imperfectly it may be realized in practice. The more one thinks about Adams’s “self-determining power,” the more it seems inseparable from most of the values and ideas that underpin (or are usually said to underpin) American society. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, claims that the people of the United States are distinguished by their belief in human perfectability, a concept that assumes the humans in question can make choices that will lead to improvement. As he puts it, “Thus, forever seeking, forever falling to rise again, often disappointed, but not discouraged, [the American] tends unceasingly towards that unmeasured greatness so indistinctly visible at the end of the long track which humanity has yet to tread.”

To believe in progress, as Tocqueville conceives of it, is to believe in choice: American optimism is rooted in American confidence in individual decision making. It’s a sentiment that is echoed at the end of The Great Gatsby, a great American novel that is also one of the great novels of choosing:

[Gatsby] had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .