Agency
Agency
Agency recognises the world we live in, not the one we fight over.
In A panarchy of relativism: and the meta of me and you which follows on from Panarchy & me I left room for a link for a then yet to be written piece on agency.
Also, in Freedom to/from liberty… —lack thereof agency is briefly compared to traditions based on liberty. I am at pains to point out that the usage of words does not create structures, I should add that usage does of course maintain them, and that in social contexts one can argue that maintenance is creation.
Generally we do not ascribe innovation to routine, but things do not survive otherwise. Ancient rites and rituals are geared to increase or maintain the growth so…
Also they might be created and then go extinct the day they are ‘born’.
(A lot of my writing is like this birth/death experience, this is why I am drawn to the obscure neologisms and usages of others-- like panarchy. Panarchy also illustrates that I am not the only one.)
One way to blur the change/stability frameworks we use is to look more at agency, and to methodically ask questions from this blurry frame. (It’s the blur that refuses this contrast as a valhalla of dialectic contradictions etc)(includes Simone Weil’s version, but I still have yet to look at Husserl’s version).
When and where does a usage or pattern of habit grant or remove agency?
Rights-based discourses arose in pre-modern Enlightenment movements in Europe which were trying to remove obedience to the Catholic Church, for local political and faith-based reasons, and while at the same time trying to removed the absolute power of the sovereign.
One of the earliest prior art to all that, is the English Magna Carta where a bunch of barons (who each wanted to be King but sadly had to compromise) force their monarch King John to grant or recognise a variety of rights to the barons, in which the wording used allowed it all later to be applied more generally to the wider population.
The barons were not fighting for their human rights, but fighting to increase their own privileges. Any good it brought to the rest of the population is a by-product of a Norman French speaking group of elite agitators.
The medieval mindset is framed by the phrase rights and privileges. These agreements. laws, customs, were always around and across Europe, and arose in both Roman law and in Germanic ancient common law practices, which the revolution in France sought to wipe away completely because they had grown into a mass of confusions, introducing a set of rights (no privileges) common to all across the republic, with no local or idiosyncratic exceptions or additions. It’s a long story, and out of it notions of unstoppable progress and enlightenment and Western exceptionalism have arisen.
My point here is not that rights-based dialogues are bad because really they are just medieval or ancient nonsense. But that we do not seem to keep this history in mind when we talk about rights.
I think rights based discourses are misguided, and misguiding because they do not encompass agency. Now this is different from the disparaging criticisms of peeps standing on their rights with the ‘responsibility’ anthem, but this response is included in the blur of change/stability that the term agency allows. This might not be clear, but basically there ware no rights without responsibilities, it’s a trade-off, if not a social negotiation/agreement/construction.
I.E. you won’t be a good neighbour if you constantly patrol your borders yelling “MINE!” “MINE!” MINE!”. Good fences make good neighbours because the fence is built by both of you.
Rights have to be granted. Who does that? Rights have to be recognised. Who does that?
If rights are won who has lost? A weak King John? Who has won? A bunch of equally powerful magnates?
Why use that process as a model for the best we can do?
Narcissists
Relying on rights-based discourses empowers narcissists and their preferred methods, whose entitlement knows no bounds. Rights-based discourses arise out of notions of sovereignty created by war bands sharing the spoils of war.
Narcissists might feel entitled to be kings, but even monarchs who would be autocrats must rely on the support of their magnates, for their real enemies they must keep closer than their friends.
So no sovereign is an island.
Thus rights are always negotiated, but their form rarely admits that process. their sanctity is something besmirched by mentioning their history. Particularly when few wrote anything down.
At the same time those few who control asynchronous communications of reading and writing, priests and propagandists, soon generate notions of royal & holy magistry to keep the commoners far away and in that distance nurture in their hearts a fondness of their betters.
<Insert here link to later piece written on how we confuse the structure as the stability they seek, e.g. hierarchists/traditonalists/conservative view the security of the, say, hierarchy (one type of structure) as maintaining the world itself>
In order to police narcissists, an agency based recognition of change/stability in society, and of individuals, would reduce the ability of these parasites to maintain the panarchy of life, and we would then be able to world better, more calmly, and thus world-build with more certainty because we embrace change as a way to maintain a nurturing place of growth and learning.
So what is this agency of which you speak?
Being alive.
Worlding with others worlding.
Recognising we we world with others policing narcissism and a psychopathic lack of empathy.
Agency-based politics will focus on behaviour and what is good, and not what is won as rights or privileges for groups/all groups, because that misses the narcissist’s ability to twist all structures and usages to suit themselves… —where all are equal but some more than others, where I am poor and entitled because my parents stole less than other parents.
Agency recognises the world we live in, not the one we fight over.
War destroys.