Reclaiming Agency in an Agent-less World
Our modern age lacks a sense of agency.
The kid’s television show, Ada Twist Scientist, speaks to this angst directly after Ada’s older brother says he will skip Earth Day.
As he walks away, Ada laments, “Guys, if we can’t convince Arthur the earth is more important than a movie, how are we going to get everyone else to care?”
Her friend responds audibly: “Sad face emoji.”
I can relate to this. Climate change feels insurmountable for little me to fix, much less to change someone’s conscience. Some call it Eco-anxiety. But it’s not the only thing that feels outside our influence.
Consider teenagers and cell phones. It’s an impossible situation. If you don’t give your teen (or preteen) a cell phone and social media access, they will be left out. But if you do, you will significantly increase their likelihood of experiencing depression, anxiety, and questioning their self-worth.
Social media has become normalized. Who can blame a child for wanting a phone after seeing it in their parents’ hands every other hour (or, more commonly, every other minute)? Who can blame the middle school girl for wanting to post a dance of herself on TikTok after she’s had years of her mom posting pictures of her on Facebook?
Sure, there are institutional policies that can be made. One middle school recently removed mirrors from their washrooms to dissuade students from taking selfies. According to a local story, “School leaders say they saw a drastic drop in the frequency of bathroom breaks after removing the mirrors.”
It’s a good step. It’s something. But even still, for those students in those classes, their eyes will be glued to their screens each night before bed, just like their parents.
This is a learned helplessness. The AI runs the feed. The bureaucracy runs the company. We say, “it is what it is,” with a shrug. Less and less people are making New Year’s Resolutions. Why even bother to set goals in a world outside your control?
Another example of our agent-less world is related to systematic racism. I’m convinced it exists in some form, though we can argue about definitions and details (e.g. repeated studies show how hiring managers prefer Anglo last names over Asian). The reason I bring it up here is because it’s another cultural trend where responsibility is in a system or force rather than in a person or action.
Those who have tried to do the work have learned that there is always a higher bar to surpass — more DEI training, more apologies, more this, more that. The task of ending racism then feels impossible, and people give up. No agency becomes no action.
So too, modern labour. I worked for two and a half years in Project Management at the University of Waterloo. One of my main projects was “to create a culture of assessment.” While I had a great boss and a good degree of freedom in how I got my work done, it began to feel so predictable, slow, and status-quo-oriented.
I left that job with a mission: “solve problems for the sake of others.” I joined a tech startup, and the freedom of action fueled me. But as our company grew, my days became predictable. I couldn’t bring originality to my sales decks because I knew I needed to follow best practices and aim for the greatest effectiveness as efficiently as possible.
Jacques Ellul, the author of The Technological Society, called this Technique. The predictable nature of modern labor tends toward the logical, precision-able, and efficient. We live in machine-like modernity, where “cog in a wheel” is cliche, and human resources professionals are tasked with keeping quiet a depressed workforce.
Not all of it, but at least some of it, and maybe even most of it, comes back to agency. In nearly every area of life, systems, professionalization, and standards rule the day.
Deep breath.
This has been an admittedly cluttered list of examples of our failing sense of agency. I haven’t made sense of it all.
I’ve been working through the idea of reclaiming agency ever since I chatted with Technology Ethicist Jason Thacker a couple years ago. His book, Following Jesus in a Digital Age, placed significant emphasis on human responsibility. I initially brushed this off as obvious. But now I realize how Thacker, with a deep Christian impulse, was pushing back on the rising trend to treat material factors as determinative, as if God had no power, as if you had no power, as if God couldn’t work in you.
Likewise, when I read Joseph Minich’s Bulwarks of Unbelief, I realized how the world’s sense of agency has been shrinking. The Industrial Revolution brought about a technoculture that displaced personhood and the purposefulness of things more generally.
When I walk down the street and see a tree, I do not think of that tree as having agency, or having the ability to impose a will upon me. The tree, if I notice it at all, is meaningless. It is just there because of some sort of city planning document that studied the benefits that come from such foliage. It can be moved and replanted at any point and has no source of purpose in itself. It, like everything else in modernity, is treated as a means instead of an end.
Likewise, the stars. They do not act on me. If I were to write my autobiography, they would not likely be included. They are far from me, yes, but also hidden from me through technology. Light pollution? Yes. And more, Light occlusion.
What is going on? Technology and techno-culture displace our sense of rule and dominion.
That phrase should be familiar to my Christian readers. We were created with a mandate to, “fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over… every living creature” (Gen. 1:28). I remember skirting away from that phrase once when I was teaching. I didn’t want to give the impression that Christians shouldn’t care for the environment. But no one will properly protect the environment without a sense of agency, a sense of powerful and purposeful personhood.
We must reclaim our status as vice-regents of God’s reign. We must take ownership of ourselves and our actions. Good theology maintains our free will while also maintaining God’s sovereignty.1
But let me return to Ada and that episode’s twist. The premise behind the show is a young girl who loves science and aims to discover the how and what of the world (as inspired by the book). Which is why the episode on environmentalism is so shocking. Instead of convincing her older brother of the objective evidence, the show suddenly becomes enchanted, with each character receiving magical powers in a dream state.
The lesson is this: if you want to really take ownership of yourself, you need an enchantment outside of yourself. Pure materialism gives no differentiation of significance between material, no contrast between person and thing, between it and you, between good and evil.
You need God to be you.
You need God to matter more than mere matter.
You need God to reclaim your agency.
A couple of resources might help in this regard:
My conversation with Joseph Minich on How Technoculture Makes God Feel Absent. The last thirty minutes are mostly about this point.
In their podcast, Wyatt Graham and Ian Clary unpacked Thomas Aquinas’ view of human freedom and God’s sovereignty. I found it helpful.