Agency, structure, love and moralism

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1

Apologies

In some ways, this is one of the more difficult essays I’ve written, both to write and, I fear, perhaps to read. This is because these concepts move in and out of each other in hectic spirals. There is no natural beginning or end, but there is, I think, a way of seeing. I want to bring you into how I see politics, or rather, how I want to see politics.

NPCs

It’s hard not to think, at least sometimes, that some people are agents and some people are not. Some people have beliefs and values, through the combination of which they make plans to maximize the attainment of their goals, and some people just go with the vibe. Certain observers- first the countercultural left and now the right- have gone so far as to call these vibe-movers terms like sheeple or NPCs, but that seems wrong to me. Perhaps there are degrees, but everyone exercises agency, it’s just a question of where they choose to use it.

I have become obsessed with the interaction of a handful of concepts: agency, love, obligation, moralism, structure - and how they relate to the left. I have become obsessed with a strange, self-murdering dream- if only I could say with absolute clarity what I wanted- that is agency, people would seize it, instead of retreating to rote scripts. An absurd megalomaniacal illusion, but one forever maddeningly at the edge of consciousness.

Let me give an example of how these ideas interact. Something almost everyone seems to forget is that radical politics are still constituency politics. If the president of the United States goes to a general store in a media photo-op and speaks to the clerk, he’ll try to sell his policies to that clerk as if his election depended on it. Somehow people who are interested in radical politics- that is politics that should be more populist and mass-oriented than any other form of politics- have come to think that a similar obligation doesn’t apply to them. They’ve come to think that they’re above persuasion. Joe Hill and his generation, infinitely more potent and better organized knew better. E.g.:

A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.

People who think earnestly and patiently making a case has no effect have often never tried it, or have only tried it in non-serious ways, i.e. trying to convince fanatics or expecting “road to Damascus” moments.

We are neglecting to take the initiative and push ideas, that’s a lack of agency in the pursuit of our stated values. Instead, we’ll substitute moral demands and posturing, that’s a moralism that substitutes an ethics of showcasing social superiority to an ethics of actually trying to help the world out of love. It is unsuprising we act like that because there are no structures in place to encourage and support us in taking agency for the left, that’s structurelessness. Instead, we simply play out online subcultural scripts of radicalism. We become, if anyone deserves the term, NPCs. But our agency hasn’t disappeared, it has moved to power plays within a subculture. That is, rather than being agents vis a vis our stated beliefs, we have become signaling agents maneuvering at a cliquey game.

There are no true “NPCs” just following scripts- everyone is strategically pursuing goals to the best of their ability the question is simply which goals. Granted, maybe some people are more habit-driven and some more goal-driven, but it doesn’t seem to me that anyone is just following a script as the PC/NPC distinction suggests, it’s just a matter of how the agency is being deployed- to try to win the world, to blend in or to be cool.

The big distinction I think, at least when it comes to politics, is whether agency is used in pursuit of a program of political values (values agency) or in pursuit of subcultural, social or affiliative goals or personal social capital (signaling agency). I generally treat the alternative to values agency as a signaling agency in this post, but that may be a little unfair. It’s likely there are other strategies people are playing out as well, for example, therapeutic agency, where engagement in politics is structured as a kind of personal therapy and there are probably many other types of agency. The overall result is an expression of sentiment in a way that makes no progress toward enacting sentiment.

Moralism: Left vs Right Critiques

There are two fundamental critiques of moralism. These critiques are often equated and sometimes overlap. The overlap between them has created a space in which ‘dissident’ organizations and thinkers of the left and right intersect and overlap- e.g., Freddie de Boer on the left, Unherd on the right, etc. They seem to combine into a common critique of moralism. Nonetheless, despite the (real) overlap, the critiques are quite different.

The right’s critique of moralism is patrician. How dare all these people- vegans, ‘gender activists’- whatever the boogeyman of the week is make so many fucking demands on me. In some cases, not to be clear, the cases of veganism or transgender rights, I have some sympathy for this view. I remember once referring to a group of adults (all male or female) as “boys and girls”. I was criticized for using the term “girls” to refer to adult women, which I was told was a sexist trope. My feeling was that in the symmetrical context, it was clearly innocuous, and so, while I remained polite, my internal sentiment was why are you harassing me about this, we are not close enough friends for you to take up my time and sentiments with these trivialities(1). If that sounds arrogant or entitled, I challenge you to spend some time in a context where this sort of policing is common and not end up feeling likewise. I know that everyone, regardless of gender, race or sexuality, used to complain to me about this culture, finding it overbearing. Ironically, some of the people who most participated in it used to whinge to me about it.

So I will concede there is probably a (limited) time and place for a patrician disdain of moral fussiness. But the right- particularly the contemporary right, and particularly the bit of the right that complains about moralism a lot- seems to fundamentally resent moral demands on itself at all. Obviously, the right disagrees with most of the demands, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about a cold, patrician anger that anyone would imply that you are not already ticking all the significant moral boxes, almost irrespective of the content of that demand. One might say: morality is a weapon I use against my enemies, you dare to turn it around and point it at me? Or: morality is what distinguishes us from them and by definition I am one of us so your claim that I am being immoral in some way is a category error. (2)

The left’s critique of moralism is different. It’s a critique of legalism and of certain kinds of shaming. Both critiques start from a fundamental principle, morality is about a relationship of love for our fellows. Legalism thus fails, because rules (with the possible exception of the golden rule) are inadequate for capturing the full scope of love. Instead, under moralism the rules become a kind of jockeying for social position. The rules are not so much intended to promote the good as divide into socially elect and reprobate. The left will concede there is a place for rules, of course, but only under the leadership of love.

Shaming (often) fails to do good for the same reason- it becomes really just a form of jockeying for position or expressing anger rather than achieving moral ends. Worse, it’s a kind of sanctioned expression of cruelty. There is, perhaps a place for shaming, but it is very constrained. I try not to participate in it because I think we’re so far back from the marginal value of an additional unit of shaming being positive.

What does this all have to do with agency? Simply, the morality of love is the morality of agents trying to make things better. The morality of moralism is a morality of self-positioning, image, social skirmishing, and so on. This is what distinguishes moralism from real morality- contra the right, moralism doesn’t go too far, rather it doesn’t go far enough.

Something, something VAMPIRE CASTLE!

Cosmopolitans trying to end history

Let me give another example of how contemporary liberalism destroys agency for our stated values by replacing it with the signaling agency of moralism.

As I was about to work on this post today, I was listening to Chapo-Trap House, who were describing some fight over American curricula and the portrayal of slavery. Will Menaker mentioned that he agreed with the Democrats over the facts of history, but agreed with the Republicans that there was no point in feeling bad about it- though the Democratic curricula are ‘better’, it still buys into a false dichotomy.

I think this was right, as far as it goes, depending on how it is spelled out, but I also thought it was an interesting case study of the reduction of the left down into a moralistic framework. Like Will, I have no interest in anyone living feeling guilty over American slavery- yet overwhelmingly the left is perceived as desirous of guilt. Why? Liberalism omits the final step of movement from the learning process- the step of non-identification.

Consider, for example, Howard Zinn and A People’s History of the United States. The point of authors in the tradition of Zinn who have drawn attention to slavery and its integral role in American history wasn’t to make readers feel uncomfortable about something they identified with (the American state), but to try to make them reconsider whether they wanted to hold that connection with American state power and ultimately to make readers cosmopolitans, citizens first of all- and perhaps only- of the universe. The point is to move not to remain suck and feel bad- first a mental movement- the transformation of one’s self-conception, then external action. You’re not meant to stay frozen in alienation- being American, but having oh-so-sophisticated feelings about the ‘moral complexity’ of that state. You’re meant to transform yourself away from identification with America and its history. Liberalism takes the first half the transformation of vision- and doesn’t recognize the second aspect, moral regrounding through mental and physical action. Liberalism is, in many ways, leftism without agency. Signaling moral sophistication rather than acting for an alternative. “Feel ambiently bad about yourself because of your association with the American state” is just the other side of the coin to patriotism, they both accept the identification of the self with a frankly monstrous structure- and one that has little interest in your wellbeing unless you’re monstrously rich.

An approach grounded in movement and agency- trying to make the reader engage in a process of self-transformation by reflection of the historical and ongoing complicity of America- was turned, through liberalism, into watery, teary inertia. Expressing the right signals, feeling the right sentiments. I guess we’ll see how it plays out, but much as I don’t want the liberals to lose this particular tug-of-war with the rightists and outright fascists, they’re at a disadvantage. “You should feel bad” is a hard position to fight for.

Hatred as stagnancy

I think that people start to hate when they feel they can’t move when they have no agentic power in relation to society. Hatred is, I think, often a displacement of a sense of powerlessness. It grows in stagnant water. This can come in several forms. General misanthropy often results from a sense of political paralysis. In relation to specific prejudice, I’ve noticed it is often a way of coping with extremely broad social concerns that you can’t really act on by focusing them down to a race, gender, etc. group.

Religion

On Twitter, a user named

Auderdy

who also appears to have the linked Substack wrote:

“OH in SF: “The far right is Christianity stripped of ideals; the far left is ideals stripped of Christianity”

In a way, this all repeats the oldest left-right battle- the battle both in and over religion.

Religion with a capital R is a sclerotic and rightwing structure put over leftwing and organic impulses, like a covering over a lantern. The closing of a canon is an act of class war. It’s also the replacement of genuine, universalistic agency with narrow tribalism. Beneath the covering though, in every religion in my experience, embers of universal, agentic love persist.

In Christianity, for example, one starts with an insistence on an infinite obligation to others, and to God, who accepts infinite obligations to us. There is no restriction by race, class or gender. No temporal power can relieve us of these obligations, and any which tries should be ignored. Somehow even that doctrine gets subverted into middle-class moralism. I know this is trite, at this point, but the bible mentions the poor 2000 times, and homosexuality, I think <10 times. In terms of the current agency of organized religions, the ratio seems, if anything, close to the reverse.

I mention this not for the usual reason it is mentioned- to draw attention to the hypocrisy of much-organized religion- but instead to draw attention to the sheer vastness of the subversion that has happened here. Ten mentions made a hundred times more potent than two thousand!

The impressive quality of this theft of what was, in many cases, working-class culture- revolutionary culture even staggers me. I must tip my hat to the bastards. I want to emphasize that what is not happening here is that, at the start, say, Christianity was “incidentally” leftwing and is now recuperated into the right. It was motivated, I believe, from the same psychological bases that animate the left. I know that a historian reading this would rightly worry about my equivocation of the left- a fundamentally modern phenomenon- with a somewhat politically quietist religious phenomenon of the ancient Roman world. But I sincerely believe, even though perhaps I cannot prove it, that the psychological spring of early Christianity was the same as that of the modern left or at least the best parts thereof.

However agency in favor of ideas of love is almost impossible to keep up, and these ideals get burnt down to a formal set of rules and social relations. Because values-agency in favor of love is difficult to sustain, but social maneuvering forms of agency are easy to keep up with everything becomes worse over time. A pattern that applies from the hippies to the punks, to the church fathers, to activist groups, to revolutions, and so on.

Again and again, we see a repeated pattern of broadly ‘leftwing’, ‘progressive’, ‘popular’ or ‘anti-authoritarian’ heresies, followed by elimination or recuperation by wholly rightwing and authoritarian structures. The embers of love and demand remain, of course, and regularly flare. Religion often begins in sentiments, active sentiments, of incredible love. To make something that begins at that moment into a bulwark of reaction- it’s a mighty and tragic achievement. We can see a similar transition happening in certain quasi-religious ideologies right now.

Structure

I don’t want you to think from the proceeding that I’m merely hoping for sophisticated individuals to seize agency on behalf of leftwing values on their own from here on out and forever, or that I think individual willpower is enough- quite the contrary.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t be begging individuals to have agency in the pursuit of leftwing ideas. It’s almost a form of moralism in itself- it’s ridiculous. Yet everything is so dead now, that there’s hardly anything but individuals to address. That’s an exaggeration, but only barely. Individual agency should be supported and sustained through networks and organizations, and inseparably embedded in collective agency, but where is that collective agency now? What else to do but plead with readers?

I have a theory about why the left isn’t doing better, and why its agency is focused on subcultural signaling rather than effective action in pursuit of its values. It doesn’t set down structure anymore. I remember when I was a student activist a fundamental goal of mine was to create structure. A persisting, directly democratic, national institution with the goal of organizing students around issues of education, and other matters as appropriate, an alternative to the National Union of Students which- due to a combination of representative democracy and extremely low information voters, was dominated by hacks. The goal wasn’t anything so grandiose as replacing NUS mind you- just creating a network for organizing activism.

No one was interested, the view was that if you wanted to organize something, you could just organize it. No one seemed to grasp what was, to my mind, the really important point, if you want to keep things going (especially in an area with such turnover as student activism!), institutional inertia helps. An organization with goals, conveners, etc. has an inertia that will keep it going during ‘the dry years’ where not much is happening around education. This keeps momentum when there otherwise might not be and allows activists to spring to action when the time is right.

Most of the absence of structure is simply due to the death of civil society- old organizations die, and we got out of the habit of building and maintaining new ones. Beyond that, I have a cynical theory about why the left has become disengaged from creating structures. Structures that aren’t tied to a specific party, tendency or grouplet are open to raiding by tendencies and grouplets. These factionally organized groups destroy non-factional organizations as a side effect of their recruiting and activity. Their tendency to pre-caucus makes people without a voting bloc of their own- often newbies- feel powerless. Sometimes these groups even deliberately destroy non-factional organizations because they fear alternative bases of power.

The long-term result is that people don’t feel like setting up organizations because they feel like they’ll be strip-mined for parts and people if they do- a leftwing counterpart of vulture capitalism. Why improve your farm if the raiders are coming anyway? You could solve a problem like this with a rule that forbids any group that pre-caucuses from participating but telling people to fuck off like this is frankly confronting. Also, as Kieran points out these grouplets are the only thing sustaining basic left-wing theory and organisation in many cases, so it’s a wicked problem.

Regardless of the cause, it’s a problem the left doesn’t build social-organisational engines anymore. I know this might sound like a niche problem, but I think this might be it. The left’s current inability to lay down structure- clubs, new unions, networks, etc- is our number one bottleneck in making progress and enabling agency. Without such organs, collective action is hard.

It distresses me on a personal level that almost no one is fighting to win. Between sectarianism, atomization, moralism, etc. almost no one is acting as an agent for the left. Almost no one is asking themselves what they can do to win. Almost no one is doing even really basic stuff like trying to sell ideas and not just win arguments or look smart. What does this have to do with the kind of agency this essay is focused on? Unstructured organizations, loose social scenes without a sense of purpose- all of these things make people lose sight of larger goals and strategic agency, and retreat to abstract posturing. Agentive pursuit of values is replaced by agentic pursuit of social and communicative identities. Structure enables individual and collective agency in the pursuit of values, social scenes while good, cannot do this alone.

In fact, we get a vicious cycle:

1. When there is no structure, there is only a subculture, and members of subcultures don’t try to win or act with any agency on behalf of their beliefs; only define and redefine the borders of the subculture and position themselves in it. AND

2. When people lack agency and reflexivity, they don’t think to set up structures.

On top of that a further buffer- exploitation and destruction of those few structures which people do create by sectarians- further reinforces the vicious cycle, and makes a spontaneous break harder (3).

What to do

1. Think about what you want to do, and act with purpose.

2. Talk about strategy and ideas with other people who share your values.

3. Talk to other people, genuinely, sincerely, and without judgment, about what you believe. Listen to them as well as speak. Don’t be afraid to think with them. People only think persuasion doesn’t work because they’ve never really tried.

4. Meet people in real life. Political meetings are great, but non-political meetings are important too.

5. Start groups, and create structures and institutions. Political groups are great, and so are non-political groups.

Footnotes

(1): I know exactly what a defender of my interlocutor would say: Don’t you think it cost them time and energy to police you too? If it was important enough for them to have the courage to say, isn’t it important enough for you to listen? To which I would reply: I think this gives my interlocutor’s motives far too much benefit of the doubt, but even if it doesn’t, part of being an adult is recognizing that sometimes you’ve invested more courage and emotional energy in something than you should.

(2): As an aside- what do you think the approximate ratio is of meat eaters on the internet whinging about vegans to vegans on the internet whinging about meat eaters? Nothing makes me feel guiltier than watching my fellow omnivores stomp their feet about it. They know they’ve got the moral low ground and they hate it, that’s all there is to it.

(3): Here’s how things might look if they were healthy:

Active supporters of the left: would be encouraged to take agency and responsibility for the left- to view themselves as custodians and expanders of a project to change the world. A view of the left as a cultural game or subculture would be discouraged- the aim is to win, and we should all consciously take strategic and balanced action toward that.

Passive supporters of the left: would be given a clear route to become active supporters, through institutional structures they could step into easily and get involved with, at the level they were comfortable with.

Neutrals: would be given information- but more than information, they would be courted and persuaded.

Passive opponents of the left: Would be mollified, listened to and engaged in dialogue, hopefully moving them to neutrality or passive support, or at least sort of defused.

Active opponents of the left: Would, ideally, be made passive through demoralization.

(4): You’ll notice that this fourth footnote doesn’t appear anywhere in the text. I wanted to make a point and couldn’t find the right place for it so I put it here. One of my favorite examples of zero-agency thinking is when left-wingers insult people in the military on the basis of shallow comparisons with cops. No doubt a substantial portion of soldiers are dickheads and worse, but A) the political character of the typical soldier is way different to that of the cops, and B) any leftwing victory, particularly in the United States, would need substantial portions of the army to desert, as even an electoral victory is likely to be met by a military coup attempt. If you’re playing the long game, you should treat people in the army not as villains, but as part of the exploited masses. This will be obvious to you if you’re actually thinking about winning and not just trying to look cool and righteous.