What I here wish to discuss is, in some ways, a criticism of one way that people speak metaphorically despite that my concern is about what people believe literally. Despite this caveat, I do think that people often allow metaphors to become somewhat unmoored from what they were initially meant to convey – and my concern is that such an unmooring has caused a profound confusion in the way we, in the Anglosphere, speak today. It is a muddling more common in political and social conversation, though it has its claims in other realms of discussion. I am speaking of how we discuss the nature of agency in relationship to corporate entities taken in their broadest form – what we now typically refer to today as institutions – though there are other concepts that are not quite institutions but with which this confusion still abounds, such as ‘society’ or ‘history.’
To be overtly academic for a moment, this sort of confusion is a source of fierce debate in political science departments. In academic discourse around politics, and specifically political institutions, the idea is sometimes proposed that a specific governmental structure or constitutional provision is somehow akin to an agent. Let me provide a concrete example. I, as a Canadian, frequently hear people say – often with a biting tone – that “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has ushered in a wave a progressive and incoherent law!” It may, in fact, be the case that there has been a distinct shift in legal practices and decisions since the constitutional reforms of 1982 – I am personally undecided about this claim – but the document of the CCRF has not done anything. In fact, it cannot do anything, because it is not itself agentic.
As far as I am concerned, agency is a very specific reality. At its simplest, it is a form of reflective consciousness capable of choice (and, to phrase this more poignantly, of choosing otherwise). For this reason, we do not tend to think of animals, and certainly not inanimate objects, as being ‘agentic’ in this sense. I, as someone who enjoys a good dog’s company, can accept that they seem to have some level of deliberation that seems to occur within, but it is not akin to the way that we human beings perform this. We reflect on the possible consequences of our actions, deliberate about the long-term possibilities that a choice opens or forecloses to us, and consider the manner in which such decisions will be received by and affect others around us who also have this same reflective capacity. Among the created order or natural world, then, it seems to me that we human beings are unique in this regard – perhaps this is what the Euro-Western traditions have referred to, since Aristotle, as man being the uniquely rational animal. A human being is an agent, a being that may decide to so this rather than that.
The issue, of course, is that human beings do not act solely as individuals – the human being is, indeed, a social animal (ζῷον πoλιτικόν), and we not only choose to take part in human collectives but are indeed thrust into one by our very births. There are, therefore, a number of collectives in which we consider ourselves members. Our marriages and families, our schools, our churches (or synagogues, mosques, etc.), our clubs, our communities, our sports teams, our cities, our states or provinces, our countries – the list can go on. It is these things, though they may not always be commonly referred to in this manner, that I am herein referring to as ‘institutions.’ In their most literal sense, these are things which human beings ‘establish,’ though I would want to qualify this by saying that we need not be the first nor need we remember the precise moment we ‘consented’ to the institution – I am hardly a contract theorist of any sort.
Due to this corporate tendency, we are also accustomed to speaking as if those collectives have a distinct aim, purpose, or direction – which they perhaps do in many cases. What I wish to reconsider is what it means for such a corporate entity, an institution, to have a directional nature. How does this come about? Does it have a mind of its own? Do the members of a given collective have no capacity to free themselves from the grips of these conglomerates that abound around us?
The answer, in my view, is a decisive “No.” An institution, a corporate entity, is the sum of the many people that make it up based on whatever internal arrangement has been orchestrated by members themselves (i.e., a fast food chain, a soccer club, or a Marxist political party will all have quite different organizational structures that are mediated by the members; nevertheless, the members themselves could understand who is involved in doing what and either maintain or extricate themselves from the movement of the collective as they deem fit – to disagree with a specific decision does not mean to rescind membership, but to follow this further might be too far afield for my present discussion). We may be able to discern that there are general tendencies that a collective follows, which I believe is why this tendency to speak metaphorically of institutions ‘acting’ has become commonplace – and surely this makes a kind of sense. This is how we might speak of the ‘intentions of the Church’ or the ‘deception of the government,’ but it seems to me that such statements also require that certain, specific human actors – perhaps in the authoritative positions or otherwise – had to make specific choices. The institutions as such have no movement of will without the agency of at least some of their specific members having been exercised.
In some sense, I believe that we fall into this trap for two main reasons: the size of some institutions and our ignorance of their operations. When we look at something like our governments in their contemporary enormity, it is often difficult to discern how precisely a decision was made or who exactly is responsible for it (intriguingly, this may be a benefit of monarchy over more ‘democratic’ systems, despite many enlightened people today being averse to the former). We can, however, recognize that there is some vague collective performing certain actions, and therefore we attribute the activity to the institutions as such – ‘The House of Commons enacted a new policy,” or “The Magisterium has made its claim.” This is, however, facile in my view, and it often obscures how one would fix problems that might be perceived in the way that a government or other institution is supposedly ‘acting.’
Perhaps it is more helpful to understand my concerns here in a fashion that reverses the method of Plato’s Socrates in discussing Justice in The Republic: I want to look at a microcosm to reconsider the macrocosmic. One institution that is always performed at a deeply local level is that of marriage. Of course, marriage is a social phenomenon that is upheld and desired by a collective, but a marriage as such is only ever two people (for now – the meaning of marriage seems to be unraveling nowadays). Now, if a divorce were on the horizon, we would never say, “The marriage is coming to an end,” as if to say that the marriage is some kind of agent in itself that is self-terminating – no, we say, “They are getting a divorce.” We recognize that a divorce required some neglect or outright violation on the part of one or both of the members; this could be an outright sin such as physical abuse or adultery, or it could be neglecting giving one another time by privileging work or some other concern unduly. Likewise, a good marriage is not merely a statement about ‘the marriage’ as such, but it is a description of how the two spouses within that marriage relate to one another and orient themselves as a union. An instituted marriage, therefore, is impossible to understand as an entity without understanding the agency of the members who make it up. It is my contention that larger institutions are no different, though their inner dynamics and relative responsibility among members is far more difficult to discern – perhaps even to their own members.
What I hope is made clear by this is that we live in a world that is deeply human in terms of how we understand what is possible to us. It is via the mediation of human wills that so much of our lives comes about and to miss this by misattributing responsibility and accountability merely to vague collectives or institutions is typically to blind oneself to the true source of decisions and prevent desired changes from ever occurring. Of course, I have not entirely cleared up the problem here; there are other aspects of this problem that also need to be dealt with: the influence of collective habits, unreflective obedience, and abuse of power within institutions, just to name a few. Nevertheless, we should aim to engage with those sources of change that are truly active: human beings. We are humans in a deeply human world, and we should speak in accordance with this reality.
Hoping for Clarity 