Sunday, March 17, 2013

Short Thoughts on Agency


Agency, at least in Foucault’s terms, is the ability to make individual decisions for one’s self.  Some might call it being able to act on a thought or the ability to dictate to make one’s decisions. Agency within everyone’s lives can be measured through the choices they make. Though, if this is through Foucault’s lens, then the panoptic mechanism plays a major role with the amount of agency one may have.  With the idea of Panopticism now in mind, with the factors of control, power, isolation, and submission; do we have agency? Do we have the power of choice that we are made to believe? 
I would simply answer, no; we do not have this agency, at least in its pure form. With submission of power of an individual, the individual must give up some of his agency with that power.  An example being laws; an individual is protected by laws, but has to give up agency because the individual has to follow the same law, or else feel the hammer that is the legal system.  The cost of control is to give up agency to ensure that other’s agency does not hinder another’s.  Although some agencies are stronger than others, there is no pure substance of this. Society created laws to help create order out of chaos.  To ask for pure agency, is to forget order within society.  With pure agency, there would be no repercussions for actions other than natural order within the cosmos.  No corrections to behavior, no prohibition of actions, and no prevention of unwanted consequences.
To counter laws, civil liberties and unalienable rights have increased an individual’s agency just based on existence and the morality that the current society upholds. Though these rights and liberties don’t necessarily give an individual the power of choice, it does give it a sense of resistance to laws that do not apply or are considered detrimental to a human being. The amount of agency is directly correlated with the amount of civil liberties and rights an individual has.  The more rights it has, the more agency.    
We can also look at this in a different view.  Is there agency within an individual on a mental level and capacity?   An example would be conscious and subconscious decisions throughout one’s life.  In Susan Bordo’s book The Male Body she discusses the workings of the male advertising business and the effect on people who view them.  Example being, if a subject looks at advertising (male underwear model, just for the sake of Bordo), the subject can simply walk past it and consciously take nothing out of it; but in the subject’s subconscious the individual has the image of beauty correlated by the advertisement and will recall it when making purchases (clothing, for example).  “In this post-modern age, it’s more of a free-for-all, and images are often more reactive to each other than to social change.  It’s the viewers’ jaded eye, not their social prejudges, that is the prime consideration of every ad campaign, and advertisers are quick to tap into taboos, to defy expectations, simply in order to produce new and interesting images” (Bordo 208). Even though subjects think they have control over purchases and decisions, they don’t. The subconscious tricks the subject into thinking that it came up with the idea of a purchase, but really the subject saw it or read it in a past time.    In short, we have lost agency within ourselves on decision making and rationality because of the outside environment due to conditioning. 
            This brings up an important element in factoring in the amount of agency a subject may have.  Conditioning one’s mind into a belief of something, or the rights and wrongs of society, happened every single day.  The more conditioning one puts on itself or is exposed to, the more agency that individual gives up.  One can lose sight of decisions that it is capable of making because of this.  Conditioning affectively takes an individual and slowly pushing them to one side of a spectrum. Make decisions more controlled or specific and generally one sided.  Conditioning can come from a variety of elements.  Parenting, schooling, law enforcement, reading, praying, etc. are all examples on how an individual can subject itself to conditioning.  Though most of these can be considered voluntary, is it truly voluntary in most cases when it was learned by a sort of systematic process.  There is a saying that children are the product of their parents.  On a biological level, this is fact. On a psychological level, there are definite factors that can lead to the thought process and ideology that that child grew up with.  Take for example a child that was raised in a Republican household, that child, according to statistics, will more likely be Republican then Democrat (Bunge 2008). This is a systematic way of learning values and life lessons.  It is not necessarily taking away the option of becoming the opposite party, but the value and ideology has made a shift in the spectrum. This successfully takes away agency because an individual does not have a clear open mind. There is always going to be preferences, whether they are rational or irrational, and these preferences from conditioning hinder agency.         
            We still are able to make decisions though, but there is a weighing factor that takes place; this could be argued by the role of conditioning that was brought up in the previous paragraph.  In Robert E. Miller’s essay, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” he invokes the idea of writing and reading within our society.  The massive impact that it may have in the lives of many and argues that we need to keep this literate art alive.  Within the essay, Miller brought up the story of a French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes.  Descartes was on a spiritual journey through meditation to be able to separate the mind from the body, the pure from the corrupt. “To rid himself of all the false opinions that he had been fed in his youth, Descartes tells us that he waited until he had both the maturity and the free time necessary to devote to the harrowing task of self-purification (Miller, 433).” After days of meditation, Descartes deemed himself clean of all past experiences and prejudges. If this was true, then Descartes essentially freed himself from the confines of society and has reached a truer form of agency, one could even say an almost pure form. Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Assuming that the isolation from society in the period of time did increase his agency, Descartes made an assumption that wiping the slate clean, tabula rasa, was possible. This is the self-submission to an idea and conditioning is too deeply weaved into the fabric of our personality to simply get rid of.  Though some conditioning foundations could be altered, there is a need to fill with an alternative measure.  An example would be a sense of morality or core values.      
            The sense of morality is also something to take into consideration when it comes to an individual and the amount of agency one has.  Though this can be viewed as a law of the mental capacity or law of one’s life to live by, it is easy to say that an individual’s life can be mandated by its own morality.  For many people, the sense of morality is based on religion.  Fundamental laws are laid down in most religions with the promise of eternal life after death, if followed correctly.  This is enough for followers to follow these commandments; there is also the other factor of religion, a higher being.  In most cases, there is always a God figure watching over and judging individual’s actions throughout one’s life.  Agency is lost if an individual subscribes to this dogma.  The fact that someone is always watching a subject at all times of the day and can read the minds of that subject is giving up agency of choice.  A subject will not deviate from the commandments set in place because there is a place for people who go against these set laws, Hell.  The power of choice through the self-submission of one’s belief has voluntarily given up its own agency. Though the individual can grant itself agency at any time, there are repercussions to this belief system. This in turn, effectively controls a population even today.
            To be fair, there are some that do not submit to a faith or religion.  Does that mean that Atheists and Agnostics do not have morals? No, but it does give them more agency than the religious counterparts.  Atheists do have morals and a perfect example could be explained by Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. In this book it talks about how morality can be based on scientific evidence and should be based on human well-being.   “I am arguing that everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive morality is clearly wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and collective well-being).  And only genuine moral experts would have a deep understanding of the causes and conditions of human and animal well-being” (Harris 36). In this case everyone has morality, but the religious figures have corrupted the view of proper morality.  If an Atheist follows this type of morality based on human well-being, then there is still agency to be given up.  This view of helping one another and to better further the existence of a species, individuals must give up agency on choices that may harm this outcome, which brings up the existence of laws.  There are no higher powers that Atheists have to answer to and the thoughts of an afterlife, good or bad, is nonexistent.  Above all, the power of choice for Atheist is not defined by rules forever set in stone, instead these moral experiences may change as a society changes. 
            In sum, we as individuals have agency, but the amount of agency is determined by factors of many different elements throughout one’s life.  It is easy to say that law, religion, the subconscious, self-submitting conscience, and conditioning has successfully hindered an individual’s agency.  The only real factor that can increase agency is to step away or dissociate from one or more of these elements.  Since most of these are impractical, gaining agency is much harder than losing agency, making it a slippery slope if not looked at carefully.         













Work cited
Bunge, Kayla. "Party-training: Parents' Influence on Children's Political Attitudes Is Powerful." GazetteXtra. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://gazettextra.com/news/2008/oct/24/party-training-parents-influence-childrens-politic/>.
Bordo, Susan. "Beauty (Re)Discovers The Male Body." Ways of Reading. 9th ed. Boston: John E. Sullivan, 2011. 187-233. Print.
Miller, Richard E. "The Dark Night of The Soul." Ways of Reading. 9th ed. Boston: John E. Sullivan, 2011. 420-50. Print.
Harris, Sam. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. New York: Free Press, 2010. Print.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

An Atheist's View on the Personal Relationship with God


When I was home over Christmas Break, my family asked me to attend church with them on numerous occasions.  Since I love my family more than I hate this sort of social gathering, I reluctantly agreed to go a few times. I attended both a wedding and the traditional Christmas mass.  With two different settings, I was surprised to find that the messages of both of them were about finding a personal relationship with their almighty god.  It was perplexing to me that this sort of sermon was given at the wedding I attended. Here we are sitting in pews watching two believers become “one” in the eyes of god, yet they are told to separately to find a relationship with him.  This created a sort of paradox in my mind, and then it hit me.  These sorts of events are not truly religious, in the sense that the religious experience should be personal.  Instead, these events are systematical and replace the subjective experience to an objective experience.  How can two individuals become “one”, yet be expected to experience a personal relationship with god differently? Therefore, the religious experience seems to be a farce when shared with others.  This wedding was not about god and his blessing, it was about two people who loved each other very much and were making a promise build on that love.  The wedding was personal, therefore the relationship was personal.  Yet, the personal experience of organized religion seems to have a different view. The churches have systematically bundled up a personal experience and sold it to the masses.
               You can choose to believe in a god or not, that’s your personal choice- therefore- that belief is of your own personal experience.  So why are we building churches and recruiting the masses to harness something the each individual is experiencing to themselves (if they so choose to believe)?  Simple, these sorts of structures are just that, structures.  Man created the bible to systematize a particular god that is apparently all powerful and beyond human comprehension into a book of oversimplified rules and contradictory ideals.  First off, this takes away from a personal experience when guidelines are set in place to even reach the point of personal expression.  If you wanted to talk to me, but you have regulations on how to reach me or even how you can talk to me, is that personal?  The god we view and even think about is the one laid out for us in the bible.  We are at a disadvantage already- because we are experiencing a god that has already been objectified. Once again, the relationship should be subjective, not objective. To believe in the absurd requires faith, but objectify the absurd is just flat out ignorance.    
               Let’s recap; we have a subjective god that has been objectified in a book written by man.  Now let’s take that one step further by systematizing it and create a church with a community around it.  In this setting, priests are able to interpret “the message of god” and spoon feed it to the congregation.  I see a couple of problems with this.  One, the priest is taking a subjective experience and trying to relay it to the masses, therefore objectifying it.  With this being done, there will never be a complete understanding of the nature of what the priest experienced or interpreted. If I told you to visualize yourself playing golf, what do you see? Do you see yourself on the 5th hole tee box with knickers on?  Even if you visualized my example- you still couldn’t see the setting I have made for myself.  The second problem is that by spoon feeding the congregation the message, you stunt the listeners’ existential look on the subject at hand.  So, either you fill an experience that isn’t the person’s own by preaching it to them, or you hinder the individual who has yet to experience the nature of their relationship to their god. This is why preaching will get the religious nowhere. What makes your relationship to your god special can only be special to you.  Only you feel the way you do. 
               What does this all mean then? How should one go about building a relationship with a personal god?  Well, the experience should be your own.  You can’t relate that experience to others because there will always be a different view of said experience. We both could say the same thing, but visualize it and feel it in a completely different manner. If you believe in a personal god, then that god should be, well, personal!  Preaching and trying to save someone is completely out of the question.  If you do try, then your objectifying what is at heart, an existential experience.   As an Atheist, this is why truly religious people don’t bother me.  Their beliefs are personal and will stay personal.  This is why there is a difference between religion and organized religion. The man preaching is not trying to save you, but trying to relate his experience to you, this will be in vain.  One cannot organize subjective reality, which would make it objective reality.  If god is truly beyond objective reality then to objectify him will only, in a sense, prove his non-existence.  When it’s all said and done- to each his own.        

Saturday, January 26, 2013

A Dance In and Out of Events


I was reading Kierkegaard the other day when I came across an interesting passage within the “Rotation Method” about experiences of events and how one should harness them.  It got me thinking, how are we not able to experience and observe events at the same time?  This was interesting to me, in the fact that we all are seemingly experiencing something at this very moment, yet blissfully unaware of the experience or event until we state what we are observing (consciously or out loud) - at that point we become an observer. 
               Events happen all around us, yet we are either within the event or outside of it observing from a far.  We can’t seem to be active within both, once you have decided to be in the experience, then you are committed until the conscience become aware of what it is part of.   An example of this would be a group of individuals chatting at a party.   Everyone could be having a great time, enjoying each other’s company and catching up on current events within each other’s lives.  The members of this group are unaware of the event that they are partaking in, until something or someone disrupts it.  Let’s say you were a part of this group, enjoying yourself with telling jokes and sipping on your favorite beverage- you are in a sense, “sharing the moment”. You are an active participant within this event taking place,  a sort of tacit consent is given throughout the group and judgment is out of the picture (alcohol may of helped us get to this point).   Suddenly, you become self-aware, nothing could have registered this, or maybe you consciously told yourself to remember or cherish this moment.  At this point in time, you have exited yourself from the event taking place and become an active observer.  Your consent is given back to you and you become almost hyperaware of the actions taking place.  The moment is lost until the conscience forgets its observations and you can sink back into the experience.  We see this all the time and we can think of it as a buzz kill of sorts.  Or let’s say that everyone is enjoying the conversation that the group is having, getting into deeper conversation and guards are let down thanks to the groups consent to one another.  Then randomly someone says, “Wow, we are all having a real good time!”  The group becomes aware of its actions and the self-consciousness starts rushing back to each individual.  Self-reflection is pouring through each of their heads of the event that they all partook in.  The mood is lost and might never recover at that point.  One may either leave the setting to allow the conscience to forget its surroundings and continue its pursuit to activate another event, or fight through the tension that has built up in the group until the tacit consent is back on the table.  
               This is why one should loathe the individual that tries to harness the moment by sharing it or trying to capture its essence by trying to get others to cherish it as well.  Moments of reflection should be done afterwards, and should be kept to the individual that experienced it.  I say this, because we all experience the same event in a different way.  To reflect with someone that was there within the event may allow them to hyper analyze the situation and the moment that they enjoyed may then be stripped of its value to the holder.  If one was to evaluate an event from the past and kept to the self, no other point of views can taint the value of it, allowing the experience to still be held within the eyes of the viewer- not a second source. 
               There is one way I can think of for being able to both experience an event and witness it as well.  The use of psychoactive drugs such a THC, psilocybin, and LSD (to name only a few) are keys to opening a gate of experience an event within the event.  This can is partly due to the fact that the brain is processing images longer than normal.  The brain is then able to experience something slightly longer than its sober state and therefore some feels immersed within an event yet somehow feels like a spectator within their own body.  This experience can intensify by dosing and is wonderful when under the right settings.  The power to alter the mind can change than experience, this seems to be self-evident. This, I believe is the only way that one can experience and participate in events simultaneously.  Though this may not be the case, I can’t think of another way without switching from observer to active participant.   
               One is always in the delicate dance between observing and interacting with a particular event.  We cannot experience and partake at the same time; we must shift between one another-unless there is an outside source that can slow the process down for our minds to fully grasp the situation.  Events will come and go, cherish them after the fact.  To try to cherish the moment will only lead to destruction of it, and then all that we hoped to harbor for the moment will be tainted with the conscious trying to make more of it than what it is.