The Moral Mandate for Freedom
Agency and Responsibility in the Modern World
Two brief notes before this week’s essay. 1) THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE, my new book about identity, social contagion, and conscience in the face of conformity, is out now. 2) I’m looking for a Chief of Staff to join me full-time—ideally based in either the Washington, DC, or West Michigan areas (or willing to relocate). The COS will be involved in everything from the full life-cycle of a new book to helping build a cultural institution from the ground up. It doubles as an apprenticeship. If you or someone you know is interested, please get in touch. Most importantly: Happy Fourth of July!
With Silicon Valley’s obsession with the word agency lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the example given by Rocco Buttiglione that shows the relationship between freedom and responsibility—because it helps shatter the myth of agency as something individual, originating in a subject. That is the Romantic Lie version of agency.
His story is one that I’ve lived many times: A friend asks me to go hiking in the Shenandoah Valley over the weekend. I’m torn. But my answer to him is that of any married man who isn’t completely insane: “Let me check with my wife first.”
The truth is: I do not know what I want unless I know what my wife wants. Why? Because I desire the common good—in this case, the good of my family. I also have imperfect information, and I have to consult with my family to even know what’s at stake over the weekend in many cases: the birthday parties I’m not aware of, the soccer match, the family dinner. I can’t know what I desire unless I know what they desire, because ultimately their wills and my will must achieve some basic shared orientation.
Both desire and my “agency” are deeply connected to responsibility. When they become untethered—when I’m agencymaxxing my personal freedom, as opposed to thinking of agency-in-community, or agency with responsibility—the result is not mere selfishness but also the weakening or destruction of bonds which connect me to something greater than myself.
That’s a crucial feature of agency to reflect on during this weekend as we celebrate our freedom as Americans. I believe we’ve largely lost the communal rites of passage that bind us to one another with a shared sense of responsibility.
I ask you: what is the thing that every American does that forms them in their rite of passage to becoming an American? Can you name one? I don’t mean something that can easily be performative, like the pledge of allegiance—which I think was an ineffective ritual even when it was widespread in schools during my childhood. I mean something difficult, bonding, formative, that forms civic and patriotic virtues and goes deep into the marrow. I can’t name one, and that’s a problem.
Other countries have an answer, of course: a year or two of mandatory military service. I'm not advocating for that here. But notice that it's an answer—a real one, with real sacrifice—and we don't have anything like it.
I’m talking about communal rites that bond people across party lines, across religious commitments, across niche hobbies and interests. The World Cup is not powerful enough to do that—in part because we don’t have to sacrifice anything to cheer for the USA. It feels good, it’s fun, but it’s not developing the kind of thick desire for genuine communion that helps people endure challenges with a strong sense of solidarity.
If anything, AI is accelerating the “agency as an individual power” narrative, with the future “one person billion dollar company” being an exemplar of that mentality. If that is the goal, what will we become? If I now have an Archimedean lever long enough to move the entire world (through my “agents”), where does that leave me in terms of my solidarity with other people, with my fellow Americans?
The basis of ethics is freedom—without intentionality, without choice, there is no moral valence to any action at all. Compelled love is no love at all.
That is why freedom is also the basis of an ethical economy that forms, rather than deforms, the human person.
This is Buttiglione's deeper point in the hiking story: freedom rightly understood must encompass the good of others, not just my own. And yet I do not want the common good imposed on me; I want to choose it. That requires people formed to think about others as much as—if not more than—themselves. It requires civic virtues that pull us out of ourselves in response to great goods we cannot achieve alone.
The deeper meaning of agency is love: freely choosing to love someone, or something. Because the deepest meaning of freedom is the ability to choose the good in any circumstance. And “the good” does not only mean what is good for me. There are goods that go beyond my personal good.
They must be named. They must be understood. And they must ultimately be loved.
It is my love for my family that moves me to choose what is good for them as opposed to what is merely good for myself. I have affection for them, which in Augustine’s terminology means love. It is not enough merely to “know” something; our will may still not be moved toward it. We must actually love it; we must come to feel affection for it. Affection, in other words, is the middle term between an inert and unmoved person and their “knowing”—it is the thing that moves them toward an embrace.
Therefore it’s not enough to tell people all of the reasons why they should love the United States of America, or appreciate its freedoms. We must develop ways of forming true affection.
That will require shared experiences, rites of passage, which touch people deeply and lead them to see, perhaps for the very first time, the beauty of the truth.
If you’re interested in agency, the award-winning workshop “The Foundations of Agency” is going to be available in an synchronous, self-paced format later this month. You can join the waitlist here:
https://learn.lukeburgis.com/
Luke, this is an astute observation. In your question about what every American does--my immediate thought went to wave a flag--but then you qualified as non-performative. I think you diagnosed the plague affecting America.