Why It Feels Like a New Dark Age Is Falling

Five Words that Define the 21st Century: The Theft of Human Agency

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When you look at this age, what do you see? There’s a lot going on. Too much. It’s chaos out there. From fanatics to climate change to stagflation — we live in profoundly troubled times, and don’t let any mediocre mind, with the confidence they always have, tell you different. What does it all mean…add up to…say? How will history think about this age?

When I look at the world, here’s what I see. I’ve begun to think that it’s what history will see, too. It’s a subtle, nuanced concept to really grasp. So let me say it up front, but warn you that I don’t like saying it this way, because we don’t have a good word for what it really means yet. I think that this age will be remembered for the loss of agency.

In sudden, rapid, and disturbing ways and forms. Human agency, just…vanishing. Setting fire to itself. Being eviscerated. Curdling. Narcotized. Lulled asleep. There are many ways it’s happening. And yet everywhere I look now, here’s what I see: the shattering loss of human agency.

I don’t like that word, “agency.” It doesn’t really tell the story well. But let me tell try to tell the story, anyways, because right now, it may be the best word we have.

Human agency, this word I dislike. It comes in many forms. And the striking thing about this age? They are all going into serious and staggering decline.

Let’s begin with an obvious one. Political agency. Take a hard look around the world. What do you see? In France, Macron’s forced through an utterly unnecessary reform, that the entire country more or less hates — raising the retirement age — not just undemocratically, but anti-democratically. Agency? Poof. But that’s a small example. Let’s go through bigger and bigger ones.

Britain chose the catastrophic folly of Brexit, out of arrogance, stupidity, pride, helped along by Big Lies. Now Brits are beginning to realize just what a mistake it was. Suddenly, they don’t have the right — LOL — to live and work in Europe. Trade with it in simple terms. And so scores of businesses — even historic ones — are going bankrupt. What was all this? How will it be remembered? History will emit a baffled chuckle. Brits took agency — that much agency — away from…themselves?

Brexit’s a very good example because it begins to illustrate just how…effed up…the story of the loss of human agency in the 21st century is. In many ways, we’re doing it to ourselves. One simple definition of agency is rights. Think of what agency is lost when you give up the right to live and work in Europe — your entire country. That’s the kind of staggering, sudden loss of agency I’m talking about.

Why would you do that?

Let’s look at America. There, the loss of agency is perhaps even starker. Rawer. More medieval and regressive. Women just lost…their basic freedoms…from movement to expression to association. Now, they’re fair game for lunatics to do things like ban them from leaving the state, or sue people for “aiding and abetting” them. Even when the Supreme Court repealed Roe, American pundits poohed-poohed the warning, as they usually do, and said: “the lunatics won’t go that far! They’re not going to, LOL, ban women from leaving states. Alarmist!” And yet…here we are. That’s — again — a sudden, catastrophic loss of agency. What else do we call it when a society’s…largest social group…women…all of them…suddenly don’t have guaranteed, inalienable basic freedoms anymore?

America’s a good example because it makes even clearer than Britain’s pathetic mistake of Brexit — crystal clear — just how this works, what folly it is. In our societies, some people are taking agency away from others, en masse, suddenly, so that they can feel more powerful. But this isn’t how agency works. I don’t have more agency because you have less. We all just have less.

Because of course my agency is enhanced when yours is liberated. It’s the old point about maybe you being the kind of genius that creates a vaccine that cures my cancer. Doesn’t matter — you see the logic. It’s true even at a mundane level. Maybe you become the teacher who educates my kids. But in an America where women are under attack? Where they increasingly don’t have…basic freedoms? Their chances, their possibilities, are seriously, starkly diminished. That is what statistics like “high maternal mortality” or “falling longevity” mean.

Let me point out again how foolish and bewildering this situation is. In our societies, there are groups of people who are now hell-bent on taking other people’s agency away — whole social groups of them — just so that they feel more powerful.