PART FIVE: AGENCY
28. Dimensions of Agency
Albert-László Barabási is the world’s leading expert on networks. All types of networks, the World Wide Web, food and disease networks, as well as social networks. His 2009 paper in Science explains how large networks regulate and manage their own behavior.1 His work is often summarised as the 80:20 rule. Check out your WhatsApp. If you behave like most people on WhatsApp, 80 per cent of your interactions will be with 20 per cent of your contact list. As a species, we also follow highly predictable patterns of travel. Most of us (80 per cent) keep going back to the same places (20 per cent). These data shift our understanding of how social networks shape the world. Barabási’s work takes us from random interactions to predictable patterns that replicate across all communities.
You will be glad to know that I am more or less at an end of setting out all the components that comprise a wider definition of civil society, of relationships between people and between peoples. In the next section I will propose a theory of how these components fit together, shape patterns of safety, health and security, how it explains the extension of social networks and belonging well beyond Dunbar’s 150, and how that feeds into a decline in violence and increase in altruism.
A year or so after starting Ratio as a decade long investigation into how relationships shape health and well-being, I was thinking we have chosen the wrong target. I was thinking we should be studying agency. Agency is our capacity to act, to initiate action that starts something new, or resists something old or sustains something that is important but dying. Agency operates at both the level of ‘I’ and ‘We’. I have to decide what I will work on for the next decade, now that my 10 years of Ratio are coming to an end. I am lucky. I have lots of freedom in making that choice. We -the people in my community- are trying to decide how we support the many people escaping from persecution in the Sahel and who temporarily camp in the square in which we live. Here I have no agency, and my community has limited control, but we can and are trying to make a difference.
Why did I suddenly think agency was important? Because I had to explain how civil society -the relationships between us- gets into the body. How do relationships change the way I think and behave? How have relationships between people contributed to the decline in violence described at the beginning of this Substack? I think the answer is agency.
Some of this is implicit in the way I have defined civil society. After all, mutual aid, market exchanges and organic deliberative democracy are what Habermas calls communicative action. In these three examples the act of communicating is an action intended to directly or indirectly change the world. But what about the power of civil society, or the changing value of social capital or patterns of shared understanding? How do these change how we think and behave? That has to be explained.
In the next four posts I will make three claims.
One that civil society influences agency at the level of I’ and ‘We’.
Two that ‘We’ agency strongly influences ‘I’ agency.
And three that ‘We’ agency is both shaped by and shapes civil society.
But first, I have to make the case that agency exists. Some really smart people think it does not.
Albert-László Barabási, Scale-Free Networks: A Decade and Beyond, Science, Issue 5939, 2009