“The government is going to want to blame this on an individual rather than blame it on the war” — John Henry Browne, defense attorney for the US staff sergeant accused of murdering 16 Afghans [NY Times].

I have lately been dwelling on the question of human agency versus social context or structure. It is a major theme in Cathy J. Cohen’s book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics, which I am in the midst of reviewing. And it came up explicitly in committee work last weekend.

We were discussing standards for civic education, and the question arose whether to make “agency” (probably not by that name) a core educational value. In practice, this would play out in settings like a history class on slavery. The older historiography emphasized structure: slavery as an overwhelming influence on the victims. Recent historiography has recovered the agency and creativity of slaves. The danger in a k-12 classroom would be teaching kids that slavery was basically OK because the victims were still agents and made choices.

The staff sergeant accused of the Afghanistan massacre made a choice that vast numbers of other US soldiers have not made and would not make. To deny his responsibility for what he allegedly did is to deny his agency and that of his fellow soldiers–it would make them all seem like automata or victims instead of responsible professionals. At the same time, he wouldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t been sent for the third time, against his will, into a bloody counter-insurgency war halfway around the world. So the context or structure matters.

That is an extreme case, for which the word “evil” seems appropriate, but the same logic arises when kids drop out of high school or have  unprotected sex. These are acts that involve both context and agency. How we weigh the two will affect how we respond.

In my view, we should not simply aim to make structures better (e.g., get out of Afghanistan or improve schools). Those are valid goals, but people should also have agency. Institutions and policies will turn out better if we all help shape them; also, actively shaping the world is an aspect of a flourishing human life. In concrete terms, that would mean not only reforming education so that kids have better outcomes, but enlisting youth in reforming education. At our best, we now strive to enhance the human capital or market power of young people. We rarely even try to enhance their political agency.

We should also recognize agency wherever it does emerge. Even in extreme cases, like prisons and war zones, people are agents as well as objects. Dismissing their action as the mere product of structure or context diminishes them. On the other hand, to assess the limits and constraints on their agency is a precondition of enhancing it. If you think that kids are simply choosing to drop out of high school and are not in any sense being pushed out, you will diagnose their situation wrong. Likewise, it’s naive to think that American soldiers in Afghanistan have been placed in situations where they are free to do a lot of good.