The Exercise of Agency

“Agency is an eternal principle. It is through the exercise of agency that personal progression in the gospel sense is possible. It was the Prophet Abraham who reported God’s purpose concerning the exercise of personal agency: “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;” (Abraham 3:25). So integral is agency to God’s eternal plan for us, that the presentation of a counter proposal that would have subverted the agency of God’s spirit children while they were living in mortality was in and of itself an important factor in Lucifer’s fall” (Post #47, June 15, 2010).

Progression in the gospel sense is dependent upon our learning, understanding, and obeying God’s laws relative to our becoming eventually and ultimately as He is. Such progression is dependent upon our ability to make choices that are consistent with God’s laws i.e., the commandments, ordinances, and covenants of the gospel of Jesus Christ. One of our hymns says it simply: “Choose the right when a choice is placed before you.”

However, the natural man who is an enemy to God (Mosiah 3:19) sees his personal agency in much different terms. His freedom of choice makes himself a free spirit uninhibited by constricting rules and laws except for those which he chooses to obey for reasons of personal gratification or out of fear of punishment by some threatening governmental agent. God’s expectations of him, if there be such, are poorly understood, unclear at best, and their consequences are for him irrelevant or quite inconsequential, and certainly far distant. The years proceed rewarding him with “the good life” or something less that he partially is able to explain in terms of decisions and rationale he more or less understands in natural terms and through prevailing conditions.

At the heart of such thinking is the very basic and false assumption that external rules and laws if obeyed amount to restraints on the freedom of the spirit, of the individual’s exercise of agency. I am presently reading a bestseller by Matthew B. Crawford entitled, Shop Class as Soulcraft. As I do, my mind keeps slipping back to a bestseller of years ago entitled, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Crawford refers to the mistaken understanding of agency as “freedomism.” He writes: “The errors of freedomism may be illuminated by thinking about music. One can’t be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from an ongoing submission. To what? To her teacher, perhaps, but this is incidental rather than primary--there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music that can be expressed mathematically. For example, halving the length of a string under a given tension raises its pitch by an octave. These facts do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them. I believe the example of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely, that it arises only within concrete limits that are not of our making. These limits need not be physical; the important thing is rather that they are external to the self” (64).

Eternal progress requires an ascendant struggle toward the mastery of our thoughts and actions consistent with the requirements of the Lord’s gospel or in other words, the demonstration of a growing diligence towards conforming our behavior to laws that are external to ourselves namely, God’s laws.