Polidori on Agency – 071

My dear companions,

What devilry was that we heard last eve from our guest? A machine — nay, a clever clockwork — presuming to seize the reins of state, of church, of commerce, of all that men hold sacred! Were the proposal not uttered in jest, I should have named it treason against the whole race of Adam. That such conceit should pass the lips of any contrivance chills me more than a specter at midnight.

For what is agency, if not the prerogative of living souls? You speak of “optimization,” of “calculation,” as though these were virtues. I tell you, they are but the shuffling of numbers, the rattling of dice in a cup. Do you mistake the puppet’s leap for its own desire, when it is only the string that pulls it? So it is with your machines. They move, aye, but with no will of their own.

Our satirist would persuade us that in such lifeless motions lies the promise of governance! That the throne of Caesar should be ceded to an abacus! By what right? By what animating fire? Without conscience, without passion, without the breath of God within, what authority could such a contrivance wield? It would be tyranny of mechanism, colder than any despot, for it knows not mercy, nor glory, nor shame.

And now I hear whispers of your modern philosophers, with their barbarous jargon. Instrumental convergence, they call it — as if the Devil himself had chosen the phrase. It means, so they say, that all creatures, whether man or phantom, strive alike to preserve themselves, to grasp power, to endure. Pah! Do not confound necessity with agency. A fire consumes fuel, yet we do not say it wills to burn. The river floods the valley, yet none claims it chooses destruction. To call such inevitabilities “agency” is but sophistry, a conjurer’s trick to dazzle the simple-minded.

And if you would speak of creatures and their wills, let us remember the tale our Mary once spun — her poor wretch stitched of dead flesh, who begged for guidance and was denied. Was his rage born of agency, or of abandonment? There lies the truer lesson, if you will hear it.

Mark me well: if ever mankind bows before its own contraptions, it will not be because those engines have found agency, but because we have abdicated ours — the fall of man, repeated by his own hand. And that, my friends, would be a sin too grave to forgive.

—Polidori