American Thought Leaders - We Are Waging War Against Our Own Nature: Mary Harrington

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

“I would suggest that, actually, we’ve been living in the transhumanist era for 50 years or more. We’re half a century into the transhumanist age, and really, it began with the contraceptive pill.”Mary Harrington is a self-described “reactionary feminist,” contributing editor at UnHerd, and author of “Feminism Against Progress.” We sat down together at the Dissident Dialogues Festival to discuss the intersection of progress, individual freedom, technology, and, ultimately, transhumanism.“What that opens up is a whole theoretically infinite spectrum of engineering of ourselves—if you like—of seeing human nature itself as a set of problems to be solved,” says Ms. Harrington. She believes that believing a “progress narrative” leads to the misguided attempt to create heaven on earth.“It just won’t matter how often we set out trying to wage war on our own nature. It will just find a way of coming back,” she says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

I would suggest that actually we've been living in the transhumanist era for 50 years. We're half a century into the transhumanist age, and really it began with a contraceptive pill. Mary Harrington is a self-described reactionary feminist, contributing editor at UnHerd, and author of Feminism Against Progress. We sat down together at the Dissident Dialogues Festival to discuss the intersection of progress, individual freedom, technology, and ultimately transhumanism. What that opens up is a whole theoretically infinite spectrum of engineering of ourselves, seeing human nature itself as a set of tech problems to be solved. It just won't

matter how often we set out trying to wage war on our own nature, it will just find a way of coming back. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Mary Harrington, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders here at Dissident Dialogues. Thank you for having me. Well, Mary, I've been following your work for quite some time, and especially your work around transhumanism and thinking about, you know, why is it that we're in this very strange moment where we have these transhumanist manifestations happening on all different aspects of society? But you've kind of taken it a little further. I've become fascinated with this recent piece that you wrote. I want to focus on that today. You don't believe in progress. And it turns out that this is a central idea to your argument in this new piece. Yeah.

When I say I don't believe in progress, I don't mean I think the world is getting worse or that nothing ever changes because these things are obviously not true. I mean, you know, the world now is not the same as it was in ancient Rome. And I don't, but when I say I don't believe in progress, I mean, I don't believe that there's a narrative arc to the world where things are necessarily going from bad to worse, from bad to better, or reversing those poles from better to bad again. I'm skeptical of that narrative arc. Or rather, I want to historicize it, relativize it, to point out that this is a culturally specific or rather religiously specific way of looking at reality and that comes straightforwardly out of Christianity and that has been secularized as progressivism just without any of the religious components. So, I mean, if you look at Indian mythology, there's this understanding of time as cyclical.

You know, we go through a series of ages which culminate in the Kali Yuga, the collapse of everything. And then it all goes back to the beginning again. And that's one way of understanding, you know, the history at a metaphysical level, if you like. I mean, the ancient Greeks had a beginning of time and they just didn't really have an end. They just had their gods. The Norse mythology has the same cyclical conception. So there are other cultures and other peoples and have not seen the world as beginning with creation and ending with some sort of end times, which may or may not result in heaven on

earth. That's a distinctively Judeo-Christian, or really specifically Christian, way of understanding the world. And it's one that even in a broadly post-Christian culture, which I think what we inhabit now in the West, or at least we think of ourselves as post-Christian, in that most people don't go to church now, most people don't believe in Jesus and the Bible, and most people don't read the Scripture. But, you know, the structures of thought and the structures of

how we understand time, how we understand history, how we understand, if you like, the moral character of our movement through time, remains distinctively Christian in the progressives and really the reactionaries as well are taking this linear understanding of reality as beginning somewhere and ending somewhere

and really ending usually with a vision of life as going somehow better, you know, as having solved all of the problems that we have on Earth. And it's not always clear how we're going to get there. But really, I think what drives the progressivist version of that, if you like, the kind of de-christianized version of that is technology, in the sense that it becomes very plausible to see history in these linear terms, and to see us as progressing from a worse place to a better place at least on the metric of material comfort and ease and so on when you consider the pace of innovation but really since since the reformation in the in especially in the anglophone world but really across the the developed west so this this was really my i suppose the sort of brand historical framing for thinking

about what we're talking about when we're talking about transhumanism. Yeah, no, I mean, this is absolutely fascinating, because I've been recently kind of convinced by the work of James Lindsay and some others that communism is actually like a Gnostic heresy, right, of Christianity. Isn't that the Eric Vogelin argument? Well, it is. And I was just unaware of it. And he's been bringing up this progress is in effect us trying to create heaven on earth.

Yes, that's that progressivism. And technology sort of is... Technology is the means of doing so. Is the means of doing so, but it also hides the fact that this is a faith-oriented thing. We often say there's a crisis of faith or there's a lack of faith, but you kind of put that on its head and you're saying you went through America, you still see it today, there's actually an abundance of faith. In the essay you're referring to, I drew some contrasts between Britain and America because we're cultural cousins.

I mean, not just because of the language, but, you know, the historical connection, which it's complicated, but, you know, it's still strong. But the major difference I see between Britain and America is the North American relation, particularly the United States, the relationship to what's possible or what could be possible. Or really, I think Walt Disney really put it best when he talks about how dreams can come true.

You know, this is the central sort of metaphysical proposal, which I think is so distinctively American. And again, sort of conceals its theological quality in being mostly oriented towards the material world. You dream a dream and then you set about trying to make it happen in history. In a sense, that's sort of central to the American proposition, the American dream. This is not very English. You sort of imagine this is how everybody thinks about the world. People who live elsewhere or come from other places who think like that will be drawn to America, I think.

And because it's such a powerful, it's a powerfully characteristically American impulse. And I think it's very easy to look at that as a foreigner, as I am, and to say, oh, you know, this is just crass materialism, or to say, oh, you know, this is just crass materialism, or to say, oh, you know, this is just exploitative at the expense of the rest of the world, or, oh, you know, this is just the American empire doing its thing. But to me, there's a very sincere and very idealistic spiritual impulse at the root of it, which is really about manifesting heaven on earth,

this desire to make dreams come true, which I think of as a very beautiful thing, and which has also, to a great extent, come on board from its Christian origin and become directed at pretty much anything you care to know, whether that's innovative forms of breakfast spread or, I don't know, like the world's most comfortable mattress or whatever it is, somebody's dreaming it and trying to make it happen with the aim of creating heaven on earth. Yeah, I mean, the result is, you know, epoch defining,

you know, America is the world's global hegemon at a cultural and material level as well for really essentially this reason, because there's so many people are trying to make so many different dreams come true. But I think part of that is that there's always another frontier. There's always a further dream, because every time you set out to realize heaven on earth,

you don't quite make it. You don't quite get there. It doesn't work. You can't do it. And every time you try and realize heaven on earth, you create new problems as well. So there's a new problem that needs another. You need the needs you to eminentize the eschaton all over again. Explain to me how technology fits into your model here. I see technology as, you know, when people say we don't live in a religious world anymore, I would disagree. But I would say that technology is the theology of our contemporary world. I would say, you know, it is theological in its nature and it's unfolding in the world.

The technological mindset, if you like, it's a spiritual paradigm in its own right. It sets the terms of what's achievable. It sets the terms for what the good is in a way that ends up excluding a great many other religious paradigms in the process. And you may or may not see that as a good thing. But I mean, it's difficult to dispute. If you're looking at the world through the technological lens, trying to do so simultaneously through a theological one

is increasingly challenging the further you get into the technological paradigm which is about claiming for yourself the right to realize heaven on earth and once you've done that you've you've you've you've left for example the christian one behind because that takes as its basic premise the fact that you can't do this and that the heaven is only realizable in the next life you know this is a fallen world and to an extent we have to accept some of its limitations and shortcomings. Whereas the technological progressivists, whether they're on the left or on the right,

and you really do get them across the spectrum, you know, this is not just a leftist thing at all. The right progressives are probably, I think, the most vigorous and likely to be the most successful of the various factions on the right at the moment. But all of these say, no, we don't have to accept the world as it is, with its foreign nature. We can fix it. You know, we can identify each one of these foreign characteristics,

and we can make them better. You know, we can take everything, for example, which is unfair about the differences between men and women, and we can find a tech fix for that. And really, this is how we get to the transhumanist uh moment the transhumanist temptation if you like uh because i mean i mean we you talk about how you know we suddenly find ourselves in this in this moment where all these transhumanist uh propositions are coming into being and i would i would suggest that actually we've been living in the transhumanist

era for 50 years more um you know we're half a century into the transhumanist era for 50 years more. We're half a century into the transhumanist age. And really, it began with the contraceptive pill. So this is the most remarkable thing about your piece to me, because you explain that the pill transformed medicine in a foundational way that hadn't occurred to me before. Probably people have written on this before, but I had not grasped this. Explain that, please. What was revolutionary about the pill was not that it allowed people to have sex outside marriage. What was revolutionary about the pill was the way it turned the medical paradigm upside down. So previously, for millennia, doctors of various persuasions in various different frameworks have set out with a common understanding of what normal

human health looks like to fix, to troubleshoot, if you like. Everyone understands what healthy human functioning looks like. And you go see a doctor when that goes wrong. And otherwise, you leave the doctor alone. Nobody. And what happened with the contraceptive pill was that that was turned on its head because the pill doesn't fix something which is broken. The pill breaks something which is working normally. And it does so in the name of individual freedom. And that's a radical. We still haven't grasped how radical a shift that was.

Because once you do that, once you accept in principle and, you know, the entire the entire developed world and great deal of the rest of the world has now accepted in principle the idea that it's legitimate to break something which is working normally in the interests of human freedom or planning your family. Once you accept that in principle, it doesn't really have a limit. I mean, why would it be legitimate to break normal female fertility in the name of personal freedom and not some other aspect of our normal physiology. And then what that opens up is a whole theoretically infinite spectrum

of engineering of ourselves, if you like, of seeing human nature itself as a set of problems to be solved. I mean, you know, there are arguments. And so now, 50 years on, we find arguments over, for example, whether or not it's legitimate to engineer embryos in order to select for the greater likelihood of particular traits. Well, yeah, I mean, any number of other reasons. So you might be wanting to engineer human beings,

or you might want to be, yeah, applying the same instrumentalist, the same controlling technological mindset to any number of other, what are fundamentally aspects of our nature, or what we previously understood as aspects of our nature, things which were given and things which we simply had to accept. You know, you have the talents you have, you have the looks you have, you have, you know, and some people are better, some people are more blessed than others. You know, I have short legs and a long body. There's not a whole lot I can do about that. And I'm fairly resigned to that. But in theory, you know,

if you accept the transhumanist paradigm, I could have been genetically engineering my child to have long legs and a short body and be supermodel. I mean, is there something wrong with that? Not within that mindset. And within the mindset that says there are other metaphysical frameworks from which you can

critique of that. But within the medical paradigm that was instantiated by the pill, and which everybody has broadly accepted in principle ever since, there's no reason why, there's no real robust argument against it. Except, you know, the residual afterburner of Christianity, which is mounting something of a real action. But it's not much of one.

With everything you just described, you can really imagine how, you know, if you're a man and you feel like you should be a woman, that there should be a tech fix for that it had never occurred to me right that through technology this is what we're trying to manifest a kind of a faith concept and that technology is the enabler that that's the view that i've come to um and in a sense i mean there's a beautiful impulse there um a very a very deeply felt one and a very but at heart what is a very very beautiful one um my i i but i also see it as a tragic one because he is all it's doomed to fail you know in a sense it sort of displaces it just displaces heaven on earth you know down the road over and over and over and over and over you know and it generally makes a lot of people rich along the way sure and you know maybe it makes some people kind of happy in some ways if if not in others along the way. And yeah,

and it, and it's, it's become the sort of driving engine. It's a Shakespearean tragedy. It is. It's a, it's a Shakespearean tragedy because every single time, particularly once we get to this state where we're in,

where we're setting out to engineer ourselves, what invariably, you know, we wage war on ourselves and it doesn't work. I mean, we have, we have the, what I find actually honestly comforting in a kind of bleak way

is that we have 50 years of receipts now on whether or not transhumanism works. We already have the data on whether it works. If you see the aim of the contraceptive pills being to stop women getting pregnant if they want to have sex outside marriage, then broadly, by and large, it works. But if you see the in terms of its sort of this larger sort of metaphysical project which is to to flatten abolish technologize away the differences between men and women it has not worked because men men still approach forming relationships differently to women women still by and large retain i mean of course there

are outliers, yes, but we're talking about the normal distribution here. We both understand that averages are a thing. By and large, women prefer long-term committed relationships considerably more than men do. That hasn't changed simply because they now have the technological means of enabling them to have short-term casual relationships.

That hasn't changed their preference for the other kind. The nature of men and the nature of women has not fundamentally changed just because we applied this thin technological fix over the top. My gut feeling is that that will just continue to be true. It doesn't, it won't matter. It just won't matter. How often we set out trying to wage war on our own nature, it will just find a way of coming back. I mean, there's that famous quote from Horace, I think it is, where he says you can drive nature out with a pitchfork and still she comes

back and and i think about that often because i think we're going to end up learning the hard way having having really more or less decided as a culture to to to collectively forget what human nature is or even though there is such a thing and i mean if you try and make normative statements about humans you'll get you'll get pelted with rotten tomatoes. You know, if you try and say men are this way, somebody will say, well, I know a man that's not like that. And you say, well, average is. But it's still there. It's still real.

You know, humans still have a normative, broadly consistent nature, which I think hasn't changed for millennia and is not going to change. No matter how much technology we throw at it, it's not going to stick. And eventually we'll come, you know, we'll probably create some monsters along the way. Not you and I personally, but collectively, you know, there'll be a great deal of teratology along the way. Singularity is what in Silicon Valley, that is the heaven on earth, isn't it? That would be a great example, right? Yeah, I mean, there's a school of thoughts that says the singularity already happened.

The point where humans fused irrevocably with their machines. You know, you could make the case that that was in 2007 when the iPhone came out. I think if there's a plausible point at which humans fused with their digital technology, that was it. Well, and people do this, right? They will put the phone, will go in a lockbox for a while, right? But here's the thing. You know, even if actually I'm right and we did, and the singularity was the point in 2007 where we fused with these machines,

human nature still hasn't changed. And it won't either. We can set about trying to technologize somehow technologize away you know the things people might try and find a tech fix for you know humans human tendency to conflict or you know maybe baby's need for in for attentive care you know there are all sorts of things which are kind of a pain because they require they ask things of us they're inconvenient to us for some reason you know these are the kinds of things that people want to find technological fixes for and i i suspect that where it comes to the the sort of higher aspects of our nature like that you know those which call

forth love or you know invite us to be angry or in confrontation with one another we'll try and find tech fixes and what will happen will either be that we'll we'll create monsters and abandon the experiment or those of us who went too far into it will just end up editing yourselves out and you know the whoever it was who didn't go completely insane in that way will be the ones who carry on the species so i'm long i'm long the human race i really am i'm i'm short the the uh capacity of technology to realize heaven on earth in silicon valley there's a contingent of people that imagine this complete fusion,

sucking the human consciousnesses into the big, broader, super-intelligent computers, AI singularity. That thesis, that is something positive. It's just the rapture. It's the rapture.

Hence this framework, right? Yeah, it's just the rapture. It's the rapture. Well, that's hence this framework, right? Yeah, I mean, it's just the rapture with a bit more sci-fi. Some sort of super, super human being or entity or force is going to come down and will lift us up into an unimaginable realm and that will end human history and take us into a new era. That's essentially what the rapture, what the story of the rapture is and it's just been transposed into the field of digital technology with very, very, very little adjustment.

You're saying that progress is a Gnostic heresy. Well, sort of. Sort of. I mean, Gnosticism is... Let me clarify what I mean by that. I just mean that the Gnostics believed that the physical world, that the reality that we have is the problem. That's right.

That the reality is the problem and that it has to be... No materiality is the problem. I think it's important to draw some distinctions. The ancient Gnostics, they were Platonists, essentially, or whatever sort of variant of Platonists, in the sense that they thought the problem with the material world was that it was irredeemably fallen. It was broken. It was a disgusting, gross, corrupted copy.

And that what they yearned to cut back to was an ideal world of Fords. You know, if you like the platonic realm of original Fords. And that was just where they desperately longed to be, you know, away from this crappy broken, half-formed, kind of mutant universe that we're all unfortunately stuck in. What I think is different now, and what I think is

distinctive about the kind of neo-gnostic place with cultural impulse, is that it's actually waging war on the forms. You know, in a sense, it's waging war on the idea that there is any normative structure to anything living and re-engineer it to suit ourselves. So we can re-engineer animals into being something that they're not.

Or we can even re-engineer ourselves into being something that we're not. And the technology kind of provides the promise of that. Right, and technology as the means of doing so i mean i can't really speculate but my gut feel is that if you told if you told one of the ancient not if you explained this proposal to one of the ancient gnostics they'd be appalled by the idea that you were waging war on you know even that that you you denied the existence of of the domain of forms altogether and then in, just wanted to engineer a world of pure desire and pure becoming, if you like. They would see that as even more heretical relative to their own non-standard. Fascinating. Well, you know, I haven't thought a lot about the ancient

Gnostics until the last few years. You have developed a fascinating to me body of knowledge and and and kind of a lens of looking at the world and I I just want to know a little bit more about you for the benefit of our audience like where do you come from how did you how did you come to be thinking in these ways uh very in a very roundabout way is the answer um I I read English English literature at university. I just love reading. I studied at Oxford. I went up to read French and German and then met a very passionate student of English literature in my first year and just realised that I wanted to be learning what he was learning. And so I persuaded my tutors to let me switch course. And that was it. And I just threw myself into what was actually an incredibly rich curriculum, which took me chronologically all the

way from Beowulf to to really the 20th century English literature and what I came away with was a framework for the the anglophone history of ideas and I guess I've been embellishing that in a slightly idiosyncratic way ever since that was the frame that that I've been hanging things off um and then particularly I was particularly interested in in classical mythology and in the the the shaping influence of Christianity and also in the shaping influence of print technology on on that history and those those cultural political developments and those are also lenses I suppose which I which find their way out in my thinking but after I left university I was just too crazy to become a writer,

which was what I really wanted to do. I was those proper 90-90 Froot Loops in my 20s. So I went off and I was a radical leftist, and I lived in various kind of experimental settings and tried various experimental lifestyles. I eventually decided that all sucked, and I got married and moved out of London and had a kid. And by the time I'd done all of that,

I pretty thoroughly revised some of my earlier views. And I guess, you know, come to think that, and some of my more extreme 20-something ideas, were maybe not quite how the world works. And, yeah, about the time I had a kid, I suppose what we could call the political realignment was was in full swing you know really this this major shift in that happened between the global financial crash and then the the great the great displacement of trump and brexit eight years after that um there was a was a real time of political turmoil and rethinking for a lot of people.

They're just trying to say, well, you know, where are we now? What's really going on? And I mean, it hasn't stopped since. You know, the turmoil and the realignment is still very much with us. And I think a lot of people are still looking around thinking, well, how do we make sense of this very strange 21st century world that we find ourselves in? Where a lot of the comfortable certainties that people had that i grew up with in the 20th century that the world is on a good

safe track towards never-ending improvement and that's all uh certainly very much in question these days um you know the values that we're supposed to order those things by are very much in question all of these things are very partly contested and honestly I think in as much as I came to be writing it's only because I was I maybe I've just I I was in a position to to have been forced to start rethinking my priors just not not very much ahead of where everybody else has been asking those questions as well anyway as a long story short, I came to writing in public very late. I was 40 and already a mum. And I published my first article at Unheard. I've written for them pretty much ever since. They're a great publication. I love them to bits. As Mary, this has been an absolutely wonderful conversation for me. As we finish up,

and I'm going to have to invite you back for a longer conversation, I want to read something from this piece that you titled very abstrusely Emanentizing the Echelon. Echelon. This is what you said, that in America, a powerful sense of how abundant America's resources are of raw spiritual wealth.

Kind of coming back to that idea. It was touching to read that because really it's the opposite, as I mentioned earlier, of what we tend to think. But you're saying what you see here in America right now is this overabundance of raw spiritual wealth. The story I told about that was riding the Greyhound bus through coast to coast, which I did in my early 20s. And there was one, I can't remember the name of the town. It was a small town somewhere in the hot muggy interior of the United States where we passed one of those little wooden churches. I'm sure you know. And it's muggy and it passed one of those little wooden churches I'm sure you know and it's muggy and it has one of those signs out the

front with the movable letters. You can picture the scene and on this sign is written, blessed is he who believes without a sign and I thought it was funny at the time you know, to have a sign about believing without a sign because I was like, if you didn't need the sign, why did you put it on the sign?

I thought it was funny, but I've thought about it a lot, because I was like, if you didn't need the sign, why did you put on the sign? And I thought it was funny. But I've thought about it a lot since. And I think there's something in the idea of believing without a sign and then wanting to make the sign, which is so characteristically American. And when I talk about America's raw spiritual wealth, what I mean is not religious communities, although, of course, America has a great deal of those as well. What I mean is the capacity to believe, you know, to say, to have a big idea and then to believe in it so strongly that you're able to go the poor everything you have into trying to make it happen

and also to bring other people with you and to have people around you who are willing to be brought with you. You know, America is incredibly rich in that kind of raw willingness to believe. And it's an astonishing resource. And it's not one that I think should be underestimated. And it's not one that I think should be scorned or treated with condescension, which is very easy to do. And it's often the case, especially among conservatives to hear, American conservatives to hear,

oh, you know, America's faith is declining, you know, we're in is declining, you know, we're in this hopeless state of decadence and spiritual decline and collapse. This is not my sense. One might perhaps make the case that these raw reserves of spiritual faith could be more coherently directed, but they're there. What's the point? They are there. What I was going to say is I think you make the case, right, that they've become dramatically misapplied. It is possible that they may be dramatically misapplied. I mean, I would posit, I would claim,

that the transhumanist temptation is very much a case in point. You know, it's a very dramatic misapplication of what is fundamentally a deeply positive and still potentially very, very life-affirming spiritual impulse. But in the end, you're long on the human nature. I'm on the human nature. Fascinating. Well, Mary Harrington, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's a great honor. Thank you all for joining Mary Harrington and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Janja Kellek.