We Are Waging War Against Our Own Nature: Mary Harrington

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “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.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Mary Harrington, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders here at Dissident Dialogues.

Mary Harrington:
Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mary, I’ve been following your work on transhumanism and the transhumanist manifestations that are happening in society today. You’ve taken it further with your recent piece stating that you don’t believe in progress, and this is central to your argument.

Ms. Harrington:
When I say that I don’t believe in progress, it doesn’t mean I think the world is getting worse or that nothing ever changes, because that is obviously not true. The world now is not the same as it was in ancient Rome. I don’t believe there’s a narrative arc 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 about that narrative arc.

I want to historicize it and relativize it to point out this is a religiously specific way of looking at reality coming out of Christianity which has now been secularized as progressivism, without any of the religious components. If you look at Indian mythology, there is an understanding of time as cyclical. 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. That’s one way of understanding history at a metaphysical level.

The ancient Greeks had a beginning of time, but didn’t really have an end. They just had their gods. Norse mythology has the same cyclical conception. There are other cultures that have not seen the world as beginning with creation and ending with the end times which may or may not result in heaven on earth. That’s a distinctively Christian understanding of the world.

It is one that is held even in the broadly post-Christian culture that we inhabit now in the West. We mostly 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. The structures of thought, how we understand time, how we understand history, and how we understand the moral character of our movement through time remains distinctively Christian.

Both the progressives and the reactionaries are using this linear understanding of reality that begins somewhere and ends with a vision of life that has solved all of the problems that we have on earth. It’s not always clear how we’re going to get there. In the progressivist version, 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. You can see this with the pace of innovation in the developed West since the Reformation. This was my historical framing when I’m talking about transhumanism.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve been convinced by the work of James Lindsay and others
that communism is actually like the Gnostic heresy of Christianity.

Ms. Harrington:
Isn’t that the Eric Vogelin argument?

Mr. Jekielek:
It is. He says that this progressivism is human beings trying to create heaven on earth.

Ms. Harrington:
Yes, that is progressivism, and technology is the means of doing so.

Mr. Jekielek:
But it also hides the fact that this is faith-oriented. We often say that currently there is a crisis of faith or lack of faith. But you put that idea on its head and say that America today has an abundance of faith.

Ms. Harrington:
In that essay I drew some contrasts between Britain and America because we’re cultural cousins, and not just because of the language. The historical connection, which is complicated, is still strong. But the major difference I see between Britain and America is the belief in what is possible. Walt Disney really put it best when he talks about how dreams can come true. This is the central metaphysical proposal that is so distinctively American, but it conceals its theological quality by being mostly oriented towards the material world. You dream a dream, and then you set about trying to make it happen in history. This is called the American dream. This is not very English at all.

Mr. Jekielek:
But don’t you imagine this is how everybody in the world thinks?

Ms. Harrington:
People living elsewhere who think like that will be drawn to America. It’s such a powerful, characteristically American impulse. It’s very easy to look at that as a foreigner, as I am, and say, “This is just crass materialism. This is just exploitative at the expense of the rest of the world. This is just the American empire doing its thing.”

But to me, there is a very sincere and idealistic spiritual impulse at the root of it, which is really about manifesting heaven on earth. It is a desire to make dreams come true, which is a beautiful thing. To a great extent, it has come on board from its Christian origin and become directed at pretty much anything you care to know about. It could be about innovative forms of breakfast spread or the world’s most comfortable mattress.

Whatever it is, somebody is dreaming it and trying to make it happen with the aim of creating heaven on earth. Yes, the results are epoch-defining. America is the world’s global hegemon at a cultural and material level for essentially this reason, because there are so many people who are trying to make so many different dreams come true.

But part of that is there is always another frontier and there is always another 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 and you can’t do it. Also, every time you try to realize heaven on earth, you create new problems as well. There is a new problem that needs you to immanentize the eschaton all over again.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain to us how technology fits into your model here.

Ms. Harrington:
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. It is theological in its nature and it is unfolding in the world. The technological mindset is a spiritual paradigm in its own right. It sets the terms of what is achievable. It sets the terms for what good is in a way that ends up excluding a great many other religious paradigms in the process.

You may or may not see that as a good thing. But 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, it is all about claiming for yourself the right to realize heaven on earth. Once you’ve done that, you’ve left the Christian worldview behind. That worldview takes as its basic premise that you can’t do that on earth, and that heaven is only realizable in the next life.

This is a fallen world and to some extent we have to accept some of its limitations and shortcomings. The technological progressives are really across the spectrum, both on the Left and the Right. This is not just a Leftist thing at all. The progressives on the Right are probably the most vigorous and likely to be the most successful of the various factions on the Right at the moment.

But all of these factions say, “No, we don’t have to accept the world as it is with its fallen nature. We can fix it. We can identify each one of these fallen characteristics and we can make them better. We can take everything that is unfair about the differences between men and women and find a tech fix for that.” This is how we get to this transhumanist moment, or call it the transhumanist temptation, if you like.

We suddenly find ourselves in this moment where all these transhumanist propositions are coming into being. I would suggest that we’ve been living in the transhumanist era for 50 years or more. We are half-a-century into the transhumanist age. It really all began with the contraceptive pill.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is the most remarkable thing about your article. You explain that the pill transformed medicine in a foundational way. Please explain that for us.

Ms. Harrington:
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. Previously, for millennia, doctors of various persuasions in different frameworks have set out with a common understanding of what normal human health looks like in order to troubleshoot and repair it.

Everyone understands what healthy human functioning looks like. You go to see a doctor when that goes wrong. Otherwise, you leave the doctor alone. That was turned on its head because the contraceptive 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. We still haven’t grasped how radical a shift that was.

In principle, the entire developed world has now accepted 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, there are no limits. Why would it be legitimate to break normal female fertility in the name of personal freedom, but not some other aspect of our normal physiology? That opens up a whole theoretically infinite spectrum of engineering of ourselves and seeing human nature itself as a set of problems to be solved.

Now, 50 years on, there are arguments over whether or not it is legitimate to engineer embryos in order to select for the greater likelihood of particular traits. You might want to engineer human beings for any number of other reasons. You might want to apply the same controlling technological mindset to other fundamental aspects of our nature, things we once simply had to accept—like the talents you have and the looks you have. Some people are more blessed than others. Some have short legs and a long body. There’s not a whole lot I can personally do about that and I’m fairly resigned to that.

But in theory, if you accept the transhumanist paradigm, I could genetically engineer my child to have long legs and a short body and be a supermodel. Is there something wrong with that? Not within their mindset. But there are other metaphysical frameworks from which you can mount a critique of that.

But within the medical paradigm that was instantiated by the pill,
and which in principle everybody has broadly accepted ever since, there’s still no real, robust argument against it. However, there is the residual afterburner of Christianity, which is mounting something of a rearguard action, but it’s not much of anything.

Mr. Jekielek:
With everything you just described, if you’re a man and you feel like you should be a woman, there should be a tech fix for that. What they are trying to manifest is a faith concept and technology is the enabler.

Ms. Harrington:
That’s the view that I’ve come to. In a sense, there’s a beautiful impulse there. It’s a very deeply felt one and at heart, a very beautiful one. But I also see it as a tragic one, because it’s doomed to fail. It just pushes heaven on earth down the road over and over again. It generally makes a lot of people rich along the way for sure. Maybe it makes some people happy in some ways. But it has become the driving engine today

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a Shakespearean tragedy.

Ms. Harrington:
Yes, it is a Shakespearean tragedy. Invariably, once we get to this state where we are engineering ourselves, we are actually waging war on ourselves and it doesn’t work. What I find comforting in a kind of bleak way is that we have 50 years of receipts now on whether we’re going to make it and whether or not transhumanism works. We already have the data on whether or not 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 by and large it works.

But in terms of its larger metaphysical project, which is to abolish and technologise away the differences between men and women, it has not worked. Because men still approach forming relationships differently than women do. We both understand that averages are a thing, but 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 of relationship. The nature of men and the nature of women has not fundamentally changed just because we applied this thin layer of technology. It’s just a technological fix on the surface.

My gut feeling is that will continue to be true. However often we set out to wage war on our own nature, it will just find a way of coming back. There’s that famous quote from Horace where he says, “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, and still she comes back.” I think about that often because we’re going to end up learning the hard way by having decided as a culture to collectively forget what human nature is.

If you make normative statements about humans, you will get pelted with rotten tomatoes. If you try to say that men are a certain way, somebody will say, “Well, I know a man that’s not like that.” Then you say, “Well, the average man is.” It’s still there and it’s still real. Humans still have a normative, broadly consistent nature which 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. Eventually, we’ll probably create some monsters along the way. There will be a great deal of teratology along the way.

Mr. Jekielek:
In Silicon Valley, singularity means heaven on earth. Is that correct?

Ms. Harrington:
Yes, there is a school of thought that says the singularity has already happened. It is the point where humans irrevocably fused with their machines. You could make the case that it happened in 2007 when the iPhone came out. If there was a plausible point when humans fused with their digital technology, that was it.

Mr. Jekielek:
People will actually put their phone into a lockbox for a while to separate from this technology.

Ms. Harrington:
But here’s the thing, even if I’m right and the singularity was the point in 2007 where we fused with these machines, human nature still hasn’t changed. We can set about trying to find a tech fix for the human tendency for conflict or maybe a baby’s need for attentive care. There are many things which are a pain because they require things from us. They’re inconvenient to us for some reason. These are the kinds of things that people want to find technological fixes for.

I suspect that when it comes to the higher aspects of our nature, those which call forth love or invite us to be angry or in confrontation with one another, we will try to find tech fixes for those things. What will happen? Either we’ll create monsters and abandon the experiment, or those of us who went too far into it, we’ll just end up editing ourselves out. Whoever didn’t go completely insane in that way will be the ones who carry on the species. I’m long the human race. I really am. I’m short on the capacity of technology to realize heaven on earth.

Mr. Jekielek:
In Silicon Valley, there’s a contingent of people that imagine this complete fusion of human consciousness with super intelligent computers and AI singularity. They see that as something positive.

Ms. Harrington:
It’s the rapture.

Mr. Jekielek:
Hence, this framework, correct?

Ms. Harrington:
It’s just the rapture with a bit more sci-fi. Some sort of superhuman being or entity or force is going to come down and lift us up into an unimaginable realm, which will end human history and take us into a new era. Essentially, that’s what the story of the rapture is. It’s just being transposed onto the field of digital technology with very little adjustment.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re saying that progress is a Gnostic heresy. Let me clarify what I mean. The Gnostics believed that the physical world, the reality that we have is the problem. Reality is the problem.

Ms. Harrington:
No materiality is actually the problem. It’s important to draw some distinctions here. The ancient Gnostics were a variant of the Platonists who thought that the problem with the material world was that it was irredeemably fallen. It was broken. It was a gross, disgusting, corrupted copy. They yearned to destroy it and go back to an ideal world of forms, the Platonic realm of original forms. That was where they desperately longed to be, away from this crappy, broken, half-formed mutant universe that we’re all unfortunately stuck in.

What is different now, and what is distinctive about the neo-Gnostic place in the current cultural impulse, is that it’s actually waging war on the forms. It’s waging war on the idea that there is any normative structure to anything living, and we can re-engineer it to suit ourselves. We can re-engineer animals into being something that they’re not. We can even re-engineer ourselves into being something that we’re not.

Mr. Jekielek:
Technology promises that and technology is the means of doing so.

Ms. Harrington:
I really can’t speculate, but my gut feel is that if you explained this proposal to one of the ancient Gnostics, they would be appalled that you were waging war on and denying the existence of the domain of forms altogether, and you just wanted to engineer a world of pure desire and pure becoming. They would see that as even more heretical than their own non-standard.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have developed a unique body of knowledge and a lens for looking at the world. How did you arrive at this? Please tell us about your background.

Ms. Harrington:
The answer is—in a very roundabout way. I read English literature at university. I went up to Oxford to read French and German and then met a very passionate student of English literature in my first year. I then realized that I wanted to be learning what he was learning, so I persuaded my tutors to let me change course. Then I just threw myself into what was actually an incredibly rich curriculum, which took me chronologically all the way from Beowulf up to 20th century English literature.

I came away with a framework of the Anglophone history of ideas. I’ve been embellishing that in a slightly idiosyncratic way ever since. That was the frame that I’ve been hanging things on. I was particularly interested in classical mythology, the shaping influence of Christianity, and the shaping influence of print technology on that history and its cultural and political developments. Those are also the lenses that I look through to develop 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 a fruit loops in my twenties. I went off and became a radical Leftist. I lived in various kinds of experimental settings and tried various lifestyles and eventually decided that all of it was not good. I got married, moved out of London, and had a child.

By the time I had done all of that, I had pretty thoroughly revised some of my earlier views. I came to believe that some of my more extreme 20-something ideas were not quite how the world works. About the time I had a child, what we could call the political realignment was in full swing. It was this major shift that happened between the 2008 global financial crash and the great displacement of Trump and Brexit eight years after that.

That was a time of real political turmoil and rethinking for a lot of people. They were saying, “Where are we now? What’s really going on?” That hasn’t stopped since and the turmoil and the realignment is still very much with us. A lot of people are still looking around thinking, “How do we make sense of this very strange 21st century world that we find ourselves in?”

A lot of the comfortable certainties that people had in the 20th century, that the world is on a good, safe track towards never ending improvement, is certainly very much in question these days. The values we hold to order those things are very much in question. All of these things are very hotly contested.

Honestly, I only came to be writing because I was forced to start rethinking my beliefs, just a little bit ahead of everybody else. Long story short, I came to writing in public very late. I was 40 and already a mum. I published my first article at Unheard and I’ve written for them pretty much ever since. They’re a great publication and I love them to bits.

Mr. Jekielek:
You wrote an article that you titled very abstrusely, “Immanentizing the Astrolabe.” You said that America has an abundant resource of raw spiritual wealth. That is really the opposite of what we tend to think nowadays. But you’re saying right now in America you see an overabundance of raw spiritual wealth.

Ms. Harrington:
That was a story about riding a Greyhound bus coast to coast in my early twenties. There is a small town somewhere in the hot, muggy interior of the United States where we pass one of those little wooden churches. It has one of those signs out the front with the movable letters. You can picture the scene. On this sign is written, “Blessed is he who believes without a sign.” At the time, I thought it was funny to have a sign about believing without a sign.

I thought, “If you didn’t need the sign, why did you put it on the sign?” But I’ve thought about it a lot since then. There is something to the idea of believing without a sign, but then making the sign, which is so characteristically American. When I talk about America’s raw spiritual wealth, what I mean is not religious communities, although America has a great deal of those as well.

What I mean is the capacity to believe, to have a big idea, and then to believe in it so strongly that you put everything into it to make it happen. You also bring other people with you, because you have people around you who are willing to go with you. America is incredibly rich in that raw willingness to believe. It’s an astonishing resource and not something that should be underestimated. It’s not one to be scorned or treated with condescension, which is very easy to do.

You often hear American conservatives say, “America’s faith is declining. There is this hopeless state of decadence and spiritual decline.” This is not my sense at all. One might make the case that these rural reserves of spiritual faith could be more directed, but they are there. What’s the point? They are there.

Mr. Jekielek:
You make the case that this spiritual abundance has been dramatically misapplied.

Ms. Harrington:
It is possible that it may be dramatically misapplied. I would claim that the transhumanist temptation is very much a case in point. But it’s a very dramatic misapplication of what is fundamentally a deeply positive and potentially life affirming spiritual impulse.

Mr. Jekielek:
In the end, you’re long on human nature.

Ms. Harrington:
I’m long on human nature

Mr. Jekielek:
Mary Harrington, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Harrington:
It’s a great honor.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Mary Harrington me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.