If chickens can’t act as chickens and humans can’t act as humans, Western civilization is not progressing. So observes Mary Harrington, contributing editor for Unherd and most recently, author of Feminism Against Progress. While society champions the defying of limits, our natures - as humans, as men, as women - always reemerge.
In this episode, Mary and Grant discuss the apocalypse, gender, and eros, asking: What if our idea of the traditional family isn’t traditional enough? Can technology suppress human nature? And, what will it take to garner the enthusiasm to bring new people into this life?
2:30 - “Obviously we need to remember that apocalypse doesn't mean end, does it? It's about a revelation, an uncovering of things which were hidden.” The apocalypse will consist not of the human civilization going extinct, but rather diminishing and reemerging having “succeeded in figuring out how to be fruitful rather than being led astray by all the great many things that people opt to do instead of being fruitful and multiplying.”
6:26 - Progress is a creature being able to live in accord with its nature, as opposed to treating it as “standing reserve.”
13:21 - “I think it ought not to be beyond the wit of man to take the incalculable wealth of technological innovation and creativity that we've come up with so far and just stop trying to abolish our own nature with it.”
18:11 - Gen Z seems ready for an alternative to the birth control paradigm.
19:45 - Men and women are “irreducibly dual, but they're also irreducibly interconnected.”
23:00 - A 1950’s understanding of “the traditional family” is not traditional enough; its relationships are already dictated by industrial economy. In a truly traditional family in a subsistence culture, economic productivity comes from within the home.
26:56 - With some qualifications and adjustments, the knowledge economy may allow families to return to a model of a pre-industrial household as a cooperative economic unit.
31:08 - The Sexual Revolution, while perhaps not a government PSYOP, was orchestrated by people who only saw the positives of the revolution, without thinking about those vulnerable to its effects.
40:38 - Young people possibly cannot imagine successful and erotic married life due to a reporting bias; those currently married are bound by respect for their partners not to air their struggles, whereas single people have license to disclose their intimate lives.
Links:
“Standing Reserve”: Understanding Heidegger on Technology
Paul Kingsnorth “The Cross and the Machine”
Front Porch Republic on Ivan Illich
Erika Bachiochi on the traditional family
“Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” by Wendell Berry
Matthew Crawford on Unherd: “Was the sexual revolution a government psy-op?”