Episode 83 Transcript

Grant: I'm really excited to welcome Mary Harrington to the Beatrice Institute podcast. Mary is a journalist and a prolific writer. She writes for many publications, but most frequently for Unherd, which is an online journal dedicated to provide a platform for unheard ideas, people and places. I think she's maybe one of the most interesting writers in the world today. I send her articles around, I think, more than any other writer I know. I'm very intimidated by the depth and breadth of her work. She writes about so many things with great clarity and intellectual rigor.

She recently published her first book called Feminism Against Progress, which brings together several of the ideas that she's been exploring in her writing. We talk about a lot of those ideas and many other things as well.

So welcome to the podcast, Mary.

Mary: Thank you for having me.

Grant: Yeah. So I want to start out with a few general questions just to get the ball rolling, to get us thinking.

So the first question: what brings an end to it all, the ecological apocalypse or the demographic apocalypse?

Mary: Yeah, I mean it's – 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.

So, the apocalypse doesn't necessarily mean the end of the world. I think it's more than plausible that we're looking at the end of this world. In fact, we're pretty much staring the end of this world in the face. And lots of people articulate that idea from a bunch of different perspectives. The Extinction Rebellion campaign, which is active in the United Kingdom where I live, talks about climate apocalypse.

Other often more conservative thinkers and writers talk about the collapsing birth rate, which in a sense is only, it is only really a bad thing if you're committed to never ending economic growth. I mean, once you let go of the idea that the economy has to keep growing everywhere forever, and we all have to keep consuming more stuff everywhere forever, then population collapse isn't necessarily a bad thing. You know, there's a lot of humans. And if it's happening because people are just opting to have fewer children, a slightly bleak way of – bleak, but pragmatic way – of looking at it would be that this is just nature reasserting a balance. Nature is healing in a sense. And there's been a sort of collective, perhaps not very rational, not very conscious, but nonetheless deeply felt sense that the order that we currently live under is so structurally antinatalist and so structurally hostile to the idea that we might have a future that perhaps we women have taken the collective decision just to opt us all out of the prospect of continuing along that trajectory.

So from that point of view, it's a rebellion in favor of extinction, but I don't see that it's necessarily going to end in extinction. The likely long-term prognosis, if the birth rate continues to collapse, is economic collapse and potentially an implosion of the complex civilization that we currently have, for a host of interconnected reasons. It seems much less likely to me that that would end in the complete extinction of the human species. In fact, the overall prognosis for the human species is probably better if that civilization does collapse, at least if you believe the Greta Thunberg analysis, than if it doesn't.

So from that point of view, the human civilization that survives or emerges out of the wreckage of that will be the one that's succeeded in unplugging from the Skinner machine and has 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. But I think that the likelihood that there will just be no more people in 400 years seems much less plausible to me than the likelihood that our civilization will no longer be there in 400 years, which seems extremely probable.

Grant: Yeah. So you allude to this, but if fertility rates do go back up to, say, replacement rates in Western countries in, say, a hundred years, what do you suspect will have been the primary cause of the reversal? And you hinted at this a little bit already.

Mary: I mean, I think technicapital is structurally antinatalist. So the best way we could fix that issue would be to have a different economic order. And by economy, I mean in the broadest sense of not just being a system of material and monetary exchange, but economy and the sense of household economy, the holistic mix of social, cultural, spiritual, material practices and beliefs that constitute a life world. I mean, I think having one of those, a life world other than technicapital, is probably the most likely way to encourage people, induce people, to want to multiply into the future again.

Grant: Yeah. So this is a really good transition to another set of questions about the economic relationships between men and women, which is, I think, really a central piece of your book. But I first want to talk a little bit about this idea of progress.

So a central premise, at least at the beginning of your book is your loss of faith in the religion of progress, right? So you say this:

It's not self-evident that humans have progressed in some absolute sense. That doesn't mean that everything was perfect once, and we're all going to hell in a handbasket. But pick a subject and you'll find some things are better while other things are worse.

So what is the system or set of values you use to determine when things are better or when they're getting worse?

Mary: Probably the simplest answer I can give is slightly an evasion – or perhaps, maybe it's not an evasion – but the simplest answer I could give is: if we're getting it right, it's in living according to our nature.

I mean, I think just to expand on that a little bit... I use chickens as an analogy quite a lot because we have chickens at home and I find them very characterful for something quite that dumb. But they also illustrate a bunch of quite complex – they inhabit an interesting space in human culture and human civilization because they sit right at the edge of – they’re a symbiotic species with humans and have been for a very, very long time. I mean, I think, I believe chickens are the most numerous bird on the planet. And that's partly, that's because they're farmed for meat. So in a sense, a great many chickens need to “take one for the team” in exchange for being that successful in aggregate as a species. But one of the things – I mean, we keep chickens in the backyard and they scratch and peck and forage. And I get a great deal of pleasure out of watching them live according to their nature, which is to say their nature as it's emerged really in conjunction with humans over millennia. And it would be difficult to disaggregate chickens from humans now and expect them to revert immediately back to being red jungle foul in those tropical parts of the world where they originated.

But despite the fact that their nature is, in a sense, now inextricable from humans, they have a nature. It doesn't take a huge amount of time observing chickens to get a sense, a sort of gestalt sense of what that is. They have their form of sociality, which works for them. It's not one that I think I would enjoy because it involves a lot of violence and it's fiercely hierarchical. But they have their social life and they have the things – they obviously, like, they obviously enjoy scratching. You get a sense of that just intuitively from watching them. They take great pleasure in it. They take great pleasure in the things they do, which are just the chickens “chickening.”

And for most of our species relationship, historic relationship with chickens, I think people have understood that instinctively and been willing to afford chickens a life that is more broadly in accordance with their nature in exchange for which some chickens sometimes “take one for the team” and go in the pot or we get the eggs and they get the grain and we keep them safe from predators at night. And the overall the arrangement has worked pretty well historically.

And then I contrast that with the industrial farming of chickens, where really there is a grudging recognition that chickens have a nature and the minimal possible concessions will be made to that nature in order for the chickens to not just die or be chronically prone to disease and cannibalism and all the other things which happen in intensive chicken farming. I mean, the horrors are just, a litany of absolutely unending horrors in what happens in the industrialization of poultry.

But I mean, I think about that approach to chickens, which is really actively hostile to me seeing chickens as they are and conducting a relationship with chickens. We know, it's a meat, it's a farming relationship, which is in a sense exploitative, but, in accordance with the chicken's nature as opposed to one which makes the bare minimum concessions to a chicken's nature in order to extract the maximum possible resource out of them, as it were viewing them as just, as Heidegger would put it, as the “standing reserve,” as a sort of “they might be alive, but we just don't care. They're just standing reserve.” But our only interest in them is what we can challenge forth as meat or pure profit, depending on how you want to view it.

So, I mean, by way of very, very extended analogy for… to me, I'm instinctively revolted by that relationship to a living species or frankly, to anything at all, but particularly to living animals. That just seems to me a profound evil.

And if I were to just zoom that back out again to – I mean, the question of what human nature is is a very vexed one – but I think you and I would probably agree that we have a kind of gestalt sense that there is such a thing, and there is, even if we were only able to sketch the barest outlines before running into a host of kind of political disagreements or discomforts or very radioactive topics, there's a normative development pathway for children, for example. And there are normative needs that a baby has. There are developmental inflection points. Men and women exist and we're not interchangeable. All of these things are observably true. And outside certain highly politicized environments, it's just common sense to acknowledge that this is the case.

And I suppose I would say, by way of a very roundabout answer to your question, what does doing it better look like? It looks like being able to live more in accordance with that nature to the best of our understanding of it, as opposed to treating ourselves or each other as standing reserve.

Grant: Would you call that flourishing? It sounds very similar to the way in which at least Tyler and Brendan talk about it.

Mary: Sure. I'm not a Roman Catholic, and human flourishing is one of those sort of code words that I think people kind of broadcast at one another, which I'm happy to use on many occasions. But I'm perhaps not aware of the full nuance of it in its Roman Catholic context.

But yeah, I would say, I mean, flourishing, I think, is as good a term for that as any. Doing well according to your nature. You can tell when a chicken is flourishing or not flourishing.

And I think too, it's a much more complicated question where it comes to people, but it's difficult to dispute that there are better and worse ways of living and flourishing as a person. That must surely be [inaudible].

Grant: Yeah. So I do want to keep talking about this question, your understanding of nature. Because this is a point of the moment that we're in. You refer to the movement against nature as sort of “bio libertarianism.” And in fact, I read an Atlantic article; one of the critiques of your work was that there seemed to be the sense in which anything natural is good. And I'm wondering what your responses to that sort of critique. Are those things that are natural necessarily good? If not, how do you conceptually tell the difference between good nature and bad nature?

Mary: I don't know. I think I sort of felt like that was a bad faith critique because it's imputing to me the is/ought fallacy, which in fact I think belongs to my critics rather than to me.

I don't say that things which are natural are good. I say that they are. And we owe it to ourselves and to reality to have a measure of pragmatism in meeting the world where it is, you know? And, that's not a moral prescription. It's an encouragement to realism and to being observant.

Grant: Right. So whenever I read someone like. Kurzweil – I'm actually not sure how to pronounce his name – Harari, and even Marc Andreessen; I read a piece that Marc Andreessen just put in for Free Press about AI.

Mary: “AI will save the world.” Yes.

Grant: Exactly. It's not so much I disagree with them, but I simply cannot understand under any circumstances why their vision of the future is remotely appealing. And I realized that I can't even really amount an argument for why I would want to live life in what, you know, Paul Kingsnorth calls “the machine.” It's just so self-evident to me. And you've done a great job of raising that argument, but I wonder: to a certain extent, is there just simply a fundamental irreconcilable difference between those that see nature as primarily a force to be embraced and those that see nature as one to be overcome?

Mary: Quite possibly. At which point you're in quite Schmittian in territory, aren't you? Because the enemy is the one who seeks to destroy your way of life, then there comes a point where those two worldviews really are quite radically opposed. I don't think we're at that point yet. And I think there's a great deal of nuance and, yeah, and then things to be teased out. But yeah, at some point I think there's a fundamental disjunction.

I mean there are – yes. But before I get accused of just being sort of fully Schmittian, unhinged, frame-breaker type, let me actually clarify that a little bit. There are a lot of open questions for me about the relationship between nature and technology, the relationship between us and technology, and the relationship between us and the future. And one of which is whether this extractive, if you like, whether this extractive, exploitative effort of total mastery is the only possible relationship with technology. I don't know the answer to that question, but it's kind of my hope that it isn't, that another technology might be possible.

And there are much more erudite and serious thinkers than me have disagreed on that point. But is it completely beyond the wit of man to reorder technology to human nature, for example? We might have spent the last century or so wielding every technological innovation at our disposal to try and overcome the limits of human nature. But one of the central thesis in my book has been that it just doesn't work. As hard as you try and abolish human nature, it just comes back reordered to the market. That's all you get.

You try and abolish the asymmetry between men and women in terms of mate-seeking behavior, which is rooted in reproductive asymmetry, right? And all that happens is that sex differences come back reordered to the market. And you then you get then you get Red Pill discourse and incels and you know, all the, all the various toxic and destructive ways that men and women find themselves at loggerheads with one another. Because those asymmetries, which used to be managed socially, are now managed through market mechanisms, which turn them into sort of adversarial weapons. And so that's just one example.

Or you end up with the sex industry where the men are exploited by being turned into addicted consumers and women are exploited by being turned into the product. And it just sucks all around, and everybody's having a horrible time, apart from the people who are creaming the money off the top. Men's desire to look at young, pretty women hasn't gone away. It's just been reordered to the market. By the same, women's youthful hotness hasn't gone away either. That's just come back reordered to the market.

And so it doesn't matter how hard we try and abolish human… That's just one of a zillion examples I could give. And given this, 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. It ought to be possible to order those innovations to what we actually are, rather than trying to stop trying to not be that. You would think.

Grant: Right. So what you're actually going towards, it's actually… Something we've been talking a lot here about at the University of Pittsburgh is – we're working on this initiative within the University of Pittsburgh. It’s to think about how we orient the applied arts and sciences towards human flourishing. So now I think that the way we're talking about this is very similar.

For example, one of my colleagues is in engineering, we have this course that we're working on together called “Engineering Happiness,” right? The idea is: how do we orient the field of engineering towards the promotion of human flourishing rather than extraction of money or designing things for their own sake?

So I actually, I feel like there's that possibility, but then in other moments, I see the power of “bio-libertarians” and my only thought is, “Can I get a place next to Paul Kingsnorth?” Right?

Mary: Yeah, I don't know. But at the same time, we started out with apocalypse, didn't we? And it seems, again, not implausible to me that whoever it is who survives the great upheaval will be not only who's that subset of people who's succeeded, who's figured out how to unplug from the Skinner machine, but also that subset of people who figured out how to use what we know without succumbing to that temptation. Yeah. Which I guess is an extension of the unplugging from the Skinner machine, isn't it?

Grant: So one question I did have is: so my wife and I, we're Roman Catholics and so we talk a lot about, to your point, natural family planning. And I have a lecture that I give one of my classes about whether or not birth control is healthcare, right? I use it as an object to sort of think through what is healthcare.

Mary: The birth control pill is the first transhumanist moment.

Grant: Right. Exactly. Exactly.

But I've actually been surprised with how many young women are actually quite open to the argument because they have this sneaking suspicion that they can't quite articulate that “Maybe this hasn't been good for me, being on birth control since I was fifteen.” Have you found that as you give these talks, there's some openings in unexpected places?

Mary: Absolutely. The last chapter in my book I call “Rewilding Sex.” And in it, I make the feminist argument against the Pill.

Now I was expecting a lot more pushback than I got and what really interested me is the demographics of the people who pushed back. And for the most part it has been Boomers.

My Gen Z female readers read it and they're like, “Oh yeah, that makes sense. Thank you for putting into words something which I've been struggling to…” That has been very much more frequently the response. “Ha, I hadn't thought about it by that” or, “Yes, you've absolutely put into words something which I was struggling to express.” But very rarely has it been, “This is ludicrous and rabidly anti-feminist and are you out of your mind?” It's been very much more… Yeah, that that response, if it comes at all, tends to come from Boomers or it comes from the kind of men who enjoy a lot of casual encounters. They would say that, right?

Grant: Yes, exactly.

Mary: They would say that, wouldn’t they?

Grant: So I want to explore a little bit the evolution of relationships between men and women over time, especially as it relates to economics and technology. This is really sort of chapters two and three in your book. This genealogy, I think, you can probably call it that, forms the backbone of, again, the early parts of your book.

Do you see the relationship between men and women as one ontologically, so in its essence, in its nature, of solidarity and cooperation or of primordial conflict and exploitation?

Mary: It doesn't really make sense to me to think of the relationship between men and women as one primarily structured by conflict. I mean, I've drawn, as will be clear to you from reading it, I've drawn very heavily on Ivan Illich in my reading of what's going on. I mean, in a sense all that Feminism Against Progress does is pick up Ivan Illich’s 1982 book Gender and develop some of its themes for the digital and the biotech era. That's all I'm really doing. Mary's one weird trick.

But Illich I mean, he has this lovely analogy when he talks about what he calls “vernacular” gender, which is to say as he sees it, the irreducible duality of male and female life worlds in the pre-modern era. Which he describes as a cross-cultural phenomenon in which – see, I'm crudely paraphrasing – he says, unisex work is the rare exception, if it happens at all. And this is true across cultures in pre-modern context. And it's only with the advent of industrial society that the idea of unisex work becomes possible. And with it, the idea of a genderless human, and with that, genderless economics. And he argues that it's only in that context that women come to be structurally disadvantaged in the way which feminism then responds to.

So that’s my starting point in Feminism Against Progress. But it doesn't really make sense in that, if you accept Illich's argument, and I think he makes the case persuasively in the book Gender. – I encourage anybody who listening to this who hasn't read it to read. It's a profound, mind-altering book. – It doesn't make sense. He has this lovely analogy of the relationship between the left hand and the right hand. They're not the same. My left hand and my right hand are not the same thing. And I'm left-handed, and so there are things this hand can do that the other one can't or just won't. And it didn't. But in terms of how my hands relate to one another, there's no sense of antagonism. But they work together. You're tying your shoelaces, both of your hands know what to do in relation to one another. And they're irreducibly dual, but they're also irreducibly interconnected. Because they're, yeah. And that's really his analogy for what he calls “ambiguous complementarity” in the relationship between men and women.

So I suppose I'm very slightly dodging your question by quoting Ivan Illich at you, but just to say, I broadly, I agree with his analysis. I find it persuasive. And to me, the idea that there exists some eternal patriarchal animus dating back to the dawn of time against which women have eternally been struggling seems to me a very tendentious effort to anti-date a contemporary set of problems, which Illich in fact dates from the beginning of modernity, into to provide a kind of ancient origin story to something which is a purely modern problem.

Grant: Yeah. So then – this is related to what you just said here is – what is a traditional family vis-a-vis the economic relationships between men and women? So we throw this term around, “the traditional family.” Sometimes we're talking about the sixties breadwinner. What is a traditional family?

Mary: The short answer to that question is that I have dissented from, I suppose, the sort of pop-conservative sense of traditional family in the book. In fact, I completely invert the pop-conservative, received meaning of that phrase. I mean, let's say you're listening to a conservative radio host and they say “the traditional family,” it's a fairly safe bet that what they're referring to is a stay-at-home mom and a breadwinning dad and an indeterminate number of children, but at least two, who own their own house. And that's approximately the template. And she cares for the kids and makes the house nice and puts lovely meals on the table and he goes out to work.

And so really what we're talking about is a template, but it's my argument in Feminism Against Progress that that's not traditional. That's actually… the trouble with that is that it's not traditional enough. It is in fact peculiarly modern because that that kind of family life is an artifact of the industrial era and particularly of the point where work left the home and men and women's working life stopped being centered around subsistence life in a productive household, with the household as the central economic unit, and became something which happened outside the home. And economic agency and economic productivity, if you like, drained from the home, which then became a site of pure consumption and of respite from the rigors of the competitive economic marketplace, the rigors of market society, if you like to borrow from Polanyi.

But that's a distinctively modern phenomenon because it's inseparable from industrialization. Prior to that, this just wasn't really a thing. Men and women both worked. They might have done, as Illich puts it, their work would never have overlapped. Women did one thing. Women's work and men's work were not the same thing. But it all took place broadly within a productive household.

And I mean, if I were to think of a traditional family, I would want to date, I would want to look more closely at that kind of a template. I would be more interested in recovering a version of the productive household that suits 21st century material conditions rather than attempting to recover the Industrial Era template. Because it seems to me the material conditions and in fact the social and cultural conditions for that simply no longer obtain across enough of the social fabric for that really to be reasonable or attainable or even, frankly, desirable.

I mean, I think about the Gen Z friends I have who despair of being able ever to leave sort of roommate existence for even a rented apartment with a partner. And they also despair of finding a partner and they despair certainly, as for having kids, I mean, forget it. And you think under those circumstances, what does the traditional family, in the radio host sense, mean to them? You're so many notches of cultural and material and political change away from that that it's meaningless. But those kids would be justified in just laughing in your face.

But some form of the productive household is, it feels… It's probably not agrarian localism on its own. But it could be something. I feel like there are lines of inquiry there which feel more fruitful or more possible, or more attainable and that might in fact involve extending familial groupings or extending the household beyond the sort of nuclear kernel, potentially, in ways which again might have potential as avenues to explore for human flourishing.

Grant: So do you think the knowledge economy is a mechanism by which we might return to this pre-industrial household as a cooperative economic unit? I was struck particularly over Covid, where… so I read a lot of Wendell Berry. His essay, “Feminism, the Body and the Machine” was really helpful for me to think through this. He sort of argued that actually his wife was an editor and she worked for a small publishing house, which is the Berry's living room, right? And I was like, “Oh man, that'd be a great way to sort of live and work with my wife and my children, of trying to produce something together as a family.”

Got a little sniff of that during Covid, right, where we were educating the kids, I was on my laptop, she was on her laptop. And our works weren't overlapping, but it felt like something approximated Berry's vision of a productive household working together both in the education and the production of survival.

Do you think that the knowledge economy might be the way in where we can sort of reimagine that sort of pre-industrial economic unit of the home?

Mary: With some fairly heavy qualifications, yes. I mean, this is obviously not a universal panacea. It's a very class-specific solution. And, I mean, that's not a criticism necessarily, it's just an acknowledgement that it has limitations and there are people for whom it won't apply.

Grant: Yeah. Literally my next question here: If so, is this a privilege of the elite? So that was my next question. Yeah. Right.

Mary: Yes, it really is. I mean, but that's not to say it isn't desirable and something to orient yourself towards if you are fortunate enough to be in a position where you could have that.

I mean, I think if you have the opportunity to structure your life like that, you'd be crazy not to. Certainly if you're a woman who is or would like to be a mother, you'd be crazy not to order your life such as to be able to run your household like that, especially when your children are young.

Grant: Yeah, and it's something that has to start early. You know, I was reading some of the examples in your book, and it was very much, they were writers and craftspeople, young adults. But I realize now at forty-three, it's sort of hard to go back from being a professor and a nurse practitioner. And it seems like whatever Gen we are – I think we're probably about the same Gen, I have a feeling – I don't know if we can remake this. Maybe our call is to help our kids figure out a way that they can make lives like this.

Mary: Yeah, that seems reasonable. I mean, I'm very fortunate in that sense in that I was terrible at everything I ever tried to do career-wise. Up to the point where I had a child and then I was a mum for a few years, which was great, and I became a writer completely by accident in the course of trying to find something to do. Trying to find a fruitful way of using those limited talents that I have that was compatible with caring for her and doing all of that. I pitched a couple of articles and then it all kind of snowballed.

And that's really how that happened. And then very shortly after that, Covid happened and there was a period where, for reasons to do with our domestic situation, I was the only breadwinner. And so I was forced by circumstance to really accelerate a career, which I'd never really thought of as much more than just a fun side thing. And suddenly I was working full time. But really coming out the other side of that, we found our life together is structured very much more like a productive household just in terms of the way it's shaken down, partly with the thumbprint of Covid and everything which happened during that period upon us.

And it was a very challenging period of adjustment. Going from being a stay-at-home mom to both being around one another all the time is not… you might think it would just be fun, but honest, it's kind of challenging. You have to learn entirely new ways of occupying space together. And it's not straightforward. I mean, I'm not going to disembowel my private family life because it's not really fair on my husband and my daughter. But yeah, it was definitely, it was a learning curve for us, for sure.

And I dare say a variant of that is true for anybody who ever tries to make the gear change from either both working full-time or the radio host traditional family to something more like a productive household. You find that there are new kinds of negotiations that you have to confront in order to make it work because they're completely different paradigms.

Grant: Yeah. So changing the subject a little bit: In the U.S., was the Sexual Revolution an organic or planned process?

Mary: Huh. I don't know. I mean, to the best of my understanding of the history… I mean, the history of the Sexual Revolution is complicated. It really begins in the early 19th century. There had been sexual revolutionaries attempting to incite a sexual revolution for like 150 years by the time it actually happened. It was only really with the advent of reliable birth control that they had uptake beyond just a few crazy people and radicals and life experimenters.

There was that heretical Christian commune in upstate New York where they all practiced complex marriage – I think they called it John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneida community – and they had to teach all of the guys how to “do the deed” without finishing, which takes a considerable amount of effort and discipline and practice.

Grant: Fortitude.

Mary: Right. So they were like full-bore sexual revolutionaries in the early 19th century, but clearly, that's not for everybody because you're not going to trust some random dude off the street to keep up his end of the bargain necessarily. It's only really once the tech fix is in place.

But then, so was it a revolution from above? I think it was… There are a number of different strands to it. I mean, it's easy to forget, because so much of it has been memory hold, just how much of the early 20th century progressive movement was bound up in the Eugenicist project. And I think it's very difficult to disaggregate the Sexual Revolution as it as it came to be from that Eugenicist project.

Grant: Which is very much planned and not organic.

Mary: Exactly, I mean, Margaret Sanger and Mary Stopes, famously or notoriously both committed eugenicists and their name and legacy on that front has been scrubbed even though their institutions are still alive and well and some, my dog, still merrily practicing eugenics.

I mean if I remember rightly, one of the main drivers behind the campaign to legalize abortion was a man who had been leading a eugenicist campaign, and who realized that he was going to get his way on legalizing abortion only if he managed to hitch it to the feminist project. So there are a number of strands that converge there. Different people who saw their interests aligning in really what was a technological revolution and who saw a way of harnessing that technological revolution to their particular idealistic or ideological ends.

I mean, the other, I think, underrated factor in the sort of elite revolution of the Sexual Revolution is the psychoanalytic one. I mean, I'm thinking particularly of Wilhelm Reich, who's a sort of little-read and little-understood figure now, but who's astonishingly influential in his beliefs about the anti-fascist political significance of sexual dissolution, essentially. The unchaining of desire, he thought, was inextricable from leading the fight against the resurgence of fascism.

And that's an idea which is now treated more or less as self-evident. When you look at the annual summer parade that celebrates sexual self-expression, implicitly the idea at the heart of it is that doing this is good and is obviously good because not doing it leads to fascism. Nobody ever really questions that central premise. “Does it really lead to fascism?” Wilhelm Reich, I forget the exact quote, but I mean, he comes out directly and says it: the family is the incubator of fascism.

Grant: Yeah. And Wilhelm Reich plays a central role in – sorry to mention Matthew Crawford again, but he's another co-writer on Unheard – he plays a central role in Matthew Crawford's argument that the Sexual Revolution was a U.S. government PSYOPS campaign. So that might be – for the listeners, that might be one you might want to read to get a little more look into Wilhelm Reich's role in the Sexual Revolution.

Mary: I mean, my usual rule of thumb on these things is that it's almost like the conspiracy theories are usually directionally correct, even if they're factually wrong. And it seems unlikely to me that the Sexual Revolution was a carefully planned, elite PSYOP to do, I mean, who knows what.

But it seemed more than plausible to me that there were some people with a relatively high level of social and cultural and economic capital who saw this as net positive, could see very few downsides to the Sexual Revolution, and who therefore rolled it out across the board without really thinking about how it would land for people with less cultural capital or poor impulse control or a history of violence and trauma and so on; who just didn't spare a thought for the trafficked women from the developing world because they just didn't think about, and who was sufficiently focused on just making life easier and freer for themselves that it never occurred to them that making life easier and freer, that “freedom for the pike is death to the minnow,” as – I forget, I think it was Chesterton who said that – but essentially that “freedom of the pike’s the death of the minnow.” And I mean that John Stewart Mill was the original elite revolutionary in that sense, wasn't he? And yeah, there have been a great many since.

Grant: So you bring up conspiracy theories, and this is a question I'd like to ask my guests. And so I'll preface it with one question for you. So, if the basic facts of a conspiracy theory are inaccurate, is the conspiracy theory necessarily untrue?

Mary: I mean, I think the way to read conspiracy theories is poetically, absolutely, even if factually, it's possible to debunk them in a strict factual sense. It's very often the case that if you read them poetically, if you like a sort of mythologies, they come very much into focus.

I mean, perhaps a simple example I can give – there are very much more complicated and much more radioactive examples than this – but a simple example that I wrote about last year – I think it was last year – is the one that says Biden is an AI. Joe Biden is not real. I mean, this is a meme that sort of circulates in the weird internet periodically that like people say “He's computer generated.” “There are glitches in the video footage of him.” “Look at his ears. It's a different guy.” You know, “Joe Biden is not real.”

And I was reading this and I was thinking “That's probably not true.” Joe Biden is almost certainly an actual guy and it seems much more like likely that he's not CGI and he's not played by a series of crisis actors and whatever. But it's plausible to me that what that expresses is a sense that somehow the agency which should be vested in the president of the United States actually resides elsewhere. And if you read it sort of mythically in that sense, I think there's actually something to it.

Grant: Right. Yeah. So is there a conspiracy theory that's particularly poetic to you, that you're particularly vulnerable to believing? I always pressure-test myself on this question quite frequently to see how my thinking's going.

Mary: I mean, one of the ones which I find poetically resonant and perhaps the most disturbing – I probably shouldn't even say this on main – but there's a whole nest of conspiracy theories, all of which, to be absolutely clear, I don't think are literally true, to do with the harvesting of human body parts for consumption by the elite, or particularly the harvesting of children's body parts or body fluids for consumption by the elite, all of which I think it's very unlikely that any of that is literally true.

However, what is literally true is that there are several well-established companies, abundantly well-funded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, that will move university college students across the border into Mexico, so they can give plasma donations for transfusion into wealthy Silicon Valley buyers in the interest of preserving youth. And you're thinking, it's not quite keeping children under Central Park so you can harvest their adrenal chrome. But it's, I mean, it's kind of, I don’t know.

So yeah, you understand like, there's a whole sort of memeplex to do with the cannibalization of the young for the sort of ghoulish zombie preservation of the old, which I mean has a kind of literal drop of truth where it comes to plasma donations for Silicon Valley’s billionaires.

But then it also to me, has a metaphorical resonance in the cannibalization of the social order in order to preserve, for example, the pension scheme. This sense that there's a sort of gerontocratic grip on the levers of power and also the priorities of the economy which is now burning the furniture to keep warm, in a way which is very tangible, to the absolute outrage of the emerging younger generations.

Grant: And I think that in many ways conspiracy theories function as almost folklore, fairytales, to express the fears of the people. And so when we don't pay attention to them – and actually they turn out to be true more often than we're comfortable admitting that they're actually factually true also.

Mary: I mean, Alex Jones was right about chemicals going into the water that disrupt the sexual behavior of frogs, shall we say. It's just not a government conspiracy. It's the contraceptive pill, amongst other things.

Grant: So a couple more questions for you. I know we're coming up on the end of time, but was sex in 1923 more erotic than it is in 2023?

Mary: I wasn't alive in 1923, so I have absolutely no idea. I mean, one thing, the only thing I will say about this, I wrote a, it is kind of a playful piece, but also serious in intent. I call “The Three Laws of Porno Dynamics.” So the loosely based on the laws of thermodynamics and what one of them is the law of erotic entropy, which is that whatever it is that you start out masturbating to won't get you going for very long. And you have to go looking for harder and harder stuff. So pornography is a vector. It's not a static thing. It has to force some direction.

Then there’s the law of conservation of libido, which is to say the more sexualized public life is, the less sexualized private life is because the amount of erotic energy in circulation is a constant.

And, finally, that every taboo has an equal and opposite porn category, which is to say you can derive a fairly accurate sense of what it is that's forbidden in a society from what it is that turns up on PornHub. But I think the one which is particularly relevant to this – well, all of them are relevant – but I mean, it seems clear to me that if the energy and frisson of a fetish, for example, is contingent on its being taboo, then the most reliable way to make it into a turnoff would be to try and accept it, to try and normalize it and de-stigmatize it. And in fact, if you want to keep the erotic frisson in life in any way…

So you have a choice. If you set out to de-stigmatize all of the fetishes, people will go in search of darker and darker fetishes. And converse, and the flip side of that is if you want people not to go looking for darker and darker fetishes, you have to stigmatize vigorously even the fairly benign ones. And it follows from this as a sort of general takeaway that repression is an accelerant to desire. And as such, we would probably all be having a nicer time in private if we were a little bit more prudish in public.

Grant: Right. So last question. A couple semesters ago I was talking to students in my class about sex. I forget how this came up, but these topics tend to come up in my classes and I made an offhand remark about how married sex is more frequent and better.

Mary: Which is true.

Grant: Right, right, exactly.

But I had to go to Google Scholar and download papers and put them on the screen because they fundamentally could not believe it. Again, it wasn't just so much that they were arguing stats, it was just this deep conviction that can't possibly be true.

Why is that? Why do my students just can't even possibly conceive that their sex lives are much worse than mine?

Mary: Well, I mean, in a sense, partly it is a little about, like the problem with talking about marriage. This is something I wrote about recently and I think about quite a lot. It's very easy to find people who write – usually women actually – who write publicly about how their marriage went wrong and finally collapsed. It's much, much, much, much, much harder to find somebody who will write publicly about how their marriage went wrong, nearly collapsed, and then didn't.

And that's for a very straightforward reason. It's just not fair on your spouse to do that because you are disemboweling what was probably a very painful, protracted, difficult, unhappy time for both of you that you've both bent over backwards to try and repair and move on from, and it's just, airing your dirty laundry in that way is obviously going to be counterproductive.

But this creates a sort of knowledge gap. And particularly when we live in an atomized world where people, and where communities are not so well-placed to share that information informally in the kind of, say, in a knitting circle. We don't have nearly such richly textured private means of transmitting that kind of information.

And so there's a real knowledge gap there. So I think, and this creates the mistaken impression that if something goes wrong in your marriage, then it's therefore necessarily always going to end in divorce. Because it's simply because there's a structural bias in the kind of information that gets put out there. And I just think that something similar is almost certainly the case, where you talk about married sexuality; it's just not fair on your partner to do it. It's just not…

I think, I mean, yeah, the number of husbands who'd be happy to have their wives writing about their intimate lives is probably quite small, whereas the number of single women writing about their intimate lives and their hookups is going to proportionately much higher, and I'd be willing to bet that it's a reporting bias like that which is principally responsible.

Grant: Right. Well, Mary, I wish we had more time, but I know that you have to get back to a lecture there in Cambridge. But I just want to thank you for coming on the podcast. Like I said, I think you're one of the greatest writers working right now, and I'm grateful for all of your great work, and this was a really fun and lively conversation, so thanks so much for taking an hour of your time to spend with me.

Mary: Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Grant: All right. Good. Thank you. Have a good afternoon.

Mary: And you.

Grant: All right. Take care.