Identity in a Digital Age ｜ Guest： Mary Harrington ｜ 11⧸7⧸25
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Summary
Mary Harrington joins me on the show to talk about her new book, Identity in the Digital Age, and why the term "identity" is not as old as we think it is. She also shares her thoughts on how technology has changed the way we think about identity.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great
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stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. Before we get started,
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Also, speaking of Blaze TV hosts, we have a new show coming to Blaze TV. It's Chris Ruffo and
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Lomez or Jonathan Kieberman. Both of these guys are fantastic. They've been on the show multiple
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times. They are insightful, conservative activists, and they are going to have a great new show coming
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out on the Blaze. So make sure that you subscribe so you can check that out. Joining me today is Mary
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Harrington. We've been talking with Mary several times on the show about the idea of identity and
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technology. She first approached this in her book about feminism and the way that progress has
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ultimately affected the relationship between men and women and their place in society. But recently
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at the ARC conference, she released a paper talking about identity in the digital age. And I believe
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she's ultimately developing that into a new book. So I wanted to bring her on and talk about that
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today. Mary, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back.
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Of course. I'm just very, very happy after just endless weeks of very stupid American conservative
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inside baseball, civil war stuff happening all over the place. I'm just desperately happy to be
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talking about anything else. So thank you so much for coming on to give me anything, literally anything
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else to talk about. It's, it's not going to give me the too long. Didn't read on all the inside
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baseball. Please don't make me do it. I can't, I can't go on about it anymore. I'm just
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extremely happy to zoom out and just talk, talk about anything else. So very excited. Oh, also
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I should say guys, we're pre-taping this. I'm traveling on Friday. So we will not be able to
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answer any super chats today. Very sorry about that. But Mary, like I said, I wanted to dive in
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to your piece on identity in the digital age. I thought there were a lot of very important insights.
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You and I had a number of very good conversations when we were at ARC about this. This is something that
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both of us have thought quite a bit about and written about. So I want to pick your brain on
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All right, Mary. So I guess the first thing that we should discuss when we're talking about this topic
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is really the concept of identity itself. One of the things that you pointed out in your piece for ARK
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was that while, of course, everyone has had identities throughout history, the concept of
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identity is some kind of separate thing that we need to understand. The use of the very term
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identity is not as old as most people would think, right?
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Yeah, it struck me when I was writing the piece that actually it doesn't really show up as a term
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in regular usage until the 20th century, really until after the Second World War.
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So I sort of, in the course of the essay, which is long and quite convoluted, it's quite a sort
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of elaborate argument. I made the argument that the idea of identity itself
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is a secularization and a sort of emptying out of an older term, which really until relatively
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recently was a soul. And that the, what we think of, what we understand by the self or the soul
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has been through several iterations, which roughly correspond to, to different information
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technologies. So it sounds like a kind of abstruse argument, but it, I found it a really helpful
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heuristic for, for a whole bunch of different things. So the, to the, the, the argument that I,
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that I set out in that essay was that the, the, the soul emerges as a way of thinking about what
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it is to be, what it is to be conscious as distinct from being, I don't know, a dog or a pebble
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or a tree or whatever, emerges as a sort of self, self-reflexive idea, roughly in conjunction
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with literacy, which was the first, it was the original information revolution. The idea that you
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could actually, you know, movable, you know, especially, especially the, the Greek alphabet.
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And that people really started, started thinking of themselves as having interiority as such,
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or the, the being, the being an inside to people at all, you know, that, that big, I suppose you
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could say, I suppose you could argue that, you know, we don't actually know because nobody wrote
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anything down before that for, because, because obviously they didn't, because they, that's, you
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know, pre, we don't really know what preliterate people thought about it because they didn't
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write it down. But as far as anyone can make out, discussion of the soul emerges roughly
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in conjunction with literacy, or at least in, in conjunction with the Greek alphabet.
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It doesn't, it doesn't seem to show up in the same way in, in older textual traditions.
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I mean, say, if, if somebody wants to, if somebody wants to write to me and harangue me about
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how I'm wrong on that and like, give me, give me endless lengthy citations, I'm really grateful
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to receive them. I'm always, always very happy to be corrected on, on incredibly nerdy topics.
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So please, like guys, have at it. However, to the best of my understanding, this is, that's
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roughly the, the people begin thinking that we have something like a soul when they start
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being able to hear words in their heads because they're reading and they start and the idea
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of words and language and ideas as being something which is transmissible, separate from a person
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becomes a thing at all. And then, and then fast forwarding through a whole, a whole trajectory
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of philosophical development following that, including the emergence of Christianity and
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the, the philosophical, the, the, and the, the Christianization of Aristotle and Aristotle's
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ideas on the soul and the self through notably Thomas Aquinas. We arrived by degrees at a second
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information revolution, which was the printing press, which both massively expanded literacy and
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also completely checked and also over time transformed how people related both to information and also
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to that sense of interior, interiority. So, and at that point, the idea of the soul begins mutating
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again. And what we get instead is the self, which is the concept that only really emerges over the course
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of modernity, which as I, actually the, the, the thesis that I'm working on with the book I currently
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have in the works is that broadly speaking, that the, the history of modernity is the history of the
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printing press, or the history of print culture considered more, more broadly than just that,
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those sort of narrow technological terms. So over the course of modernity, you, you, the, this,
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this idea of, of the soul as being something directly connected to God becomes sort of partially
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evacuated and secularized and becomes instead the self. I mean, romanticism never quite lets, you know,
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the romantics never quite let go of the idea that, you know, it's, it's, it's transcendent and
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connected to something mysterious and other, but this, this idea, this idea of a sort of immediate
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connection to God, you know, gradually fades away, the world becomes disenchanted, blah, blah,
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Charles Taylor, the whole rest, all of that. And then I think my sort of working hypothesis on this
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is that the reason we now have identity, the reason this, this has mutated again, and when we're now
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talking about identity is that this is happening in conjunction with, with another information
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revolution, uh, namely the digital one. Um, and I think, well, and what, what's that, what I've,
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what I've tried to trace, um, through the, through the rest of that paper on identity in the digital
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age has been the, the commodity, the commodification of, and I've, I analyzed this actually in terms of
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Aristotle's, uh, or actually it was Plato, uh, the, the, the ancient Greek understanding of the self as
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comprising three parts, eros, thumos, and logos, and the way in which post-war culture has by degrees set
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out to commodify all, all three of those aspects of the, of the human soul. So with the concept of pill, um, the,
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we, we see this sort of technologization of eros, this idea that we, we, we can bring that aspect of the human soul
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under technological control. We can master our own reproductive, reproductive biology and usher in a
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sort of a horny new era of, uh, infinite polymorphous perversity or whatever. And as, you know, as everybody
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knows, that's not really how that worked out. Um, and I, I think, um, again, I'm, I'm, I'm really happy
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if anybody wants to disagree with me or, or argue or offer counter counter arguments on this, but my sense
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the, the whole social media dynamic, um, of, of self-creation and, and the sort of pursuit of kind
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of politics by posting and the pursuit of empty valor by creating internet selves, um, is functions
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in effect as a sort of commodification of thumos, um, as the, the pursuit of glory. And so, so you see,
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I suppose, I mean, if I wanted to be provocative in relation to your audience in particular, I could
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argue that computer games are also a kind of commodification of thumos in that sense.
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Oh, of course they are. I don't think that's provocative at all, actually, even among those
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who are familiar, you know, who, who enjoy them.
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But there's this, there's this sense in which the, the digital world sort of becomes a whole
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series of ways in which, um, ways in which these aspects of the human soul become, become
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technologized and commodified and, uh, and, and sort of consumed, used up, turned into, turned
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into resources to be strip mined and, and, and made in profit. And the, the, the final frontier
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in that, which was really the, the culmination of the papers, I wanted to make a case that the,
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the invention of so-called artificial intelligence is an attempt to commodify logos, which is to
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say that the capacity for, for thought itself. Now, I don't think, I don't think that's going
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to work any more than trying to commodify eros, you know, resulted in, you know, our utopia
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of polymorphous perverse enjoyment or, and any more than, any more than the, the, the commodification
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of, uh, thumos has, has made us any healthier and more capable of constructive political action
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together, or even capable of spending any time with each other at all. You know, you think
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about all of the, the endless articles about spending time with your racist uncle at Thanksgiving
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or whatever, you know, it's not as though creating social media identities for ourselves
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has made it any easier to get on or get organized or even really to, to, uh, create, to, to form
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effective, uh, political resistance to any of the stuff which is just happening, whether
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we want it to or not. I actually, there's a, I'm, I'm, I might disagree with myself later
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about that, you know, trust the plan and always chimp is, is possible, is possibly an argument
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against that, but maybe we should come to that in a minute. Um, I, I don't know. I don't
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know about that yet. I'm, I'm thinking of that as a very interesting essay and I'm still thinking
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about it. Um, but it, that, that, that might be a counter argument, but we'll see. Um, and,
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and, and AI isn't going to work to, I mean, AI is not going to produce actual artificial
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intelligence. What it's going to produce is automation. I just, I just published a newsletter
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about that today. Let's see. It's, it's, it's, it's another, another iteration of the same
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process of industrialization that's been going on since the 19th century or even earlier in
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England. Um, it's just, it, it's just, it's just opened up a different field for automation
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and industrialization. And we're all going to have to, we're all going to have to deal
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with that. Um, but, and I think they will, we'll be able to deal with it more effectively
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if we see it, see it for what it is, um, and stop imagining that we can, we can master our
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own souls. But, and, and the, the final point that I, the final point that I made in that
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argument is that we can't do any of this unless we actually realize what it is that we're talking
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about, you know, and stop talking about identity, which is this kind of empty evacuated
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concept that doesn't really have any content and it doesn't really function very well as
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a container either. Um, and actually just talk and, and realize that what we're talking
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about is the human soul. And this is, this is not something that anybody's, anybody's
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really managed to explain away even now. Um, and that, and the sooner we realize what
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it is that we're, what it is that we're talking about automating away, the sooner we can just
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stop doing it and realize what it is that we're actually looking at.
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Well, I'll be honest. I don't know that we can stop automating it away.
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Uh, and that is my, one of my greatest fears ultimately, uh, you know, uh, obviously, uh,
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I I'm obsessed with the idea of scale and how it impacts social organization and politics
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and all of these things. And you're of course, absolutely right. I think your analysis of each
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one of these aspects of the human soul being abstracted away, uh, is, is a very good one.
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I would actually argue that it starts with the abstraction of logos in the written word. Uh,
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but we don't have the ability to iterate on it fast enough for it to kind of gain momentum or
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consciousness in the way that our more artificial intelligence structures would now. There's simply
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not enough cyber magnetic feedback in the system when you're having to handwrite letters at best
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to correspond with each other. It can't build on itself. It can't iterate on itself fast enough to
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kind of gain its own, uh, its own teleology. But when you have that, which is what we're approaching
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now, I think with our current, uh, technological, technological advancements, uh, you have to have
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a very different situation. Uh, obviously the same is again, true of, uh, you know, Eros and
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Thumos. I think, uh, you know, the idea that pornography and video games are, you know, wide
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scale control mechanisms. I was exactly right. Not because necessarily they were engineered
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specifically for that purpose, but because once we've abstracted everything else, this is the
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logical way that you scale these, all, all of these embodied desires, all of these embodied
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realizations, uh, they are, uh, they are not good for scaling society. They do not allow systems to
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move beyond natural human limitations. So one of the reasons you need to subjugate men's desire to
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conquer things and have sex with lots of women is that ultimately that's the kind of stuff that like
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barbarians use to tear down complex, but fragile systems, right? So you need to subdue
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those impulses inside of, uh, you know, the, the, the population at large, if you're going to
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scale up and create these more complex societies. So in a way it feels like, um, as, as much as we can
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look at these things and say, they have very negative impacts. It's very difficult to sell people on the
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idea of scaling any of this back of changing any of this, of avoiding as, uh, Dugan calls it, uh, you
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know, the, the metaphysics of the washing machine. Uh, we just feel compelled towards, uh, the, these
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revolutions in ourselves, our technology, our, our identity, uh, because ultimately we have a very
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difficult time imagining us ourselves, not being at the bleeding edge of like human progress.
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Right. There's a, there's definitely something, I mean, certainly you'll prize my washing machine
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from my cold dead hands. Uh, you know, you're not having that back. Absolutely no way. Um, and yet,
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I mean, my, my view on this tends to be, I'm, I think you, you, you and I both have a kind of
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gloomy accelerationist street, right? Um, and I, I tend to take the view that with this, with all of
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this stuff, you know, there's, you know, standing a fort history yelling stop just demonstrably
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had not worked so far. Right. Uh, and probably the only way out is through, but, um, uh, just as a
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footnote to that, that are really important in some aside in Carl Polanyi's book on the great
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transformation, where he talks about the violence involved in the original creation of market society
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in England. It's very, very interesting book. I mean, people, people take issue with his economic
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history, but his description of the process of turning England from a sort of quasi medieval
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society into a market society is, is very, uh, thought provoking. And one of the, one of the
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assides he makes is that the, the English crown and the peasantry were in alliance for a long time
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against the increasingly mercantile aristocracy to slow down the process of enclosure. Um, just for,
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for a bit of context, if anybody, anybody on the, watching this is not a history nerd, um, or an
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English history, English political economy, historic nerd, um, the enclosure acts were the original
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process of transforming England from a feudal, um, series of, of, uh, a feudal society into a,
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into one governed by private property. And it began with the, with the dissolution of the monasteries
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under Henry VIII. And at that point, at that point, land, which had previously hitherto been mostly
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held, it all belonged to the crown. And it was, it was given to various feudal lords in a sort of
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hierarchical chain to manage according to various, to specific obligations, appropriate to their
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station, all the way down to peasants at the bottom, whose job was to dig. And then, you know,
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occasionally give a couple of, in exchange for being able to exist there and do some digging
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and grow potatoes, or sorry, that potatoes is anachronistic, but to, to, to grow vegetables
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and kind of exist in this space, you, you had, you had to pay like three chickens a year to your
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lord or whatever, um, and occasionally turn up with a weapon if they needed you to. Um, so that was the
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old way of doing things. And then, and then private property comes along and people are like, no, no,
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we're going to change the law. And this is, this is, this is just our land now. And so you have to
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get off it, off you go, go and do something else. Um, and that's, that's what created the industrial
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proletariat. And that was the beginning of modern England. That was also the beginning, the beginning
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of the industrial revolution. It's the beginning of modernity as such. Um, it happened in England
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before it happened in America. And then when it happened in America, it happened brutally fast
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over the 19th century. And now here we all are, right? Um, so the potted, potted economic
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history. And the, the, the point, the point of this, um, is that the, Polanyi makes this
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really interesting aside about how enclosure, the process of privatizing the land in England
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was driven by, by the landed gentry, um, who wanted to own the land rather than just manage
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it. They, they, they didn't want to be in hot to the king, basically. Um, who could, who
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could kick them off and replace them with some other, some other guy. They wanted to own
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the land and for that just to be there so that they were the ones who were in charge
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of who got, who got kicked off or whatever. Um, and, and the crown resisted it alongside
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the peasantry for a long time. And what Polanyi says, which I think is so interesting is that
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on balance, it was for the best that enclosures happened and market society happened. But the
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fact that the crown was able to slow it down meant that some of its more horrendous consequences
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were happened slowly enough that people were able to tolerate it. And it would have just
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been an absolute social holocaust if it had happened, if it happened as quickly as the,
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as the Lords wanted it to. Um, and I think, I think this is a good, a good general principle
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to apply. I mean, I think that this is probably, this is probably my excuse for conservatism,
00:20:20.720
right. Um, in, in general, this is sort of a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a crotchety old man, but
00:20:28.560
No, this is, this is sort of qualified theoretical case for conservatism, you know, you know, as,
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you know, people criticize conservatives, conservatives for just, you know, being liberals driving
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the speed limit. And I think, I, I think I will, I want to cite Polanyi and say, actually,
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sometimes that's not a bad thing. Actually some, you know, that's, you know, even, even
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if you are, even if it's maybe a sort of futile last stand, sometimes, you know, just being
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able to slow a process down, isn't it can, can have social value in and of itself. But anyway,
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we've, we've, we've, I think we've, I think we've just been down three, three nested rabbit
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The rabbit hole in the rabbit hole in the rabbit hole.
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To pull, to pull us back in a little bit, to be fair, you know, this is a wide ranging
00:21:11.440
discussion, so no, no problem there. Feel free to, to go wherever it takes us. But I see what
00:21:17.120
you're saying ultimately is like, look, if, if the revolution is going to occur, there is
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some, there is some value in slowing it down enough, being aware enough, being thoughtful
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enough to, to put some, you know, some brakes on things, allow people to adapt over time.
00:21:34.540
Yeah. And, and with, with that caveat in place, those three, or mult, however many nested
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rabbit holes it was in place, with those caveats in place, I remain fairly confident that the
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only way out of this is through. You know, we're, we're going to end up all the way, you
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know, fully automated luxury sex war or whatever it is that's coming. You know, the, do, do
00:21:57.180
we, do, do we have to talk about that Gooner article or can we just acknowledge that it
00:22:04.180
I'm, I'm really glad I don't know what article you're talking about right now.
00:22:07.700
Okay. All right. In that case, we're not even going to acknowledge that it happened.
00:22:11.480
Congratulations. You might be a more online than I am. That's a, that's an impressive
00:22:15.420
award that you've accumulated there, but no, I'm, I'm trying to be less online this year.
00:22:21.380
So I think, I think that definitely qualifies as a fail.
00:22:24.540
Uh, very sorry. I didn't, didn't realize I was ruining a resolution there for you.
00:22:29.140
Um, but no, I could probably guess where that, that article went. Um, but, uh, but
00:22:33.740
that said, um, I think that you're correct. Um, and that worries me quite a bit, uh, which
00:22:42.900
is kind of the general direction I have with this, you know, a lot of people, uh, infamously
00:22:47.840
now Nick land, uh, has, has gained quite, quite a bit of, uh, well, infamy, uh, through,
00:22:52.640
through, uh, Tucker Carlson's episode on him. Um, but what, you know, what, one of the things
00:22:57.660
I've said many times over is that while I find lands work fascinating, uh, I find his
00:23:03.360
ultimate, ultimate conclusions of kind of where we're going to end up while very compelling,
00:23:07.480
uh, also rather, uh, terrifying. Uh, and so, uh, you know, it's one of those things where
00:23:12.800
you can recognize that the process is probably going to happen and hate every minute of it
00:23:17.020
and desperately look for some reason to escape it either way. Uh, but I think you're, you're
00:23:21.220
probably largely correct. Ultimately that is where we're heading, but this, this is what
00:23:25.820
worries me the most because I do think that this process has been ongoing for quite a while
00:23:31.240
now, as you kind of lay out, this is not some new development. Uh, it does feel, you know,
00:23:36.080
accelerationism is real. The circuit is closing. Things are advancing faster. Uh, but we can see
00:23:42.760
kind of the trajectory this is on. We know the gradient that this process travels. And what
00:23:47.980
we're really ultimately seeing is that people, the, the less embodied identities are the less
00:23:54.560
real and lived and, um, organic these identities are the more desperately unhappy people become. And
00:24:03.160
the more poorly are rather complex systems operate. And kind of my, my current worry is that, uh, the next
00:24:13.480
step of disembodied identity is one that opens us up to forces. We do not understand, um, things that
00:24:22.180
we are playing with that we are not prepared to deal with. I think this is also a very Landian
00:24:27.520
thought, isn't it? Although, although I think you and he disagree on, on whether or not it's a good
00:24:32.220
thing. Right. Yes. Very, very much. So, uh, we're, we're both, we're both recognizing the same
00:24:37.140
process. We might be rooting for different teams. Um, but, uh, but, but I think ultimately,
00:24:42.720
uh, you know, and again, this is why I wanted Land and Dugan to have the discussion that they did,
00:24:47.900
uh, because I think this is that, that again, they're, they're both approaching this,
00:24:52.140
they're recognizing the same process and, again, approving of different parts of it or encouraging
00:24:59.340
that certain things need to change within it. And so for Land, um, and this is, you know,
00:25:06.740
just, especially from the last few discussions I've had with him, it seems that his understanding
00:25:11.560
is ultimately this disembodied logos is the perfected form of your particular ethnic way
00:25:20.000
of being, right? Like this is not, uh, this is not quite the globalist, you know, gray goo human
00:25:25.700
soup. We're talking about here that for him, for instance, like the Faustian escape of, uh, kind of
00:25:32.480
the Anglo mind, it would happen through something like a super intelligence that could go into the
00:25:38.340
stars. It would still be very Anglo in its orientation. The technologically would basically
00:25:44.060
be like almost spiritually, ethnically encoded with this thought process, this way of being,
00:25:50.820
uh, but he, you know, it would be able to spread to places that a physical embodied, you know, Anglo
00:25:57.360
soul could not. So in this way, the identity, the Anglo identity in its purest form could be projected
00:26:03.980
out into the cosmos while leaving the embodied nature of the soul behind. Um, which, uh, certainly
00:26:11.160
isn't the way I would like to have my civilization exist, but that really, I think is kind of the,
00:26:16.740
the, the Nietzschean understanding, like you're transforming it. You're moving beyond the human,
00:26:20.940
you're moving beyond these things. And, and this is the, this is kind of the perfected form
00:26:25.020
that you take into the world. Uh, that, that's a lot of, my, my response to that would be,
00:26:30.560
it's a very, I would call that a very selective reading of the Anglo spirit as well. Right. I mean,
00:26:38.700
I sort of, you know, I get what, you know, there's that Faustian thing, like the, the Anglo,
00:26:43.140
the Anglo seafarer is a very, you know, that, that's a very potent impulse, right? Yes. I mean,
00:26:48.980
my, my, my dad is, my, my dad's dead now. Uh, but all the way through my childhood, I remember he
00:26:55.460
always insisted on red spotted handkerchiefs because he said, if it all got too much, he could
00:26:58.820
pack up his belongings in a red spotted handkerchief and take off. Um, there's, and there's, there's,
00:27:04.400
there's something, I mean, when I think back, it's kind of a dark thing to say to your children.
00:27:08.440
Right. But, but that was, that was my dad. He was, he, he, he liked, he liked sailing in small
00:27:13.000
boats and he was kind of a, yeah. There's always, there's always that sense that, you know, the
00:27:18.500
Anglo loves home and also yearns for the open sea. Um, those, those two, those two things are,
00:27:24.260
that that's the tension at the heart of, and it's one of the tensions at the heart of the
00:27:27.960
English spirit, but also, um, you know, we've been, we've been a Christian country since,
00:27:33.060
since the, you know, what was August, Augustine of Hippos, like the 5th century AD, something,
00:27:39.900
I mean, my, my very early church history is a little bit sketchy, but it's like, like,
00:27:44.480
you know, people were like, they, they were, they were duffing up Saxons and building monasteries
00:27:49.000
at Lindisfarne, you know, you know, less than a millennium after, after the death of Jesus,
00:27:54.540
you know, and, and Christianity is a fundamental, you know, it's, you know, my, my Christianity will
00:27:58.840
be incarnational or all the bullshit, to, to, to paraphrase whoever that was. Um, but you
00:28:06.640
understand what I'm saying? This idea, this idea that you can, you can be meaningfully Anglo in our,
00:28:12.640
in a deep historical sense and also be disembodied seems to me a very selective reading of our, of the
00:28:18.700
much longer arc of our history. And I think, I mean, sure, perhaps if you, if you want to read,
00:28:24.920
if you want to read our culture, you know, if you want to make year zero, I don't know, somewhere,
00:28:30.000
maybe 1688, you can make that case, maybe. Um, but, but if you, if you want to start,
00:28:36.200
if you want to start the, the cultural, the cultural history and sort of deep Anglo impulses any earlier
00:28:41.080
than that, then, then, sorry, I just don't buy it. I think there's, I think there's just so much more
00:28:45.920
going on. Um, so I, I sort of, I respectfully disagree on that, but I can sort of see why he
00:28:52.320
would want, why he would say that. And he's, he's clearly, he's clearly not particularly interested
00:28:57.820
in arguments from Christianity, but I'm, I'm going to, I'd like to, I'd like to cite, you know,
00:29:02.620
a fairly hefty weight of, you know, deep culture, like all of English literature up to about 1914
00:29:07.840
doesn't make sense unless you have a solid working knowledge of the Bible. And the, and the idea that
00:29:12.640
you can say anything meaningful about, about the Anglo, um, having abstracted its Christian content
00:29:18.740
just makes no sense to me. Christianity is fundamentally incarnational. Well, I don't
00:29:24.380
obviously want to make this entire episode, uh, you know, debating a clan by proxy. Uh, but I would
00:29:29.440
say that he, uh, does acknowledge that. In fact, that actually the Christian tradition, uh, is very
00:29:36.140
important to his understanding of the way Anglo way of being. I think he, he thinks you can ultimately
00:29:42.480
kind of abstract that. And I think, you know, his argument, I've, I've, I've, I've put this exact
00:29:46.960
question to him is like, well, we are abstracting it. And if God didn't want us to do that, we
00:29:51.840
wouldn't be doing it. So, you know, this is obviously kind of part of God's plan. Like the
00:29:55.800
fact that we continuously move towards this disembodiment is, is obviously part of the overall
00:30:02.520
divine, uh, you know, uh, kind of direction that that's where providence is taking us. Uh, and so even
00:30:08.700
if they, we can see problems ultimately with that, because it seems to be kind of the telos,
00:30:13.780
uh, of, of kind of where our people are going, uh, therefore it must be a part of God's plan.
00:30:19.100
Again, I don't want to debate that endlessly, but I just say to, to be fair to Nick, uh, you
00:30:23.420
know, he, he would work that I think into the Christian understanding. He said very specifically,
00:30:28.480
you know, things like the, you know, uh, the, the King James Bible, that is British culture.
00:30:33.340
That is the canon. That is what defines, uh, you know, uh, you know, kind of, kind of how
00:30:40.980
Okay. Uh, that seems, that, that seems much fairer and more reasonable. Uh, I, I still
00:30:47.020
disagree. Um, although, although, although not, but perhaps not, not entirely. Um, I mean,
00:30:53.740
who, who knows, who knows what providence is, um, you know, who, who knows, who knows
00:30:58.680
anything, you know, it's, it's not like, it's not like I can say anything very useful
00:31:01.800
about God's plan. Um, but the idea that you can extrapolate disembodiment sort of all
00:31:10.120
the, all the way out to infinity, I, I also am skeptical of, um, and I, and I suppose
00:31:16.620
I'm skeptical of it because I, I look at like the, we've been living in the transhumanist
00:31:22.120
era. This is one of my kind of familiar Harrington refrains, right? We've been in the transhumanist
00:31:26.260
era for half a century now. So we have a bunch of receipts, um, for how it's going so far.
00:31:30.940
Um, and I think if you look at, if you look at the promises of the contraceptive revolution
00:31:36.460
versus what they've actually delivered, um, it's, it's not working. Um, you know, it hasn't
00:31:43.600
delivered our utopia of polymorphous perversity. It hasn't even delivered a more horny culture.
00:31:48.500
You know, it's kind of evacuated it of horniness, um, if, if, if anything, um, because it's all
00:31:54.320
just become this kind of commodified stuff, which gets, you know, instrumentalized for all sorts
00:31:59.180
of other, you know, escalating, all sorts of other purposes of escalating disgustingness
00:32:03.640
that we, we agreed we were not going to go into. Um, and, and meanwhile, um, what you also,
00:32:11.520
what, what I, one of the most interesting phenomena of the 21st century has been subcultural backlash
00:32:18.640
against that people who've come out the other side of embodiment of disembodiment and are,
00:32:23.100
and are trying to, trying to find ways of being embodied again. You know, people who sort of
00:32:27.420
come, come, come back from, from right from the darkest, bleakest, grimmest, most kind
00:32:31.880
of destructive battlefronts of, of the, the sexual revolution, you know, with, with all
00:32:38.280
of their battles, battle scars and are doing their best to try and actually exist as embodied
00:32:42.800
people now. Um, and, and then, and then you, you, I mean, I think the, the crudest example
00:32:50.840
of this, and again, it's, it's a subcultural thing, but I think it's real and it's, it's
00:32:54.460
definitely happening is young women, young women rejecting the pill.
00:32:57.420
Yeah. And this, this is absolutely not necessarily a political thing. This is a,
00:33:02.060
this is a psychoactive drug and I'm not even sure it's helping me to, I, in fact, I'm definitely
00:33:06.780
sure, I'm sure it's helping me have better sex or even sex with people I actually want
00:33:12.000
to be with or having physical contact with at all. This is, I don't, I'm, I'm, I'm not
00:33:15.720
down for this anymore. Um, or women who just don't, don't want to go there in the first
00:33:20.040
place because it's psychoactive. And I mean, who knows, who knows what the consequences
00:33:23.000
will be. Or you end up with a guy who actually gives you the ick when you come off, when you
00:33:26.920
come, this is, this is apparently a real thing that happens. You know, people fall in love
00:33:30.020
while they're on the pill and they come off the pill and then suddenly their, their husband
00:33:33.100
gives them the ick and it's like, crap, now, now what do we do? It's a problem because it's
00:33:38.840
psychoactive and it changes, changes your disposition in all sorts of very deep ways. Um, so if, and
00:33:43.980
and, and I suppose, you know, I don't want to hop on about this forever, but it's a, it's an
00:33:48.960
interesting example of something which promised mastery over our embodiment. Um, and it promised
00:33:54.560
to disaggregate, to, to separate identity from physiology such that men could become women and,
00:33:59.720
you know, that whole, that whole discourse. Um, and it doesn't work. It obviously doesn't work.
00:34:05.000
Um, the, the social, the, the gender identity, social contagion is start, we've passed peak
00:34:10.920
trans, you know, it's going to go on being annoying. Um, especially in the provinces for
00:34:15.160
like, I don't know, decades probably, but, but peak trans is past. It's, it's been and gone and
00:34:21.720
the hips, the hipsters are onto, I mean, I, I shudder to think what they're onto now, but, uh,
00:34:26.680
it's, it's not gender identity anymore. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Do you have any guesses as to what
00:34:32.940
they're into? Um, I sort of, I sort of don't want to think about it. You know, uh, I, I am less
00:34:37.300
sure that the trans is gone, uh, than you are. I think that we're not going to be doing the
00:34:42.440
worship it on the lighthouse law thing for a few years, uh, like we were in the United States.
00:34:47.680
Uh, but you know, we were told in, you know, no uncertain terms that the look was kind of going
00:34:52.980
away, that all this stuff was going to be calmed down. And in the United States, uh, after a few
00:34:59.380
months of it laying low, uh, it's only gotten, uh, more and more horrific, uh, here it's kind of
00:35:05.180
ramped back up again. So I don't know what the UK will be like. Maybe it will totally, uh, you know,
00:35:10.720
evacuate, uh, itself there, but here in the U S I don't think we, we, uh, shook that one at all.
00:35:15.580
I think we just kind of knocked it off its pedestal for about six months.
00:35:22.240
Interesting. So, so the, the gender identity thing is back and it's got worse.
00:35:27.560
It's, it's creeping back in. I think we're seeing, I think what we're seeing it do is fall back
00:35:32.800
more into the intersexual coalition than being the driving force. Uh, at this point, uh, it's still
00:35:39.740
something, I mean, you have to recognize that we had multiple, uh, children and a political activist
00:35:46.580
murdered in the names of trans ideology in the United States in the last few months, right? Like
00:35:52.220
a lot of people for some reason don't seem to remember that, but that's, that's a real thing
00:35:57.200
that's happening in the U S right now. Now you could say at some level it's well, because trans
00:36:02.000
ideology isn't being centered all the time. And these people are kind of lashing out now that
00:36:07.200
the entire society is no longer worshiping in them. And they no longer have this kind of magical
00:36:12.140
social shield after they've kind of mutilated themselves to gain this, uh, you know, kind of
00:36:16.920
social favor and identity. And that's why they're, they're lashing out. But either way, you know,
00:36:22.000
the, the, the, the, the politics of gender identity have gone from a, you know, culture war to a,
00:36:28.360
a real war war, uh, for some of these people here recently. Uh, so I guess, you know, I guess
00:36:33.960
it's all in, you know, our, our football teams putting trans activists on their Budweiser right
00:36:39.520
now. No. Uh, but did, but the trans disappears an issue? No, not, not even to the slightest,
00:36:44.840
but it's still California. And I believe Wisconsin stealing people's children if they, you know,
00:36:50.280
don't want to convert them to trans, uh, you know, so there, that has not disappeared suddenly
00:36:55.500
out of the American zeitgeist, unfortunately. I find that really interesting. It's, it's one
00:37:01.920
of the ways in which, like, I mean, you, you guys and we in Britain have, have a lot of
00:37:06.740
similarities and, you know, we have, we share a common ancestry and blah, blah, blah, but
00:37:10.700
there, but there are some, there are some ways in which American culture is just incredibly
00:37:14.300
different. Um, one of them I think is just the, a level of optimism about what technology
00:37:19.000
can do. Um, you guys are just really upbeat about what you can, what you can do with,
00:37:24.560
with enough, with enough determination and grit and engineering, ingenuity. Um, I, I wonder
00:37:31.920
if, I wonder if this is, this isn't just a case of one of those cultural differences,
00:37:36.260
um, but allied, allied obviously to a different medical funding model, um, where if it's insurance
00:37:43.280
based in theory, that's unlimited paychecks where I'm on the national health service, you
00:37:47.180
know, for whatever it's other flaws, when it comes to quack medicine, it's structurally
00:37:50.740
conservative in a way which American medicine is not. So, so I think there are, there are
00:37:57.460
a bunch of different factors. And one of the, one of them is that you guys are just much
00:38:00.580
more into immunitizing the eschaton than we are. Um, and, and gender identity is just,
00:38:05.060
um, you know, mutilated children are just an unfortunate byproduct of that. Um, yeah, but, but
00:38:10.160
again, um, eventually, you know, even, I, I, I feel my heart bleeds for every,
00:38:16.920
every one of the kids that, that gets subjected to this sort of Munchausen by proxy. Um, but,
00:38:22.420
but eventually there'll be enough of them that the medical scandal will happen. Um, because
00:38:27.040
eventually there'll be enough of them that you can't avoid the data. I mean, there really
00:38:30.460
is already enough of them that you can't avoid the data, but you know, it takes, it takes
00:38:33.960
a while for people to, to see a church in daylight sometimes, especially when they're that committed
00:38:38.900
to something. And I think this is a point Helen Joyce made that especially if you as a parent
00:38:44.300
have committed your child to that course of action, you're going to do everything. You're
00:38:48.560
going to move heaven and earth to make sure you, you, you never get, you never, you're
00:38:52.200
never forced to leave your cognitive dissonance. Oh, the point when you do the point where the
00:38:56.820
point where you do is the point where you have to acknowledge what you've done to your
00:38:59.500
own child. And I don't think any parent wants, I just, it just doesn't even be thinking
00:39:04.220
about. So yeah, there's, you know, protect trans kids. It's not the trans kids who are
00:39:10.000
being protected in that scenario. Um, it's no, of course. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
00:39:21.600
No, no, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. It's I can't you because your video is lagging. I
00:39:25.380
can't see whether you're, uh, you're attempting to speak or not. So I just have to do my best
00:39:28.960
to guess, uh, cause we're jumping in there. Um, uh, but, uh, I, I agree of course that ultimately
00:39:35.720
these things should be so unnatural, uh, that the cost will come due. But at the same time,
00:39:42.560
that's kind of what we've been banking on for a long time with many of these technologies.
00:39:47.660
And, and you make a good point, one that I myself have echoed that ultimately there is
00:39:52.940
going to be a segment of this population. It's not going to be the whole population, but
00:39:56.680
we're seeing this across the board, whether it be, you know, people returning to faith or
00:40:01.000
people rejecting certain pharmaceuticals, uh, people trying to unplug from the internet in
00:40:06.200
certain ways. Uh, there, there is a contingent of people who are trying to live back apart,
00:40:11.120
uh, from this. And it's a strange dichotomy because as we say, you know, the only way out
00:40:16.280
is through some parts of this process do seem inevitable. And yet, if you came up to me and
00:40:21.620
personally said, well, what would you advise people to do on some of these things? Honestly,
00:40:26.360
the unplugging from these systems, the attempt to step back from this, this disembodiment,
00:40:31.900
the search to re-ensole these things, I think is ultimately, uh, the correct move, which does
00:40:39.700
sound a little bit as if you're trying to return. Uh, but ultimately we, we have to strike some level
00:40:45.640
of balance because at, at some level it's, it's impossible to interact with the world around us
00:40:52.820
without doing this abstraction process, without joining in, uh, and kind of some of these scaled
00:40:59.280
social experiences at the same time, a lot of people are recognizing how empty, completely immersing
00:41:05.940
themselves in this is. And so, uh, you know, I have friends who are starting intentional communities.
00:41:10.860
They're moving together into neighborhoods with people who are like-minded, share the same religion,
00:41:15.640
share the same, uh, political beliefs, uh, you know, have a certain understanding of how their culture
00:41:20.100
should operate, uh, you know, so, so they're, they're- So I have a question about those guys.
00:41:24.480
Taking different steps about that. Sure, go ahead. I have, I have a question. This is a,
00:41:28.760
this is going somewhere. Uh, so your friends who are starting intentional communities and forming
00:41:34.840
networks with people who share their faith and so on, did they start out very online before doing
00:41:40.440
their best? Okay. Right. And I think this is, this is kind of, this is a case in point and this,
00:41:46.100
this speaks to one of the other, uh, uh, another, another reason where I think to have at least a
00:41:52.320
qualified measure of optimism about, about being able to work through some of the more obviously
00:41:57.980
catastrophic consequences of the digital revolution and come out somewhere where at least some of us
00:42:02.920
are vaguely functional. Uh, and that's the, whatever its downsides and they are legion, um, digital reading
00:42:10.140
is different in kind to the print sort in, in that it foregrounds, not linear thinking, analytic
00:42:16.100
thinking, you know, there are the, and you know, there's a great, there's, there's already a huge
00:42:19.560
literature, notably in the New York Times about how it's bad that nobody, that nobody can think
00:42:24.560
long form anymore, which is true. But what is also true, and I think, I think under discussed
00:42:29.140
still is the fact that it's not as though people have stopped thinking, but their consciousness has
00:42:34.260
shifted a lot of the time subtly, such that pattern recognition plays a much greater role
00:42:39.120
in the way people, especially very online people, and especially younger, very online people are
00:42:44.860
much more attuned to pattern recognition than they are to thinking in a long form, linear analytic
00:42:49.660
way, which is the characteristic thought form that emerges from, with, from and with the print era.
00:42:55.420
Um, and one of the, and this has, this has a whole slew of political and theological consequences,
00:43:01.280
um, and also consequences for embodiment, because if you think in terms of pattern recognition,
00:43:05.480
I mean, you could just become a schizo poster, and just confine your pattern recognition to the
00:43:10.620
internet, and just spend, spend all day online posting, like obscure, obscure means. Um, but most,
00:43:17.220
but what, what tends to happen is that people then take that capacity offline as well, and they start,
00:43:22.560
they start noticing, for example, that men and women are normatively different, and they, and the,
00:43:27.060
the gotcha about how some men are taller, some women are taller than some men just stops working,
00:43:31.820
because they start being able to see formal cause again. And then, I mean, if you're, if,
00:43:36.300
if you're sufficiently nerdy about trying to, trying to understand what it is that, what it is that
00:43:41.280
you're seeing, and trying to find words for what it is that you're now able to see, and able to think
00:43:45.500
about, um, you find yourself by degrees back at a kind of metaphysics, which was just normal, and part
00:43:50.640
of every, everyday epistemology in the, in the Middle Ages, um, which, which, yeah, you, you end up,
00:43:57.560
you end up accidentally retrieving scholastic metaphysics, basically, because there's just
00:44:01.060
no other way to make sense of what it is that you're seeing. And, and this is, and it's like,
00:44:07.740
it's just not possible to exist in a disembodied way, if you see the world like that, not for,
00:44:12.320
not for long, and that's why your friends are forming intentional communities, and, and beginning,
00:44:16.700
and, and, and that's why so many people, it's also, I think, why so many people are going back to
00:44:21.240
church, is because it's simply not possible to live like that. It's, it's, it's not possible to exist in that
00:44:27.060
disenchanted, disembodied way. If you, if you see, if you can see form and final cause just around you
00:44:32.480
all the time, as well as, as well as the two modernist, um, as well as the stuff, and the cause
00:44:37.880
and effect. If you can, if you're also seeing the form, and you're seeing, and you're seeing the
00:44:42.440
purpose, um, if you can see the form of things, and you can see the meaning of the directedness of
00:44:46.700
things, it's just not possible to, to, to live a disenchanted life. And, you know, and re-enchantment
00:44:53.160
doesn't necessarily mean people are going to embrace Christianity, you know, just as a note
00:44:57.100
of, a note of caution there. I mean, I remember having a completely serious conversation with
00:45:02.440
some 22-year-old girl at a conference a few years back, where she, she told me with a totally
00:45:06.940
straight face that in her, her view and her boyfriend's view, the earth is flat. And I could
00:45:11.020
not tell whether she was having me on or not. And I think that was maybe the point. Um, but
00:45:16.360
also, I, I don't think she was entirely not, I don't think she was entirely joking. I think she
00:45:21.020
was just, she was just playing with, uh, I, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, there
00:45:25.120
are, there are a bunch of different ways that re-enchantment could go and they're, they're
00:45:28.100
not all of them very fun or good news. Yes. And this is, whether we want it to or not.
00:45:34.920
Right. Right. Yeah. And, and this is part of my concern as well. Like I said, when I said,
00:45:38.960
we're, you know, about to re-embrace forces that we don't entirely understand. And a lot of
00:45:43.760
people will return to the Christian understanding, uh, but many of them will not, and they will
00:45:49.240
embrace others, uh, that they, they, they do not grasp and they do not have a firm
00:45:54.500
understanding of what they are truly, uh, letting in or what they are reenacting. As
00:45:58.540
you say, you know, one of the things about this kind of irony, irony poisoned, um, existence,
00:46:05.640
you know, I have a lot of people push back on me when I say that things will be re-enchanted
00:46:09.420
and they say, well, no one's going to believe in this kind of thing anymore. And then no one's
00:46:12.840
going to believe in that kind of thing anymore. No one's going to, it's like, well, yeah,
00:46:16.300
they really are actually, because what happens is once you get to this like super ironic state
00:46:21.060
where you start enacting certain things, uh, once you embody those things, it doesn't matter
00:46:26.500
if you believed them ironically or not. You know, I've, I've made this point many times
00:46:30.480
over. There is no such thing as that ironic Satanist. Like once you, once you are embodying
00:46:35.840
that, once you are going through the steps, whether you thought it was a joke or not, you're
00:46:41.580
Oh, so you're embodying pure negation in the spirit of pure negation that obviously cancels
00:46:48.560
Yeah. Well, there's, you know, people have brought this up many times, but there, you know, there
00:46:51.640
are studies where professors will have their students get together and, you know, create a
00:46:56.380
religion out of whole cloth and they're there, they're there for writing the ritual. They come
00:47:00.160
up with the deity. They do the whole nine yards, right? Like they're, they, they objectively know
00:47:06.100
it's all fake, but once they start practicing the rituals reliably, the people involved start
00:47:13.080
to believe that the religion is real, that fit, that things really are happening around
00:47:17.300
them. And that's because whether you faked it or not, once you start kind of interacting
00:47:22.180
with the outside, once you start interacting with those forces, uh, they, they will be real
00:47:28.260
like, like that, that force is real. Even if the name you gave to it is something that's
00:47:33.500
fake. And once you start going through the rituals of enacting and reaching out to it,
00:47:37.620
it will reach back. And it's, and especially if you've irony poisoned yourself and not recognize
00:47:42.700
what you're talking to, you could be talking to something, uh, quite dark. Uh, and so I,
00:47:47.520
I agree with you this, I think this is going to happen. I think we are in the process happening
00:47:51.420
and many people will return to Christ and Christianity in this movement, but many people will return
00:47:57.180
to something else entirely. And that's a reality that people need to grasp that there will be
00:48:03.220
the return of spiritual forces that are not necessarily Christian in nature.
00:48:07.420
And I think one of the, one of the most striking developments that speaks to this is the way in
00:48:13.420
which Silicon Valley now just talk openly about demons. I mean, they call them, they call them
00:48:18.560
egregores, but I mean, functionally, you know, the, you're an egregore, you know, if you, if you look
00:48:23.340
into what people are talking about, you know, it's, it's a lot of words, um, and it was several,
00:48:27.820
it's several paragraphs worth of words, but basically what you're saying is demon, right? And you might as well
00:48:31.280
just be more succinct about it. Um, and then you've got, you know, there's, there's, there's,
00:48:36.820
there's plenty, there's plenty of well-documented reports of, of people who work in the tech
00:48:41.880
industry who are, who are deliberately, you know, who sincerely believe, and I have no reason
00:48:46.700
to disbelieve them, that they're speaking to otherworldly intelligences in order to access
00:48:50.860
whatever, whatever inspiration they're, they're deriving for the technological work,
00:48:56.040
for the, for the coding work that they do. I've, I have no reason to, I've no reason
00:48:59.880
to think that they're making that up. And as far as they can, and for, from their point
00:49:03.780
of view, that's, that's just what it is that's happening. I mean, who knows what to make of
00:49:07.520
all of that? But I think, I think the fact that the, the epicenter of where people like
00:49:14.980
to think of themselves as the most hyper-rational, the most intellectually vanguardist, and the
00:49:21.200
most, um, committed to freeing themselves from unreason and bias and, um, anything other
00:49:29.840
than the pure intellectuality, um, is also the place which seems to be the most, a boil
00:49:35.520
with, um, parties covered in Book of Revelations insignia and coders who are, coders who are summoning
00:49:46.700
demons and, or, or, or, or who straightforwardly believe that that's what they're doing.
00:49:51.480
Um, and, and the, and the whole, the whole nine yards, it, I mean, it's, it's not, it's
00:49:55.460
a slightly alarming horseshoe theory, but that kind of looks, that, that's, that's, that's
00:50:02.960
Yeah, you really have that, uh, feeling that we, uh, we are, yeah, we are re-returning,
00:50:08.240
we are approaching, uh, something ancient in, in the most bleeding edge of technology, uh, you
00:50:14.580
know, uh, as, uh, has been said before, you know, we all kind of know Warhammer 40k is
00:50:19.980
here and we're just kind of picking our teams, uh, uh, yeah, I mean, this is, this is very
00:50:25.660
much Paul Kingsnall's argument in, in his recent book, Against the Machine.
00:50:30.280
I mean, he doesn't, he doesn't quite spell it out, but he more or less spells it out.
00:50:33.920
He, he, he just thinks we're summoning Satan in, in the, in the spirit, in the spirit of
00:50:38.500
technology, the spirit of technicity, um, or, or something, something of that kind.
00:50:42.900
I think he would more precisely, he would probably say Armin as a, as a spirit, as a
00:50:47.760
personified, um, one, one, one aspect of the demonic, um, but, but that, that's essentially
00:50:53.400
the argument that he's making, um, that these actually, what, what we're, what we're engaging
00:50:57.760
with, you know, in all of these technologies is, is not just lines of code.
00:51:03.440
Again, I don't know what to make of all of that, but this is, it's, it's happening everywhere.
00:51:07.940
You know, re-enchantment isn't some vague prospect of something that might happen.
00:51:13.340
You know, this is, is it, that event is in the rear view mirror.
00:51:18.840
That was the, like the singularity already happened.
00:51:21.340
This is, so I'm writing, I'm writing a book at the moment.
00:51:25.140
Um, and this is, and the, my, my starting premise is that the singularity already happened
00:51:29.840
and it happened specifically between 2007 and 2021 over a 14 year period between the
00:51:36.680
launch of the first iPhone and the end of the COVID lockdowns.
00:51:39.840
And that was, that was the point where we transitioned from being fully, from being
00:51:43.660
still predominantly a print culture, you know, albeit with other characteristics to being,
00:51:50.380
And just everything, everything is now going to be, everything is already different.
00:51:53.640
I can, I can only vaguely remember the before times and you grew up in the before times
00:51:59.420
Just, I think, I think we got the first internet connected computer in, uh, fifth or sixth grade.
00:52:08.080
I remember when they used to give you the Apple II to take home, uh, because computers were
00:52:13.920
so rare when I was in kindergarten that like, oh, you had the computer that weekend, you know?
00:52:19.780
Um, and you and I are definitely the last generation who, who remembers the before times.
00:52:23.640
And even for me, even for me, it's kind of hazy.
00:52:26.340
Uh, I can only just remember what it felt like to, to not be permanently wired to the
00:52:39.520
Um, and, and, and, and I'm, I'm sort of, I'm, I'm genuinely broadly optimistic about the
00:52:47.260
Um, but the only way out really is through, um, we have to learn the hard way why certain
00:52:53.160
things matter, including embodiment, including formal and final cause, including, um, taking
00:52:58.080
extreme care before you invoke anything that you don't know the nature of, um, stuff like
00:53:03.520
Um, basic, basic cognitive hygiene, but it's, it's not as, it's not as though you are the
00:53:09.280
only people who are thinking about this, you know, and anybody who's, anybody who's, who's
00:53:13.600
both extremely online and, you know, has eyes and a functioning brain is thinking about this
00:53:17.620
Um, because it's, yeah, the, the, the, the alternative, the alternative is probably schizophrenia
00:53:25.340
Well, and, and I understand the irony always of two people, uh, discussing the dangers of
00:53:31.100
technology across, uh, the planet on the internet.
00:53:35.020
Uh, so, you know, that's, well, this is exactly, this is absolutely it.
00:53:39.320
I mean, even, even Paul will acknowledge that despite having just written a book called
00:53:43.160
Against the Machine, he has to spend quite a lot of time plugged into the machine promoting
00:53:47.460
Um, and this is, you know, you, you, you have to, you, you have to be completely, completely
00:53:55.900
Um, and the only way is the, the only way is through, we have to, we have to learn the
00:54:01.800
hard way because there's a certain amount you can do just on a sort of individual survival
00:54:06.460
level by, you know, creating, creating your, your wholesome community or, uh, making sure,
00:54:11.200
making sure you have a, you have a functioning kind of body discipline, which involves not
00:54:15.420
scrolling literally 24 seven, um, and, and all the rest of it.
00:54:18.880
Um, but at a collective level, um, we're just going to have to learn the hard way.
00:54:22.360
And the same is going to go for all of those transhumanist technologies as well.
00:54:26.360
You're right that the gender ideology thing isn't, isn't completely gone away.
00:54:29.860
I mean, my, my hunch with that has always been that the vanguardist activist identity
00:54:34.840
stuff will die down, but that it's just going to get absorbed into a sort of general ideological
00:54:40.260
campaign for if freedom, what, what Martin Rothblatt, Martin Rothblatt, I should say, calls
00:54:45.500
freedom of freedom of form, which is to say a generalized right to edit your own physiology.
00:54:51.200
Um, and it'll stop being about, it'll stop being about men in dresses and it'll become
00:54:55.240
about, um, people, people who want to edit their physiology in any way, in any way they
00:55:01.700
And that's, that's just not going to be a sort of gender goblin left-wing cause necessarily.
00:55:08.180
In fact, I think it plausibly will come from the right.
00:55:09.960
The next one's going to be designer babies, uh, in my mind.
00:55:15.600
And you'll have people on the right pushing for it.
00:55:19.860
Um, because it's, you know, it, it sort of, it scratches a certain eugenicist itch, which
00:55:23.680
is certainly, which has always been latent amongst a certain kind of right-wing progressive.
00:55:29.120
And again, the only, the only way, the only possible way that you can answer this on its
00:55:34.140
own terms is, is by, is by blowing away the Noaquinus rule.
00:55:39.380
Like you, you need to bring out the heavy artillery.
00:55:43.320
You know, if you can't talk about, if you're going to assent to this sort of modernist claim
00:55:48.440
that human nature doesn't exist because something, something, uh, something, something
00:55:53.280
offers razor or whatever, um, then you're screwed.
00:55:58.100
You have no argument against designer babies ultimately.
00:56:00.700
Um, but if you, if the, the, the only possible cogent case for, against designer babies is
00:56:07.900
on the basis that human nature actually is immutable.
00:56:10.180
Um, and it's, and, and we're created in the image of God, but like there, there isn't
00:56:14.680
any, there, there is no other, yes, there is no other sufficiently cogent, uh, reason to
00:56:21.840
And I think, yeah, I mean, that, that's, that's why, that's why we're seeing people like I am
00:56:27.240
here, see Ali having serious conversations about Christian conversion in New York City with
00:56:32.420
Richard Dawkins, you know, because there's a sense in which it's not possible to meet the
00:56:37.720
kind of fundamental questions that we're now raising through AI and biotech without, unless
00:56:42.720
we dust off theology, there's just no way of doing it.
00:56:45.980
And so people desperately, everyone's desperately scrabbling around in the old libraries for
00:56:49.740
something, something which looks like it has any kind of a bearing on all of this.
00:56:54.280
Once you start rummaging, you realize it's just, it's just all 500 years old and we maybe
00:56:58.840
need to, maybe need to update the language a little bit, but it's all, it all works.
00:57:02.820
Well, that's the thing that, you know, we'll, we'll blow people's minds pretty much
00:57:06.920
every time they go down the rabbit hole is, you know, you, you're fed this idea, this
00:57:10.760
chronological snobbery that by existing time and place that you, you are just far more
00:57:16.880
And then you read anyone from 500 years ago and it's so clear that they are way more
00:57:21.720
intelligent than kind of your average college professor today.
00:57:25.620
And, and you know, you, you, so the, the, the mountain of wisdom and the number of things
00:57:30.480
that have already been addressed in quite a bit of depth, the minute you step into that much
00:57:34.520
deeper pond of a historical writing is significant, but Mary, uh, we have tested your internet
00:57:41.920
Uh, now you're barely moving on my side and I'm afraid it's going to, it's going to just
00:57:47.160
So it's probably best that we go ahead and wrap this conversation up, but it's been fantastic
00:57:52.180
Can you let people know if they want to find your work, where your next stuff is coming
00:58:01.860
Um, I have a regular column that's usually out on a Monday or a Tuesday, uh, Tuesday or
00:58:09.000
I have a sub stack, um, that's just maryharrington.co.uk and I tweet, uh, post, I see, I don't know
00:58:15.940
whatever, whatever you say now at moving circles, those are the main places I guess you find me.
00:58:25.280
Can you imagine how annoying Elon must find that?
00:58:31.660
Uh, you should be checking out all of Mary's work.
00:58:34.260
Make sure you check out the sub stack and the article and, uh, follow her on Twitter.
00:58:39.720
Uh, uh, if you, uh, are here for the first time on YouTube, you need to subscribe, click
00:58:46.280
So, you know, when we go live and if you would like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you
00:58:50.680
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00:58:54.020
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00:58:58.160
All again, guys, remember this is a prerecorded episode.
00:59:00.800
So unfortunately we cannot get to any super chats or questions today, but thank you everybody