The Auron MacIntyre Show - Identity in a Digital Age ｜ Guest： Mary Harrington ｜ 11⧸7⧸25

00:00:00.580 Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great

00:00:04.400 stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. Before we get started,

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00:00:54.600 Also, speaking of Blaze TV hosts, we have a new show coming to Blaze TV. It's Chris Ruffo and

00:01:01.060 Lomez or Jonathan Kieberman. Both of these guys are fantastic. They've been on the show multiple

00:01:06.240 times. They are insightful, conservative activists, and they are going to have a great new show coming

00:01:11.220 out on the Blaze. So make sure that you subscribe so you can check that out. Joining me today is Mary

00:01:17.560 Harrington. We've been talking with Mary several times on the show about the idea of identity and

00:01:23.840 technology. She first approached this in her book about feminism and the way that progress has 1.00

00:01:30.160 ultimately affected the relationship between men and women and their place in society. But recently

00:01:35.760 at the ARC conference, she released a paper talking about identity in the digital age. And I believe

00:01:41.880 she's ultimately developing that into a new book. So I wanted to bring her on and talk about that

00:01:46.660 today. Mary, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back.

00:01:51.400 Of course. I'm just very, very happy after just endless weeks of very stupid American conservative 1.00

00:01:58.560 inside baseball, civil war stuff happening all over the place. I'm just desperately happy to be 0.99

00:02:04.160 talking about anything else. So thank you so much for coming on to give me anything, literally anything

00:02:09.460 else to talk about. It's, it's not going to give me the too long. Didn't read on all the inside

00:02:13.400 baseball. Please don't make me do it. I can't, I can't go on about it anymore. I'm just

00:02:20.780 extremely happy to zoom out and just talk, talk about anything else. So very excited. Oh, also

00:02:26.740 I should say guys, we're pre-taping this. I'm traveling on Friday. So we will not be able to

00:02:32.300 answer any super chats today. Very sorry about that. But Mary, like I said, I wanted to dive in

00:02:38.440 to your piece on identity in the digital age. I thought there were a lot of very important insights.

00:02:44.340 You and I had a number of very good conversations when we were at ARC about this. This is something that

00:02:48.820 both of us have thought quite a bit about and written about. So I want to pick your brain on

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00:03:57.220 All right, Mary. So I guess the first thing that we should discuss when we're talking about this topic

00:04:01.960 is really the concept of identity itself. One of the things that you pointed out in your piece for ARK

00:04:08.940 was that while, of course, everyone has had identities throughout history, the concept of

00:04:15.460 identity is some kind of separate thing that we need to understand. The use of the very term

00:04:20.700 identity is not as old as most people would think, right?

00:04:24.820 Yeah, it struck me when I was writing the piece that actually it doesn't really show up as a term

00:04:31.400 in regular usage until the 20th century, really until after the Second World War.

00:04:35.340 So I sort of, in the course of the essay, which is long and quite convoluted, it's quite a sort

00:04:42.760 of elaborate argument. I made the argument that the idea of identity itself

00:04:49.960 is a secularization and a sort of emptying out of an older term, which really until relatively

00:04:58.680 recently was a soul. And that the, what we think of, what we understand by the self or the soul

00:05:06.120 has been through several iterations, which roughly correspond to, to different information

00:05:12.180 technologies. So it sounds like a kind of abstruse argument, but it, I found it a really helpful

00:05:17.180 heuristic for, for a whole bunch of different things. So the, to the, the, the argument that I,

00:05:22.680 that I set out in that essay was that the, the, the soul emerges as a way of thinking about what

00:05:29.280 it is to be, what it is to be conscious as distinct from being, I don't know, a dog or a pebble

00:05:33.800 or a tree or whatever, emerges as a sort of self, self-reflexive idea, roughly in conjunction

00:05:40.240 with literacy, which was the first, it was the original information revolution. The idea that you

00:05:44.920 could actually, you know, movable, you know, especially, especially the, the Greek alphabet.

00:05:51.220 And that people really started, started thinking of themselves as having interiority as such,

00:05:55.640 or the, the being, the being an inside to people at all, you know, that, that big, I suppose you

00:06:00.440 could say, I suppose you could argue that, you know, we don't actually know because nobody wrote

00:06:04.540 anything down before that for, because, because obviously they didn't, because they, that's, you

00:06:08.900 know, pre, we don't really know what preliterate people thought about it because they didn't

00:06:13.200 write it down. But as far as anyone can make out, discussion of the soul emerges roughly

00:06:18.240 in conjunction with literacy, or at least in, in conjunction with the Greek alphabet.

00:06:23.140 It doesn't, it doesn't seem to show up in the same way in, in older textual traditions.

00:06:28.460 I mean, say, if, if somebody wants to, if somebody wants to write to me and harangue me about

00:06:31.900 how I'm wrong on that and like, give me, give me endless lengthy citations, I'm really grateful

00:06:36.000 to receive them. I'm always, always very happy to be corrected on, on incredibly nerdy topics.

00:06:40.560 So please, like guys, have at it. However, to the best of my understanding, this is, that's

00:06:46.840 roughly the, the people begin thinking that we have something like a soul when they start

00:06:52.020 being able to hear words in their heads because they're reading and they start and the idea

00:06:55.220 of words and language and ideas as being something which is transmissible, separate from a person

00:06:59.980 becomes a thing at all. And then, and then fast forwarding through a whole, a whole trajectory

00:07:05.700 of philosophical development following that, including the emergence of Christianity and

00:07:10.580 the, the philosophical, the, the, and the, the Christianization of Aristotle and Aristotle's

00:07:15.900 ideas on the soul and the self through notably Thomas Aquinas. We arrived by degrees at a second

00:07:23.780 information revolution, which was the printing press, which both massively expanded literacy and

00:07:29.040 also completely checked and also over time transformed how people related both to information and also

00:07:34.860 to that sense of interior, interiority. So, and at that point, the idea of the soul begins mutating

00:07:41.320 again. And what we get instead is the self, which is the concept that only really emerges over the course

00:07:46.980 of modernity, which as I, actually the, the, the thesis that I'm working on with the book I currently

00:07:52.360 have in the works is that broadly speaking, that the, the history of modernity is the history of the

00:07:57.760 printing press, or the history of print culture considered more, more broadly than just that,

00:08:03.680 those sort of narrow technological terms. So over the course of modernity, you, you, the, this,

00:08:08.740 this idea of, of the soul as being something directly connected to God becomes sort of partially

00:08:15.320 evacuated and secularized and becomes instead the self. I mean, romanticism never quite lets, you know,

00:08:20.960 the romantics never quite let go of the idea that, you know, it's, it's, it's transcendent and

00:08:24.860 connected to something mysterious and other, but this, this idea, this idea of a sort of immediate

00:08:29.620 connection to God, you know, gradually fades away, the world becomes disenchanted, blah, blah,

00:08:34.200 Charles Taylor, the whole rest, all of that. And then I think my sort of working hypothesis on this

00:08:43.980 is that the reason we now have identity, the reason this, this has mutated again, and when we're now

00:08:49.480 talking about identity is that this is happening in conjunction with, with another information

00:08:54.340 revolution, uh, namely the digital one. Um, and I think, well, and what, what's that, what I've,

00:09:01.080 what I've tried to trace, um, through the, through the rest of that paper on identity in the digital

00:09:07.080 age has been the, the commodity, the commodification of, and I've, I analyzed this actually in terms of

00:09:14.080 Aristotle's, uh, or actually it was Plato, uh, the, the, the ancient Greek understanding of the self as

00:09:19.320 comprising three parts, eros, thumos, and logos, and the way in which post-war culture has by degrees set

00:09:27.180 out to commodify all, all three of those aspects of the, of the human soul. So with the concept of pill, um, the,

00:09:34.840 we, we see this sort of technologization of eros, this idea that we, we, we can bring that aspect of the human soul

00:09:40.920 under technological control. We can master our own reproductive, reproductive biology and usher in a 0.98

00:09:46.080 sort of a horny new era of, uh, infinite polymorphous perversity or whatever. And as, you know, as everybody

00:09:51.940 knows, that's not really how that worked out. Um, and I, I think, um, again, I'm, I'm, I'm really happy

00:09:59.000 if anybody wants to disagree with me or, or argue or offer counter counter arguments on this, but my sense

00:10:05.100 the, the whole social media dynamic, um, of, of self-creation and, and the sort of pursuit of kind

00:10:12.700 of politics by posting and the pursuit of empty valor by creating internet selves, um, is functions

00:10:19.800 in effect as a sort of commodification of thumos, um, as the, the pursuit of glory. And so, so you see,

00:10:26.220 I suppose, I mean, if I wanted to be provocative in relation to your audience in particular, I could

00:10:31.800 argue that computer games are also a kind of commodification of thumos in that sense.

00:10:35.620 Oh, of course they are. I don't think that's provocative at all, actually, even among those

00:10:39.300 who are familiar, you know, who, who enjoy them.

00:10:44.280 But there's this, there's this sense in which the, the digital world sort of becomes a whole

00:10:48.700 series of ways in which, um, ways in which these aspects of the human soul become, become

00:10:56.140 technologized and commodified and, uh, and, and sort of consumed, used up, turned into, turned

00:11:03.060 into resources to be strip mined and, and, and made in profit. And the, the, the final frontier

00:11:09.600 in that, which was really the, the culmination of the papers, I wanted to make a case that the,

00:11:14.400 the invention of so-called artificial intelligence is an attempt to commodify logos, which is to

00:11:20.440 say that the capacity for, for thought itself. Now, I don't think, I don't think that's going

00:11:25.280 to work any more than trying to commodify eros, you know, resulted in, you know, our utopia

00:11:31.020 of polymorphous perverse enjoyment or, and any more than, any more than the, the, the commodification

00:11:38.460 of, uh, thumos has, has made us any healthier and more capable of constructive political action

00:11:45.340 together, or even capable of spending any time with each other at all. You know, you think

00:11:50.600 about all of the, the endless articles about spending time with your racist uncle at Thanksgiving

00:11:54.360 or whatever, you know, it's not as though creating social media identities for ourselves

00:11:58.840 has made it any easier to get on or get organized or even really to, to, uh, create, to, to form

00:12:06.140 effective, uh, political resistance to any of the stuff which is just happening, whether

00:12:10.920 we want it to or not. I actually, there's a, I'm, I'm, I might disagree with myself later

00:12:15.840 about that, you know, trust the plan and always chimp is, is possible, is possibly an argument

00:12:20.740 against that, but maybe we should come to that in a minute. Um, I, I don't know. I don't

00:12:24.840 know about that yet. I'm, I'm thinking of that as a very interesting essay and I'm still thinking

00:12:28.400 about it. Um, but it, that, that, that might be a counter argument, but we'll see. Um, and,

00:12:34.320 and, and AI isn't going to work to, I mean, AI is not going to produce actual artificial

00:12:38.880 intelligence. What it's going to produce is automation. I just, I just published a newsletter

00:12:42.340 about that today. Let's see. It's, it's, it's, it's another, another iteration of the same

00:12:48.300 process of industrialization that's been going on since the 19th century or even earlier in

00:12:52.880 England. Um, it's just, it, it's just, it's just opened up a different field for automation

00:12:58.300 and industrialization. And we're all going to have to, we're all going to have to deal

00:13:02.240 with that. Um, but, and I think they will, we'll be able to deal with it more effectively

00:13:06.520 if we see it, see it for what it is, um, and stop imagining that we can, we can master our

00:13:12.160 own souls. But, and, and the, the final point that I, the final point that I made in that

00:13:17.080 argument is that we can't do any of this unless we actually realize what it is that we're talking

00:13:21.780 about, you know, and stop talking about identity, which is this kind of empty evacuated

00:13:25.520 concept that doesn't really have any content and it doesn't really function very well as

00:13:29.620 a container either. Um, and actually just talk and, and realize that what we're talking

00:13:33.680 about is the human soul. And this is, this is not something that anybody's, anybody's

00:13:37.720 really managed to explain away even now. Um, and that, and the sooner we realize what

00:13:43.860 it is that we're, what it is that we're talking about automating away, the sooner we can just

00:13:47.600 stop doing it and realize what it is that we're actually looking at.

00:13:51.720 Well, I'll be honest. I don't know that we can stop automating it away.

00:13:55.520 Uh, and that is my, one of my greatest fears ultimately, uh, you know, uh, obviously, uh,

00:14:02.440 I I'm obsessed with the idea of scale and how it impacts social organization and politics

00:14:08.180 and all of these things. And you're of course, absolutely right. I think your analysis of each

00:14:12.940 one of these aspects of the human soul being abstracted away, uh, is, is a very good one.

00:14:19.520 I would actually argue that it starts with the abstraction of logos in the written word. Uh,

00:14:24.660 but we don't have the ability to iterate on it fast enough for it to kind of gain momentum or

00:14:30.560 consciousness in the way that our more artificial intelligence structures would now. There's simply

00:14:35.800 not enough cyber magnetic feedback in the system when you're having to handwrite letters at best

00:14:41.220 to correspond with each other. It can't build on itself. It can't iterate on itself fast enough to

00:14:45.320 kind of gain its own, uh, its own teleology. But when you have that, which is what we're approaching

00:14:51.120 now, I think with our current, uh, technological, technological advancements, uh, you have to have

00:14:56.460 a very different situation. Uh, obviously the same is again, true of, uh, you know, Eros and

00:15:02.000 Thumos. I think, uh, you know, the idea that pornography and video games are, you know, wide

00:15:06.940 scale control mechanisms. I was exactly right. Not because necessarily they were engineered

00:15:11.060 specifically for that purpose, but because once we've abstracted everything else, this is the

00:15:15.800 logical way that you scale these, all, all of these embodied desires, all of these embodied

00:15:21.160 realizations, uh, they are, uh, they are not good for scaling society. They do not allow systems to

00:15:28.060 move beyond natural human limitations. So one of the reasons you need to subjugate men's desire to

00:15:34.180 conquer things and have sex with lots of women is that ultimately that's the kind of stuff that like 0.97

00:15:39.960 barbarians use to tear down complex, but fragile systems, right? So you need to subdue 0.98

00:15:45.180 those impulses inside of, uh, you know, the, the, the population at large, if you're going to

00:15:50.520 scale up and create these more complex societies. So in a way it feels like, um, as, as much as we can

00:15:58.520 look at these things and say, they have very negative impacts. It's very difficult to sell people on the

00:16:04.220 idea of scaling any of this back of changing any of this, of avoiding as, uh, Dugan calls it, uh, you

00:16:11.940 know, the, the metaphysics of the washing machine. Uh, we just feel compelled towards, uh, the, these

00:16:17.600 revolutions in ourselves, our technology, our, our identity, uh, because ultimately we have a very

00:16:24.600 difficult time imagining us ourselves, not being at the bleeding edge of like human progress.

00:16:31.660 Right. There's a, there's definitely something, I mean, certainly you'll prize my washing machine

00:16:35.740 from my cold dead hands. Uh, you know, you're not having that back. Absolutely no way. Um, and yet,

00:16:44.100 I mean, my, my view on this tends to be, I'm, I think you, you, you and I both have a kind of

00:16:49.940 gloomy accelerationist street, right? Um, and I, I tend to take the view that with this, with all of

00:16:55.780 this stuff, you know, there's, you know, standing a fort history yelling stop just demonstrably

00:17:00.080 had not worked so far. Right. Uh, and probably the only way out is through, but, um, uh, just as a

00:17:08.300 footnote to that, that are really important in some aside in Carl Polanyi's book on the great

00:17:13.820 transformation, where he talks about the violence involved in the original creation of market society

00:17:19.280 in England. It's very, very interesting book. I mean, people, people take issue with his economic

00:17:23.080 history, but his description of the process of turning England from a sort of quasi medieval

00:17:28.360 society into a market society is, is very, uh, thought provoking. And one of the, one of the

00:17:34.460 assides he makes is that the, the English crown and the peasantry were in alliance for a long time

00:17:41.160 against the increasingly mercantile aristocracy to slow down the process of enclosure. Um, just for,

00:17:47.820 for a bit of context, if anybody, anybody on the, watching this is not a history nerd, um, or an

00:17:53.280 English history, English political economy, historic nerd, um, the enclosure acts were the original

00:17:59.060 process of transforming England from a feudal, um, series of, of, uh, a feudal society into a,

00:18:06.440 into one governed by private property. And it began with the, with the dissolution of the monasteries

00:18:11.380 under Henry VIII. And at that point, at that point, land, which had previously hitherto been mostly

00:18:16.620 held, it all belonged to the crown. And it was, it was given to various feudal lords in a sort of

00:18:22.020 hierarchical chain to manage according to various, to specific obligations, appropriate to their

00:18:27.200 station, all the way down to peasants at the bottom, whose job was to dig. And then, you know, 0.55

00:18:31.020 occasionally give a couple of, in exchange for being able to exist there and do some digging

00:18:34.820 and grow potatoes, or sorry, that potatoes is anachronistic, but to, to, to grow vegetables

00:18:39.620 and kind of exist in this space, you, you had, you had to pay like three chickens a year to your

00:18:43.600 lord or whatever, um, and occasionally turn up with a weapon if they needed you to. Um, so that was the

00:18:48.940 old way of doing things. And then, and then private property comes along and people are like, no, no,

00:18:52.720 we're going to change the law. And this is, this is, this is just our land now. And so you have to

00:18:56.480 get off it, off you go, go and do something else. Um, and that's, that's what created the industrial

00:19:00.200 proletariat. And that was the beginning of modern England. That was also the beginning, the beginning

00:19:03.080 of the industrial revolution. It's the beginning of modernity as such. Um, it happened in England

00:19:07.820 before it happened in America. And then when it happened in America, it happened brutally fast

00:19:11.420 over the 19th century. And now here we all are, right? Um, so the potted, potted economic

00:19:17.380 history. And the, the, the point, the point of this, um, is that the, Polanyi makes this

00:19:22.940 really interesting aside about how enclosure, the process of privatizing the land in England

00:19:27.620 was driven by, by the landed gentry, um, who wanted to own the land rather than just manage 1.00

00:19:33.200 it. They, they, they didn't want to be in hot to the king, basically. Um, who could, who

00:19:37.560 could kick them off and replace them with some other, some other guy. They wanted to own

00:19:41.280 the land and for that just to be there so that they were the ones who were in charge

00:19:44.020 of who got, who got kicked off or whatever. Um, and, and the crown resisted it alongside

00:19:48.780 the peasantry for a long time. And what Polanyi says, which I think is so interesting is that

00:19:52.740 on balance, it was for the best that enclosures happened and market society happened. But the

00:19:58.020 fact that the crown was able to slow it down meant that some of its more horrendous consequences

00:20:02.720 were happened slowly enough that people were able to tolerate it. And it would have just

00:20:06.920 been an absolute social holocaust if it had happened, if it happened as quickly as the, 0.65

00:20:10.820 as the Lords wanted it to. Um, and I think, I think this is a good, a good general principle

00:20:16.120 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

00:20:26.920 yeah, that's a good one too.

00:20:28.560 No, this is, this is sort of qualified theoretical case for conservatism, you know, you know, as,

00:20:33.560 you know, people criticize conservatives, conservatives for just, you know, being liberals driving

00:20:37.700 the speed limit. And I think, I, I think I will, I want to cite Polanyi and say, actually,

00:20:41.840 sometimes that's not a bad thing. Actually some, you know, that's, you know, even, even

00:20:47.520 if you are, even if it's maybe a sort of futile last stand, sometimes, you know, just being

00:20:52.580 able to slow a process down, isn't it can, can have social value in and of itself. But anyway,

00:20:59.800 we've, we've, we've, I think we've, I think we've just been down three, three nested rabbit

00:21:03.680 holes.

00:21:05.840 The rabbit hole in the rabbit hole in the rabbit hole.

00:21:08.020 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

00:21:21.700 some, there is some value in slowing it down enough, being aware enough, being thoughtful

00:21:27.860 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

00:21:40.320 rabbit holes it was in place, with those caveats in place, I remain fairly confident that the

00:21:46.200 only way out of this is through. You know, we're, we're going to end up all the way, you

00:21:51.740 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

00:22:01.020 happened and like those, those people exist?

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.98

00:25:57.360 soul could not. So in this way, the identity, the Anglo identity in its purest form could be projected 0.94

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, 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.95

00:27:58.840 be incarnational or all the bullshit, to, to, to paraphrase whoever that was. Um, but you 0.97

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 1.00

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

00:30:37.920 you speak and how you understand your culture.

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 1.00

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 0.98

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 1.00

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 0.94

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 0.97

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 0.99

00:34:10.920 trans, you know, it's going to go on being annoying. Um, especially in the provinces for 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

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. 0.99

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.80

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 0.97

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 0.89

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 0.66

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

00:46:40.840 there, right?

00:46:41.580 Oh, so you're embodying pure negation in the spirit of pure negation that obviously cancels

00:46:46.440 itself out. No, it doesn't.

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 1.00

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 0.92

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

00:49:59.940 kind of what it is, right?

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.

00:51:01.840 There's something else going on there.

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.

00:51:16.180 I, I think it happened during COVID for me.

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.

00:51:23.400 The working title is The King of the Swarm.

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,

00:51:47.920 um, to being fully digital first.

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

00:51:57.340 as well, didn't you?

00:51:58.520 I did.

00:51:59.240 Yeah.

00:51:59.420 Just, I think, I think we got the first internet connected computer in, uh, fifth or sixth grade.

00:52:05.880 Right.

00:52:06.360 So, uh, yeah, right, right.

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?

00:52:18.960 That's right.

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

00:52:31.260 rage machine.

00:52:32.980 Um, it has pros and cons, you know, here I am.

00:52:37.000 It's a living.

00:52:39.520 Um, and, and, and, and I'm, I'm sort of, I'm, I'm genuinely broadly optimistic about the

00:52:44.680 direction of travel.

00:52:45.520 I think it's going to be a very bumpy ride.

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

00:53:03.220 that.

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

00:53:17.380 stuff.

00:53:17.620 Um, because it's, yeah, the, the, the, the alternative, the alternative is probably schizophrenia

00:53:23.360 and nobody wants to go there.

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

00:53:46.640 it.

00:53:47.460 Um, and this is, you know, you, you, you have to, you, you have to be completely, completely

00:53:52.940 upfront about, about the paradoxes in that.

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.

00:54:25.540 I mean, you're right.

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

00:55:01.220 see fit.

00:55:01.700 And that's, that's just not going to be a sort of gender goblin left-wing cause necessarily.

00:55:06.400 It could, it could even come from the right.

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.

00:55:13.480 Exactly.

00:55:13.820 That's going to be the real battle.

00:55:15.300 Exactly.

00:55:15.600 And you'll have people on the right pushing for it.

00:55:18.080 Yeah, that's absolutely coming from the right.

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 0.96

00:55:53.280 offers razor or whatever, um, then you're screwed.

00:55:56.780 Basically, you have nowhere to stand. 0.92

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

00:56:20.620 disagree with them.

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.

00:56:52.900 And actually there's loads there.

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

00:57:16.340 intelligent.

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

00:57:40.720 connection to its limits.

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

00:57:45.740 throw you out of here at any moment.

00:57:47.160 So it's probably best that we go ahead and wrap this conversation up, but it's been fantastic

00:57:51.220 to talk with you.

00:57:52.180 Can you let people know if they want to find your work, where your next stuff is coming

00:57:56.500 out, where they should be going?

00:57:58.260 Sure.

00:57:58.660 Uh, I write weekly at unheard.

00:58:01.860 Um, I have a regular column that's usually out on a Monday or a Tuesday, uh, Tuesday or

00:58:06.920 a Wednesday, whatever I write at unheard.

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.

00:58:20.960 Yeah.

00:58:21.440 It's always going to be tweeting to me.

00:58:23.220 I know.

00:58:24.000 I know.

00:58:24.460 Just that.

00:58:25.280 Can you imagine how annoying Elon must find that?

00:58:27.700 Yes.

00:58:28.820 Yes.

00:58:29.340 Well, he can be annoyed.

00:58:30.780 All right, guys.

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

00:58:44.740 the bell notifications, all that stuff.

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 need to subscribe to the or Mac entire show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:58:54.020 If you do leave a rating or review, that really helps with the algorithm magic.

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

00:59:05.100 for watching.

00:59:05.820 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - November 07, 2025

Identity in a Digital Age ｜ Guest： Mary Harrington ｜ 11⧸7⧸25

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