How Transhumanism Subverts our Nature | Mary Harrington

So, Mary, the argument you've made, um, I'm going to summarize it and tell me if I've got it right. So you went back far enough in time to assess the role that men and women played in home-centered agrarian societies, and you made a case that that was a stable solution of relative economic equality, let's say. And then the Industrial Revolution kicked in, and it pulled men away from the home first, but then it, um, replaced women's work. And that meant that women were up in the air about what their role was, but it also turned them into something approximating comparatively wealthy individualist consumers.

Then you said there were two responses to that. One was the emergence of a feminism of care that detailed out the realm of women's responsibilities and opportunities in the really, in the domestic sphere, with regard to, say, relationships with their husbands, their immediate family, and, more importantly, their children. And then you detailed out another stream of feminism, which was the feminism of freedom. You associated that to some degree with women's concern about being tangled up with men who weren't really good for anything.

And so that's an interesting little twist on that, but your fundamental point was that once women became independent actors in the free market, in the industrialized free market, there was every reason to move towards the transformation of law so that women, as independent economic actors, would have the same economic rights as men. But then, there's that problem with bad men lurking in the background there that contaminates things. And then you talked a little bit about the transhumanist movement, identifying that at least in part with the rise of the birth control pill, which is a radical innovation, basically equivalent to a major genetic mutation, a species-altering mutation.

And then you pointed out that, oddly enough, in concert with the rise of the pill, we got the rise of legalized abortion and its widespread prevalence. Okay, so that's where I want to drill into. I want to tell you something biological, and I want you to tell me what you think about it because I think it's key in some mysterious way to this entire problem. The problem you've laid out is that women and men, for that matter, have been recalibrating their identity since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It made us into more atomized individuals who were more consumer-oriented, let's say, and that's a major social disruption.

But then, on the pill and the abortion side, here's something that is worth considering, I believe. So, you know, the evolutionary biologists have identified two fundamental reproductive strategies. So imagine there's a continua. Okay? On the one end, you have, they're called R-selected or R-strategists, and the R stands for reproduction, essentially rapid reproduction, let's say.

And so, mosquitoes, puffballs, and fish are R-strategists. And so, the R strategy is fairly straightforward: many, many, many potential offspring—millions or even billions of them—zero post-sex investment. So that's the R investment strategy. Okay? And so, most of your fertilized offspring, gadgets, are going to perish. Enough will last for them to replace you or maybe even for the population to thrive, but it has nothing to do with you after the sexual act.

Okay, on the other side are so-called K investment K-strategists, and those are creatures—mammals would be a reasonable example—that have very few offspring but pour a lot of resources into them. The ultimate K-strategists are human beings. So our investment strategy is long-term high-cost investment, even spanning multiple generations. Okay? So there's a real distribution, and humans are on the extreme end of one of those, uh, directions, let's say one of those poles of the distribution.

Okay, now there's a subsidiary observation that goes along with that, and this is where the point is really germane. So now imagine that among human beings there are R-strategists and K-strategists. Okay? So the R-strategists are ones who have many sexual partners and low investment. Now, that's a lot easier for men than it is for women because, of course, if women get pregnant, their high investment strategy is immediately—unless they circumvent that—but the men can get away with it, let's say, being R-strategists.

Now, a further question is just who the hell are these R-strategist males? So these would be the men who are interested in multiple sexual partners, um, low emotional investment, and low post-sexual investment, say, in any result in children. And we know the answer to that: our-strategist males are narcissistic, melancholic, psychopathic, and sadistic.

And so what that means, I think, as far as I can tell, is that when you free up women to be sexually available with the technological transformation, you both deliver them into the hands of R-strategist males who have all the lovely personality features that I just described, or you, or maybe something even worse, is that you train men who might otherwise be high-investment mates to adopt an R strategy, with all of the psychopathy and melancholia and narcissism and sadism that goes along with that.

And so this is a very perverse outcome because—and I guess I don't really know what people expected to begin with—you said that, for example, you implied that, you know, women are pursuing their freedom, let's say, with regard to untrammeled sexual access on the reproductive front, but that's not exactly a freedom.

It's more like a subjugation to sexuality as the prime motivator in life. Right? I mean, you could identify yourself with your sexuality, which is, of course, what people are doing in spades now. But the idea that the opportunity—the ability to pursue untrammeled sexual expression—is actually a manifestation of freedom is an error if you believe that subjugation to biological—untrammeled subjugation to biological whim—doesn't constitute freedom.

This is especially true if it turns out that it's delivering women into the hands of psychopathic men, which seems to be the case. There's a great deal of truth in that, and really that speaks to one of the—it speaks to the epigraph, actually, which I gave, the second half of the second part of the book, which comes from Horace. I'm not going to try and quote the Latin at you, but the translation is: "You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but still she comes back."

Um, it's a very famous quote. Um, I think I've taken it slightly mischievously out of context, but it's a very important piece because the governing theme of the transhumanist era is using technology to try and abolish our nature. And really that's the—that's the governing, um, theme, the governing project of the transhumanist era, which is the point where we embrace the—or as we hope—the power of technologies to transform ourselves so we're no longer industrializing the world.

We're no longer using machines to, say, make weaving easier. Instead, we're using technologies to remodel ourselves, um, to make us more like we think we ought to be, at least, also, or that's the idea. And that really begins with the contraceptive pill, which is a medical technology which we—the original utopians, the first wave of feminist responses to the pill—were hugely optimistic about what it would do. I mean, we're some decades further down that track now, and we can see that it hasn't really worked out like that.

And our mutual friend Lise Perry recently wrote a very persuasive book detailing all of the ways it hasn't really worked out like that, and all of the ways which, as you've just outlined, the sexual revolution was considerably more to the benefit of, um—was it R-selected?—um, all these narcissistic, psychopathic, highly sexed, and not particularly fatherly men seem to have been the net beneficiaries of this technological transformation, contra the—the utopians who imagined that we might—that it would open out a kind of sexual utopia in which everybody could be free to be themselves.

Women could finally express themselves, free from the gossiping, the gossiping old ladies in the street, and free from the risk of pregnancy, and it would make everything sort of sunshine and rainbows and kittens, and it would all be lovely. Now we know—we know at this point that that's not exactly what happened. But really this just goes—this serves to illustrate the utopian spirit that people have brought to the project of technology, technologizing ourselves using, using essentially biotech, beginning with the chemical intervention of the contraceptive pill.

Um, but we're considerably further down that path now, and at every stage we've set about embracing new innovations in biotech in the hope, really, of remedying perceived flaws in our nature. You know, whether that's a pill to stop us being sad, or whether it's a—whether it's a technology which will—will mean women's fertility no longer has to fall off a cliff at the age of 40, because now there are technologies which will enable her to go on having kids into her 50s or her 60s or whatever.

I mean, you—we could—we could be here all evening, um, enumerating the—the technologies, uh, the opportunities, and the biomedical advances. And at every stage what happens is there's a utopian promise of being able to escape a previous embodied limit. Um, there is a new set of—a new set of constraints on us, if you like—aspects of our nature—which were previously managed by social means, in the way that the difference between women's and men's reproductive role was previously managed by what what now gets dismissively referred to as the sexual double standard, which was, in the area prior to reliable contraception, an extremely pragmatic measure, um, oriented to avoiding a proliferation of unwanted children within a community.

Um, and so, so, so that's one example of a way, you know, an asymmetry or some awkward aspect of our nature was managed socially in a way which just went away more or less overnight the moment Technology came along that seemed as though it would fix the problem for us. And there have been countless other examples since then, and what invariably happens is you get a dividend of freedom, and then whatever it is that's been technologized in that way is then reordered to the market.

And you see this very clearly with the sexual revolution, which promised a great utopian dividend of self-expression and free love and, you know, everybody having a good time, and it'll be fine. Um, and actually, what it gave birth to was the porn industry, and it gave birth to a ballooning sex industry. And now, you know, 50 years on from that, we have PornHub, which is one of the biggest websites, one of the most high-grossing websites in the world, and which is already notorious for sex trafficking, for abuse, um, for countless other atrocities, and for corrupting the appetites of children, frankly, who are the majority of its consumers, and much else besides.

So, so, so, what—but, but really what I want to emphasize there is the dynamic at work. We think—we think technologizing ourselves will liberate us from some aspect of our nature. What, in fact, happens is that that aspect of our nature becomes opened up to commerce, and in the meantime, our nature is unchanged. [Music]