Mary Harrington on Female Elites, Post-Liberalism, and our Cyborg Age

An exclusive interview

Mary Harrington is one of the most interesting writers publishing today, as far as I’m concerned. A columnist at UnHerd, and a frequent commentator elsewhere, Mary is a prolific writer. But what makes that writing consistently fascinating is her ability to bring together many disparate topics – from religion and philosophy, to economic and technological change, to the shifting front lines of the culture war and gender relations – to make arguments that often suddenly seem blindingly obvious only in retrospect. And in doing so she effortlessly punctures the orthodoxies of political left and right alike with an utterly nonchalant disregard for political correctness, a fierce regard for human dignity, and a delightfully dry – and devastating – British wit. I think she’s pretty cool, in other words.

I should also point out that she has a book coming out this year, Feminism Against Progress. It doesn’t have an official book page yet, but you can and should follow her on Substack or Twitter @moveincircles to stay up to date.

Mary Harrington

I’ve cited Mary a number of times here, so decided to reach out to ask her a few questions by email, which she was generous enough to answer. The result is the interview below, in which we get into how the increasingly female character of the educated elite may explain “cancel culture,” the social consequences of the shift from an industrial to a “cyborg” age, feminism, the collapse of liberalism, the meaning of progress, and nightmarish dystopias, among other things.

I hope you enjoy the discussion.

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If I was forced to try to concisely describe a theme for The Upheaval, it would basically be an attempt to answer the question “what the heck is going on?” By now I think many people have a good sense of what I mean by that question. But the more I keep digging, the more interesting potential answers I’ve found. Which is why I was excited to see your essay in the latest issue of The Critic arguing, rather boldly, that much of the cultural (and political?) upheaval we are seeing today can be explained as the result of the overproduction of female elites (around 60% of US college students are female, with an even higher ratio in elite institutions). The political scientist Peter Turchin and others have argued that too many elites competing with each other to retain their class status leads to societal instability and even state collapse, but what does the (largely unprecedented) female character of the new Western elite have to do with it, in particular, in your view?

In that essay I argued that the particular character of our emerging intra-elite conflict is historically unprecedented, because it’s heavily female. America has been producing more female than male graduates since the 1970s, and the same has been true in Britain since the 1990s. The imbalance might be relatively slight (though it's grown less so: 60/40 female to male at some elite US colleges now) but over the decades it compounds. The consequence has been, as numerous articles are now pointing out, an increasingly female-skewed ruling class.

I put this together with Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, and Joyce Benenson’s research on female-typical aggression, to suggest that much of what looks like ideological conflict within institutions can plausibly be read as a conflict for increasingly scarce resources conducted in the female key. Whereas men tend to be more direct in their aggression, women typically compete indirectly via tactics such as hidden hierarchies, mob hostility, or conflict disguised as moral condemnation or concern for the group. Seen through that filter, it’s much easier to explain why – for example – one person is forced to resign for “historic tweets” while another weathers the storm: if you assume that in each case it's mostly about office politics, it all makes a great deal more sense.

I tried to make it clear that the jury’s out for me as to whether this is better or worse than the more violent sequelae Turchin describes in historic cases of elite overproduction. Either way, given that the structural conditions remain in place – women are more overrepresented than ever among college graduates since the pandemic – we can anticipate seeing it escalate over coming years and decades.

Let’s put a pin in this for a moment and then maybe come back to it later, as I want to discuss another of your very interesting ideas that seems to be related. Clearly feminism has had and is having a significant impact on our societies. But you’ve argued that “what we think of today as ‘feminism’ is a story of economic transitions,” and, “If everyone today seems to be arguing about men and women again, it’s because we’re in the throes of another economic transition.” What do you think is the nature of this economic transition, exactly? And how is it producing these arguments?

I’d suggest we are in fact about 50-60 years into this transition, which I characterize as the end of the industrial and beginning of the cyborg age. It began in the 1960s with the emergence of new technologies that radically shifted how we understood our limitations on two crucial fronts: computation and reproduction. The contraceptive pill threw into question whether – or how far – we were limited by the givens of human reproductive biology, and in the process liquefied the entire corpus of social and cultural norms we’d developed to manage fertility and family life, seemingly opening a limitless vista of polymorphously perverse and consequence-free sexual pleasure in its stead. Computation, and especially the internet, promised to end all limitations to our thinking, and even to enable us to transcend embodiment itself. A core thesis of the book I'm working on, Feminism Against Progress, is that significant changes in material conditions within a society inevitably force re-negotiations of family life – how could they not? – these two developments represent just such a radical change.

The digital reimagining of personhood, and the (supposed) biomedical mastery of fertility, dramatically change the possible conditions both for individual human life but also for the life of a family. That can be on as mundane a front as where work happens, but it has shaken our norms and assumptions to their foundations by proposing – for example – to disaggregate reproduction from being a woman, identity from being in a body, gestation from being a mother, sex from emotional intimacy or, in the age of mass pornography and sex robots, even the necessary presence of another.

The consequences of radical material changes tend to lag the changes themselves: you saw that in the delay between industrialization and the way families – and women in particular – adapted to those changes. I think we're now far enough from the cultural legacy of the industrial age that we’re beginning to see the contours of the cyborg one more clearly. Much of my work seeks to ensure that women are meeting that age not with a hermeneutic toolbox left over from the last age but as far as possible a critical framework that's trying to understand what constitute women's interests now and in the world that's now emerging.

This leads into what is I think a very useful term that you’ve coined: “bio-libertarianism.” Can you briefly explain what you mean by this, and why it has emerged out of contemporary feminism?

In Feminism Against Progress I'll argue that throughout the industrial age women wrestled with two conflicting pressures, which together form twin poles for much feminist debate: the importance of valuing care and acknowledging human dependency, and a desire to embrace the individualism that flourished during that era. You can trace that debate throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th century – but the individualist branch of feminism won the battle conclusively, when it became a key feminist policy from the 60s onward to treat the right to abortion as a central pillar of personhood. That enshrined at the heart of feminism a conception of personhood as inseparable from radical individualism, and mastery over the body. And the long-term consequence of conflating women's interests with mastery over our sexed bodies has been a call to abolish all sexed differences in the name of feminism. In effect, then, liberation from embodiment becomes inevitable as the telos of feminism, which thus morphs from being a negotiation between humans with two normatively different physiologies and reproductive roles but equal dignity, into one of interchangeable humans possessed of a radical right to remodel their bodies as they see fit: bio-libertarianism.

Ok, so as I see it we now have here two quite strong possible explanations for at least a good portion of what’s been called the “Great Awokening”: female intra-elite competition and the emergence of bio-libertarianism from feminism. I want to touch on one other potential piece, which is your idea of “luxury Gnosticism,” or the elites’ quest to transcend physical reality entirely through digital and other technology. Is that the right definition? If so, I want to try tying this to another phenomenon we’re seeing, which seems to be a growing elite distain for (even disgust with) the manual labor class of people – do you think this rejection of manual labor, and perhaps embodied physicality in general, also has something to do with the preferences of an increasingly feminine elite, or is that not relevant?

I don’t know. I will say that if you dig into a the DEI reports of the kind published by elite American colleges, and look at the sex breakdown by non-academic job type, you'll notice that the only roles which are heavily male-dominated tend to be physical ones, such as janitors, maintenance personnel and security staff. The proletarianization of men is by no means universal, but in some parts of society it’s real.

Do you think ideas matter? What I mean is that a tremendous amount of intellectual effort has now been expended by conservative and liberal thinkers on tracing the intellectual history of “woke” ideas, from the post-modern critical theorists, back through the neo-Marxists, and so on, right through to Rousseau and perhaps well beyond (in my view) – but if much of what we’re seeing can in fact be attributed fundamentally to an economic and technological transition, is this a waste of time? Are these cultural ideas actually causally relevant to our societal upheaval? Or was Marx right that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force,” and woke ideas were sort of just the ones that happened to be lying around at hand for the elite to pick up and deploy as part of an escalating intra- and inter-class war?

I have to believe that ideas matter, as they're the only thing I’m any good at. I suppose while I broadly agree with Marx on this, it’s worth noting that the ruling class isn’t monolithic, and part of what's afoot at present is a kind of conflict within the ruling class for which direction to take. If there's a macro-trend there in my view, it’s that all politics is now “post-liberal,” in the sense that we’re now on a long, stately backswing from the liquefaction of all morals with “woke” and conservative factions competing more in the domain of which morals get enforced from the top down, by which elite, than the principle of whether or not such enforcing is necessary.

Much of what we’ve talked about seems to involve at root the idea of transcending limits and boundaries, of the desire for liberation from all constraints. This liberation is arguably a core, or the core, idea of liberalism. Therefore there is, as you know, currently sort of a raging debate on whether liberalism, as an idea, sowed the seeds of its own destruction and is now in the process of collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. What is your perspective on this debate?

I think it's over. The liberal subject is above all a product of the print age, which had free-flowing information but not too much of it, enabling us to imagine a “marketplace of ideas” that was creative and lively but manageable. What we have in the digital age is information overload, networked subjectivities, radical disembodiment, people working across geographies and time zones, and in virtual realities. Learning to parse a torrent of information requires a different kind of self. We’re a long way from understanding the kind of politics that feels natural to such a self, but I strongly doubt that politics is “liberal” in any sense that would be recognizable to someone from the 19th century.

Elsewhere you’ve portrayed your mission, so to speak, as defending the human. That is, against all of these forces seeking to transcend embodied and relational humanity. Is that basically the theme of what a genuine “post-liberal” politics would look like to you? Where does what you call “reactionary feminism” fit into this?

I don’t think we have a clear answer yet to what it means to be human, when faced with the radical re-ordering of subjectivity I’ve described above. I’m as much a creature of and hopeless dependent on the cyborg age as I am a critic of it, but I worry that we're running full-tilt at a nightmarish dystopia because our most idealistic thinkers aren’t paying attention and refuse to believe it’s not heaven on earth. As for “reactionary feminism,” that's a shitpost-y way of asking what it might mean to work the interests of men and women as such loose from the narratives of progress that bedevil us even now, some decades past Peak Progress.

Peak Progress? That’s a very interesting phrase, especially capitalized. And given the title of your book. Some people, like the Thiel-ites, have made the case that we’ve seen peak progress because real – non-virtual – technological change has slowed to a crawl. But I don’t think that’s what you mean. You’ve just described relentless technological “progress” ushering us kicking and screaming into the cyborg age. Yet I know that you think “progress” is one of the great myths of our age. So I’m curious when you think “Peak Progress” was, and what that consisted of?

Very briefly, I think the providential ideology of “progress,” which covers a huge range of domains, was most convincingly an article of faith at the point where technocapital had obviously delivered huge improvements to huge numbers on a range of metrics (for example material comfort and health outcomes), and had done so without having yet obviously started to run up against natural limits. Peak Progress is my shorthand for that point, which in Britain I’d situate in the period 1980-2000.

That’s not where we are now. It’s increasingly obvious that resource extraction, population growth and industrial agriculture (to name a few) can’t go on expanding forever. But swathes of politics even now is conducted on the unexamined premise that they can – even as politics reorients underneath that discourse to manage people’s expectations as it becomes increasingly clear in practice that the Ponzi scheme is running out of road. The end of progress has a number of ramifications including for the whole political edifice of democracy, and if there’s an immense blind spot I see on the mainstream Right it’s in the reluctance to grapple with this.

Thank you the conversation Mary. Finally, what do you find gives you hope and keeps you sane in our strange times?

My husband and child, my work, long-distance running, and anonymous Twitter accounts.