The Sexual Revolution and the Radical Redefinition of Feminism — A Conversation with Mary Harrington

Albert Mohler:

This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Mary Harrington is a columnist and editor for the online platform, UnHerd, and she runs her own Substack entitled Reactionary Feminist. Born in the United Kingdom, she graduated with a First in English literature from Oxford University in 2002. Mary’s work has been published in First Things, American Affairs, The New York Post, The Spectator, The Statesman, The London Times, and The Mail on Sunday. We’re going to be talking today about her new book, Feminism Against Progress. Mary Harrington, welcome to Thinking in Public.

Mary Harrington:

Thank you for having me.

Albert Mohler:

So you have made a very provocative thesis in this book, Feminism Against Progress, and there’s so many aspects of it I’d like to ask you about. But I think just for the sake of the conversation, it’d be helpful if I just ask you, why did you write this book and what do you see as its main point?

Mary Harrington:

I wrote the book as a way of answering a question, which preoccupied me for a number of years, which is this, “Is it possible to be a feminist if you don’t believe in progress?” And it’s a very long story how I came to lose my faith in progress and how I came to think of progress, a belief in, as a theology, if you like, in its own right. But anyway, this is where I found myself. And there I was trying to figure out is it possible? I don’t believe in progress. And then I was thinking, “Well, hang on, if you don’t believe in progress, then I’m also a woman. And the situation of women now is quite different to the situation of women, say even a hundred years ago, let alone 300 years ago. And if you say to anybody as I did on occasions, ‘I don’t believe in progress.’ They say, ‘Aha, but you want to go back to, do you want to go back to when Asian women couldn’t vote? There’s progress. So what do you make of that then? Haha, gotcha.”

And I thought about this and I thought, “Well, yeah, you kind of got a point. But also I think it should not be beyond the wit of man to care about women’s interests and yet to not believe in progress because, here I am, I don’t believe in progress, but I still care about women’s interests and I still think these matter and that women’s interests and men’s interests are not always the same. And that sometimes women’s interests can be sidelined in the larger political conversation.” So I find myself in this bind. So how do I resolve this?

And Feminism Against Progress, which is the book I wrote, I guess is the very long answer to that question–“Is it possible to be a feminist if you don’t believe in progress?” And the answer is always yes and no, isn’t it? And really the slightly longer one is it depends what you mean by feminism and it depends what you mean by progress.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, I guess the part of the book in its original thesis, because you identify it, you say it’s quasi-theological, this false idea of progress, in fact you call it progress theology. During the 20th century, Britain was the hotspot for what was called process theology. But yours is I think a far more pervasive theology, frankly. But it makes me think we have to define progress in a way that, first of all, we understand what you mean by it. And then we understand that we do believe in change and some of that change is better than other change. But the Western idea that progress is inevitable, is that the main point that you’re trying to deny that there’s an inevitability and kind of a comprehensiveness about this progress?

Mary Harrington:

Sure. Let me explain a little bit more what I mean when I talk about progress.

So obviously we don’t live in the same world now as in say, Roman Britain. Clearly things change. But my process for thinking this through was that yes, things are different now. But it seems to me an unfalsifiable assertion that things are better in some absolute sense now than they were in say, Roman Britain. And it seems to me that, in order to make that case–and people do argue that things are better in some absolute sense. Progressives tend to do this– to make that argument, you need to ignore the trade-offs. You need to ignore the things which have got worse at which point, which means you have to define your terms, your metrics for progress. And once you’ve defined your metrics and excluded the things that you don’t care about, you’ve rigged the game–you’ve assumed the truth of what you set out to prove. So, in a sense, it becomes a circular reasoning.

And so I came to the conclusion that this doesn’t necessarily mean we have to discard thinking about progress, but we need to accept that it’s not a fact, it’s a belief. And there are whole disciplines dedicated to discussing the details of beliefs. I mean, but that’s what we call theology, isn’t it? Christopher Lash, who I’ve mentioned in the book, describes progress as a secularized version of Christian eschatology, the Christian belief in providence specifically.

But in a sense it’s got all of the transcendent bits sanded down. We’ve abandoned the death judgment, heaven and hell stuff. And certainly, certainly we’re not talking about the end of days and seven headed beasts and any of that. We can do that, all this stuff. But still, and what we’re left with is a very minimalist version of the Christian eschatology, which is wholly stripped of transcendent content, which has only really retained the linearity, the directionality of the Christian narrative, which again is very culturally distinct in a way that progressives often don’t acknowledge.

But the Christian story says that history is a thing– the world was created and then some stuff happened and then Jesus. And if I want to answer to respond to this question of “How do I square my concern for women with my skepticism of progress theology?” Then I’m going to start from the basis that this is a belief and not a fact. And I’m going to say, “What happens to, what does feminism look like if you remove that frame and try and find another way of telling the same story of everything of what has changed for women over the last, say, 300 years? Because it’s a huge amount.” And so I tried that and really that’s the substance of the book, is looking at the history of the Women’s Movement since the Industrial Revolution and then looking ahead a bit at where that industrialization of ourselves is taking us.

Albert Mohler:

I have to say, first of all, I am one of those theologians who actually does believe in the metaphysic. So I am looking for all those things that you mentioned as secular society’s not looking for anymore. I appreciate your reference to Christopher Lash, and I think he understood that actually he was trying to do this theological analysis of what was going on in society, when frankly he wasn’t buying into the theology, the Orthodox Christian theology either. But I think just for listeners, as you’re speaking about this idea of progress theology, it clearly, you’re not suggesting that nothing has gotten better–you’re suggesting that there is no inevitability in comprehensiveness to this secular commitment to progress.

Mary Harrington:

Yes. It seems unfalsifiable, sure, to me that things are getting better in some secular, material sense. So some things are getting better, other things are getting worse.

Albert Mohler:

It’s better that I would argue, just in terms of classical Western thought, it’s better that there be some kind of social mobility whereby you could have a young person go to college, that’s better than the absolute fixed situation, immobility say, of 12th Century society. But comprehensively, there have been gains and losses in all of this rapid social change.

Mary Harrington:

I mean, and one example I could cite, leaving, would be our relation to animals. If we want to talk about moral, moral improvements and moral declines. Judging from what I can discern in literature and in history, routine abuse of animals is now very much more frowned upon than it used to be. People no longer routinely dogs extremities and beat horses to death in the street and so on. However, we also have industrial factory farming, which these are factories that produce as a byproduct industrial quantities of misery and fear and pain, suffering, sickness and pollution. So how do you weigh these two? Yeah, and you throw pretty much any improvement at me. I’ll show you the trade-offs.

Albert Mohler:

I think a classical Christian worldview understands–

Mary Harrington:

This is not to say, yeah, and this is not to say that we shouldn’t care about or that we shouldn’t try and grapple with the evils that we have now, as we’ve tried to grapple with the evils that we had then, but also to accept that we’re unlikely to be able to instantiate heaven on earth. In a sense, this is a process which is simply ongoing and it’s kind of a moving target.

Albert Mohler:

Right. The other word I needed to ask you about is the word feminism. So I understand Modern Ideological Feminism First Wave, Second Wave, now Third and Fourth Wave feminism. So you clearly believe that feminism is something important. So what is it?

Mary Harrington:

Okay, we could be here all day, but I’ll try and be as succinct as I can. I mean, this occupies really the first two thirds of the book is unpacking what I mean by this. So I’ve divided the women’s movement into three stages. So canonically, the First Wave was Suffragism, the Second Wave was the Sexual Revolution, and the Third Wave is all the nebulous MeToo stuff and various transgender movements that we have now. That’s very crudely, that’s the canonical history.

And what I wanted to show in the book was that the Women’s Movement begins very much earlier than is generally understood, and it emerges out of very radical transformations in the relation between men and women that arrived with modernity, particularly with industrialization. So up to that point, family life, which absolutely transformed family life. So the basic economic unit of the polity was no longer a household, and it was no longer a productive household, which had been the case. But when industrialization happened, the economic productive aspect of the household bled away from the home.

First, working men left the home to work in factories and other settings, leaving. And then women’s work bled away. It was a radical change in how men and women related to one another. And, in fact, one counterintuitive effect of that was that from between pre-modernity and modernity, women lost economic agency. So, women lost economic agency because they lost their productive role, and yet they still needed, somebody still needed to look after the kids, which created a whole new set of dilemmas depending on how wealthy you are, and how much you could subcontract, and how able you were to find to get help, and how close your extended family is, and whether you need to work yourself. So, whereas a woman might’ve been weaving textiles within a cottage industry in the pre-modern world, suddenly she’s got to work in a factory. What does she do with her breastfed baby? She could maybe nurse whilst working at home. Now she can’t do that anymore. What do you do?

And really, the early history of the Women’s Movement emerges from confronting these very concrete transformations in family life. And from this then developed two characteristic ways of trying to slice this new normal, the bourgeois, the bourgeois, literate, educated women by and large either set out to make the case for domesticity, which then prompted a whole 19th Century women’s movement oriented towards valorizing the home, valorizing domestic life, extolling the virtues of motherhood and the importance of motherhood and women’s crucial role in educating children and shaping the moral world. But then the flip side of that is that this model of bourgeois domesticity and public social reform only works with the proviso that your husband is a good guy, good guy, that he’s able to support the family, that he doesn’t drink the money away, he doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t abuse the children.

What do you do if the legacy legal environment that you are living in is still premised on the idea of the household as the economic unit, which was really the world that 19th Century women found themselves in, because within the model of the household as the primary economic unit, women don’t have separate representation as individuals. And so there’s this other dimension, this other side of feminism, which comes into being to challenge some of the ways that women had lost economic and political agency and have found themselves radically dependent and in some cases woefully abused as the consequences of really of these far-reaching material changes.

And this is the way I’ve chosen to tell the story of early feminism, and my argument in Feminism Against Progress is the point where the canonical story of feminism is said to begin, which is to say the Sexual Revolution, in my view, is the point where it ended. The Sexual Revolution killed feminism because up to that point, the Women’s Movement had been arguing for a proper balance of the relations between men and women given these changing material and economic conditions in recognition of the fact that men and women were fundamentally different. Only women could get pregnant. Only women can be mothers. That in a sense, men, women exist and we need to find a way of living together.

Albert Mohler:

That’s the point, isn’t it? I mean, it seems to be a major point of your book is that there is a physicality, and more importantly, there’s a relationality, there’s an ontological function that falls to women. And you can try to argue this in purely secular terms. I can’t do that, but at some point, the whole logic of feminism falls apart in terms of the reality of motherhood. I think you make that point very clearly.

Mary Harrington:

Yeah. I think this is–just to go a little bit deeper into your point. The feminism, which denies reality of our twofoldness–if you like, of our sexed nature as men and women–the history of that denial begins really with another technological transformation. And I think, again, this is underused in the canonical story where because we’re looking at it through progress theology, we tend to see it as a series of moral changes, whereas you can tell the same story as a series of technological developments, and suddenly it takes on quite a different coloring. So if we take off the progress theology goggles, and we look at what happened with the Sexual Revolution, what we’re actually looking at is another technological transformation on a par with, and I would say in continuity with the Industrial Revolution. In a sense, it’s a continuation of the Industrial Revolution by other means, except now we began to industrialize our own bodies. And really ground zero for the industrialization of people was women. And specifically through the technology of the contraceptive pill, which promised to free us, it promised to free women in particular from our embodied limits, which is to say our specific reproductive role and to free us. And by freeing us from the reality that only women get pregnant, then to liberate us to be more like men.

And really implicitly, it takes the male as a standard for what personhood is and then says, “Okay, now, because women are a little bit faulty as humans, we’re going to use this technology to fix you so that you’re more like standard humans and then you can be free. And then you can be people in the same way as real people.” That’s really the message that the contraceptive pill as a feminist technology is offering to say, “We can use this technology to fix you faulty humans, so you can be more like real humans then.” And it worked up to a point. It really does. If you view the right to access higher education, to enter the workplace, to plan your life without the prospect of an unexpected pregnancy at any minute. If you view all of those things as improvement, and many do–I mean, let’s be honest, I’m grateful. I’m grateful for my years at Oxford University. I enjoy, here I am in the United States, now speaking to you, I might not be in those positions if I were born prior to the age we live in now–however, what it’s also telling us is that women are only people to the extent that we can technologize away the differences between us and real people. In that sense–

Albert Mohler:

There’s also, I think it’s very important to say there is an antinatalism in the birth control movement ideologically, which they owned. They talked about it openly. In other words, it’s not, I think the point you make is brilliant. They’re trying to make women into men in economic terms. But the other thing is they just wanted less babies, period. They wanted less humans.

Mary Harrington:

That’s right. Now, of course, of course, everybody’s doing a full 180 and saying, well, can we have some more babies please? And it’s like, “I dunno. I dunno.” Can we do that now? It might be too late to turn the ship around, but I guess it’s well, time will tell.

Albert Mohler:

Morally. Yeah, culturally and morally, I’m afraid. I’m afraid it is because quite frankly, I think the Second Wave Feminism was far more successful than conservatives feared at transforming society in a way that appears to be nearly irreversible.

I want to ask you a key methodological question just in terms of your work. The one response that conservatives first offered to what we’re seeing as the faults of Second Wave Feminism, those were grounded in either Christian assertions, and I speak as a Christian theologian, or in assertions that only made sense in a Christian context. The interesting thing is that some of the categories you’re using are more Marxist or neo-Marxist. In other words, you’re looking at the fact that it’s not just ontology, but you’re ascribing an economic motive to why society sought to call this liberation for women, but it really was about a larger economic and social purpose for the society.

Mary Harrington:

Yeah, I think that’s true. I mean, one reviewer–and this made me laugh–accused me of having scaled the north face of the Vatican without ropes or ?, Reverse engineered, reverse engineered a very Catholic critique of technology through pretty much every means at my disposal, apart from Catholic social teaching. And I think there’s probably some justice in that. And I suppose, honestly, the thing I would say to that is it’s more of a technical question than anything else, which speaking as a journalist, yes, there are easier ways to, there are more direct ways of making the arguments that I make. But speaking as a journalist, my intent is always to meet people where they are. And bluntly, in terms of the wider reading public, I think the reality, whether we like it or not, is that the people who’ve read Catholic social teaching or who’ve read within that canon probably don’t need to hear what I have to say because they’re kind of already there. And if you want to make the arguments beyond that, you have to find other ways of doing it.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, that makes sense. I think the other thing going on here is that conservatives generally just kind of an allergic recoil to anything that Karl Marx said, for very good reason. But, the interesting thing is that even as Karl Marx and Engles, and you cite Engles as well, even though they point to this future without a family. What they described the Industrial Revolution doing to the family was not all wrong. What they believed would come out of that via communism. That’s horrifying. But they weren’t wrong when they said, look, this is alienating persons from their end.

Mary Harrington:

Absolutely. I mean, I think the basic Marxist analysis is not a million miles wrong. I would dispute the mad teleology, which is, I think it was Eric Voegelin who described it as trying to immanentize the eschaton, and I’m with you, I’m with you on feeling that this is probably a misguided thing to try and do. But if we stop trying to immanentize the eschaton, and we just look at the critique of technology contained within Marx’s Das Capital, he’s not wrong. And we can take some of those critiques and we can take them in a different direction if we want to. I think as you say–

Albert Mohler:

That’s what I saw you doing–

Mary Harrington:

–The simply coming out in hives and going in a different direction. Yeah. Perhaps we’re leaving useful lines of arguments behind us, which we could do something very fruitful with.

Albert Mohler:

As a very young person, a college student assigned to read Marx and Engles, the thing that struck me was, biology is going to make this impossible. In other words, as a conservative, I see the revolutionary portion of the communist theory, the Marxist theory to be inherently horrifying. But, at the granular level, you just can’t work this out, because eventually nobody’s going to have babies and nobody’s going to care for those babies. No one’s going to love those babies. And so a society that actually follows this is simply going to fall into nothing. So in other words, he’s right. He’s right when he says–and Engles was of course the prosperous son of an incredibly wealthy industrialist– but this is what industry is doing. It takes the man out of the home and soon it’s going to take the woman out of the home as well.

Mary Harrington:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I’ve reflected a great deal more on the relationship between technology and utopianism and human nature, which it’s an unfashionable concept these days, not least, not least because of progress theology, which claims or at least implies that we don’t really have a nature, and that in a sense we can technologize ourselves all the way to perfection. And inasmuch as we have a nature, it’s probably fallen and it’s probably amenable to being a tech fix. And in that sense, it very much belongs within the sort of gnostic critique that Eric Voegelin has of immanentizing the eschaton. In a sense, the technological paradigm is another version of that, that kind of agnostic push for replacing our fallen world with a more idealized and more perfected one. But the thing, what I’ve tried to show in Feminism Against Progress is that it doesn’t matter how many times you apply a tech fix to human nature, what you reveal is never heaven on earth.

What you reveal is in the end, always, the enduring reality of human nature. And yes, you can agree or disagree with the Christians that this is a created human nature. And you can agree or disagree with the theological narrative, which lies behind seeing our createdness. But in reality, it doesn’t matter how often you technologize us as in Marx and Engels trying to make men and women the same. Invariably, in the end, you’ll come up against the reality that our nature is still there. And I quoted Horace in the book whose framing, whose formulation for this is the most famous. He says, “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, and still she comes back.”

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely.

Mary Harrington:

And actually he’s complaining about gardening, I think, if you remember rightly. But it’s true. It’s true. It doesn’t matter how often we try and–please go on.

Albert Mohler:

No, I have to ask. So I’m trying to discern whether in your book you’re kind of bracketing leave progress theology. Let me just talk Christian theology for a moment. Are you bracketing all the ontological issues and just saving that for later? Or are you suggesting, when you talk about human nature, is that an evolutionary product? Is that an accidental sociological process, or is human nature something real with transcendent meaning and value and anchor?

Mary Harrington:

I don’t know. I don’t know. But what I do know is that it’s real. We have a nature and we can’t technologize it away. There is a well worked out body of Christian thinking on our nature. There are other ways of looking at it as well. You can view it as evolved. You could view evolution as the sign of God’s creation in the world if you wanted to. There are a number of different ways you can slice it, but what I’ve simply settled in the book for saying, for now, it’s enough for me to say that this exists. This is real. And my argument is that we need to stop treating this as a problem to be solved through technology and accept that and try and take a more pragmatic– and try and develop a more pragmatic relation to our nature.

Albert Mohler:

The headlines about your book, and I don’t mean that just in terms of say the mainstream media, but the thought world relating to your book, the shock is how clearly you address issues related to the sexual revolution, abortion birth control, and frankly, your own experience of motherhood being a part of that. Has that surprised you or were you intentionally provocative in leading on those issues?

Mary Harrington:

I didn’t set out to make people angry or incensed or shocked. I simply told my story…

 

Albert Mohler:

Well, thank you for doing that.

 

Mary Harrington:

…I came fairly late to motherhood after a very radical youth, and it made me rethink a lot of the things that I believed up to that point. And having a baby was very much one of my starting points for this very radical rethinking of what I believed up until that point, particularly about the Women’s Movement, because it made it becoming a mother, so made it clear to me that simply seeing women’s interests as lying in a greater freedom from just doesn’t make sense the moment there are children in the picture. Because I realized at the point where I had a dependent child that my freedom from couldn’t include freedom from my child and that this created for any woman who is a mother, a certain tension within the liberal paradigm, full stop. And that this is something which, well, I mean in classical, in classical liberal theory philosophy, for example, Rousseau just solves this by excluding women from the liberal paradigm altogether as sort of charming compliance support humans. And I’m thinking, well, I’m not sure I’m signed up to that. Quite aside from anything else, Rosseau sent all of his six children to an orphanage because he didn’t think–well, let’s not get into Rousseau– I’ll be ranting furiously for that.

 

Albert Mohler:

I’ll be with you.

 

Mary Harrington:

I don’t doubt that.

Yeah, becoming a mother makes liberalism make a whole lot less sense, or at least much more complicated for women, and it makes a great deal of Freedom Feminism make a whole lot less sense, and it raises a whole series of questions about why it is, because it’s not as though Maternal Feminism doesn’t exist. It’s not as though there isn’t a very well worked out body of maternalist thinking about women’s interests. Actually, a huge amount of that has happened in the 19th century and has been memory hold because those maternalist women turned out to be against granting women the vote, which sort of complicates the feminist narrative a little bit, but Maternal Feminism in the 20th century is very much the poor relation.

And a significant reason for this is because the legal right to abortion became such a central plank of the Liberal Feminist program. And it’s very difficult to square the maternal one–the valorization of women as interdependent creatures in the light of our unique physiological generativity– with the idea that women’s personhood can only be accessed through a right to be free from that unique generativity. So this is not a tension which can easily be resolved, and the consequence of that has been that Maternal Feminism has been the poor relation ever since. And I suppose you could probably describe me as a kind of Maternal Feminist or really somebody who wants to get to grips with the question of motherhood and to grapple with the tension between that and Liberal Feminism. Yeah–

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. The approach right now taken by the left, and I don’t just mean the far left, but the political left by jumping on the issue of abortion all the time, is that the main issue of their even political campaigning, it means they’re not talking about a woman as a mother at all. It’s like motherhood has now been completely eclipsed. They just can’t talk about it now. It’s all about a woman’s right as they style it to choose not to have a child. And the Christian theologian in me goes, even just at the level of the pragmatic, “There’s not a future in that argument.” I’ll just put it that way. There’s not a future in that argument. You may win an election on it, but your own movement is absolute sterility. And I really appreciated your book and your pushback because without using even poetic language, you’re making very clear the rejection of motherhood is the rejection of what it means to be a woman, and I don’t mean every woman being pregnant. I mean motherhood as a destiny.

Mary Harrington:

Paraphrasing slightly, I think the way I phrased it in the book is by arguing that a movement which claims that women accesses personhood to the extent that she can be freed from her own physiological capacities is a movement which sets us constitutively at war with our own biology. And I’m just unconvinced that there’s a long-term, emancipatory future for us in that line of thinking. And I think we need to find some more compassionate accommodation with our own embodied reality. Otherwise, we’re not just setting ourselves constitutively at war with our own physiology. We’re also setting ourselves at war with our own future, literally. I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about antinatalism. This is where we are now, and none of this is to say that none of this is to say that unplanned or unwanted pregnancies don’t happen, or that historically there haven’t been equally grave and grim means of managing pregnancy risk, or that this is a problem that admits of any utopian solution in a world which is fundamentally fallen and unlikely to be, unlikely to be turned into heaven on earth tomorrow.

None of this is to say that abortion isn’t at least one attempt to slice one of the most difficult challenges of our human existence, particularly as women–which is to say the tension between our needs and the implications of hosting another potential human being on our own bodies.

These are the questions. These are the fundamental questions of life and of death. It’s not likely to be an easy answer, but my stance on this is that these are grave things to do, and I simply have questions about the abortion, the contraceptive, and the abortive paradigm as offering a long-term emancipation or an emancipation of women that gives due regard to our humanness and also to our collective human future. I think there has to be a better way. There has to be another way.

Albert Mohler:

I appreciate your candor. Speaking as an orthodox Christian, I see that in, I guess what you would say the easier terms in terms of right and wrong. And the horror of it is far more apparent to someone operating out of a biblical worldview. The answer is that this can only lead to massive human misery because it is a massive subversion of the sanctity of life.

I think that leads me to another point which I want to ask you. You’ve got a lot of readers among conservatives. A lot of conservatives of different stripes are reading your book, published by a conservative publisher, and the conversation has been pretty intense in conservative circles. What in the world has the left done with your book? What are you getting from the left or, well, I’ll just leave it at that. What is the left saying?

Mary Harrington:

A lot of them I think just didn’t notice me to begin with. I mean, you know how polarized everything is now. I think it depends. So in Britain, as you are probably aware, the conversation around transgender activism is quite different to the conversation in the United States. For a whole host of complicated reasons–

 

Albert Mohler:

And ahead of, I think.

 

Mary Harrington:

–Okay. The Turf Island is called Turf Island for a reason. And among gender-critical feminists, most of whom in the UK are left-leaning. The gender-critical movement, which is usually reduced as fascist adjacent by trans activists, but really in the United Kingdom, most of those women are just straightforward, radical feminists of the old stripe, or they’re liberals who are mugged by reality or broadly speaking, they are left-leaning and they happen to know that biology exists. In those communities, my arguments are generally appreciated. Although by and large, the gender-critical side will stop short of my critique of some aspects of my critique of biotech and specifically, particularly where it comes to abortion and birth control. They won’t go there. But they’ll say, “I think a lot of what Mary says is great, but I’m still, I’m not really sure about that bit.” On the left-left, the fully cyborg left, they know I exist and I’m just anathema.

I think that’s probably, that’s a fair summary, and on the right on, again, it varies a great deal. Right liberals, often they’re often unconvinced by the critique of biotech or a bit wary of the critique of markets, or not really sure what they’re doing in the same place.

Albert Mohler:

Right. No, I get that.

Interestingly, as I say, I think the response to your book, among the people to whom I speak, it’s kind of like the people who are finding it most interesting, not agreeing on everything, but most interesting are those who are kind of the organic conservatives and the Christian conservatives who are saying, “I think this is a very, very important critique.”

I think that for another conversation one day, the conversation could be, where do we go from here? But at this point, I do think it’s interesting that the people who are talking about this book that I’m hearing from, and there are an increasing number, they are very interested in the critique and understanding that modern conservatism in the most classic sense has to come to terms with these realities, and so I think it’s something of an interesting fact that it was a conservative publishing house that published your book. Thirty years ago, that would’ve been unthinkable. I think today it makes a lot of sense. Does that make sense to you?

Mary Harrington:

Yeah, I think so. I think I have a challenge for both sides, in the sense I have questions for the left on social liberty, social liberalism if you like, but I also have questions for the right on economic liberalism. And I have questions for both about, there’s a whitewashed, the ideological, but in a very covert, very concealed way aspects of our collective across both sides, faith in technology. And I think more than anything else, at the fundamental level, my book is a feminist critique of technology and markets, and from that vantage point, it’s a provocation really to both sides.

 

Albert Mohler:

A very interesting development, and as I expected a very interesting conversation. We’ll look forward to your next work and where these arguments take you. Mary Harrington, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.

Mary Harrington:

Thank you so much for having me.

Albert Mohler:

Many thanks to my guest, Mary Harrington for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking In Public. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.