If the nation-state was built on books, what will emerge from TikTok? Having established herself as a public intellectual on both sides of the Atlantic with her work on “reactionary feminism” and her 2023 book Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington is now turning her attention to the technological “singularity” that arises from the combination of man and machine. But, as she explains in this interview, the singularity isn’t something that awaits us in the future—it arrived with the smartphone, and we’re only now beginning to understand the ramifications of this revolution for everything from political organization to the nature of masculinity and femininity. She recently spoke to Modern Age’s Gene Callahan about the themes of her forthcoming book, The King and the Swarm. The discussion has been lightly edited for length and clarity. —ed.
Gene Callahan: The first topic I want to discuss with you turns around the difference between a culture that is primarily oral and one that is highly literate. How did print change human lives?
Mary Harrington: I literally just finished writing a chapter about that today—at least I think I finished it. I hope I finished it. It’s difficult to say anything very comprehensive about this succinctly, because it changed everything. I’ve titled the chapter “The Modernity Machine,” because in my view, the printing press is the foundational technology of modernity, which is itself a vague term. I mean, your magazine is called Modern Age, but what precisely do you mean by modern? You can go down a whole philosophical rabbit hole with that.
It’s like, you know it when you see it, right? There’s an indefinable thing that happens. There’s a sort of this-ness which comes into being, and people sort of wave their arms around and talk about the spirit of the age, or transformation of ideas and a genealogy of this or that. I find Elizabeth Eisenstein, who’s a historian, persuasive in her argument that actually what almost all of these histories of ideas leave out or simply take for granted is the material contribution of print to all of these changes.
I sent the chapter to a friend earlier this evening, saying it was just an absolute headache to write. It was like trying to get an octopus into a fishnet stocking. There’s probably still tentacles flopping around where there shouldn’t be. It’s a very unruly subject, because—
GC: Wait a second: You’ve tried to put an octopus in a fishnet stocking?
MH: I wanted to convey the sense of elusiveness and slipperiness and just in general things . . . things thrashing around in ways I didn’t want them to. So no, it’s not something I’ve ever tried, but I hope it’s evocative.
I’ve tried to throw out some thematic key points in this chapter. You see, I’ve already failed to do this succinctly, because this is just impossible to do succinctly. What Eisenstein points to are two characteristics of print as a form which were transformative. It wasn’t just that the ideas carried by print changed things, although they did. It was also two characteristics of print as a form, distinct from handwriting, which was the prevalent information technology of the manuscript age, which were world-transforming. One of them was scale. There was just a lot more reading material than previously, and that had all sorts of complex feedback loop effects. And the other effect was fixity. And between them, those two material attributes of print as a form invented progress.
The advancement of knowledge just wasn’t a steady thing prior to the printing press because books would get eaten by insects, or muddled, garbled in translation. You couldn’t copy diagrams. It simply wasn’t possible to do accurate science, because how many ignorant copyists do you think can reproduce an intricate diagram of an aorta before it’s just unrecognizable?
It’s not until you have woodcuts or engravings that any sort of accurate pictorial representations become possible. So there are entire vistas of human knowledge which can be catalogued and developed and worked on in a collaborative, distributive way. And that only becomes possible through print.
My working hypothesis is that there were a concurrent set of transformations in the prevailing culture, and really in the mindset of individuals within that culture, that changed how people thought. Literacy as such—well, there’s pretty good evidence that it just changes people at a fundamental level and sort of irreversibly as well. The literate brain is different from the nonliterate brain: Once you’ve seen it, once you can parse the little symbols, you can’t unread them later. You can’t forget how to do that without some sort of significant brain damage.
And again, this theme of scale: Once you scale that up to a larger proportion of the population, something fundamental changes about what that culture is like and how that culture approaches reality, and all sorts of things, like time and memory. What constitutes knowledge, what constitutes reality, how you conceive time, or history, and many other things, all changed, not overnight, but over a period of many years.
Part of my thesis is that the inflection point for a lot of these changes, and the three in particular that I wanted to look at, which are the nation-state, democracy in the seventeenth century (at least in the English-speaking world), and secularism, left us with a settlement the broad outlines of which, albeit with some contestation, we’ve had more or less until recently. Now the digital revolution is undoing a lot of those changes. And I think we’re now embarking on a very interesting period where we’re doing the seventeenth century again, but in reverse.
GC: I have been reviewing your recent Substack posts, so these ideas were in my mind one day when I was watching American football with a friend. There’s this very elaborate little dance a receiver does catching a pass where he has to get both feet inbounds.
And I said to him, “Could you imagine our ancestors finding out that this would be a really highly paid skill, that you could catch a ball and then do this little intricate dance with your feet around a little white line?”
He replied, “Well, we’ve always had sports.” To which I said, “Yes, but, until recently, we never had sports with intricate rulebooks. A sport would be, for instance, you two people chuck this javelin, and whoever chucks it farthest wins.”
It’s only with print that you can have sports with two-hundred-page rulebooks that the referees are supposed to master, and the players and coaches too as much as they can. So, even with something as mundane as how a sport is played, this transformation radically changed things.
MH: Yes, absolutely. I mean, you can trace that genealogy back through English football. English football originated back in unknown, illiterate times. There’s a game called Shrovetide football, with basically has no rules at all apart from two goals, a mile or more apart, and a roundish object, and then the rest of it is basically just barely contained rioting, where two loosely demarcated sides sort of have a riot and try and get the ball to their preferred end. Everyone drinks a lot of beer, and it’s basically a minimally constrained opportunity to have a big, enjoyable, beery fight. It’s still played once a year on Shrovetide, in the north of England.
GC: We actually played, in my grade school, a game much like that, and on an asphalt parking lot. But no beer: The nuns wouldn’t allow it.
MH: There are variants! Unsupervised little boys will reverse engineer a version of this, because that’s deep in their DNA.
GC: So what did radio and television do to the world created by print?
MH: Your man for this is not me; it’s Marshall McLuhan, really. The book that made him famous was The Gutenberg Galaxy, which was published back in the 1960s, where he basically made the case that the beginning of the electric age was the end of the print era. So it was really quite a long time ago. The advent of radio and TV brought the gradual return of orality, what Walter Ong calls a secondary orality, back into culture. McLuhan thought it would come with a return of some of the consciousness attributes of an oral culture: a more mythic approach to reality, more heightened emotionality, and more tribalism.
If you look at how the counterculture erupted, and the way our world has developed since the two world wars, you think, “Maybe he was onto something.” But further, I believe that the revolution happened gradually, and then all at once with the internet. The internet, in a sense, crystallized something which had been latent in broadcast media, perhaps because broadcast media are broadcast. There’s only so far the picture can fragment as long as there are still these structural forces: the gatekeepers, who has control of the microphone, which is more or less the situation you have with TV, even as channels proliferate.
But then the internet comes along, and all of that is suddenly very much up for grabs. Everybody’s curating their own personal feed of whatever it is that they want, and the race to the bottom feels as though it’s been very, very sudden, and a lot of people are still reeling slightly with shock, thinking, “Well, what just happened?”
GC: So, some people might push back on the idea that something novel is going on. They might say, “You know, the smartphone, it’s just a new tool.”
People like David Chalmers have put out the extended mind hypothesis, that our minds actually reside not just in our brains but in our tools, in our books, and so on. You know, a shovel is a part of our mind because it’s shaped so that we can dig with it properly and once we learn how to use it. Michael Polanyi talks about how the blind man’s stick becomes an extension of the blind man’s arm, and he actually feels the world with the tip of the stick.
So someone might say, “Well, these phones, they’re just another element of extended mind, and we’ve been doing this with technology since we began chipping rocks. Nothing to see here.”
MH: While I think that’s mostly true, it’s not a rebuttal. In a sense, it doesn’t really do anything except put forward the same thesis but from a different angle, and say that it’s fine, actually. And let me be clear: I’m not saying that any of this is necessarily bad. I think it comes with some downsides that people who like the modern world have perhaps not appreciated. But it also comes with some significant upsides.
The entry into modernity was not cost-free, right? The world is full of people shroudwaving about disenchantment and the like. Or moaning about the atomizing and ecocidal impact of industrial technologies, or what have you—all of these not-so-desirable byproducts of modernity, which we tend to look past because we quite like the washing machines. I mean, you’ll pry my washing machine from my cold, dead hands, no matter how mournfully I wring my hands about modernity, or water tables, or pollution, or whatever. So there’s a sort of doublethink that I think even vociferous technology critics are actually sort of tacitly quite comfortable with.
But what I think we can still be attentive to—and again, I’m mostly just channeling McLuhan here. I think without saying that the effect of a particular extension is good or bad, we can explore what it does and how it extends our abilities, and whether there are other abilities that we might lose as a trade-off for extending those capacities.
Creatures that live underground develop acutely sensitized hearing, for example, but aren’t particularly good at seeing things because they just don’t need to. You hyperattune the senses that you’re focused into and perhaps allow the other ones to atrophy somewhat. And just saying “let’s be attentive to what is atrophying” is not the same as saying, “Oh, this is bad and we must return to some past state,” because that’s just not going to happen, right?
I think it’s perfectly legitimate to be curious about what we run the risk of atrophying in the course of developing a new extension, and perhaps to suggest, politely, that it might be worth being a little bit intentional about how, or how quickly, or to what extent, we allow faculties to atrophy. Just to concretize this a little bit more, one of the authors I’ve been really enjoying reading lately, in the context of thinking about how consciousness shifted with the advent of the printing press, is Mary Carruthers. She wrote a book in the late twentieth century on the art of memory, which is to say, medieval mnemotechnics.
That is a whole series of practices for remembering stuff from an age when books were incredibly rare, and you might, for instance, get one go at the codex, and then it goes back in the cupboard, and that’s it, and then you have to go home and you never see it again. You can’t take photocopies and there isn’t spare paper to write stuff down, so you just have to remember it. And people were amazingly good at this. This is a set of techniques that apart from card-trick guys, fairground entertainers, nerds who like to show off, and just eccentric people is almost completely neglected as a set of cognitive tools, but it’s incredibly effective. And this was completely standard practice for well-educated medievals.
They would literally construct their memory, and they had all these very vivid metaphors for what they were doing. They would describe it as a series of pigeonholes, the cells in a honeycomb, or a treasure box—all these metaphors for containers of precious things. What they were doing was a very methodical kind of inward filing. And these are practices that we just don’t have anymore because we don’t need them.
You can say, “Well, so what? Now we just have Google, or whatever.” But you can also be attentive to what changes. With the atrophying of mnemotechnics as a set of necessary skills which every educated person needed to learn, they also lost an entire method of composing arguments, an entire visual vocabulary for illustrating arguments, and a whole panoply of other shared cultural reference points, all of which together made up a huge part of the cultural color of medieval thought.
The simple fact that we don’t learn that stuff anymore—and I’m paraphrasing C. S. Lewis here—is one of the biggest barriers between them and us. It’s what makes the medieval world so completely opaque. I think it’s a major contributor to why so many otherwise extremely literate thinkers seem to go straight from, say, Plato to Descartes, and skip the entire Middle Ages.
GC: As if it just isn’t there.
MH: There’s a slightly more complex set of reasons for it as well, but I think a significant chunk of it is just down to the fact of not understanding how the medievals thought because we don’t understand how rhetoric and the art of memory works. This means that basically the subtleties of medieval thought are unintelligible to us, to a far more radical degree than people realize.
So to bring this fairly extended analogy back to the question of phones and the question “You know, isn’t this just an extension of ourselves?” Absolutely, that’s completely true. However, I bring up the medieval art of memory as a quite precise analogy for the kind of thing we need to be attentive to when we think about how something like a smartphone, for example, or the use of ChatGPT changes our relationship to our ideas. It changes how we retain ideas, what ideas we retain, and how we structure our approach to thinking. I think if it’s possible for the loss of something like the art of memory to create so fundamental a cultural gulf between different eras, then it stands to reason that an equivalent shift in our relationship to our storage and retrieval of ideas could very well have an equivalently transformative effect, which could be good, or it could just sever the world that is from the world that will be. And I think it’s worth being thoughtful about how we approach that. If that’s a future that we want to walk into, I propose that we should do it with our eyes as open as possible, and not just, as the kids say, YOLO it.
GC: You can see this in the difference between the book version of The Lord of the Rings and the film version: In the books, once the fellowship is split up, Tolkien has no problem following one set of characters for a couple hundred pages and then switching and following another set for a similar length of time. But the movie cuts back and forth every few minutes because I think Peter Jackson worried his audience would forget who Sam and Frodo were.
MH: Yes, there were some figures that popped up recently in the press saying that something like one in three kids who start school in the United Kingdom simply don’t know how to interact with a book. They try to zoom it or swipe it as though it’s an iPad. Which, maybe your guy might say, “Well, so what?”
However, there’s pretty persuasive evidence—the citation for this would be Nicholas Carr, who wrote The Shallows in 2010—to the effect that reading on a printed page is different in kind from reading in that associative way that you do across multiple web pages, in terms of both the kind of thinking that you do and the amount of information that is retained. For example, in the course of reading a long-form argument in a printed book, thoughtfully over a period of time, you’ll have a dialogue not just with the author but also in your own mind, once you can read competently enough to be able to read swiftly. You’ll find yourself reading—I’m sure you have this experience all the time—and in the back of your mind, you’re cross-referencing or you’re arguing back. So you’re dialoguing with the text, but in a sense you’re using your stored memory, your own memory palace, because we all have one to an extent.
Again, I’m not violently anti-tech. For instance, one of the more interesting practices that I’ve noticed emerges among people who like to read and who are also somewhat online: I’ll find myself absorbed in a book, but I also have in my mind four or five interlocutors who are interested in similar subjects, and occasionally I’ll think of somebody, and I’ll photograph the page and text it to them.
And that creates a whole secondary or tertiary dialogue, which really does feel like an extension of that expert reader dialogue, which people like Maryanne Wolf and Nicholas Carr talk about. It feels like an externalization of that, mediated through the phone or the chat window.
So it’s not to say that these things are mutually exclusive; they’re absolutely not. It’s more a question of intentionality and not confusing one thing for the other.
Returning to our theme of translating ideas between media, The Lord of the Rings is a great series of movies. It’s also a fantastic set of books. It’s the same story, by and large, but nobody would go through it in both forms and say there’s no difference between them, right?
And I think that’s very much the subject that we’re talking about here, a translation between information technologies. It seems logical to me that we should be able to apply the same level of critical reflection to what’s happening in that sense, and in this field, and not make it into either some sort of dumb culture war thing, a sort of tech doomerism, or indeed a sort of rushing into the future without any care or attentiveness to the treasures that we already have.
GC: To your point, I find, in my writing and editing, I always finish on paper. For my last couple of edits, at some point I have to get off the screen to really read the piece.
MH: Yes, I don’t do that for short pieces anymore. But I think that’s more a function of time than anything else. The last few times I’ve written anything long form, absolutely. And certainly, when it comes down to proofing a book, there’s no other way around it. You sit down with a red pen and a ruler. There’s no other way.
GC: Man, I’ve been missing the ruler! No wonder . . .
In any case, if liberal democracy was the political form appropriate to the age of print, what political form is going to be appropriate for our postliterary age?
MH: I don’t know, and I’m hesitant to be too concrete, because I think this is the sort of thing which can land quite differently according to local cultural conditions. But it seems plausible to me that a genuinely postliberal politics will be more autocratic in some form or other.
And I think you can probably make that case. Several foreign policy publications have recently, in fact, made the case that that’s actually already happening. It doesn’t make me a prophet of doom to note that the world seems recently to have been carved up between three very postliberal-seeming sphere-of-influence powers, not one of which is based in the United Kingdom. But this is the considered and not particularly delighted view of serious people in the foreign policy world, that something very much more imperious and imperial is already upon us. I think the nation-state has had it, but I also think we already knew that.
It’s only normal voters who still think we have nation-states, or have been acting as if we still have nation-states since the Second World War. The guys who are in a position to actually decide anything have been acting, for a very long time, as if that needs to be bypassed. And I think that all happened with the best of intentions. This isn’t some sort of sinister plot, lest you be tempted to depict me as a tinfoil-hatter. I’m not.
With the best will in the world, there are a lot of people who have been very worried that if we ended up with nation-states again, then they’d end up with national wars again, and then millions more would have to die like they did in the First and Second World Wars. But nobody wants that. So let’s have something transnational and postnational instead, they said, and we’ll have international, universal systems of governance, and it’ll all be much more cooperative and collaborative and sensible and rational, and we won’t do any more fighting. That was the hope.
So we’ve got this strange pantomime, a strange sort of chimeric political order where about half of the people in charge want it to be transnational or postnational and the other half are determined that it shouldn’t be, so nobody can really get anything done.
But I think sometimes, when I’m in my grumpier moods, “Well, you know, maybe the postnationals are sort of directionally right.” And here I come back again to my McLuhan-ish speculations about the end of the print era: The printing press and the nation-state are coextensive in terms of their emergence. I did a hopeless job of summarizing all of the ways in which print changed the world, but one of the ways print changed the world was helping to create the nationstate as a political form.
For one thing, it helped to kill off Latin as a lingua franca. It consolidated these states, which hadn’t really existed before, based on people reading in a vernacular. And it’s only once you have that larger reading public that you can begin to create what Benedict Anderson calls the imagined community, which is an enabling condition for the nation-state as a political form.
When you run that scenario in reverse . . . well, I don’t really like any of the outcomes of that. What does it look like if the nation-state comes apart into its national components? And here I mean nations in the Old Testament sense. It’s obviously historically the case that nation and state haven’t always coincided. In fact, there’s something peculiarly modern about that. Do we get something like the Habsburg Empire, a state comprising multiple nations?
I don’t really want to think about it in very much detail, because there’s no plausible scenario which isn’t quite ugly, at least until everything settles down again.
I forget who, but it was someone on the internet who pointed out, I think persuasively, that once you have constant transnational connectivity, the idea of migrants integrating is fundamentally a nonstarter.
Whereas, for example, when people left to go and settle in Australia and moved halfway around the world one hundred or two hundred years ago, they basically said goodbye to their family because they might never see them again. So they had to fit in wherever it was that they found themselves. But when you can just be constantly messaging to whoever it is that you’re still friends with back home, you don’t need to be where you are at all, except maybe in a sort of very thin economic sense or perhaps a sort of equally thin administrative one. But in terms of the kind of presence denoted by actual integration, you don’t really need to. You might want to, but you don’t have to.
GC: Neal Stephenson, in The Diamond Age, depicts what he calls phyles, or geographically dispersed polities scattered across a globe from which nation-states have disappeared. Your phyle is similar to a guild you belong to, and it will step in and defend you against aggression by people from other phyles. It’s an interesting speculation on what might be coming.
MH: It’s an interesting speculation, although I’d probably want to set that against the maxim that geography is destiny. This is an idea that’s been kicked around more recently in the tech communities, hasn’t it, in the form of network states? And the question which I have yet to see answered, at least openly (I’m sure they talk about it privately among themselves), is what hard power looks like in a network state. Who manufactures the weapons? Who defends the supply lines? Who’s making the food? And if you’re just going to wave your arms and say, “Oh, it’s all robots,” my response is “Okay, who’s guarding the power stations? And with what?”
Because the question “you and whose army?” is bound to emerge sooner or later. At least if you have a fairly tragic view of human nature, you’re expecting it to emerge sooner or later, right?
GC: That’s right.
MH: To complete that thought about dispersed communities interacting all the way around the world: When we think about nations and states coming apart, I think the most depressing version of that scenario is ethnic balkanization within what were previously more homogenous nation-states. There’s some sort of thin, supranational governance, and then it splits along a very much more tribalized line below that.
There are doomsayers who warn that that’s already happening in some European countries. For example, people talk about no-go zones in some Swedish cities. Now, we have to take such reports with a pinch of salt, because whoever it is who produces a report like that has always got an axe to grind. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a sort of retribalization occurring. And this is happening even within polities that had explicitly embraced a version of modernity which disavowed tribalism as being a thing of the past. I don’t think it’s a thing of the past, or at least if it was a thing of the past, I have a horrible feeling it will be a thing of the future as well. I don’t love that outcome. I don’t love that story, but I think that’s part of what nation-states coming apart looks like.
So, you can paint a gloomy picture about the end of liberal democracy, but I think the more alarming side of that story is retribalization.
GC: Okay, can you give us a sneak preview of the book you’re working on?
MH: Well, this is what we’ve been talking about! The title is The King and the Swarm, and the subtitle is Politics After the Singularity, my thesis being that the singularity already happened, and in fact it was just the point where the smartphone became pervasive.
But this isn’t the first singularity. We have merged with our information technologies before, for example with the printing press. And even that wasn’t the first singularity because before that we merged with our information technologies when we invented the Greek alphabet.
And so I’m tracing the development particularly of European/Western cultures from the inception of the alphabet through these two earlier singularities of the invention of literacy and the invention of the printing press, and then setting some of the developments of the digital age in the context of those developments to tease out some of the pros and cons.
GC: Is there a reason you’re focusing on the Greek alphabet? After all, the Phoenicians had an alphabet, and the Hebrews adopted that, prior to the Greek alphabet.
MH: The Phoenician one was the one that turned into the Greek alphabet. The significance of the Greek alphabet was that that was the point where all the sounds had their own symbols. Yes, the Jewish people had had a script for considerably longer than that. The Jewish history of scriptural study and deep literacy is thousands of years old. I’m certainly not ignoring that. But the significance of the Greek alphabet is that it represents all of the sounds, whereas earlier scripts only had the consonants.
GC: Okay, that’s what I was curious about.
You have made a point about the European states attempting to show that they are ready to stand up to Trump over Greenland and stand up to Russia. And you posted a picture of the cardigan-wearing NATO guy talking tough like this. I looked at the picture, and I thought, “Well, if I wanted to say what threat this guy would represent, I’d say he’s perhaps threatening to steal your organic bran muffins, and not much worse. And certainly not to fight Russia.” So, I think your view that the states in Western Europe are American protectorates is accurate. It’s perhaps what the Trump administration is trying to do, to break that dependency.
MH: I think anyone from another planet who counted the number of American military bases in Europe would conclude that Europe is American-occupied territory.
GC: No doubt.
MH: Of course, the relationship is far more complex than that. You know, some of my best friends are American, etc., etc.
GC: Hey, some of the Greeks’ best friends were Romans, even when Greece was a part of the Roman Empire!
MH: While the relationship is complicated, I think it’s basically accurate that the European states are American protectorates, and there’s a great deal of ambivalence about that.
It’s not really clear to me how all of that is going to shake down. A lot of it depends on who comes after Trump, doesn’t it? Of course, you’ve got three more years of him, and, based on how it’s gone so far, pretty much anything could happen over that time.
GC: Certainly.
MH: But nobody really knows who or what comes next.
GC: Now, an interesting point on this topic is that being inside an empire is a mixed bag. If you look at the Roman Empire, the invading Germans were not invading for the most part because they wanted to defeat the empire; they were invading because they wanted to live inside it.
MH: That’s right.
GC: Changing topics, you wrote about Helen Andrews’s Compact essay [“The Great Feminization”] from last October on the feminization of work. And you feel she missed some points there. Could you describe what her essay overlooks?
MH: Well, I wrote Feminism Against Progress about the emergence of the women’s movement, and the book touched on some of the same themes that Andrews hits in that essay, particularly a very strong female representation in certain kinds of knowledge work. This has happened especially in the kinds of disciplinary, educational, and moral conditioning–type work that used to be done by church ladies in the nineteenth century. And now in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it’s done by HR ladies, who are functionally the same, and they’re the same class and type of person as the church ladies. Just they do that job for money now instead of for free.
But I think it’s a mistake to attribute the “great feminization” entirely to women because I think some of it is a product of our environment. And I don’t just mean this in the sense of Andrews’s argument, where all we have to do in terms of the environment is take our thumb off the scales and civilization will correct itself. Which may be, but I think it’s a mistake to attribute feminization, as she characterizes it, purely to women.
Now that sounds like a crazy argument to make! But let me give you an example: One of the most commonly cited sex differences, on average, is between male and female typical styles of conflict. Men are more physically violent than women. Men tend to form in-groups and compete with other in-groups in social forms which have a clear hierarchy. Women tend to have more flat, diffuse social structures and to conduct their interpersonal conflicts indirectly through social means, such as ostracism, or dogpiling, or what have you.
But if you’ve ever watched a group of young, predominantly or perhaps exclusively male right-wingers having an argument on the internet, you’ll see that the “feminine” style is the mode of conflict there.
If you think about what the internet does as a form, it incentivizes endless talking, ostracism, backbiting, dogpiling, and so on, and it forecloses actual physical violence. As a form, it forces everybody into a social performance which is indistinguishable from what Joyce Benenson characterizes as feminization.
So, the internet is actually feminizing everybody. Social media is an incredibly feminizing technology. Of course, the internet is a long way from being the only phenomenon which contributes to this kind of subtle, pervasive social shift. Just think about the transition of work away from arduous manual labor of the kind which privileges men toward the more flat-structured, socially based skills and promotional, managerial-type work which very much advantages women.
Is it all down to some malign attribute of women that people are tending more to exhibit feminine styles of behavior? I’m not convinced. Certainly, you can cite statistics until you’re blue in the face about the increased presence of women in the workforce, but most of the trends decried under the heading of feminization and blamed on women started long before the women were in the workforce in any numbers at all.
I think there’s a really important factor that needs to be taken into account, which is the overall sociocultural effects of our prevailing material environment and the social forms that it produces, which Andrews’s essay leaves out. And if you ignore that, you get a large-scale hand-waving, all of which just cashes out as saying, “We need to kick women out of the workforce.” But to me that just seems stupid and fundamentally mistaken. I guess I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Look, I don’t particularly love cancel culture, right? But I don’t think it would go away if you remove women from the workforce. I really don’t. Not unless you also changed, fundamentally, a number of other salient features of the prevailing culture.
GC: Okay, let’s end on a gloomy note.
MH: Huh, do we have to? Yes, I guess we do.
GC: In Feminism Against Progress, one of the major themes is that market dominance of the economy works toward making people interchangeable. “The market” wants to flatten any differences between men and women because it wants them to be cogs in the machine of production. And I was just reading a paper on Hannah Arendt that quoted her saying that one of the characteristics of totalitarianism is that it wants to flatten all differences and make people as interchangeable as possible.
This raises the specter of what for my libertarian friends would be impossible: totalitarian capitalism, a society where everyone has been reduced to a cog in a great machine of production, except for the few people on top running it. Do you see that as a possible outcome of what is occurring around us now?
MH: I don’t know. I think the most likely countervailing force against an outcome like that is probably one which would be, in effect, just as depressing, which is to say the oncoming tidal wave of demographic and cognitive collapse.
I’m not sure which version of catastrophe we’re going to get first . . . Maybe we’ll get both at once. On the one hand, we seem to be on a trajectory toward what you characterize as totalitarian capitalism, but then populations are imploding to as-yet-unknown effect.
Furthermore, the cognitive transformations affected by postliteracy are also driving a rapid decline in people’s ability to think rationally. If you think about it for even a moment, you’ll agree that it’s visible everywhere. And this is driving a competence crisis across all of the technical and engineering skills that we need to just keep everything that we already have functioning, let alone to make it into space or whatever.
With potholes appearing in the roads, electricity substations spontaneously catching fire, and windows falling out of airplanes, air traffic control systems going kaput every five or ten minutes, I’m not sure how long that’s compatible with the dark, dystopian, or hyperefficient image of totalitarian capitalism.
GC: Maybe it will be more like in the movie Brazil?
MH: Yes, a nightmare future where you somehow get both of those feels like it might be sustainable for a bit, but eventually the sheer force of numptiness is going to sink your Gattaca dystopia, right? Just because people can’t keep the lights on.
So, it’s not a particularly cheery argument, my stance of skepticism towards totalitarian capitalism. But I think people are too human to allow that to happen. It won’t happen, because people will just be like, “Oh, I can’t be bothered,” or they’ll forget to turn the gas off, or something like that. It’s never going to get that efficient. I just don’t buy it.
GC: I think what we have to do when this is published is to send all the readers a bottle of antidepressants to take while they read.
MH: Just to put a slightly more positive gloss on what I just said . . . Well, actually, now that I think about it, I realize it isn’t a more positive gloss. So, just to wrap things up on an even more miserable note, there are times when I look at the fertility crisis and I think, “That’s nature taking its course. That’s nature self-correcting.” This is a culture which is obviously so comprehensively, organismically intolerable that people have just stopped having kids in it. And therefore, eventually, over several generations, it will self-correct.
Something will come out which won’t be either version of the dystopia I just painted. I think it’ll probably be a bumpy ride getting there, but I think we will get there, and we’ll remain human, whether we want to or not.
GC: Okay, this has been very interesting, but I don’t want to take up any more of your time, for which I thank you.
MH: It’s great to speak to you, Gene.
