Mary Harrington is an author I became familiar with in the covidtime reading at Unherd.com. Her book is Feminism Against Progress(1), described on the back cover as

…a stark warning against a dystopian future in which poor women become a little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the Rich. ‘Progress’ no longer benefits the majority of women and only a feminism that is skeptical of it can truly defend their interests in the twenty-first century.(2)

Harrington describes her youth,

Drenched in queer theory and adrift in the endless possibilities of digital culture, it suddenly felt possible to reimagine our genders in bespoke terms, and to create supportive enough communities to somehow realize our inner lives in the world.(3)

For a period she lived an online life as a virtual male, “Sebastian,” but eventually became untangled from all that.

Harrington is not a theologian, or necessarily even a Christian. She grew up in Britain in postmodernism, imbibing feminism as a child but who now rejects much of what presently is defined as feminism.

She describes a crucial worldview which she calls “progressive theology”:

Legal scholar Adrian Vermeule has dissected what he calls ‘sacramental liberalism’, a ‘lived, and very concrete type of political-theological order’ representing ‘ an imperfectly secularized offshoot of Christianity’. This quasi theological regime, he argues, takes as its central sacrament the disruption of existing norms, in the pursuit of an ever receding goal of greater freedom, transformation and progress towards some undefined future goal of absolute human perfection— that we somehow never attain, and whose externalities are never counted, save as further evidence of how far progress still has to go. This is the core of progress theology.(4)

“The key,” she says, “is to notice the underlying structure of belief: that there exists a kind of axis along which progress can be measured, and that we are inexorably moving along that axis, from ‘more bad’ to ‘less bad.’…(5) Harrington says that she does not believe in progress theology.

Here is an insight. Most of us are adherents of progress theology. If I asked you to tell me your life story, you would likely frame it in terms of progress from less good to more good. You came from this background, you came from this understanding, to that understanding, from this misconception, to this corrected understanding. You were born in a small town and worked for minimum wage at the hardware store, but you went to school and now live in suburbia making more money and have a house and a good car and this list of gadgets, or whatever. Yours is a story of progress upward. We want to think that things are improving. We tell the story, automatically, so that we are moving from less good to more good.

There is something there, built into us about framing, or less preferably, spinning. We spin our stories. Harrington is telling that the actual story of feminism has been framed, spun, portrayed, differently than it is in fact.

I was especially interested in her critique of contemporary feminism:

What we call feminism today is for the most part this worldview, the Team Freedom one, which should more accurately be called bio-libertarianism: the doctrine that legitimizes the vision of men and women as Meat Lego, and which is taking on increasingly pseudo-religious overtones. This doctrine focuses on extending individual freedom and self-fashioning as far as possible, into the realm of the body, stripped alike of physical, cultural, or reproductive dimorphism in favor of a self-created ‘human’ autonomy. This protean condition is pursued ostensibly in the name of progress.(6)

Mainstream feminism has morphed, says Harrington, into a “movement focused almost entirely on individual freedom, imagined as the property of functionally interchangeable ‘humans’” She asks how pro-women is a movement now aimed at transcending our sexed bodies in favor of a genderless ‘human’ state?(7) “The endpoint of a three century struggle for progress, understood as individual separateness, has culminated in a political effort to eliminate all meaningful sex differences through technology.”(8)

Is she overstating the case? I don’t think so.

She is accurately observing that what one would think had to do with making real improvements for women instead has turned into something anti or opposite the interests of women. There has been a shift in worldview that is actually antagonistic to humanity, that devalues not only maleness but femaleness. Nature is in the way, and we need to transcend nature to have true freedom. Only, actually, this idea is that creation is in the way, and since God created us male and female (Genesis 1:27), God is fundamentally the ogre in all this, since He created us with these biological constraints.

You and I may see this in this way. Harrington doesn’t say that, but she does see that from a utilitarian perspective, the inconsistencies are great. What today passes for feminism has come into clearer focus, for this woman, as something that is anti-woman.

Hear Harrington’s words:

The modern variety [of gnostic] seeks to transcend the physical, not through spiritual knowledge, but through technology… This worldview sets women constitutively at odds with our own bodies. To realize ourselves, we must wage war on nature – and even on the idea that we have a nature. Indeed, from a bio-libertarian perspective waging war on the idea of ‘nature’ is precisely what feminism should be doing… ‘nature’ is a set of physiological constraints that we didn’t choose, and that limit our ability to self-realize. In turn, this invites medical science to expand its sphere of control ever further beyond normal reproduction, and to encompass ever more of our physical nature. The upshot is an order where matters once deemed the proper realm philosophy or religious faith, such as questions of birth, death, or desire, are subcontracted to the machine. That is: if we have technological control, we don’t need moral codes anymore, except what this produces is, in practice, a new code: a cyborg theology…. The end goal of cyborg theology is delegitimizing the idea that we have a nature: liquefying, perhaps the most fundamental social norm of all, and in the process opening profoundly disturbing new market possibilities.(9)

So political prisoners in China are subject to involuntary organ harvesting. And every kind of cut and paste surgery possible or that will become possible will be conducted to revise our bodily appearance to match our confused internal imaginings about changing what we are. If I can change my nature, why not cut and paste until I have recreated myself? In Christianity the believer and God interact cooperatively within the constraints of nature to be what we become. But in “cyborg theology” as Harrington puts it, we recreate ourselves in contradiction to nature, in contradiction to God’s creation. We erase what He made and replace with with what we make without Him.

I can’t do justice to this book in such a limited space. I’m unashamedly focusing on the points she makes that are especially interesting to me. I come at this as a Christian person embracing a biblical worldview in which God is transcendent and He is the Creator and designer of humans. He created humans in His image, that is, as moral creatures, able to love and appreciate beauty, and to participate in God’s fundamental givingness and benevolence toward His creatures.

Harrington warns that the “singularity” has already occurred, which is “the now normal experience of disembodied online sociology.”(10) Our author posits that a great societal shift already has occurred. We are not just upstream from the singularity, we are already past it, downstream from it. There has already been a shift in society away from the actual and the face-to-face, to the virtual. And the virtual is invading the physical. “New branches of elective surgery are springing up, filled with the promise that you can re-skin not just your digital avatar but also your meat avatar.(11)

If those reaching adulthood today are already natives of the world bequeathed to us by the real singularity, they are greeted with enthusiasm by thinkers who have long sought to merge us with our technologies. For the link between trans and tech is, to some, neither threat nor mental health crisis, but the key to an entire theology.(12)

This is a manifestation of Paul’s warning in Romans chapter one, that when humans push God out of their reckoning, they turn to the worship of the creature. There is a theology here, but one in which humans have become god.

But although she may not be coming from a religious angle, I do believe that some of her conclusions are sound. For example,

…we can’t, in fact, be whoever we want to be… constraints exist on what our true selves may realistically become.… whether at a small or large scale, human nature refuses to be entirely liquefied.(13)

Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, shows that some see through the transhumanist scam. It may not be that there is recognition that the Bible way is the way, but there is recognition that progress theology and self-creation are mirages which have done harm to men and women who have embraced that thinking. Authors like Harrington are stepping back from the brink. It is a step in the right direction, back toward the Creator, even if they may not see that in it. What I read is that the plastic cover has come off and the shiny metal underneath is showing defects. Progress is regress. it is interesting to see others who now see that that which currently passes as feminism is toxic.

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Notes:

1. Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, (Regnery Publishing: Washington DC, 2023), 250 pp.

2. Outer back cover.

3. Ibid., p. 8.

4. Ibid., pp. 12-13.

5. Ibid., p. 12.

6. Ibid., p. 18.

7. Ibid., p. 17.

8. Ibid., p. 19.

9. Ibid., pp. 141-142.

10. Ibid., p 149.