Human Nature Is Real

Address at Fieldstead and Company in July 2025

I gave this address at a salon hosted by Fieldstead and Company, an artistic and cultural foundation generously supported by Howard and Robarta Ahmanson. I’m grateful to Howard and Roberta for their invitation and warm hospitality. The full video is below, and I’ve added a lightly edited transcript of my notes.

Today I’m going to tell a personal story; I guess, an intellectual journey. How I lost my faith in progress; how this led me to rethink feminism as fundamentally a story about technology; and finally how this led me off the deep end of feminism, into theology.

This all started when I found myself trying to answer a thorny question: is it possible to be a feminist, if you don’t believe in progress? The answer, as it turns out, is “yes, but it depends what you mean by feminism, and also what you mean by progress”. As it turned out, expanding on both these definitions took a whole book’s worth of words, which I’ll try and summarise for you this evening.

But first I need to explain how I got to be thinking about all this in the first place. (Think of this as the bit in the movie where there’s a record scratch and some backstory.)

Growing Up Progressive

My first political memory is the fall of the Berlin Wall when I was about 10. So my adolescence and young adulthood happened during the End of History. I absorbed all the usual nostra about more stuff, and more freedom.

I first became interested in feminism in my early teens, when I realised I faced a family dilemma. My dad would walk away from the dinner table and leave my mum the dishes. After a while my brothers began to copy him. It left me a dilemma: assert equal standing with my brothers, and leave my mum to do the dishes, or show her some solidarity and accept the implied second-class status?

This insoluble dilemma kick-started my interest in feminism. I found Simone de Beauvoir in a second hand bookshop (remember those?) and discovered a whole body of thinking on this and other questions related to women’s situation.

This all happened against the background of the End of History. There was a sense both that there’s no big battles left to fight, and that “capitalism” is a pervasive enemy that should be smashed. And also that we’ve resolved most of the big questions, and from here on in progress should basically mean more freedom and more stuff for everyone. We should end poverty, get rid of unjust barriers, dissolve old fashioned social norms. There was an assumption that tradition, Christianity, patriarchy, the Right were the other: something old-hat, alien, of the past, to guard against in the pursuit of freedom and abundance.

In this context the key avenues for progress felt increasingly like personal ones, often concerned with interpersonal behaviour or individual identity, plus sometimes environmental or economic justice ones such as gay rights, glass ceilings, date rape, poverty relief, polar bears, or holes in the ozone laye. Basically the standard Clinton-era progressive policy stack.

Add critical theory

I grew up, went to Oxford to study literature. There I was one of the first generations to be one-shotted by critical theory. It’s difficult to overstate how mind-bending this experience was:I had a basically classical education, with a broad understanding of civilisations as sequential and cumulative: Egypt, Greece, Rome, Christendom. But also that true things are true, and we are able to apprehend them as such. This was a baseline assumption for my school years and evaporated on contact with post-structuralism at university

Now I was reading, with Jacques Derrida that true things were not in fact true, but only felt that way because we are all trained to look past the way language shapes our encounter with the world. Once you look at and “deconstruct” that linguistic aspect you realise it’s rhetoric all the way down. From this core argument other theorists delved into the politics of such constructions.

Now every subject was consumed by studying the rhetorical construction of everything, and the operations of power served by that construction. From architecture to clothing to social norms to literature and poetry, everything was suddenly open to this kind of critical rhetorical analysis and power theory.

It was so disorienting. On one hand the world around me came alive: I felt as though I was looking directly at spiritual realities. On the other the same theory also told me there is no transcendent reality. For Derrida there’s no there there: everything is rhetorically constructed. There’s no meaning, no truth, only power. It was like being handed enlightenment and simultaneously told it’s all a cynical lie. Trying to manage that paradox made me borderline psychotic for a while, and I’m still sure it’s a big reason a whole generation of students went crazy.

Anyway. I recovered (mostly) from this in the end. The important piece for this story is what critical theory did to my adolescent feminism. In the modern gender wars, Simone de Beauvoir’s most notorious quote is “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. She was describing that social process of being constructed as the Other, for women relative to men. De Beauvoir didn’t question physical sex dimorphism as the ground of our human existence; She’s not claiming construction as Other shapes women’s sexed nature or reproductive physiology

For the queer theorist Judith Butler though even this was up for deconstruction. Butler argued in Gender Trouble that not just the binary of gender but the supposedly immutable embodied one of sex is rhetorically constructed. Even where our bodies were concerned, there’s no there there. There’s only power. This was appealing to me: what if I could de- and re-construct my own gendered presence in the world, and show up as my own creation? Would this not be the real liberation from oppressive expectations?

It also fried my brain, not least because it’s not actually true. But I had to learn this the hard way.

Losing My Religion

So I’ll fast-forward through my early twenties, which were experimental, arty, queer, and pretty hand-to-mouth. While my Oxford peers were getting consulting gigs I was working as a janitor, riding the Greyhound bus across the United States, writing unreadable novels, living in sketchy house shares, and getting fired from jobs I didn’t really want to do. I lived in communes, experimented with my sexuality, curated immersive art events.

I was trying to reconcile the End of History financialisation of everything, with my progressive ideals; I co-founded an education services marketplace that almost made it. But it all fell apart the year of the Global Financial Crash. It’s a long story but I lost my social circle, my best friend, my startup and most of my ideals.

That was when I realised I no longer believed in progress. The more I pulled at this idea the more questionable it seemed. How is it possible to claim that things are better now in some absolute sense than (say) in ancient Rome? Some things are better, others are worse. How can you evaluate it all without being omniscient?

And that, I realised, was the clue: the God-shaped (omniscient) hole. The idea of “progress” was a theological story in disguise. It’s Christian eschatology, just with the transcendent bits sanded flat. And I realised I didn’t believe in this secular eschatology any more. None of it seemed to add up. I ended up questioning everything else too, like people always do when they lose their faith. What if everything I’d hitherto believed was not true? If progress wasn’t a thing, maybe nothing else was either.

By now I was in my 30s, married, and no longer living in London. Then I had a baby. and I’d internalised the idea, from all the second-wave feminism I read, plus all the 1990s and 00s magazine feminism - all glass ceilings, and empowerment, and being “one of the lads”, that looking after a baby was somehow oppressive, low status, a sign of failure. But when it was my own baby I found there was nothing I wanted to do enough to make me want to be away from her all day.

That was when I started wondering if there was something missing from the feminist picture. I had a choice about whether or not I went back to work; some of my friends didn’t have that choice, and not all of them were happy about it. They didn’t seem all that “liberated” by leaving their babies in daycare. In this state, I began to question my beliefs on feminism and progress.

I started reading, and realised there have been plenty of feminists who tried to make the case for motherhood. But they all get memory-holed. Why? I began to suspect there was something bigger going on. The omission wasn’t accidental; it’s baked into the modern worldview.

Early feminism

The mother-shaped blind spot is there right from the beginning of modernity. It’s there in Rousseau, who imagines women not really as people but charming, compliant support humans. It’s there in every liberal philosopher from the 17^th century on, who frames human personhood in terms of autonomy. Because the problem with this model, for women, is that when you’re a mother it doesn’t fit. “Autonomy” is radically incompatible with motherhood. When you have a dependent baby to care for you need a richer account of the good. So how did we end up with a feminism that just prioritises autonomy?

As I read, I realised that the early history of the women’s movement wasn’t like this. It’s a recent development. And as I read further I came to understand something else: the history of the women’s movement is really the history of technology. Feminism emerged not out of the blue but as a response to the industrial revolution. We talk about homemakers and breadwinners as “traditional gender roles”, but this arrangement is in fact distinctively modern.

Before the industrial revolution almost everyone worked. Men’s work and women’s work were distinct, but almost no one was “economically inactive”, as stay at home moms are sometimes described. The central economic unit was not the individual but the household; most work happened in the home, and women’s work was typically processing raw materials into goods for the family. Most of this is compatible with having little kids underfoot; in the book the paradigmatic example I gave is textile-making. Looms can be raised off the ground, the work is interruptible and social.

But the industrial revolution changed all this. What happens when textile-making moves to factories? You can’t take your breastfed baby or toddler on your 12-hour factory shift. What do you do?. This threw up a whole new set of challenges for women. The cultural responses varied by class and geography, but typically followed two patterns I call the feminism of care, and the feminism of freedom.

Feminism of care comprises a huge body of work by women, sometimes dismissed by second-wave feminist historiographers as a “cult of domesticity”. These 19^th-century writers extolled the private domestic virtues of women retreating from economic competition, in favour of nurture, education, and respite from the marketplace. This tends to be framed by later feminists as reactionary, but to me it’s straightforwardly feminist: they’re making the case for care, domesticity, and non-commercial human needs outside the market.

But the feminism of freedom was also legitimate in its context. These women responded to the pragmatic reality that an idealised picture of economically dependent domesticity only works if you have a good, loving husband. What if your husband beats you, drinks the family wage, or abandons you? Remember: this was in the 19^th century, in a legacy legal and cultural environment based on the household as basic economic unit. In that context, there was little economic and political agency for married women. You can’t get divorced; you have to give your earnings to your husband; he has absolute rights to the kids.

The feminism of freedom responded to this by making the case for women’s entry into market society on the same terms as men, adapting the liberal framework pioneered by Hobbes, Rousseau and others to defend womens individual personhood and agency within the market model.

The early history of feminism is a dialectic between these competing domains of freedom and care, dependency and autonomy. This surely reflects the reality that this divide runs through the centre of every human life, but nowhere more palpably than for mothers. But that dialectic was resolved decisively in favour of freedom by another tech transition: one that, in the book, I called this our entry into the cyborg era. More conventionally, we might call this the transhumanist era: the point where we turned from industrialising the world to industrialising ourselves.

Transhumanism

The first mass-market transhumanist technology was the birth control pill. Consider: it does something radically different to every previous “medicine”. Up to that point, medicine set out to fix what was broken relative to a commonly understood implicit template of normal health. The Pill sets out to break something that’s working - female fertility - in the name of personal freedom. This represents a radical departure for medicine, but was swiftly adopted by feminists of freedom, because it really did massively expand women’s freedom. It promised to level one of the most profound gaps between the sexes, namely reproductive role.

Adoption of the Pill transformed culture even for women who didn’t use it. It rewrote social norms, such that refusing extramarital sex became vastly more difficult; and this in turn drove a ratchet toward the legalisation of abortion. Because where early advocates of birth control thought it would reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies, and the Pill did in fact do this relative to the overall number of extramarital encounters. But the total number of extramarital encounters went up so dramatically that the absolute number of unplanned pregnancies didn’t shrink, it grew.

This in turn meant more desperate women seeking illegal and sometimes dangerous procedures to end unplanned pregnancies, which drove calls for abortion to be legalised. And when this passed, a new model of women’s personhood was institutionalised, that we can read as a defeat of the feminism of care by the feminism of freedom. For legalising abortion gave women the right to end the life of an unborn child – a child dependent on its mother’s body for survival. This right is framed as a matter of “bodily autonomy”. And wherever you stand on the sensitive issue of abortion, it’s clear this legal development institutionalises the primacy of autonomy over care, and makes “choice” a central plank of feminism.

This has become the vector for “progress” understood solely in terms of autonomy. Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed this in a 1978 paper, in which she emphasises ‘a woman’s autonomous control of her full life’s course’ up to and including control of pregnancy. RBG characterised that as essential to a woman’s ‘ability to stand in relation to man, society, and the state as an independent, self-sustaining, equal citizen’. In other words: personhood is conflated with participation in the market.

In this context, no wonder mothers don’t really show up as people, as I discovered pushing my buggy round that small town. And no wonder being a mum is low-status, and women are so ambivalent about it. This development also yoked women’s personhood to transhumanism. For the Pill and abortion became central to “autonomy”, meaning the capacity to control fertility - up to and including the right to end a pregnancy - came to be accepted as the normal baseline for personhood. And thus we have all accepted, without even realising it, a vision of human autonomy and personhood that, for women, can only be realised with the help of biotech.

The transhumanist era

That’s how transhumanism started. 50 years in, how’s it going? We opened Pandora’s box with the Pill; it’s been opened still wider since. The era since has seen a radical expansion in freedom for some, but exploitation for many more. The first example followed swiftly on the Pill: this really did increase freedom for bourgeois women, who benefited from the ability to plan their lives, study, take jobs. But it also opened women’s bodies to the market. If you “own” yourself why shouldn’t you sell yourself? So the Pill meant college degrees and high-flying jobs for some, and for others, no reason not to work in the sex industry. Pornography flourished: by the early 1970s the feminists who advocated the Pill were protesting Big Porn, not realising the same technology and “bodily autonomy” ideology underpins both.

When we zoom out, a more general principle becomes clear: every time we use technology to escape a previously natural limit we open new space for commerce. Freedom and trade are two sides of the same coin. And the same logic has governed the advance of biotech since. Today we have Big Fertility, with a thriving trade in gametes; we have commercial surrogacy, which rents the wombs of poor women to manufacture babies to order.

In the book I set out to show how the capture of feminism by transhumanism has turned it into an elite, exploitative ideology that liberates only a few even as it immiserates many more. It produces a strange double effect, in which care and dependency become marginalised in our private lives while at the same time nurture and care become hyper-emphasised in public life, via progressive ideologies that refuse to set boundaries, punish criminals, or enforce social or educational standards or even national borders.

The result is both low-status mothers and also a kind of nightmarish institutional atmosphere of “devouring mother”, that does not love but consumes and suffocates those it promises to “care” for. This was perfectly encapsulated by Covid lockdowns: a vision of the good as each of us sitting alone in our hygienic cells, as robots or helots bring us supplies.

In the book I argued for grounding resistance in embodiment and our interpersonal lives: seeking to rebuild livable settlement between the sexes, re-opening cultural space for accepting that men and women are different. This, I argued, should include accepting that men need single-sex social spaces too, and that some types of work should be segregated by sex (paradigmatically, childcare and the military). I also argued for “rewilding sex” – that is, rebellion against the contraceptive paradigm.

But this attack on our interpersonal domain is just one front in a wholesale technological war on human nature: one that seeks to escape every limit imposed by human physiology, in the name of personal freedom. The main battleground for this, while I was writing Feminism Against Progress, was transgender ideology, which weaponised gender-confused children and gender-nonconforming adults to serve as a battering ram for the ideological war on human “normal”.

In the book I characterised this worldview as “Meat Lego Gnosticism”: a belief that we are not our bodies, and the “I” who experiences embodiment is distinct from the body and can treat that body as a jumble of fleshy Legos to be reorganised at will. I drew a parallel between this and the Gnostic heresies of early Christianity, which expressed deep hatred of the physical world, and a desire to escape into the Platonic world of forms. But the difference between Gnosticism and transhumanism is that the modern version explicitly rejects the idea of transcendent forms. It’s a vision in which our flesh can be remodelled at will, but this points not beyond us to the spiritual world. It merely points to power. Just as for Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, there’s no “there” there.

Here’s the thing though: Derrida and Butler were wrong. And so are the transhumanists. There is a there there. Human nature is real. And the difficulty I’ve discovered exists, in making this case, turned out to be the route by which I argued myself out beyond feminism into metaphysics.

Premodern Wisdom

In the four years since I wrote the book a lot has changed. On both sides of the Atlantic a movement to resist transgender ideology has begun to gain traction, for example in Trump’s executive order on two sexes and similar victories in Britain. This is all great news, but it doesn’t stop at transgender ideology. It’s a mistake to imagine transhumanism is a left wing thing. It’s not: it is prevalent on the Right too.

The ideological war on the idea of human nature continues: new startups keep springing up which promise to gene-edit babies, for intelligence or other desirable attributes. Others aspire to make ageing a treatable medical condition rather than a normal feature of human life. What I’ve come to see is that every pattern I described in the context of feminism can be generalised, as indicative of where we are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. That is: the AI and biotech revolution in which (as Yuval Noah Harari puts it) the “product” becomes “humans ourselves”.

Most people feel a deep instinctive unease with the idea that we ourselves might be products, but struggle to explain why. Since I began exploring this theme I have found this a puzzle: why it is so difficult to explain that unease? I have come to realise that the blind spot is analogous to the one I found in feminism, with respect to care and dependency. But it’s a far deeper metaphysical challenge.