Initially delivered as the first in the Protopia Conversations series, 23 May 2024 at Ateneu Barcelonès
The argument which became Feminism Against Progress began as an exploration of the tensions between environmentalism and liberal feminism. To take just one example: Women were demanding that men do a greater share of baby care from the 1960s on, but men did not start changing nappies in any great number until the 1980s. So what changed in the 1980s? It may or may not be a coincidence that this was the moment disposable nappies became available, making a stinky part of baby care instantly far easier.
But this implies that what changed was less feminism, than a technology that made baby care easier. And this made me realise that the same is true of women’s liberation more generally. Was American antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly right that what liberated us was not feminism but the washing machine?
If so, this poses a problem for women who care about the environment, and also think of themselves as feminists. Nappies are an ecological disaster; but imagine for a moment the feminist pushback you’d get if you tried to ban them! It’s easy to understand why: environmentally conscious parents may adopt washable nappies, but then have a great deal more work to do – much of which often ends up falling to the mother.
From washing machines to the contraceptive pill and every domestic labour-saving device, I can think of a great many more examples of women’s modern liberation seeming bound up in technology. But if this is so, taking decarbonisation and sustainability seriously would imply undoing many of the changes that have freed modern women from domestic drudgery. Even so, most mainstream liberal feminists would say they care about fossil fuels, capitalism, resource extraction and so on – even as liberation in practice continues to rely on technologies that depend on these things
As you can perhaps imagine, when my agent tried selling this book into the (mostly female) British publishing industry, no one wanted to know. Over time, though, I came to think that the argument wasn’t just about feminism but about progress, in our modern sense, in general. And this points in turn to a paradox that none of us really wants to think about.
So that’s what I’m here to talk about today: progress, which is to say technology. Or rather: progress, versus the survival of our species. Because I think we’re going to have to pick one.
Theology by other means
I don’t believe in progress. When I say that, people sometimes look a little surprised. How could you not believe in progress? Isn’t it obvious that the world is much better today than it was a thousand years ago? Well, I don’t mean I think nothing ever gets better. Nor do I mean I think everything is somehow getting worse. Nor, obviously, do I mean nothing ever changes. Of course things change! But I don’t think history is going from somewhere to somewhere else, along a linear path where on some moral metric things get better in an absolute sense.
I’m by no means the first person to make these arguments. Thinkers from the early Enlightenment philosopher Giambattisto Vico, to the German conservative historian Oswald Spengler, and the American social critic Christopher Lasch, have attacked the belief in a linear, forward-marching history.
For such thinkers, civilisations and human epochs rise and fall, in a more cyclical pattern. To impose a linear narrative over these cycles is, according to this argument, less about reality than metaphysics. Whose metaphysics, though?
To get at this, let’s think a bit about the structure of “Progress”.
We can point to things that are better now. Other things are surely worse. There is no way to evaluate the trade-offs except by defining your terms. And once you define your terms for making progress, each of these turns out to have a shadow. How about wealth? Material comfort? Personal freedom? Peace? Health? Equality? On all these metrics, some things can be said to have improved a great deal over the course of modernity. Some parts of the world are much richer now than 200 years ago. Some people have a great many choices today than in the past. Europe has seen almost no conflict since the Second World War. More of us make it to old age. Laws forbid slavery, others seek to promote equality.
But let’s look at the the trade-offs.
The engines of economic growth rely on forward movement: an exploitative paradigm that views the world only in terms of what may be extracted, instrumentalised, and mastered. It consumes resources, ecosystems, and cultures. It leaves ruin and pollution in its wake.
At least some of us now are richer than ever before in history. That’s progress. Even so, this was accumulated on the back of colonial projects that exploited and sometimes literally enslaved peoples it considered “other” or “backward”. Many of these remain in conditions of relative squalor today.
We’re more comfortable, too. This is progress! All of this, though, is downstream of energy input, meaning it cashes out in the end as the consumption of non-renewable fossil fuels.
Or food! We have access to greater food abundance in the West than at any previous time in history, and all get to eat meat every day! This is progress. But this also relies on ecocidal farming practices, including (again) fossil fuel input, and methods of intensive animal farming that industrialise pain, fear, and misery for millions of sentient creatures while contributing directly to river- and ocean-killing algae blooms. Is this also progress?
To be clear: I am not saying the past was better. Nor am I arguing that we should abolish our technologies, or try and go back. This is obviously not possible even if it was desirable. What I am saying is that I don’t think we can prove conclusively that the changes we have seen in modernity demonstrate progress in total, in some abstract sense.
It’s not really possible either to falsify, or to prove conclusively, because none of us is a divine being able to see and understand everything.
So: you can choose to believe we are making overall progress, if you wish. But this a belief, not a fact. Once we step away from the moral story of progress it becomes clearer what we are looking at. Indeed, fact that “progress” could only really be evaluated in the all-seeing eye of a divine being gives us a clue: “Progress” is a continuation of theology by other means. Specifically, the structure of “progress” is a version of Christian eschatology.
This isn’t an original observation at all. Christopher Lasch described “progress” as “a secularised version of the Christian belief in Providence”. It’s characteristically Christian to see history in linear terms, as beginning with creation and taking the form of upward moral struggle that concluding with a grand revelation and the end of all sin and suffering
Greek and Roman mythologies had creation stories but no end times, while Norse and Hindu mythologies have end times but see the divine story as cyclical. The main reason Progress doesn’t show up immediately as Christian is because we’ve edited out the spiritual bits. Progress tells us we’re fine without the Christian story: Creation, Fall, Crucifixion, Second Coming. We don’t need a substantive vision of the good. We don’t need God, the soul, or the afterlife.
But Progress still follows the linear Christian structure. History is a story with a beginning, middle, and end; a belief that we’re heading from somewhere to somewhere else, and the end is in some sense better than the beginning. To be “on the right side of History” is to be contributing to this forward motion: going somewhere, usually somewhere better. And the ultimate endpoint, the ultimate somewhere, is also the ultimate better. That is: the point at which everything that’s wrong with the world has been resolved.
This looks a lot like the Christian idea of heaven. But if you secularise this Christian story, you run into a problem. If you’ve given up on death, judgement, heaven and hell, where can the Heaven at the end of Progress be realised? Your only remaining option is now trying to realise heaven, on earth, in history: what Eric Voegelin called “immanentising the eschaton”.
And this is a religious story which does everything in its power to hide the real content of its theology, which is the technological mindset itself. That is, not a set of tools but a relation to the world around us. The clearest articulation I have found of this comes from Martin Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology. Heidegger characterises the essence of technology as a mindset, which he calls Gestell, usually translated as “enframing”. In this mindset creatures, ecosystems, natural resources and even people appear to us not in their full being, but only in respect of how they may be instrumentalised in order to further our project of mastery and perfection.
Faith in “Progress” requires that we take this enframing mindset as our core disposition toward reality. How else are we to perfect this life except by mastering and re-engineering it? Progress, then, is fundamentally a technological project, and simultaneously a moral one. It is, in fact, is a deeply religious worldview; it’s just pretending to be a neutral, scientific, utilitarian one.
This technological project is now increasingly obviously ecocidal: in other words, it threatens not just the natural world but also human survival. I have therefore come to think we will eventually be forced to choose between “progress” and survival – or, perhaps, have the choice made for us.
The mother-shaped blind spot
My way into all this, in my own work, was through reflecting on the problem of progress from a feminist standpoint – and also from a maternal one. I spent my youth as a progressive: I embraced what we might call “magazine feminism”, which promotes a simplified version of the the liberal understanding of what a person is, developed from Rousseau on. In this vision, we are assumed to be separate by default, and we opt into relationship via some kind of “social contract”.
I also embraced the default assumption of magazine feminism, which largely focuses on those ways popular understandings of modern liberal personhood historically excluded women, and seeks to extend these goods to women as well so we can be as free, unencumbered and agentic as men.
Whether liberated from normative sex roles or even the constraints of our own bodies, the aim of feminism seemed to be freeing me from any need to be specifically a woman, as opposed to some sexless abstract “human being”. Later, I embraced the post-structuralist belief that even sex itself might be somewhat socially constructed – and, therefore, that we could remodel gender all the way to its core, in the name of freedom. I took for granted that this would be what I wanted; that it would be in my interests; that it was obviously in the wider interests of my society.
These beliefs ran aground, for me, on the experience of having a child.
I came to motherhood late, at 38. I found it hard, but also transformative. I came to feel myself remade in the experience of relationship with my child and through family life – but, importantly, in ways that felt radically at odds with the ideology of progress.
I discovered that when you love a dependant infant so viscerally you would die for them, “freedom” in this thin sense means nothing. Meanwhile, nearly dying in childbirth cured me of any lingering belief that sex might be socially constructed. But as both a new mother and a feminist, I struggled to make sense of how marginal mothering is to modern feminism. I could not connect the Rousseauean understanding of liberal personhood with my embodied experience of not quite belonging to myself. For inasmuch as my baby needed me, I was no longer free – but as it turned out, I didn’t mind!
I also realised that many feminists have sought to make sense of this. And yet somehow these seem always to be sidelined. I wondered: why is this? Why do the reams and reams of writing on maternal feminism get ignored, again and again?
Reflecting on this, I’ve come to think that the mother-shaped blind spot goes beyond even liberal feminist selective memory, and is baked into the paradigm of modernity itself. That is: because the enframing mindset requires us to close our eyes to what mothering is.
To be modern, technological, progressive, is to see the world in terms of how it may be used so that we can improve it and realise heaven on earth. Whether minerals, or animals, plants, or other people, modernity invites me to view people in terms of what I may get out of them. But mothering is the opposite of this! I don’t care for my child because I have a utilitarian goal in mind, but because we belong to each other – and that makes caring for her a necessity for my existence too.
But this means even the mindset required to raise a baby is in tension with the modern world. Mothering a baby means meeting an absolutely dependent being where he or she is, and seeking to intuit, meet, and shape his or her needs. (This is what is meant by “attunement” in attachment studies.) The philosopher Hartmut Rosa would characterise this form of relationship as “resonance”: that is, an encounter with the other in which we are both moved by the experience of one another’s being.
But this means mothering is in profound tension with the characteristic mindset of modernity, as Rosa outlines it: a desire to control every facet of existence, and treat life as “points of aggression” that must be dealt with: jobs to get done, problems to solve, situations to control. We can map this, more or less, onto the Gestell mindset described by Heidegger.
My (not very scientific theory) of the dreamy, unworldly state of new-mum consciousness, sometimes condescendingly referred to as “baby brain”, is that it’s an effect of how unhospitable a world we’ve created for resonance. As a mother, you feel a visceral need to resonate with your baby; but to do so, today, means travelling an incalculable mental distance from the consciousness needed to function effectively in modernity, to the headspace you need to be in, to attune to your infant and thus be able to intuit his or her needs.
When I was a new mum I found the distance between resonating with my baby and functioning in modernity very difficult to tolerate. I suspect I’m not alone. And I also suspect that it’s partly this structural tension that drives down family sizes, wherever the technological paradigm has taken hold – and that makes this problem so resistant to policy fixes that address only material obstacles to family formation, such as housing costs. Family size is multi-factorial, obviously; but evidence to date suggests that such interventions move the needle a little, but not much.
Perhaps, then, one central issue that can’t be reached by tax changes or different housing policy that the enabling paradigm of modernity itself – of technology, of “progress” – is radically hostile to the mindset required to welcome children. This possibility then also provides a window into a great deal else, which has been marginalised by the ideology of Progress. For by extension, the technological mindset is at odds with any kind of interdependent relationship - because it is at odds with resonance, which is to say encountering the world and other beings in relationship rather than as resources. If you treat your marriage as a series of transactions you will not stay married for long. If you treat the topsoil as a resource to be mined for yield you will soon have soil erosion.
And mothering also offers a metaphor for some ways we might embrace the calls placed upon us by the nature of the living world around us. Living “sustainably” would mean being more like the mother, who journeys from modernity toward resonating with her baby. It would mean being willing to journey away from the modern world’s “points of aggression”, toward resonating with what is around us.
That might mean, for example, raising meat animals in accordance with their nature rather than in accordance with the industrial search for maximum yield. And meeting someone or something where it is means accepting limits on what we can demand. In the context of human connections, as for example a baby’s needs, we don’t call this “limits” but simply “relationship”. To accept relationships that fall outside transactional logic is to accept being bound by and to something we can’t always control, and can’t always opt out of. Belonging to others means accepting that those relationships place constraints on us. As a wife and mother, for example, I couldn’t just move overseas for three months at no notice. This is not oppression; it’s an enabling condition for the freedom I have to live the life I have well.
In my most utopian mood, I imagine a world where we could extend this mindset beyond immediate human relationships. I imagine topsoil once again renewed by attentive care and willingness to be bounded by the nature of the thing. A similarly bounded and interdependent relation with wild and domesticated animal and plant species; even with our weather patterns.
Progress or survival
Then I remember that we live in a world ordered to Progress, which is to say a religious pursuit of heaven on earth, via the instrumentalising and extractive logic of technology. A mindset structurally at odds with a mindset premised on interdependence, and thus on boundedness in relationship.
We’re going to have to choose. We can either have sustainability, which is to say relationship, which is to say boundedness, in love. OR we can have progress, in the sense I’ve defined here. I am expecting us to choose progress, for as long as we can. There’s no political upside, within a democratic system, to talking about limits. No one wants to be the mean parent who says “no, we can’t do that”. Unsurprisingly, then, no matter how loud the climate lobby, energy throughput keeps rising.
Nor is there any way of legislating from the centre, via political power, for an attitude toward one another and the world that starts from relationship rather than exploitation. When it’s tried, the inevitable result is more exploitation. Every top-down “Net Zero” or “decarbonisation” initiative just turns into a feeding frenzy for big business; a new vector for resource extraction.
But if we’re unable to impose limits on ourselves, the world will eventually do it for us. Technological civilisation is self-limiting: it is not, as the technological order suggests, possible to separate ourselves from the world in order to master it. Progress in the sense I describe here will eventually run out of resources to consume; and even if we escape this trap, it will eventually run out of adults willing to tolerate the tension between resonance and modernity long enough to bear and raise children.
No amount of technology will fix this, any more than technology will fix climate change; because the resource being mined to exhaustion in our intimate lives is resonance. And you can’t fix a shortage of resonance using the mindset that is causing the shortage.
I see three possible long-term ends to this scenario.
One: Progress is ended by the destructive effects Progress has on the environment
Two: Progress is ended by the downward pressure Progress exerts on human fertility
Three: Progress is ended by the weakening effect Progress itself has on human agency and competence.
Perhaps we’ll enjoy some combination of all three! Or perhaps I’m wrong. But if I am right, perhaps the best we can do is seek to strengthen those ways we live in relationship – for this is, ultimately, the only form of resilience that matters. If we succeed in this, it’s possible we’ll survive the end of Progress in some form. After all, humans have survived the end of civilisations before.
And who knows? Perhaps what emerges after Progress will be better. Perhaps, ironically, the path of human progress must travel through the end of Progress.
Fascinating subject matter ... to which I would like to add an unexplored proposition: that feminism has yet to occur. Let me seque into that suggestion by telling a quick story: Bernie Peixoto, aka Ipupiara, was from the Eur Eu Wa Wa tribe in eastern Brazil and held a PhD in anthropology. He was infiltrating Western culture, living in Washington D.C., giving interviews, talks and workshops on indigenous wisdom, which included, among other things, an in-depth psycho-spiritual understanding of gender and male/female relationship dynamics.
“You must understand that in my tribe men and women are completely equal,” he said earnestly. “And yet it might not seem that way to you because male and female roles are highly traditional. The men do guy things—they hunt and fish and build the huts and canoes. The women take care of the children, food gathering and domestic chores. Both men and women are equally represented on tribal council. But,” he paused, “There is one job only the women can do. And it is the most important job in the tribe. In fact, the survival of the tribe depends upon it.”
“What job is that?” I asked, curious, yet defensive. I totally expected him to say, “They have babies.” But he surprised me.
“Men are naturally doing-oriented, linear and aggressive,” he said. “We will hunt until there is nothing left to kill in the jungle. We will fish the rivers dry and cut down all the trees until nothing remains standing. Women, on the other hand, are being-oriented and the natural caretakers. They are intuitively hooked up and know what the needs of the family and community are. They are in tune with nature and know how to keep a healthy balance between the tribe and the surrounding ecosystem which we depend on for survival.
“The most important job in the tribe is the women tell the men when to ‘STOP!’” he said. “Stop cutting the trees. We have enough huts and canoes. Stop fishing the river, we have enough fish stored.”
Again he paused, then quietly asked, “Why are the women in your country not telling their men to stop?”
Wow. That was a really good question. My entire life flashed in front of me, ending in a sudden realization that made my head explode. Oh, my god. I don’t know how to STOP any better than a man does.
The next nakedly obvious conclusion followed: I don’t know how to stop because I’ve been programmed into a masculine mindset by my society. I’ve been raised to embody masculine beliefs and values.
I’m not liberated at all!
The thought shook me to the core.
How can I be liberated if I’m only liberated to be a man?
And then finally . . .
Do I even know what a woman really is?
This interview took place in 1999. Twenty-five years later I am more than ever convinced that we are yet to see the rise of true feminism—ie. the acknowledgement and respect for feminine values and yin energetic expression and intuitive capacities that have yet to be tapped in our grotesquely masculine, aggressive out-of-balance society. When women step forth as whole beings—expressing both masculine AND feminine qualities, in other words intellect AND intuition, rationality AND emotion, aggression AND receptivity, gentleness AND fierceness, sensitivity AND imperviousness, sensuality AND sexuality, ... in other words, when we step forth as whole BALANCED humans at long last, we will have the common sense, the sensitivity, the balance to manage progress in an ecologically sane manner. We will have the capacity to say STOP when we need to. To rise up and say "STOP" to the insanity of an economic model based in never-ending profit. But before all of this, humanity has to understand that we have yet to see WOMAN in her fullness ... including her fierce holy motherliness ... ready to take on any who harm her child ... or the world.
I read this, with my 5 month old asleep on my breast, while I listened to my toddler arguing with her dad in the other room. I feel very "seen" by this piece. Motherhood is hard, but it seems hard because it is in conflict with modern living.
Living far away from our parents (thus the need for daycares and other institutionalized child care).
Making an appointment to see the doctor - instead of doing things around the baby's sleep and feeding schedule.
Even things like sleeping in their own beds, formula feeding, and of course disposable diapers ... All these things are made to make life more "convenient." But convenience is also separation.
Every time someone else feeds my child, I lose resonance. Every time someone else puts my child to sleep, I lose resonance. Even letting someone else change the diaper. All of these things make me just a little less aware of my baby's daily cycles and changes.
I was just about losing my mind in despair, last week, feeling such frustration with this phenomenon as I see it happening in my own life. Thank you, Mary Harrington, for your thoughts and your eloquence. You put into words something so visceral, the inherent conflict of the modern mother. And you give me courage to re prioritize resonance and attunement. Thank you.