The reactionary Feminist Mary Harrington brilliant interview on Triggernometry

Exactly LosbsterNapkin.

We also still have slavery and human trafficking in the UK even if it isn’t legally sanctioned.

The decadence of the wealthy contrasted to those in abject poverty is as bad now as it has been at any time in human history.

Perhaps Aristotle was more honest than we are willing to be.

Insightful post, LobsterNapkin.

I am skeptical of the idea that we have overcome slavery, even if you only consider the west. We live in a globalized economy, we simply have moved the slave class out of sight and outside the sphere of our political responsibility.

Most of us are not moving to the wilds of Alaska to get outside of that, most don't give up fast fashion, very few consider boycotting all the big tech companies and give up their cell coverage or internet access.

And truthfully, most of us can't. There is very little we can do to change the wider economic landscape we operate in, and it almost seems as if a complex economic system which includes some real wealth may always require a layer of people who are there more or less to serve the rest. Even with machines to take over much traditional servant labour in individual households, we still haven't dispensed with that and neither has any other western country. Perhaps Aristotle was more honest than we are willing to be.

Quite true cocoa Aristotle did construct a defence of slavery; his problem was that the "wrong sort of people" were being made slaves. His argument presents a hierarchy of rationality, with (roughly speaking) adult males at the top, then women and children, then slaves. The problem was to allocate the "right" people to the slavery class—those whose powers of reasoning were so restricted they required someone else to set their life-goals for them and ensure they met them as far as possible. Reason here is not just means-ends reasoning, which people lower down the hierarchy do have, but also enables the sort of rational reflection on theories and experience, conceptual analysis, and abstract thinking that allows a person to discern what is good or bad overall. This distinction is already implicit in the argumentation in Plato's Republic concerning the tripartite structure of the soul and the parallel tripartion of the ideal society. Aristotle is thinking in political terms only, however, and regards slaves as "living instruments" for use by their superiors.

As you say, general enslavement followed defeat in war, and the horrors of it were well-known.

There's a fragment of a Greek poet, Hipponax (probably), that focusses vividly on slavery, as part of a curse, when the poet imagines the man who betrayed him being shipwrecked and enslaved (Thracians, who lived in northern Greece, were considered uncivilized). Here is my translation:

'…battered by the waves;
Thracians with those top-knots of theirs
up in Salmudessos
will take him, naked, to endure
evil upon evil
eating the crust of slavery—
shivering, chilled from the brine,
seaweed covering him, his teeth
chattering, powerless, lying like
a dog on his face there
right where the surf breaks…
All this I’d like to see:
the one who wronged me, the one who
ground oaths under his heel—
he who was once my friend.'

Enslavement continued into the Hellenistic period, with Alexander's expansion of Greek control and civilization. During this time a genre of anecdotes became especially popular: a philosopher is enslaved, and then meets the conquering leader. For example, one philosopher was asked whether he was all right and whether he had lost anything. He replied, 'I have all my goods with me', meaning that he did not value possessions, or even being free, as good, but only virtue, knowledge, or philosophy, or some combination of these.

It's a variation on the genre of anecdotes about philosophers meeting kings or other leaders. An early example of this genre (entirely apocryphal, of course!) was between Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander. Alexander asked Diogenes whether he could do anything for him (this alleged meeting would have taken place in the market square, where Diogenes always hung out). Diogenes replied, 'Yes, please move, you're blocking the sun'.

The point is that philosophers did not start arguing that slavery is wrong, despite its evils; they thought about how a philosopher, or a wise man, ought to behave if enslaved. A lot of moral philosophy was done in the Hellenistic period by discussing what a wise man ought to do or not do, and this is one more example of that trend.

Seneca says that the Roman Senate had debated ordering slaves to wear distinctive clothing; there was a lot of pearl-clutching going on about how slaves had begun wearing better clothing than free men, being carried in litters, etc. (slaves could legally accumulate wealth). It was realized in time that this would only alert slaves to how many of them there were! I am not sure if this report is substantiated by other evidence.

[quote HBGKC]This was good:

reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/on-mothers-and-political-violence[/quote]
I hadn't read that essay before. It's a good one! Thanks.

I find Mary Harrington interesting and thoughtful. I enjoy reading her and listening to her.

I agree with @Aparallaxia. Good points made there. I think a lot of the confusion in the "are we better than we used to be?" debate is a failure to identify "we". I hate "we". The word never refers to anything distinguishable in this kind of discussion (incidentally, the thing which first put me off Owen Jones was his relentless "we"ing).

But I don't believe there is any "society as a whole" which can improve, or can bear any kind of meaningful moral responsibility. Institutions can improve. There's evidence. Public discourse can improve. There's evidence. Outcomes for identifiable groups and classes can improve. Lots of evidence.

And there is absolutely no reason to assume that once improved things will stay improved, let alone keep getting better.

This was good:

reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/on-mothers-and-political-violence

I also enjoyed this interview, and went away to read various of her written pieces on UnHerd etc.

@cocoapopfan you said 'I think the philosopher John Gray said in an interview that contraception and dentistry were the only unambiguously good technological developments, I think he has a point.'

Harrington made the point towards the end that hormonal contraception is actually an ecological disaster.

Dentistry's use of antibiotics will contribute to the incredibly dangerous prospect of antibiotic resistance. There are always trade-offs.

Technological change, especially contraception, has been so important for women, that it’s hard not to see any other period of time than now as a much worse option. I mean it doesn’t matter how privileged you were if you were likely to end up doomed to a life of constant childbirth, and all the ramifications of that, including likely early death.

In general, though, technology changes but I’d agree with Mary Harrington there are almost always losers as well as winners. (I think the philosopher John Gray said in an interview that contraception and dentistry were the only unambiguously good technological developments, I think he has a point.)

It’s hard to claim our moral understanding improves. Look at how Darwinism, which maybe liberated some from the clutch of religion, was then distorted into social Darwinism which was used to justify Nazi eugenics. I think societies lurch around a lot and much depends on the underlying conditions. Belief in progress can itself be quite a dangerous thing, I mean look at so much of the smug left and their conviction they are on the “right side of history”.

@appalaxia Yes, there were terrible aspects of Ancient Greek society. But then they knew that too. Slaves were often taken as captives of war, which meant anyone could end up enslaved, and their literature is full of the terror and tragedy of what this meant, from Homer to Euripides. The historian Thucydides wrote about how the Athenian army, ie many of their male citizens, were seized in battle and put to work in the stone quarries of Sicily, where most of them died horribly. Of course Aristotle famously wrote a defence of slavery, but the fact he wrote it at all shows that he felt an element of doubt, or his society did, about slavery and how it can be made to fit with ethical precepts. (It’s a bad defence, even Aristotle couldn’t square the circle.) And the Greeks were very aware of how fragile everything was, for individuals and societies, maybe an insight which is dangerous to forget.

I remember speaking to a zoologist who disabused me of the idea that evolution was an upwards curve. It's either a random mutation that is more or less successful or possibly a response to environment, but it's not travelling towards anything, which I think is a subtle almost unconscious picture that many people have, at least I did.

SmokedDuck, just what I was going to say, except more eloquently and with references!

It is possible for humanity/societies to improve things and it has and does happen. The trouble is we often end up with an underlying idea that this betterment is natural, irreversible and inevitable. I think this subtle idea that we are on course for a utopian ideal can actually be deceptive and dangerous- this is where the idea of the wrong side of history comes from; in reality things are messy, go forward and back wards - in fact maybe the idea of forward and back is problematic- up and down? We respond to context and circumstance.

Are we confusing the arrow of time with the idea of an upwardness direction of progress? Am I making any sense at all?!

Will coffee and come back.

Ooh now i want to listen.

I don't really think Harrington is arguing against the idea that there can be some ways of like that are better than others, or more just than others - although that's always difficult to argue from a purely materialist perspective because it involves values. But in any case my sense is Harrington believes in such ideas.

I think what she is saying is that there is not some kind of inevitable movement of history toward that kind of justice, in some kind of Hegelian or Marxist sense, which may western people have a strong sense of being real, often without really articulating it - especially younger people.

As to whether we are better off morally - that's very difficult to say, since almost every age considers their values to be more or less correct, and they are always the culmination of a historical process. It always appears, whatever age you live in, that history has led people to the correct moral viewpoint.

But the question of trade-offs is important. I think we see it more as we age - changes in law or social practice often have consequences that go beyond what we thought, in part because they change people's way of thinking. That can create it's own problems. You can't always solve things like this, you may have to decide which problem you want to deal with.

Fabulous post @Aparallaxia.
I, for one, would be happy if you did go on.

"the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

That ^ is my personal lodestone. For "government", replace with individual/school/ business/ family.

Sorry, should have said…

‘We are not progressing towards them or moving away from them.

I really enjoy listening to her talk and she thinks for herself, unlike a lot of the current debate, but some of it just seems like she is poses intellectual problems that don’t really exist…

1. Feminism is tied to progress. Not really. It is just at looking at any kind of society and asking how can women have human rights here, just as we do with disabled people, children, older people etc. We are progressing towards those rights or moving away from them. They are not something we will one day stop thinking about when we finally get somewhere, anymore than we will get to some utopia where we don’t have to think about freedom of speech anymore.

1. We have put a taboo on evolutionary psychology and so don’t understand how men and women are different. Not true. What about anthropology, human ecology, geography? Plenty of research into material reality and men and women and why they do what they do. We don’t need to bring evolutionary psychology in.

So some of it is her reinventing the wheel.

But, she has really interesting things to say about the impact postmodernism had on her, on the internet, on the different ages of women. She is an amazing thinker on what is happening to people due to digital technology. I plan to read everything she writes.

Great post Aparallaxia.

Say what you like about Mary Harrington, and on balance I'm not a fan, but she does trigger decent debate. It's a delight to be thinking about posts like Aparallaxia's rather than about whether male people are women.

Thank you @Aparallaxia for that post. I found it educational and thought-provoking.

I disagree about moral progress. This does not mean that the evils you refer to have disappeared. But I think of what life was like in the Athenian democracy, say, the economy of which relied on slave-labour; no-one, anywhere, was saying slavery is wrong and we must end it. "Respectable" women were baby-machines; they lived in a separate part of the house, and men were ridiculously anxious about the possibility of their wives receiving lovers there and having babies by them that would be passed off as legitimate. Rape was basically considered an offence against the male guardian of a girl or woman, his rights of property in her. No-one was saying women should have the vote, women should have equal opportunities, women should have control over their own fertility. (The 'Lysistrata' is a comedy, not a documentary.) Unwanted babies were left on rubbish-heaps. There were no international rules about how to behave in war, about leaving civilians out if it, about the treatment of prisoners. And Athens was surrounded by states without even the rudimentary "democratic oversight" provided by the Athenian system—mainly hereditary autocracies.

Yes, people continue to behave abominably. But long decades, if not centuries, of voices calling them out, of selfless protest, of stubborn resistance, have produced some improvements, usually in the form of legislation, independent courts, and international agreements. These are not always effective. Proving someone did something in court is not easy. Convictions for rape in Britain are ridiculously low, still today—but where there has been change, it is for the better. Most people now regard rape as a brutal exercise of power, not an expression of love. Husbands no longer have the right to beat their wives or have sex with them whenever they want. Even in the late 70s/early 80s, when I worked for the Law Society which at the time adminsitered the civil legal aid scheme, it was rare to grant a wife aid to get a restraining order against and maintenance from her husband. It was only when the kids were in danger too that it became automatic. And it was generally accepted that she would go back to her abuser, because she had no-where else to go. The fact that we still need women's refuges is appalling. The fact that we have them at all is an ethical advance.

Again, in the Victorian era prostitution used to be understood as a choice driven by nymphomania coupled with moral degeneracy, not an economic necessity forced on poor girls and women. Women working in factories and mills weren't allowed any time off to nurse their babies, who at lunchtine were brought to them by their other children to be fed. The commonest operation at the Royal Free Children's Hospital in 1930 was breaking and re-setting the leg-bones of kids with rickets. This was both a technological and an ethical advance, set against a background of widespread pollution and malnutrition. But kids don't get rickets anymore in post-industrial countries, and that's a direct result of huge changes, enforced by the government since the 1950s, in how heat and power are generated. I look at photos of my home town in the 19th c. when it was the home of "King Cotton" and I wonder how anyone could have breathed that air for long. I was amongst the first generation of children to benefit from the clean air legislation.

But public health, including vaccinations, provision of sewers, provision of running water in homes, testing of air and water, cleaning of streets—all of these are not just technological advances. We have them not (just) because they can be done, but because people thought and still think they ought to be done. From John Snow to Jonas Salk and beyond, enough doctors and medical researchers have been driven by the desire to have people live longer, suffer less, and lead healthier lives.

The fact that we now have publicly-scrutinized, officially recognized medical qualifications, even if some doctors practise who shouldn't, is a massive advance on the time when even doctors who wanted to do good didn't know what the fuck they were doing and you had to choose on the basis of personal recommendations, anecdotes, and salesman's patter. The institutions that set up tests for who can practise and who can't are basing their decisions on the vast extension of medical and scientific knowledge since the 19th c. True, there are fraudulent and incompetent doctors. But the fact that we think we ought to have such standards at all is ultimately an ethical matter, not a technical one. We think we ought to be able control doctors' power over our bodies, not because we can (or can try to do so) but because we have accepted autonomy as an ethical ideal. And we think those ideals should be accepted by everyone, and many NGOs and even governments are trying to make that a reality. How is that not progress? It's progress to have people saying, that's wrong, and trying to do something about it, rather than thinking it's OK, it's God's will, it's unimportant, etc., or not even noticing it at all.

I could go on about how attitudes to war have changed since WW1, about the appearance of the legal ideas of crimes against humanity and of genocide after WW2, about the protections children in Europe enjoy in law, but this post is way too long already.

Vaccines are technological progress Aparallaxia not moral progress and you absolutely make the point that there has been no moral progress by your point about the existence of less developed, less rich, authoritarian and even more corrupt countries. Humanity has not got any better or any worse morally than we always has been.

We wouldn’t have a global pandemic now without the technological progress that we have made since we were gatherer/hunters, neither would we have the climate crisis so I agree with her that we make gains and losses.

I think when push came to shove she'd agree that her kid not dying before its 5th birthday of measles, whooping cough, TB, cholera, or smallpox is, well, progress. Also her own not dying in childbed. What would she say are compensations for those gifts? And they belong to almost everyone (or every woman) in the West. Those in less developed, less rich, even more authoritarian, even more corrupt countries, without access to vaccines or clean drinking water or flushing loos or education or a relatively uncorrupt judiciary or a vote that actually determines the winner of the election or or or, would say she's talking bollocks.

But, yes, only women can breastfeed. Humans cannot change sex. The Pope is still Catholic. She's right about all those.

As for family, I agree with George Carlin: the secret to a happy life is a large, close-knit, loving family in another city.

I definitely agree about moral progress. I don’t think that we have genuinely made moral progress since the beginning of humanity.

We’ve made technological progress constantly throughout the existence of humanity but as Mary suggests we continually make gains and losses as a result.

When reading classic literature or anthropology, or literature from other countries and cultures I am always struck by how much people are alike in every time and place.