Sebastian Morello joined UnHerd writer Mary Harrington for tea at her Shires home to discuss reactionary feminism, conservatism, cyborg theocracy, the future of the West, and her new book Feminism Against Progress.
Sebastian Morello: Under communism in the Eastern Bloc, individuals got used to having two personalities. At home—as long as one of your children wasn’t an informant—you could be yourself, and even mock the regime, but outside the home you had to be a good comrade. Under our regime, however, even though there appears to be widespread awareness that things are heading in the wrong direction (and have been for some time), one still has the experience of dining with friends or family and hearing the convictions of the mainstream media—the mouth of our regime—being repeated as dogmas.
I will give you an example. Recently, I went to the garden centre where I pick up my dog’s food. They were promoting a new dog food made of insects. I said that I wouldn’t feed my dog insects, to which the assistant replied, “Well, we’ll all be eating insects when meat is no longer available.” She said this as if it were an inevitability. The fact that one can go into a garden centre in rural Bedfordshire and be faced with Klaus Schwab’s latest thoughts indicates to me that there is far deeper trust in the globalist regime than we might have expected by this point.
Mary Harrington: The vast majority of people are just not interested in thinking seriously about big picture stuff. People really just want to be left alone. They want to focus on what arguably does matter: family life, friends, and getting by. No one really wants to think about geopolitics, apart from nerds. Obsessing about national politics is niche enough, let alone whether a globalist regime is going to make us eat insects. The fact that that’s a topic of open discourse is a sign that something is really wrong.
Do you think there is such a weak response to the emergence of a globalist regime because much of the Right is kept together not by shared moral commitments but by pragmatism?
There are all sorts of disagreements that have been bubbling just under the surface for a while now, many of which can be clearly seen online. But you’re not much of an online person, are you?
I’m not an online person at all. I’m a real world, embodied, incarnational sort of person.
I approve of that!
There seems to be an alliance between those who identify as traditionalists, in the broadest sense, and TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). They’ll affirm each other’s criticisms of the trans movement or what they perceive to be the grooming of children, but it seems to me that they can maintain this alliance by ignoring a lot of deeper moral and social commitments that they typically don’t share.
That’s true. There are some very bitter conflicts raging within the TERF tent. And then on the Right, among old school conservatives and trads, there is a real ambivalence about how much feminists can be trusted on any issue, or indeed to what extent they should be blamed for the chaotic situation we’re in now. These points are all bitterly contested on the internet.
Are these debates, insofar as they’re online, mostly taking place between young people?
By no means. A lot of the big dogs are my age or older, which is to say, they’re Generation X people.
You belong to that strange generation which is post-Boomer liberalism but pre- all that really aggressive cultural criticism that emerged with the Millennials.
Yes, there’s a weird little micro-generation, the Xennials, and I can spot them immediately on the internet just from the way they post online, and their angles on things.
What are the characteristics of Xennials?
It’s partly a set of cultural references, but what is most obvious is a deep-felt scepticism of digital culture, and a critical distance from digital culture. We’re young enough to be almost net-native, but we remember what things were like before the digital age.
And people of the next generation haven’t been able to develop a critical distance from digital technology because they grew up with it as an extension of themselves?
People under—I would say—thirty-five years old don’t see digital technology as something separate to critically engage with because they can’t remember the ‘before times.’
The generational issue fascinates me. I recurrently see a deep disparity between boomer conservatives and younger conservatives. Boomers look at phenomena like critical race theory, transgenderism, and all this revolutionary stuff, and they see infections on an otherwise healthy organism. Younger conservatives, on the other hand, think that Western civilisation itself is now rotten to the core. What boomer conservatives judge to be mere infections, young conservatives deem symptoms of a whole cancerous body.
I’ve noticed the same thing, especially at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando in 2021. After that event, I wrote about the gulf between ‘Conservative Inc.’ and ‘Conservative Ink.’ The latter are the guys who are thirty years old or younger. They have tattoos, are extremely online, stay up late drinking bourbon, and then wake up early to lift weights. Then there’s ‘Conservative Inc.’—they’re the legacy guys with the fusionist commitments and institutional power.
This isn’t just an aesthetic difference. Conservatism is undergoing a fundamental paradigm shift. Something really deep. There’s basically been a loss of faith: the younger conservatives believe that the West is over. It’s toast. And they’re right!
We’re at the beginning of a massive information revolution. The last time we had a change this big, its long-term consequence was the Thirty Years War. A lot of the paradigm shifts that we’re facing are inextricably bound up with this digital transformation. ‘Conservative Ink’ are, broadly speaking, net-natives. And they’re on the other side of an unbridgeable gulf from ‘Conservative Inc.’
Is ‘Conservative Ink’ more religious than ‘Conservative Inc.’?
I’m not sure, but ‘Conservative Ink’ is postmodern and post-liberal at a cellular level. They’re operating with an understanding that all politics is now post-liberal. I read a piece in Rolling Stone recently that was making the case for cancel culture. The writer basically argued that the digital transformation of society has enabled us to abandon the illusion of discursive and political neutrality, and that’s empowering voices that were not previously heard to exert power which was not previously possible. The writer’s conclusion: bite us. That’s how it is going to be from now on. You can like or dislike what he says we should do with that insight. But the basic insight is undeniably true.
By post-liberal, do you mean that we’re seeing the rise of coercion as the primary social and political determinate?
By post-liberal, I simply mean that the entire liberal paradigm is over, except within a few social circles and media pockets where people still adhere to its norms. But these are vanishing islands in a rising tide. Under the old paradigm, there was a belief that knowledge was separable from the knower, and thus one could stand outside something, so to speak, to view it objectively. With this, there was a belief that a dispassionate perspective on things was available, and desirable, and that civil discourse could be used to resolve conflicts. People believed that there were sufficient shared norms for civil discourse to be possible and for peaceful solutions to be found.
Isn’t there another aspect to liberalism, namely that it promised peace specifically by banishing to the private domain any commitment to transcendent goods? So, according to the liberal, one’s deepest religious and moral commitments ought to be deemed private matters, with public matters being concerned with the procurement of commodities and individual choice.
Now, we suddenly have a generation of people emerging in public life who are saying, “No, religious convictions, the goods of family life, virtue, human flourishing—these are things that we want to have a public conversation about.” Even the ‘woke’ crowd wants this conversation; they’re just providing different answers than the Right.
The ‘woke’ lot are not wrong about standpoint epistemology, they’re just too reductive about it, and they use the wrong metrics. They’re not wrong that it’s impossible to detach yourself entirely from your own background and perspective. And this is a paradigm shift that’s been accelerated by the decentralisation of authority in digital culture: personal authority now counts for more, as does being reflexive about your personal biases. If you want to have an impact now, it’s widely considered good practice and due diligence to acknowledge your own standpoint. I broadly agree with that. I think it’s a basic principle of intellectual hygiene to say: “I can only see things from my perspective and that means that I may have some blind spots.” In that respect, I’m a paid-up postmodernist.
This is the post-liberal shift in a nutshell. It says that we’re all implicated in what we’re dealing with, all of the time, and it’s just not possible to have a neutral public space. It follows from this that you cannot simply privatise moral goods. That follows logically from the acknowledgment that we’re all implicated in the mess of our condition. You can’t just say, “Well, I’m going to worry about myself, for my life is my business.” No, your life is everybody’s business. The question, then, is: which aspects of my life are whose business? And how and why, and who gets to say so? So, the ‘woke’ crowd are not entirely wrong to say that much of the public debate should orbit around questions of power. To say that everything is a question of power is far too reductive. That quickly takes things in a very nihilistic direction.
The big problem with the ‘woke’ movement, in fact, is that it’s not really postmodern. It’s largely a last attempt at modernism. It says, “If we can’t have a neutral shared public square, we’re just going to destroy all remaining shared meaning because that’s the only way we can all be free.” ‘Wokeness’ is, if you like, modernism’s final temper tantrum. But this temper tantrum, unfortunately, is now being institutionalised by HR departments.
The problem for the Right—or rather for whatever conservatism is rapidly morphing into under this new order—is that most of the boomer conservatives just don’t see what’s going on because, with few exceptions, they remain on the wrong side of the digital paradigm shift. They still think we can have a neutral public square, equality before the law, and so on. They don’t realise that you must take and use the mechanisms of power, which means being implicated in this mess. Neutral discourse just isn’t going to work anymore for the single reason that no one, apart from the boomers, believes in it anymore.
Things just aren’t the way they used to be. The battle lines are drawn completely differently. Just look at Compact Magazine. Sohrab Ahmari often brings together conservative observations with Marxist analyses of material conditions. This would have been unthinkable until very recently. Just this week, Compact published pieces by Peter Hitchens, Nick Land, and Slavoj Žižek in the same edition. That’s mind boggling. It speaks volumes about the direction in which things are heading.
One solution to the emerging chaos—one which has a certain attractiveness—is that which says we need to return to something like cottage economies. One sees this expressed online in the ‘cottage core’ aesthetic. People are playing with the romantic idea of recovering the family home, the settled life of the village, the privacy of domestic life, and so on. These seem like wholesome aspirations and may speak of a longing for an experience that has been taken away, but which every one of our ancestors would have enjoyed to some degree.
Well, perhaps we should talk about sci-fi versions of the right-wing future. There are basically three competing visions which I think have the most clarity. (We can ignore the boomer vision of the future, in which everything pretty much remains as it is, except that we enjoy infinite economic and material growth on a finite planet—that’s just self-evidently false.) So, what will the Right look like in 30 years?
There are those out there on the fringes of the internet Right who think that we’re going to end up with Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism, plus race wars. This vision of things says, broadly speaking, that we’re going to have a hyper-technologized super elite comprising a tiny number of people, and everyone else will face a strange mixture of subsistence farming and Mad Max. That’s one vision.
Then you have the tweedy distributists. They think that we can go back to tiny hill farms, and that we can do this without reducing the global population by about 90%. There are of course the eco-fascists who say we should reduce the world population, and that this would be the best way to both save the planet and a small fraction of the human species. This is not a view I endorse, obviously, but it is one that is taken up with enthusiasm by a subset of the online far-Right. There is a fascinating horseshoe between the far-Left eco-fascists and the far-Right eco-fascists out there in the internet Badlands. At one edge of this group, you’ll find tweedy distributists, at another edge, the eco-fascists, and these converge on the proposal of a return to subsistence agrarianism—with or without neo-feudalism, and with or without an advanced technological superstratum over the top.
Then, scenario number three: a kind of space fascism. In this scenario, technology just continues to advance, but somewhere along the way we leave behind democratic arrangements, and then we’re all ruled in network states by assorted techno-despots. Technology eventually becomes so advanced that we colonise other planets, and technological innovation just goes on forever, becoming ever more sophisticated. And if I understand this view correctly, it’s right-wing because it’s vaguely imperial and hierarchical and dismissive of democracy.
These three visions of the future overlap, but there are very substantive points of disagreement between and within them. The common thread of ambivalence can be found running through the issue of technology. What is the relation of the Right to technology? Are we going for a Prometheanism, in which we can chemically engineer races of both subhumans and superhumans? Or is this forbidden, and if so why?
All those visions, apart from the romantic agrarianism we touched upon, entail a whole or partial conciliation with the ongoing technologization of our civilisation. But it seems to me that what characterises the young Right today is that they think the conflation of technological innovation and moral progress is mistaken.
Given that you’re not a very online person, it’s likely that you’re just not encountering the young right-wingers who do link technological innovation with a positive vision, and who think that this can be a right-wing position. Look at the online Anglo-Futurist aesthetic: giant interplanetary ships, plus colonialism, plus colossal space statues of Peter Hitchens perhaps. World War II meets sci-fi. The guys that love that stuff are really up for a space epic with Churchillian characteristics.
You’re not painting a happy future for conservatism, if these are the major themes in the minds of young conservatives. What about those who think that there is a ‘great awakening’ happening, and that soon ‘the people’ will rise up against the globalists?
But even if there were some ‘great awakening’ taking place, so what? If such a thing is happening now, it doesn’t yet have any teeth. It’s just talk and memes on the internet.
Well, changes in consciousness can considerably change the political landscape. Just look at the Reformation and the French Revolution. I don’t think these changes were for the better, but nonetheless these were transformative shifts due to widespread changes in consciousness.
Obviously, I wouldn’t write every day and try to convince people of a new way of seeing things, if I didn’t believe that it was possible to change the paradigm on a very large scale, with enough effort, and if you have the right people involved. So, I’m not a complete ‘doomer.’ And yes, there may be a massive change, and a change for the better. But I don’t think we’ll see that in our lifetime. I do what I do because I’m trying to take the long view.
Then let’s talk about your work as a writer, specifically your new book, Feminism Against Progress. A major theme of your writing recently has been what you call the ‘war on relationships.’ Your exploration of this theme has fascinated me since I first encountered it, and it overlaps with a lot of the philosophical work I’ve done over the past few years on the human being/human person distinction. In my own writings, I characterise modernity per se as a sort of ‘war on relationships,’ to use your phrase. Do you continue to explore this theme in your new book?
I think that the war on relationships is the defining characteristic of what I call ‘cyborg theocracy.’ It’s a borrowed meme, but it’s expressive of so much I see happening around us. What I mean by ‘cyborg theocracy’ is the moral and political order which emerges from the belief that we are most emancipated when our condition of freedom is underwritten by technology. A central theme of Feminism Against Progress concerns the extent to which that order has emerged through the structural reliance of post-1960s feminism on the technologies of birth control and abortion.
Feminism has gone from seeing these technologies as grave and necessary to grant women a measure of respite from major physiological vulnerabilities to something that is now demanded on a quasi-theological basis. Watch the energy put into protesting in favour of greater access to these technologies. People no longer say that these are ‘necessary evils’ that might mitigate worse evils. The whole thing about “safe, legal, and rare” is simply not the stance anymore. Abortion now has a sacramental quality to it, which I find deeply disturbing.
This ‘sacrament’ serves to underline the conviction that my freedom is so important that it can be bought even at the expense of those most vulnerable and in need of care. It’s about the most extreme statement one could make in favour of individual autonomy, and I think that’s why it’s become ‘holy’ to the modern world. In fact, the Satanic Temple in the United States ritualised abortion as a sacramental offering to the condition of radical autonomy, a condition which is now worshiped as the central—and perhaps only—good.
I’ve really wrestled with these ideas. I’m not a Roman Catholic; I come from liberal, Left-leaning, feminist origins. I’ve taken it for granted until quite recently that ‘safe, legal, and rare’ was an appropriate stance to hold on the issue of abortion. But I’ve come very reluctantly to the conclusion that the structural, metaphysical impact of these technologies—birth control and abortion—have been profoundly anti-women.
If you take as your fundamental premise a vision of freedom and selfhood that radically atomises oneself, as a woman—for all people, but especially for women—that sets one at odds with one’s own embodied existence. A culture that accepts the liberal worldview, namely that the individual is essentially an autonomous, self-authoring subject, in many ways structurally places women at a disadvantage. That whole paradigm simply doesn’t work if you’re a mother.
I started on the road to writing my book when I began to consider what had happened to my liberalism when I became a mother: I saw that the ideology of the autonomous subject makes no sense in the context of motherhood. As a mother, you wake up moments before your baby wakes to feed, because you’re responding to your baby’s needs before your baby even has those needs. Motherhood completely rewires your brain, and you can no longer exist as a totally separate person. For a mother, the idea that you can just go back to the condition of a liberal, autonomous subject—or that it would even be desirable to do so—is nonsense. If you insist on returning to the idea of yourself as a liberal, autonomous subject, as a woman you can only do that by introducing technological interventions to buttress that vision of yourself, because otherwise it is increasingly revealed to be false.
Where we go from here is much more difficult to say. I’m not convinced that we can solve the problem that these technologies have created by just bringing down the banhammer. Nicolae Ceaușescu tried that in Romania, and that certainly didn’t create a pronatalist utopia, but something quite nightmarish.
Do you think what you are saying is true, though in a different way, for men as well?
Yes, I would say so. But the falseness of liberal anthropology is more obvious for women, and it’s easier to point at how it’s false if you’re a woman.
The falseness of that anthropology is revealed in a more embodied way for women, perhaps. But I recall having this thought, when I learned that I was going to be a father for the first time, that the degree to which my wife and child would flourish would largely depend on the extent to which I worked hard. It was as if, for the first time in my life, I became—as the basic fact of my identity—a truly accountable person. The corollary of that thought was the imperative to grow up really, really quickly.
As a man, it seems to me that if you can just contracept into your thirties or forties, and require your lovers to have abortions if they get pregnant, you can perpetuate an adolescence of mind. That may be one of the gravely deleterious effects that these technologies have had on the male psyche: they have created a generation of overgrown children.
Yes, I think that’s true. I have been thinking, since you said it a moment ago, about your claim that modernity is a war on relationships—that this is the real essence of modernity. In my book I try to explore many ways in which our so-called emancipation by technology functions within the context of a war on relationships. My book begins with an analysis of the war on the relationships between men and women, how we form such relationships and what they typically look like. You have just outlined some of what happens there: once you take the consequentiality out of sex, it becomes a meaningless leisure activity, and we can cease to grow as persons.
Here’s the overarching thesis of my book: we have taken the technologies of enclosure and marketisation, which were imposed on England’s commons with the Inclosure Acts in the 18th and 19th centuries, and since the contraceptive era we have applied those same technologies of enclosure within the human body—and within the human soul, too. This is what defines the cyborg era.
You’re a Jacobite romantic like me! You’re arguing that this cyborg era is directly downstream from the Whiggish, rapacious behaviour of the last few centuries.
What is distinctive about our era, the cyborg era, is that it marked a turn away from enclosure and marketisation out there in the world—with a focus on mineral, plant, and animal resources—and a turn inward of that dynamic of enclosure and marketisation to human culture, and ultimately the human body.
My governing thesis is that once you use technology to liberate some domain of human activity from its givens—for example, by enclosing the commons and privatising them as a resource that can be bought, sold, and exploited—you might get the dividends of emancipation and economic growth, but then the market moves in. You don’t get rid of the givens that you were trying to abolish, you just reorder them to the market, subjecting them to the logic of supply and demand.
So, what I see happening in the cyborg era is a series of efforts to abolish human nature altogether through technology. This hasn’t actually succeeded in abolishing human nature at all, but has merely reordered human nature to the market, frustrating it in the process, leaving it neutered and commodified. Look what happens to sex once you use technology to liberate it from its own consequences and reorder it to the market. Men and women’s distinct sexual roles haven’t actually gone away just because they’re now contracepted, nor have their distinct mating habits, but these roles and habits have been commodified, marketed, and have become abusive, adversarial, and aggressively commercialised.
Within that dynamic, sometimes people exploit themselves and sometimes people find themselves exploited, with their bodies pressed into services, or with their desires leveraged so they become porn consumers. One can point to countless other examples. In any case, this dynamic is generally hostile and exploitative. And in the course of this dynamic, trust, solidarity, and mutual complementarity are lost. That’s the war on relationships between men and women. That war leads to another war on the relationship between mother and child. And that war leads to a final war with our own bodies.
Ground zero of the cyborg theocracy is the abolition of any possible integration with our own bodies. That’s exactly what the whole transgender phenomenon is about. It’s not a malign conspiracy. They’re more like canaries in the coalmine: people so radically dissociated from their own bodies that they’ve come to believe that they can only reach any sense of fulfilment by remodelling their bodies to bring them in line with identities which they imagine they’ve concocted ex nihilo, but which more often than not are the products of some f*cked up online Girardian mimesis. It’s as though the fantasy is ultimately to de-materialise their bodies altogether and turn them into pure information, and then squeeze them this way and that as if they were made of plasticine. Some express this openly, as though such an ability to re-inscribe their own bodies would somehow be liberatory and a satisfaction of everyone’s deepest desire.
It’s an illusion, though. The fruit of desire is always more desire: desire desires desire—as (I think) Jacques Lacan said. What they will end up with is a never-ending hunger, and the only people who benefit are the surgeons. And downstream from the surgeons are the people who stand to benefit from the deregulation of human nature, namely Big Biotech. There will never be public acceptance of human-pig chimeras until we’ve completely delegitimised the idea that there exists a human normal. The idea that humans have a moral and civil right to remodel their bodies because of some identity claim is a huge step towards abolishing altogether the notion of a human normal. Now, only ‘deplorables’ believe that human nature exists, and such discrediting of the idea of human nature is an essential precondition for Big Biotech advancing further than it has already.
And really, this signals the way we’ve now liquefied everything to the point at which there’s nothing left to liquefy—or at least I hope there isn’t. That’s why I feel uncomfortable with the term ‘conservatism.’ People who call themselves conservatives don’t seem to have noticed that there’s nothing left to conserve. Such people must either live in a bubble or maintain some kind of extreme cognitive dissonance. Rather than conservatives, they might call themselves ‘reconstructionists.’ But the question is: what should we build? We need to recover a sense of history, study the Western Canon, and also be open to serendipity. That’s how we’ll start to rebuild. We’ve spent years trying to liquefy human nature, and we haven’t fully succeeded. They’ll keep trying, and things will get progressively more ghoulish, but in the end they’ll never be able to do it totally.
But you seem to be adopting a sort of tabula rasa mentality, in which it’s thought that we can just reconstruct a shared and settled way of life from scratch, as if such things aren’t developed and accumulated over centuries—handed down or not enjoyed at all.
Well, I think our situation is a bit like living in a city that’s been bombed. Stumbling about in the wreckage, occasionally you may find a perfectly preserved Louis XV chair in a heap of smoking rubble. When you find one of those, you should cling to it. But the whole way of life that gave rise to that magnificent chair no longer exists, and there’s no bringing it back.
Our era is another dark age?
Well, we certainly need to bring the monasteries back! We need monasteries, in some form or another. We’re in a barbarian age—that’s clear. I’m not, though, in agreement with people who think that the American empire is about to collapse. On the contrary, I think the American empire is only just beginning. The American republic is ending, but the American empire is only just getting going.
You mean that it’s now the age of the American Caesars?
Yes, but Caesar will be an artificial intelligence. What is rising is an Empire of the Swarm, and we’re not going to see the end of this empire for many generations. Those who think that America is in decline are only looking at America as a republic. The republic is on its deathbed; the empire is just beginning.
So that’s cyborg theocracy in the form of empire?
Yes, and I think it’s up to women to fight back, and that starts with women reclaiming their own bodies. That must be the first step to deconstructing imperial cyborg theocracy. Women were the first people to concede ground to the cyborg theocracy by welcoming the contraceptive revolution. If there were a women-led fight back against the technologization of women’s bodies, it might have a chance at succeeding as a genuine grassroots movement. It’s already happening: there are young women pushing back against the routine imposition of the contraceptive pill, for example. These aren’t necessarily conservative or religious women; many are otherwise quite liberal. But these young women are saying, “You put me on this chemical when I was 12 years old, and now I’ve just come off it at the age of 25 and I’ve undergone a complete personality change; what the f*ck did you do to me?” They’re really angry about this.
So, we need a grassroots movement. But we also need a concrete game plan for taking and using power at a higher level. Much of this conversation needs to be elevated out of the discursive realm and into the realm where these issues are actually settled. Things aren’t settled at the level of electoral politics anymore, but considerably upstream of that, at the level of NGOs and transnational corporations.
Out of the hands of the average citizen …
Yes, completely. That’s a done deal. It’s structural, and there’s no reversing it now.
You say that women need to fight back against cyborg theocracy. But men are also emasculated by the regime you’ve described. Masculine predispositions of aggression and competitiveness are routinely derided as unacceptable. Many men are fed up with this, but they’re also repulsed by the Andrew Tate response to this attack on masculinity.
As a woman, I want to say to other women: back the f*ck off! Let men be men. Good men are not formed by women but by other men, in a competitive and hierarchical dynamic which is both opaque and deeply uncomfortable for most women. The only way that we’re going to increase the supply of good men is by stepping back and letting that dynamic exist to a far greater extent than it currently does. There are plenty of articles out there about the mental health crisis among men, but invariably the prescription is that men should behave more like women and then perhaps they’d be less miserable. That’s getting it completely backwards. The reason men are miserable is because they are told not to socialise like men.
Sometimes, when I’m out running, I see a field in which four or five men with metal detectors are walking about. They’re usually hundreds of metres from one another, saying nothing, but they’re nonetheless communing. That’s them socialising. They might occasionally grunt at one another, and probably they’ll exchange a few words afterwards, but something deep is happening there on a frequency that is totally inaccessible to me.
Unless women are prepared to take a step back, and let men have their own spaces where they can just be themselves, men are going to get more miserable, lonelier, more resentful, and then more hostile towards women. There is, I think, a strong feminist case for women just stepping back. Otherwise, we don’t stand a chance of ever recovering solidarity between the sexes, which is a vital precondition for surviving cyborg theocracy together, as embodied human persons.
