PANEL: SEXUAL REVOLUTION | Louise Perry, Jordan Peterson, Mary Harrington, Stephen Blackwood

so we're well set up for this conversation so I'm going to outline a proposition to you and then we'll we'll start the discussion so in when when n announced the death of God in the late 1800s he said we will have to create our own values we will have to create our own values and I suppose one rejoinder to that is out of what and also what do you mean by we precisely and so part of what we've heard in the uh previous discussions in this session is is a a a hinting toward something which is that that vision of the untrammeled isolated atomistic liberal individual pursuing their own values is really indistinguishable from something approximating an immature immediate gratification hedonistic satiation model of the self right because what what seem seems to have happened is that the values that we ended up creating were the same values that drive a 2-year-old and and I mean that I actually mean that technically is that two-year-olds pursue their own hedonistic whims without higher order integration and the pro and you might say well what's the problem with that the problem with that is well two-year-olds in the absence of a more sophisticated ethic just die right it's not a sustainable mode of being and so and I think all of the work that the work that all three of you do pertains to that topic and Louise maybe we'll start with you you you've written against the sexual Revolution now I presume by that you don't mean against sex you mean against against what and for what as an alternative so I mean I would Define the sexual revolution in two ways you know one of it one aspect of it is material it's the introduction of the pill it's all the technological changes that we've seen over the over the course of 20th and 21st centuries that has transformed our lives and transformed gender relations it's also ideological though and I think this is this is the the meat of what we're talking about it I think that the the neatest way of understanding the ideology of the sexual Revolution is the rejection of traditional sexual Norms the idea that we can just throw them out the window and have one very simple rule which is that everyone should be able to consent and then apart from that you sort of make it up as you go along and I think what we discovered is that that doesn't work that actually I there was a line actually a reader sent to me from all places from a um a book about wine making it would be a very politically explosive thing to say in any other context but in a book about wine making you can say it and the line was Traditions are experiments that worked MH and I think what we've found from having rejected all of the sexual norms and laws of past is that they were there for a reason and I mean I argued very um uh strongly in my book and in my work that uh the winners of the sexual Revolution have not been women in general maybe some individuals you know I think some I think some individual men have definitely done well at of the sexual Revolution although not all men you know it's a complicated story when we're talking about men and women but um I think what's clearly true is that the great Losers of the sexual Revolution have been children so so one of the things one of the things we might in an effort to tie these sorts of things together one of the things we might point out is that that that offer of unlimited sexual gratification I think to some degree you could understand the desire for that and the wish for that and the hope that that might be true as a consequence say of the introduction of the birth control pill because it put forward to us the proposition perhaps that sex sexuality could be divorced sexual pleasure could be divorced from from everything except sexual pleasure but the consequences of that haven't been what has been intended intended so you say you're you're claiming in your response that children and women in particular have not been the winners and and so that means something like the sacrifice of their medium to long-term well-being for the short-term gratification you said maybe of a tiny minority of men yeah what we know too that the men who engage in what are called short-term mating strategies so that would be many women sequential with no relationship also tend to be Psychopathic Machiavellian narcissistic and sadistic that's what the CL I'm telling you that's what the clinical literature indicates and so not only are the winners a very tiny minority of men let's say but they're exactly the men that we wouldn't want to have win what what do you see the price that children and women have paid 50% of children in this city will reach the age of 15 not living with their biological fathers right so they've lost their so that means they've lost the good men so you can say the good men have been sacrificed to the predatory psychopath yes I think what culture does what good what good culture does is it recognizes the fact that as as as animals we are quite short-termist that you know sparkly things dangle before us are very alluring and that instinct towards making short-term decisions is is one that we all fall into you know not just when we're not just when we're two right when we're adults that's all too easy to do what good culture does is it channels our instincts in the best possible Direction and encourages us to make decisions that are good for us long term and also good for our descendants long term and I think that's exactly what we're not doing right now with our current sex so there's an implicit definition of the best there Mary you've written a fair bit about your dis dissatisfaction with a kind of mindless conception of progress we heard progress celebrated as a concept this morning but you're concerned about um misapprehended progress I suppose and also about technological progress def technology and pro technology being conflated with progress that's right um I mean te the Technologies of the sexual Revolution are the foundation on which we base the illusion that we can escape from traditional sexual Norms because they do go some considerable way to flattening the the fundamental differences between the sexist which are what produced those Norms I mean if you think that if you think the what what's now called the sexual double standard really arose out of the fundamental asymmetry in who gets pregnant you know the idea that we women are punished more heavily for having sex outside marriage um comes straightforwardly from the fact that it's women who get pregnant and and fatherless babies are everybody's problem you know they're not just um they're not just something which can be pmed off on an individual so there's a there are real in absent reliable contraception there are real practical problems which however unfairly were managed by these asymmetrical social norms around who who Who's allowed to do what and with who um and then they and then birth control semi Fairly reliable birth control comes along and suddenly it seems as though we don't we don't need those we don't need those constraints anymore because actually women can have sex just like men as it turns out and as Louise has written so persuasively in in fact it doesn't quite work out like that and in fact it's there there are as many negatives as there are positives to that that apparent increase in Freedom um but I think the point I made in feminism against progress is that these these supposedly liberatory Technologies the the sexual Revolution isn't the first application of them in fact since the beginning of modernity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we've been using technology to overcome the apparent limits of The Human Condition we've been using those to expand how quickly we can travel how fast you know what how much energy we can put through how comfortably we can live you know a billion and one different ways that we've changed our our state our condition through through the use of Technologies and seem to escape what were previously understood as given limits of our human State um the the sexual Revolution is distinctive because that was the point at which we turned those Technologies inward to the human body you know in that sense I see the sexual Revolution more accurately as the transhumanist revolution that was the the 19 we we're 50 years into the transhumanist Revolution and we've been we've been living in that world for all of that time to me you know if if you look at how how it's going I have some questions about how well it's how well it's contributing to human flourishing at this point and I feel on you know I heard some very enthusiastic words about progress this morning and I would I would challenge everybody here to think to try and think as concretely as possible about what we what we really mean when we mean when we say progress and what we really mean do we just mean more more Freedom underwritten by technology because I would put it to you based on the evidence from the sexual 50 years of transhumanist Revolution that it comes with as many downsides as costs and I think the challenge we face now is to try and try and grapple with our Technologies and the and the apparent freedoms they give us such as to be able to reorder those Technologies to human flourishing rather than to Bear individual liberty so maybe I'll get you and Louise to comment to comment on this so so you made a case and I think it's a case that everyone can appreciate is that since the radical transformations of the technological Revolution we have been freed from what appear to be some of the more onerous constraints that were placed upon us by brute necessity but both of you seem to be making a case that there are limits to how much we wanted maybe you could put it this way there are limits to how much we actually want to transcend our limits because some of the things that we might perceive as limits so those might be limits on unbridled sexual Freedom aren't limits they turn out to be actually uh features that we want to keep and so how do you we'll start with you how do you how is it that you've been able to discriminate between those aspects of the technological Revolution that might have been beneficial to people and those elements where you know we're pushing against limits we actually don't want to trans send know so so I guess that's it's a Live question for me all the time honestly Jordan and I would certainly not be confident in saying I always get it right I mean I'm far too addicted to Twitter for example you know far you know I'm fully I'm a fully paid up cyborg in that sense um but the I I mean an example I often give of where I think where where I see particularly young women using Technologies in ways which could potentially be more more aligned with human nature as as it really is rather than as we as we want to imagine it being is for examp in using using digital technology to support natural Family Planning and to me that seems that seems a powerful way I mean there there are a huge number there are there are a number there are platforms and Technologies out there which enable women to attune to their natural cycles and and to manage their fertility um without having to interfere using chemicals or you know other artificial means and and there are great I've spoken to a great many women who report feeling more in tune with themselves more more align with their with their natural cycles and and no longer affected by the by the the the the mood altering impacts for example of oral contraceptives so that's one example of how how we might approach it but but really I think the the the question behind your question is what is a human yeah you know that's the question we need to answer if we're going to if we're going to make any any sort of attempt at at grappling where we need to step back from technology and where we can actually you support our flourishing with it so Louise it seems I don't want to misread what what you've done and so tell me if I am but it seems to me that maybe in the early 1960s we flirted with the idea that sex could sex could be reduced to sexual pleasure and that in consequence it could be divorced from from Love and from children let's say and maybe what you're pointing to is the fact that that's actually not a separation first of all if we make that separation the whole Enterprise comes to a collapse you know like I think it's 30% of Japanese young people under 30 are now virgins by the way so we' kind of dispensed with the notion of sex as such but it may also be that it turns out that if we start to become conscious of this that we don't want to divorce sex from Love and reproduction we want to optimize their balance you're pointing to that with this alternate use of technology so I I maybe you could make a comment or two about that proposition I mean I think that one of the things that we discovered um from the the rapid changes it technologically has brought to our lives is we still basically have Stone Age brains you know our species spent 95% of its history uh in Hunter Gathering mode right our first and most successful adaptation there are many important ways in which our minds have not been able to keep Pace with technology the pill is a great example of that the pill has has existed in our in our in our in our lives you know in terms of a species for all five minutes is incredibly new thing and the thing that I continually find from talking to with women who have tried their darnest to have sex like men to pretend that these differences don't exist is that it makes them utterly miserable mhh 99% of the time it makes it naturally miserable I'd say the same thing I mean I always think of that um something a friend told me about someone who knows who um decided with his wife to experiment with polyamory right having multiple partners having convinced themselves that all this monogamy stuff was just oldfashioned nonsense whatever who cares and the first time he um his wife had sex with another man and he knew that this is what was happening he found himself vomiting on the floor of his bathroom because he had tried so hard to override his supposedly socialized ideas about monogamy and so on he tried so hard to override them and actually in the end he couldn't at a gut literally at a gut level he couldn't do that and I think that that is once you see that in Modern Life this these these various ways in which our environments are are Mal adapted to our instincts you see it everywhere and the the task we have now I suppose is trying to I mean you can't uninvent the pill it's not going to happen the advice I give to women is to behave as if the pill doesn't exist and you will probably make better sexual decisions if you're having sex with someone on the condition that he absolutely does not become the father of your children that's probably a really good indication that you shouldn't be having sex with him you [Applause] know so there is scope for us to be making different decisions within the very tight constraints in which we find ourselves and accepting the existence of technology and also accepting that we don't actually have to use it but the trade-offs are painful you know Stephen um I'm going to ask you two questions that are united the first one very difficult I would say is because um a transhumanist skeptic listening to this conversation might say to Louise for example well why don't don't we engineer ourselves to override the disgust response that the gentleman who delivered his wife into the hands of some reprobate experienced right what well because maybe we could re-engineer ourselves so that we would have no guilt about the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure and so and then I guess I'd align that with another question I know that's dear to your heart which is your the educational Enterprise that you're engaged in is designed to inculcate in its students or to guide them towards the the as Bishop Baron pointed out the the um embodiment of a higher order set of Virtues and so we could subordinate our biology to our transhumanist technology and live for Hedon hedonistic pleasure I don't think you think that's a good idea why is it not a good idea and and what would you propose as a better story let's say well let's just say as a as as a starting point that uh human nature is not a construct we are some would say created others would say evolved as self-conscious creatures that means that that any culture that cannot enable us to realize ourselves in a way that we're living lives that we ourselves regard as worth living has failed from the most basic standpoint of heav human evolution and so we're living right now in a culture clearly that is not facilitating that realization in a deep sense and if human meaning were something you could simply create a construct well you just you know go home in the weekend and make a whole bunch of it and you'd have enough to live on for the rest of your life that's not how it happens that happens by locating yourself within some frame of genuinely Transcendent things to which you give your life and and that's that's why fundamentally it's a mistake to think that freedom and responsibility are opposed because there's no substantial account of what freedom is that isn't realized in the real world in relation to difficult things so if you think about anyone that you've really admired or loved your mother from his whether it's from a person in your life who has influenced you or anyone from history that you really admire well they've substant they've made substantial and difficult commitments and very often those things were not arbitrary they they were they were growing in you might say the determined soil they were already in you know their whether that's their sex their time in history their family their their political cultural moment and and they they Rose to the occasion of finding their freedom in that and so you know a culture is really just the soil we're growing in that's that's really cool to us in the Latin so culture is really just the soil we're growing in and the question is we've talked a lot about human beings made in the image of God well what does it mean to have a culture that enables young people and not only the young but young people in particular to think that is actually true of them I mean Jonathan height told us yesterday about the leading indicators of social media and the ways in which it just it actually you might say communicates a profound nihilism to the young what does it mean to Pro to to posit to create an alternative to that to have a culture in which you know let's just say quickly that you can have an acorn that falls on bad soil it's contaminated there's no water there's there's no exposure to Sun it can't become what it is and I think the big question we facing at ARC and in our culture at at large is precisely how we can realize the Transcendent dignity and free nature of the human being and and certainly at Ralston College what we find is that you know you don't have to persuade the young people that they should be seeking alternatives to to nihilism they are profoundly committed to that already they are they they come to us in in thousands seeking ways of discovering their true nature and living it out in a way in the world that is profoundly meaningful they're seeking truth beauty goodness freedom justice Redemption all of these things and it's as if we're living in a time in which which you know the grocery stores had no food and we can talk about oh the food chain and what happened and what were the problems and so on we've just got to go out there and you know plant some Orchards and some farms and give give the young the things they need to nourish their own own Souls such that they can realize what is in them already so I just maybe I'll make one comment on this from a neurological perspective let's say we talked a little bit about Child Development today you know as the as the brain matures and this is actually what the higher reaches of the brain are are for when you're born you're under the primary influence of your your basic emotions and your basic motivations and so you are a programmed hedonistic organism from day one and what happens as you mature and the the the the the more sophisticated brain areas are trained in in the particulars of the civilization is that those lower order hedonic whims don't get inhibited they get integrated and they get integrated into a mode of app apprehending the world and behaving in the world that enables those underlying impulsive whims to also get gratification but in a way that isn't self-destructive and in a way that can be United with everyone else you know so there's there's no utility in pursuing your own subjective self-gratification if that means that everyone hates you and won't have anything to do with you because it won't even result in the gratification of your own subjective desire and so one of the things we we can know I think now I think the scientific enterpris has moved to this point is that there is no difference between the claim that maturation involves the activation of the more recently developed neurological systems and that human beings move towards lower order values towards higher order values and that there is a rank ordering of values from lower to higher not least physiologically practically philosophically and theologically and your the work of both of you also seems to indicate I would say that we make a dreadful and culture undoing mistake if we Elevate the the the impulsive vices to the highest possible place and so maybe we'll end and gratify our hedonic desires at lunch to the degree that's necessary before we turn our attention to higher order things once again thank you very much [Applause] everyone

Channel: Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

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Id: 873SGJYfp6s

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023