Mary Harrington: I needed to make a feminist case against progressivism

We live in a time of mounting cultural confusion. Social roles are in flux. Technology fragments our attention. And the idea of human nature itself is up for debate.

Beneath our daily political debates lies a deeper crisis: a broken picture of the basic elements of the world and our place in it.

Are we just collections of small parts, infinitely malleable and divisible – ‘meat lego’, as our guest would call it – ready to be arranged and rearranged through technology in the pursuit of individual aims, and all aspects of life commodified in the pursuit? Or, are we more embodied and interdependent than we like to think?

Until we grapple with some basic questions about the worldviews animating our lives – like how we see the role of individuals and their connections and responsibilities to the broader society – many of our most important political debates—from gender to productivity, family to freedom—will keep missing the mark.

To offer her perspective on these issues, Mary Harrington joins Inside Policy Talks. Harrington is a columnist at UnHerd and the author of Feminism Against Progress. She's one of the most incisive voices challenging core aspects of the dominant modern western worldview – from its assumptions about autonomy and equality, to its blind spots around embodiment, gender, and the limits of technology.

On the podcast, she tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at MLI, that despite the fact that most women become mothers, woman are told that "the core sort of desiderata of feminism are a set of aspirations which ... conceptually exclude this whole domain of experience." She said that led her to "questioning the idea of liberal individualism," including "the feminist difficulties with it" and "how well it fits with being a physically embodied person."