Read the full transcript of a panel discussion titled “Sexual Revolution” At ARC 2023: Sexual Revolution [Oct 31, 2023]. Participating on the panel are: Louise Perry, Jordan Peterson, Mary Harrington, Stephen Blackwood.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: So, we’re well set up for this conversation, so I’m going to outline a proposition to you and then we’ll start the discussion. So, when Nietzsche 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 previous discussions in this session is a hinting towards 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 seems to have happened is that the values that we ended up creating were the same values that drive a two-year-old. And I mean that, I actually mean that technically, is that two-year-olds pursue their own hedonistic whims without higher order integration. 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. It’s not a sustainable mode of being. And I think all of the work that all three of you do pertains to that topic. Louise, maybe we’ll start with you. You’ve written against the sexual revolution. Now, I presume by that you don’t mean against sex, you mean against what and for what as an alternative.
The Sexual Revolution and Its Consequences
LOUISE PERRY: So, I mean, I would define the sexual revolution in two ways. 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 course of the 20th and 21st century that has transformed our lives and transformed gender relations. It’s also ideological, though, and I think this is the meat of what we’re talking about. I think that 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’ve discovered is that that doesn’t work.
There was a line actually a reader sent to me from all places from a book about winemaking. It would be a very politically explosive thing to say in any other context, but in a book about winemaking you can say it, and the line was, “traditions are experiments that worked.” And I think what we’ve found from having rejected all of the sexual norms and laws of the past is that they were there for a reason. And I argued very strongly in my book and in my work that the winners of the sexual revolution have not been women in general, maybe some individuals. I think some individual men have definitely done well out of the sexual revolution, although not all men. It’s a complicated story when we’re talking about men and women, but I think what’s clearly true is that the great losers of the sexual revolution have been children.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: So 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 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 sexuality could be divorced, sexual pleasure could be divorced from everything except sexual pleasure, but the consequences of that haven’t been what has been intended. So you say, you’re claiming in your response that children and women in particular have not been the winners, 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.
We know, too, that the men who engage in what are called short-term mating strategies, so that would be many women sequentially with no relationship, also tend to be psychopathic, Machiavellian, narcissistic, and sadistic. I’m telling you, that’s what the clinical literature indicates. 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 do you see the price that children and women have paid?
LOUISE PERRY: 50% of children in this city will reach the age of 15 not living with their biological fathers. Right, so that means they’ve lost the good men, so you can say the good men have been sacrificed to the predatory psychopaths. Yes, I think what culture does, what good culture does, is it recognizes the fact that as animals we are quite short-termists, that sparkly things dangled before us are very alluring, and that instinct towards making short-term decisions is one that we all fall into, 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 cultural culture. So there’s an implicit definition of the best there.
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Mary, you’ve written a fair bit about your dissatisfaction with a kind of mindless conception of progress.
We heard progress celebrated as a concept this morning, but you’re concerned about misapprehended progress, I suppose, and also about technological progress, technology, and technology being conflated with progress.
MARY HARRINGTON: That’s right. I mean, 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 fundamental differences between the sexes, which are what produce those norms. I mean, if you think that what’s now called the sexual double standard really arose out of the fundamental asymmetry in who gets pregnant. You know, the idea that women are punished more heavily for having sex outside marriage comes straightforwardly from the fact that it’s women who get pregnant, and fatherless babies are everybody’s problem.
You know, they’re not just something which can be palmed off on an individual. So in absent reliable contraception, there are real practical problems, which, however unfairly, were managed by these asymmetrical social norms around who’s allowed to do what and with who.
And then birth control, fairly reliable birth control comes along, and suddenly it seems as though 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 fact it doesn’t quite work out like that, and in fact there are as many negatives as there are positives to that apparent increase in freedom. But the point I made in “Feminism Against Progress” is that these supposedly liberatory technologies, 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, 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 state, our condition, through the use of technologies and seem to escape what were previously understood as given limits of our human state. The sexual revolution is distinctive because that was the point at which we turned those technologies inward to the human body. In that sense, I see the sexual revolution more accurately as the transhumanist revolution. We’re 50 years into the transhumanist revolution, and we’ve been living in that world for all of that time.
To me, if you look at how it’s going, I have some questions about how well it’s contributing to human flourishing at this point. I heard some very enthusiastic words about progress this morning, and I would challenge everybody here to try and think as concretely as possible about what we really mean when we say progress and what we really mean. Do we just mean more freedom underwritten by technology?
Because I would put it to you, based on the evidence from the 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 grapple with our technologies 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.
Limits of Technological Progress
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Maybe I’ll get you and Louise to comment on this. 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 want to, 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 features that we would want to keep. We’ll start with 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 we’re pushing against limits we actually don’t want to transcend?
MARY HARRINGTON: 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. I’m a fully paid up cyborg in that sense. An example I often give of where I see particularly young women using technologies in ways which could potentially be more aligned with human nature, as it really is, rather than as we want to imagine it being, is in using digital technology to support natural family planning. To me, that seems a powerful way. I mean, there are a huge number of platforms and technologies out there which enable women to attune to their natural cycles and to manage their fertility without having to interfere using chemicals or other artificial means.
I’ve spoken to a great many women who report feeling more in tune with themselves, more aligned with their natural cycles, and no longer affected by the mood-altering impacts, for example, of oral contraceptives. So that’s one example of how we might approach it.
The Inseparability of Sex, Love, and Reproduction
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: But really, I think the question behind your question is, what is a human? That’s the question we need to answer if we’re going to make any sort of attempt at grappling where we need to step back from technology and where we can actually support our flourishing with it. So, Louise, I don’t want to misread what you’ve done, 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 be reduced to sexual pleasure and that, in consequence, it could be divorced 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.
I think it’s 30% of Japanese young people under 30 are now virgins, by the way, so we’ve 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 maybe you could make a comment or two about that proposition.
LOUISE PERRY: I think that one of the things that we’ve discovered from the rapid changes that technology has brought to our lives is that we still basically have stone-age brains. Our species spent 95% of its history in hunter-gathering mode, 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 existed in our lives, in terms of the species, for all five minutes. It’s an incredibly unique thing. And the thing that I continually find from talking to women who have tried their darndest to have sex like men, to pretend that these differences don’t exist, is that it makes them utterly miserable.
99% of the time it makes them utterly miserable. I always think of something a friend told me about someone he knows who decided with his wife to experiment with polyamory, having multiple partners, having convinced themselves that all this monogamy stuff was just old-fashioned nonsense. And the first time his wife had sex with another man and he knew that this was 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, literally at a gut level he couldn’t do that. And I think that once you see that in modern life, these various ways in which our environments are maladapted to our instincts, you see it everywhere. And the task we have now, I suppose, is trying to…
I mean, you can’t un-invent 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. 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.
The Limitations of Transhumanism
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Stephen, I’m going to ask you two questions that are united. The first one, very difficult, I would say, is because a transhumanist skeptic listening to this conversation might say to Louise, for example, well, why 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?
Well, because maybe we could re-engineer ourselves so that we would have no guilt about the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure. And then I guess I’d align that with another question I know that’s dear to your heart, which is the educational enterprise that you’re engaged in is designed to inculcate in its students or to guide them towards the, as Bishop Barron pointed out, the embodiment of a higher order set of virtues. And so we could subordinate our biology to our transhumanist technology and live for hedonistic pleasure. I don’t think you think that’s a good idea. Why is it not a good idea? And what would you propose is a better story, let’s say?
STEPHEN BLACKWOOD: Well, let’s just say as a starting point that human nature is not a construct. Some would say created, others would say evolved as self-conscious creatures. That means 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 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, we’d just go home on 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.
It happens by locating yourself within some frame of genuinely transcendent things to which you give your life. And 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 history, whether it’s a person in your life who’s influenced you, or anyone from history that you really admire, well, they’ve made substantial and difficult commitments.
And very often those things were not arbitrary. They were growing in, you might say, the determined soil they were already in. Whether that’s their sex, their time in history, their family, their political-cultural moment. And they rose to the occasion of finding their freedom in that. And so a culture is really just the soil we’re growing in. That’s really, culturus in the Latin. So a 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 Haidt told us yesterday about the leading indicators of social media and the ways in which it actually, you might say, communicates a profound nihilism to the young. What does it mean to create an alternative to that?
To have a culture in which, 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 no exposure to sun. It can’t become what it is. And I think the big question we’re facing at ARC and in our culture at large is precisely how we can realize the transcendent dignity and free nature of the human being. 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 nihilism. They are profoundly committed to that already. They come to us 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, 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 the young the things they need to nourish their own souls such that they can realize what is in them already.
The Neurological Perspective on Human Development
DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Maybe I’ll make one comment on this from a neurological perspective, let’s say. We talked a little bit about child development today.
As the brain matures, and this is actually what the higher reaches of the brain are for, when you’re born, you’re under the primary influence of 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 more sophisticated brain areas are trained 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 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. So 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 desires.
So one of the things we can know, I think, now, I think the scientific enterprise 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. 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 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, everybody. Thank you.
