Liberalism’s Pathological Aversion to Suffering
19th February 2023
Recently, I attended a brilliant address in Cambridge by the remarkably insightful quasi-prophetess, Mary Harrington. She spoke about the age of social media and presented the degree to which, in her view, we are not so much on the verge of a transhumanist world, but already living in one. She pointed to the contraceptive pill as the first great transhumanist innovation, which, as she put it, “moved us into a completely new paradigm in regard to what medicine and healthcare actually are.” Harrington began as a feminist thinker, and today calls herself a “reactionary feminist,” which is fast becoming a title for several public intellectuals who are developing certain feminist criticisms into a full-scale assault on late modernity. The contraceptive pill, Harrington argued, changed healthcare as a discipline exclusively organised to remedy failing bodies to include the altering of well and properly functioning bodies as if they were problems to be solved. Whilst contraception per se frustrates the procreative act, the pill is unique in doing this by modifying what would otherwise be the natural functioning of the body. She claimed that this moved us into the transhumanist epoch, in which we are now far more entrenched than we realise.