The Impact of Intensive Schooling on Children's Play

Speaker 2
So in this book, you made a very convincing argument. I thought that, that women's liberation and the sexual revolution were less a product of like a shift in social mores and cultural norms that led to technological change than of the technological developments themselves. Like specifically you mentioned, like the industrial scale availability of like, contraception and then abortion, probably also STD treatment. And this echoed to me something that last said, and before him Marx, as you pointed out, that progressive activists are always marching in lockstep with battles that have already been kind of fought and settled in advance outside of their control. And like taking credit for them and their solutions often amount to kind of doubling down on the source of our misery by prescribing more of the same. And I'm wondering why this is such a keystone of progressivism.
Speaker 1
Why do we always have to address the problems created by progress by just leaning ever further into progress? Yeah. I mean, I guess if I were to speculate wildly, I mean in the book, I've suggested that, you know, what we call progress is something, you know, if you look at what's happening materially, it's often more like technology being used to liberate people from previously immutable seeming limits. And what happened really with the transition, I mean, through industrialization that kind of happens outside in the world, you know, we invent all these technologies which let us make things quicker or move faster or dig up more stuff or make more, you know, build, you know, create more abundance out in the world. And then with the sexual revolution, that kind of turns inward and the human body becomes the site of liberatory technologies. I mean, the contraceptive pill is the first transhumanist technology because it sets out to break normal physiology in the interests of desire. And at that point, at that point, the same mechanism, you know, the same liberatory dynamics turn big starts, sets to work on the human body for the first time. And what I see happening there is not, I mean, we call it progress, but it's kind of just the market, you know, and the market's like a shark. It has to keep swimming or it
Speaker 2
dies.

Peter Gray - Learning Through Play

The New Schools

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