I was raised to believe in progress – the more-or-less religious framework that governs much of modern culture in the West. This framework says there’s a right side of history, and things can go on getting better forever.
It’s not self-evident, though, that humans have steadily progressed. That doesn’t mean everything was perfect once and we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. But pick a subject, and you’ll find some things are better, while other things have become worse. If you’re going to believe in progress, you have to define what you mean by progress. More stuff? More freedom? Less disease? Whatever your measure, you’ll find that what looks from one vantage point like progress mostly seems that way because you’re ignoring the costs. We’ve grown immeasurably richer and more comfortable in the last three hundred years, for example. But we did so on the backs of plundered, colonized, and enslaved peoples, and at the cost of incalculable environmental degradation. Meanwhile, torture in warfare hasn’t gone away. Warfare hasn’t gone away. Nor has hunger, misery, or human degradation. […]
Resisting this means pursuing not untrammelled freedom, but a broader project of staying human together.
I’m admittedly hijacking Harrington’s point (which is a great point about how a “radical reordering of women’s politics, women’s priorities, and even our bodies to the interests of the market, in the name of liberty, has racked up a growing mountain of uncounted costs,” and the need to “re-evaluate how men and women can be human together”), in order to make a note that this broad, and very central, project of “staying human together” is an excellent way to frame a thus far mostly intuited explanation for why I am so deeply—or at least viscerally—opposed to libertarianism.