A new era of technological change is on our doors. He threatens to supplant the human person and make the family functionally and biologically useless. But this anti-human result is not inevitable. Conservatives must welcome dynamic innovation, but they must oppose the deployment of technologies that undermine human goods. We must adopt policies that raise the family to a main constituency of technological advancement. Our goal should be a newly re-functionalized household for the 21st century.
Technology is supposed to empower the human person. We have seen, however, that if it is not governed, technological progress is too easily hindered human development and threatens the human and family. Many of the most important political questions of our time have been caused by the moral implications of new technologies: should human life be created artificially or destroyed? Can people change the sexes? Should digital obscenity be accessible to all ages in the name of freedom of expression? Should families support families automated? We must discern prudent ways to govern technology in order to keep the human person, human dignity and the common good as the central objectives of our policy. We must make sure that new technologies serve human life and the human family, not the other way around.
Our current technologies are not designed to serve the family, however. They have been developed to achieve military, bureaucratic and business purposes, regardless of the effects on families. American technology has undermined the moral authority of parents, the procreative potential of spouses and the ability of families to shape their communities; He bargained data, relationships and children’s bodies; And this made it possible to underline jobs which formerly supported a culture of healthy marriage among the poor and the working class. This crisis affects almost all aspects of our national life. The family generates society and a culture of flourishing families is an essential condition for social health. A nation hostile to the family is hostile to itself.
Conservatives should push for policies that support economic dynamism and innovation, but we must recognize that the market has failed to produce a technological order that raises the family. This order attacks it rather often at the root.
As researchers, writers and political experts, we believe that public policy should lead technology towards the development of the family and the human person. Our laws and regulations must seek to form a technological order which provides a functional economic role for household, protects human sexuality, rewards marriage, enriches childhood, preserves parental and community authority, allows the practice of freedom and Ennobled our common life. These human goods are fundamental for prosperous families and they must be kept and advanced in the midst of revolutionary technological changes. For these purposes, we offer the following ten direct principles to authorize families through technology:
- Respect the natural cycle of mortality through healing or attenuation of chronic diseases rather than pursuing a radical extension of life and overcoming the suffering of terminal disease rather than artificially accelerating death.
- Support women in their natural ability to conceive, gestate, birth and nourish children, rather than trying to bypass or short-circuit the female body or reduce it to organs for rent.
- Protecting human sexuality against commodification and dehumanization in progress by violent pornography, digital prostitution, sexual abuse material of children, deep buttocks, sex companions and sexual robots.
- Work to get the childhood of the grip of social media and smartphones and encourage free game and personal interaction in their place; Keeping companies responsible for the design of platforms to undermine human well-being and exploit the most vulnerable phases of childhood development; And remove the screens from the center of the classroom while restoring physical books and mechanical arts.
- Oppose the political economy of dependence integrated into software interfaces and users of intelligent devices, which capitalizes on compulsive use, surveillance and disembodied relations. Encourage the growing market for intelligent devices that offer only productivity and connectivity tools, while ensuring that smartphones are not required to fully participate in our economy or society, but remain a real choice of consumption.
- Legislate towards a republican culture restored in the digital age by granting citizens ownership of their own data; Protect privacy by blocking the transformation of daily devices into surveillance systems; And require platforms to create robust tools that give users transparency and choices concerning algorithms that build their flows.
- Foster technologies that improve local and family autonomy thanks to repair right laws, open-source software and open platform conceptions, which all make technology less dependent on distant power centers. Oppose the imposition of universal technological changes, such as the EV mandate, which undermines the capacity and responsibility of local actors.
- Foster technologies that improve human skills and improve workers’ satisfaction with those that degrade or replace human work, thus increasing productivity and growth in working class wages. Balance the rate of automation by investing in employment recovery and skills development to support a family salary in the most affected industries, in particular those that promote higher marriage rates.
- Accelerate the transition to a new household economy, eliminate political restrictions outside of home production and shape laws on labor and tax policy to adopt flexible work models that strengthen families and invigorate communities, While taking measures to protect the house against managerial overcoming and the disturbances of family life.
- Launch projects that encourage culture by man in the natural world and raise the human mind, such as a renewed inhabited space flight program and reimbursement of American West parts technology. Demant the government’s incentives that push the American people to artificial or virtual substitutes for embodied life, such as laboratory -cultivated meat subsidies and a regime of responsibility which punishes industries and embodied activities.
These guiding principles will lead to a deep and necessary reform of our existing technological order. Whenever technology ceases to complete other human goods and threatens to replace them, we are in danger, especially since technology attacks human life at its root by overthrowing and replacing the family. The family plants the seed and forms the basics of the future, thanks to the consumption and education of children who will make the human project. As such, family, technology and a dynamic and fruitful future are intrinsically connected, and the current conflict between them must be overcome. Soft the family is to cancel the future; To strengthen the family is to fulfill the future of possibility, invention and hope.
Affiliations are for identification purposes only.
Authors:
Michael ToscanoExecutive Director, Institute of Family Studies; Director, Family First Technology Initiative.
Brad LittlejohnFellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center Technology and Human Florishing Project.
Clare MorellFellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center; Director, Technology and Human Florishing Project; Author of the coming book Technological exit (June 2025).
Jon AskonasDeputy Professor of Politics, Catholic University of America; Fellow Senior, Foundation for American Innovation.
Emma WatersSenior research partner at the Devos Center for Life, Religion and Family at the Heritage Foundation.
Signator:
Ryan T. AndersonPresident, The Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Erika BachiochiFellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center; editor -in -chief, Fairer disputes.
Oren Cass,, Founder and chief economist, American Compass.
MIRIAM CatesPresenter of GB News, principal researcher at the Center for Social Justice and former member of the Parliament.
Spencer CoxGovernor of Utah.
Matthew B. CrawfordFellow Senior, The University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
Christopher Demuth,, Distinguished Fellow in American Thought, The Heritage Foundation; President, National Conference of Conservatism.
Patrick J. DeneenProfessor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame.
Robert P. GeorgeProfessor of McCormick case law, director of the James Madison program in the American ideals and institutions of Princeton University.
Mary Harrington,, author of Feminism against progress.
Yoram HazonyPresident, Edmund Burke Foundation.
Yuval LevinDirector of social, cultural and constitutional studies, the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Anthony Mills,, Principal fellow and director of the Center for Technology, Science and Energy at the American Enterprise Institute; Fellow Senior, Public Policy School of Pepperdine University.
Joshua MitchellDepartment of Government, University of Georgetown.
R. Albert Mohler Jr.,, President, Centennial Theology Professor, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
CC PecknoldAssociate professor of theology, Catholic University of America.
Nathan PinkoskiResearcher, Institute of Philosophy, Technology and Politics.
Ramesh Ponnurueditor, National review.
RR Renoeditor, First things.
Kevin RobertsPresident, The Heritage Foundation.
Christine RosenSenior Fellow, the American Enterprise Institute.
Leah Breresco Sargeantauthor of The dignity of dependence.
Ari Schulman,, editor, The New Atlantis; Fellow, Cosmos Ventures.
O. Carter SNEADCharles E. Rice Professor of Law and Professor Competient of Political Science, University of Notre Dame; Fellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Eric TeetSelExecutive vice-president, Center for Renewing America.
Carl R. TruemanProfessor of biblical and religious studies, Grove City College; Fellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Andrew T. WalkerAssociate professor of Christian ethics and public theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Fellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Brad WilcoxMelville Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation University Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia; Future of Freedom Fellow, Institute for Family Studies; And non -resident senior Fellow, the American Enterprise Institute.
Follow the wider project to www.afureturethefamily.org.