Wednesday, more than two dozen eminent conservatives signed a declaration: “The future of the family: a new technological program for the right.” The declaration and the broader movement that it represents points out a new era of conservative thought on the technologies which shape our lives and the public policies which must govern them. So far, conservatism has had an ambiguous relationship with technology.
On the one hand, many conservative crusades to defend “family values” over the decades have targeted technology: unhealthy television shows in the 1980s, video games in the 1990s, online pornography in 2000s and in the 2010s and social media censorship more recently. But these efforts have generally focused on the content flowing from our screens rather than the screens themselves. The conservatives have rarely respected the famous Dicton of Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.”
However, it has become more and more clear that the form of our technologies shapes us as much as the content. Digital media promote a feeling of disconnection from our own body and our physical communities, a feeling of independence and autonomy that has helped to radically undermine traditional customs. But the threats of digital family technology is hardly new. For some time now, technological innovation has tended to disrupt communities (the car), gender roles (household appliances) and sexuality (pill and in vitro fertilization). Insofar as automation and artificial intelligence threaten massive replacement in certain industries, they are likely to further weaken the capacity of many men to earn a family salary.
On the other hand, since at least the Second World War, the conservatives have generally celebrated technological innovation, seeing in the dynamism of American inventors and entrepreneurs the blessings of capitalism against the dark gray stasis of economies of command of communism. Of course, technology sometimes takes a bad turn, but it is better to leave the market self-correction rather than daring to try to hold it back. In addition, who will say “no” in the future?
The resulting schizophrenia frequently led the conservatives to adopt a disjointed moralist approach from the various political battlefields of our time: feminism, abortion, homosexual marriage, transgender, research on stem cells, euthanasia, surveillance, censorship, game and pornography . Technology, we say, is fantastic, but for any reason, people continue to do bad things with it. It is high time to adopt a more holistic approach, recognizing that there is no future without the family.
The reality is that so much of our technologies today follow a common thread: they Treat human nature itself as an obstacle to overcome or a pirate systemRather than asking: “What are humans for?” and conceive to keeping and healing human nature or taking advantage of its natural capacities. They also aspire – consciously or involuntarily – to make the family obsolete: a single woman reproduces via a sperm donor and a substitute; Children interact with foreigners by screens rather than their parents and sisters; An “concert economy” digitally optimized replaces stable jobs offering a family salary, encouraging young people to remain single and childless in the thirties; And euthanasia offers to remove aging parents from the hands of their working children.
Today, we are going to an inflection point. Our biotechnologies offer new opportunities and frankly horrible to hack human nature thanks to the genetic improvement of embryos, asexual reproduction and the transhumanist fantasies of man fusion with the machine. Our digital technologies have become distraction, dependence and pornography engines. The AI promises to reflect, read, write and work for us, putting a large part of humanity of a job.
And yet, if it is wrong to ignore the effects of technology on the family and the human person, it is even more false to personify it as an unstoppable agent. The reality is that we choose the technologies in which invest, create and distribute, and we choose where and how to use them. Many of our technologies could be used to empower rather than dissolve the family, allowing the household to become a production site again, for example. We do not make all these choices as an individual, of course, in fact, one of our greatest frustrations today is the feeling that we have so little power or choice as an individual on the way our technologies will shape our lives. But we can and must make these choices as communities and as a nation.
Doing it is hardly non -American. After creating nuclear weapons, we chose to regulate them and limit them strictly. After developing powerful chemical and herbicide pesticides that turned out to be wreaking havoc on our ecosystems and our own health, we demanded that they be replaced by safer products. After discovering how to use the stem cells of aborted babies for medical breakthroughs, we said “no” to such prohibited knowledge and found new research paths. We are responsible for governing our technologies and doing so to defend the human nature and the family that supports it.