The family and technology

On Wednesday, more than two dozen eminent conservative leaders signed a statement: “The Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right.” The statement, and the broader movement it represents, signals a new era of conservative thinking about the technologies that shape our lives and the public policies that must govern them. Until now, conservatism has had an ambiguous relationship to technology.

On the one hand, many of the conservative crusades in defense of “family values” over the decades have targeted technology: unwholesome television shows in the 1980s, video gambling in the 1990s, online pornography in the 2000s and beyond, “woke” influencers in the 2010s, and social media censors most recently. But these efforts have generally focused on the content flowing from our screens rather than the screens themselves. Conservatives have rarely heeded Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: “The medium is the message.”

However, it has become increasingly clear that the form of our technologies shapes us just as much as the content. Digital media fosters a sense of disconnection from our own bodies and physical communities, a sense of independence and autonomy that has helped to radically undermine traditional mores. But digital technology’s threats to the family are hardly new. For quite some time now, technological innovation has tended to disrupt communities (the car), gender roles (household appliances), and sexuality (the pill and in vitro fertilization). Inasmuch as automation and artificial intelligence threaten massive job replacement in some industries, they are liable to further weaken the ability of many men to earn a family wage.

On the other hand, since at least World War II, conservatives have generally celebrated technological innovation, seeing in the dynamism of America’s inventors and entrepreneurs the blessings of capitalism over against the grim, gray stasis of communism’s command economies. Sure, technology sometimes takes a wrong turn, but it is best to let the market self-correct rather than daring to try and restrain it. Besides, who’s going to say “no” to the future?

The resulting schizophrenia has frequently led conservatives to take a disjointed, moralistic approach to the various political battlegrounds of our time: feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, stem cell research, euthanasia, surveillance, censorship, gambling, and pornography. Technology, we tell ourselves, is fantastic—but for some reason, people keep doing bad things with it. It is high time to take a more holistic approach, recognizing that there is no future without the family.

The reality is that so many of our technologies today follow a common thread: They treat human nature itself as an obstacle to overcome or a system to be hacked, rather than asking, “What are humans for?” and designing themselves to guard and heal human nature or leverage its natural capacities. They also aspire—consciously or unintentionally—to render the family obsolete: A single woman reproduces via a sperm donor and a surrogate; children interact with strangers through screens rather than with their parents and siblings; a digitally optimized “gig economy” replaces stable jobs offering a family wage, encouraging young people to remain single and childless well into their 30s; and euthanasia offers to take aging parents off their working children’s hands.

Today, we stand at an inflection point. Our biotechnologies offer new—and frankly horrifying—opportunities to hack human nature through genetic enhancement of embryos, asexual reproduction, and transhumanist fantasies of fusing man with machine. Our digital technologies have become engines of distraction, addiction, and pornification. AI promises to do our thinking, reading, writing, and work for us, putting much of humanity out of a job.

And yet if it is wrong to ignore technology’s effects on the family and the human person, it is even more wrong to personify it as an unstoppable agent of doom. The reality is that we choose what technologies to invest in, create, and disseminate, and we choose where and how to use them. Many of our technologies could be used to empower rather than dissolve the family, enabling the household to again become a site of production, for instance. We do not make all these choices as individuals, to be sure—indeed, one of our greatest frustrations today is the sense that we have so little power or choice as individuals over how our technologies will shape our lives. But we can and must make these choices as communities and as a nation.

To do so is hardly un-American. Having created nuclear weapons, we chose to strictly regulate and limit them. Having developed powerful chemical pesticides and herbicides that turned out to be wreaking havoc on our ecosystems and our own health, we demanded that they be replaced with safer products. Having discovered how to use the stem cells of aborted babies for medical breakthroughs, we said “no” to such forbidden knowledge and found new research pathways. We have a responsibility to govern our technologies and to do so in defense of human nature and the family that sustains it.