We need a pro-family state, not an anti-state family

I was privileged to teach Katherine Boyle when she was an undergraduate at Georgetown University, and I am both unsurprised and gratified to see her emerging as an influential voice exploring the intersection of technology and values. My remarks are offered in the spirit of a teacher keen to engage — even if critically — with a former student, and one who obviously has much to teach me as well.

Katherine’s argument is often internally conflicted. She has breathed deeply the anti-statist, even libertarian air that pervades Silicon Valley, saying at the outset that “all of history is a war between the family and the state.” She offers China’s one-child policy as a main example of authoritarianism at odds with family — true enough, as far as it goes — but shortly thereafter adds further examples of developments that have undermined family life, including the Industrial Revolution, the pill, and work arrangements demanding that one or both parents work outside the home. China has since reversed its one-child policy. Has the industrialized West solved the problem of decreasing birth rates that are doubtless one of the consequences of capitalism and the pill?

While Katherine claims that technology can come to the succor of the family in the West, she elides recognition of how various technologies have arguably been more effective in undermining and even displacing the family than even the authoritarian regimes she rightly deplores. She would benefit from renewed acquaintance with the arguments made over sixty years ago by Robert Nisbet, who recognized that the greatest threat to traditional social organizations came not necessarily from the state as much as from technological developments (and resulting social transformations) that rendered social groups such as the family — not to mention community, churches, and a vast variety of associations — functionally obsolete.

The family is in crisis in the West and around the world not because of authoritarianism, but because of our luxury to be free of those social bonds. By Nisbet’s telling, the modern state arose not so much to attack the family, as to replace many of the functions that had been undone by modern economics and technology.

Katherine is to be praised for considering ways that technology can be deployed to assist the family. But, in almost every case she offers, she fails to show that technology can counter its own baleful effects. In fact, most of her correctives aren’t technological (in the sense she means) at all, but ultimately rely upon the assistance of the very state that she otherwise denounces as hostile to the family.

Take, for example, her recommendations that highways have designated “family lanes,” and that families have increased school choice. More likely than not, these changes would be effected through the auspices of law — that is, pro-family public policy. Or consider her argument that work from home should be normalized. We have already seen companies (and even the government) insisting on workers returning to the office. How are such efforts by powerful actors to be counteracted, unless through force of law?

Yet even the argument for normalizing work from home, aided by technologies such as Zoom, is far from a satisfactory response to challenges faced by the workforce in attaining reasonable work–life balance. Even if supported by law and culture, such an alternative would only apply to the “laptop class” comprising people such as Katherine and me. A vast number of jobs can’t be done from home, as we learned so vividly during Covid lockdowns, when whole areas of work were designated as “essential.” What good is a work-from-home option for truck drivers, construction workers, janitors, sanitation workers, luggage handlers, and waitresses? Ought not those who support more at-home involvement of parents with children give some consideration to those who don’t primarily work on a screen? And isn’t it precisely the working classes, for whom a growing conservative attention to pro-family policy is not only increasingly of interest but vitally necessary?

In this case, conservatism can’t fall back on knee-jerk denunciations of “government” or “the state” as the enemy of the family. Instead, it must engage with the current reality that family flourishing in the modern world requires a fundamental shift in thinking about how public policy can support family life. The libertarianism of yesteryear is likely to be as effectively anti-family as any claims about statism.

Katherine states that “all culture is downstream of technology,” when much of the evidence points in the opposite direction. Culture is undoubtedly shaped by technology, but — as we know from counterexamples such as the Amish — certain kinds of culture will shape the ways in which we use or don’t use technology.

Similarly, politics invariably shapes culture (and vice versa, of course), and law influences how — and even whether — we utilize a variety of technologies, as Katherine’s own proposal of family car-lanes shows. If we live in a political and social order that deeply values family life, then we are far more likely to see a confluence of law and technology supportive of marriage and family, and welcoming the new arrival of children. Whereas, in societies such as ours that above all prize individual liberty, it should come as no surprise that technology is used as a means of liberation from long-term commitments like the family.

Law is itself ultimately just another technology that we can use to ends that are good or ill, and we should be grateful that a supposed dichotomy between pro-government and pro-family approaches is no longer accepted by leading voices within the New Right.

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