{"id":35097,"date":"2025-05-20T11:34:36","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T15:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/?post_type=article&p=35097"},"modified":"2025-08-14T09:41:02","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T13:41:02","slug":"we-need-a-pro-family-state-not-an-anti-state-family","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/we-need-a-pro-family-state-not-an-anti-state-family","title":{"rendered":"We need a pro-family state, not an anti-state family"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article is a reply to Katherine Boyle\u2019s
\u201cThe Great Tech\u2013Family Alliance<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\t<\/div>\r\n\t<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

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 \u2014 even if critically \u2014 with a former student, and one who obviously has much to teach me as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Katherine\u2019s argument is often internally conflicted. She has breathed deeply the anti-statist, even libertarian air that pervades Silicon Valley, saying at the outset that \u201call of history is a war between the family and the state.\u201d She offers China\u2019s one-child policy as a main example of authoritarianism at odds with family \u2014 true enough, as far as it goes \u2014 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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 \u2014 not to mention community, churches, and a vast variety of associations \u2014 functionally obsolete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> can counter its own baleful effects. In fact, most of her correctives aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, her recommendations that highways have designated \u201cfamily lanes,\u201d and that families have increased school choice. More likely than not, these changes would be effected through the auspices of law \u2014 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2013life balance. Even if supported by law and culture, such an alternative would only apply to the \u201claptop class\u201d comprising people such as Katherine and me. A vast number of jobs can\u2019t be done from home, as we learned so vividly during Covid lockdowns, when whole areas of work were designated as \u201cessential.\u201d 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\u2019t primarily work on a screen? And isn\u2019t it precisely the working classes, for whom a growing conservative attention to pro-family policy is not only increasingly of interest but vitally necessary?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this case, conservatism can\u2019t fall back on knee-jerk denunciations of \u201cgovernment\u201d or \u201cthe state\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Katherine states that \u201call culture is downstream of technology,\u201d when much of the evidence points in the opposite direction. Culture is undoubtedly shaped by technology, but \u2014 as we know from counterexamples such as the Amish \u2014 certain kinds of culture will shape the ways in which we use or don\u2019t use technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, politics invariably shapes culture (and vice versa, of course), and law influences how \u2014 and even whether \u2014 we utilize a variety of technologies, as Katherine\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n

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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 \u2014 even if critically \u2014 with a former student, and one who obviously has much to teach me as well. Katherine\u2019s argument is often internally conflicted. She has breathed deeply the anti-statist, even libertarian air that pervades Silicon Valley, saying at the outset that \u201call of history is a war between…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":35432,"template":"","article_type":[13],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[2266,5000,5003],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/35097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/35097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35681,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/35097\/revisions\/35681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=35097"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=35097"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=35097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}