Conservatives Should NOT be Afraid of Technology
Liberalism, in its dying gasps, has given us the ammunition to build new sources of power for a new era.
Conservatives should not be afraid of technology. That sentence seems quite paradoxical, but if conservatism is to be the dominant form of political thought, it must take that sentence into account.
For liberals, technology comes naturally. The reason for this is because they are a technological ideology: they operate like a machine, murder like a machine (abortion), and somehow have made Finnegan’s Wake a reality.1
However, as has long been asserted at this point, liberalism is in a crisis. As Dr. Jonathan Askonas points out, “the kind of subject whom liberalism imagined [has] been made obsolete. We’re losing liberalism because we’ve lost the liberal subject.”2
For Askonas, the liberal subject is one that was born into print societies. The rule in such societies is, again, methodical and procedural. Eventually, the conclusion to such a project was enough; reading for Askonas is case and point. In modern technological society the liberal subject, for Askonas, is now a “dividual.” The dividual is the type of person behind this screen writing, editing, and ironically, “reading” this essay.
Liberalism in crisis means liberals, too, are in crisis. They now fear technology for the exact reason Askonas points out — that liberal citizen no longer exists. The modern individual that exists now is someone that, (1) does not have to like the natural “conclusion” because they will not undertake such a project otherwise and (2) does not really have to wait for the conclusion to come anyways.
The modus operandi of modern technology and the machine is efficiency; you put in and it puts out. This is the world in which we live and conservatives can hoit and toit and they can bemoan all they want about the destructive tendencies technology has on traditional forms of life and communication. Those protestations and criticisms are all legitimate and sound in principle. Yet, if they are invoking traditional conservative voices to muster to the defense of these forms of life then, to quote the great Alasdair MacIntyre, “it is dying or already dead.”3
The institutions and forms of life that conservatives are “protecting” cannot hold up against non-human, technological threats, and so, those institutions are much like the liberal subject; built for a certain time, for a certain conception of the person.
The conclusion for this essay probably not what some would expect. It is not some doomsday look at our current affairs, quite the opposite in fact; the title of this essay asserts that conservatives should not fear technology. We should not be afraid of it because the materials to build new institutions, conquer old ones, and establish a new elite are right in front of us.
Liberalism, in its dying gasps, has given us the ammunition to build new sources of political and economic power for a new era. If conservatives of this generation are to truly fight, then they should begin to build and conquer the institutions so that they, in the future, may truly rule.
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Finnegans Wake is a book written by James Joyce, wherein the main character, Finnegan, dies by hitting head while falling from the roof. While at his wake, his friends accidentally pour whiskey on him while getting rowdy; He promptly and subsequently, because of the whiskey, comes back to life. The point being, in a liberal regime, technology has given us the ability to create new life, whether it be IVF, or by way of cloning.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, (South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), 222.
Modern ‘conservatives’ (especially of the Anglosphere variety) are ‘liberals’ too.