On the latest Tech Policy Podcast, I spoke with Richard Morrison, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. We covered a lot of ground, discussing podcast history, the rise of micro media (find a thousand true fans!), performative tech doomerism, trad dating apps, “bicycle face” (be afraid), and much more.
We kept things loosely organized around technology and politics. Richard suggested that, because technology tends to disrupt the status quo, one might expect liberals to be more welcoming of new technology (on balance) than conservatives. You could say, with some irony, that Richard is calling on the Left to “RETVRN” (if I may co-opt the meme). Once upon a time, Marxism was all about technological progress. Now we’re stuck with progressive intellectuals who’re terrified of smartphones, and degrowth activists who want to take away your AC and your refrigerator.
At any rate, I’m more interested in the challenge that rapid technological change poses to conservatism. Let’s slide to the other end of Richard’s heuristic. Since its birth during the French Revolution, conservatism has been about defending the status quo—defending tradition. I raised with Richard an article by Jon Askonas, “Why Conservatism Failed,” which posits, bluntly, that “a technological society can have no traditions.” Richard then pointed out, correctly enough, that technology and tradition aren’t invariably at odds with one another. Technology is a tool; tools can serve all sorts of ends; one such end is the preservation of tradition. For example, the advance of technology enables better recordkeeping—better memory.
In response, I didn’t do full justice to Askonas’s point. “As new technologies enter a society,” Askonas writes, “they disrupt the connections between institutions, practices, virtues, and rewards. They can render traditions purposeless, destroy the distinction between virtuous and vicious behavior, make customary ways of life obsolete, or render their rewards meaningless or paltry.” The key Burkean insight is that there’s wisdom embedded in standing social practices. As technology drives rapid change, Askonas argues, much of that wisdom loses its purchase. Technology might benefit tradition around the edges (old recorded sermons! TikTok Bible quizzes!), but overall it “radical[ly] alter[s] … the social environment” and “render[s] received wisdom obsolete.” Liquid modernity washes away the ground from which the established beliefs grew.
This is obviously a problem for conservatives, and I don’t know where conservatives can turn for answers. Do they scour the great books? For all their virtues—they’re worth reading for all sorts of other reasons—those works do not provide a map for navigating technological postmodernism. Even apart from how technology undermines ancient wisdom, the Western canon does not contain a consistent message. (You might even say that it is itself corrosive of tradition!)
Should conservatives double down on politics? Yikes. Of course not. “We went for politics,” I heard a conservative complain, “rather than cultivating the imagination.” Indeed. And look where it’s gotten them. What could be less conservative than Trumpism? What passes for “conservatism” today massively vindicates Lionel Trilling’s claim about the Right’s “irritable mental gestures.” Trumpism is reactionary anti-intellectualism, even anti-rationalism, triumphant. At this point, Trump is denouncing school vaccine mandates. (Note well: vaccines in general. Measles and polio—so hot right now.)
On the show, I mentioned a book by Michael Warren Davis called The Reactionary Mind: Why Conservative Isn’t Enough. Davis may not be a prominent figure, but I think he captures (or, rather, represents) something important. With little remaining, at a societal level, to “conserve,” modern “conservatives” are turning by degrees into angry renegades. Loud eccentrics. Squawking heretics. In a word, cranks. Consider the confused mental stew—the bowlful of irritable mental gestures—served up by Davis. On the one hand, he’s brash and imperious. The modern world is a shambles, he declares. Smash your smartphone. Your life is “measurably worse than that of the medieval serf.” On the other hand, he’s proudly ignorant. Is climate change real? Was the universe created in six days? Are Scientologists on to something? Who knows! Don’t read the news. Experts disagree sometimes, so it’s all one.
A lot of conservatives will tell you that conservatism is not an ideology; that it is, in point of fact, against ideology. And that’s fine. Call it a “persuasion,” if you will. This doesn’t relieve conservatives of the obligation to be minimally coherent, if they’re to participate in civil discourse at all.
Where does conservatism, as a political or philosophical movement, go from here? What is clear is that nothing constructive will occur while the orange tyrant reigns. We all know Eric Hoffer’s adage about causes that start as movements, become businesses, then degenerate into rackets. “One of the amazing things about the MAGA ‘movement,’” Jonah Goldberg recently noted, is how it “kind of got Hoffer’s sequence backward.” It was a racket from the first. Many grifters and second-rate intellectuals have haplessly tried to dress it up as something more respectable. But it’s just aimless, spiteful populism. In the words of Rep. Thomas Massie, it’s people “voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race.”
Roger Scruton described T. S. Eliot’s conservatism as a “retreat into high culture as the spiritual resource with which to combat the godlessness of modern society.” More modestly, Saul Bellow spoke in praise of the artist who refuses “to submit to what societies and governments consider to be important.” That quietist vision of conservatism retains a certain appeal. It is arguably the only true form of conservatism left.
Tech Policy Podcast #374: Politics and Technological Change
The Right’s Ironic Fixation on Roman Virtues, The Bulwark (Aug. 2022)
The Jacobins of the New Right, American Purpose (Feb. 2022)
Why Is the Republican Party Obsessed with Social Media?, Techdirt (Aug. 2021)