Peter Copeland: Conservative culture cannot survive technological neutrality
A conservatism that speaks only of markets, efficiency, and consumer choice, while ignoring the rapid encroachment of technology into our social fabric, does not deserve its name.
Culture is where we live, breathe, and have our being. It is the sum total of the norms, artefacts, institutions, beliefs, and patterns of life that make up a people. Tools and their use in the activity of making—what the Greeks called techne, and what we now call the technological—are therefore at the core of culture-making. Technology has always served human aims, but now, more than before, it has come to enframe and structure the whole of life, shaping and, at times, supplanting those aims through the expansion of efficiency-seeking and controlling technique as an end in itself. This orientation is consistent with the progressive worldview of both left and right, in which boundaries are to be overcome and limits transgressed in pursuit of the ever-fleeting satisfaction of subjective desire.
The social consequences of this worldview are becoming harder to ignore: anomie, isolation, loneliness, and demographic decline all bear the mark of a culture obsessed with technology yet increasingly estranged from human flourishing. It was not the case just years ago, but in 2026, most people can now recognise either inherent flaws or serious deficiencies in the omnipresence of the digital, social media, euthanasia and assisted suicide, transgender ideology, rampant pornography, the prospect of surrogacy, assisted reproductive technology that severs life from the loving bond of mother and father, and much more—even if they are afraid to say so. All of these things involve the deployment of technique to create technology that allows us to exert ever more control in the interest of unrestrained subjective desire and the impulse to overcome everything that is given.
Indeed, even Liberals in Canada have at least begun to recognise that certain features of social media design are harmful, even if they often take the wrong approach to content through ‘hate speech’ and ‘online harms.’ With a few notable exceptions, conservatives, by contrast, have had little of substance to say, treating technology with the same naïve laissez-faire they bring to so many other cultural questions, as though it were simply a neutral engine of innovation and growth.
Culture must be preserved, improved upon and passed on, and that requires an approach to technology ordered to that end. We have to recognise that many of the social ills that animate conservatives of different stripes are the consequence of ignoring culture and the technology that shapes it, and of an excessive reliance on the assumption that individuals should always be left alone to make their own choices, even if those choices evidently inflict harm on themselves or others.
This overemphasised belief in unrestrained freedom has left us powerless to properly design technology, and tailor its application in countless domains of law and policy. But we all recognise in our own lives that happiness is the result of commitment, of order, of using our faculties well rather than poorly, and many now see that we need a major shift in emphasis on the side of order in our politics and policy. We can’t continue to look to the liberal traditions of the libertine left or libertarian right for the answer—we need properly conservative ideas manifested in ordered liberty that tilts towards the side of order and manifests itself in policy ordered to the common good. Inspired by George Grant, we must recognise our unique position next to the United States—a nation that views technology as inherently transformative. In line with our own philosophy of peace, order, and good government, our approach to technology should build upon the past rather than break from it, ensuring that innovation ultimately serves humanity rather than supplants it.
The Canadian position
Canada stands beside the United States—the paradigmatic nation of the progressive ethos where technology stands for unrestrained freedom and constant change, which are treated as the foundational values of the culture and pursued almost as ends in themselves. Grant recognised this clearly. America’s immense productive power and technological ambition are inseparable from its revolutionary character, which is to treat inherited forms, natural limits, and settled boundaries as things to be overcome. It is a political philosophy that has generated extraordinary wealth and dynamism, but it has also unleashed a vision of progress that is increasingly inimical to the human.
The evidence shows as much. Compared with Canada, the United States has markedly higher inequality, higher violent crime and a homicide rate about three times as high, and worse health care outcomes for a significant part of the population, despite far higher spending. It also has a higher share of children living with a single parent. On some other family indicators—such as divorce and births outside marriage—we are more comparable, and there are contrary trends like the rise in euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada. But the broader pattern remains: the United States spawned the left-wing takeover of the universities, and every socially liberal phenomenon that is now worse here originated there. The U.S. has been the world leader in technological dynamism, but also in the commercialisation of practices and industries that treat natural limits as obstacles to be overcome. Commercial surrogacy is illegal in Canada but permitted in many U.S. states; the U.S. has built a vast commercial gambling market, including expansions into online gambling, sports gambling and polymarkets, with clear, documented harms: increased bankruptcy and insolvency rates, addiction, and declining mental health; its speech regime is more permissive towards pornography than Canada’s, and it is the United States that spawned Playboy and the pornography industry we have with us today; and many of the firms most responsible for the psychologically manipulative attention economy are American. These things derive from its highly libertarian society—the champion of ever-increasing, unrestrained, and unrefined liberty.
Standing next to that power, Canada should not simply imitate it, whether in its progressive or libertarian form as we have thus far. Our task should be to soften the sharper edges of an all-enframing technological order and to assert political and cultural agency over it. But we must not do so in the paltry way we’ve attempted to date.