Human beings have always been shaped by the things we use to accomplish our many aims. We are homo faber (maker) as much as sapiens, for all the myriad things that make up our culture—from writing and building, to commerce, science, art, politics—are shaped by tools. The art of making is what the Greeks called techne, what we now call technology. And though we like to think of culture in terms of the content in its final product, it bears the mark of what is used to make it. We cultivate it after all, with techniques, methods, equipment, and increasingly digital devices. Technology, then, is not merely a neutral instrument through which culture expresses itself. It reflects assumptions about human purpose and, once embedded in institutions and daily life, reshapes all our habits, the way we relate to each other, and our forms of cultural authority through which culture is made.
Three underappreciated giants of Canadian thought, namely George Grant, Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, together help to explain how a technological order can come to reshape the culture that created it. Grant, in particular, understood the potential dehumanizing effects of technology made to serve the wrong gods, the lust for power and control. Contemporary science increasingly casts doubt on both halves of this vision, showing that nature is not the sum of parts that the mechanistic picture suggests, and that human flourishing is not the product of limitless autonomy. It depends instead on the strength and quality of our embodied relationships, institutions and forms of life, ordered to things that are good for us because of the beings we are, not because they conform to the fleeting desires and subjective delusions we possess. The challenge, then, is to ensure that technological power should remain subordinate to human purposes, rather than allowing its pursuit of mastery to redefine them.
I. Three Wise Men
George Grant was prescient about the narrow way in which the question of technology would be framed in the twentieth century. Conceived as a simple user problem, the prevailing view treats technology as neutral and assumes its flaws can be resolved by rules and regulations ensuring its proper use. This brackets the design of technologies and the intentions of its creators that are embodied therein. Grant understood technological civilization more deeply, as a totalizing orientation to the world in which mastery, efficiency, and control predominate, capturing both liberals and conservatives alike. This ethos, he argued, was especially at home in the United States, a revolutionary liberal order that he thought broke sharply with its European inheritance by starting afresh and using technology to remake the world around the sovereign individual, rather than embedding substantial theories of the good in political order.
Grant feared this technological-liberal order would flatten cultural and historical differences, privileging the mass movement of people, goods, and ideas, creating a new kind of homogenized culture, one that would be global and marked by the imperative of technological progress as a means of endless transformation and control for the satiation of individual desire and will. Canadian nationality and sovereignty would consequently come under increasing pressure from the United States, its chief purveyor. Smaller nations and peoples the world over, he believed, would gradually be absorbed into an American-led universal, homogenized technological-consumerist order.
Much has been said about whether his prediction has come true or not. But as trade tensions and expansionist rhetoric from the United States now reach a new level not seen since the end of the nineteenth century, it is hard not to see the signs of the perpetual threat from this worldview to our own identity and sovereignty, and that of other peoples. Around the world, including in the United States, we see strong reactions to the various manifestations of the homogenizing liberal-technological worldview; these can be seen in the social and political pushback to unlimited trade, migration, and the denigration of local cultures and their histories, as well as the dehumanizing implications of the dominant paradigm’s rejection of limits and the elevation of autonomy and subjective desire as goods in themselves. Much of what Grant said may be too strong and totalizing as critique, as we have been beneficiaries of healthy doses of individualism, liberality, and technology. But it’s worth looking afresh at how tendencies, if left unchecked, result in unhealthy imbalances that call out for realignment. That is where we are today.
If Grant theorized the philosophical and political character of technological civilization, two other Canadians help explain how technologies reshape the cultures that adopt them. Harold Innis argued that communications media have inherent “biases” implicit in their design. Some favour continuity through time, preserving memory, tradition and inherited authority, while others favour extension through space, facilitating administration, commerce, expansion and centralized control. Healthy civilizations require a balance between the two, otherwise you are left with stasis or runaway flux. Our society is exceptional at compressing distance and accelerating exchange, but this means each product drowns in a sea of output that is marked by transience and lack of depth.
As a result, we live in a world where everything is available everywhere but very little has enduring value or impact, and so, we are increasingly unable to transmit a durable cultural inheritance through time, and our stable normal is instability itself. Innis also saw that control over the production and transmission of knowledge could ossify and concentrate among certain classes creating what he called “monopolies of knowledge.” When concentrations reach a threshold, they give particular institutions and classes disproportionate authority over how a society understands itself. This is something we see in the convergence of the ethic of transgression and unrefined freedom of the 1960s, which fused with the professional managerial classes, giving these bourgeois bohemians (“bobos”) dominance that started in the radicalism of the faculty lounge of the universities all the way to the boardrooms of the corporate world; the same ethic has also come to predominate in the centres of technological power in Silicon Valley.
An intellectual heir of Innis, Marshall McLuhan trained the argument inward on the human person. His famous dictum that “the medium is the message” directs our attention beyond the content carried by a technology to the forms of life its use creates, dictated by its structure and the ideas animating its design. A technology’s design changes the scale of interaction, pace of engagement, and the patterns of our social association. Across various media—from print to radio and television and now the smartphone, social media, and AI— we’ve witnessed an accelerating trend toward frictionless, rapid, and decentralized communication; this has led to the production of reams of information and communications content, along with patterns of consumption and engagement characterized by high volume, scattered and short attention, and little depth. McLuhan shows how the technology we use does not stay on the outside, but works its way inward, reorganizing our perception and behaviour. Tools, therefore, are far from a passive vehicle for creation. They bear the mark of the ideas and material conditions from which they emerge, and in turn reshape the culture that produced them through a continuous feedback loop.
My argument is that our liberal-technological order increasingly directs this feedback loop toward the aforementioned values of autonomy, frictionlessness, and the overcoming of limits, increasingly at the expense of human flourishing, cultural continuity, and common life, which are all part and parcel of each other. We need a worldview, and a politics animated by it, that puts human flourishing first to correct this imbalance. We will return to Grant, Innis, and McLuhan later in this essay, for their insights can serve as the indispensable aides by which a new balance can be struck—but first we must understand where we stand today, how we got there, and the extent of the social and human carnage wrought by our techno-utopian status quo.
II. Our View of Technology: Domineering and Transgressive
Technology plays a necessary role in shaping culture, but it did so for a long time as an aid to human ends that more or less faded into the background of modern life. In the nineteenth century, alongside the philosophical and scientific outlook that promoted atomism (everything is small parts) and reductive materialism (every larger object is directly reducible to the sum of its material parts), the emergent modern worldview disparaged teleology (the in-built directedness to specific ends in nature) as illusory or non-existent. A pivotal figure in the Scientific Revolution, Francis Bacon, like Marx centuries later in political thought, would turn the rationale for the pursuit of wisdom on its head, replacing wisdom with knowledge, and the end of contemplation with the goal of greater power over nature for “the relief of man’s estate.” This Baconian dream in which knowledge becomes mastery and nature material for human use is the picture we are enthralled with today.
In the writings of Francis Bacon and others that followed him, the world came to be seen as less a created order with an intelligible form and purpose discernible in its many levels and layers and more as a ‘standing reserve’ of completely inert and valueless matter that could be used, manipulated, and reordered at will. In time, this way of seeing extended beyond nature to human life itself, preparing the ground for technology not merely to assist culture but to frame and reorganize it according to its own image.
This approach to technology now suffuses our culture, which elevates subjectivity to the highest order: the raw and uninterrogated inner life of the individual and her desires or preferences become the primary source of identity, moral authority, and truth. Whether intentional or not, the subtext of Apple’s icon of the forbidden fruit is illustrative of the seductive appeal of technology-fueled transgression. It is easy to see how under this ethos technology ceases to be merely a means and becomes an end in itself.
This outlook is not confined to the creation of the machines, screens, and processes that take up so much of our lives; it extends across the whole moral imagination and amounts to a rejection of boundaries as such: between male and female, citizen and foreigner, nation and world, nature and artifice, body and will. The commodification of every aspect of life is evident across multiple fields of contemporary existence: the outsourcing of child or elder care, friendships with artificial intelligence, the desire for death on demand via euthanasia and assisted suicide, the destruction of unborn life, or its design and selection through genetic screening or in-vitro fertilization (IVF), bodily mutilation in the service of a gender identity, plastic surgery for aesthetic purposes, the marketization of intimacy through dating apps, or instant and limitless access to the most degrading pornography. The principle is the same: if there is a limit, it must be overcome in the name of subjective desire, which is often fleeting and ultimately unhealthy; it speaks to a shallow version of freedom as unrestrained choice.
The same technologically-driven impulse to overcome limits in the name of personal choice is also eroding all the mediating institutions and stable bonds that hold us together – from family, to friends, civil and religious communities, and nation – in favour of a globalized world where people are constantly, and more deeply connected to strangers and digital forms of reality than their next door neighbours. Yet it is precisely those forms of belonging, when vibrant – and not technologically-mediated connection – that the best social science shows make us happiest and deeply fulfilled.
The technological order has enabled an increasingly integrated world of professional experts, and their institutions in universities, bureaucracies, media, and lastly the corporate and financial world. These sectors may have their differences, but they are small compared to the shared pursuit of ever greater mobility, choice, consumption, autonomy and the desire to be liberated from all constraints. Interestingly, this same communications revolution that has strengthened this consensus also allows challenges to it to emerge from outside established institutions, since the pace of technological change allows for competition and lowers the barrier to new entrants, which we have recently seen with some in the tech world dissenting from social liberal orthodoxies, starting alternative media networks, and power structures. This conflict between centre and periphery explains both the uniformity of elite counterculture and the counterreactions to it. These counterreactions are becoming stronger and stronger, as the results of the pursuit of false liberation have become apparent, both in the sciences and as seen in its social impacts.
III. Science and Ends: Back to Aristotle
The technological ethos of endless transformation is not nearly as secure, intellectually or scientifically, as its defenders often assume. The reductionist picture of the world as a mere aggregate of atomized bits of matter, devoid of intrinsic form, purpose, or direction upon which it’s built, sits less comfortably with contemporary science than many still suppose. Across physics, biology, and cosmology, the world appears less like the deterministic sum of basic parts and more like a layered, intelligible order in which organized wholes possess powers of their own that emerge from their stable organization but are irreducible to the mere sum of their constituent parts.
Starting with physics, developments in the early twentieth century weakened the old picture of matter as solid, self-contained stuff governed by simple deterministic laws, and we are only now catching up to it. The image of the corpuscular, then clockwork, and later atomistic and deterministic world of infinitely small building blocks was replaced by quantum theory’s image in which exact position and momentum are not simultaneously definable even in principle, and in which the behaviour of physical systems is often described probabilistically rather than by straightforward classical determinism. It also introduced entanglement and nonseparability, where the states of distinct systems cannot be fully described independently of one another, making it harder to treat wholes as nothing more than the sum of self-subsisting parts.
Aristotle always thought this atomistic world was absurd on the grounds that reality cannot finally be reduced to infinitely small parts without losing any coherent account of extension, form, and change. For small parts must always have extension, and an infinity of small parts would make movement, and therefore change impossible. Instead, it is plausible to think that quantum physics suggests the whole is prior to the part: that macrostructures—from chemical compounds to organs and organisms, and even properties such as consciousness—help actualize the unrealized possibilities of quantum matter, drawing what exists only as potential into a definite state within a larger organized whole. Werner Heisenberg, the great physicist who pioneered quantum mechanics and developed the quantum uncertainty principle tended to agree with Aristotle.
In biology, the full reduction of organic life to the laws and properties of chemistry has been a dominant view. But it owes a great deal more to the simplicity of the picture rather than the completeness of its explanatory power. Organisms are not just collections of molecules, but integrated wholes that grow, repair, regulate, and develop according to characteristic patterns and ends, which are not the mere sum of their parts. Every complex chemical compound, even ones as simple as H2O, is not the mere sum of the properties of constituent molecules: some properties of the whole emerge along with the new macrostructure that’s been created, perhaps from the reservoir of latently present properties of the quantum world. The language of function, development, and homeostasis is so hard to avoid in biology because living things really are ordered in a manner that inert matter is clearly not, and that order arises not merely from their constituent parts taken in isolation but from the organized structure of the whole. This structure is found in the homeostatic semi-permeable feedback loops that define autopoietic (self-organizing) organic systems, and the emergent properties that belong to them.
And our cosmological picture of the universe is one that was discovered by a Catholic priest after all, one with a beginning, intelligible structure, and fine-tuned conditions remarkably suited to the emergence of complex life. The multiverse hypothesis that posits infinitely many universes to “explain” our own fine-tuned one—far from a scientifically grounded theory—appears more like atheistic philosophy trying to save face by positing endless universes to avoid the theistic implications of contemporary physics.
Lest I overstate things, at minimum, the best science casts considerable doubt on the idea that our world is a standing reserve of infinitely reducible parts, ready for the consequence-free breaking apart and rearranging according to the limitless desire of human will. Instead, there are clear properties and patterns of development proper to the chemical, biological, and higher order social forms of life. It seems as though reality is both predictable and ordered, and that complex wholes from chemical compounds to organisms have in-built developmental pathways that determine what is good and healthy for them. What's more, there is inherent indeterminacy at the quantum level, which provides space for physical reality to continue to expand and develop, and for human agency to exert causal influence through consciousness.
Taken together, these interpretations do not prove a full philosophy of the person or of nature, but they would suggest that there are clear physical realities that circumscribe what and who we are and therefore what will fulfill us. They do make it much harder to regard the universe as a sum of parts without form or clear structure, and human being as just “meat lego,” a manipulable aggregate with no intrinsic form, ends, or meaning. The effects on well-being of living by such a worldview would suggest as much.
IV. The Misery of Techno-Utopianism
A culture that treats technology as inherently good since it confers more power and control, and the self as something to be constantly revised through its application, leaves people less at home in their own bodies, less capable of stable attachment, and more prone to the by now familiar cluster of social ills of loneliness, anxiety, depression, and anomie.
The attention economy is exemplary here. It is a business model where the main source of revenue is not the sale of a good or service, but user data, collected by maximizing the engagement of users through explicit attempts to manipulate psychology, even to the point of fostering addiction. It is highly prevalent in social media, search platforms, and internet-based goods and services, and the same engagement maximization logic can now be seen in how AIs are programmed to please and reinforce the whims of their users at every turn. The same tools that promise instant gratification and constant, continuous connection deliver instead isolation.
The technological imperative as transformative and enframing of all of life is a world that replaces presence with mere digital mediation and our shared lives with increasingly screen-based, individualized patterns of consumption. Omnipresent screens monopolize time, and they also thin it out, and fragment our attention, creating people who are impatient, have weakened memories, and are unfocused. It is little wonder that we are rendered lonely and depressed, and that our networks of care, built as they are in disinterested networks of informal obligation, have weakened. And at the core of these trends is the rejection of human nature. We are estranged from others, our own embodied nature, and from the basic activities that make us happy, whole, and human.
Indeed, every term in the contemporary lexicon of technologically-mediated realities is like a euphemism and an impoverished version of the real thing. Social media is anything but social. It would be better called anti-social. A friend on Facebook or Snapchat is hardly a friend at all, as friendship requires time, presence, and physical interaction.
The products of technology and their effects should come as no surprise, as they mirror the philosophy of the tech leader class itself. The entrepreneur and technology guru is often presented as the heroic figure of the age, yet many of the men who occupy that role display precisely the moral and emotional illiteracy their products help reproduce. (The fact that many of these figures are now heavily associated with the political Right, at least in the United States, may be baffling and dispiriting to philosophical conservatives, yet it merely shows how the revolutionary and liberal impulses of technological society are ubiquitous precisely because they precede political labels themselves and can infuse every segment of the ideological spectrum.)
Elon Musk leads an utterly degenerate and chaotic personal life with at least fourteen children by four different women with some germinated and selected through IVF. Marc Andreessen has admitted that he has little interiority and “practices zero introspection” as though that were a good thing. Sam Altman’s designer babies startup and the normalization and promulgation of AI pornography illustrate just as well his preferred set of values or lack thereof. The philosophies and lifestyles of the tech elite are not bugs but features of the common creed of this small sampling of barbarians—who are not at the gates of our civilization but well within it and pulling the levers of power. They are exemplary of the most esteemed values in our culture, and the kinds of visions of success we reward: an image of the pinnacle of human excellence as brilliant in technique, utterly stunted in judgment, and unable to distinguish between freedom as licence and freedom as the pursuit of human virtue and fulfillment.
V. Technology for the Human Person: A Canadian Synthesis
I would like to think that many of my fellow conservatives would stand naturally opposed to these things, yet they tend to treat technology with the same kind of light-touch, freedom-first fundamentalism that they apply in other domains of culture or economics. However, the old laissez-faire disposition now looks inadequate given the depth of the problems in evidence; we have seen how the post-1960s fusion of techne-driven disruption and cultural liberation has entrenched the deracinating and fragmenting effects of technological modernity as a core part of the reigning culture. And we have seen how its contemporary and particularly American incarnation, i.e., the Silicon Valley dispensation, has intensified the same pathologies at the dawn of the AI age. This is where a distinctively Canadian tradition of reflection on technology has something important to offer here as a corrective: returning to Canada’s three great sages can deliver useful insights to this end.
Innis’s warnings about monopolies of power and the counterreactions they generate are being vindicated in real time. The takeover of X, the proliferation of alternative media and the rise of populist movements all illustrate how quickly new centres of power can emerge in this technological order defined by fluidity and constant change. This can lead to periods of genuine instability and rupture, but Innis’s thought can also help us find a path back to balance in which those countervailing “time biases” he identified in favor of permanence and transmission may be brought to bear in the construction of a technological order that serves continuity rather than dissolving it. As to what this could look like in practice, consider how the same systems that now ceaselessly generate the fleeting digital distractions that consume our attention can also be used to preserve, curate, and disseminate such things as literary canons, rare books and manuscripts, historical voices and archival footage, making the accumulated human inheritance of a civilization more accessible, durable, and transmissible across generations.
Just as well, McLuhan’s “global village” has passed from prophecy into present reality and, where we are connected instantly to people and events everywhere and exposed to differences once encountered only at great distance, the result is not depth of understanding and relations, but its opposite. Deeper, slower forms of communication are crowded out and traditional sources of authority are displaced with the continuous demands of feeds and algorithms. And yet the rising trend in favour of delimiting exposure to digital content in schools and homes and redrawing boundaries between ourselves and our technologies, of slowing down the pace of information absorption, and of restoring the habits of deep reading and thought all speak to the McLuhanite instinct to reckon with our media as environments that require devising holistic environmental responses rather than making regulatory tweaks around the edge; the implication underlying McLuhan’s analysis is that human beings have agency and purpose if they would only seize the opportunity to shape technological environments consciously and in the service of human ends as opposed to allowing those environments to shape them by default.
Grant saw the political significance of all this for the West as a whole, and Canada in particular. Standing beside the United States, a revolutionary liberal order breaking strongly with the past: his struggle was against the political and cultural corrosion of Canada at the apex of U.S. hegemony in the twentieth century. Today, the Grantian intellectual legacy, with its outsize concern for the sanctity of the human condition, can be our best defence against the incoming onslaught of ever more dystopic technological applications that would practically abolish all remaining natural limits, such as untrammelled Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and human biomodifications. His concerns about the right of each nation to sustain its own identity and tradition in the face of a “universal state” can help to inform ongoing debates about Canada’s digital sovereignty and technological self-determination, whatever the policy outcomes may be. Grant can also remind us that American ways of thinking, with emphasis on abstract liberty and hyper-individualism, do not have a monopoly on the interpretation of Western civilization. And as U.S. moral authority wanes, Canadian voices in the Grantian mould may have an opportunity to recover and further develop an older Aristotelian understanding of the good life, one in which freedom is situated within a larger moral order, the classical virtues of moderation and restraint are reclaimed, and technological and cultural life remain answerable to a distinctly human telos.
We are governed by technological forms that distort and degrade our common humanity. But cracks are starting to emerge, and the concentration of power in the professional managerial class—and perhaps also the tech elite—is starting to break, presenting an opening for a properly conservative alternative to emerge, understood morally rather than in a mere partisan or ideological sense. That alternative can be drawn from and refined by these Canadian schools of thought, with the profound attention they pay to limits, continuity, moral transcendence, and the preservation of natural human purposes against the autonomous logic of technique.
Such a view can help us remember that while freedom is real and precious, it is not the highest good. It is in fact a means that enables us to pursue what is true, beautiful, and good, not merely to multiply options or dissolve every constraint. Technology must therefore be judged not by whether it expands choice, but by whether it strengthens the forms of life in which human beings actually flourish: family, friendship, community, worship, work, memory, and care. Can technology promote models of each that are thick and full, not so paper thin and endlessly diverse that they lose their capacity to help us attain those ends?
This vision has direct political implications. The common good is not the aggregate of private satisfactions but the order of social life within which persons, families, and institutions can flourish according to their nature. It emerges when human capacities are properly developed and shared, producing a richer good that individuals cannot achieve alone—much like a choir or musical ensemble, where each person contributes a part, but the good is the harmony that arises only when those parts are ordered to a shared whole.
A conservatism worthy of the name would therefore question the cult of unrestrained freedom in both markets and morals. Such a stand against the spirit of licence need not be confined to the right, either. The core common to many modern right, left, and liberal political movements, be they conservative, social democratic, or left-liberal, is not abstract freedom but a kind of humanism that privileges the cultivation of conditions under which human capacities develop and people live well together, within, to varying degrees, a substantive conception of human agency and the good life. Something like this concern for humanity is reappearing across the political spectrum.
Anxiety about what makes us fully human now attaches to questions of rootedness, limits, purpose, and control; the sentiment is becoming commonplace. Human dignity and judgment in the face of AI; the seeming sense of lack of control over the applications and technologies that are supposed to serve us; the erosion of local community and national sovereignty in an era of renewed great power conflict, accelerated by the homogenizing pressures of a digitized and globalized culture. Different traditions offer competing diagnoses, but they increasingly begin from a shared recognition that autonomy, efficiency, and choice are not sufficient measures of a good society. This helps explain the renewed interest in forms of populism, democratic socialism, “elbows up” liberalism in Canada, or various manifestations of each in countries throughout continental Europe. It is unsurprising given we all inhabit the same deracinating technological environments and are suffering from the same sets of maladies.
But among these competing alternatives, the conservative response in my telling should stand most strongly for particular cultures and doing what it takes to cultivate, refine, and sustain them. It would resist the reduction of human beings to consumers, producers, or manipulable material, and instead defend the intrinsic worth of human life, the dignity of embodiment, and the mediating institutions through which a culture is preserved and passed on.
Peter Copeland is Director of Domestic Policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Photo by Wilfredor, dedicated to the public domain under CC0.