Published September 4, 2024
Steve Jobs named his company “Apple” after a pleasant trip to an apple orchard. The bite mark in the logo was added to give the silhouette a sense of scale, lest someone think it a cherry. Yet that name and that symbol, evoking consumption of the forbidden fruit for which man was expelled from the Garden of Eden, must be inadvertently the most perfect metaphor in corporate history. Our age-old striving to “be as God” has never seemed more achievable than in the age of the iPhone and its accompanying social media ecosystem, which promises not only to put the world at our fingertips, but also to remake our sociality and liberate us from the constraints of time and place. The digitization of our lives is transforming human existence in ways incompatible with conservative conceptions of flourishing.
“Ideas have consequences,” conservatives admonish one another, pouring more money into think tanks and great-books conferences. Sometimes, however, consequences also have ideas; our behaviors determine how we think. If Marshall McLuhan is right, and “the medium is the message,” what is the message of the smartphone era? It is one that has rendered many basic conservative instincts simply nonsensical, especially concerns about family, morality, and sexuality. In the age of TikTok, the Judeo-Christian tradition is not just becoming discredited, but altogether inaccessible.
The social acid of the smartphone era is dissolving six fundamental pillars of conservatism: Limits, Tradition, Patience, Dependence, Embeddedness, and Embodiment. In stressing these themes for centuries, conservatives have sought to tether human action to the limits of human nature, insisting that individuals and polities alike cultivate the virtues of self-restraint.
Increasingly, however, our fellow citizens cannot see the point. If technology promises a transcendence of natural constraints, why should we shackle ourselves with social and political ones? Younger generations in particular see less and less reason to tie themselves down with marriage or children. If they do marry, it is on their own terms, in a culture promoting a choose-your-own-adventure lifestyle where sexual partners and pregnancies can be mixed and matched through open relationships and surrogacy. “Hookup culture” already existed, of course, but apps like Tinder have made sacred acts of intimacy as easy as placing a GrubHub order (minus the tipping—for that, there’s OnlyFans). With the normalization of online porn, even the one-night stand is more work than it’s worth for many young people; sex itself no longer requires embodied presence. This mindset is inseparable from the one that has little compunction about legalizing drugs, performing mastectomies on healthy young girls, and, when our battered bodies no longer serve their use as pleasure-maximizing machines, quietly euthanizing them.
The recent implosion of the pro-life movement powerfully illustrates the challenge. Within two years of Roe vs. Wade’s long-awaited reversal, the Republican Party excised abortion restriction from its platform. Many activists felt stabbed in the back by political operatives, but the leadership in Milwaukee was just doing what party leadership does: trying to win elections. Opposition to abortion no longer found a place in the GOP platform because it no longer had a place in the minds of most voters. Just 35% of voters now think abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. Nor was the culprit elite universities force-feeding Marxism and post-structuralism to our best and brightest. From 2012 to 2022, support for abortion on demand surged from 36% to 56% among Americans with only a high-school education. After Obergefell recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the fashionable claim held that the law was a moral teacher, helping to normalize the behavior it legalized; but after Dobbs reversed Roe, support for abortion increased further. The constant was radical autonomy. Is it really surprising that a generation conditioned to escape an unwanted relationship by tapping the “Block” button or simply “ghosting” someone cannot see why a woman should be compelled to carry an unwanted fetus to term?
With each passing year, a new class of high school graduates enters the electorate—marinated in the digital culture, and increasingly anxious and lonely, as Jonathan Haidt has documented in The Anxious Generation and his Substack, After Babel. On almost any measure of youth mental health, graphs have a hockey stick shape with an inflection point around 2010. Graphs of young adult support for progressive causes have a similar shape. After declining for a decade, support for abortion on demand among Americans aged 18 to 34 started rising in 2006 and had more than doubled by the time of Dobbs. A similar trend appears in opinion among young Americans about marijuana legalization: support falls from 2000 to 2006 but then doubles by 2018. The share identifying as something other than heterosexual or straight rose from 4% in 2010 to 25% in 2022. After remaining more or less unchanged for decades, the share saying that divorce should be easier to obtain nearly doubled.
These trends are intimately linked to each other and to the technological transformation of the culture. Young people do not vote pro-life because they do not feel pro-life: more and more suffer with suicidal ideation, and fewer and fewer seem able to take up the burden of giving life to a new generation. Without disruption of the technological “progress,” social conservatives are facing not only political extinction, but also a collapse of the conditions for human flourishing.
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Brad Littlejohn, Ph.D., is a Fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping public leaders understand the intellectual and historical foundations of our current breakdown of public trust, social cohesion, and sound governance. His research investigates shifting understandings of the nature of freedom and authority, and how a more full-orbed conception of freedom, rooted in the Christian tradition, can inform policy that respects both the dignity of the individual and the urgency of the common good. He also serves as President of the Davenant Institute.
