Progressives and Jacobins

Commencement season can offer a good deal of insight into culture.

Historically, commencement speakers aim to reflect the times and the audience. On the cusp of this millennium, legendary science fiction author Ray Bradbury urged Caltech graduates to push through the unknown.

Commencement speeches during the Great Recession featured President Obama encouraging Michigan grads to “meet the challenges of our time” and President Clinton telling Yalies to be “relentlessly committed to change.” Several years later, around the time Hillary Clinton was warning everybody about our nation’s “basket of deplorables,”

Steven Spielberg was telling Harvard graduates that the “world is full of monsters,” while President Obama returned that year to inform Rutgers grads that “ignorance is not a virtue.”

After Donald Trump was elected, commencement speeches got angrier. In the ensuing years, author Robin DiAngelo lectured graduates at Lewis & Clark about “white fragility” and implored them to stop defending or denying their complicity in systemic racism. Professor Ibram X. Kendi urged UT Austin grads to give up on antiquated notions of equality and commit themselves to something called “equity.”

The stretch from circa 2016 to 2023 was interesting, to say the least.

But for decades, the pattern has featured a speaker directing some flavor of progressivism at a mostly progressive audience. But, more recently, a new dynamic is emerging. In a few cases, administrations have hired speakers whose perceived image or whose perceived message has been—for lack of a better way of putting it, insufficiently progressive—for the 22-year-old progressives sitting in the seats.

One example was when Jerry Seinfield, who is hardly a conservative but is someone willing to express an opinion on Gaza somewhere to the right of Hamas, was greeted by boos and a sizable walkout from Duke’s “Blue Devils” in 2024.

As interesting as the Seinfeld episode is, this year has featured something even more novel: progressive (and overtly corporatist) speeches that rankle crowds of other progressives.

When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Arizona grads that artificial intelligence was their future, he was loudly jeered.

When real estate executive Gloria Caulfield told the same to the University of Central Florida crowd, she received a similar response. Record company CEO Scott Borchetta barreled full speed ahead with his AI evangelism, telling the Middle Tennessee State grads who were booing at him to “Deal with it!”

What is going on here?

Before offering my take, let me address three potential challenges to the way I have just characterized things.

First, some might say that there is nothing inherently progressive about being an AI dogmatist. My response: revisit early 20th-century history. Progressivism is rooted in an unmistakably long tradition of viewing technology as a vehicle for perfecting society. For over one hundred years, progressives have supported the emergence of a credentialed expert class who could develop, harness, and employ technology for the supposed betterment of all. A century ago, this birthed what would become known as the Technocracy movement. Its proponents argued that human conditions could be perfected through reliance on science and engineering; the Eugenics agenda flowed from there.

A second possible rebuttal is a variation on the first: real progressives don’t sound like Schmidt, Caulfield, or Borchetta but are more like comedian Ronny Chieng, who was cheered when he rallied Harvard grads to “Destroy AI!” It is true that Chieng sounded a lot like Bernie Sanders, but astute observers of history understand that inciting a crowd to “Kill it!” is simply progressivism further up the curve. By hyper-focusing on the temporal and, by definition, crowding out the eternal, progressivism suffers from an inherent incoherence. Hellbent only on perfecting the here and now, it eventually becomes angry when all efforts to do so prove futile. Here, progressivism veers into Jacobinism. “Kill it!” is the stuff of Jacobins.

Which brings us to a third retort: progressives do not hiss and holler at speakers like those in variance audiences have. But anyone who lived through the 2020 riots and is observing the anti-ICE chaos today knows that progressives do exactly that and worse. Regardless of what they claim to be, they are radically intolerant. In demi-god fashion, progressives and Jacobins determine for themselves and everyone else around them what is and will be. All while accusing their opponents of doing so. Of course, there is nothing remotely Christian about yelling and jeering at those with whom one disagrees. Shouting down a speaker is sophomoric, at best. It is most certainly not the behavior of the civically mature, learned college senior, which a healthy culture produces.

Which leaves us with this: what about the graduates who stayed in their seats, listened, considered, and still came away troubled by the technocrats? ChatGPT has been around since this year’s seniors were freshmen. Many of them could have more firsthand experience with AI than the commencement speakers who lectured them about it. And these students may have some insight into both what AI can do for human beings and what it can take from them.

Which brings us to Pope Leo XIV. Not because of the graduation message he sent to Villanova students this year, but for the encyclical he providentially published during this very interesting commencement season. Entitled “Magnifica Humanitis: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence”, there is a lot in the encyclical itself, but the name says it all.

“Magnifica Humanitis” is unmistakably speaking to both those who have been sitting through this year’s AI speeches feeling uncertain, frightened, and a bit depressed, as well as the speakers themselves. Just as Pope Leo XIII offered Rerum Novarum amidst the tumult of the industrial revolution 135 years ago, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical brings God to today’s void and offers the powerful reminder that we are still, yet, ever, always His. We are made by Him and for Him. Nothing that does not begin with Him can ever be what He intends it to be.

Pope Leo’s message is neither “Deal with it!” nor “Kill it!”. It is loving and wise: the human person is a magnificent creation who must be placed at the center of what AI is designed to do and become.

Of course, the pope’s message is not going over well with progressives and Jacobins. But that should not surprise anyone.