Why I think Magnifica Humanitas is a pointed and prophetic gut punch

Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is a pointed and prophetic gut punch.

Don’t be fooled by the usual “ecclesial-speak” argot of the text. When read carefully and closely, what emerges is a blunt, and even at times brutal, assessment of the threat posed to humanity by the digital revolution in general and of artificial intelligence in particular.

There are those who will strongly disagree with this assessment. There are those who think Pope Leo has been too soft on artificial intelligence and the threat it poses. However, demands that the pope engage in a scorched-earth rejection of all things AI do not fully understand the deep dilemma he faces.

If he summarily condemns AI and says we must reject it tout court, the Church will be accused of being “anti-science” once again and summarily dismissed as the institution that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and put Galileo on trial. Such an approach also does nothing to help those Catholics who find themselves in jobs where the use of AI is mandatory for the work at hand. It might feel cathartic in a purging cleanse sort of way to just condemn it, but it does little to address the problem.

But if the pope were to ignore the threat of AI, the Church would perhaps be guilty of fiddling while Rome burns. Happily, the pope has not ignored AI, and so this aspect of the dilemma does not pertain.

Irenic, but pointed

What Pope Leo has done instead is to summarize papal social doctrine and to glean from that analysis certain principles that can help guide our deliberations: the common good, subsidiarity, the universal destination of goods, and the preferential option for the poor.

Magnifica Humanitas seeks to apply those principles in ways concretely helpful. It is a long text (around 42,300 words), as all encyclicals are these days, and it deals with a large array of topics. Nevertheless, the document uses each of the topical foci as different angles from which to analyze the main phenomenon of the digital transformation of our world, with an eye toward the aforementioned principles.

The analysis provided in the text, in my opinion, is deceptively irenic. Embedded within its call for dialogue and fraternal cooperation is a Christologically-based and evangelical challenge–or better, provocation–for humanity to turn to God or face an effacing obliteration on the altar of a digital slavery, the likes of which the world has never seen before. Along these lines, and much to my delight, Leo makes the following statement and then quotes the famous line from Gaudium et Spes 22.

Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is ‘only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear. (1)

Obviously, Pope Leo thinks this challenge is more than an intellectual abstraction and more than just one more “issue” in a long line of social issues that the Church has faced before. Quite to the contrary, Leo views the current challenge as a visceral, existential threat to the very foundations of what it means to be a human being. Leo understands, and explicitly mentions, that there are voices in the transhumanist and posthumanist world who advocate for a radically reductionistic anthropology that views human beings as little more than organic meat computers.

Leo’s claim that this false and dangerous anthropology must be countered by an even more powerful and persuasive Christological anthropology is truly radical insofar as it returns us to our theological core, our roots, and our very reason for being a Church. Along these lines, he makes the following eye-opening statement early in the text:

In this regard, artificial intelligence, too, should not be considered as merely yet another theme to be studied or a crisis to be managed, but rather as a development that challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within, calling for their further development in fidelity to the Gospel. (17)

An Augustinian document

All that said, Pope Leo is certainly not a Luddite who is calling us to become Catholic Amish. He understands the inherent goodness of human technological ingenuity and its manifest potential for bettering the human condition. But neither is he a sociologically and psychologically naïve enthusiast for the idea that technology is “just a tool” and all that matters is “how we use it”. Channeling his inner Marshall McLuhan, he makes it clear that the tools we create shape us and change us and are therefore not inert instruments devoid of causative influence on those who use them.

Therefore, he insists that these two paths—Luddite fear and naïve enthusiasm—are both dead ends. He states clearly, “We cannot condone naïve enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears” (1).

But are these not, in fact, our two alternatives? Can we avoid committing to either stark rejection of the digital world or to embracing it with fulsome fervor?

The former understands that when you swallow poison, you die. So, don’t swallow poison. The latter understands that once the technological toothpaste is out of the tube in a global market economy, there can be no acceptance of the digital world without embracing the system that produces it, warts and all. So, just deal with it.

However, I think this is overly simplistic insofar as we stay faithful to divine revelation and therefore know that there is no “inevitability” to any particular historical moment. Yes, there is an internal metaphysical and spiritual logic that informs a given culture, giving rise to easily predictable results, all things being equal. But humans still have free will, and the engine of history is the dramatic interplay between human free will and the divine economy of the Kingdom.

Pope Leo is an Augustinian, and it shows in this document. Free will is what characterizes the distinction between the City of God (love of neighbor and God) and the City of Man (control, selfishness, libido dominandi).

Two images, two possibilities

I think this is a critical point. Leo begins his reflection, in an Augustinian tonality, by framing the entire discussion around two competing biblical images for how human beings have chosen to organize themselves socially. He then constructs his entire analysis of our new digital culture around these two alternative visions for social construction.

The first image is that of the Tower of Babel, which Leo views as a prideful attempt to construct a society without God. The project begins with a broad unity of language, purpose, and culture, but it ends in disaster. The will to dominate and control everything—including people—via the path of efficiency alone, inevitably leads to conflict, as sinful human beings succumb to the antinomian underpinnings of the entire project and descend into a lawless chaos that rips everything apart. He states:

It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused, and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing (7).

It is not hard to see echoes of Augustine here and his descriptions of the libido dominandi as the prevailing ethos of those who live without reference to God.

Leo then contrasts the image of Babel with the biblical image/narrative of the prophet Nehemiah and his efforts to reconstruct Jerusalem after the return from Babylonian exile. The devastation of the city was almost total; therefore, Nehemiah required the help of the entire community of believers. With God and their covenant with him as their focus, the post-exilic community came together in cooperative efforts that were only possible if motivated by a genuine love for God and neighbor, with the concomitant practice of a genuine self-sacrifice for the sake of the common good.

Applying these images to the problem of digital tech, Leo concludes:

In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel ore rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence. (9)

It is important to keep these two images in mind when approaching the encyclical because it is Leo himself who frames the entire discussion within the interplay of these two possibilities.

Against the growing libido dominandi 

There is already an emerging criticism in some circles that Pope Leo is too quick to appeal to international bodies as the source of human fraternity—bodies which have proven themselves over the past 80 years or so to be wholly inadequate and which often espouse pointedly anti-Christian values. Furthermore, Leo clearly doubles down on the approach of St. Pope John Paul II in appealing to the modern language of “human rights” in a manner that many think is too larded with secular humanistic overtones. Leo quotes Pope Francis’s Fratelli Tutti, appeals to the more Pollyanna aspects of the second half of Gaudium et Spes, and refers us back to the social optimism of John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris.

However, the pope’s citing of previous papal and conciliar texts in order to establish continuity is hardly something new. He also quotes other texts, from both John Paul and Benedict, that are far more oriented toward the confrontation with modern moral and religious relativism. Therefore, the attempt to dismiss Leo’s analysis in the encyclical as yet more liberal gibberish about “dialogue” and “human fraternal solidarity” ignores the many ways in which Leo raises several red flags that, when considered objectively, make it clear that he is no glassy-eyed enthusiast for the modern political ordo.

Leo’s concern is that in an age where the libido dominandi is gaining in power, and where so much of modernity is a recapitulation of the Promethean hubris of Babel, AI will be used in deeply destructive ways. We see this in his description of modern globalization as having succumbed to a polarizing nationalism. We have moved from the hope of a truly multilateral world of ordered economic and political relations to an ordo of competition between nation-states (I think the pope is thinking here of the competition between the United States and China).

Having critiqued the “technological paradigm” of efficiency above all else, Leo appears concerned, in the light of this unhealthy competition, about the weaponization of AI. Embedded within the technological paradigm is the “technological imperative,” which, loosely stated, means “what we have the power to do we must do, or else somebody else will do it instead.” Not without reason did Christopher Olah, co-founder of the AI firm Anthropic, attend the press conference launching the encyclical. He has been openly critical of the Pentagon’s decision to create AI weapons systems that have no human firewall and will operate automatically based on algorithmic calculations.

Just war theory and today’s challenges

I think this concern, which is hardly that of a Pollyanna optimist, also explains the pope’s cryptic comment that Just War theory is now “outdated”. He clearly reaffirms the right to legitimate self-defense if your nation is the victim of unjust aggression. But he goes on to rightly point out that Just War theory has been used to justify all kinds of wars that are clearly unjust, making the prudential decision-making principles at its heart serve the libido dominandi rather than the Amor Dei.

More than that, his use of the word “outdated” is instructive. Given the threat of the weaponization of AI, a deeper analysis of war-making is needed. I wrote my Master’s thesis on Just War doctrine, and it is clear to me that, as a tool for discernment, it has very strong merits. However, it is also a theory grounded in the notion that wars are waged between clearly discernible “sides”–competing city states, competing nations, competing empires–that have discrete and discernible boundaries, clear and discernible chains of command and authority, and which are fully carried forward by human agents with whom one can eventually parlay.

But all of this has broken down to a great extent, and the threat of AI is, as the Holy Father points out, that it is owned, developed, and operated by giant, private tech firms that seem to have no higher allegiance to anything except profits. And these firms, even if they call one country their “home base”, have no real patriotic impulses and are part of an emerging network of tech powers that are beholden to no one.

Furthermore, they have a vested financial interest in war, the ability to create a surveillance capitalism that destroys privacy, and can generate endless mountains of fake videos, false flag deceptions, and misinformation galore.

Pope Leo mentions all of this; it cannot be said that he is ignorant of this danger. In fact, I think the mere choosing of this topic for his first encyclical shows us just how dangerous he thinks it is.

Conclusion

Finally, those who chastise the pope for turning to the language of “dialogue” and for appealing to the “international community” ignore the fact that Leo has succeeded in bringing the world’s eyes to Rome. I saw a CNN panel discussing “subsidiarity” and what an “encyclical” is, and why this one is important.

It is plausible to think that, through this encyclical, Leo means to position the Vatican as a key player in the discourse and thus to potentially serve as a politically neutral venue for bringing together the world’s only real conversation about this topic. And that would not happen if Leo just summarily dismissed the international community as the enemy of all things good.

St. Augustine still has relevance. And perhaps the Holy Spirit has gifted us with this Augustinian pope for precisely this moment.