Thoughts on Magnifica Humanitas: Part 6 (Chapter 4)

Due to some unforeseen changed in my personal life (you know, little things like career change and going back to graduate school), I have fallen woefully behind on continuing my reflections on Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. This is also partly due to the fact that I found Chapter 4 to be a bit of a slog to read through and mentally process. So, I have taken some weeks to got through it and collect my thoughts.

While I would quibble a bit over various sections in the preceding chapters and prologue, I was generally on the same page of where he was going (or at least where I thought he was going) with this encyclical. His overviews and recaps of Catholic Social Teaching since Rerum Novarum in the late 1800s have been solid. He took a few liberties in his summations of Catholic Social Teaching, but, for the most part, I was in general agreement with where he started and where he landed in those chapters. 

Chapter 4 was a bit of a different bird. I was a bit surprised by where he went in this chapter of the encyclical. It appears to be the longest chapter of the document, or at least thus far. Chapter 5 might be close to it's length, but I have not specifically counted the pages of that chapter as yet.

I think I was having some problems mentally following his logical in this chapter because it seems a bit disjointed. Almost like popcorn, he seems to pop from topic to topic, and I was having difficulties in a few of the sections trying to figure out how it was relevant. Usually by the end of the section, I could see how he was loosely tying it together, but I really feel like this chapter was a conglomeration of several different papers or homilies that he all sort of merged into one document. As an interesting experiment, I did run the text of the encyclical through an AI Text detector to see if any of it had been generated by AI, and it said zero percent appeared to have been AI generated. So, that was something. 

 Chapter 4's given theme was "Safeguarding humanity at a time of transformation." The premise started out simple enough, in that we are on a search for truth as a human race, and truth is a universal human good held in common. The idea is that all human knowledge is for the good of all humanity, not just a commodity to be held and guarded by a select and privileged few. He even states in paragraph 134 that, "The search for truth is an essential element of democracy." The reasoning is that when certain groups, usually governments, start hiding the truth, then you end up with totalitarian regimes. As I am all for open records and transparency in all levels of government, I don't disagree with this assessment. 

He then starts posited that idea to new technology like Big Data and AI. His premise being that Big Data is producing all sorts of algorithms and tracking data on people, and largely none of that is open to view or use by the general internet user. If you have ever been having a private conversation about some item and then magically you start seeing ads for that item suddenly showing up on your Facebook feed when you never discussed that item before, you generally understand a little about what the Pope is on about here. His general point is that something like that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Big Data and AI can mine about people from their online footprints without their knowledge. 

He then posits to children and the need to protect them from this Big Data, teaching them the dangers. He gives a hat tip to the importance of schools and learning to help shelter kids from the predatory internet. He then goes off into an odd tangent about challenges facing schools. While vague, it sort of tied into the theme of how unprepared we are as a society (including our school systems) on dealing with the Brave, New (Internet) World. 

Then in paragraph 148, things start going sideways. He opens with a very interesting turn of phrase, "Since the emergence of her Social Doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum..." That phrase raised my eyebrows because it made Catholic Social Doctrine seem like something that appears out of the ether. Granted, Rerum Novarum did take Catholic Social teaching to a whole new level, particularly with dealing with things like the Industrial Revolution and Communism and all that which the Church had really never systematically dealt with. But moral teachings about charity and the poor and usury and all manner of social teachings existed, at least in threads, before Rerum Novarum tied them all together in a unique way. So, that phraseology that Social Doctrine was a new and innovative thing created out of the ether apart from any Catholic tradition of the Magisterium didn't sit particularly well with me. 

He then transitions into I think the most problematic section of the document thus far. He starts delving into the idea of the value of labor and the dignity of work. Largely from paragraphs 152 to 164, he really starts throwing out some proto-socialist buzzwords, for lack of a better term. He starts advocating for "progressive redistribution" and the "paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace" (paragraph 153). I have gone over this passage several times, and it makes me uncomfortable because he seems to start advocating heavy governmental control and centralized planning to put into effect all his proposed safeguards and economic theories (paragraph 156). It is all conveniently vague, but I don't see how anyone could achieve the aims and goals he is proposing without throwing the doctrine of subsidiarity completely out the window in favor of top down centralization by a heavy handed government. 

Then, at the end of these paragraphs, he opens paragraph 158 with "With prophetic spirit..." I literally had a pen as I was reading my printed copy of this and wrote "Barf!" in the margins. As a survivor of the Anglican church's descent into Left wing nonsense, I cringe when clergy types start throwing around words like "using your prophetic spirit" or "your prophetic voice." It was always code word for "I am going to cloak my radical political activism under the guise of unproveable theological mummery." 

I always get antsy when people (particularly clergy types) start actively saying they are being prophetic because if you read the Old Testament, when a someone started self-proclaiming as a Prophet, it was *always* the case that the person was, in fact, a false prophet. Biblical texts would refer to people like Samuel or Eiljah as prophets, but a true prophet would never self identify publicly as a prophet and say, "Follow me because I AM THE PROPHET." The true prophets would always address people and present God's message by referring to themselves something like, "I am just a dresser of sycamores" or "I am a servant sent with a message." They would never publicly open a prophecy like the Pythia of the Greek Oracle of Delphi (a temple of of the greek god, Apollo) with "I am now prophesying directly from God...listen to me because I am the Prophet." If they did that, bad things happened because they were clearly not a true prophet. 

The other reason why listening to people self identify as a prophet is because there's no real way to rebut that statement at the time. "I'm using my prophetic voice!" Well, no, you are just cloaking your political hobby horse in a godly mantle to make your hobby horse seem like it is directly from God. You can never prove in the moment that what you are saying is indeed from God. You simply have to sit and wait to see if God eventually knock down their house of cards. Nor is there any recompense when God does prove their words were not prophetic unless you can jump into your Delorean and go back in time with a 'prophetic' message from the future. That just irritates me when clergy do this. 

 I would also note that once the Pope plays the inference of speaking with a prophetic voice, the rest of this entire section starts getting extremely vague on any particulars. He goes into cryptocurrencies and and then proclaims how we can "no longer...rely solely on the 'invisible hand' of the market. (paragraph 163)," but then gives no further explanation why that is or how he came to that conclusion. So, that whole section is extremely vague and bizarre.    

He then transitions back to safer ground with several paragraphs on families being the bedrock of society and the social conditions for hope. This is a good section, but a weird transition from cryptocurrencies and toying with centralized social control to combat AI. 

Finally, he more or less closes the chapter by roughly transitioning again to the topic of slavery. He does not directly reference, but he seems to allude in paragraph 172 to the two races of people that the Time Traveler in HG Wells' classic The Time Machine encounters when he goes far into the distant future: The Eloi and the Morlocks. He comes back to his odd sub-themes of trans-humanism and post-humanism that he never clearly defines. 

If you are unfamiliar with HG Wells' (himself an atheist) classic work of science fiction, after some post-atomic horror, humans evolve into two district species. One is a group of almost childlike human innocence (the Eloi) who live life in an Edenic existence without work, where the master race who run the machines are these hideous creatures (the Morlocks) who live underground and only come out at night because they feed on the Eloi. So many people completely overlook the Biblical allegory HG Wells throws in with the names. The Eloi are clearly references to the children of God (El is a name for God in the Old Testament and the suffix -oi is plural in Greek-so literally 'Little Gods' or little followers of God). Morlock is clearly a reference to Molech, the god in the Old Testament who people sacrificed babies to, hence the famous line from literature, "Bewareth the Molech's taste for human flesh." Pope Leo does not directly reference this story, but it is clearly something he is alluding to. 

He them goes into human slavery of various forms and how AI could be used to become a Molech that is used to harvest human flesh in the form of human trafficking, etc. It's sort of a stand alone sub-passage within the greater chapter, but I otherwise liked. I wish he had used the Molech analogy to greater extent in warning about the excesses of AI so as we don't feed ourselves, our families, or our children to the AI Molech. 

 I am perhaps reading too much into the last sections of Chapter 4, but I think, giving Pope Leo the benefit of the doubt, this is what he was attempting to discuss, dispute his best efforts going down prophetic economic rabbit holes. So, I will try to leave my discussion of this chapter on a high note. Like I said, I had to read through this chapter multiple times because I was really having trouble tracking his line of logic, but I think he finally gets there. 

We will see when we move into Chapter 5.