An academic friend, JD (name redacted), writes this about today's encyclical.
"I just finished the new papal encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas." I hope to do an op-ed on the piece for a major news outlet and I'd love some suggestions about where.
This is not quite as good (as concise or poetic) as Laudato Si. Pope Francis was one-of-a-kind. But, it does have the virtue of attempting a synthesis of all the Catholic Social Teaching (which he calls "Doctrine") since Rerum Novarum in 1891, and in most ways this synthesis is fair and even-handed.
The essay begins with a contrast between the "Tower of Babel" (which he says was a city built on a "claim to self sufficiency," and which "eliminated diversity," and the work of Nehemiah in using the practice of collaboration in rebuilding Jerusalem. His overall point is that we need to include everyone in the ownership and management of technological tools and we also should not use weaponize these technologies to extract profit, create unemployment, and thus deprive people of the human dignity of creativity and the opportunity to support themselves. (He could have said this much concisely.)
The introduction and chapter 1 are dedicated to a synthesis of previous social teaching for those who haven't been following. Here he wanders a bit from his thesis. He notes the necessity of caring for migrants and refugees, stands opposed to wiping out other nations, and acknowledges that it took the Church far too long to repudiate slavery and its own investments in systems of slavery. He reiterates previous statements on the value of ecological diversity, development of the Global South, widespread public management of essential public utilities. He especially emphasizes the importance of "subsidiarity," the idea that power should be pushed down to the lowest level and that we should not depend on "states" (ah hem, communist states) for managing welfare. Again, he could do more to connect these back to his main argument.
It's not until he is about half way through the essay that he gets to the point. His points:
1. "Work is not considered simply as a problem to be dealt with or as a means of generating income, but a fundamental good for the person, a principle of economic activity and the key to the entire societal question. Through work, human beings bring their freedom, creativity and capacity for cooperation into play, contributing to the cultural and moral elevation of society." (Paragraph 37) Yes, meaningful work is part of what makes us human.
2. The church has previously supported "private property" and free markets. But, the desire for profits should "remain subordinate to the moral law and guided by the principle of solidarity, without sacrificing the most vulnerable to the rationale of profit." (Paragraph 39) This is huge. I wish the last Leo said this in 1891. We might have had a much better twentieth century. Will this change the way we teach in "Catholic" business schools? I am not holding my breath.
3. He says that AI is not a morally neutral technology. It creates value through machine learning and many of the workers in this industry are poor people, especially women in the Global South, whose lives are not necessarily measurably improved through this work. This is a technology that, like all new technologies, should be studied and evaluated for its moral and social implications and handled well. He discourages the concentration of power through monopolization of access to the benefits of this technology.
5. He says he wants to "safeguard humanity" from "transhumanist" and "posthumanist currents," meaning that he wants to remind people that they need to make good decisions about how to use these new technologies. He supports the expansion of schools as a necessary safeguard to equip people to face the future and calls for communities to come together in support of excellent education in their communities. He says, "Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships." (paragraph 147)
6. He says that we need "an economy of dignity" that develops meaningful jobs and puts people to work. He sees forced unemployment as degrading to human community. He says, "It is important to move beyond current metrics of development--which for more than eighty years have been tied to the concept of Gross Domestic Product--since these metrics almost systematically neglect aspects essential to the overall wellbeing of people and the environment." (Para 159)
Overall, I'm glad for the encyclical but it's a little late. Too bad most of those "Catholic Social Doctrine" popes were so consumed with opposing "communism" that they wouldn't take on capitalism when it was forming the very foundation of Western Civilization. I guess it's never too late to become a Marxist, but I'd like an apology for the Catholic Century of Redbaiting."