“At this jagged, violent and sometimes madcap moment in history, calling one’s first encyclical “Magnifica humanitas” (Magnificent humanity) may seem an exercise in papal naiveté. A close reading of Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural letter, released Monday and addressed “to men and women of good will,” reveals something quite different: a great and energizing hope born of Christian faith. That faith in turn underwrites a striking confidence in the human capacity to do better than we’re doing at present.
Given the exponentially accelerating technological change represented by artificial intelligence, Leo suggests in the encyclical that the civilizational choice before us is between Babel and Jerusalem. Babel, of course, was the brick tower built out of a technological hubris that resulted in chaos, conflict and a shattered, scattered humanity. The Jerusalem the pope has in mind is the holy city rebuilt by Nehemiah in the 5th century B.C. after its destruction and the Jewish population’s Babylonian exile. Jerusalem’s reconstruction, Leo writes, was “the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of household, and young people,” an undertaking that “rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.”
The “primary choice,” he writes, “is thus not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology.” What any technological innovation is used for is what counts. So is the idea of who we are as human beings — the implicit anthropology — that any technology embodies.”
Continue reading more from George Weigel with the Washington Post here.
