The Pope is a spiritual leader, head of state and at the same time an American citizen. Now he is at the head of a movement that will give a human face to a digital and artificial intelligence revolution, a revolution that has great dehumanizing power. Being at the forefront of the movement, it becomes part of the next divide between the US and Europe
1.
Of the many names available to Cardinal Robert F. Prevost, the Pope-elect took it as Leo XIV.
Leo before him was XIII. He wrote at the end of the 19th century “Rerum novarum”, “On new things” and started a conceptual revolution, not only in the Catholic Church. In this encyclical, the Pope wrote about the industrial revolution and about the Church’s obligation to preserve human dignity. From Leo XIII emerged the concepts of the dignity of work and the worker, fair wages, union organization… And, unlike the socialists and Marx who had written similarly, Leo XIII also determined that private property is sacred and that the state is there to guarantee a system in which the private economy can progress by integrating human dignity into this progress.
This was the basis for the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church, from which the shaping of the idea of the contemporary European social state was not a little influenced.
2.
The new Pope, Leo XIV, published his first encyclical in mid-May, entitled Magnifica humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). And, just as he continued with the name of his famous thirteenth successor, he continued with the foundation of his thought but now with the challenge of establishing the foundations of Social Doctrine in the XXI century. And produced a book that will be published in about 150 pages that with an intellectual breadth and theological discipline is a document that understands the time in which we live as a revolution for which doctrinal answers will be formulated.
The Pope’s answer can be read in two ways. In the end, the Catholic Church will find the whole text justified, as it begins with quotations from the Old Testament, it will end with Saint Mary and the Incarnation of the Word. But for those who are not among the believers, they will find a detailed explanation of our time, with the vocabulary of a sociologist, such as:
“In many cases, in the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power rests not in the hands of states, but of large economic and technological actors. These actors in practice define the conditions of access, set the rules of visibility and shape the very possibilities of participation. When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and avoid public scrutiny, increasing the risk of forms of distortions of development that produce new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities”.
Here Pope Leo raises the essential issue of the time we are going through: the danger that our societies (democratic and less democratic) settle into a new form of authoritarianism, of a dictatorship hidden in technocracy.
And, more knowledge, more technological capacity, more information and speed of handling them will not solve the problem by themselves.
“Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral, because they can promote participation and justice, but they can also deepen inequality, control and exclusion. Therefore, they must be evaluated by asking a fundamental question: Do they really help individuals and peoples become more humane and fraternal, while respecting our common home and future generations?”
The answer is no, because we live in the “technological paradigm”, a term coined by his predecessor: “The technocratic paradigm in our globalized world is the tendency to subject personal, social and economic decisions only to the logic of efficiency, control and profit. This makes it clear that technology is not just a tool”
3.
Pope Leo XIV with his book may have entered an ideologically and politically heterogeneous society of those who in recent years have dealt critically with the revolution we are going through. Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher of the Frankfurt School, published three years ago the book entitled “A new structural transformation of the public sphere and deliberative politics”, where he expressed the fact that the digital revolution and social media are improving the debate in the public sphere, directly endangering liberal democracy.
Yannis Varoufakis, the former Marxist Minister of Finance in Greece, in his book “Technofeudalism” warns that capitalism as we know it is dying because, among other things, the commodity that is traded is us, our information which is collected through social media, search engines and the like, and which in the end are used to direct our tastes and actions.
Francis Fukuyama of “The End of History?” with which at the end of the last century and the end of the cold war he heralded the historic victory of liberal democracy, is recently part of an initiative of American intellectuals for the regulation of the Internet, in particular of social media, as well as for complete transparency of algorithms.
All of these are found in the Pope’s encyclical. He raises many of the ideas that have been discussed in recent years, including those of these thinkers, although without naming them, in something that may be the first comprehensive philosophical elaboration (with ethics, political economy, international relations, theology and what not) that tries to address the challenge of the digital revolution and artificial intelligence.
4.
The Pope is a spiritual leader and head of state at the same time. Leon XIV also aimed to be an American by citizenship. That all these are important for the future of the Social Doctrine of the 21st century which he initiated, considering that this new Doctrine could be one of the new dividing lines between Europe and the USA. “Magnifica humanitas” is established in the thought of the European social state, of care for the common good (the Catholic postulates of “Rerum Novarum”). The Pope’s encyclical aims at this, that the digital revolution becomes part of the effort for the common good, through the participation of society and the individual in the transparency of algorithms, privacy of information, creation of ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence… In the US there is, not only in this administration, the culture of thinking that any regulatory measure on the Internet (and now artificial intelligence) is a restriction of freedom.
With “Magnifica humanitas” Pope Leo XIV may have opened the way for himself to be at the head of a movement that wants to give a human face to a revolution that has great dehumanizing power.
