Humanitas: Mundane, Magnificent, and Wanting More

Pope Leo XIV understands what a human being is. We, however, frequently do not. We’re so confused about what a human being is that a Supreme Court Justice waffles when asked the question what is a woman and Silicon Valley billionaires think the future of humanity is to merge with machines and to produce better babies through reproductive technologies. All the while, AI companies bombard us with promises of digitally enabled companionship and liberation from our obligations to one another.

Such examples of anthropological confusion are just the low-hanging fruit. Even more concerning are the subtler ways our technological and efficiency-driven culture nudges us towards treating people as units of labor, as objects for pleasure, as means to ends, as less than human.

In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo addresses these interrelated issues by situating a response to AI in the broader framework of Catholic Social Teaching, alongside the Church’s rich sacramentology and theology of the body. Understanding the interconnections of technology, culture, economy, and humanity, and that technologies are never neutral but always value-laden, the Roman Pontiff proffers a soaring vision of human beings as glorious in their mundanity and magnificence. And all of it is set in stark contrast to the techno-logics of the digital age which tend toward dehumanization and the reduction of the person “into data and performance.”

Mundane

Leo calls us to find meaning in the mundane aspects of human life and care. In doing so, he articulates the centrality of limits in the human experience. Embracing limits is extremely countercultural in a society that trains us to eliminate challenge and friction and sees human finitude “primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.” Yet, as he points out, it is precisely within our limitations that we grow as persons in compassion, generosity, and relationship.

Embracing human limits debunks the cultural myth of self-creation we swim in, which says that through self-expression and self-improvement techniques I will find who I am and lead a fulfilling life. We search for the latest life-hack, newest productivity technique, or optimization strategy. Leo lays bare this industrial and mechanistic approach to human problems and reminds us that there are higher human goods. Consider the extreme inefficiency of caring for a young toddler or elderly parent, or the long agonizing hours of inefficient conversation and presence required to walk with someone through despair, grief, or depression. These are highly inefficient but deeply human and deeply beautiful expressions of love. Such practices and experiences shift our mindset from the dehumanizing one of humans as unlimited autonomous machines, to one of humans as contingent and interdependent creatures. There is a givenness to our existence; being a creature implies limits. But human limits are not oppressive structures placed on us; they are part of our design, stitched into the very fabric of our bodies and of the universe. When we reject these limits, we work against our own nature.

Magnificent

Leo soars when expounding the glory and dignity of the human being, and our innate desire for relationship and communion. “The value of persons,” he writes, “does not depend on what they achieve or produce.” There is a dignity “that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God.” This message is needed in an age where talk of AI consciousness and super-intelligence are tossed around freely like beachballs at graduation. Leo grounds human value not in what a human does, but in what a human is, which helps us avoid what Patrick Anderson describes as the “humanity of the gaps” approach:

An inclination among some skeptics of technology to locate the quintessential human quality in whatever it is that no machine can yet do. What makes us special in a world of large language models, for instance, is that the best human writers can still write better than even the most advanced algorithms. You find this sort of argument all over, and there are several problems with it. Chief among them is that it unwittingly places our sense of ourselves at the feet of the historical contingencies which underlie the development of technology.

The phrase is a play on the nineteenth-century concept of the “God of the gaps,” which attempted to retain a role for God in the universe “in whatever it is that science cannot yet explain.” As science came to explain more mysteries of the universe, God’s role continually shrunk until there was no role left for him at all. Similarly, we must not to fall into the “humanity of the gaps” trap, where the definition of what it means to be human continually narrows as AI gets better until there is nothing left that makes one distinctly human. This approach paints ourselves into a corner, just as it did in understanding God’s role in creation. Leo’s rich Christian anthropology avoids this trap.

Which brings Leo to the pinnacle of humanity in the Incarnation. To truly understand our humanity, we must go to the one who is truly and fully human. “At the heart of everything is the mystery of the incarnation,” which subversively answers the yearnings of a technologically saturated culture attempting to transcend human limits. For God took “upon himself our weakness and transforms it into a setting for salvation.” Leo invites “everyone to contemplate, in the face of the Son of God, the grandeur of humanity that shines a light also on the era of AI.” And this experience of true humanity is made visible in the Eucharistic community that is the church: “The Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery reveal God entering into our human condition and transforming it through the gift of himself. This gift remains present and active in the Eucharist, in which the Lord gives himself and gathers the Church together.” Churches are to be outposts of the truly human, where we experience communion with God and one another. And as AI further liquidates our sense of truth, the reality of the sacrament and the community it constitutes is going to be more needed than ever.

More

The sheer breadth of Leo’s encyclical is impressive. Summarizing Catholic Social Teaching and applying it to the digital age and AI is no small feat. But there were points where I was left wanting more.

Amid his helpful call for embracing human limits, there were some lines and phrases that give the sense that limits are inherently tied to suffering. This doesn’t seem to jive with the reality that human beings were limited creatures even before the Fall into sin. He writes, “precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering, and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person.” But there are many other such limits that aren’t tied up with our fallenness. Our creatureliness and bodily limits are not results of sin but are built in to what it means to be a creature and not the creator. I would have liked more clarity here. Similarly, he calls for us not to deny or suppress suffering but to integrate it because “to eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well.” I’m not so sure. When Christ eliminates all suffering in the New Kingdom and wipes away every tear, will there not still be love? Did not the Holy Trinity love one another perfectly from all eternity and love Adam and Eve before suffering existed? St. Paul tells us, “Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:8).

Leo rightly critiques the ways in which AI attacks our personhood and plays on our desire for love and communion with one another. Yet he goes on to say that “the artificial imitation of positive human communication—words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love—can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful.” So, which one is it? Can a bot that by definition is just making things up, that cannot know truth or experience love, that does not have a body or a mind, really be “genuinely helpful” when it feigns all these human attributes? I’ll put my chips in with the first chatbot creator who, after becoming horrified of what he created, said that “to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love [should be off-limits because]…there are some human functions for which computers ought not to be substituted. It has nothing to do with what computers can or cannot be made to do. Respect, understanding, and love are not technical problems.”

At junctures like this, it felt like what Leo gave with the right he took with the left. The principles upon which he critiques AI and the digital age are sound and compelling. It just seemed like in places he could have followed the implications of his own arguments more fully. Yet this is precisely what makes the AI age so difficult: for so many of the use-cases, even at the individual level, there are no easy answers. And attempting to tell the whole world how to use or not use AI is a task that seems beyond even the Pope’s purview. What lingers with me most is Leo’s use of John Paul II’s key question, applied to AI: “Does AI ‘make human life on earth more human in every respect of that life? Does it make it more worthy of man?’” And that is a question we should ask of any technology.

Image Credit: Sebastião Salgado