Magnifica Humanitas and a Healthy Realism

Magnifica Humanitas, “on safeguarding the dignity of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence,” has made quite a stir. After all, AI is the new thing we are all talking about all the time. But there are other lessons in it, which are not about AI. Readers may have noticed how much the encyclical draws its weight and substance from a foundation of Christian thought that goes back centuries. Magnifica Humanitas demonstrates the value of Scripture and church tradition, which allow believers to build on something more permanent than shifting sands. Magnifica Humanitas also shows the value of a certain temperament.

“Cultivating a Healthy Realism” is a small section toward the end of Magnifica Humanitas. It has only one paragraph, number 218. It begins by saying that “We are in need of a healthy realism that avoids both political idealism and cynicism.”

Whether we turn on the news or not, the world seems to be spinning at an alarming pace. With AI, technology seems to be taking another great leap forward. Will the human cost resemble that exacted by Mao’s great leaps? In the United States, our political realm seems to be sinking ever further into the muck. Young people are showing signs of generational cognitive decline. Many people echo Yeats and suggest that “the center cannot hold.” Others might echo Jacob van Hoddis in “Weltende,” when he writes “The storm is here, a wild ocean has jumped / On land, the swollen dams have burst. / Most everyone has a cold. / Locomotives everywhere drop off bridges.”

As Leo XIV observes, in our troubling times, many of us turn to idealism or cynicism. We ignore signs of trouble or we ignore signs of life. He writes, “There is a kind of idealism that, in order to preserve its own worldview, tends to choose facts selectively, distorting and renaming them. Its proponents eventually inhabit a reality constructed to fit their own convictions. Conversely, there is also a debased form of realism that confuses observation with resignation, arguing that since force prevails, it will always prevail.” We can see both these tendencies at play in many areas of modern life. Sometimes we assume that everything will sort itself out and that surely some of the negative reports we are hearing are exaggerated. Sometimes we fixate on harms and cannot imagine having any hope for the future.

Magnifica Humanitas endorses another kind of realism. Here the pope travels down a somewhat unexpected path. He writes, “Authentic realism does not give up on changing the world; indeed, it starts by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics, precisely in order to determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it.” This realism does not give up on changing the world.

There is an entire discourse built around the idea that we should “stop trying to change the world.” Some people see in the urge to change the world the kind of obsession with ideals or with abstract nouns that has led to extreme political experiments. Others see it as the kind of foolhardy mission that leads to poor mental health outcomes. Even most idealists will admit the impossibility of achieving utopia. And conservatives will know that it certainly isn’t Burkean to try to change the world. For all these reasons, in many circles, it is decidedly unpopular to want to change the world, much less to try to change it. Instead, some kind of endurance of the world is preferred. If it cannot be entirely escaped, the neo-Stoics tell us, it should be ignored as much as possible.

Magnifica Humanitas does caution against some ways we may be tempted to try to change the world. This authentic realism “does not reduce politics to morality; neither does it surrender to violence. Instead, it seeks viable paths for making peace more than a mere word, through credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, conflict prevention and the protection of civilians.” There is no endorsement of revolutionary violence or anything hurried. A proper method of change will be peaceful and patient, will involve institutions and not just powerful individuals, and will protect civilians.

There is a certain kind of hope in believing it is possible to change the world. And, in this case, hope opposed to a certain kind of hype. One of the main “arguments” we are facing with AI, and with many other things, is inevitability. Every day someone says the equivalent of “I don’t like it either, but what can you do?” We are told that, though we don’t have to like AI or the state of politics or the educational system or anything else, we will still need to accept them as they are. It’s inevitable.

Many people are simply fatalists about many things. And with regard to AI, especially, many of us have already surrendered. How often do we sound like Hemingway in Farewell to Arms? “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

To suggest that we should not give up on changing the world is to defy the inevitability of AI. We do not have to be fatalists about everything. Indeed, we ought not be.

Some readers have been disappointed that Magnifica Humanitas does not condemn AI or call for action against it. Yet this point on authentic realism makes it clear that the encyclical dismisses inaction and passivity. Christians, and all men and women of goodwill, can and should do more than try to survive these trying times. We can and should do more than shrug our shoulders.

Several times the encyclical reminds us of our various responsibilities and encourages action at different levels for the common good. Is this naïve optimism? While historians may be skeptical about changes in human nature, human history has been full of changes, many brought about by human activity, intentional or not. As the body of Christ, Christians have significantly contributed to such changes, often overturning longstanding traditions. In the Roman world, Christians redefined acceptable treatment of children. As Tom Holland’s book Dominion shows, Christianity transformed the Western world and gave birth to the dominant ethics that now span the globe. Christians led the abolitionist movement. It is a very good thing that many of the people involved in those historical moments did not give up on changing the world.

Magnifica Humanitas references Hannah Arendt several times, and Arendt’s concept of miracles is very relevant here. In “What is Freedom?” she describes miracles, performed by God or by humans, as “interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected.” These miracles are possible because of human freedom. It is always possible for someone to step out of line or interrupt some seemingly automatic process. The Christmas truce of 1914 was a miracle in this way. In 1962, Vasily Arkhipov performed this kind of miracle on a Russian submarine when he prevented the launch of nuclear weapons against the United States. Arendt believed “it is not in the least superstitious, it is even in the counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and expect ‘miracles’ in the political realm.” These things are seen as miracles, because “the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear; for it is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automatically and therefore always must appear to be irresistible.”

Magnifica Humanitas encourages us to not give up on changing the world, reminding us that disaster is not irresistible and an AI-dominated future is not inevitable. Certainly not in a world in which the Lord is at work. The encyclical’s authentic realism offers us a vision of reality that has space for Arendt’s miracles and God’s miracles, alongside a fair assessment of the world’s troubles. Leo XIV writes that authentic realism “starts by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics, precisely in order to determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it.” We can see in Magnifica Humanitas and its authentic realism a call to attention, a call to action, and an affirmation of hope.

Image Credit: Andrew Wyeth, “Christina’s World” (1948)