A couple weeks ago, the Pope issued the first encyclical of his term. An encyclical, as I’ve found out, is something in between a dissertation and an epistle from the New Testament where the Pope elucidates the Catholic Church’s stance on a topic. Now, I am not Catholic; an encyclical does not affect me (aside from the soft power wielded by the Papacy’s incredible cultural cachet). But this encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, did pique my interest.
The central thesis of Maginfiica Humanitas as written in its subtitle is “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” I have a lot of opinions on artificial intelligence1 and as the hype and buzz around the tech reaches a fever pitch, the question of what it means to be human gets bandied around by tech ghouls even though the slightest scrutiny reveals that any talk of conscious tech is just more marketing. It’s into this zeitgeist that Pope Leo XIV writes his encyclical.
In it, he (astutely) sums up generative artificial intelligence as “a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth” [x]. Conversely, to be human is to grow and learn and exist with one another. Pope Leo goes on to describe this social doctrine: “The ability to care for one another is a fundamental dimension of our humanity, one that is learned and mastered through lived experience” [x]. Technology can support this, but it cannot replace it.
As the Pope warns of artificial intelligence in weapons and condemns the use of deepfakes in politics, he extolls the importance of not giving up in the effort to build a better world, a “civilization of love.” Even if it all feels meaningless in the scope of the threats to the world, everyone can do something And then he drops the following paragraph which is the main reason I cared about this encyclical in the first place:
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. [x]
The Pope is quoting The Lord of The Rings. And he’s not doing idly but with great deliberation. The line is Gandalf’s advice to the others during The Last Debate: the Battle of Pelennor Fields has been won at great cost and now Aragorn and the others must decide on a course of action. They know they cannot defeat Sauron’s military might in open warfare, but sequestering away in their castles will be to merely prolong the inevitable. Their only hope is Frodo and Sam, two small Hobbits on a quest to destroy the Ring — the only way to defeat Sauron. Gandalf’s counsel is a reminder that even if they do not win, their task is to make sure that those who come after may have one less battle to fight. It is in light of this that Aragorn leads his army to Mordor, loudly proclaiming his kingship in challenge of Sauron. He knows he can’t win the battle ahead, all he can do is hope that his efforts will be enough of a distraction that Frodo and Sam will be able to destroy the Ring unnoticed. Trusting and hoping in their shared desire to create a kinder, gentler world of peace.
Put simply: Pope Leo XIV gets it. By quoting Tolkien in his encyclical he’s positioning the themes of one of the greatest works of modern fiction alongside his edification of humanity. The themes of The Lord of The Rings do indeed line up with what Leo is talking about: Tolkien’s work is vehemently anti-war and decries the dehumanization of industrialization; the books are also about hope and the importance of trying to make the world better no matter how small or insignificant one might be.
We live in a time when the tech ghoul Peter Thiel seems to have made misinterpreting Tolkien’s work his life’s calling by naming a surveillance company Palantir (after the palantír, a seeing stone that, in the context of the story, corrupts its users with knowledge) and a venture capital fund Mirthil (the rare metal for which the Dwarves “delved too greedily and too deep” and awoke the Balrog that laid waste to their underground kingdom). There is an autonomous weapons systems company named Anduril, — Aragorn’s sword in The Lord of The Rings which was reforged to mark the return of the king and peace, not more damn weapons to enact an imperialist agenda2. All these companies are the sorts that Tolkien would have been adamantly opposed to, yet they’ve taken names from his work because irony is dead.
Thus it is so very refreshing to see Tolkien quoted in a context that actually makes sense and that his work supports. Technology is racing forward at an unchecked, almost frightening pace as companies try to find the Next Big Thing in their pursuit of endless growth. With these massive companies touting their newest boondoggle as a superhuman worker we are left asking what does it actually mean to be human when the tech industry seems hellbent on dehumanizing us. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical is a beautiful answer to that question, one that finds an ally in Tolkien’s work. The threats that we see rising may not be ones that we can overcome in our own lifetimes, but that does not mean it’s not worth still hoping for and fighting for a gentler, kinder world.
- To sum up ever-so-briefly: The term is pure marketing nonsense that conflates machine learning tools (good!) with generative artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators (not good!). So much effort is being put towards finding ways to justify the spending and environmental cost of the latter (because generative artificial intelligence being able to simulate human conversation is a sexier technology than a machine being really good at analyzing data), despite its outputs being shoddy and lackluster outside of specific use cases. It’s also often just wrong. ↩︎
- I must once more quote Faramir’s line in The Two Towers: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend…” (678) ↩︎
Essays, Not Rants! 