Lesson 5: Hitting the Bottom?
The pope’s latest encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” is subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” That is what the rules of civility do. They provide guidelines for safeguarding the human person.
To be civilized is to protect the weak from being abused by the strong. To be truly human is to respect the dignity of every individual.
Pope Leo claims this will be ensured if we choose a civilization of love that serves all people rather than a culture of power in which a few control everyone else.
He builds on Pope Francis’ insistence that church teaching should appreciate local cultures as expressions of genuine community and respect all persons as created in God’s image.
Our present problem stems from our people choosing a culture of power in which winning is everything and there are no rules to regulate how you do that.
We see in the past few days how far we have fallen. We celebrated our nation’s 250th anniversary with a brutal cage fight in which violence with few rules was featured.
The essence of the event and problem was captured by one of the colorful victors. While covered in blood, he decorated the president, thanked Jesus, and declared that Michelle Obama is a man.
He certainly first recognized that the most powerful man in the world supports uncivil activity, second proclaimed Jesus as someone who supports destroying people, and third captured in a nutshell that this is based on fear, not courage. In five words, he expressed the need to control blacks and women.
The distress was compounded when Elon Musk became a trillionaire around the same time, perhaps making him the second most powerful man in the world. He tried to prepare for the event by justifying making 1 million dollars an hour because his decisions affect so many. And we all know that his most famous decisions have been to destroy, without explanation, the careers of tremendous numbers of dedicated public servants.
Hopefully, we have reached the bottom. Maybe the indecency of these few days will inspire people to begin finding ways to recover civility. I want to suggest how we might do that in the next couple of weeks.
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