Three Things Thursday: A Warm Take on Magnifica Humanitas

Like many people, I’ve been reading Pope Leo XIV’s first Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. It is long, it is expansive, and in many ways, it is daunting. Time will tell whether it is a worthy successor to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), but it certainly continues (explicitly) in that tradition. 

There are already quite a few “hot takes” from various commentators on this document and I am sure that folks much more learned in matters of theology, “Social Doctrine“, and papal politics will have more thoughtful takes on this over the next year or so. I offer here a few warm takes on the letter that mainly focused on parts of the text that resonated most deeply with me. To be clear, I’m not Catholic and don’t have any particular faith commitment to this document, but it still struck me as a remarkable statement that speaks to many issues that haunt our contemporary society.

Thing the First

Over the last few months, I lost my father and this week we decided that our 13 year old “yellow dog” is suffering too much. Fortunately, my dad liked dogs and because he was willing to give Milo “butt scratches,” Milo liked my dad. I’m sure that Milo and my dad will find each other in the next life. (This sentiment is probably not theologically justifiable, by the way!) 

One of the points that resonated with me the most in Magnifica Humanitas is how human interaction is not something that benefits from efficiency, optimization, or improvement. When my brother and I visited my dad before he passed, he was brought to tears that we came to see him and wanted to spend time with him. If you know anything about dogs (and particularly our “yellow dog”) most of what they want is companionship (and treats) whether this took the form of just being in the room, going for walks, or a vigorous game of “ram ball.”

The genuine experience of time together is not something that AI can simulate and it is not something that can be performed more efficiently. It is irreducibly human and forms the fabric of our society and extends at least as far as our companion species (although this is not something that the Pope discusses). For Leo XIV, technological developments cannot be just if they lead people to feel alienated, lonely, and isolated through either false promises, shallow simulations, or material requirements that promote slow violence that rends the social fabric of communities.

Thing the Second

Leo XIV evokes the idea of the dignity of work drawing heavily on Leo XIII’s thought (especially in Rerum Novarum, but elsewhere as well). I have to admit that I had not considered how this concept fit into my formulations of “slow” in archaeology (or in academia more broadly). On the one hand, I had recognized that efficiency often drove scholars to race to keep up with ever accelerating expectations and standards and that these often measured accomplishments on the basis of quantifiable products (publications, citations, FTEs, or whatever) rather than growth experienced through process. On the other hand, I had not thought about how this growing sense of manufactured urgency and the shift from process to product dehumanized work itself. 

Magnifica Humanitas got me thinking more about how the tools we use carry with them certain social expectations that erode the dignity of work by accelerating the time when social and moral reflection take place. Many tools — particularly AI — see process as something to be optimized rather than enjoyed, savored, or celebrated. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical calls out this reasoning and makes clear the process is what imparts work with dignity and allows for growth by making work human. When humans do work at the pace of the machine or do work to support the machine for the sake of the machine, this deprives the work of dignity.

The most scathing insight in this document is that those responsible for creating a society where optimizing process deprives work of dignity are morally responsible for the results of their actions. It is not possible to hide behind “the market” or “capital” as an excuse for advancing anti-human ideas. As humans, we have a unique kind of agency and as a result, unique responsibilities.

Thing the Third

Part of the genius of Leo XIV’s sprawling encyclical is that its structure, content, and scope make it resistant to contemporary reading practices. Much like Augustine’s Confessions, this is not a text susceptible to executive summary or other forms of streamlined digestion. Running it through your average LLM powered AI bot overlooks the nuanced interplay between the various arguments that relies, in no small part, on understanding the development of the church’s social doctrine over the past 135 years. Indeed, the interplay between Rerum Novarum and Magnifica Humanitas alone as well as scripture, Augustine’s work, and the writing of Leo’s immediate predecessors ensures that this text is not reducible to a series of bullet points, but rather a gateway to further engagement. The text is not linear. It is discursive and held together by centuries-old conversations, debates, and texts. It’s the kind of text that will draw a reader back to it multiple times and resist our society’s need for efficient, tidy, and conclusive engagement. 

In this way, Leo’s text resists the very forces that he (and his predecessors) see at play in the world. In a world that celebrates efficiency often at the expense of humanity, Leo has provided us with a very inefficient, but also very human text.