The best thing I have seen so far on Pope Leo’s encyclical is this reflection by Yuval Levin, in which Yuval notes with pleasure Leo’s use of the story of the Tower of Babel but wishes that the story had been pursued further. For anyone who might be interested, some years ago I wrote a series of posts on the theme of building in the Bible:
I think they hold up pretty well, and some of the comments are quite illuminating. I kinda wish I had turned these posts into a book….
Some years ago Edward Mendelson published an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness — sorry about the paywall — and anyone who studies Auden keeps stumbling across his generosities. Just today, for example, I happened to read that (a) when James Schuyler had his first psychotic breakdown Auden paid for his hospitalization, and (b) when Joseph Brodsky was forced out of the Soviet Union Auden arranged for him to have a job at the University of Michigan. One favorite anecdote from Mendelson’s essay:
At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.
I don’t think this Pope operates according to categories like “throwing shade.” As we saw when Leo tangled with Donald Trump over his war of choice in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and proclaiming.
His Gandalf quote may well be targeted at Thiel, or perhaps more broadly at those who think in similar ways. But it is not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of speaking across differences using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource between the two camps. It offers up a different interpretation of Tolkien’s tremendous work to those who see in it a license for warfare, technological disruption, tremendous battles, and global action. Those things exist in the story, and they are exciting, but they are also terrifying and ultimately endured only for the purpose of defending community, hearth, and home.
From the same article, The Eadwine Psalter (c.1155-60)
At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo’s Warnings About the New Technology: Well, of course! Did anyone expect thoughtful response? The people who run the big A.I. companies believe that they are so rich and powerful that they can do anything they want, and don’t require public support to do it. Time will tell if they are correct.
A lot happened in 2016. It would be easy to imagine that the entire reason for this change was the election of Donald Trump as president, and to stop looking for other causes, but something else also happened which I think we should at least consider, and that other thing says something important about how social media and human psychology interact.
In March 2016 Twitter completed their transition to the algorithmic feed, meaning that it was the default for all users to have their timeline populated by what Twitter thought they would want to see, rather than a chronological feed of posts from people they had decided to follow.
Count me a big fan of the infographics the Vatican has helpfully made to illustrate the main points of Leo’s encyclical.
The last few weeks have been pretty miserable, honestly, but tonight I’ve made myself a Frisco and am listening to Ella singing Rodgers & Hart. So for the moment I have absolutely nothing to complain about.