by William McGimpsey

This essay discusses the issues raised in Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical – Magnifica Humanitas. In it the Pope warns of the threats posed to mankind by technology and the centralisation of power.

I am a former policy analyst: the Pope’s encyclical contains many elements of a problem definition. This essay draws out some of those elements and restates them in something closer to the language of policy analysis.

The Tower of Babel

The encyclical begins with an invocation of the Tower of Babel – using it as a metaphor for the range of threats to humanity under examination. The Tower of Babel story occurs in Genesis 11 just after the story of Noah and the Great Flood and before the beginning of the story of Abraham.

God decides to flood the earth in Genesis 6 because mankind has become so corrupt and violent there is no saving them. There is a mysterious discussion of “the sons of God” taking wives from “the daughters of men” and producing Giants, or the Nephilim. Theologians debate what this really means, but it seems clear that there had been some sort of violation of proper moral and biological boundaries here.

There are also genealogies immediately before and after the story. The Genealogy in Genesis 10 is called the “Table of Nations” and describes how all the nations of the world descend from Noah via different bloodlines. The Genealogy after the Babel story in Genesis 11 describes how Abraham descends from Noah’s son Shem. That the nations are described in terms of ancestry and bloodlines and these are given prominence before and after the Babel story (and many other places in the Old and New Testaments), underscores, I think, that they form an important part of God’s plan for mankind.

The Tower of Babel story occurs after the founding of the nations’ post-flood, which makes it read as a rebellion against God’s plan – rather than going forth and populating the whole Earth, mankind gathered together on the Plain of Shinar and decided to build a city and a tower to “make a name for themselves” – this invokes pride as a motivation. God disapproves of: the building of the tower; that they are united; that they all have one language; and that “nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do”. This indicates that God disapproves of humans pursuing their own will or imagination unchecked. To thwart their plans, he confounds their language and scatters them across the face of the earth.

I think the teaching here is that human social organisation based on centralisation, pride and human will is unacceptable. Confounding languages and scattering people across the earth is God’s remedy – it restores distinctions between different peoples in terms of geography, language and bloodline that make future attempts at centralisation and homogenisation more difficult.

I take from this that a world of separate nations based on distinct ancestries, languages and homelands is part of God’s plan, and that these distinctions help to prevent mankind from falling back into “Babel-Syndrome”.

Babel-Syndrome and Heidegger’s Enframing

The “Babel-Syndrome” outlined in the Pope’s encyclical has some similarities to Heidegger’s idea of “enframing” outlined in the essay “The Question Concerning Technology”. It is useful to introduce this to provide a secular philosophical framework that illuminates the same problem.

In simple terms, Heidegger’s idea (my understanding of it at least) is that technology doesn’t merely expand our range of capabilities, it also exerts influence over our view of the world and the appropriate ends of human activity – rather than viewing the world as a home in which we dwell and to which we have loyalties, duties, and connections, technology allows and encourages us to think of it as a bundle of resources (Heidegger says “standing reserve”) to be manipulated according to our will – nudging us toward treating the world and our fellow man as means rather than ends.

Technology makes it possible to change the environment and ourselves in ways we could not have conceived of before. In Christian terms you could think of this as a form of temptation. The problem is that making changes to the world and ourselves risks changing, undermining and ruining God’s design (which he tells us repeatedly in Genesis is “good”). Modes of human and civilisational failure that were once technically impossible must now be prevented by moral restraint.

We are in a certain sense defined by our limits and boundaries, and if we change them, at a certain point we cease being who and what we originally were and become something else – this is true for individuals (take the transgender issue for example), but also nations/ethnic groups (take the issues of mass immigration and The Great Replacement), and it is also true for the environment, or the world in which we dwell, and which we have been given a duty to safeguard. The latter issue is the focus of environmentalist movements.

Three manifestations of Babel-Syndrome

a. Totalitarianism

Modern technocratic tools, AI and other new technologies expand what governments are capable of.

In the past, good governance was about more basic goals – maintaining peace, stability, law and order. Now governments are capable of pursuing more specific ideas like “wellbeing”, “equality”, “diversity, equity and inclusion” and more. These all involve judgements about the appropriate ends of man and society. But these are deep and complicated issues on which the greatest human minds, and the most esteemed philosophical and theological traditions still disagree. The debate is not settled, and no Government knows the correct answer with certainty.

If you make the aims of governance something too specific and top-down, then, especially with the suite of laws, policies, tools and methods modern governance has at its disposal, it can compete, conflict with and crowd out other visions that individuals and groups in society may wish to pursue, resulting in a kind of totalitarianism.

With AI and other new and advanced technologies, governments, bureaucracies and businesses will become increasingly powerful, such that they will be able to control the “choice architecture” of their citizens/ employees to such a degree that everyone will choose to do what the government/ planners/managers want them to do – formal legal freedom may remain, but dissent will be able to be eliminated in practice. The combination of modern technology, managerialism and “nudge theory” poses particular risks in this regard.

During my time as a policy analyst, producing a briefing often required input from teams of people: to provide information, undertake components of the analysis, make recommendations, and identify risks. AI is increasingly capable of performing much of this work in seconds. While this may improve efficiency, it also raises important questions about responsibility and judgement. Policy analysis is not merely a technical exercise: at every stage analysts make value judgements about what matters, which risks deserve attention, and what outcomes ought to be pursued.

The danger is that AI results in human beings becoming increasingly detached from the decision-making process, with those independent moral judgements increasingly delegated to machines. This creates the potential for a number of problems:

• Concentration of power – AI will allow complex decisions to be made by smaller groups of people, allowing power to be concentrated into a smaller number of hands, increasing the risk of tyranny emerging.
• AI bias influencing the direction of society – AI isn’t a neutral or value-free decision-maker: it makes value judgements in line with the data it has been trained on. In my experience, it is often “woke”, and recommends that you tone down, remove or censor politically incorrect ideas (even Grok). AI Bias “locks in” a certain set of value judgements which may not reflect the particular people or context in which the AI is being used. And the fact that the independent human moral agents capable of identifying and challenging AI’s moral judgements have been removed from the process, makes it harder for that direction to then be changed.
• Loss of sovereignty – If AI is making value judgements in governance that used to be made by human leaders, decision-makers, or advisors, then in effect the AI is, to a certain degree, exercising sovereign power in the place of those human leaders. If this were taken to an extreme it could result in human leaders being reduced to ratifying conclusions generated by systems they neither fully understand nor control, undermining self-government and the human dignity that goes along with it.
• Risk of catastrophic failure – All human power hierarchies ultimately depend on the following of orders. As a last resort, if the leader issues commands that risk catastrophic consequences, human subordinates, because they have moral agency, have the ability to independently revise or disobey their orders to prevent it. AI does not have this capacity, and so replacing human moral agents with AI removes this last resort against catastophe. This dystopian scenario has been portrayed in science fiction in movies such as 2001 A Space Odyssey, which I wrote about here.

These problems are relevant for all mankind, but perhaps particularly for religious communities like Christians who believe their existence has ends which are “not of this world”, such as faith in and right relationship to God. A possible dystopian future is that the religious impulse is demonised as a form of insanity, pathologized and attempts made to eliminate it through state power.

Augustine argued that the City of God and the City of Man have different ends. My argument is that if the City of Man becomes too specific in terms of the ends of governance it aims for, it can begin to coerce (or nudge) the City of God into an unwilling compliance with these unchosen ends, incrementally making it impossible for the two cities to coexist.

We have recent experience with this in terms of wokeness and DEI, which I believe have become coercive, impinge on people’s rights and freedoms, and are hostile and punish adherence to certain religious teachings around marriage, sexuality, and biological sex.

To prevent these problems, Governments must protect people’s rights and freedoms, and not become too specific in terms of the ends they pursue. The right of free speech is of the utmost importance here as it allows threats to the other rights to be publicly identified and allows people to communicate, organise, and advocate for their defence.

The same temptation toward use of power can operate in foreign policy as well as domestic, leading leaders and Governments to fail to respect the rights of other nations and their citizens. We have seen this in recent examples of power projection, including military actions by the United States, Russia, and Israel, where the lure of power and the desire to remake the world by force have led to violations of international law, sovereignty, and the basic human dignity of civilian populations caught in the crossfire.

b. Transhumanism

The encyclical warns against transhumanism and the desire to overcome human limitations: “It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centred, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of “salvation.””

We see transhumanism in some of the discussion from the tech sector, including figures like of Peter Thiel, who has discussed using technology to augment mankind and overcome our limitations.

A forerunner to this way of thinking is transgenderism, which uses technologies such as hormone therapy and surgical innovations to change the human body away from an individual’s God-given sex and into the sex subjectively desired. The desire to change one’s biological sex, was, until very recently considered a mental illness. It is only now that we have the technology to do so that a social movement has arisen to try and legitimise it (i.e. to tie the argument back to enframing).

The trans movement and gender ideology are examples of man’s rebellion against God’s created order – they are based on the idea of human self-definition and non-acceptance of God-given limits. And much like the story of Babel, they have resulted in confusion of language, especially the terms we use to describe sex differences. The fact that gender ideology has progressed and gained cultural sway through linguistic manipulation seems to me to have theological overtones.

But the trans movement is just the most recent iteration of a series of progressive social movements that have pursued sexual liberation and equality between the sexes. The idea that “gender roles” are arbitrary and oppressive originated from feminist thinkers. And the ideals of free love, and gay liberation created social momentum, and a constituency with vested interests in tearing down traditional limits on human sexual behaviour. The delegitimisation of opposition to feminism and gay rights has resulted in important ideas and principles, which would be useful and appropriate for opposing transgenderism in the intellectual and cultural spheres, to be taken off the table.

And transgenderism is merely a prelude to the much more radical changes in our bodies that future technologies are likely to enable – genetic engineering, augmenting body parts with machines, augmenting our brains with microchips, the merging of human and artificial intelligence, new and different forms of human reproduction, and many more things we have not yet imagined.

The risks here are that if we just leave these processes unregulated, they may proceed incrementally and become normalised before the risks have been thought through. Journeying too far down this road may result in the loss of our humanity. Without sufficient controls on the use of this technology, the changes could be harmful at an individual and collective level in ways we can’t anticipate. They could also be irreversible.

The upshot is that human biology needs protection from the combined forces of technological development and social change so we are not subject to “updates” that eventually deprive us of our humanity.

c. The Great Replacement

The encyclical defends the preservation of traditional peoples and nations, saying: “the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations…any attempt or plan to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral and therefore unacceptable”.

Traditional peoples and nations are under threat in the modern world from mass migration and The Great Replacement, but also from other factors.

The availability and affordability of transportation technology – roads, trains, planes, automobiles, etc, make mass migrations feasible in today’s world to an extent not possible in earlier times. As with the examples above, after it became technically possible, intellectual and cultural movements arose to promote it, and in recent decades an international legal framework and set of cultural norms and expectations has been built up that “normalises” people moving en masse to culturally alien country’s in order to “seek a better life”.

These laws, norms and expectations often consider it a violation of migrants human rights, equality, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, if things like citizenship, voting rights, and ability to become an MP are reserved only for members of the nation, thereby undermining the ability of peoples to preserve themselves and remain self-governing. The “outsider perspective” has been privileged and the rights of traditional majorities to preserve themselves have been delegitimised.

But in addition, individualism, consumerism, the drive for cheap labour, and the loss of traditional religious faiths, have also worked to destroy communal bonds, collective identity, and our connection to something larger: weakening the natural resistance to the breakdown and destruction of traditional peoples and nations.

The encyclical affirms both the human rights of migrants and the right of peoples “to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations.” Balancing these two moral imperatives is one of the central policy challenges of our time.

I think we should still accept refugees and asylum seekers fleeing wars, famines, natural disasters and so on, but the acceptance should be on the understanding that their stay will be temporary, and we expect them to return when conditions in their homeland have returned to normal. In addition, systems should be set up to distribute refugees and asylum seekers fairly between different countries – the burden should be shared to prevent any one country baring too much alone, but closer nations should generally be preferred to those further away, and refugees should generally go to countries where they fit in better and share more of the language, culture, religion and ethnicity of the host population – Christians to majority Christian countries, Muslims to majority Muslim countries, Arabs to Arab countries, Asians to Asian countries, English speakers to English speaking countries and so on.

As for economic migrants, I propose something similar: migrants should only be invited to come to a country to work where there are genuine skill shortages where no workers from within the host country can be found. Migrant labour should not be used merely to keep wages low for employers. And like refugees, migrants coming to work should be expected to return home again when the work is done and their visa expires: the practice of using grants of permanent residence or citizenship to lure foreign workers should end, as should hopping from one visa to another in perpetuity. Ensuring migrant workers return home again prevents them from staying, retiring and adding to the burden placed on pension schemes and social services, thus ensuring migration works FOR the host country, rather than making the immigration, welfare and social security systems operate like a Ponzi scheme.

Voluntary return incentives and other non-coercive measures that respect migrants’ human rights should be deployed to deal with the issue of unassimilated minorities whose presence is a threat to the host nation through crime, terrorism, the creation of parallel societies, foreign interference, and ethnic conflict/displacement.

Conclusion: Babel-Syndrome Defined

This essay takes the issues outlined in the Pope’s recent encyclical – Magnifica Humanitas – and reformulates them into a high-level problem definition. The problem definition describes Totalitarianism, Transhumanism, and The Great Replacement as being driven by a common tendency – the desire to overcome mankind’s limits. The encyclical coins the term Babel-Syndrome which this essay appropriates to describe this problem.

Man’s limits come in at least three types – moral, biological, and geographical. The failure of a society to respect these limits generates three corresponding types of social pathology – Totalitarianism, Transhumanism, and The Great Replacement. These social pathologies impinge on human dignity in three different ways: totalitarianism strips persons of their freedom and moral agency; transhumanism strips persons of their material human form; and The Great Replacement strips people of their traditional communities and sense of belonging. The necessary safeguards to prevent these social ills require protecting mankind’s rights and freedoms, his biology, and his borders.

An important aspect of the adjustment mankind needs to make is psychological and philosophical. We must adjust our attitude to limits. Modernity has taught mankind to view limits as barriers holding us back, and fostered the idea that overcoming these limits is “social progress”. But the limits which technology and centralisation of power allow us to overcome are part of what make us “magnificent humanity” in the first place. Instead of viewing limits as inhibiting, we should view them as definitional – something that makes us who and what we are. And, if we consider ourselves, our fellow man, and our world to be intrinsically valuable, as I believe God does, then it follows logically that those limits must be safeguarded rather than overcome.

Afterword: Rebuilding God’s Walls

The Pope’s encyclical contrasts Babel with Nehemiah, who organised the rebuild of Jerusalem’s walls. Rebuilding God’s walls and enforcing his limits is exactly what is needed to combat Babel-Syndrome.

But before we do that, it might be precautionary for us to consider another idea from Heidegger, who said: “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.” What he meant by this, I think, is that our moral and aesthetic senses, and our character in general, must be formed by the place we are in, in order for us to make appropriate judgements about how to change, add to, or develop it. Heidegger was a particularist in this way rather than a universalist, and if he is correct, it means that only someone who’s true home is in a place, who was formed by it, knows it, and loves it, is in a position to make appropriate judgements about where its limits and boundaries should lie.

Great Christian medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas incorporated moral particularity into their philosophical/theological frameworks through describing how we use reason to tailor and apply universal moral laws, which we grasp intuitively, to particular contexts. But perhaps this works the other way around, and we use our moral intuitions, which have been formed by our culture, upbringing and other features particular to the place and time we grew up in, to grasp intuitively what is right in context, and then reason inductively from particular applications to arrive at universal moral laws. This is analogous to how it works in empirical science, and when I reflect on my own moral experience, this process seems more like how it works for me.

Regardless of this speculation though, if Babel-Syndrome arises from thinking of the world as bundle of resources to be optimised, then the solution is instead to think of it as a home – the place which shapes us, to which we belong, and which we love for its own sake. Only if we have a relationship like that with the world around us will we ask what we can do for our country, rather than what it can do for us, and then get to work on rebuilding the little patch of wall that God has assigned us.

Originally published on The Conservative Network.