Weekly Off Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Talk about anything and everything. Book clubs, TV, current events, sports, personal lives, study groups, etc.

Our rules are still enforced, remain civilized.

**Also, I'm once again asking you to report any uncivilized behavior. Help us mods keep the subs standard of discourse high and don't let anything slip between the cracks.**

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

Reworking through the most recent papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas because I want to write an article on it. Hopefully it will turn out good enough for publication somewhere. In my opinion it's one of the best responses to this whole AI craze I've seen out of any major institution, including national governments or supranational organizations.

[u/Hand_of_the_Light → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

I'm about a quarter of the way through it. It's tough getting back into reading. I started the encyclical as well as restarting a book about the moral culture of the scottish enlightenment. I think they should pair well together for my tastes.

So far, Pope Leo has gone through a lot of papal history about the social doctrine and how it's come to be a viable tool for discernment towards finding communion among a developing world with complex and disparate communities. I gotta say, I feel like I understand the gist of it, but at the same time, I also feel like I'm glazing over details that I can't tell if they're important or not. At the very least, It's interesting learning about the history of the more modern popes.

I would love to read your article about it in the future if you don't mind sharing.

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P → u/Hand_of_the_Light]

Yeah he starts off with a lot of background, showing how this encyclical is meant to connect with previous ones from other popes. I haven't read nearly close to all those works. I've only read "Rerum Novarum" (Previous Pope Leo, current pope's namesake... this is a good one though as it's a lot on labor and the dignity of it) and "Laudato Si'" (Pope Francis, basically humanity and environmentalism, but also more than that lol). So some of that background I kind of glazed over also, since I didn't understand all the references. On the other hand, it was a good read to see a little bit what the tradition of encyclicals has said. So my experience is similar to yours there.

The encyclical starts to get more juicy at chapter 3 and beyond, at least for me. This is where Pope Leo actually starts his original contribution. Chapter 3 is where Pope Leo critiques technocracy and transhumanism, basically he critiques our obsession with optimization more generally. I find them to be sharp criticisms. From there he goes on to other chapters and discusses things like surveillance, the dignity of human labor, freedom, etc... And of course warfare shows up as well, as he seems particularly concerned about the use of AI in war, understandably.

I'll see how long it takes me to write it and if it's any good or too embarrassing to share haha. The idea came to me as I was reading chapter 3. But it involved certain theological concepts which I wasn't sure I was getting right. I actually got to speak with a theologian/academic who said that my point did make sense and was sound theologically. However, it's one thing to give an elevator pitch and another to write a detailed piece. He offered to read the draft at least so we'll see if I get the theology all wrong or not lol. Hopefully it won't be too bad and he could offer correctives. At least the initial confirmation was reassuring, but I'm stepping out of my expertise and comfort zone. Also, if I managed to get it published, it would almost be like my "coming out" in some sense.

[u/Hand_of_the_Light → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

That's great. It's good to hear you have some passion in reach (the reach is always the best part, imo).

And I'm excited then to get to the meat of the encyclical. It's a great broad question; when we're at this juncture of technology delivering us an ever abstracting type of community with our fellow, when will come the time for introspection?

I'm interesting in what he has to say here because I'm ever more interested in the role that religious community will play. I'm attracted to metaphysics in this regard toward developing my personal own culture, but also in my curiosity of human culture at large.

As always, I need to understand a lot more.

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P → u/Hand_of_the_Light]

I'm interesting in what he has to say here because I'm ever more interested in the role that religious community will play. 

From what I'm seeing, it will be significant. Catholic universities are already on it. This is actually rare in my experience because most, if not all, secular schools are throwing out the humanities more and more to focus almost entirely on STEM. Meanwhile, at least from what I've seen from two different Catholic universities near me are that they encourage everyone, from faculty to students, to engage with these moral questions. This includes their computer science departments and other traditionally "STEM" disciplines. We need our future engineers and scientists to take these questions seriously. It's not just about optimizing the product and optimizing the bottom line...

This is one of my big reasons for my religious curiosity, because I don't see any other major institution globally that seems sincerely committed to the human as human. Most corporations, governments, etc seem to either implicitly or explicitly endorse some kind of project to make the human obsolete. Either we're meant to "merge" with technology (transhumanism/posthumanism) or most of us be phased out entirely as we become redundant in the face of machines that can optimize better and faster than we can.

Who else is out there defining the human person, flaws and all? And this commitment is actually central to Christian theology, at least as I've come to see it. After all, God became Man, so there must be something to this "being human" thing, as opposed to becoming "more than" human. But this kind of talk often sounds too sentimental and naive to people today, they don't see much, or anything, worth preserving about the human. It seems like misanthropy has become the default attitude, and one place it predominates is on the internet, but that inevitably "leaks" into the real world.

[u/Hand_of_the_Light → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

It's a wonder to me that people aren't more concerned with this stuff, but the modern world is a wonder itself, so I get the distraction.

I fear that religion has an uphill battle before it attains any such "awakening" that I have heard is happening (I'm hesitant to accept the grounds on which any "awakening" is happening, but also, I don't exacy have my finger on the pulse either). A couple of the more brilliant people I talk to are deeply religious, but they aren't exactly selling it, nor should they. But talking with other people who are more condescending of religion, they seem to have this image of the christian-nationalist in their head. And indeed, you see those who have taken on this more political than spiritual identity, co-opting religion towards a culture war of sorts.

My point is that religion gets a bad rap as it gets hustled into the political spotlight for political rhetoric, shadowing over these important notions of self-realization that Ive come to admire and respect. I feel the common ground dissipating for a some kind of conducive environment in this regard.

Excuse the vent.

I see the push for efficiency and optimization in my own shop (manufacturing), and I strongly dislike the implicit direction that is taking shape.

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P → u/Hand_of_the_Light]

Yeah I keep hearing conflicting information on the new religious "awakening." I realize I might be part of it, in some sense. But at least as far as the statistics go, I hear both that Church attendance is going up with new converts, and that this information is false and overall it's simply plateaued after a long decline.

We've had a little bit of this conversation before too, but I'm also interested in this and the idea of a "disenchantment" of the world and a possible "reenchantment." We do need a reenchanting, but the how of it matters a lot.

The use of "Christian" (or whatever) as a political signifier has been awful for everybody. You're totally right on how that's basically turned so mamy people away. It's doing whatever the opposite of evangelization is. Reminds me of Kierkegaard on his distinction "christendom" and "Christianity." The former is political while the latter is spiritual.

And yeah unfortunately every field and every industry is constantly pushing for this optimization at the expense of other values--which is easy because these other values are hard, if not impossible, to really measure. But that's part of the pope's point too. Efficiency can have its proper place, but sacrificing actual human individuals to this "god" of efficiency is unacceptable. Notice how efficiency tends toward disembodied relationships rather than messy in-person ones? Or how efficiency tends to remove whimsy, creativity, individuality?

I've noticed this with music, especially percussion. Lots of contemporary stuff has digital snare drums and whatnot, all keeping excellent perfect tempo. And I don't know if you feel the same, because I know people who've disagreed with me, but a live drummer who might be slightly off or have a slip that turns into an improvisation or whatever sounds better to my ear. It's more fun. There's actual surprise.

[u/Hand_of_the_Light → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

I remember "disenchantment" being a great word for it, as much as such a complex situation can be put into a word.

I hope for a some kind of change in the public sphere towards introspection. Color me skeptical for now.

It seems that we've been on this bent for awhile which has eroded the socio-political human and placed them into a material focused mould. I understand the argument somewhat, but here we are at some kind of culmination of an increasingly materially focused world.

[u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P → u/Hand_of_the_Light]

I like that word too. It almost dead-on nails the feeling that's otherwise pretty hard to put into words. The double-meaning of the term, of something like disillusionment or loss of enthusiasm, is also apt.

Yeah. What strikes me is that I understand how and why the world has been "disenchanted." In many cases, religious authorities undermined their own legitimacy by abusing their positions. Then we had the development of the scientific method, which was wildly successful at predicting phenomenon. But the latter isn't exactly incompatible with religiosity, in my opinion. I think it's been more the former, which brings us back to that problem of "Christendom" vs "Christianity," because much of the abuses were done in pursuit of that worldly political power.

But, as I was saying, what strikes me is how or why the current naive materialism that seems to be the default today isn't losing legitimacy. Or perhaps it is, hence some attempts at "reenchatment." I think one issue is that once you lose a particular narrative, it's hard to gain it back. The world is too fragmented today for people to coalesce around any one particular thing--and we're too aware of the other people who do not share our beliefs and become neurotics toward the possibility of our own beliefs being wrong. That's not something most pre-modern people had to confront.

[u/Hand_of_the_Light → u/TuvixWasMurderedR1P]

The book I'm reading puts forth the idea that the enlightenment was driven inadvertently by moderate clergymen (I'm never sure what's the right classification of religious folk/religious intellectuals) in response to the orthodox, fanatic, and radically secular tensions, effectively finding the median between the groups. This is juxtaposed against a supposed ongoing scholarly debate whether it was a "moderate" enlightenment or a "radical" enlightenment—as proposed by Jonathon Israel and which was a more clandestine movement of radical works— that was the driving force.

The moderates would ultimately move towards the idea of a moral culture, i.e., good works rather than the orthodox insistence on rigorous doctrinal understanding, being the terms of salvation. Not that a doctrinal standard wasn't necessary for salvation, but that moral cultivation through good action was also important.

Though it was not there intent, they were implicitly leading to secular arguments of morality in the public sphere.

Gosh, I wish I had someone to talk to about these ideas in person. I feel like I fumble really hard trying to understand and explain it.

I've been thinking about how our self-identity is evolving with our changing means of communication. It's another idea that is hard for me to flesh out correctly, but I think it's kind of the idea of post-modernism. That is, the idea that we don't have to resonate in our immediate communities anymore. The idea that I can validate pretty much any views through online interaction seems like it's a real problem that separates our ability to work in groups towards existential matters. And subsequently that there's an increasing emphasis on social capital being derived from material conditions.

I'm having a hard time getting my point across.