About the Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Can it be called Luddism?

The publication of Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has prompted some people to accuse it of being an exercise in Luddism and a return to the Middle Ages (many of these people know little about the medieval period), sometimes accompanied by gruesome images of robots being burned at the stake, undoubtedly generated using AI tools. The speed of their responses is so surprising that one may wonder if they are judging the text without having read it. Are they right? Can the encyclical be accused of Luddism?

Let's begin by defining the word Luddism, as it appears in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

The beliefs or practices of the Luddites: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest. Broadly : one who is opposed to technological change.

It is, therefore, a term primarily applied to the use of violence against technological advancements. Violence is certainly difficult to justify, although in Ned Lud's case it is understandable, considering what happened at the time as a consequence of the introduction of machinery (looms) in textile factories. Some employers took advantage of this to dismiss their workers, telling them something like this:

Craig Venter, rest in peace.

Craig Venter

Craig Venter died on April 29, less than six months shy of his 80th birthday. This biologist revolutionized genomics research with two major achievements:

·         Deciphering the human genome. The Human Genome Project, whose scientific director was Francis Collins, was launched in 1990 by a multinational consortium with huge funding and the support of several governments. Its goal was to decipher in 15 years all the genes in human DNA. In 1998, eight years later, Craig Venter founded Celera Corporation and decided to apply the shotgun sequencing method, which he had developed, to decipher the human genome in parallel with the Human Genome Project, but much faster and with far less funding. His efforts culminated successfully, as in 2000 Venter and Collins jointly announced the success of both projects, several years ahead of schedule, and presented partial results, which were completed in 2003.

The future of science

Friedrich Nietzsche

With the loss of the impetus of Christianity, cyclical conceptions of history have resurfaced in the West. Let us see how Nietzsche expresses this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part III, 2.2), at the same time as predicting the replacement of man by the Superman, so he should have been immune to it:

And that spider creeping slowly in the moonlight, and that same moonlight, and you and I, standing before this door chatting about eternal things—must we not all have existed once before? And must we not come again and travel that path that stretches before us, that long and dreadful path? Won't we have to return eternally?

Twentieth-century atheist cosmologists often expressed a preference for a cyclic cosmology, which in their view would make God unnecessary to explain the existence of the universe. Although some of those theories (steady-state cosmology and the alternation of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch) are no longer in vogue, thanks to the data we now have about the origin and future of the universe, new theories continually emerge to replace them.

The Synthesis of Science and Faith in Western History

S.Augustin, by Louis Comfort Tiffany
Lightner Museum

By studying the history of science, one fact becomes evident: while other civilizations reached remarkable technical, mathematical, or astronomical heights, within European Christendom germinated a systematic, accelerated, and extraordinary scientific development, incomparable to that of any other civilization, past or present. Why this spectacular difference? The answer is not a matter of chance, but of worldview. Science and faith are not adversaries, but pieces of a puzzle designed with astonishing precision.

The supposed war between science and faith is a false diatribe fueled by nineteenth-century prejudices. While science deals with the material and experimental world, philosophy and faith deal with being and purpose. The error of scientists like Stephen Hawking was to declare that philosophy is dead and then, immediately afterward, propose theories (such as model realism or the multiverse) that are philosophical speculations.

Quantification of science

Chapter 2 of my book, The Quantification of History and the Future of the Western World, is dedicated to quantifying science, something I had done in the introduction to my dictionary, 1.000 grandes científicos (1,000 Great Scientists, Editorial Espasa, 1996), although in this new book I have introduced new tables and figures, and expanded upon the analyses carried out there. Here I will summarize some of the results of this chapter.

The following table shows the list of the 24 greatest scientists in the history of Greco-Roman and Western civilizations. The complete study considers the names of 1,000 scientists, who have been ordered according to the number of lines dedicated to them in the sources and encyclopedias used as the basis for the selection. Personally, I don't agree with all the results, but if I were to give in to the temptation to alter them at any point, that would have been an end to the objectivity I was seeking.

Quantification of literature

William Shakespeare

The analyses conducted about the literary field in the book The Quantification of History and the Future of the Western World cover almost three thousand years of Greco-Roman and Western literary history. This is a biographical analysis, based on recording the birth, flourishing, and death dates (if known), as well as the nationality of the writers. Each of the 210 historical figures considered has been assigned a quantitative rating, represented by a number between zero and ten. This number was calculated based on the number of lines dedicated to each author in the texts or encyclopedias used as the basis for the study.

Can history be quantified?

Can the history of culture be quantified? I believe many historians would answer this question in the negative. The prevailing view seems to be that historical events are unique and unrepeatable, and any attempt to discover laws or recurring patterns in these phenomena is usually met with extreme suspicion. Let us remember as an example the antagonistic reaction provoked by works such as The Decline of the West by the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler, or A Study of History by the British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, whose conclusions, however, were based on qualitative analysis. It is not surprising, therefore, that to find true quantifiers of history, one must turn to authors who were not professional historians.