From the October issue: Five hundred million years ago, complex and diverse animal and plant life suddenly appears in the fossil record in an event called the Cambrian Explosion. In our time, the metaphysical opposite is occurring, argues Matthew W. Maguire: Technology rules over organic life, stunting and killing it.

Animal life and human health both physical and spiritual are abating in the digital age, and the collapse will only get worse with the advent of artificial intelligence. “The contrivances and apparatus of the inorganic now assert themselves against the organic in almost every dimension of life,” Maguire writes.

The effects of digitization and AI are at the forefront of humanist thought right now. Last month’s print issue featured Mary Harrington's essay "The King and the Swarm" on what the collapse of long-form reading will do to human consciousness and political society. We are reverting back to a pre-printing press mode of consciousness, she argued, where complex reasoning is replaced by symbols and pattern recognition. And no discussion of the tensions between the organic and inorganic can proceed without referencing Paul Kingsnorth’s essay “The Cross and the Machine,” now the basis of a book of essays titled Against the Machine published just a few weeks ago. Next month’s magazine will include our review of the book. 

In the first essay, Maguire said that we lack the capability to say no to technological infiltration except in the most dire of circumstances. Might that have something to do with the declining comfort in drawing stern boundaries and just saying no? John M. Grondelski might say so, though this piece presents the problems with refusing to “just say no” in the realms of family and the Church. 

And yet “no” is often the language of love. He writes, “The most classic distillation of Judeo-Christian moral teaching, the Ten Commandments, are mostly negative: Eight of ten begin with ‘Thou shalt not.’ This isn’t an outdated legalism. It’s the language of a Father who loves his children.”   

Columnist Carl Trueman recently wrote a version of this argument in his essay “Christianity Is Nothing Without Dogma.” He writes that his reading of John Henry Newman (one of his “guilty pleasures” as a Protestant) helped him understand that “the faith is not an expression of the religious consciousness of the community. . . . It is the dogmatic expression of supernatural truths about God and man as his creature.” That involves saying "no" to a whole lot.

The effects of the Church's refusal to say no or declare dogma are playing out in a scandalous situation in the Archdiocese of Chicago, where Blase Cardinal Cupich plans to grant pro-abortion Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin a lifetime achievement award. The announcement prompted outrage and rare public fraternal corrections from his brother bishops, including Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois.

Now Daniel Lipinski, former U.S. representative from Illinois, is offering his perspective as a pro-life Democrat who was ousted when his party moved left on abortion. He writes, “When Church leaders give their tacit approval through silence—or worse yet, honor a man who made them—it is destructive to the Church and undermines its witness in the world.” Refusing to say no ultimately harms the Church itself.

This is the third essay we’ve run on this story. You can read Bishop Paprocki’s admonition here, and check out Illinois Right to Life president Mary Kate Zander’s piece on how Durbin has shifted on abortion here.

Until next time.

VIRGINIA AABRAM

Newsletter Editor