There are important policy interventions on the table, especially regarding young people’s exposure to AI in pedagogical contexts and at formative times in their life. Strong stances from the major mainstream institutions of American life would also be wonderful. But I suspect there is little point in waiting around for either D.C. or Harvard to lead the way.
We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.
This, I think, is where Magnifica Humanitas will prove most inspired and invaluable in the years to come. Regardless of whether the powers that be heed the pope’s injunctions and warnings, that striking opening image will be available to all the faithful, and to every person of goodwill. If you find yourself in a ruin, staring at the crumbling remnants of a wall and the world it protected, what do you do? You assemble your people, you stake out a section, and you start to build.