Campion Hall is an Oxford college which, as a ‘permanent private hall’, is also a Jesuit institute. On 14 May I went to this year’s Campion Lecture there, on Developing Human Dignity in the Digital Age.
It was given by Paolo Carozza, a law lecturer at Notre Dame University in Indiana. For the past two years he had moved on from human rights law as such to the impact on it of the electronic media and artificial intelligence (AI). In this he looked to Catholic Social Teaching (CST), though this had yet to become media savvy (not his word). His starting point from this was that every person was a child of God. CST included the concepts of the preferential option for the poor and of the common good. Jesus preached non-violence (turn the other cheek).
But the issues he now saw were not denominational but attacks on human dignity from all directions. Narcissism and tribalism were leading to bullying and violence against minorities. The media and AI were enhancing fixed mindsets, as was also surveillance capitalism. The (CST) concept of subsidiarity should lead to freedom of individuals and groups, but these trends were distorting it. The media community served a vast network of undifferentiated people whilst very small teams were managing it. It was naive to see any of this as contributing to the CST concept of solidarity.
Human dignity and the value of the human person were in treaties and legislation, but the consensus about these was allowing real problems to be evaded, partly with the concern for consensus. In this digital age, we should perhaps rethink the principles. It was Wittgenstein who said that we must revisit the rough ground. Life lived on screen disembodied relationships. It offered experience with no meaning. Coercion wasn’t necessarily physical. Facebook itself had admitted the fact of mental health risks. Individual agency and freedoms were diminished. Algorithms and AI were reducing the need – and hence the capacity – for individuals to take decisions (for example in screening job applicants). Having new tools inevitably changed the worlds we lived in. A typical unintended consequence was the way that GPS and SatNav travelling was undermining our understanding of spaces and distance. Understanding more widely was at risk, not just the unknowable universe, but of matters moral, social, ontological, and ultimately of God.
We can’t wholly avoid the technology but alongside it we can seek a ‘thicker understanding’ of human dignity. With human rights under threat and the need for privacy channelled into personalised and solipsistic (not his word) claims for rights, the search for truth was becoming more and more necessary – I don’t think he actually spoke of fake news. (A Vatican Declaration on Human Dignity of 8 April this year mentions this, but in a section on digital difficulties which is something of a tailpiece to the document.) Freedom of thought was under pressure, let alone freedom of religion.
Paolo ended by saying that he did not disown digital technology, whilst hoping that, with CST, we can be brought back from from the abyss (his word).
In the question period I was able to say that Quaker testimonies closely matched his Catholic advices, whatever our doctrinal differences. I also mentioned a recent press finding that the screen-based young were losing the capacity for small talk, by which individuals can explore what other people are like. Others mentioned globalisation as a threat to local dignity, and suggested that the media were undermining recognition for womanhood, and also respect for the non-human biosphere.
Given the small talk imperative, I found myself after the lecture in a group consisting of a Norwegian Lutheran theologian, a Peruvian historian concerned with the nation-building of the individual South American states, and a Christian Palestinian who was working on Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts at Thessaloniki. They had each come up to Oxford for the day.
All this makes me recall that Campion Hall is a 1930s Lutyens building containing sensationally beautiful religious art from the mediaeval, renaissance and 20th centuries.
Richard Seebohm
23.5.24