A Loss for Humanity
In a world tilting toward technofascism, Pope Francis ceaselessly recalled us to our duty to care
I feel bereft. I am not a Catholic, but I feel orphaned by Pope Francis’s death. He preached compassion and respect for the essential human dignity of even the most vulnerable among us at a time when such sentiment is openly mocked, even by many who call themselves Christians. He railed against the indifference and hypocrisy of the comfortably cocooned citizens of wealthy democracies who are free to simply ignore the unimaginable suffering and injustice that are abetted by our governments, our military-industrial complexes, and the makers of our devices, our internet search engines, and the social media platforms we use every day.
The daughter of a Jain Indian father and a mother brought up in the Danish Lutheran church, I was left by my parents to figure out spiritual matters for myself. I have never practiced nor participated in any religion or cult, and I am exasperated by the deep conviction of many people of faith that their religion is the only legitimate one, and that everyone else is going to hell or coming back in their next life as a cockroach.
I consider myself to be a humanist. I love the literature of the French Enlightenment, and wrote a doctoral dissertation on 18th-century French philosophe Denis Diderot at U.C. Berkeley many years ago and the Enlightenment’s emergence in tandem with European colonial expansion. I am still besotted by Diderot. (“Est-ce que l’on sait où l’on va?" And if you know which character asks that in which novel, I am very impressed.) Diderot is l’homme de ma vie, apologies to husbands current and past.
Yet, I cannot share the absolute faith in technological progress that Diderot, co-author of the Enlightenment’s greatest compendium, the Encyclopedia, espoused, even if shaking off the superstitions that confer to unenlightened despots a divine right to rule was as worthy an undertaking then as it is now, and even if reason and science bring us miraculous good on many fronts.
Technofascism
What Diderot did not see, but we see too clearly two and a half centuries later, is that technology, the logic of techne, the great motor of Western civilization lauded by Sophocles in his Ode to Man, that power that allows humans to extract value from and to dominate the natural world, if left to its logical end untempered by unreasonable love, leads to such monstrosities as Manifest Destiny, efficient death camps, planetary environmental collapse, total surveillance societies and Drill, Baby, Drill.
Without empathy, compassion and love, (Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas observed the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal), life can only be a soulless, living hell, which is apparently what the tech broligarchy wants, at least for those of us who aren’t billionaires. We are neither to think (all those book bans and curriculum takeovers) nor to feel: People abducted from their homes and whisked off city sidewalks by unidentified masked men and ferreted away to faraway gulags? Refugees repeatedly drowning in the Mediterranean? People willfully starved? Babies blown to bits? Using Palestinians to perfect the technologies of surveillance, detention and liquidation that are now beginning to be deployed to track and remove to gulags people in Western democracies? Look away, folks. Nothing to see here.
Ukraine, a European country, used to be an exception to this ban on feeling empathy for people slaughtered by colonial aggression. Not anymore. Trump has had enough of pretending he cares. It’s Russia’s way, or the highway. Beyond what he can extract in rare metals and nuclear-generated electricity sales, Trump could give a good God damn about Ukraine. Europe? That’s so 20th-century, so elitist, so soft, so leftist, so everything the new masculinist strongmen despise.
As for Gaza, it’s nothing but an AI-generated video game to Trump, just real estate speculation, the latest setting for the exercise of 21st-century empire as the deranged fantasy of those who really don’t care. Do you?
Elon Musk doesn’t care. For him, the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Apparently, white men are simply better than other people, and it’s civilizational suicide to let needy people who aren’t white into the West or to squander Western money and resources on them wherever they live, whether out there in the “shithole” countries of the world or in America. (Ditto for women everywhere.) This, not “government efficiency,” is why the Trump administration has cut foreign aid programs. This is why DOGE is intent on gutting social service programs, including Medicaid and Social Security. This is why the Trump administration has made DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion, which sounds a whole helluva lot like a more inclusive version of the motto of the country where I live, France, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité — and which used to be considered a good thing, now a crime.
In an unselfconscious echo of the efficiencies of the machinery of Nazi deportations, disappearances and killing on an industrial scale, ICE director Todd Lyons gushed about his intention to bring lightning fast efficiency to what is euphemistically called the “deportation process.” Lyons says that he envisions abducting people and disappearing them to offshored gulags or for-profit prisons with a speed “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
As The Guardian reports:
[ICE director Todd Lyons] expressed hopes that the agency could utilize artificial intelligence to “free up bed space” and “fill up airplanes”, allowing Ice to deport immigrants at a quicker pace.
One can only imagine Pope Francis’s horror at such “processing” of human beings.
A Cry from the Heart
Who with the power and influence of a global leader will try to protect all of us against tyranny now that Pope Francis is gone? Who will exhort us to be our better, braver, more empathetic and generous selves? Who will challenge us not to remain indifferent to the suffering of others? Suffering for which we bear responsibility?
Pope Francis was deeply pained by the plight of desperate refugees seeking safety, survival and a better life at the risk of their and their children’s lives. He was deeply pained by the genocide in Gaza, appealing over and over again to stop the carnage, the tearing limb from limb of babies and children by powerful American bombs dropped by Israeli armed forces, the obliteration of every school, every hospital, every cultural monument, all the arable land, most neighborhoods, the deaths of tens of thousands, the maiming of even more. His was a cry from the heart against the blistering wind of Western belligerence and greed. I dare you not to weep when you watch the video below.
