• 大清聖祖仁皇帝（康熙）實錄 三百卷  Da-Qing Shengzu Ren Huangdi shilu  1661-1722 (Kangxi), ed. 1741

• Yet Magnifica Humanitas only incidentally concerns the promise and peril of the AI revolution. A closer examination reveals that Leo’s ultimate project is nothing less than a defense of moral and political universalism — the collective struggle for “a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason,” as the pope puts it — just when universal reason is menaced on every side by various irrationalisms.
• Put another way: amid the ruins of modernity’s great emancipatory universalisms — liberalism, socialism, “positive science” — Leo is reminding us that there is a much older mode of universal reason, blending revelation and classical philosophy, preserved by the Catholic Church
• And that Rome, with its “dynamic approach to the Gospel,” isn’t afraid to acknowledge the achievements of exhausted modernity, nor to collaborate in its renewal today.
• That collaborative element — Leo’s tipping of his mitre to the United Nations, multilateralism, abolitionist and labor movements, and the like — renders the encyclical supremely unfashionable. Not least among neo-traditionalists within the Church, for whom the document harks back to the heyday of Vatican II and the midcentury moment that saw theologians and hierarchs embrace projects like global governance.
• Blind faith in markets and technology, he suggests, is far from the only latter-day irrationalism. Others include “fundamentalist, identity-based, and nationalistic reactions” that have been stoked by the failure of capitalism and technocracy since the end of the Cold War to “generate prosperity, democracy, and stability.”
• the pope’s approach — combining a classical and Christian account of the human person with openness to modern means for social emancipation — goes back to the previous Pope Leo, Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching with his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum.
• Leo XIII recognized that the organization of social and economic life implicates the salvific mission of the Church and therefore the Church can’t stand neutral in relation to it.
• Writing in the teeth of the Industrial Revolution, that earlier Leo beheld around him “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses” and a resulting “moral degeneracy.”
• More fundamentally, Leo XIII saw modern market societies as characterized by a constitutive antagonism: “social antagonism [that] erupted not in spite of, but as a result of people acting rationally within the rules of the game,” as I’ve written elsewhere. Under industrial conditions, a handful of firms dominated most sectors, giving employers nearly all the bargaining power, with the result that workers didn’t enjoy the freedom promised to them on paper. 
• “The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves,” Leo observed, “whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”
• Leo XIII’s classical and Christian anthropology came in: workers aren’t just another production input, but human beings with rights due them as a matter of “justice.” These rights, not least the right to a family wage, must be upheld by the state and promoted by associations, the “most important” of which are “workingmen’s associations” — i.e., labor unions. 
• It’s classical in its anthropology: the worker is a human being with a family to maintain and the natural imperative to participate in civil society; if he’s materially desperate, his family falls to immorality and he can’t take part in other societies like church and politics. 

• It’s modern in that Leo XIII notably didn’t decry industrial production as such. He didn’t hanker for the restoration of feudal relations or a return to the land or small-producerism or other such fantasies of the Tweed Jacket Class. At some level, he accepted that there is no “going back behind” of modernity. 

   

  The answer for Leo XIII, rather, lay in just wages enforced by the state and in labor organizations mounting what he called “united action” (what we now call “collective action”)
• Leo XIV is perhaps more cautious. Nevertheless, the same general pattern — an insistence on the human person as possessed of divine dignity; a willingness to engage with modernity in protecting that dignity — is easily discernible in Magnifica Humanitas. 
• the American pope begins with the insistence that “the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people.”
• In short: “There is no authentic evangelisation that does not also affect the structures of human society.”
• “I am convinced that the concrete way of living out social relationships in the light of the Gospel is not established once and for all, but remains a task entrusted, from generation to generation, to the Christian community. . .  For this reason, I encourage all members of the Church not to be afraid of the present challenges.”
• The present challenges, to his mind, are AI and what he calls the “normalization of war”
• AI, he warns, could lead to the logics of efficiency and profit crowding out all others — a radical acceleration of the “technocratic paradigm.” The symptoms include screen addiction, the potential for mass joblessness, and the imposition of tech bosses’ worldview on the masses under the facade of “objective” information.
• he fears, AI could strengthen an “anti-human vision.” Meaning one in which “the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty, and exerting total control.”
• “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.”
• you won’t find any calls for a general ban against AI in this encyclical,
• Magnifica Humanitas is full of praise for AI’s potential to eliminate “arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity.”
• Rather, Leo XIV envisions a role for the states as well as the “transnational institutions” that took shape in the wake of the last century’s horrors. The Catholic principles of subsidiarity holds that when a problem is too large for national authorities, it must be addressed at a higher level by some sort of “world authority,” as Saint John XXIII envisioned it in his Cold War encyclical Pacem in Terris.
• Such a problem, Leo XIV feels, is AI. Hence, the new encyclical’s unfashionable emphasis on transnational governance and political universalism.
• This is the Church, as Augustine described her: tam antiquam, tam nova!

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• Naomi Kanakia, for example, probably doesn’t want me — a religious-minded, gender-critical writer — to review her book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though it Might Destroy You)
• The book is a defense of the classics, written for the Left, and it has agonizingly cringe chapter headings such as “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?”
• Kanakia trots out all the usual progressive objections to the canon, including that Western novels can psychologically damage marginalized people, and that to say you like Great Books can be read as an endorsement of white men (the horror). The biggest problem with the great books, though, is the people who read them: Right-wingers, religious people, racists, and transphobes. 
• Kanakia is a literary critic and author of several young-adult novels, and she writes the excellent literary Substack Woman of Letters. This book sprung out of a lifetime self-improvement (and enjoyment) project in which she read her way through most of a legendary “Great Books” list, The New Lifetime Reading Plan, by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major.
• The process changed her life and her tastes, set her on a rigorous program of reading a wider range of classics, and had unexpected results (the promise to “destroy you” in the title is joking, but the books will change you, she cautions).
• However, “the main reason I have trouble endorsing the Great Books is that so many transphobes also love them,” Kanakia writes. She is trans, and “transphobes” in her estimation include people who imagine trans rights are complicated, and those who feel that trans rights might be “up for debate.”
• (A note on pronouns: it has always been my belief that the usage of transgender pronouns is the provenance of the speaker, and should be decided as a relational matter between individuals. Despite Kanakia’s probable feelings about gender critics like me, a few years ago I had a friendly exchange with her on X, formerly Twitter, and I will refer to her as “her.”) 
• What’s So Great About the Great Books? would appear to be a niche product for a niche audience. But it is actually much more.
• In the same way Kanakia does not want people on the Left to miss out on the Great Books because of their politics, I do not want people on the Right to miss out on her great book because of their politics. 
• he topic of what books we should be reading and teaching is obviously a cultural flashpoint, with the “diversity” versus “tradition” camps well established, and horror stories abounding.
• Most recently, a professor at Stanford went public with the complaint that the university’s three-course general-education requirement includes, “with the partial exception of Frankenstein,” no literary classics in the Western liberal tradition
• These latter books, he says, are eminently skippable: “if these courses were electives, I would not recommend them; I would tell students to seek out the best courses Stanford offers in the humanities instead.” 
• . If we want a return to the classics, what do we even mean? What are the Great Books? (They are a concept invented by a president of Harvard in the early 20th century, she tells us, which was only popularized in the 1930s; there’s no definitive list.)
• Is reading the Great Books really a return to ancient or classical tradition? (No, the classical tradition was almost exclusively to study Greek and Latin
• Kanakia’s treatment of these subjects is wonderfully illuminating. And the extreme skepticism with which she approaches the concept gives her conclusion — that she loves these books; and that they are worth reading —  a beautiful force.
• What she’s really doing is taking on the haters of the Western canon, giving their arguments the strongest and most sympathetic possible interpretation, and then defeating them. The treatment should be highly satisfying for any lover of literature. 
• “If you’re asking for a book that can only be read as supporting one politically correct viewpoint, then you’re asking for a book that is lacking precisely the quality that makes the Great Books so great,” she writes.
• In any truly great book, she argues, the author has engaged courageously with thorny “moral, ethical, political and spiritual questions on the deepest and most rigorous level,” which means they have engaged with situations that are legitimately complicated, and they have portrayed the complexity. In her lovely phrase, she promises you’ll often see “the ghosts of other answers” within whatever answer a book produces.
• Authorial willingness to take on such fearless exploration is “integrity,” in her word, and it is the quality that more than any other defines a Great Book.
• This is a reasonably good description of Kanakia’s own method. She is one of the best critics and literary Substackers around, and both are professions that require a person to be able see (or read) something and form an original opinion — not the consensus opinion, not an opinion you learned in school, but an opinion of your own.
• She has a rare talent for this, and also a rare talent for erudition without pretension. Her piece on New Yorker fiction is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the literary landscape today.
• Her willingness to take on establishment hits is estimable. And What’s So Great About the Great Books?, itself, is brave given her milieu and the cultural circumstances. 
• Kanakia’s list starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh, and ends in 1958 with Things Fall Apart. It was originally published in 1960
• She took a casual, pragmatic approach, reading out-of-order, starting with works she considered easiest (in the same order I’d choose myself
• with a truly unusual and admirable simplicity and clarity. Kanakia may be a critic and a professional, but she is first and foremost a reader, and the book’s ultimate thesis is that the Great Books are for everyone — or can be
• It’s a shame, then, that her view of trans rights issues, and of the conservative and religious enemy is one of the few places she does seem unwilling to see complexity. She writes critically about Hillsdale College, a Christian institution that requires the classics of the Western canon as part of its core curriculum, because it “has a history of opposing LGBTQ rights and discriminating against LGBTQ students.”
• But in another sense, the greater integrity would be admitting that, obviously, there is a debate over trans rights, and that people, including religious people, might have reasons for this that are more complex than “transphobia” — a fake word, used to simplify and demonize your opponent and win an argument, and thus not a word worthy of a great book. 

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