Escaping The Torment Nexus

For more than 30 years, the Blairite Eurocommunists and now also the Starmerite Pabloists have been calling themselves “modern Social Democrats” on the assumption that most people would have no idea what the SD thing meant when uttered from their backgrounds. By contrast, the Labour Movement grew from many and various roots, trade union and co-operative, Radical Liberal and Tory populist, Christian Socialist and Social Catholic, Fabian and Marxist. It is a shame about the “Sirach”, but Sohrab Ahmari both challenges our tradition and deserves to be challenged by it:

The Christian- and social-democratic model represents the fullest, most concrete historical expression of the Catholic social teaching inaugurated in the late nineteenth century by the previous Pope Leo—Leo XIII—and so dear to Pope Leo XIV. What are the prospects of that model today? It has been under immense strain ever since neoliberalism took hold, beginning in the late 1970s, but it now faces its greatest test—and opportunity—amid the rise of the Torment Nexus.

What, you might wonder, is the Torment Nexus? It’s a reference to a satirical online dialogue between a science-fiction author and a Big Tech company. The author says, “In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.” But the tech company proclaims, “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.” Pick your favorite fictional dystopia, and chances are, some Silicon Valley firm is working feverishly to turn a profit by realizing its premise.

In the context of political economy, the joke cuts close to the bone. As Popes Leo and Francis have both warned, many of these technologies, particularly robotics and artificial intelligence, threaten to widen today’s already-chasmic gaps between the asset-rich and the asset-poor, between a handful of megacorporations and the rest of us. This, even as they promise to deliver our species from grinding toil, permitting us to recover long-lost time and space for worship, mutual care, and creativity.

Where we end up—in the dystopian Torment Nexus or a new world of broadly shared abundance—turns on whether we appreciate the logic of Christian democracy and of the social teaching that inspired it. It will depend, too, on the careful development of that doctrine, with eyes firmly trained on the “signs of the times” (Gaudium et spes) and a keen awareness that, as the Catechism puts it, Catholic tradition is “always living and acting” with the world.

Let’s begin with what was achieved in Western political economy in the reforming decades leading up to and shortly after World War II. In that moment, Christian and social democracy created the middle class as we know it, allowing most of your parents or grandparents, for the first time ever, to access reliable health care, take vacations, retire in safety, and enjoy disposable incomes.

Now, you might’ve noticed that I use the phrase “Christian and social democracy” to describe the governing model that prevailed in that era, as if the two things—Christian democracy and social democracy—were one and the same. Permit me to justify this usage and, along the way, to trace the unified model I’m defending back to its wellspring in Catholic social teaching. As a preliminary matter, it’s worth noting that Pope Leo XIII, who authored the social doctrine’s charter document, Rerum novarum, believed that “there is nothing in common between social and Christian Democracy,” as he wrote in a 1901 encyclical (Graves de communi re). Leo heartily approved of “Christian democracy”—indeed, he is widely credited with having helped to popularize the term. But social democracy was anathema to him.

This is perfectly understandable given the historical context in which Leo made this distinction, and given the divergent origins of the two tendencies. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian democracy was a distinctly Catholic tendency, with theoretical origins in Leo’s own teaching and practical roots in lay movements in countries like France, Germany, and Italy. Social democracy, by contrast, was led by men and women who emphatically belonged to the socialist left. At the turn of the twentieth century, the leading social democrats were avowedly atheist and still strived for full-on socialism, at least in theory. What set them apart from revolutionary socialists was a commitment to peaceful reform and the ballot box, an approach that stood out especially after the savagery of the October Revolution.

Yet as the decades wore on, social democrats made peace with the market system. Rather than try to overthrow capitalism, as the historian Tony Judt wrote in Postwar, they resolved to “use the resources of the state to eliminate the social pathologies attendant on capitalist forms of production and the unrestricted workings of a market economy: to build not economic utopias but good societies.”

As we will see, this meliorist approach was, in practice, quite close to Leo’s Christian-democratic vision. To be sure, differences persisted, especially on cultural issues, where Christian democrats were typically associated with “the right” and social democrats with “the left.” Yet when it came to the core questions of political economy, the two models converged—just as, in the United States, the analogous New Deal order formed a solid governing consensus between FDR-LBJ Democrats and Eisenhower-Nixon Republicans. As the German left politician Sahra Wagenknecht noted last year in an interview with the New Left Review, midcentury social democrats had a healthy respect for the intuitive conservatism of working people; by the same token, Christian democrats recognized the need for various “left” economic interventions to save society from the devouring maws of the market. This overlap explains Pope Benedict XVI’s famous dictum that “in many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine.”

There was only one problem for the social democrats: Why? Why did they come to affirm property rights and accept many aspects of the market system? Why the simultaneous rejection of full-on socialism and full-on capitalism in favor of what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the “reasonable regulation of the marketplace”? Why nationalize a few critical industries while assigning many others to private activity? Why institute wage floors instead of abolishing wage-labor altogether? Why this hybridity?

Social democrats never managed to unravel this tangle of questions, according to Judt. Social democracy, he observed, is “a practice in lifelong search of its theory.” The movement had its thinkers, to be sure, as did the New Deal order. Yet the best, most cogent account of the hybrid model was to be found in Catholic social doctrine. Indeed, all of the most admirable tenets of Christian and social democracy could be traced back to the Leonine teaching.

All of the most admirable tenets of Christian and social democracy could be traced back to the Leonine teaching. In coming to grips with today’s political-economic “polycrisis,” then, we’d do well to first discern the deepest principles of the social teaching. We should also consider how those principles linked up with Christian- and social-democratic thought and practice in the model’s postwar heyday. Only afterward can we assess what Pope Francis described as today’s “epochal” technological changes—the new things of our time that demand the Church’s magisterial intervention.

The first thing to note about Catholic social teaching is its historical context. As the Catechism reminds us, the social teaching arose from the Gospel’s “encounter with modern industrial society, with its new structures for the production of consumer goods, its new concept of society, the state and authority, and its new forms of labor and ownership.” Its encounter with capitalism, in short: a mode of social organization in which production for exchange value—commodity production—took center stage, reshaping nearly every other domain to serve its need.

I say “nearly” every other domain, because there still stood the Church, a remnant of premodernity, sheltering institutional forms inherited from the Roman Empire, but now encircled by a new order that melted every relation into exchange value. In Europe and the United States, industrial capitalism had compelled millions to migrate from the countryside to tightly packed, squalid urban quarters. New social problems like homelessness sprang up, even as ancient ones like prostitution and poverty ballooned to an unprecedented scale.

Nor did industrial capitalism rest content with reshaping how people made things—it also transfigured how they reproduced themselves. Shattering village life, with its settled patterns and kinship-based support networks, the new order goaded poor women into the factory and chained their children to the machine as well. Industry, as Karl Marx noted in Capital, “dissolved the old family system.” Soon, a workers’ movement emerged, now demanding incremental reform (in the battle for a shorter workday), now menacing the whole system (at the barricades of 1848).

For the Church, all this amounted to an enormous pastoral challenge. But more than that, capitalism’s liquidation of premodern social forms also threatened the characteristic intellectual forms of the earlier epoch: orderly cosmos and unchanging nature upheld by, and mirrored in, rigid social hierarchies and a largely static economic and technological landscape that seemed like it might stretch on forever—until suddenly, it didn’t.

This transformation prompted the Church to deepen its understanding of society and historical development. Social antagonism erupted not in spite of, but as a result of people acting rationally within the rules of the game. An awareness of such constitutive antagonism is thus the first structural principle of the social doctrine. It’s right there, in the opening of Rerum novarum:

The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvellous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes…

References to “the conflict” pepper the whole encyclical. Passages like the one above, and many others in the Church’s social teaching, closely resemble Marx’s descriptions of intensifying class struggle in The Communist Manifesto. We detect, too, a Leonine realism about the antagonistic shape of markets in general and labor markets in particular. As Rerum novarum and its progeny indicate, Pope Leo and his successors were sharply alert to the coercion embedded in the spheres of production and exchange. Leo wrote, “The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves...whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”

Given these asymmetries—the desperation of assetless workers; the domination of most markets by a handful of firms—the “freedom” of the individual employee to bargain and consent to wages was a mirage. Here, again, we hear a striking echo of Marx’s account of the “dual freedom” that made possible the wage-labor system: the worker’s legal freedom to sell his labor-power, and his “freedom” from any other assets beyond his sweat, leaving him no other means of reproducing himself but by selling his body and labor-power for wages. (In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith foreshadowed this point even earlier, noting that, all else being equal, the employer is likely to prevail in any conflict with the employee.)

This Leonine realism punctured the idealized picture painted by market fundamentalists—what the political economist Michael Lind has described as the Econ 101 ideology, which uses categories and models derived from a preindustrial “arcadia” to describe industrial reality. In the Econ 101 arcadia, every market is populated by innumerable buyers and sellers; price is a pristine index of supply and demand; wages perfectly capture marginal productivity; every worker is a capitalist-in-waiting; everyone can get a better deal elsewhere; and, therefore, there is no coercion and no inherent conflict in capitalism.

Acknowledging “the conflict now raging,” Pope Leo affirmed the daily experience of working people the world over, then as now. And he ensured that a baseline of economic realism would guide twentieth-century reformers: not just Christian democrats in Europe, but also U.S. bishops and figures like Fr. John A. Ryan (the “Right Reverend New Dealer,” as he became known), whose ideas prefigured the New Deal.

If, as both Marx and Pope Leo recognized, class-based antagonism was constitutive of market societies, Leo did not believe—as Marx and his followers did—that it was foreordained to be absolute or irreconcilable. Yes, the encounter with industrial modernity impelled the Church to come to terms with a temporal sphere that was more dynamic, unsettled, and racked by internal contradiction than premodern sages like Aristotle and Aquinas could have imagined. But that didn’t mean the premodern tradition was destined to slide gently into oblivion. Not if Pope Leo and his successors had a say in the matter.

In the Marxist view, society’s constitutive antagonisms reflect contradictions at the very core of material reality, down to what Marx famously described in Capital as the “metabolic interaction between man and the Earth.” History was a saga of relentless conflict, culminating in the triumphant revolt of the working class. In this telling, the immanent reason of social life itself demanded revolution—the abolition not just of certain relations of production, but of one class by another.

Pope Leo disagreed: “The great mistake” regarding political economy, “is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict.” Such a view is “irrational” and “false.” Yes, antagonism is constitutive—but of a contingent system, not of human beings as such. It needn’t serve as the natural baseline of our species or the singular driving force of History with a capital H.

Pope Leo and his successors were sharply alert to the coercion embedded in the spheres of production and exchange. Out of the selfishness and turbulence that defined their own contingent moment, the moderns had extracted an account of the human person as hopelessly selfish and turbulent. Leo repudiated the resulting pinched account of the human person. He doubled down, instead, on the classical and Christian account, which defines humans as naturally political: naturally primed to do things together, to govern, to share burdens, to strike up civic friendship, to contest and deliberate and compromise. To seek common goods, not least justice. Far from an external imposition on unruly nature, such pursuits come naturally to Homo politicus.

Market fundamentalists and socialists alike discounted political man for different reasons. The fundamentalists ordered him to shut up when he entered the workplace and the marketplace. “Politics” was something that took place in parliament or the pages of the newspapers. But at the factory, the boss was the boss, private contracts were contracts, and the wages were what they were. If the worker didn’t like it, well, he could always find a better deal elsewhere. Socialists, meanwhile, considered economic antagonism to be an iron law of history, and they therefore judged political man’s humdrum capacities—to govern, contest, and compromise—too meager for the task at hand; revolutionary politics were the only kind that counted.

Both camps, in other words, privileged the economic life to an inordinate degree. Over and against both, Leo asserted the primacy of the political life over the economic, and this is, indeed, the second structural principle of the social doctrine: that politics can, and should, rationally circumscribe the market.

Start with the should. We see it at work, for example, in the case of workers forced to accept poverty wages. Pope Leo saw such arrangements as traducing both justice and the primacy of politics. “Wages,” he wrote in Rerum novarum, summing up the Econ 101 view, “are regulated by free consent, and therefore the employer, when he pays what was agreed upon, has done his part and seemingly is not called upon to do anything beyond.”

“This kind of argument,” Leo countered, “is not complete, for there are important considerations which it leaves out of account altogether.” If labor were merely a matter of personal choice, then the employer would have the right to offer any wage, no matter how low, and the employee the right to “freely” accept it. But labor and wages involve a great deal more. “Work,” Leo wrote,

is also necessary for [the worker] to live: these two aspects of his work [the personal element and the fulfillment of necessity] are separable in thought, but not in reality. The preservation of life is the bounden duty of one and all, and to be wanting therein is a crime. It necessarily follows that each one has a natural right to procure what is required in order to live, and the poor can procure that in no other way than by what they can earn through their work.

The hallmarks of the classical worldview are unmistakable here. The employment agreement doesn’t merely enshrine abstract rights, and labor-power and wages don’t float free from the embodied needs of workers as individuals and as a class. Economic rights are tied to mutual duties, which, in turn, implicate workers’ ability to sustain and reproduce themselves—the final cause for the sake of which they seek employment in the first place.

The employment contract has to be embedded within larger considerations of justice—and within still larger considerations of the political common good. In the Leonine telling, then, living wages are a requirement of justice. And from the perspective of the state, living wages are essential to preventing widespread penury and social unrest, since, as Leo warned, “when work[ing] people have recourse to a strike…it is frequently because…they consider their wages insufficient.”

The Leonine tradition prompts us to ask, first and foremost: What sort of political community do we wish to protect, and which common goods are we resolved to promote? And then: How do we arrange our economy and class structure to uphold that kind of community and those kinds of goods? The market fundamentalists would instead have us put the economic cart before the political horse—letting the market rip and then asking society to pick up the pieces. That is how you end up with an economy like the one we have today, in which half of fast-food workers and a quarter of college adjuncts must resort to public welfare because their wages are too low, at an annual cost of $153 billion to U.S. taxpayers—allowing employers and the low-wage lobby to privatize the gains while socializing the costs.

The Leonine primacy of politics was a pillar of Christian and social democracy (and the American New Deal) in their heyday. The political leaders who enacted these models weren’t starry-eyed idealists. Many were conservatives (from Herbert Hoover, whose vision of “associationalism” served up a prototype of New Deal–style tripartite bargaining, to Winston Churchill and Konrad Adenauer). As conservatives, they understood that when left to “self-regulate” in search of the lowest price, the market generated destabilizing labor unrest.

But more than that, unhindered capitalism threatened to upset its own apple cart: persistent demand crises were a feature, not a bug, of economies in which workers toiled for nothing to make goods worth next to nothing, as the New Deal economist John Kenneth Galbraith summed up the reductio ad absurdum of market fundamentalism. Something had to be done, and that something was to preserve the market and property rights, for all the benefits they delivered, while setting up political guardrails around them—precisely as Pope Leo had urged.

This brings us to the third and final structural principle—associationalism and class compromise. I group the two items under a single heading because they go together logically and sustain each other. These are the most familiar aspects, and their practical benefits are still readily apparent in the admittedly moth-eaten fabric of Christian and social democracy.

Ameliorating class antagonism requires subjecting the economy to the same political give-and-take that characterizes other facets of our common life. We might think of this as embedding economic exchange within a broader political exchange between the classes. This is why this model is sometimes described as “embedded liberalism”: it bounds market liberalism inside “a web of social and political constraints,” as the economic geographer David Harvey puts it in A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

But how, exactly? Pope Leo’s answer was, in a word, associationalism. He saw the political economy as made up of various corporate blocs or “associations.” In Rerum novarum, he mostly focused on capital and labor, the two most consequential, but he also alluded to mutual-aid societies, religious charities, youth groups, and the like. Between these, the state would largely play the role of umpire. Not his term, of course (unlike Leo XIV, Leo XIII was not a baseball fan). But the “umpire state” is an apt and frequently encountered description for the government’s role in Christian and social democracy (and in the New Deal). 

A classic umpire function is the sectoral wage board—still in use among Las Vegas casinos and their hospitality workers, with input from Nevada authorities, to set wages, benefits, and working conditions. Rerum novarum commends state-backed labor “boards” as an ideal way to “safeguard the interests of wage-earners.” Through the political activities of the associations, opposing social forces could be made to “dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic,” Leo wrote. To be sure, the respective interests of the associations would sometimes put them at odds. Contestation is part of political life. But the contest and the resulting bargain had to be fair. That is why Pope Leo put such great emphasis on organized labor as a crucial instance of his associationalist model: “The most important of all [associations] are workingmen’s unions,” wrote Leo, for they allow workers to defend their mutual interests and bargain collectively, rather than as weak single-comers.

As he taught in Graves de communi re, an encyclical published a decade after Rerum novarum, the democracy half of “Christian democracy” implied “united action”—we might say collective action—of the kind exemplified by labor unions. And the social teaching allowed that this might involve a measure of friction, with Leo endorsing the right of workers to go on strike within certain limits. The pope thus made clear that a class compromise wouldn’t come about merely through moral exhortation or interpersonal goodwill. Invaluable as these things were, they were inefficacious in the face of the market system’s constitutive antagonisms. Class compromise also summoned our natural capacities for collective action and contestation.

On both sides of the Atlantic, this translated into government policies permitting and even encouraging collective bargaining and collective action—workers’ mounting of what Galbraith called “countervailing power”—after decades during which such activism had been met with bullets and truncheons. Employers didn’t like it at first, but the upside was a labor peace that, in some cases, is still paying dividends (to the point of lulling some employers and policymakers into forgetting what real working-class militancy can look like).

Under pre-reform conditions, workers either went along to survive, or else found themselves locked in pitched battles that rattled social stability. But under Christian and social democracy, workers could channel their demands through recognized unions and mass political parties; labor bought into the system. In a way, this model made explicit the coercion characteristic of market life. But it also lent workers a measure of legal power to negotiate the coercion to which they had long been subjected. As Michael Lind sums it up in Land of Promise, the “middle class enjoyed its zenith under a system of highly regulated...capitalism” and “suffered under the less regulated capitalism that preceded it and followed it.” Catholics can be proud of the Church’s contribution, through the social doctrine, in bringing about that zenith.

The zenith is past. The Christian- and social-democratic order has been in decline for two generations now. The reasons are complex and beyond my scope here. In my book Tyranny, Inc., published in 2023, I treat this decline as mainly a result of contingent policy choices, contra the determinist accounts preferred by many on both the Marxist left and the free-market right. What matters for our purposes is the tectonic, and highly destructive, shift that took place—the so-called neoliberal turn of the 1970s. To understand the “neo” in neoliberalism, it helps to periodize modern political economy into three stages.

In the first stage, the pre-reform nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state and society gave the market a wide berth. But the crises of the “self-regulating” market spurred reforms that were both theorized and legitimated by Catholic social teaching. The idea was to subject Homo economicus to the imperatives of Homo politicus, economic exchange to political exchange. Mass prosperity, mild egalitarianism, and relative social stability in the first three postwar decades were the fruits of this second stage.

In the third stage, Homo economicus struck a counterpunch against Homo politicus that reverberates to this day. Neoliberal thinkers like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, and the politicians who realized their vision, weren’t content with restoring the “self-regulating” market to its former autonomy from politics (which they did, foremost, through union-busting and various forms of wage arbitrage that weakened the labor movement in the private economy). More than that, the neoliberals demanded that state and society “economize” themselves: to measure and adjust their own functions according to market metrics and logics.

A good state, in this telling, was one that created the best “investment climate”—which means ripping up the most barriers standing in the way of the market’s quest for the lowest price. This demolition job was presented as a new birth of universalism. Yet as Pope Francis taught, this was a far cry from the vision of true global fraternity long promoted by the Church. It was, he warned in Fratelli tutti, an “authoritarian and abstract universalism, devised or planned by a small group and presented as an ideal for the sake of levelling, dominating and plundering.”

Most perniciously, neoliberal political economy erased social class—the basis of not just Marxian class struggle, but also Leonine class compromise. The social teaching, recall, took for granted the reality of distinct classes locked in a constitutive antagonism, but also susceptible to compromise. Under the new dispensation, there was “no such thing” as society, as Margaret Thatcher famously declared—only individuals. Workers became so many atomized “human capitals,” compelled to seek investment and maximize returns on themselves over the course of a lifetime. In short, to borrow Michel Foucault’s pithy formulation, whereas classical liberalism merely demanded that state and society leave the market alone, neoliberalism “governs society by the market.”

It’s against this bleak backdrop that the tech industry has lately made impressive strides in developing AI and advanced industrial automation. As my choice of adjective indicates, I am not, by any means, reflexively hostile to these innovations. Nor are the Church and the two popes who’ve so far had occasion to address these new things. It’s instructive, indeed, how little credence the hierarchical Church seems to lend to the kind of hobbit-y, antidevelopmentalist mentality that pervades the Christian literary imagination.

Earlier this year, Pope Francis suggested that AI could “introduce important innovations in agriculture, education, and culture, an improved level of life for entire nations and peoples, and the growth of human fraternity and social friendship.” Likewise, Pope Leo XIV has lauded AI for opening “new horizons on many different levels, including enhancing research in health care and scientific discovery.” This openness to AI’s positive possibilities is deeply congruent with biblical faith: “He gave skill to human beings, that he might be glorified in his marvelous works” (Sirach 38:6). It follows, too, from the Church’s mature reflection on technological modernity, which, as the Fathers of Vatican II put it in Gaudium et spes, kindles the “hope of improved self-knowledge” in our species.

At the same time, the popes have shared grave concerns about these technologies. Even as he expressed hope for AI-led betterment, for example, Pope Francis noted that “evidence to date suggests that digital technologies have increased inequality in our world.” Similarly, Pope Leo XIV tempered his optimism with fears about AI’s potentially negative “repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, on our distinctive ability to grasp and process reality.” Meanwhile, in the Church’s most systematic treatment so far, the doctrinal and education dicasteries warn of how AI could consolidate the power of a handful of corporations; rob workers of their skills and reduce them to even more rote tasks than many are assigned now; lead to massive job losses; and, ultimately, diminish the very notion of human intelligence and creativity. In short, a headfirst dive into the Torment Nexus.

To pull back from the precipice, we must first organize the problems according to the structural principles of the social teaching outlined above. These arise within a market society racked by antagonisms not unlike those that characterized capitalism in the time of Leo XIII: the asset-rich seek the cheapest possible price for labor no less eagerly than did their predecessors in the late nineteenth century; meanwhile, all else being equal, the asset-poor majority still has no other means of sustaining and reproducing itself than by selling labor-power for wages. Already in the nineteenth century, amid the First Industrial Revolution, technology and the factory system allowed capital to do more with fewer human hands.

Moreover, as both Adam Smith and Marx recognized, industrial processes often stripped even skilled workers of their tools and mastery, reducing the craftsman of old to a repetitive toiler. Smith, writing in the eighteenth century, observed that in the factory system, “one man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it,” and so on. This brought about immense gains in efficiency, but it also narrowed the worker’s intellectual and moral faculties. Marx, writing in the nineteenth century, saw machinery further simplifying labor and deepening the alienation of workers from the products of their toil. Machines, he argued, magnified productivity at the aggregate level, but at the cost of turning labor into a soulless mechanical routine, as a result of which the worker no longer recognized himself in his work.

By the latter decades of the twentieth century, technological development steadily slashed the total number of hours worked per year in developed countries. AI robotics are “merely” likely to accelerate these trends, bringing them to their logical terminus: not merely doing more with fewer human labor inputs, but altogether supplanting the human element in many sectors.

Let me underscore the empirical nature of this prediction; as Russell Hittinger has often argued, the social doctrine necessarily integrates moral and empirical analysis. The empirical question here is whether current AI will follow the course of previous industrial revolutions, in which the job displacement caused by a new technology was absorbed by other or newer sectors; or if those rendered jobless this time around won’t soon—or ever—return to the labor force. I’m persuaded by economists who hold the latter position, describing the jobs losses as gradual but ultimately permanent and inexorable for vast multitudes of human beings. The Holy See, it seems, shares this worry—hence its warnings about mass job losses. More optimistic analysts, however, still predict dramatic dislocation of the kind that accompanied the advent of the cotton gin or the automobile. Even granting that new jobs elsewhere in the economy might absorb current losses, the social pain will be enormous, if economic history is any guide.

And what will become of the meaning of work? The Catholic tradition has always rejected the notion of “living to work”—the formula that, for Max Weber, summed up the capitalist ethic. We work to live. As Leo XIII noted, “to labor is to exert oneself for the sake of procuring what is necessary for the various purposes of life.” Nevertheless, work isn’t altogether meaningless in the Catholic frame. Far from it. As Pope Francis taught in Laudato si’, work as such is “part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfillment.” Especially in a market society that has conditioned people to live for work, deprivation from it could prove profoundly unsettling at an existential level.

And that’s not to mention the deepest crisis highlighted by the Holy See in its early confrontations with AI: the social and ideological eclipse of what makes for true intelligence and wisdom. Men and women transfixed by the achievements of artificial intelligence may soon forget that machine thinking is the work of their own hands, whose gifts, in turn, come from God above. This, contrary to the urging of the prophet Hosea: “Return to the Lord; say to him…. ‘We will say no more, “Our god,” to the work of our hands’” (Hosea 14:2–3). / All this suggests multiple antagonistic fault lines crisscrossing twenty-first-century capitalist society. The basic class-based tension between the asset-rich and asset-poor—Pope Leo’s “conflict now raging”—is still there. Only now, what’s at stake isn’t merely the quantitative measure of the latter’s wages, but whether or not they can earn any wages whatsoever by the sweat of their brow. 

Layered atop this conflict is a new tension, touching another dimension of the human animal: namely, Hannah Arendt’s Homo faber, man the maker, who cannot help but shape durable objects, blending use value and beauty, carving meaning into the bare material of his world. AI is an unprecedented human fabrication, insofar as it pits Homo faber not against the physical limits of nature, as in ages past—but against himself. That is to say, AI threatens our very capacity to go on fabricating, and casts into doubt the special regard we accord to human creativity, not least its status as a mode of participation in the divine life.

In the face of all this, we must reassert the primacy of politics, as Pope Leo XIII did in the nineteenth century, and as Christian and social democrats and the New Dealers did in the twentieth. Left to their own devices, those who control today’s productive assets will, in the search for the lowest price, automate out of existence the very conditions of human creativity—much as neoliberalism has already devastated the conditions of human sociality.

It follows that we can’t treat AI and its consequences as merely technical or economic questions, as our impoverished popular discourse too often does: “Can AI do this or that?” “How do we extend automation to such-and-such sector?” Such questions aren’t insignificant. But as should be clear by now, they are second-order questions, if we take seriously the primacy of Homo politicus over Homo economicus and (now) Homo faber—the political common good over mere economy and mere technique. “The order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons,” as the Vatican II Fathers taught, “and not the other way around.”

The first question to pose in the Leonine or Christian-democratic frame is: What sort of community do we wish to protect, and which common goods are we resolved to promote? Starting out here can help us carefully discern where AI and expansive automation belong, and where they don’t.

The Church is especially well-placed to think through the most fundamental problem—namely, deciding which sorts of responsibilities can be safely relegated to machines, and which must remain in human hands. One especially relevant insight from the classical and Christian tradition is the distinction between grinding toil, the function of Arendt’s animal laborans on the one hand, and man’s contemplative, political, and creative activities on the other. The premodern tradition, as I already noted, didn’t venerate grinding toil for its own sake. That’s because the premoderns centered their account of the normal human being around rationality, the thing that set people apart from animals tethered (literally) to toil.

For Aristotle and his heirs, this rational capacity was expressed in political life and, even more fully, in contemplation. Grinding toil, by contrast, was an unfortunate necessity, imposed by scarcity or by God or the gods. It was best outsourced to a subset of human beings, “natural” slaves, who forfeited their humanity and became “living tools,” in one of Aristotle’s more repugnant terms. Slave labor enabled a narrow stratum of society to pursue creativity.

But if we reject the notion of “natural” slavery, it follows that creative work—what emerges once the struggle for subsistence is overcome—can’t be the exclusive preserve of an intellectual elite. What was normal for Aristotle ought to have been normal for his servants. They, too, possessed the capacity for creativity, broadly understood. Only, they were barred from realizing it by the political economy of ancient Greece and the hierarchies to which it gave rise. Aristotle himself implicitly acknowledged this. In a famous passage in the Politics, he speculated that if a tool could one day “perform its own work when ordered or by seeing what to do in advance”—if “shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves”—then “masters [would have] no need of slaves.”

Then came Christianity. Toil, in the biblical telling, is the curse laid upon Adam after the Fall (see Genesis 3:17–19). Yet that didn’t stop the early Church from calling for humane treatment of slaves (see Philippians 1:16). More radically, as Arendt observed, Christianity opened the life of contemplation to the many. Grace, not pedigree, made one receptive to higher things. The slave and the craftsman could partake of the inner life once reserved for the thinker alone. Toil took its rightful place as the enabler of the feast, not least the Lord’s feast.

As Josef Pieper argued in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the modern glorification of toil for toil’s sake rests on a deep suspicion of anything that comes freely or by grace, anything that appears effortless. Creativity entails an element of pure reception. It means being open to inspiration. But according to some modern sensibilities, as Pieper noted, “everything man does naturally and without effort is a falsification of morality—for what we do by nature is done without effort.” In this view, knowledge, virtue, or creativity only counts if hard-won through exertion. Hence, for example, Kant’s view that morality should be “hard,” or the poet Schelling’s lament: “I’d serve my friends, but alas, I do so with pleasure, / And so I am often worried by the fact that I am not virtuous.”

Parting ways with Arendt—who, like her master Heidegger, romanticized toil as a means by which man establishes harmony with nature’s cycles of rest and exertion—the Church can welcome the automation of grinding, rote, or repetitive toil. (This is evidenced in the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, the Vatican has identified the increase of rote work as one reason to be wary of AI.)

Meanwhile, the social teaching must guard those aspects of work that draw upon or implicate humanity’s deeper social, cultural, political, religious, and contemplative capacities; there should be nothing artificial about that sort of intelligence. Moreover, the asset-rich and Big Tech firms can’t be allowed to reap all the financial benefits of automation. If we reach an age of ultracheap production, then it is only fair that the resulting bounty be publicly devoted to training less-skilled workers and compensating them for care work—child care, elder care, and the like—that for too long has gone uncompensated or undercompensated, work that mustn’t be automated this side of the Blade Runner franchise. After all, it is by trawling the work of workers living and past that AI teaches itself. The machine thus owes present and future workers duties of compensatory justice.

Where exactly to draw these lines, and the exact nature of tomorrow’s collective bargains, can’t be determined by any single person or office. That brings us again to the third and final structural principle—namely, associationalism and class compromise.

Catholic social teaching, as I’ve shown, frequently sets out from a severe diagnosis of capitalist conditions that is strikingly similar to the diagnosis proposed by revolutionary socialists. Yet the Church would have us negotiate these drastic conditions with trust in the humdrum deliberative capacities of Homo politicus: trust in labor unions, employer associations, social insurance, pension systems, religious charities, consumer co-ops, youth groups, and the like—bringing them into a productive and ultimately harmonious tension with each other, all underpinned by a government that encourages Leo’s “united action” while playing umpire. The neoliberal model has severely damaged associationalism, as we’ve seen, and as witnessed in the decline of all mass-membership organizations, from political parties to Rotary clubs. It pretends there is no constitutive antagonism and often erases social class as a legible category. Add AI to this picture, and the asset-poor majority is defenseless.

It won’t suffice for the Christian to merely declaim that tech corporations should do this or that. They won’t compromise in the face of moral exhortation or calls to goodwill, no matter how eloquent—not without countervailing pressure exerted by other associative bodies. In the teeth of the Torment Nexus, then, the Catholic task is to repair and reempower such bodies, starting with unions, and to stimulate long-atrophied muscles for Pope Leo’s “unified action.” We should also imagine new tripartite forms, such as AI ethics boards that place organized labor and civil society (including the Church) across the table from technologists.

This—the legitimation of collective action and countervailing power exerted from below—was Pope Leo’s most pathbreaking teaching. It helped make possible the middle-class economy that older Americans and Europeans are still nostalgic for. And it can lift us out of the Torment Nexus yet. Meanwhile, we might join our hearts to that of Pope Francis, who, in one of his final public messages, mused: “How wonderful it would be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation could come with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, even as we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters who orbit around us.”