Most of us live very predictable lives. From the time we awake to when we return to our beds at night, we typically know where we’ll be going and what we’ll be doing. Our lives often follow a numbing routine until weekends or holidays arrive, and we can divert our attention to leisurely pursuits that refresh us for our return to the grind of our workaday world.
Many of us find comfort in our daily habits and routines. As William James wrote, “Habit is the enormous flywheel of society.” But what if our habits get broken or if certain habits become damaging to our physical or spiritual health or blind us to opportunities for spiritual growth? Sometimes our routines can also cause us to be unaware or uncritical of developments in society or culture that creep in upon us unawares—developments that may threaten us, our families, or the world more broadly. Our routines may undermine what it is that defines us and the reality of who we are as human persons. We are living in such times.
Aquinas wrote that “a habit is a quality difficult to change, according to which a thing is well or badly disposed, either in regard to itself or to something else” (Summa theologiae 1-2.49.1) The habits of our spiritual lives are either dynamic and responsive to the needs around us (well-disposed) or complacent (badly disposed). If we notice that our habits are stifling our spiritual alertness to the needs of those around us or to troubling events in our culture, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves, Quo vado? “Where am I going?”
The International Theological Commission (ITC) recently challenged us with that question in a three-year reflection (2022–25) on Vatican II’s pastoral constitution, Gaudium et Spes, in commemoration of its sixtieth anniversary. They named their publication Quo Vadis Humanitas? Thinking through Christian Anthropology in the Face of Certain Scenarios for the Future of Humanity (QVH). The ITC document focuses on how we should consider the ambivalence that exists between scientific and technological innovations that have “reawakened our wonder at humanity’s great potential and our perception of its greatness,” and our “dismay at humanity’s fragility, subject as it is to death and disease” (QVH 1).
Questions about how we understand human identity have become acute in an age increasingly convinced that we must overcome (transcend) human limits imposed by nature through scientific and technological intervention.
This ambivalence creates a challenging question for humanity at this very point in time: How should we regard human vulnerability if we are given the opportunity to overcome it, and is there a moral line we should not cross between our growing scientific and technological knowledge and the use of that knowledge to overcome our vulnerability—our inherent “fragility” that results in incapacitation, impairment, injury, and disease?
The unmaking—or rather remaking—of modern man becomes the core subject of QVH as it challenges us to reclaim our understanding of who we are by considering “carefully the condition of humanity in today’s world” (QVH 7). Questions about how we understand human identity have become acute in an age increasingly convinced that we must overcome (transcend) human limits imposed by nature through scientific and technological intervention.
In expounding on this question, the ITC introduces an unexpected gift to persons living with disabilities and to those who know and love them. The ITC introduces disability as a source of reflection on the inherent nature of our shared dependent and vulnerable humanity.
After presenting these new challenges to human identity and the consequences of pursuing human enhancement through technology, the ITC calls for a theological reflection on disability to ground our understanding of the “decisive significance of dependence and vulnerability as integral elements of every human experience” (QVH 118). But why disability? Precisely because disability dispels the illusion of the autonomous self, touted as the summum bonum of modern secular anthropology. Modern humanity values independence, productivity, and freedom from limitations imposed by nature and is increasingly looking to technology as a panacea to overcome what in reality is most fundamental to our shared human identity.
Frankly, I found the ITC’s suggestion a welcome surprise. Those whose lives are affected by disability know this, but for others, the challenge to reflect on disability is a reminder to consider the truth of who we truly are and to not see our limitations as something to be overcome, but to accept that each of us is unavoidably dependent and vulnerable. Acceptance of this reality of human existence is an often humbling way that we are brought to realize the importance of our relationships with others.
Reflecting on disability makes us confront the question of human dignity and what it is that makes human persons invaluable and unrepeatable. Is human dignity intrinsic to every person, or is it conditioned by things external to who we are as persons—jobs, success, contributions to culture, etc.? Even more compelling, disability challenges us to ask if receptivity to and for others is meaningful to our existence and essential to our happiness, and if dependence is really a weakness (flaw) or if it is a feature of our creaturely existence inseparable from our need to give and receive love.
The once creeping but now rapid development of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and human enhancement technologies has intensified these questions. QVH reminds us that technology becomes a threat to humanity when we see it as a means to overcome what is intrinsic to our human nature.
The ITC claims that reflecting on disability keeps “personal identity firmly anchored to given bodily-spiritual reality, to the point of appearing as an inescapable element of the identity of the disabled person” (QVH 118). When we reflect on disability, we are reminded that our “finitude and contingency” aren’t something to be overcome but evidence of a deep truth—an anchor that keeps us from entertaining the fantasy that we can escape the “natural basis of our existence” and the “limitations of one’s own body,” and that doing so is necessary “to achieve one’s identity.”
We are living in a time of deep dissatisfaction, encouraged by suggestions that we can change what is immutable in our nature. In his article “Eugenics as Self-Loathing,” Colin Redemer presents the consequences of modern humanity’s despair over our natural fragility, or what he names from the Christian tradition “the refusal of our creatureliness.” He writes that those consequences are an “inverted posture” that doesn’t look outward with contempt at individuals perceived as inferior, as the old eugenics of the early twentieth century did, but rather inward, toward ourselves, with “revulsion.” He writes, “In nearly every case, [we have] been taught to see [our] own body, [our] own mind, [our] own inherited frailties as defects in need of correction or, better yet, elimination.” Modern man “does not want to improve the race. He wants to be unmade.” Redemer’s essay is worth reading in full.
We are living at a time of radical social and cultural change that is largely driven by the seductive quality of technology and the promise that it can be a panacea for our personal, social, and global woes. It is not, and it never will be. St. Augustine told us in his Confessions the only solution to those woes: It is the beauty “ever ancient, ever new.” It is in him where our troubled hearts find rest—and nowhere else.
QVH 159 states, “At this juncture of the twenty-first century, the human family is faced with questions so radical that they threaten its very existence as we have known it until now.” In the once slow creep of technology that at first might have seemed beneficial to work and social life, we have become aware of the damage done to young people by social media. Now we are disquieted by the alarms of an even greater monster arising.
While most of us have been riding William James’s flywheel, occupied with the numbing routines of our lives, decision-makers have been reshaping the world around us, guided by transhumanist visions of remaking humanity and with fantasies of “midwifing a deity” with “artificial general intelligence” that will far surpass human cognitive capacity. There is no shortage of apocalyptic scenarios being painted by experts who are pleading for a grand pause to regroup and rethink the future.
For those of us who may be stuck in the grind of daily life and its routines, it’s time to jump off of that flywheel and ask where we are going before the direction is chosen for us. Follow the suggestion in Quo Vadis Humanitas and rediscover humanity by reflecting on disability. The way forward is not found in attempting to engage technology to escape dependence, vulnerability, or finitude but to receiving those things as gifts—as truths of our human identity that bind us to one another in generosity and love. That is a mystery artificial intelligence will never understand.