The proverbial Martian visiting America in this 250th year (a whole quarter millennium) of our existence would be struck by many things. But probably by nothing more obvious than the large gap between what, on the one hand, we daily say and do – and on the other, what we would like to be. We’re worried about how technologies like AI are coming to define us, but are mostly blind to how we’ve already defined ourselves – confined ourselves, really, even before the devices took over – to a materially prosperous but flat view of the world and ourselves. The Church, in recent years, has been trying to compensate with terms like Dignitas infinita and Magnifica humanitas, concepts that, in their argumentative way, do try to get at the problem. But they fall well short because what we desperately need now is not yet more arguments, but serious and artful poetry.
The incomparably great Dante Alighieri already understood all this at the beginning of his Paradiso:
Trasumanar significar per verba
non si poria; però l’essemplo basti
a cui esperïenza grazia serba.
To transhumanize in words
Cannot be done; but let the example suffice
For those whom grace reserves the experience.
(RR trans.)
It’s
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