It is disturbing news when physicist Stephen Hawking, in a recent interview on BBC, comments that the chances of human-inflicted disasters in the coming years pose the biggest threat to the planet, which with “near certainty”, will be destroyed in hundreds and thousands of years.
He stated that “we face a number of threats: nuclear war, global warning and genetically engineered viruses” that if we are not “very careful” will over the next 100 years threaten our own existence on the planet.
It is ironic that progress in science and technology is being considered by the world’s most famous scientist as being the most serious risk for Earth.
Progress in information technology is likewise threatening humanity in restricting privacy and impeding human freedom and dignity.
The more we surf on the internet, the more we are leaving a trail of our personal lives with the high risk of being manipulated and abused by the faceless owners and managers of technology.
The issue of algorithms is not the technology as such, but who is behind the design of those algorithms. Science and technology are not autonomous of human dignity and freedom.
Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, reflected on Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si by examining the paradox in materialism and modern ideologies – materialism is indeed anti-material and destructive in nature.
Blind technological development, not underpinned by ethics and morality, will physically destroy humankind.
It is ironic that progress in science and technology is being considered by the world’s most famous scientist as being the most serious risk for Earth
Pope Francis’ view of society today is that it has lost the significance of meaning – the value and purpose of the human person and the relationship between the person, creation and its creator. The bad aspect of globalisation has meant a hastened “ deterioration of cultural roots and that human beings are themselves being considered as consumer goods to be used and discarded”. (Evangelii Gaudium).
The world we are living is marked by ‘globalisation of indifference’ that makes us slowly inured to the suffering and travail of our neighbours.
These comments resonate with Benedict XVI’s leitmotif on the dictatorship of relativism, which was amply described in his address to Canada’s episcopal conference in 2006: “recognising nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. Within such a relativistic horizon an eclipse of the sublime goals of life occurs with a lowering of the standards of excellence, a timidity before the category of the good and a relentless but senseless pursuit of novelty parading as the realisation of freedom”.
In a recently published book When Breath become Air, the late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi wrote about his reflections and experience as a doctor facing cancer patients when he himself was dying of cancer which was rapidly spreading from his lungs. His experiences, such as a sense of deja-vu and indifference when dissecting a human body, made him deeply reflect on science, life and purpose.
It is very significant that this surgeon, who died at the age of 37, reflects on “science’s inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honour, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue”.
It is time for us to seriously contemplate what we are doing and its purpose. There lies in us, if we keep silent for a while, a yearning for contemplation, but also a search for justice and a realisation that we need to be socially transformed.
Pope Francis challenges us to reject the status quo, be it in the way we behave in society and the way we act in the economy. He knocks down established thinking and clamours for a reform in society and economic systems that reinforces the centrality of the human person, and the person’s dignity and freedom from prejudice and injustice.
This creates a strong sense of ecumenism whereby people of all faiths and none can congregate together in moments of reflection about life and purpose. Science and the economy cannot be separated from ethics, and politics cannot be separated from human yearning that goes beyond the now and all. It is a search for human fulfilment but also for collective flourishing.