The progress of duncery is geometric, while knowledge and understanding advance, if at all, with arithmetic slowness.  He who demands acute perception from the overwhelming mass of humanity will find himself crushed in disappointments, and immersed in doleful ruminations.

This unfortunate fact is a consequence of the nature of man.  The poet Hesiod may have been the first, or perhaps one of the first, to articulate a principle related to the hierarchical division of humanity into three categories.  He observed:

That man is altogether best, who considers all things himself and marks what will be better afterwards and at the end; and he, again, is good who listens to a good advisor.  But whoever neither thinks for himself, nor keeps in mind what another tells him, he is an unprofitable man. 

[Works and Days, 293—297; trans. by H.G. Evelyn-White]

So does Hesiod tell us what is best, what is good, and what is worthless; and it is without doubt that his tripartite classification is just as valid now as it was in 700 B.C.  The best category is necessarily the tiniest; perhaps only one man in ten thousand can claim to occupy its ranks.  The group considered by Hesiod “good” has the ability to take advice, and to correct his course as life’s circumstances demand.  But the final division, those men described perhaps too charitably as “unprofitable,” constitutes the large portion of humanity.  They have the capacity neither to learn by experience, nor the humility to submit to the recommendations of wise counsel; what they consider their own thoughts are often only the imprintings of habit, or the directives of higher authorities.

It occurs to me that, in the modern era, this largest category has swelled at a faster rate than in previous eras.  It is true that for the whole of history, ignorance and delusion have far outpaced reflection and consideration; we must not delude ourselves with rosy perceptions of expired ages.  Dullards and morons have proliferated in every century.  Yet there is something about the quickening of technological progress, and its accelerating rapidity, that now seem fundamentally different.  Whereas the challenge of antique eras was the limited access to knowledge, the difficulty now is resisting the addictive allurements of a surplus of information.  The human mind is daily assaulted by a slurry of mindless garbage and pestilential distractions, which are no more easily escaped than is the inhalation of pollen and other allergens floating in spring breezes.  Discrimination, mental filtration, and the discipline of attention become precious skills in such an environment.

The development of artificial intelligence threatens to foreclose the mental processes of the human mind entirely.  Muscles and organs atrophy, and finally wither away, with disuse.  The final contours of this informational revolution have not yet been shaped; but initial indications are not encouraging.  The papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), which was published by Leo XIV in 2026 and may be the most consequential ecclesiastical letter since the appearance of Rerum Novarum in 1891, warned:

At the root of these problems lies a technocratic and post-humanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit.  What prevails is efficiency, rather than respect for human freedom and dignity.  Some post-humanist currents even go so far as to envision “second class” human beings, subordinate to the interests of elites who consider themselves superior.  This troubling prospect becomes all the more serious when combined with technological tools that exponentially increase the capacity for control and selection.  Even certain forms of structural indebtedness, which keep entire peoples in conditions of dependence, reflect the same mentality, in new forms, that tolerate relationships of subordination akin to slavery. 

[Mag. Hum. 172]  

Whatever beneficent smiles may adorn their pallid faces, whatever utopian enticements they may dangle before the public, the technocratic overlords of today are just as determined to swell the ranks of the dispossessed and the enserfed, as were the dukes and seneschals of medieval Europe; the only difference is that the modern overseer possesses neither a shred of the conscience, nor any hint of the sense of social duty, held by his feudal predecessors.  But the man of virtue refuses to be subjugated.  We must adopt the ethic expressed by Virgil when he wrote, in his Georgics,

A path must be tried in which I too may rise from the earth,

And fly from the mouths of men as a victor.

[Temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim

Tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora.]

III.8—9.

He who rises from the earth, and flies skyward as a victor, can never be vanquished.  Soaring over the earthly plain, he discerns, with sight of aquiline precision, what contributes to the advancement of the Ultimate Good, and what may tend to its lessening. 

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Read more essays on moral, biographical, philosophical, and historical subjects in the collections Digest and Centuries.