What’s Our Ambition for the Common Good with Ronald Rolheiser (Part 1)

Ilia Delio is joined by theologian Fr. Ronald Rolheiser. They discuss his book The Holy Longing, and what he observes in the world today especially considering the direction and impact of technology like AI. Ilia and Ron explore the challenges of information and misinformation and what it means for personhood and the future of the human.

ABOUT RONALD ROLHEISER

“Faith is not a question of basking in the certainty that there is a God and that God is taking care of us. Many of us are never granted this kind of assurance. Certitude is not the real substance of faith. Faith is a way of seeing things.”

Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, Ph.D., is a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He is a community-builder, lecturer, and writer. His books are popular throughout the English-speaking world and have now been translated into many languages. His weekly column is carried by more than 80 newspapers worldwide. He taught theology and philosophy at Newman Theological College in Edmonton, Alberta, for 16 years, served as Provincial Superior of his Oblate Province for six years, and served on the General Council for the Oblates in Rome for six years. From 2005–2020, Fr. Ron served as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He remains on staff at OST as a full-time faculty member.

Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. Today, Ilia Interviews theologian, Father Ron Rolheiser. They discuss his much celebrated book, The Holy Longing, which prompts Ilia to ask, what is the hunger for wholeness at work in our world today, especially considering the impact of AI?

Ilia: Father Ron Rolheiser, we're really delighted to have you join us today on our podcast, the Hunger for Wholeness. You have done really amazing work in the area of spirituality over the years. I remember reading your book and being so inspired by one of your many books, but The Holy Longing was a very significant volume for me. I'm just curious, in this age of information and restlessness, what do you see as the greatest hunger for wholeness? Or do you see a hunger for wholeness in your work?

Ron Rolheiser: Ilia, I'll just start with where I was in The Holy Longing. Well, let me go back. You know, Saint Augustine wrote a line 1700 years ago. To me, that's still the most penetrating line ratchet to explain. He said, "You've made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." And no amount of progress or secularization or whatever, or even falling away changes that that still, that's the force that drives the planet. And that's also as Teilhard  would say in the cosmos itself, eros doesn't start with human beings. The atoms and the molecules are, but there's an eroticism, if I may use that word, inside of all of everything that is. From the proton, the atoms up and to us today, and we're driven. We're driven towards one place. That's still, to me, the ultimate explanation of what happens, both good and bad. You know, like for in yesterday's gospel, Jesus says, the violent take the kingdom by storm. It's the same energy.

Ilia: Misguided passion and violence. I remember that Holy Longing, I think you write something like, we are fired, we are fired to life. But you say eroticism or this passion, this fire of life, you know, even the God, this fire of life.

Ron Rolheiser: You know, it's a deliberately chosen verb. Actually, I lean on Plato for that. You know, see, when you say we're fired into life and supposed to, we're born serenely, you wake up and your prayer and contemplatively surveying your options, so we wake up crying, we wake up hungry. We are driven human beings and it's divine fire. You know, they always used to blame half of our problems on original sin, or all of our problems that I don't think they're original. Most of our problems come from the fact that we have divine fire inside of us.

Ilia: I love that. I know that is wonderful.

Ron Rolheiser: It's not that we went wrong somewhere, it's just that we are overcharged. I mean, we have a God or goddess inside of us that is not going to make easy peace down here with godly appetites that's trying to eat up the planet.

Ilia: Yes. That is a great way to look at original passion, we might say, rather than original sin, original aeros. That is thwarted, distorted, and turned into vehicles of consumption. I think that's really true that the unfulfilled aeros or the unfulfilled passion can turn violent. It can turn into a fight or flight syndrome.

Ron Rolheiser: You know, saints and demons on this planet are driven by the same energy, basically. It's one energy that's driving us all.

Ilia: This Holy Longing, which is a great term, longing, do you see that as being fulfilled in this life? Or is it a longing that's driving this life towards, in the Augustinian sense of the city of God, which is in the sense, the eternal life in God?

Ron Rolheiser: Well, that's a perfect question. Is it fulfilled in this life? And the answer is going to be both yes and no in terms of, it's what we call realized eschatology, we are going to get some of heaven on earth, but we're not going to get, Karl Rahner said, “the full symphony.” You know, I always loved that line from Rahner, "In the torment of the insufficiency of everything we've attained, we realize in this life there is no finished symphony." A lucky person may have some moments of ecstasy, but there are moments, but nobody has the full symphony, which doesn't mean we don't get a beautiful symphony. Jesus came to bring us light, but the light is already here. You know, the light to my spirituality is not meant to be a test, or how much can you endure? No, God is a good parent, and good parents want their children to thrive. God wants us to thrive and have happy lives and so on. But at the same time, given that over eroticism in the wide sense inside of us, we're never going to get the full symphony. Everybody dies without the complete symphony.

Ilia: Well, what's so interesting, I just finished teaching a course actually on technology, religion, and human becoming. One of the articles we read was by John Passmore on the quest for perfectibility. And his notion, there is this drive for perfectibility in nature that not only has driven, you might say the course of evolution, but that continues to drive us with artificial intelligence. That we continue to want to transcend ourselves in this longing for perfection, for godliness, for a life beyond the biological limits of suffering and death. What is your position maybe on AI, which is our fastest evolver today and our fastest game changer?

Ron Rolheiser: Yeah. I have to confess that at this stage, there are fears and maybe I'm getting too much popular science, type of thing. I think like AI is, like, for instance, the internet and social media, it's a good thing in itself. We have to make sure it doesn't take control of us.

Ilia: For sure.

Ron Rolheiser: You know, I'm not even so much worried that we're going to have robots that start killing us all. But for instance, what's happening with social media, after a while, we lose a common sense of truth. Everybody has their own research, their own beliefs, and so on. With AI, at a certain point, are we going to create the Tower of Babel anew?

Ilia: Well, that is the fear, isn't it?

Ron Rolheiser: Well, I'm less scared of robots who are going to kill us. I'm scared of more the Tower of Babel syndrome, which is already kind of happening with social media where we can't find a common basis for truth anymore. We have a hundred million news channels today.

Ilia: Right. It's tribalized us even further in some ways where more ensconced in our little tribes of ideas and ideologies. If I can just take this one step further, is that AI, actually, while that is one level of fear, and it's a real fear, because we can see that fracturing of the human community for the hyper tribalism of social media, so to speak, or these news feeds. But on the other hand, there is a level where AI is globalizing us. In other words, we are able to access information globally. We're able to be in connection with one another in a more immediate way. So even our quest where the holy longing, which I think goes back to—we are made for God, but thank God no God there who's not here. There's no God who's like, you can't love the God. You do not see unless you love the God you're in relationship with here. So, can AI, in a sense, be the next step of the holy longing as it connects us on a new level of mind or thought or consciousness, and therefore maybe build a type of new hyper relational or interrelation community that we're struggling with without AI? I mean, part of our struggles and our oppositional fears is precisely kind of Darwinian territory. Like you're in my plan, I'm more powerful than you are, type thing. But can we come to, I think this is what technologists are trying to look toward, a new world where we can maybe realize our capacity for deep relationship, our capacity for belonging to one another as we belong to God.

Ron Rolheiser: No, it can. That would be the ideal. You know? So that ideally that he created the first truly global village which we're kind of have created with technology, information technology. The problem is we have a global village in which nobody gets along, now everybody knows what's happening all over the world. This can happen. But my fear is and maybe this is a paranoid fear that so much of this stuff, eventually it's going to be commercially driven and it's going to be for profit, for whatever, where it's not necessarily being designed for the common good. Entrepreneurs and the Bill Gates, not to anything wrong with him or something, or the Elon Musk, somebody can get on this and make billions of dollars and it control a lot of stuff. I worry about the common good. Will the common good be lost? You know, this is development, we would need a Teilhard de Chardin visioning this stage. Have Teilhard de Chardin the visionary behind it, I would trust that this is a wonderful thing God has given us, and we're going to make it help form the Christophere.

Ilia: Exactly.

Ron Rolheiser: No offense to these guys, but Elon Musk and Bill Gates and these people, they're Google. They're not exactly Teilhard. I worry about the common vision for the common good that won't be ultimately driving it. It can be driving for commercial reasons or ambitious reasons and so on.

Ilia: Absolutely. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. That fear that it is right now it's being driven by big corporate money and big money. You know, big money with big ideas. And does it include the everyday Jane and Joe from Bluebell, Pennsylvania, and that's the whole thing. But I do think, and I think we have to consider this; even within the context of spirituality today, I am concerned talking about spirituality apart from our reality of what's driving evolution, what's driving human change, and why we're having a difficult time, you might say, keeping up with the way technology is reshaping our world. It's sort of breathless. And I think this is part of our dilemma today. People feel they're very anxious. They feel very much like they're losing control. And I think in some ways this drives consumerism, because if I buy enough stuff maybe I'll feel good about myself, and so it's unhealthy. So I am wondering can we come to a more adequate relationship between the drive for AI, but the need that a robust spirituality must be at the heart of it. If it is indeed going to be in the direction of what Teilhard envisioned, and that that is a greater personalized planet where we are part of a body that as Christians, we mean the body of Christ. And without spirituality, in my view, AI can be potentially dangerous. You know, it kind of has an unbridled future.

Ron Rolheiser: No, I agree with you Ilia. Spiritual writers who teach this stuff like yourself, myself, we have to engage this. We have to engage this. Otherwise, spirituality becomes an art form. The danger is we have this wonderful spirituality. It's not touching real life. This is real life. You know, it also scares me because also technology isn't my strength. You know, I can handle Saint Augusta and Plato and Aristotle. I'm not sure I can handle all the intricacies of technology, which is changing so fast every day. By my own admission, I'm a digital immigrant, which means that I wasn't born at this. I'm learning the language, but I'll always speak with an accent, if I can put it that way.

Ilia: I love that.

Ron Rolheiser: But you're right, it has to be addressed. I mean, it's just kind of—you know, I struggle—I heard a great line once from Robert Moore who was teaching on Jung, and he says, the struggle of the magus or the sophia in your case, he intellectually says that, we'll engage it, but not for real. And this was his line. He says, when the last tree in the United States has cut down, academics have written a lot of studies why it's shouldn't be done. We write the studies, but we're not out there trying to, you know, we're not hugging the trees, we're not stopping the chainsaws. You're right, spirituality has to engage. One of my heroes was Daniel Barrigan and Daniel Berrigan, he lost every teaching job he had. He probably taught at 650 universities. He got fired every time for taking his students out on the picket line.

Ilia: Really?

Ron Rolheiser: It wouldn't be long before he was teaching classes on a picket line or outside of a draft office or something, and he'd get fired for it. He was more than a pure teacher. I've never been arrested or fired for taking my students to the picket line, and I admit that that's a fault. But you're right, it's a question of how to get there, how to get there, because first of all, you have to have some knowledge of technology to make an impact and so on. Yeah. But you're right. This is our future, we can't ignore.

To be sure, the general idea and practice of spirituality is more popular than ever. But is it deep enough? How do we facilitate better, more impactful collaboration between technologists and the deep wisdom of our metaphysical traditions? Next, Ilia and Ron probe the challenges of information, misinformation, truth and lies. And later, Ilia asks Ron, what all of this means for the future of the human person.

Ilia: I do get concerned where spirituality becomes kind of a separate domain, and I worry about a therapeutic system. You know, that spirituality becomes sort of a feel good thing like I'm in relationship with God and God loves me, and life is good and it's beautiful when in fact, Teilhard's ideas spirit is the higher portion of matter. It's the energy portion. And the energized matter is to build the earth. And that's why Barrigan's being on the picket line is, we have to engage, which is the same way of being engaged with what science is telling us, being engaged with what's happening in politics, being engaged with how the lines of human personhood are shifting; they're changing right through our eyes.

Ron Rolheiser: You know, that famous axiom of Teilhard’s, ever increasing complexity and consciousness. It's increasing. It's increasing. Now, ideally, that's also increasing in unity, increasing in unity, complexity and consciousness.

Ilia: Yes, exactly. Perfect.

Ron Rolheiser: We're definitely increasing in complexity. We're increasing in consciousness, although with some sliding back; it's never pure, but I worry about the unity thing. So, is it going to make our world more one?

Ilia: This is so interesting because I've had these discussions recently, and I do think unity for Teilhard, its diversity. So it's diversity in a way that there's lines to respect. Love becomes a core energy of unity. So the love that unifies differentiates, right? So it's like when two people fall in love, they actually are enhanced in their own personhood, precisely because of the unity, even more than without that relationship. And it's the same idea. I mean, imagine that on the level of globe, a planet that we are more ourselves together than we are alone. I think that's what Teilhard meant. He didn't mean, I think, some homogenization that we're all going to become Catholic, or we're all going to become Unitarians or something. It is rather that we're all going to be ourselves. The elements of life that is most in jeopardy today is the human person. I think we've lost touch, and I'd love to hear your insights on this. Have we lost touch with what we are? In other words, if we have a heart that longs for God, do we even know that we have a heart that longs? Are we even in touch with that heart anymore? Or have we become so unraveled that we've lost sense of self, we've lost sense of one another, and we've lost sense of the earth?

Ron Rolheiser: Yeah. I want to give you two answers to that, or two perspectives. One of them is way back. Classical spiritual writers talk about distracting yourself, that you no longer feel your spirituality. Neil Postman wrote a book a generation ago called, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Like today, one of the issues that I think, where we're not in touch with humanities, we're simply pathologically and habitually distracted. There isn't a lot of contemplative time or solitude time or whatever, and that scares me. And not just in a threat, it scares me myself. You know, like we're always busy, we're always doing something. For years I didn't have a cell phone, and now I'm looking at it every eight minutes, as opposed to somebody's looking at it all the time. But the second thing, Ilia,, that really scares me, and I know if you see it in the same way, and that is, I mentioned it before, but I didn't expiate, our loss of a sense of truth.

Like today, for a lot of people, two and two isn't four anymore. So almost like, I don't know, if you ever had to study this, like what we call the transcendental properties of being Thomas Aquinas, that God is one true, good and beautiful. I always kind of got the true good and beautiful. I didn't know what the oneness meant, but now know what it means. The oneness means that reality can't contradict itself. It can't be two and two and five both at the same time. You know, but you're seeing again and again today, like it starts, well, the Holocaust never happened, or we never had slavery in this country, or this didn't happen, this didn't happen. You know, sometimes comedians less so, they go too far sometimes, but they'll pick on a politician where this politician says, "I never said that," and they'll show 10 clips right in a row where he said it, and he say, "Well, I never said it." See, that's unmooring our sanity where it's kind of like we're losing our sanity. I always point out that in the gospels, a lot of people don't pick up on that, but that Satan is the prince of lies. Satan is not the prince of pride or the prince of sex or whatever. The most dangerous sin you can do, according to John's gospel and according to synoptic gospels, is to lie. That's why Luther said sin bravely, sin honestly.

Ilia: I love this. You know, as you've defined, it actually was super, this kind of unity of nature, this transparency, the oneness itself. There's no duplicity. There's no contradiction. That truth itself is, to me, it's the divine light shining through everything that brings it into a coherence and a depth where beauty itself becomes the very illumination of truth. So that the one, the true and the good, that which is good is beautiful. So, you can see how the transcendentals really work together in, you might say through the lens of truth, but I want to go back to this, your deep concern over the digital self that has emerged, the digital native. People talk about the exoskeletal self that we're no longer ourselves without our devices. So, I think we've passed the stage of just having a phone. We are cyborgs, we're sort of merged with those phones in a way that that device actually completes my own personhood. And that's alarming to us.

And we're thinking, how can you be fully a person with your device? But I think for younger generations take that device away and they can't go to sleep, they can't do anything, and yet they're long to do that. They long to be unplugged. So there's something about this information that Nicholas Carr I always use his famous 2010 article is Google making us Stupid. And his idea is that we are so now enamored with our devices that we're flattening out our thinking processes. So in his view, like neural processes that in the past were involved in contemplation, in creativity, these are being flattened out as we export our brains onto our devices, we're asking Google to think for us, Wikipedia to think for us. And studies have shown actually that there are neural changes, like in the grade matter of thinning out in some areas of the brain. Areas of compassion are weakening, whereas areas of aggression are strengthening. And we have to at least be aware that technology is not innocent. It's not an innocent bystander. It's having a very significant effect on what we become.

My concern actually is that, first of all, we don't talk sufficiently about it; we kind of keep it as a marginal discussion. Secondly, our systems are not aligning with the world that's being driven by technology. We have systems that are built on ancient principles, metaphysical principles from another age; they worked in that age, they don't quite work today, whether it's politics or religion or culture itself. So, you can see some of the problems why people are, one, I always think of the internet—like cyberspace is sort of what the medieval is did when they looked into heaven. The realm of possibilities. It's the realm of the infinite. I can be whatever I want to be, and find whatever I want to find, which is what makes religion sometimes a little bit dull because you really have to work for religion, you have to pray, you have to go to church and belong to a community. Internet is great. Touch of a button, I have everything before me. And so, I do find a there's a gap. We have a real gap here between what is actually changing us and what we are, how we conceive of ourselves. And that's why I'm very interested to hear from you, like, how do you conceive of the human person today? May I ask, how would you even define the human person at this point in time?

Ron Rolheiser: Well, first of all, that's a struggle. I want to give you an example. You know, just last week I was hearing oral exams. At a certain point I thought, today, why are we doing this? They have that information. Remember we used to have to memorize answers for exams, and today they're carrying a calculator for all those answers that, why are we putting you through this thing on any of these questions you can just ask your phone and they're going to answer it for you? You know, so it's changed so much, like those changes, they're catching me oftentimes unaware. Like, this was a realization just that last week's oral exams. There's one thing if you ask, well explain some huge theory, but any dates or facts and so on, there's no sense in asking; they have at their fingertips. The phone or their device is an extension of their brain right now. The same as like a calculator. You know, you can do the most complicated mathematical thing in 30 seconds, so it's changing who we are. I'm still sorting out what that's going to mean.

Robert: This concludes our first episode with Father Ron Rolheiser. Next week Ilia asks what our hope is for the future. Is it the church? Stay tuned. A special thanks to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. If you'd like to dig deeper into today's conversation, visit our new website at christogenesis.org to explore exclusive essays and content from Ilia Delio, and more. I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.