LAUDATO SI JOE CARTER

JUNE 2015
CHAPTER 3: THE CRISIS AND EFFECTS OF
MODERN ANTHROPOCENTRISM

What's inside this article:

A certain way of understanding human life and activity— the

dominant technocratic paradigm—has gone awry, to the
serious detriment of the world around us.

1. TECHNOLOGY:
CREATIVITY AND
POWER

Technology can be good, but it is also

powerful and increases our power. Not every

increase in power is an increase in progress.

We need a “culture and spirituality genuinely

capable of setting limits and teaching clear-

minded self-restraint.”
“We can once more broaden
our vision. We have the
freedom needed to limit and
direct technology; we can put
it at the service of another type
of progress, one which is
healthier, more human, more
social, more integral.”
(Paragraph 112)

2. THE Humanity has taken up technology and its

development according to an “undifferentiated

GLOBALIZATION and one-dimensional paradigm.” But science and

technology is not neutral. Many environmental

OF THE problems stem from the tendency to make the

method and aims of science and technology an

TECHNOCRATIC “epistemological paradigm” that shapes the lives

PARADIGM
of individuals and the workings of society.

We need to “slow down and look at reality in a

CONSIDER WHAT CHANGES WE
different way,” so that we can “appropriate the
NEED TO MAKE SO THAT ALL
MIGHT SHARE IN THE BENEFITS positive and sustainable progress which has been

OF TECHNOLOGY made” and “recover the values and the great

goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of

grandeur.”
 “All of us can cooperate as
instruments of God for the care
of creation, each according to
his or her own culture,
experience, involvements and
talents.” (Paragraph 14)

Modern anthropocentrism prizes technical thought

3. THE CRISIS AND over reality by seeing creation as mere raw material

EFFECTS OF MODERN
for our use. This has affected many areas of life:

“When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the

ANTHROPOCENTRISM worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person

with disabilities – to offer just a few examples – it

“Since everything is becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself;

interrelated, concern for the everything is connected.”

protection of nature is also
incompatible with the
justification of abortion.” Practical relativism is misguided anthropocentrism—

particularly our culture of relativism—that leads to a

misguided lifestyle. When human beings place

themselves at the center, they give absolute priority

to immediate convenience and all else becomes

relative.