The Human Worker as Civilizational Nexus
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Anti-Mimetic<br>The Human Worker as Civilizational Nexus<br>A myriad of forces threaten the integrity of the human person. Every one of them converges on the same place—work.
Luke Burgis<br>Jul 15, 2026
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Velázquez's Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630)
My new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out now. Some of the essay below is inspired by its Chapter 8, on the changing nature of work and its social dimensions.
There is a small machine on my desk in Washington, D.C. It runs AI agents around the clock, humming quietly, sending me intermittent messages about what it is “working” on. It drafts. It summarizes. It reasons, plans, reports back. By some definitions, it works harder than I do.<br>But nothing it does is doing anything to it. It is not becoming anything.<br>I sometimes look at it and think: That machine has never worked a day in its life.<br>Explaining why I believe that—and why the kind of work humanity does both now and in the days ahead will determine the future of our civilization—is the purpose of this essay and of the publication it announces.<br>Lewis Mumford thought the machine age did not begin in a factory. “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age,” he wrote in 1934 — and the clock began in the monastery. The Benedictines rang bells to call monks to prayer at the appointed hours, and to keep the hours of worship they invented the habit of mechanical time. Then the habit escaped the cloister. The clock moved from the bell tower to the counting house, and time became money. But the first machine was built to order work around prayer.<br>Every age has been forced to ask its own version of the question: What is the relationship between work and the whole of life, and what kind of work should we be engaging in?<br>In 1891, Pope Leo XIII confronted the “new things” of industrial modernity in the encyclical Rerum Novarum. It was published at a time when technology, capital, labor, politics, and ideology had been rearranged faster than the moral imagination could grasp. Rerum Novarum tackles the great social questions related to these changes—namely, how to defend the dignity of the human person in a world newly organized by industrial capital, wage labor, and the logic of production.<br>By the 1930s, amid depression and mass unemployment, with the stock market having recently collapsed and the lure of communism strong, the social questions had sharpened into the “worker” question. The Catholic Worker movement, with its publication sold for a penny and its houses of hospitality, emerged as a concrete witness to the dignity of labor and the irreducible worth of the person in an economy tempted to treat workers as expendable.<br>By the 1980s, networked computation opened the Information Age, and the question shifted again: What happens to the human person when information becomes the dominant material of economic and cultural life? How can we prevent or inoculate ourselves from becoming commoditized? And with all of the world’s information soon at our fingertips, what is even worth paying attention to and pursuing?<br>Today we stand at the dawn of the Intelligence Age. AI does not merely store, transmit, or organize information. It imitates the activities we have long associated with human intelligence: writing, a particular form of reasoning, designing, composing, advising, judging, creating. And so the old question returns in its most radical form yet. Not only, “What will happen to jobs?” but: What is work for? What is the human person? What forms of intelligence, creativity, responsibility, love, and calling cannot and must not be outsourced to a machine?
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And yet this powerful new technology comes with enormous promise and possibilities for humanity: it has the potential to cure diseases (and already is), solve difficult problems in math and physics that are unlocking the mystery of the cosmos, and help humans make connections across domains of knowledge that they wouldn’t otherwise make. While there are uses where these technologies are obviously dangerous—people seeking therapeutic or spiritual advice from the machine, for example—there must be a way to navigate this world without resorting to knee-jerk reactions, fear-mongering, or a failure to grapple with real problems that AI might be able to help address.<br>Pro-tech and anti-tech narratives are each creating problems of their own. There is a need for serious discernment—a kind of discernment which starts, in some sense, with spiritual freedom. That means a willingness to examine our conscience and the communal discernment of the communities of which we are a part; to chart a new path forward that is not driven by various forms of ideological and economic capture, or a compromised moral imagination. I have also noticed the twin pressures of coercion and conformity creeping over into the Church, where dogmas become prudential judgments and...