Whither Solidarity: On the Conditions for Building Jerusalem

“Two loves have built two cities: the earthly city, the love of self even to the contempt of God; the heavenly city, the love of God even to the contempt of self.” As throughout history, these two loves continue to contend for dominance in our hearts today. The age of AI is no exception: the construction of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins within each one of us.”

— Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas §130

It is very difficult to go a week, today, without having a casual conversation about Artificial Intelligence. Google nGrams data, which measures the prevalence of words and phrases in all books in the Google Books catalogue, shows that use of the terms AI and Artificial Intelligence has doubled since 2020 and is almost 10x the usage of 2016. Every day, the major news outlets feature articles on AI and its effects on our education, our psychology, our economy, our environment, our national security and so on. It is hard to remember another subject that so captured the zeitgeist of an era. Some historical events capture our attention for a moment—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Challenger explosion, the Kennedy assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis—but few, if any have had the staying power or the reach into so many aspects of our lives that the rise of AI has had in the mid-2020s.

So when the leader of the Catholic Church and its 1.4 billion followers, sends a letter to the world on the subject that has captured our curiosity and our fears of the moment, people (not just Catholics) pay attention. As I have engaged those non-Catholics in the past several weeks, I have explained the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching is a set of documents, issued by Popes and Councils over the last 135 years, aimed at offered guidance for how society ought to function. Often, these encyclical letters offer reflections on some particular question of the day. Previous letters have been written in response to the perils and threats of industrial revolution, the great depression, the cold war and nuclear proliferation, and the environmental crisis. But collectively, these letters share an overarching throughline about what modern society needs to be focused on, what it was built for, and who it is in service of. None of these themes are reliant on a particular Catholic Dogma or claim any exclusive Catholic faith claim, which is why, increasingly since the 1960s, these documents are almost always addressed to “all people of good will” as invitation to conversation about how we shape the world and society in which we all live.

In Magnifica Humanitas Pope Leo XIV uses a central metaphor of two contrasting cities to describe the two directions in which every age must choose. With clear echoes of his spiritual forefather, St. Augustine’s famous comparison of the city of God and the city of man, Leo offers the Biblical city of Babel as a monument of the inward-turning love: humanity building toward heaven by its own power, certain that the ambition and technological ingenuity can close the distance between the human and divine perfection.

Today, Leo suggests, we are building Babel, once again. We are pouring extraordinary resources, energy, and technical know-how into constructing systems of unprecedented reach and power to achieve some distant and unknown perfection loosely titled AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). But we pursue these aims without regard to how these technologies will affect the social fabric through which genuine human life is sustained. The question Leo presses — and that this essay wants to take seriously — is whether we understand that what we most need cannot be built in either brick or silicon. Leo places Babel in juxtaposition to the rebuilding of Jerusalem following the Babylonian exile. When the Jewish people returned after decades away from their capital city, the walls had crumbled and the temple was destroyed, but before laying a single brick in reconstruction, the leaders first set about rebuilding the community that the city is meant to serve.

Its telling that in a letter ostensibly about “Artificial Intelligence,” Pope Leo actually refers to the “Common Good” more times (83) than he does AI or Artificial Intelligence (77 times). “Technology/Technological” appears 111 times, but “social” shows up 183 times and “human/humanity” dwarfs them all at 300 references. The title of the document does the work: this is not an essay on magnificent technology (the kind that builds the tower of Babel), it is a letter about the magnificence of humanity (the kind that builds the city of Jerusalem) and the “safeguarding of the human person in the time of artificial intelligence” as the subtitle drives home. So the question before us, is: how do we build the bonds of community? Pope Leo points to several applicable principles from the corpus of Catholic social teaching: common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, social justice, and solidarity. While each of these merit individual attention, I would like to focus this essay on the subject of solidarity.

Solidarity is a word that has been used in a variety of ways in the contemporary lexicon. Often it is invoked it as a moral principle to stand together on the face of oppression. In union literature and civil rights movements, it is framed as a demand: participate in strikes, do not cross picket lines, assemble and march en masse. And in truth, this is how it appears in some places in the tradition. However, I do not believe this is how Leo uses the word. Building upon his city metaphor, solidarity is not an individual choice but a social force. It is, in fact, the force that binds the very fabric of society (the city) together. In this way, we need to turn to the way solidarity is used in the social sciences. In particular, the work of 19th-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim is uniquely insightful. For Durkheim, solidarity was the social force that held communities together, but his particular insight was that solidarity actually comes in two forms. Durkheim’s first book, The Division of Labor in Society, was published in 1893, two years after then Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical that began Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum Novarum. In important parallels, both men found it necessary to develop novel ways to respond to the changes of society in the same wake of the industrial revolution. Durkheim’s thesis in The Division of Labor was that changes in the way we live and society were structured in the second half of the 19^th century had actually shifted the very forces that kept society from unravelling into chaos.

Durkheim described how the way of life in the kind of small, rural, agrarian towns that dominated Western society for centuries were built upon communal values, common fortunes, and shared rituals—from Friday night football games to Sunday morning church services. Good and bad times are faced together, and communities grow closer through such experiences. When we can see ourselves in the successes or challenges of our neighbor, empathy abounds. Communities that are held together by their commonality are bonded by a social force that Durkheim dubbed mechanical solidarity.¹

As societies begin to embrace the division of labor and skills, Durkheim argued that solidarity itself shifts. In the urban, industrial cities that were emerging in his day, Durkheim recognized that individuals were no longer drawn together by their similarity, but by their different skills and labor. Under a division of labor I need my butcher, my baker, and my candlestick maker because, as an ethics professor, I lack the requisite skills to butcher my meat, bake my bread, and craft my candlesticks and presumably they all have need for essays like this one. Through such needs, we are drawn into community by our differences, or in Durkheim’s term, organic solidarity.²

Durkheim also recognized that organic solidarity can be distorted. Under mechanical solidarity society was built around shared norms and values that created empathy. But for industrialized societies, if such norms and values were not purposely cultivated, the bonds of organic solidarity would be reduced to the cold mathematics of economic exchange, resulting in what Durkheim termed “anomie”—a social disintegration deriving from a lack of meaningful shared social norms in the industrial world.³ Anomie leads to all manner of breakdowns in community, including increases in crime—since individuals lack a shared set of morals—and depression and suicide—since individuals lack meaningful connections beyond the exchange of labor and material goods. Durkheim spent the rest of his career around studying these different anomic effects on post-industrial society.

While the term anomie is not particularly well used today, the concept feels all too familiar. We have seen a 50% rise in teen depression and anxiety since 2012.⁴ In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a national epidemic, with 58% of American adults reporting they feel lonely — a figure that climbs to 79% among adults aged 18 to 24. ⁵ The share of Americans who report having no close friends has grown fivefold since 1990. ⁶ We are not merely depressed; we are socially unmoored. Durkheim’s argument in 1893 was that we needed to recognize the shift from mechanical to organic solidarity and in situations of organic solidarity, create mechanisms that would constrain anomie and build human connection and empathy. But what even in industrialized, urban societies built around a division of labor, there were still a host of institutions that kept us bonded to one another around our sameness. Within multicultural urban cities, local ethic neighborhoods became environments of shared culture. While it became common to find three different churches and a synagogue on four different corners of a city block, within each of those spaces, community members found comfort in shared rituals, practices, and beliefs. New organizations also emerged to provide spaces and relations that could give rise to mechanical solidarity. As the division of labor connected me to my butcher via organic solidarity, it connected all members of the meatpacker’s union via new forms of mechanical solidarity. Through the first three quarters of the 20^th century, we witnessed the rise of Elks clubs, Knights of Columbus, veterans organizations, and college alumni groups, not to mention scouting, little league, bowling leagues, and even the emergence of professional sports, all of which offered mechanisms in which a shared interest could provide the mechanisms of mechanical solidarity, even as more and more of the world was turned over to organic solidarity. Where individuals didn’t find these spaces and got caught in the sterile, unemphatic forces of organic solidarity, anomie still took hold and cracks formed in the social fabric, it is safe to say that in cities in the late 19^th and most of the 20^th century, mechanical and organic solidarity worked harmonically to hold society together. What will the technological revolution of the 21^st Century will do to the forces of mechanical solidarity, organic solidarity, and anomie?

To be clear, AI was not the cause of any breakdown in solidarity that we might witness. This world changing technology did, however, arrive at a particularly weak time for social solidarity. Marriage rates have fallen to historic lows, with projections suggesting that one in three young adults today will never marry — a figure that would have been unimaginable to any prior generation. ⁷ Three-quarters of women and nearly two-thirds of men between the ages of 22 and 35 report that they have not dated, or dated only a handful of times, in the past year. ⁸ The percentage of young adults who speak with their neighbors at least a few times a week has been cut in half since 2012, from 51% to 25%. ⁹ “Third spaces,” those informal gathering places, apart from home and work, that once anchored daily community life — the barbershop, the union hall, the parish basement, the neighborhood bar—are disappearing.¹⁰ Union membership has fallen to a historic low of 10%, down from 33.5% at its peak in 1954.¹¹ Weekly church attendance has dropped from 42% of Americans twenty years ago to roughly 30% today.¹² Taken individually, each of these data points is concerning. Taken together, they describe a society in which the structural conditions for mechanical solidarity have been quietly dissolving for decades.

This is the world into which artificial intelligence has arrived. And so amid questions of whether AI will take our jobs or surveil our movements, we must also concern ourselves with a social question is what AI does to the forces of solidarity that hold our very society together. Durkheim believed, at least in principle, that the anomie that emerged in his time could be corrected through new means of interpersonal connection.¹³ AI, however, threatens to short-circuit that recovery mechanism. When both the mechanisms of both pre-industrial mechanical solidarity—the town, the tavern, the church, the community hall where everybody knows your name—and 20^th century mechanical solidarity—”third spaces” built around culture, religion, veteran status, or sports affinity—have been replaced in the 21^st century by doom scrolling on social media, Reddit conversations with anonymous usernames, and, increasingly, chats with AI bots, what is lost with every real human relationship we remove from our everyday lives? In the ultimate example, between 2022 and 2025, the number of AI companion applications such as Replika or Character.ai grew from 11 thousand downloads per month in Jan 2023 to 13 million downloads per month in Dec 2025.¹⁴ In surveys, active users of Replika report feeling closer to their AI companion than to their best human friend.¹⁵ Some may herald this as a great achievement in a society gripped in a loneliness epidemic. Nursing home residents who rarely get visitors from family and loved ones, teenagers who haven’t found a place to belong, and every form of loneliness in between can be digitally assuaged. But seen through the lens of Durkheim, this is not a story about technology filling a gap. It is a story about technology completing a structural collapse that was already underway — and, in doing so, removing the very friction of need that might otherwise have driven people back toward one another and created genuine solidarity.

But companion bots are only the tip of the iceberg. As dive beneath the surface, we begin to recognize the pervasiveness of the problem. We have been slowly automating every human-to-human interaction in our lives for decades—the advent of the automatic teller machine (ATM), self-checkout at the grocery store, pay-at-the pump gas stations, and app delivery services all replaced small but real interactions we used to have with real people—but the addition of artificial intelligence will exponentially decrease the number of people we need to have any sort of interaction with on any given day. For Durkheim, organic solidarity holds because I genuinely cannot do without you. But what happens, then, when that need is progressively satisfied by a machine? When the customer service representative, the paralegal, the radiologist, the tutor, and the therapist are all, increasingly, artificial, then organic solidarity, the functional requirement of other people, does not merely diminish. It evaporates. In short, Durkheim’s thesis was that during the industrial revolution, forces that held society together shifted from mechanical to organic solidarity, but ultimately, the mechanisms of social cohesion still held. Today, however, the AI revolution threatens both mechanical and organic solidarity with no recognizable mechanism to replace them.

This brings us back to Pope Leo and Magnifica Humanitas: Leo does not call for a moratorium on AI research or suggest that the tools of the digital age are inherently corrupting. His argument is more precise. What Leo insists upon, drawn from the long tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, is a society that aims for the common good and creates the conditions in which every person can flourish. The common good is not served by an economy that grows while the social fabric tears. It is not served by productivity gains that leave people with more convenience and less community. And it is not served by a technological revolution that promises to meet our every personal need while quietly dismantling the structures of mutual dependence through which we become, in any meaningful sense, human together.

The human person is never an isolated individual. The person, in fullness, is embedded in relationships, communities, and institutions. To safeguard the person is to safeguard the conditions for genuine solidarity. Today, those conditions, as we have seen, are already fragile, and AI, as currently oriented, will likely exacerbate this fragility. Leo’s constructive response draws on what his predecessor Francis called a culture of encounter — the patient, deliberate, often uncomfortable practice of meeting actual people in their actual particularity. Not the frictionless interaction of a well-designed interface, but the slow and sometimes costly work of showing up. Leo acknowledges, with realism, that this is not a simple prescription. The proper construction of “Jerusalem” will not happen overnight; Leo speaks of “slow and arduous effort” in which the walls come second; the community comes first.

This reorientation is not merely a counsel of restraint. It is a positive challenge to everyone building, deploying, and governing AI systems: the same technological capacity that promises material abundance will, if not guided, destroy social solidarity. But we could also build AI systems with solidarity as and end. AI could be built to lower the friction of genuine encounter rather than substituting for it. And when automation removes the administrative and logistical burdens of human service work, we could either displace workers or free nurses, teachers, counselors, and social workers to do the irreplaceable relational work that is at the foundation of human society.

In the end, Leo’s metaphor of the two cities reminds us that building the tallest tower is not the same as building the greatest city; constructing machines of extraordinary efficiency is not the same as bringing forth extraordinary benefit; and designing wondrous systems that can replace humans is not the same as designing systems that serve humans. For all of the wonder that technology brings, it is for naught if it undermines the forces of solidarity that have bound us together for all of human history.

References

1. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, George Simpson, trans., Glencoe, IL: Macmillian, 1933, 70ff.
2. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, 111ff.
3. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, 353ff.
4. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).
5. Vivek Murthy, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023). https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf  
6. Daniel A. Cox, “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss,” Survey Center on American Life, June 2021. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/
7. Lyman Stone, “1-in-3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry,” Institute for Family Studies, 2024. https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-3-a-record-share-of-young-adults-will-never-marry
8. Wheatley Institute, National Dating Landscape Survey, Brigham Young University, 2025. https://wheatley.byu.edu/the-dating-recession
9. Daniel A. Cox et al., “Strangers Next Door: The Decline of Neighborhood Socializing and the Class Divide in Belonging,” Survey Center on American Life, 2024. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/strangers-next-door-the-decline-of-neighborhood-socializing-and-the-class-divide-in-belonging/
10. Samuel J. Abrams, “America’s Third Places are Disappearing and Why It Matters,” American Enterprise Institute, December 2, 2025. https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/americas-third-places-are-disappearing-and-why-it-matters/
11. Hayley Brown, “Union Membership Stagnated in 2025,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2026. https://cepr.net/publications/union-membership-stagnated-in-2025/
12. Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/collections/religious-landscape-study
13. Durkheim’s later work on suicide was less sanguine than The Division of Labor in Society that anomie could be completely assuaged in the conditions of modern society but he still recognized the emergence of new forms of connection emerging.
14. Appfigures, Rise of AI Apps: Key Trends Shaping 2025, Industry Report, 2025. https://resources-cdn.appfigures.com/industry-reports/appfigures-rise-of-ai-apps-key-trends-shaping-2025-report-v2.2.pdf
15. Julian De Freitas, Noah Castelo, Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp, and Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp, “Lessons From an App Update at Replika AI: Identity Discontinuity in Human-AI Relationships,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 25-018, 2025. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/25-018_bed5c516-fa31-4216-b53d-50fedda064b1.pdf

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