Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical  Magnifica Humanitas  offers a series of hopeful reflections for addressing the problems we face at this stage of history. One of the challenges we must confront is the  Babel syndrome , a growing social disorder that imposes “a uniformity that flattens differences,” seeks “a single language—even a digital one—with the aim of ‘translating everything, even the mystery of the person, into data and performance (…): an ancient and ever-new temptation, which today also takes on a technical face’ (No. 10).”

When this crushing uniformity is introduced into the systems of companies, universities, and schools, it transforms collaborators (employees, professors) into mere cogs in the machine of production, with no function other than to repeat what the system dictates: goodbye to creativity, personal contribution, and the intelligent and free exercise of action—essential elements of human dignity. It is a regression to the mechanization depicted in Charles Chaplin’s film  Modern Times  (1936) or to the presence of the “gray men”—time thieves—described in Michael Ende’s novel  Momo  (1973). The problem is the same, only now it has a digital face. What should be an instrument at the service of the integral development of the person can become a threat to human flourishing.

The Babel syndrome, with its drive to homogenize human activity, champions the goal of greater effectiveness, efficiency, and optimized results. The temptation is immense, for can we be even more effective? Of course. We can optimize yields, reduce waste, improve machine tools, enhance control systems, and so on. When processes are standardized, the production chain flows smoothly, information travels at breakneck speed: time is saved. The dream of zero errors extends to every activity: banks, schools, universities, supermarkets, hospitals… The thieves of time—who would have thought it?—have achieved their objective. Efficiency has become an idol on whose altar the most authentic dimensions of the human condition are so often sacrificed.

Babel, too, needs a single language to function; it doesn’t know what to do with diversity. Or rather, it does know what to do with singularity: erase it, ignore it! It is bureaucracy and its protocols—once designed to bring order and security to processes—that now stand as an “untouchable” to which people must adapt: ​​”the rules say so, period.” We have gone from the innocent expression “speaking the same language to understand each other” to the imperative to live, think, and speak with the single language invented by the enlightened one of the moment. This pretension, put into practice, for example, in universities, leads to professors of the same subject teaching, saying, and using identical teaching materials. It is the price paid to access academic accreditation, a system that, by dint of homogenizing, impoverishes the teaching/learning process inherent in the liberal arts. The single-language model turns educational activity into a package of commercially produced, uninspired content.

Babel, as Leo XIV points out, conceals a profound deception, for it promotes uniformity, eliminating diversity; it chooses homogenization, relegating communion; it sacrifices the dignity of the person (the awareness of being an active agent) for the sake of efficiency (cf. No. 7). Babel’s proud pretension, much to its chagrin, fails to achieve the unity it seeks and instead generates dispersion, exclusion, and anguish. What do we do? It is not a matter of turning our backs on technology, but of placing it once again at the service of the whole person (we are not a number or an algorithm), who resists being bound by the straitjacket of efficiency and a single language.

I wonder, will Momo be able to deal with the new gray men and prevent them from stealing people’s quality of life and time in this new cyber world? I hope that Momo, with the wisdom of the small and the innocence of children, will reveal that the pride of Babel is a gigantic structure, but one built on feet of clay.