Resisting the Modern Desire for Dominance
At the beginning of October, Pope Francis promulgated a new encyclical that offers a critical assessment of the modern world and its attachment to materialism. This encyclical, named Fratelli tutti because of its appeals to fraternity and social friendship, uses the language of “domination” to describe a modern ideology that tries to capture all human cultures within a false universalism. This ideology takes wealth and its progress to be the only sure foundation of social unity, which then narrates all other commitments—whether they be moral, cultural, or religious—as tools for the greater benefit of the global economy. In response, Francis asks his readers, Christian or not, to unmask this modern vision as the false, elitist ideology that it is and propose, in its place, a true universal of hope and service.
St Dominic and St Francis by Angelo Lion early 1600s
He begins this encyclical by offering his papal namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, as a model for how the modern world can willingly give up its sickness, writing: “Francis was able to welcome true peace into his heart and free himself of the desire to wield power over others. He became one of the poor and sought to live in harmony with all” (#4). However, though this passage captures Francis’s distinct notion of peace and filiation, the original Spanish edition does not quite say “the desire to wield power over others.” Rather it reads, “deseo de domino sobre los demás,” which is better translated as “the desire for dominance over others.” Francis diagnoses the deseo de domino as one of the most significant problems of modernity, exposing its compulsion to make wealth our highest value.
The Latin phrase libido dominandi (“desire for domination”) is one of St. Augustine of Hippo’s most influential interpretations of human behavior (cf. Conf III.viii.16; and Civ Dei V.12-19), with its attendant critique of Rome for allowing wealth to corrupt its morals. This Augustinian language is used throughout Fratelli tutti and, as I have already pointed out, becomes more obvious when we consult the original Spanish (it more than doubles the number of times we encounter references to domination). Francis uses this language against the false universality of wealth and the form of global unity that it fosters. For him, social weaknesses are being exploited through the “global economy in order to impose a single cultural model” (#12). He thus distinguishes between the economic idolatry of globalism and the universal care for human dignity. This distinction implies that modernity is driven by a reductive obsession with unprincipled financial growth, rather than a concern for the dignity of each person. Indeed, Francis laments that regional cultures are forced to forget their past in order to fit into this false universalism, arguing that such ideological deconstructions embody “new forms of cultural colonization” that destabilize tradition and the grounds of shared moral coherence (#14).
His warnings about epistemic fracturing give rise to the title of the first chapter (“Dark Clouds Over a Closed World”). Francis emphasizes this destabilization by asking, “nowadays, what do certain words like democracy, freedom, justice, or unity really mean? They have been bent and shaped to serve as tools for domination, as meaningless tags that can be used to justify any action” (#14). The dominating culture has taken words as forms of control, which drastically complicates any effort to establish an authentic social unity. Francis clarifies that just as words have become tools, so too have our moral values, because the “best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values” (#15). Moreover, he addresses how wealthy countries are often used as cultural models that other “less developed countries” are forced to imitate, corroding local customs and producing “a tendency to look down on one’s own cultural identity, as if it were the sole cause of every ill” (#51). This socio-economic manipulation is one of the most common ways that cultures are restructured to serve the elite, because “destroying self-esteem is an easy way to dominate others” (#52).
The Good Samaritan after Eugène Delacroix by Vincent Van Gogh
Francis appeals to the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) as a counter-model for how to imagine a fully human form of encounter, but in chapter four (“A Heart Open to the Whole World”), he frames modernity’s form of domination as a fixation on wealth and begins to develop a clearer vision of a truer universalism. He calls attention to his meeting with the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb from 2019 and quotes from the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, writing: “the West can discover in the East remedies for those spiritual and religious maladies that are caused by a prevailing materialism” (#136). However, once again, I want to point out that translating this as “prevailing materialism” might actually obscure the forcefulness of Francis’s language, because the original Spanish reads: “la dominación del materialismo.” Francis thus identifies the West’s obsession with wealth as one of its central problems, one that has decayed its other values and embroiled it in a system driven by the domination of materialism.
He then returns to his indictment of false universality with another warning about a “single prevailing (dominante) cultural model,” comparing such mechanistic forms of unity to the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11:1-9 (#144). These examples from #136 and #144 are best translated literally as “dominant” and “domination” rather than “prevailing” because it shows that he is working within an Augustinian framework, not simply commenting on how common materialism is.
Besides these general references to domination (of which I could name more), Francis explicitly references the “desire for domination” in two other places. Both come from chapter seven (“Paths of Renewed Encounter”) and touch on events that directly challenge modernity’s narrative of progress. In the first, he quotes from a 1986 pastoral letter issued by the South African bishops, a text written in the context of apartheid, to declare the impossibility of their moral neutrality. Francis argues that “the Bishops of South Africa have pointed out that true reconciliation is achieved proactively, ‘by forming a new society, a society based on service to others, rather than the desire to dominate’” (#229). This quote places domination in opposition to service, which, to me, summarizes how Fratelli tutti interprets the negative effects of modernity and imagines an alternative.
The second reference occurs amidst Francis’s discussion of memory and his lament over the kind of forgetting that many confuse for forgiveness. He adds an exhortation to remember the Shoah and the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, writing that “we can never move forward without remembering the past; we do not progress without an honest and unclouded memory” (#249). Then, he quotes his message from the 2020 World Day of Peace, suggesting that the memory of these events bear “witness to succeeding generations to the horror of what happened” because it “awakens and preserves the memory of the victims, so that the conscience of humanity may rise up in the face of every desire for dominance and destruction” (#249, emphasis mine). These quotes summon some of the most horrific events of recent history, but in light of his broader use of the language of domination, it is clear that, for Francis, such things are a constitutive feature of modernity, not merely dark aberrations on an otherwise clean slate.
This critique of modernity recalls two possible responses to Fratelli tutti. Both charge Francis with mutually exclusive characterizations, saying that he is wracked by an optimistic naivete, on the one hand, or a cold pessimism, on the other. The controversial aspects of the encyclical constitute the major loci for such characterizations: the social emphasis on private property (#120), closure on any current possibility for just war (#258), determination to abolish the death penalty (#263), and commitment to interreligious dialogue (#271). However, his warnings about modernity’s fixation on wealth as a false universality imply that the foundation of these values (in forms of service or domination) drastically shifts how they are expressed in human society. The modern cultural models that Francis warns about are animated by a desire for domination, particularly of a sort that functions on progress. Francis’s language of domination illumines his critique of these systems and their obsession with making a thriving economy into the foundation of social unity. This tendency is consistent with Francis’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (November 24, 2013) and its stance that “the worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose” (#55).
Such thematic connections highlight how false universals can quickly subvert values and distort them into tools of domination. Francis identifies no grounds for a blind optimism, only a steadfast attention to hope and service. For him, we have inherited systems of socio-economic domination that not only need to be unmasked but that also require acts of surrender if there is to be any chance of an alternative. This alternative is modeled by St. Francis of Assisi as one who could teach us to search for the source of human dignity that lies beyond modernity’s closed horizon. This search is, finally, the foundation for the interreligious dialogue that Pope Francis outlines in Fratelli tutti, since Muslim leaders like the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb become natural allies in the face of contemporary moral challenges. He does this interreligious work not to engage in indifferentism, but to look beyond the immanent scope of secular ideologies and find a universal grounding of human dignity that is open to a transcendent horizon. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the Abu Dhabi document employs the language of domination to identify modernity’s spiritual problem with wealth. In Fratelli tutti, Francis offers an alternative to such modern forms of domination and points to fraternal service as a way of countering its love of money, the desire that so often presents itself as development.
Trevor B. Williams is a doctoral student in theology at Villanova University.
