The boldness of belief, the timidity of technology

Ratzinger points to an exit from the soft despotism of the present. (Final installment of the vitalism seminar.)

Sometime around 1830, a young Frenchman of aristocratic family, with liberal sympathies, got on a boat headed to America. He wanted to see the new democracy in action. He travelled around and reported what he saw: a vigorous spirit of self-government that manifested in a hundred little ways. But he also got intimations of trouble down the road.

I refer,…