The Faceless Man
For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul? Mark 8:36
Romano Guardini’s masterpiece The End of the Modern World (1956) portends the consequences of the collapse of the modern world. Heavily influenced by the destruction wrought by the world wars, he notes the loss of naiveté in the modern man with regard to his belief in the unyielding march of progress and the perfectibility of mankind. Guardini declares the end of the modern world as a construct that emerged beginning in the late Middle Ages that questioned the value of Revelation and resulted in a change of how man viewed himself and his role in society. This rejection of faith marched to the tune of progress through the consciousness of the Western World.
A new conception of the individual person was due to the convergence of changes in culture, science, and religion. Guardini posits that a “Mass Man” emerged from the decline in culture and religion as an individual who held inestimable power over nature itself despite his disconnection from it. He lived in a society where culture was degraded by a lack of faith. Without this culture to sustain him, men turned to force and ideology to conquer nature and the society in which he lived. Mass Man though powerful had not yet developed power over his conception of power and its usage.
In the decades following Guardini’s writings, we find the continued evolution of the conception of the Mass Man resulting in a more deficient profile of man completely stripped of his own identity, personality, and individuality. With the emergence of technological advances that Guardini could not have foreseen at the time he authored his work, we find in the digitized world the emergence of a Faceless Man.
Man becomes genuinely a “Person” when he is faced toward God, is left inviolate in his dignity, is robed with duties no other can assume.
Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World
The Faceless Man is the consequence of the passage of time and the birthright of two generations of Mass Men who were born into and subsequently lost in the wilderness of chaos created from the decline in culture and faith for the past century. The Faceless Man was never taught that anything exists beyond what he can perceive with his senses. He was raised in a materialistic, positivistic world. His childhood was fragmented and inconsistent and he was the master of his own environment with few limits placed on his behavior. He was lonely, but didn’t realize it because he was continuously distracted by the television. As he grew, he went to a university far from his hometown and decided to never return.
The Faceless Man, now an adult, is created anew each day by the media around him on screens that he watches closely at work, at home, and even carries in his pocket. His identity is digitized and tracked and stored in databases of which he is only partially aware. He remains faceless even though advertisements predict his every material need. He is both a consumer and a commodity to be used by those who don’t know and don’t care to know him.
He spends many hours of his day behind an avatar trying to connect with others without human contact. He no longer knows his neighbors. He wanders through life anonymously, devoid of connection. He is disconnected from the fruits of his labor. His only exposure to nature is in a carefully cultivated patch of grass set aside in the city park. He is part of an economy where he registers only as a statistic on a graph and a number in a conglomerate of those like him on a pie chart.
He is mobile, disconnected from his roots in person and in place. He is told what to think, not how to think and if he questions what he is told he is chided for being disruptive. If he comes to a different conclusion through his own efforts to learn and comes to an opposite conclusion than the majority he is alienated from those around him.
The Faceless Man is categorized and labeled according to characteristics that he never chose for himself. He is told what he must think based on those labels assigned to him from birth. The humanity of the man himself is lost. He is merely an anonymous shell of a man according to society without individual defining internal characteristics. He is discouraged from self-determination but must act in ways that are congruent with what he is told he ought to be.
In a society devoid of culture, he has forgotten how to create. There is nothing to sustain the autonomous individual that others feel he should be. The Faceless Man was not taught how to bond with others and finds that he lives in an epidemic of loneliness and suicide. His future is defined by a sense of hopelessness and is devoid of direction.
The Faceless Man finds safety only in the group think with which he must comply or be further alienated from society. He searches for meaning through membership in ideological tribes mistaking his shared beliefs for belonging. In fact, he is still a Faceless Man, a part of a movement, a cog in a wheel of godless religiosity that superficially and only temporarily numbs the awareness of his own loneliness.
In the quiet hours, if he allows them, he has few independent thoughts and if they occur he quickly shuts them down due to their drift toward the nihilism that pervades his heart. The Faceless Man has accepted that life is meaningless and finds no solace. Only by finding meaning could he flourish, but the Faceless Man no longer knows the excellence that man can reach because his godless society taught him to stop dreaming and believing a century ago.
His mind is hampered by a lack of spiritual influence in his youth and adulthood. His blindness to the invisible makes him blind to the visible. He shields himself from the thought of mortality by seeking answers within himself and finds only a dulled conscience. His belief in his own powerlessness once caused angst but with time has subsided into a forlorn pursuit for momentary pleasure to drown out the void in a life he finds meaningless.
The Faceless Man fades into the masses of those who like him have failed to be taught the truth found in the Divine that exists beyond the materialistic philosophies that filled his university classes. He finds himself finally free of God and even other men. His ability to love and have compassion for humankind withers each passing year like autumn leaves that fall around his feet leaving only the empty skeletons of trees that once had the potential to bloom with a faith and an identity now stolen from him by the postmodern world.
In fact, free of attachments to family, home, and God, the Faceless Man as the autonomous individual is truly alone and at the mercy of a secular order that no longer even recognizes the sanctity and value of his individual life. He remains oblivious to the fact that to a world devoid of the inherent belief in the value of every human life, he is disposable as an individual and only temporarily useful to the masses that want to wield power. Bereft of belief in a personal knowable God, each day passes like the one before in a neverending march toward the end of the postmodern world.
As soon the true value of the person is lost, as soon as the Christian faith in the God-man relationship pales, all related attitudes and values begin to disappear. Modern man’s dishonesty was rooted in his refusal to recognize Christianity’s affirmation of the God-man relationship.
Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World
Rae Carpenter