The movement from the middle ages brought to bear a new type of human consciousness – the formation of autonomy, when humans “became Lord of his being” (p. 57). As modernity has continued, however, the forces of being “self-created” became technologized and shifted outside the individual to the social engineering, taken out of a local context of family and friends and history and placed within a society governed by “experts.” Guardini calls this “mass man”: “The mass was fashioned according to the law of standardization, a law dictated by the functional nature of the machine. Moreover, the most highly developed individuals of the mass, its elite, are not merely conscious of the influence of the machine; they deliberately imitate it, building its standards and rhythms into their own ethos” (p.59). Do you remember a decade ago when the CEO of MTV said, “We own America’s teenagers”? A leveling of human being takes place – one is defined by one’s organization, or place within the wider social order. “The new leader is co-ordinated by the very masses he leads; he does not possess a creative personality in the old sense; he is not that former individual who always flowered under exceptional circumstances” (p. 61). Personal responsibility slides into oblivion; one learns to live and conform to “what is”: “With the loss of personality comes the steady fading away of that sense of uniqueness with which man had once viewed his own existence, which had once been the source of all social intercourse” (p. 62). Remember that Guardini wrote as one who had suffered imprisonment as a German critic of Hitler and watched the German society conform to the agenda of the Third Reich. I wonder why there has not been a deeper reaction to the known manipulations of information and media of the public toward the Bush administration -- what Scott McClellan criticized as continuous "campaign mode" rather than "governing mode". Of course, in so doing, he implied that media manipulation and untruthful image production is legitimate during campaigns!

Guardini looked forward and saw two possible consequences of this change: “The individual will either disappear in the collective mass as an empty means for a mechanical function . . .. . or he will appear to accept the standardized patter of social life, adjusting to his loss of liberty both for free decision and for open growth as a person. . . . If he takes the latter course, he will do so for the sake of consolidating his own inner life, of conserving—at least for a time—the core of his spiritual existence” (p. 62). He predicted Oprah’s spiritual turn years before it happened!

We live in a world that demands increasing conformity, run by an increasingly small number of people – the leaders of the G8, for instance; the head of the Federal Reserve; those overseeing the Chinese economy. “This new attitude is revealed by the evident fact that the coming man renounces an idiosyncratic life for a communal form, that he surrenders individual initiative for a given order of things. The process of conformity has profaned so many areas of life and has dons so much violence to man that we are apt to neglect its positive meaning. . . . When all other substantial values have disintegrated comradeship remains” (p. 66) – what we have come to call our “community”. “Community” becomes a good in itself, rather than asking whether it is truthful, good, or for what end it exists -- community becomes “life-style enclave” to connect us with the like minded.

Guardini finally sees the political fall-out of such a shift. He argues, “democratic values presumed a small population. It is evident that a genuine democratic spirit, in that sense, is only possible in small countries or in the large country which possess great space of open land. The effectiveness of democratic values for the new age is problematic. . . . . Without those values another and terrible possibility could emerge; man might succumb to the power of the anonymous” (p. 67), those spin-masters who control mediate outlets to convince society where “clear and present dangers” exist so that the “leader” might “save them” from danger. One looks to find the “tipping point”, the sociological density for a phenomenon so that others might conform to it.

This is no real humanism; it presents a false freedom; it turns the Incarnation of Jesus into a “type” or “abstraction” of life to help the “mass man” cope with the general social engineering of the experts within a self-chosen “community.” To read Guardini here presages Foucault, but without the nihilism.