Avatars and Mere Mortals

In an age where most people present themselves through carefully curated digital avatars, an important question arises: what does it mean to be human?

For centuries, civilization has been steeped in dehumanizing propaganda, to the point where many can no longer distinguish man from machine—or, for that matter, man from beast. The Enlightenment, with its fervent embrace of rationalism and science, claimed to explain the world but instead handed men like Darwin the quill to rewrite humanity itself. Once tethered to the divine, man was rebranded as a self-sufficient, secular creature—both sculptor and clay. The irony is that in elevating himself as the measure of all things, he has often reduced himself to nothing at all. In the process, he lost the ability to create glorious, timeless feats.

Industrialization may have unleashed mass productivity, but modern man finds himself reduced to little more than a hamster-wheeled consumer. In the realm of philosophical scientism, he fares no better—stripped of meaning, he is merely a survivor, a sophisticated animal clinging to existence. Conditioned by the Marxist paradigm of modern thought, he views life as a deterministic game of power struggles, where humanity is neatly divided into oppressors and victims. Meanwhile, the cult of personality ensures that man, having cast off all external reference points, now imagines himself as both origin and end, the alpha and omega of his own existence.

We have built a civilization of unparalleled convenience, yet one in which virtue has no function—except, perhaps, as a nostalgic relic of a bygone age.

This self-obsession metastasizes in the digital arena, where engagement is no longer a conversation but a combat sport. Social media has not elevated discourse; it has eviscerated it. Invectives are hurled from behind curated avatars, where people mistake incendiary hot takes for reasoned argument, and their supposed debates are little more than gladiatorial spectacles—bloodthirsty, theatrical, and devoid of substance. In the quest for viral relevance, the art of coherent persuasion and rhetoric is abandoned, and anonymous personas trade dialect for digital posturing. With no avenue for credibility to be formed, a digital world of anon disruptors function as cultural activists. This results in a world where man sees himself as a brand and others as mere consumers of it, where the avatar eclipses the person, and where ad hominem attacks—often aimed at the digital effigy rather than the flesh-and-blood individual—serve not to convince but to humiliate. The line between fiction and reality is blurred, and the tragedy is that few seem to notice.

If man is honest—he rather likes the world this way. He revels in the absence of responsibility, freed from the tiresome duties of slaying his pride, cultivating selflessness, thinking deeply, speaking eloquently, and forging real relationships. Why labor in the vineyards of virtue when dopamine is abundant, consumption is effortless, and people don’t care anyway? Discipline demands sweat; indulgence merely requires a screen.

The consequence of this is society estranged from itself. We navigate a world teeming with people yet relate to them as mere cogs in a vast, impersonal machine. The grocer scanning our items, the postman delivering our mail, the waiter balancing plates—all reduced to background scenery in the grand production of our convenience. John and Jane have names, but we have never bothered to learn them. Our indifference affirms the modern zeitgeist’s grand ambition: the systematic erosion of human dignity.

Economics, once rooted in relationships, has been severed from its human core. The world now prizes efficiency over virtue, replacing character with algorithms and outsourcing moral obligations to the inanimate and inhumane. We have built a civilization of unparalleled convenience, yet one in which virtue has no function—except, perhaps, as a nostalgic relic of a bygone age.

One ought to wonder whether the modern psychological trope of introversion is truly a personality trait or merely a convenient excuse—a socially sanctioned retreat into isolation, aided and abetted by those who profit from our atomization. After all, Adam was not made to be alone, but modern science seems determined to prove otherwise. And so, we inhabit a world where the economy enables relational negligence, where we love to have our voices heard without ever being seen, and where we long to be seen but labor tirelessly to remain unknown. We persistently dehumanize ourselves and others, then feign bewilderment at the unraveling of society.

Modern education plays no small role in this crisis. When students are taught that they evolved from fish, that education is merely a pipeline to job placement, and that they exist as wards of the state, they are being conditioned to accept their fate as interchangeable cogs in an impersonal machine. They are not formed to be family men but company men, not neighbors but brands, not givers but perpetual receivers. Even ethnic identity itself is fractured—one is expected to be “black” or “white” before being human. The net result? A generation primed for consumption, stripped of relational bonds, and divorced from any higher purpose beyond serving the machinery of modernity.

When strong and healthy relationships are stripped away, we find ourselves precisely where God’s enemies would have us—isolated, fragmented, and vulnerable. At the root of humanity lies relationship: first with God, then with our fellow man. This is not incidental to human thriving; it is essential. Dehumanization, at its core, is an assault on these relational ties, and when it takes root, a culture of death inevitably follows.

This is the hallmark of a Christian Liberal Arts education—an education that shapes people to be fully and authentically human.

A man who sees himself as nothing more than a cog in a survival machine has little incentive to marry, raise children, own property, build enterprises, or create anything of lasting value. The very institutions that sustain thriving civilizations—family, industry, and innovation—are demonized and discarded. Even the architecture of modern life conspires against relationships: cars and houses, drowning in sophistication and comfort, become silos of selfishness, designed more for isolation than communion. Enclosed in these cocoons of convenience, men lose not only the desire for deep relationships but even the awareness that they are withering in solitude. Possessing no vision for greatness—no willingness to sacrifice for anything beyond themselves—they drift into a world of self-loathing, intent on severing the very ties that make life meaningful.

And once relational bonds are severed, all manner of evils become permissible. History provides a grim reminder: before every genocide comes the dehumanization of God’s image-bearers. The moment we begin reducing men to rats, cockroaches, machines, or mere evolutionary accidents, we have already laid the groundwork for their destruction.

We must recover and promote an education that empowers its subjects to truly be human. Not human in the sense of mere existence, but human beings who know God and live before Him, unburdened by guilt and shame. Human beings who cultivate thriving relationships with their neighbors, who communicate with wisdom and eloquence, and who create and innovate for the good of those around them. Humans who live with purpose and joy, who are thoughtful and generous, and whose moral bearings are firmly rooted in truth. Human beings who are not ruled by fear or driven to rule with anxiety. This is the hallmark of a Christian Liberal Arts education—an education that shapes people to be fully and authentically human.

Yet, a caution must be offered. There are those who can recite the classical and Christian virtues with precision, but whose lives betray a profound absence of those virtues. A person’s grasp of theology and the great books is not truly revealed in academic recitation or through the echo chambers of intellectual circles, but in the seemingly mundane moments of life, where the fruits of the Spirit ought to be evident, not in grandiose gestures, but in the simple acts of grace displayed before ordinary men.

Your love for your liberal neighbor should treat them as more human than they treat themselves. Every person we encounter is made in the image of God, possessing a soul and a story. Recognizing this truth requires a rejection of the lies perpetuated by modernity, secular humanism, and the systems that shape the social order around us.

The light of Christians should not be confined to ivory towers. It is meant for the good of all people—Lydia the barista, Ben the gym instructor, Luke the insurance clerk, and Tim the mechanic. Know their names and use them. They are not machines. Through our thoughtfulness, we can help others rediscover their humanity as image-bearers of God, standing firm against the tide of a world that seeks to reduce them to mere commodities. Indeed, no man has ever met a mere mortal.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory