Are we humans?

The tendency to use the word "humans" to refer to mankind damages our self-understanding, and it's used, thoughtlessly I believe, by even the most refined thinkers in these ideological days of ours. This usage has a curious evolution. 

Feminists understood that they could change how people thought about fundamental realities of life -- being a man or a woman, in this case -- without opposition, simply by making certain strategic demands. They weren't above couching these demands in terms that begged for a chivalrous response, ironically enough.

The general public dropped "man" and "mankind" and began to say "people" universally when "inclusive language" -- a political tool designed by feminists to control speech for their own ends, ends inimical to natural law -- became the norm. In academe especially, they succeeded in replacing ordinary speech with "inclusive language" (and this was their triumph of using an appeal to chivalry for egalitarian ends) and thereby achieved results without a struggle.

Feminists knew they had to control the social media of the time in order to change the minds of the great mass of people. Magazines and TV were the media through which opinions could be changed without the need for argumentation. They grasped the Marxist idea that communication itself is a means. And they succeeded in controlling the language to the extent that many children seem not to recognize older texts using the word "man" to mean "men and women," even when they continue to use "man" in its linguistically productive sense (as Fr. Paul Mankowski explains), in forming or recognizing new words.

English "man" remains a preeminently productive morpheme. This is obvious from the fact that speakers are continually using it spontaneously and unreflectively in the creation of new compounds, not only in such terms as "hit-man," "bag-man," "airman" and "manned flight," but even in words we have seen emerge in our own adult lifetime, such as "point man" or "pacman." A few moments' consideration will show that "humanity," "people," or "person" are not productive in this way.

(Read the whole essay, which focuses on inclusive-language translations in Scripture and the Liturgy, but can illuminate the general question.)

In our more managerial and utilitarian time, yet another ideological usage has taken hold: The deliberately imposed replacement "people" has been itself been replaced by "humans." I don't as yet know how this came about; it seems not to have been a conscious effort on the part of any group of agitators. Humans brings a particular context, albeit subliminally; namely, the biological categorization of animals. In biology, humans are studied next to other species; we would speak of humans as a kind of mammal, or in contradistinction to birds. It's not a word that was used to mean man in the old sense, for as a scientific term, it takes no notice of the immaterial aspect of the human being.

Using "humans" in a sentence like "Humans have been making mistakes in governance since ancient times" makes a category mistake, because man is rational, unlike the animals -- monkeys don't govern and clams don't make mistakes.

To use the word "humans" instead of "people" or "man" in non-biology discussions tends, I'd argue, to imply that man is not a rational creature -- that he has not been endowed by God with the capacity to reason and thus to share in the immaterial world of the angels and of divine life itself.

When I posted these thoughts on Facebook, Tony Esolen said, "I always mark 'humans,' in my students' papers, with the comment, 'sci-fi lingo'." He tends to confirm my intuition that it is a scientific term -- and not a complimentary one -- that fails to acknowledge man's soul. And that implication becomes a feature of the user's world view, just as "inclusive" language formed ideological egalitarianism between the sexes in those who adopted it.

A note about the term "human person," which may seem to overcome the difficulty of the over-technical term human, in that the added word "person" connotes the rational side: First, "person" is not productive in the linguistic sense. It's awkward to form new words or replace old ones with it -- we are self-conscious when we say "garbage person" and if military, we would not bother to refer to a "pointperson" -- even if in so doing we would increase our virtue signal. Second, "person" is also a technical term, this time in theology, not biology. It lacks "homeyness" or common use. The man on the street cannot be counted on to recognize it as anything other than a redundancy, and an effete one at that. It can be argued that it will gain that comfortable connotation as it is used, but these things can't be forced. Honesty requires us to ask whether we would have used the term "man" or "mankind" in the context that we use "human person"* but are too ashamed to do so, simply because we sense it would not be politically correct.

*edited to include "human being" in this lexicon of substitutes for the straightforward yet more meaningful "man."