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F r o n t i s p i e c e
Man Is the Richer Word
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 14, Number 3
 March 2003 
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Joseph Conrad is said to have spent hours trying to decide whether to describe a character as "penniless" or "without a penny." Most people, no doubt, think the terms are exact synonyms, but they are not. The distinction between them is subtle, so subtle that that it is only felt and cannot proved from a dictionary. Yet a good writer—and Conrad was a very good writer—knows that such distinctions makes a difference (at least to himself, if not to his readers).
I am halfway through Ron Hansen’s A Stay Against Confusion, a collection of "essays on faith and fiction." I have not read any of his six novels but suspect I would enjoy and profit from them. Hansen is a Catholic and apparently a devoted one, and he seems to be orthodox. At least so far I have not come across anything theologically untoward, and his essays on Ignatius of Loyola and Gerard Manley Hopkins are well crafted. I look forward to the ones on stigmata and the Eucharist.
So far the only thing in his writing that has bothered me is his repeated use of humankind. Never does he use mankind. I cannot tell whether this is a mere affectation, a piece of ideological baggage, or simply something about which he is quite oblivious, as many of us are oblivious to the "um"-words that fill spaces in our conversation. But I do know that humankind and mankind are not exact synonyms.
My rule of thumb is not to use humankind, for two reasons. First, political and theological liberals use it in place of mankind because the latter too clearly is based on man, a word that offends feminist sensibilities. (Of course, human also is based on man, but at one remove, so to speak.) Second, and more importantly for me, humankind seems sterile or clinical. Human (or human being) is more a term of science than of philosophy or theology. While man has been in use from earliest times, human, as a noun, is not even 500 years old. It came in with the growth of modern science. It is a word that differentiates one animal from the others, but only at the physical level, not at the spiritual. Man is the richer word.
I admit there are times when humankind does seem just the right word. T. S. Eliot uses it (splitting it into two words) in his poem "Burnt Norton": "Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality." In his play Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot puts the line in the mouth of Thomas Becket: "Human kind cannot bear very much reality." I can see a poetic reason for each use, with more justification for the first (spoken by an animal) than the second (spoken by a man).
In Ron Hansen’s fine essays there is no poetic justification for humankind, and the entire absence of mankind suggests, well, something. I am not sure what that something is, but I am bothered by it nevertheless. Perhaps that botheration is my version of baggage.
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