As an everyday example of how this Enlightenment-era machine metaphor persists comes from a friend who has a daughter with Down syndrome. My friend heard someone observe that a classmate was ‘low-functioning’ in comparison to my friend’s child. This well-intentioned comment made my friend realize that talking about any person’s abilities in terms of ‘functions’ is dehumanizing because it serves to ‘compare them to a machine.’ When we use language such as ‘functioning’ to describe human beings, my friend wrote, ‘we play into the dehumanizing rhetoric of modernity.’ We treaty ourselves as Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, as if we were ‘created in the likeness of a machine rather than in likeness of God.’ – Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination
My professional career is in Training and Development, which is a part of Human Resources, a term I have never liked. There was a time when HR was called Personnel. I had a colleague who had the habit of referring to his employees as “resources.” As in, “we have ten resources at that account.” To which I usually replied with something like, “You mean human beings, right?” This usually elicited an eye roll from my colleague, but I was serious.
We see this dehumanizing language everywhere…
- That’s just the way I’m wired.
- I need to reboot.
- That does not compute.
- We’re working like a well-oiled machine.
- I need to let off some steam.
- I need some time to process that.
As I thought about this a while, I realized that I don’t have language to replace it with. This kind of dehumanizing language that diminishes the dignity of being made in the image of loving Creator has become such a part of the way I think and speak, that I don’t know what to say instead.
I’ll admit that changing the way we speak is a challenge and may even make us look a little weird. But hey, if we’re Christians, we’re weird already so why not really lean into it?
Of course, instead of referring to people that work for us as “resources” we can simply say, “employees” or, what I like to use is, “team members” or “colleagues”.
Perhaps, the way we speak about ourselves and others will change based on the way we see and think of ourselves and others.
Joseph McBee 