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| Welcome to The Dragons of Selzar. This place is designed as a Role-play site where you literally live as a dragon. You create your dragon character, join one of the five dragon clans, and then you live it's life as if it was your life, and adapt it to different scenarios that are brought upon you by other users and characters. This place is a lot of fun and that's what everything is all about. Come and Join our clan of Dragons! ~Silvera~ ~Head Admin~ |
| Human vs. Man; Essay/ Polemical | |
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| Topic Started: Oct 7 2009, 03:28 PM (242 Views) | |
| Deleted User | Oct 7 2009, 03:28 PM Post #1 |
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Deleted User
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I've wanted to work as a columb-writer for a newspaper at some point, so here goes..! ~ When one hears the words ‘human’ and ‘man’, I’m sure one simply shrugs them off as two synonyms, two words for the being that we are. But, if one really thinks on the subject, will he continue to believe so? Just because the latter is derived from the former, do they necessarily have the same meaning? In all truth, they are used today in the same context, for the same purposes and by the same people. In short, they have become so commonplace as synonyms that we take it for granted that they are so. However, do they really hold the same meaning? To be honest, no. Ever since we began to gestate the abstract notions we know so well today; friendship, knowledge, wisdom, the soul, we commenced in sorting our kind into a race separate from animals. The Greeks called us ‘anthropos’, the Romans “homo’. It is from this latter term that the word ‘human’ evolved. It has grown to mean that which is humane, an epithet to convey the moral aspects of our existence, that which renders us different from animals. In other words, it has come to mean a sentient being that has the capacity to feel, use his cognitive abilities, and sympathize with his fellow man. In contrast, the word ‘man’ has simply become the commonplace tag of our species, the name with which we refer to when addressing one of our own kind, or when talking about it in general. With it, it carries no trace of the emotional and ethical context that its root word holds. In the barest sense, it represents an assortment of bone, tissue and chemical elements that make up the human body. Rather than the spiritual, it conveys the raw material reality of our physical world, the more brutish side of us. If we searched for the deeper cause of this cohesion of meaning, we would likely conclude that we have lost our humanity. As our morals wither and our consciences grow ever more feeble, ever more incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, so do the terms between the beast and the civilized being merge into one and the same. Steadily over the past century, the value of the individual has been reduced to little more than an industrial machine. Though we speak of its enormous value today and profess to want to protect it, in truth, we’re erasing the individual from our society with our conformism, our globalization. At the same time, we isolate it from its peers, causing it to feel the keen edge of solitude and possibly depression. How, then, is our spirit progressing? We have turned our sights from the good of man to his destruction. Gone is the ethic code with which we used to live. Nowadays, young people flaunt their various body parts in the faces of others, they spout profanities in the streets, with no respect to anyone but themselves, let alone their elders. Man has lost his faith in the spiritual, turning once more to materialistic tendencies and worship, which can only lead to his own self-destruction. What will become of us, if we carry on this way? Will our progress take a turn for the worst, so to speak? Will all that we have done be put to waist, as we return to our spiritually primitive self-images? We can only try to regain what we have lost and, through considering what led us to this decline, hopefully continue the evolution we had put on hold temporarily. Personally, I find it clear that, if man follows the course he has set today, he will gradually sink deeper into the absurd, as Camus put it. What can we hope for, but for the terms human and man to be once again set apart? But for man to raise his head, look into dawn’s rising light and decide to stop turning his back on the sun? We have lived too long in the twilight of individualism and materialism. The time has come, finally, for human kind to once again be worthy of the title human and not a simple beast, like the others. |
 
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