Kant set out to extinguish the skeptical fires set by Hume, fires that threatened to engulf and consume cherished Enlightenment beliefs about the sovereignty of reason. Hume had cast doubt on a whole slew of philosophical beliefs, including the idea of cause and effect, the integrity of inductive reasoning, the belief in an inner self, and—perhaps most troubling for Kant—beliefs about the foundations of moral judgment. If morality is just a matter of how we feel, then moral values seem to lose all of their objectivity.
Kant’s approach to morality is, in some respects, the very antithesis of Hume’s. Whereas Hume’s theory was based on feeling, Kant’s was based on reason. Kantian theory makes a sharp distinction between means and ends. When we value something as a means, we treat is as a stepping-stone to some further goal. For example, as I type these words, I’m sipping from a mug of strong black coffee. I value the coffee because it will help me stay alert while I am writing (it’s early evening, and I’m planning to work on this manuscript far into the night). I’m not drinking the coffee because drinking coffee is intrinsically right. I’m drinking it as a stepping-stone to achieving something else.
Sometimes, we use other people as means to ends. My students use me as a means of getting an education, and I use them as a means of earning a living. But we don’t relate to one another purely as means. I also value them as human beings, as they—I trust—value me. If we were to treat one another only as means, our relationship would be mutually exploitative rather than respectful. These sorts of considerations are central to Kant’s vision of an ethical life. He argued that we are duty-bound to “treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”45
Kant didn’t extend this principle to our relationships with nonhuman animals. He thought that human beings have absolute worth—that is, value in and of themselves—and that, in this respect, people are “altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, with which one may deal and dispose at one’s discretion.” Unlike Hume, Kant believed that nonhuman animals “have only a relative worth, as means, and are therefore called things, whereas rational beings are called persons because their nature … marks them out as an end in itself.”46 Animals have neither property rights nor any moral standing.
When he first said to the sheep, “the pelt which you wear was given to you by nature not for your own use, but for mine” and took it from the sheep to wear it himself, he became aware of a prerogative which, by his nature, he enjoyed over all the animals; and he now no longer regarded them as fellow creatures, but as means and instruments to be used at will for the attainment of whatever ends he pleased.
Kant thought that this has an important implication for our relationship with fellow human beings.
This … implies … an awareness of the following distinction: man should not address other human beings in the same way as animals, but should regard them as having an equal share in the gifts of nature.47
Although he never discussed dehumanization as such, Kant recognized that people are prone to regard one another only as means. When we do this, we place others in the same category as subhuman creatures and thereby exclude them from the universe of moral obligation. It then becomes morally permissible to “deal and dispose” of them as we please.
THE RISE OF ANTHROPOLOGY: WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
A lot of guys really supported the whole concept that if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want.
—JOSH MIDDLETON, US ARMY 82ND AIRBORNE DIVISION48
As the European powers consolidated their grip on Africa, Australasia, and North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, settlers, missionaries, and explorers increasingly encountered cultures that were very different from their own. The relatively narrow domain of European scholarship was challenged and enriched by exposure to alien ways of life, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the new discipline of social anthropology had emerged from the mix.
The early anthropologists collected the strange and occasionally hair-raising stories brought back from overseas by missionaries, explorers, and soldiers of fortune, and used them to craft theories about human nature and the evolution of culture. Of course, no science deserving of the name can be based on anecdotes, and anthropologists began to realize around the turn of the twentieth century that they needed more rigorous methods for gathering data. When they eventually got up from their plush Victorian armchairs and started observing cultures firsthand, they noticed that people everywhere tended to think of their own culture as superior to everyone else’s.
In 1907, Yale University sociologist William Graham Sumner gave this tribal tendency a name; he called it ethnocentrism. As Sumner described it, ethnocentrism is the belief that “one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it … Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.”49 As ethnographic research grew more extensive, Sumner’s claims were amply confirmed.50
The most extravagant expression of ethnocentrism is the belief that the members of one’s own culture are the only true human beings, and it’s at this point that ethnocentrism begins to shade into dehumanization. Sumner illustrates the point with a number of examples.
When the Caribs were asked whence they came, they answered “We alone are people.” The meaning of the name Kiowa is “real or principal people.” The Lapps call themselves “men” or “human beings.”… The Tunguses call themselves “men.” As a rule, it is found that native peoples call themselves “men.” Others are something else—perhaps not defined—but not real men. In myths, the origin of their own tribe is that of the real human race. They do not account for the others.51
Over three decades later, Franz Boas, who is credited as the founder of modern cultural anthropology, observed that, “Among many primitive people, the only individuals dignified by the term human beings are members of the tribe. It even happens in some cases that language will designate only tribal members as ‘he’ or ‘she,’ while all foreigners are ‘it’ like animals.”52 A quick survey of Native American tribal names drives the point home. Many Native American tribes (including the Inuit, Tanaina, Chipewyan, Navajo, Kutchin, Innu, Klamath, Apache, Mandan, Comanche, Ute, Hurok, and Cheyenne) refer to themselves as “the human beings” (as do contemporary Germans—the word Deutsch comes from an Indo-European root meaning “human beings”).
Nowadays, the word ethnocentrism is used to express moral disapproval. Accusations of ethnocentrism are almost always used to disparage blinkered Western views of indigenous cultures. But Sumner used it in a descriptive way rather than as an evaluation. Of course, it’s true that Westerners often display ethnocentric biases toward aboriginal people—but, as we have seen, it’s equally true that aboriginal communities often think of Westerners and members of other aboriginal groups as less than human.
Napoleon Chagnon, an anthropologist best known for his studies of the Yanomamö of Brazil and Venezuela (and who will return in Chapter Seven), gives an engaging account of his experience at the receiving end of tribal ethnocentrism. When he first made contact with the Yanomamö, “They were pushy, they regarded me as subhuman or inhuman, they treated me very badly.” But eventually:
More and more of them began to regard me as less of a foreigner or a sub-human person and I became more and more like a real person to them, part of their society. Eventually they began telling me, almost as though it were an admission on their part: “You are almost a human being, you are almost a Yanomamö.”53
Sumner believed that ethnocentrism was found the world over—in modern nation-states as well as in primitive tribes. “Each state now regards itself as the leader of civilization,” he wrote, “the best, the freest, and the wisest, and all others as inferior.… The patriotic bias is a recognized perver
sion of thought and judgment against which our education should protect us.”54 Less than a decade after he wrote these words, a frenzy of patriotic bias engulfed Europe, inundating the continent in blood. World War I took slaughter to an unprecedented level. It left around 17 million dead (about a million of whom perished of starvation) and many millions maimed or seriously injured. This human cataclysm led thoughtful people to ask searching questions about war and human nature.
THE GREAT WAR: JOHN T. MACCURDY
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns
—WILFRED OWEN, “ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH”55
One of the most significant attempts to address these questions was a slim volume called The Psychology of War, published in 1918 by a neurologist named John T. MacCurdy. MacCurdy had an unusual trajectory. Born in 1886 into an academic family (his father was professor of Assyriology at the University of Toronto), he first studied biology at Toronto and then took a medical degree at Johns Hopkins. Sometime after completing his studies, he met Sigmund Freud’s English-speaking disciple Ernest Jones, and became one of the founding members of the American Psychoanalytic Association and its president. The final stage of his career was spent at Cambridge University, where he was lecturer (in American parlance, “professor”) of psychopathology until his death in 1947.56
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, MacCurdy became a member of the American Expeditionary Force, and visited hospitals in the United Kingdom where shell-shocked soldiers received psychiatric treatment. This experience led him to think deeply about the psychological dynamics of war. MacCurdy was struck by the degree to which warfare depends on group solidarity. People live in groups cemented by powerful ties of community loyalty, and this collective devotion to the group makes mass violence possible.
Here we have what is perhaps the greatest paradox of human nature. The forgetting of self in devotion to others, altruism or loyalty, is the essence of virtue. At the same time, precisely the same type of loyalty that makes of a man a benefactor to all mankind can become the direst menace to mankind when focused on a small group.57
Altruism and group loyalty are necessary for war, but they’re not sufficient. War can’t occur unless the members of one group are prepared to go out and kill the members of another. This raises a problem. In the movies, killing is easy. Both heroes and villains nonchalantly blow their enemies away, unperturbed by hesitation or remorse. But in real life things are different. Unless one is a sociopath, a psychologically disturbed person devoid of empathy and moral feeling, there are strong inhibitions against killing others.
Unlike many writers on war and violence, MacCurdy was acutely aware of our inhibitions against killing, and he pointed out that “unless the animosity of the race becomes individual, it would be impossible for a civilized man to deal a lethal blow, restrained as he is by the inhibitions of generations.”58 How, then, do warriors overcome their ingrained resistance to killing other humans? MacCurdy thought that our ability to dehumanize others is part of the answer. He framed his argument by painting a picture of prehistoric tribes vying for scarce resources.
In earlier days … friction with other tribes over hunting grounds or other coveted possessions must have made strangers appear like those of other species.… Advance of knowledge has taught that all the members of the species Homo sapiens are men, but it is doubtful whether that knowledge is a vital part of our automatic mental life. It is one thing for us to recognize in an animal, identity of anatomical structure, and another to feel that he is like ourselves. Without this instinctive bond, every stranger, every member of every other group, must to a greater or less extent arouse in us the biological reaction appropriate towards a different species. We have sympathy for a dog, an animal useful to us, but we kill wolves, snakes and insects without any revulsion of feeling for the act.59
Although we now know that all people are members of the same species, this awareness doesn’t run very deep, and we have a strong unconscious (“automatic”) tendency to think of foreigners as subhuman creatures. This gut-level assessment often calls the shots for our feelings and behavior. We can bring ourselves to kill foreigners because, deep down, we don’t believe that they are human. MacCurdy emphasizes that these beliefs are not always unconscious. When tensions are high, “[t]he unconscious idea that the foreigner belongs to a rival species becomes a conscious belief that he is a pestiferous type of animal.”60
This was the first full-blown psychological theory of dehumanization, but it was for the most part ignored. After 1918, the study of dehumanization was neglected for the better part of half a century, until a psychoanalyst named Erik Erikson introduced the concept of cultural pseudospeciation.
PSYCHOANALYSIS: ERIK H. ERIKSON
And mercy on our uniform,
Man of peace or man of war,
The peacock spreads his fan.
—LEONARD COHEN, “THE STORY OF ISAAC”61
Erik Homberger Erikson led an unlikely life. Born in Germany in 1902, the child of his Danish mother’s extramarital affair, Erikson’s formal education ended with high school. After that, he took to the road, hitchhiking across Europe and eking out a living as an itinerant artist. At the age of twenty-five, he drifted into Vienna and found a summer job as an elementary school teacher. The Hitzig School, where the young Erikson found himself, was not an ordinary one. It was a liberal, experimental school founded by Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna and her longtime companion Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham. Erikson flourished in the vaguely bohemian ambience of both the school and Viennese psychoanalytic scene, and with Anna’s encouragement and support he remained in Vienna and become a psychoanalyst.
Five years later, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany, and many members of the predominantly Jewish psychoanalytic movement saw the writing on the wall. They fled Austria and Germany, initially to France, Belgium and Scandinavia, and later, as the Nazi shadow lengthened, to Latin America, Great Britain, and the United States. Erikson was part of this diaspora. He arrived in New York City in 1933, and became an American citizen in 1938 (the same year that Austrians lined the streets welcoming German troops into Vienna with shouts of “Heil Hitler!” and the elderly Sigmund Freud fled to London to die, as he put it, “in freedom”). Erikson’s move to America marked the start of his meteoric rise to intellectual celebrity. After a series of influential publications, and still with only a high school diploma behind him, he was offered a special professorship at Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement at the age of sixty-eight.
The question of how culture shapes identity was the axis around which Erikson’s work revolved. He was fascinated by the fact that although all human beings are all members of the same species, we tend to treat the members of different cultures as different kinds of beings. This invites a comparison with biological taxonomy. Just as biological lineages bifurcate to form separate species, human populations coalesce into separate cultures. Human cultures are artificial species, or, more accurately, pseudospecies.
Erikson introduced the term pseudospecies in 1966, at a meeting of the Royal Society of London. The famous Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz was in the audience, and suggested that he use the term cultural pseudospeciation to describe the process of cultural differentiation. Erikson adopted Lorenz’s advice. The term caught on, and proliferated rapidly through the social science literature.
Erikson wrote surprisingly little on pseudospeciation. It’s mentioned in passing in several of his writings, but he wrote only one short paper specifically devoted to it, and that paper is less than four pages long.62 Here’s how Erikson defined it.
The term denotes that while man is obviously one species, he appears and continues on the scene split up into groups (from tribes to nations, from castes to classes, from religions to ideologies and, I might add, professional associations) which provide their members with a firm sense of unique and superior human identity—and some sense
of immortality.63
Ritualistic paraphernalia such as “pelts, feathers, and paints, and eventually costumes and uniforms” as well as “tools and weapons, roles and rules, legends, myths and rituals” confirm and reinforce these cultural identities. But pseudospeciation is not all sweetness and light. It’s also the basis for mass violence and oppression.
What has rendered this … process a potential malignancy of universal dimensions, however, is that, in times of threatening technological and political change and sudden upheaval, the idea of being the preordained foremost species tends to be reinforced by a fanatic fear and anxious hate of other pseudospecies. It then becomes a periodic and often reciprocal obsession of man that these others must be annihilated or kept “in their places” by periodic warfare.…64
It’s important to be clear about what Erikson was and wasn’t saying. There are two points to be made in this connection. First, although he was not always consistent, Erikson intended pseudospeciation as a descriptive term—an engaging metaphor for the tendency of our species to coalesce into diverse, mutually exclusive social groups with ethnocentric biases. He didn’t think that pseudospeciation explained anything. Perhaps an example will make this a bit clearer. Affluence is just a word for having lots of money. Clearly, it would be uninformative to say of Bill Gates that he is affluent because he has lots of money. That would be equivalent to saying that Bill Gates has lots of money because he has lots of money! It’s uninformative to say cultures are formed because of cultural pseudospeciation for exactly the same reason. Second, although Erikson sometimes mentioned dehumanization in discussions of cultural pseudospeciation, he didn’t equate the two. He thought of pseudospeciation as necessary but not sufficient for dehumanization.
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