These distinctions were quickly eroded as the term gained wider currency, as is evidenced by the following passage by Konrad Lorenz, who managed to commit both errors in the space of a single paragraph.
The dark side of pseudospeciation is that it makes us consider the members of pseudospecies other than our own as not human, as many primitive tribes are demonstrably doing, in whose language the word for their own particular tribe is synonymous with “Man.” From their viewpoint it is not strictly speaking cannibalism if they eat fallen warriors of an enemy tribe.65
Lorenz knew whereof he spoke. During the 1930s, he had been an active member of the Nazi party, and endorsed their racial policies. For example, he wrote in 1940 in the German periodical Der Biologe that:
There is a certain similarity between the measures which need to be taken when we draw a broad biological analogy between bodies and malignant tumors on the one hand and a nation and individuals within it who have become asocial because of their defective constitution, on the other hand.… Fortunately, the elimination of such elements is easier for the public health physician and less dangerous for the supra-individual organism, than such an operation by a surgeon would be for the individual organism.66
Erikson never even gestured toward an explanation of why cultural pseudospeciation occurs. Explaining it as a by-product of culture would put the cart before the horse: Cultural diversity is supposed to be the outcome of pseudospeciation, so it can’t also be its cause. Clearly, if we want to discover why cultures form we must look in the precultural domain for an explanation. To do this, we need to turn to biology, and consider the evolutionary forces that shaped the human animal.
BIOLOGICAL ROOTS: LORENZ, EIBL-EIBESFELDT, AND GOODALL
On the outer door of a mall in my town is a sign: NO ANIMALS ALLOWED. Look inside, however, and one sees dozens of human animals, browsing through clothing racks or standing behind cash registers. On what do people base their certainty that the term animals does not apply to them?
—MARIAN SCHOLTMEIJER, WHAT IS HUMAN?
When Erikson introduced the concept of pseudospeciation in 1966, there were a number of prominent biologists present, including Konrad Lorenz, who took up the concept and included a short discussion of it in his 1966 book On Aggression. But Lorenz was not the only biologist who found the concept of pseudospeciation useful. During the late 1960s and early 1970s there was growing interest in biological explanations of human behavior. In Austria, the new field of human ethology was being pioneered by Lorenz’s colleague Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who used principles derived from the study of animal behavior to explain the behavior of Homo sapiens. At the same time, a small group of Harvard biologists spearheaded by E. O. Wilson was developing the new discipline of sociobiology—the biological study of social behavior, including human social behavior. Scientists from both of these groups adopted the concept of cultural pseudospeciation.
Perhaps the best way to explain why biologists were attracted to the notion of pseudospeciation is to start with some reflections on culture. Many people, both inside and outside the academy, assume that culture is what sets human beings off from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is common—especially in the humanities—to dichotomize biology and culture, and to assume that this binary opposition defines an unbridgeable gulf between human beings and other animals. But nature dislikes yawning dichotomies. It is continuous rather than discrete, preferring subtle gradations to abrupt discontinuities. Perhaps, then, behavior of nonhuman animals can disclose the driving forces behind human culture.
Many animals spend their lives in close-knit communities. Sometimes individuals discover novel forms of behavior, which group members copy. If these prove useful, they may be transmitted down the generations—not by genetic inheritance, but by custom. These traditions are probably continuous with (although obviously far more rudimentary than) human culture.
Chimpanzees are especially adept at creating and sustaining traditions, which makes for striking differences between local populations. More that forty populations of chimpanzees across the breadth of sub-Saharan Africa have been found to use tools, and each of them uses tools in ways that are different from the rest.67 As Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham and science journalist Dale Peterson point out, “Chimpanzee traditions ebb and flow, from community to community, across the continent of Africa.”
On any day of the year, somewhere chimpanzees are fishing for termites with stems gently wiggling into curling holes, or squeezing a wad of chewed leaves to get a quarter cup of water from a narrow hole high up in a tree. Some will be gathering honey with a simple stick from a bee’s nest, while others are collecting ants by luring them onto a peeled wand, then swiping them into their mouths. There are chimpanzees in one place who protect themselves against thorny branches by sitting on leaf-cushions, and by using leafy sticks to act as sandals and gloves. Elsewhere are chimpanzees who traditionally drink by scooping water into a leaf cup, and who use a leaf as a plate for food. There are chimpanzees using bone picks to extract the last remnants of the marrow from a monkey bone, others digging with stout sticks into mounds of ants or termites, and still others using leaf napkins to clean themselves or their babies. These are all local traditions, that have somehow been learned, caught on, spread, and been passed across generations among apes living in one community or a local group of communities but not beyond.68
One force that’s instrumental in maintaining this sort of cultural diversity is hostility between communities. Although there are some exceptions, social mammals tend to be fiercely xenophobic. Aggression between community members is usually muted, but unbridled violence is readily unleashed against outsiders who have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Violence is also meted out to deviant members within a community—individuals who violate group norms of appearance and behavior become targets of community aggression. Mark a hen’s comb with an oddly colored spot, or tie it so it hangs in a peculiar direction, and her former flock mates will attack her mercilessly. Jane Goodall, who was the first scientist to observe chimpanzees up close and personal in the wild, noticed that crippled chimpanzees were rejected and attacked by apes that were previously on friendly terms with them. The deviant animal becomes an outsider—one of “them” rather than one of “us.”69
Biologists use the theory of evolution to explain this pattern of hostility toward strangers. Natural selection—the engine of evolution—favors traits that help an animal’s genes to proliferate. Genes are spread in two ways. One is by an animal reproducing: mating and producing offspring. The other is by an animal helping its relatives to reproduce. Because close kin share many of an individual’s genes, giving blood relations a hand in the struggle for existence is an excellent way to promote one’s genetic interests. That’s why evolution favors kin altruism—behaviors that are geared toward promoting the well-being of an animal’s relatives.
Kin altruism is a cornerstone of social behavior. Animal communities are breeding groups, and consequently fellow community members are more often than not blood relations. In light of this, loyalty to the group and hostility to outsiders makes elegant biological sense. Threatening or attacking trespassers prevents them from horning in on precious resources like food, water, and mates—resources best reserved for one’s own.
It’s obvious that cultural pseudospeciation resembles nonhuman xenophobia. E. O. Wilson seems to have been the first biologist to put his finger on this, commenting in his 1978 book On Human Nature that
Erik Erikson has written on the proneness of people everywhere to perform pseudospeciation, the reduction of alien societies to the status of inferior species, not fully human, who can be degraded without conscience. Even the gentle San of the Kalahari call themselves !Kung—the human beings. These and other of the all-too-human predispositions make complete sense only when valuated in the coinage of genetic advantage.70
And just a year later, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt observed:
The f
ormation of species … has its counterpart in cultural pseudospeciation. Cultures mark themselves off from each other as if they were different species.… To emphasize their differences from others, representatives of different groups describe themselves as human, while all others are dismissed as nonhuman or not fully equipped with all the human values. This cultural development is based on biological preadaptations, above all, on our innate rejection of strangers, which leads to the demarcation of the group.71
The biological explanation of xenophobia supplies a missing link in the story of dehumanization. Like many other social animals, human beings often live in mutually antagonistic communities. But dehumanization goes beyond the hatred and fear of strangers. It adds a fresh ingredient to the unit, one that is uniquely human. Thinking of others as subhumans requires sophisticated cognitive machinery. Minimally, it depends on the ability to deploy abstract concepts like “human” and “subhuman”—something that is well beyond the reach of even the cleverest nonhuman primates. More generally, dehumanization is bound up with the intricacies of symbolic culture, including notions of value, hierarchy, race, and the cosmic order. It is something that only a human brain could concoct. Although chimpanzees don’t have the mental horsepower to consider their neighbors as Unterchimpen, there are indications of a primitive precursor of dehumanization—let’s call it “despeciation”—in their behavior. We can never know for certain whether chimpanzees ever view their conspecifics as less than chimps. After all, they can’t tell us. But it’s possible to make some tentative inferences. Animals behave very differently when interacting with conspecifics than they do when stalking prey, even when the social interactions are aggressive or violent. Same-species aggression typically involves a lot of posturing. It enacts a choreography designed to intimidate the opponent, often by making loud, threatening sounds or puffing themselves up so as to appear as formidable as possible. The hunter’s dance is completely different. A predator tries to be undetectable. It is silent and stealthy, flattening its body to the ground rather than enlarging it, and creeping forward slowly and carefully before launching itself into the final deadly sprint.
Chimpanzees are hunters. Their favorite prey is the red colobus monkey, whose flesh they consume with relish. Chimps also conduct violent raids against neighboring chimpanzee communities. To do this, they form small bands that enter another troop’s territory and kill any individuals that they find and are able to overpower. They “hunt” for other chimpanzees in much the same way that they hunt for colobus monkeys.72
Observations like these led Jane Goodall to speculate about the relationship between pseudospeciation, dehumanization, and chimpanzee violence in her fascinating book Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe.
Among humans, members of one group may see themselves as quite distinct from members of another, and may then treat group and non-group individuals differently. Indeed, non-group members may even be “dehumanized” and regarded almost as creatures of a different species.… Chimpanzees also show differential behavior toward group and non-group members.… Moreover, some patterns of attack directed against non-group individuals have never been seen during fights between members of the same community—the twisting of limbs, the tearing off of strips of skin, the drinking of blood. The victims have thus been, to all intents and purposes, “dechimpized,” since these patterns are usually seen when a chimpanzee is trying to kill an adult prey animal—an animal of another species.73
Eibl-Eibesfeldt also recognized a connection between dehumanization and war, in primitive cultures as well as the developed world. His approach was subtly different from that of other pseudospeciation theorists. Whereas Erikson, Lorenz, Wilson, and Goodall all describe dehumanization as a feature of pseudospeciation, which is itself seen as a consequence of our natural tendency toward ethnocentrism and xenophobia, Eibl-Eibesfeldt suggests that it has a special role to play in war. For war to take place, he notes, human beings need to find ways to overcome biological inhibitions against lethal aggression. Dehumanizing the enemy is a means for doing this.
In tribal societies as well as western civilization this is done through attempts to “dehumanize” the enemy. In addition, in technically advanced societies, it is done by creating deadly weapons that act quickly and at a distance. In both cases, indoctrination transfers the aggressive act to a context of being directed against another species. The opponents are degraded to inferior beings. War is primarily a cultural institution, even though it utilizes some innate dispositions.74
This is a subtle, multilayered analysis. We are innately biased against outsiders. This bias is seized upon and manipulated by indoctrination and propaganda to motivate men and women to slaughter one another. This is done by inducing men to regard their enemies as subhuman creatures, which overrides their natural, biological inhibitions against killing. So dehumanization has the specific function of unleashing aggression in war. This is a cultural process, not a biological one, but it has to ride piggyback on biological adaptations in order to be effective.
We will probably never know what goes on inside a chimpanzee’s mind when it kills a member of its own species (although we will revisit the issue in Chapter Seven). We are better placed for finding out what occurs in human minds in similar circumstances. In the next chapter, we will explore some more recent contributions to the psychology of dehumanization, and use these to bring the dehumanizing mind into sharper focus.
3
CALIBAN’S CHILDREN
On the other side of the ocean there was a race of less-than-humans.
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, PREFACE TO THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, BY FRANZ FANON1
WE HAVE SEEN THAT EUROPEAN EXPANSION, and the intercourse with alien cultures that this entailed, encouraged philosophers and scientists to think about dehumanization. In this chapter we will look at the role that dehumanization played in the European conquest of the New World. The interlopers needed to find a place in their conceptual topography for the indigenous peoples whom they encountered. They needed to determine their position on the great chain of being. Were they fully human, subhuman, or something in between?2
In Shakespeare’s magnificent allegory of colonialism, The Tempest, the character of Caliban personifies the liminal status of Native Americans. A ship’s crew is marooned on an island somewhere in what Shakespeare calls the “brave new world,” where they find and enslave Caliban, an entity who is presented as barely human—a “howling monster,” “abominable monster,” “man-monster,” “a thing most brutish,” “filth,” a “thing of darkness,” “not honour’d with human shape.” Subhumanity is intrinsic to Caliban, for he is “a devil, a pure devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick.” But there are also strains of humanity in Caliban, who suffers from his mistreatment, is aware that he is exploited, and who recognizes that he has been robbed of birthright. After four centuries, Caliban remains an iconic representation of the colonized. “Our symbol,” declared Cuban poet Fernández Retamar, on behalf of present-day mestizos, “… is … Caliban.… I know of no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality.… [W]hat is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban?”3
After discussing the conquest and colonization of North and South America, I will use this as a springboard for extending the analysis of dehumanization. By the end, I will have uncovered an essential feature of dehumanization, one that I will build upon in the chapters to follow.
DEATH IN A BRAVE NEW WORLD
Malignant lividities and putrid ulcers often grow in the human soul, that no beast becomes at the end more wicked and cruel than man.
—POLYBIUS, THE HISTORIES 4
The story of the American holocaust begins, like so many stories in the history of Europe, with the Jews. “After having expelled the Jews from your realms and dominions…,” wrote Christopher Columbus at the beginning of his first voyage, “your Highnesses ordered me to proceed with a sufficient fleet to th
e said regions of India.”5 Columbus addressed these words to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain who had, just over a month earlier, confronted the Jews of Spain with a gut-wrenching dilemma, ordering them to convert to Christianity or leave the country. Those who chose to leave rather than betray their faith would have all of their valuables confiscated, and anyone who remained but did not comply with the edict would be put to death. Most decided to leave. They knew that as nominal Christians, they would continue to live in terror. Constantly under suspicion of practicing their religion clandestinely, many conversos had already been tortured and executed. The Christians despised them, and called them Marranos—pigs. Jews were not the only targets. Christian armies had only recently won back southern Spain from the Moors and, like the Marranos, the Moriscos—Muslims who ostensibly converted to Christianity—were enshrouded in an aura of distrust and contempt. Referred to as wolves, ravens, dogs, and evil weeds, a little over a century later they, too, would become victims of wholesale ethnic cleansing.6
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