Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  Although searching for the necessary and sufficient conditions that define everyday concepts is ultimately quixotic, it’s still a worthwhile ideal, because the closer we can come to them the more precise and nuanced our understanding will become.

  Bearing these points in mind, let’s see how Kelman’s analysis of dehumanization stacks up. The first thing to notice is that the two psychological biases we have been considering—the out-group bias and the out-group homogeneity bias—aren’t specific to dehumanization. Although they play a role in the dehumanizing process, they play a role in other derogatory attitudes as well. A person might believe that the members of some ethnic group share certain undesirable characteristics—for instance, that all Arabs are violent religious fanatics. Such attitudes are regrettable, to be sure, but they fall short of dehumanizing Arabs. People often disparage others without denying their humanity. So, the out-group bias and the out-group homogeneity bias may be necessary for dehumanization, but they’re not sufficient for it. The second thing to notice is that there are plenty of examples of dehumanization that don’t involve denying that others are rational agents, as Kelman claims. Consider the Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented episode of dehumanization in history. The Nazis didn’t deny that Jews were rational agents. In fact, they felt threatened by what they took to be the Jews’ collective and conspiratorial agency—their destructive goals and degenerate values. Hitler’s policy of extermination was based on his belief that the world was in the grip of a vastly powerful Jewish conspiracy that was implacably hostile to the spiritual and material flourishing of the Aryan race, and single-mindedly devoted to its destruction. Nothing short of mass execution could save the planet from their diabolical project of world domination.

  How about the principle of fungibility? Even though the Jews were believed to be plotting against Germany, the notion that the entire Jewish race was dedicated to this project suggests that the Nazis denied that Jews were individuals (recall the swarm of rats in The Eternal Jew). This is perfectly true, but—once again—it’s not unique to dehumanization. The very same Germans who tried to exterminate the Jews of Europe strove to subordinate their own individuality to the Nazi state. The ideal of the German people as an aggregate entity was clearly expressed in the 1933 inaugural address of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger: “The Führer has awakened this will in the whole nation,” Heidegger trumpeted, “and has fused it into one single will.… Heil Hitler!” The Nazis had a special term for this process of homogenization; they called it Gleichschaltung, which is roughly translated as “bringing into line.” As one German citizen revealingly explained, Gleichschaltung “means that the same stream will flow through the ethnic body politic [literally, ‘body of the people’].”47 But the Nazis didn’t dehumanize themselves, as Kelman’s reasoning would seem to imply. Instead, they considered themselves to be the purest and most exalted form of humanity.

  Nick Haslam, the University of Melbourne psychologist whom I mentioned earlier, takes a somewhat different approach toward the question of what it is that dehumanized people are supposed to lack. Haslam proposes that we operate with two distinct concepts of humanness. One is that humanness consists of characteristics that only human beings possess. Take language. No other species can arrange words into sentences to communicate information, which means that the capacity for language is uniquely human (as is the ability to dance the samba or memorize the libretto of La Bohème). The other is that humanness consists of characteristics that are “essentially, typically or fundamentally” human. The language here is a bit confusing, as it’s not quite clear what makes an attribute essentially, typically or fundamentally human (indeed, it’s vacuous to define the human as “that which is essentially human”). But let’s look beyond these infelicities and try to understand what it is that Haslam is gesturing toward. The idea seems to be that we have a stereotypical image of what a human being is—a kind of model or paradigm. Consider bipedalism. When we imagine a typical human being, we picture a person standing upright. In reality, of course, there are plenty of people who can’t stand upright: babies, for instance, and people with certain forms of physical handicap. There are also nonhuman animals that stand on two legs (when Plato defined human beings as featherless bipeds, Diogenes of Sinope, the Harpo Marx of ancient philosophy, crashed his lecture wielding a plucked chicken and shouting, “Here is Plato’s man!”). Nevertheless, there is a strong association in our minds between being human and standing on two legs.48

  So, how are these two concepts of humanity linked with forms of dehumanization? Haslam suggests that when people are stripped of their typically human attributes they’re seen as cold and inert—as inanimate objects lacking warmth, individuality, and agency. In contrast, people denuded of their uniquely human characteristics are perceived as subhuman creatures without language, incapable of reflection and refined emotions, devoid of imagination and intelligence, without culture, industriousness, or self-control.

  It’s certainly true that people sometimes treat others as though they were inanimate objects—as equivalent to robots, inflatable dolls, or mere statistics. But this sort of dehumanization isn’t pertinent to this book. There are a couple of reasons for this. Viewing others as inanimate objects distances one from them, but it doesn’t seem to motivate behavior or play a significant role in producing mass violence. Sure, the Nazi bureaucrats treated prisoners as mere numbers, but the Nazi bureaucrats treated everyone as numbers. That’s part of the bureaucratic mind-set. The men (and occasionally women) who actually committed atrocities, as well as the leaders that commanded them to do so, emphatically did not conceive of Jews as numbers. You don’t kill numbers. Israeli anthropologist Eyal Ben-Ari distinguishes “objectification” from dehumanization, which correspond to Haslam’s two forms of dehumanization. Ben-Ari points out that, at least in the military context, both “us” and “them” are objectified, whereas dehumanization exaggerates the difference between “us” and “them.” This dissimilarity suggests that the forces producing these two phenomena may be correspondingly distinct.49

  The other form of dehumanization is much more relevant for understanding collective violence. As we’ve already seen, people who commit atrocities often conceive of the targets of their aggression as lower forms of life. But there’s something wrong with Haslam’s explanation of why this is. Think of a newborn baby. We all accept that babies are human beings. But on Haslam’s analysis this is puzzling, because babies lack the uniquely human characteristics that he lists. Neonates can’t speak or engage in higher order thought, their emotions are at best extremely crude, and they are not industrious, imaginative, or cultured. If we consider babies to be human even though they lack the traits dubbed “uniquely human,” then it simply can’t be true that anyone without these characteristics is viewed as subhuman. Pushing the point further, Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet was a uniquely human achievement if ever there was one. No other animal (even the proverbial multitude of monkeys pounding interminably on typewriters) could have pulled it off. But even though writing Hamlet was uniquely human, only William Shakespeare wrote it. It’s true that anyone that wrote Hamlet is human, but false to say that anyone that’s human wrote Hamlet. Writing Hamlet is sufficient for humanness, but it’s not necessary. The same is true of the other uniquely human traits.

  COUNTERFEIT HUMANS

  Haslam, Kelman, and other psychologists who theorize about dehumanization make a key assumption that is probably incorrect, and which hampers their efforts. They assume that we equate the essence of a thing with its observable characteristics. Haslam, for example, lists various attributes—higher order thought, language, refined emotions, and so on—and supposes that people conceive humanness in terms of them.

  Do we really think of humanness as the sum of a set of observable characteristics? Or do we think of it as something deeper that is hidden from view?

  Before offering answers to these questions, I need to introduce a notion that plays a promine
nt role in the discussion—the concept of natural kinds. The concept of natural kinds (and the related notion of essences) is central to the analysis of dehumanization that I will develop later in this book. So, I will spend some time discussing it here to lay the groundwork for the more extensive discussion in Chapter Six.

  Imagine that there are several dozen pieces of jewelry spread out on a table in front of you. There are rings and broaches, pendants, bracelets, and earrings. Some of these are made of silver, and some of them are made of gold. Further, imagine that you are asked to arrange these items into groups, based on the kinds of things they are. There are lots of ways that you might perform this task. One way would be to put all the earrings in one pile, all the bracelets in another, all the broaches in a third, and so on, making five piles in all. Another method would be to make just two piles, one for all the gold jewelry and the other for all the silver jewelry.

  Obviously, the choice of one method or another depends on the sort classification scheme that you find most appealing. It’s not that one is right and the others are wrong—the choice of a classification scheme is just a matter of how you want to cut the pie.

  Suppose you use the first method. You’d be dividing the jewelry into categories based on what they’re used for. Philosophers call these “artificial kinds,” because they’re based on human preferences and practices rather than on real divisions “out there” in nature. They are classifications of convenience. But if you performed the task in the second way—putting all the gold jewelry into one pile and all the silver jewelry into another pile—you would be classifying them as natural kinds, as categories that exist objectively in nature, independent of human artifice.

  Now, let’s dig a little deeper.

  Suppose that one of the earrings was made from white gold, and because the earring looked like silver, you placed it in the silver pile. If you had done that, you would have made a mistake, because something’s being gold or silver isn’t fixed by how it looks. Objects belong in the “gold” category only if they are made from atoms with atomic number 79, and those that fall into the “silver” category must have atomic number 47 (i.e., atoms with 79 and 43 protons respectively). Atomic numbers determine what gold and silver are.

  This has the startling implication that, centuries ago, before the advent of modern chemistry, nobody knew what gold and silver were! Of course, our forebears could distinguish between gold objects and silver objects, and they got it right most of the time, but they didn’t know precisely what it was about these things that made them gold or silver. However, they had some inkling. Even in those far-off days, people suspected that there was a hidden “something” that determined whether an object was gold, silver, or some other substance. The medieval alchemists—the intellectual ancestors of today’s chemists—spoke of the “souls” of metals. The soul or essence of a metal was supposed to be something distinct from its appearance or “body”—something that makes it the kind of metal that it is. Interestingly, the alchemists saw this as analogous to the soul or essence of a human being. The Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius, for one, made this point quite explicitly in a tract entitled The New Chemical Light.

  The bodily nature of things is a concealing outward vesture. If you dressed a boy and a girl of twelve years of age in exactly the same way, you would be puzzled to tell which was the boy and which the girl, but when the clothes are removed they may easily be distinguished. In the same way, our understanding makes a shadow to the shadow of Nature, for our human nature is concealed by the body in the same way as the body by the clothes.50

  The notion of the “soul” of gold (or any other natural kind) functioned as a placeholder for a mysterious unknown. Although Sendivogius’s text dates from the early modern period, just a year after settlers founded the Jamestown colony, it expresses a view that originated in antiquity and, if anything, gained impetus from the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  Later in the seventeenth century, the English philosopher John Locke wrote one of the most influential discussions of natural kinds and their essences.* Locke speculated in his monumental An Essay on Human Understanding that members of natural kinds have an unobservable “real essence” that accounts for their observable properties. He illustrated the point with a gold ring. “The particular parcel of matter,” Locke wrote, in his characteristically tortuous literary style, “which makes the ring I have on my finger, is … by most men, supposed to have a real essence, whereby it is gold.”

  For ordinary purposes, we say that something is gold because of its “peculiar color, weight, hardness, fusibility, fixedness, and change of color upon a slight touch of mercury, etc.” Locke calls this a “complex idea” because it consists of a number of components, all joined together in a description. However, the real essence of gold must be something that underpins these characteristics. Locke conjectured that this must lie in the microscopic structure of gold.

  This essence, from which all these properties flow, when I enquire into it and search after it, I plainly perceive that I cannot discover: the furthest I can go is only to presume, that it being nothing but body, its real essence, or internal constitution, on which these qualities depend, can be nothing but the figure, size, and connection of its solid parts; of neither of which having any distinct perception at all, can I have any idea of its essence.…51

  Today, we can marvel at Locke’s prescience. Although he couldn’t have known that the stuff his ring was made from had atomic number 79, he knew that there must be something about its microscopic structure that made it gold.

  Like the alchemists before him, Locke applied the same pattern of reasoning to human beings. To demonstrate this, he asks us to consider a child who has “framed the idea of a man.” Locke suggests that “it is probable that his idea is just like that picture which the painter makes of the visible appearances joined together”—that is, the child forms a complex idea of what a man is on the basis of the characteristics of the people whom he or she has observed. Locke then asks us to suppose that the child is English, and is exposed only to people who are “white or flesh-colour.” It follows that “the child can demonstrate to you that a negro is not a man, because white colour was one of the constant simple ideas of the complex idea he calls man; and therefore he can demonstrate … that a negro is not a man.” Locke continues, “And to this child, or any one who hath such an idea … can you never demonstrate that a man hath a soul, because his idea of man includes no such notion or idea in it.”52 The child’s way of thinking misses the mark, because it fails to zero in on the real essence of the human.

  Locke thought that even though real essences are impossible to observe, we suppose that they exist.

  First, it is usual for men to make the names of substances stand for things, as supposed to have certain real essences, whereby they are of this or of that species.… Who is there almost, who would not take it amiss, if it should be doubted whether he called himself a man, with any other meaning, than of having the real essence of a man? And yet if you demand what those real essences are, it is plain men are ignorant and know them not.… And yet, though we know nothing of these real essences, there is nothing more ordinary than that men should attribute the sorts of things to such essences.53

  This sort of essentialistic thinking can lead us astray. Although it works nicely for chemical elements like gold and silver, it doesn’t apply to biological species. Biological species do not have essences—at least not in the traditional sense.54 There is no hidden essence unique to North American porcupines, nor is there for Homo sapiens. But Locke was right to suspect that essentialism comes naturally to us.

  Locke’s theory of real essence was dramatically extended by Princeton University philosopher Saul Kripke. Although not well known outside of the circle of academic philosophers, Kripke is one of the most influential philosophers of recent times. One of his most important contributions has been to clarify the role that essences play in our talk a
bout natural kinds. Kripke illustrated his ideas using the Lockean example of gold.

  Given that gold does have the atomic number 79, could something be gold without having the atomic number 79?… Given that gold is this element, any other substance, even though it looks like gold and is found in the very places where we in fact find gold, would not be gold. It would be some other substance which was a counterfeit for gold.55

  The idea here is disarmingly simple. The word gold is reserved for the stuff with atomic number 79. Anything that looked and behaved exactly like gold, but didn’t have atomic number 79 wouldn’t be gold any more than a brush-stroke for brush-stroke copy of the Mona Lisa would be the Mona Lisa. Both would be mere simulations of the real thing.

  Locke seemed to think that we have a natural tendency to essentialize human beings, thinking of them—or rather, of us—as members of a natural kind with a distinctive human essence. He was right. There is a substantial body of psychological research (some of which I will describe in Chapter Six) showing that human beings are natural-born essentializers. We spontaneously divide the world into natural kinds to which we attribute hidden essences. In doing so we suppose that there is a natural kind to which we belong—a human kind—and it’s an aspect of our basic psychological makeup to think that the term human (or its equivalent) is properly applied only to bearers of a human essence.

  This feature of human psychology opens up the possibility of someone appearing human without really being human. It’s easy to imagine that a being can seem human without being human. The notion of demonic possession is an evocative example. To conceive of demonic possession you have to find it credible that a nonhuman spirit can inhabit a human body, and therefore that someone can be outwardly human, but inwardly demonic. Of course, belief in demons is a primitive superstition, but it’s nevertheless a very compelling one, as is evidenced by the success of films like The Exorcist, one of the highest-grossing (and scariest) films ever made. The point is that we have no difficulty conceiving of demonic possession. In fact, this belief has been (and is) extremely widespread—presumably, because there is something about it that the human psyche finds congenial.