Zombies are another case in point. They are animate human bodies without souls—shells of human beings, with nothing inside, just like the lifelike robots that are standard fare in science fiction. The Terminator is easy to mistake for a person, but he’s not a person. He’s outwardly, but not inwardly, human. In fact, Australian philosopher David Chalmers is famous for his argument that we can conceive of beings that resemble people down to the last physical detail, and behave just like people do, even though they are completely devoid of consciousness. Even though these hypothetical beings, called “philosophical zombies,” are different from those featured in Haitian folklore and horror films, the fact that Chalmers’s theory is given credence by a segment of the professional philosophical community indicates that even highly educated people find it easy to embrace the metaphysical presumption underpinning the psychology of dehumanization.56
In this book, I will argue that when we dehumanize people we think of them as counterfeit human beings—creatures that look like humans, but who are not endowed with a human essence—and that this is possible only because of our natural tendency to think that there are essence-based natural kinds. This way of thinking doesn’t come from “outside.” We neither absorb it from our culture, nor learn it from observation. Rather, it seems to reflect our cognitive architecture—the evolved design of the human psyche.
The notion that a creature can appear human without being human invites a comparison with counterfeit gold. To try this on for size, let’s look at the passage from Kripke again, this time substituting the term human beings for “gold,” and human essence for “atomic number 79.”
Given that human beings do have a human essence, could something be human without having this essence?… Given that humans are this kind of being, any other being, even though it looks human and is found in the very places where we in fact find human beings, would not be human. It would be some other creature which was a counterfeit human.
I think that this reworded passage captures what goes on in the minds of people when they regard their fellow human beings as less than human. In the chapters to follow, I will add a considerable detail to this bare sketch as well as trace out some of its implications.
4
THE RHETORIC OF ENMITY
Since propaganda as the rhetoric of enmity aims to persuade people to kill other people, others must be demonized in a denial that we share a common humanity.
—NICHOLAS JACKSON O’SHAUGHNESSY, POLITICS AND PROPAGANDA1
WE ARE MYTHMAKERS who weave stories to explain who we are, our origin and our destiny. Narratives about quasihuman monsters and demons with uncanny powers grip us like no other. These stories may be elegantly wrapped in the jargon of science or religion, culture or philosophy—but in the final analysis they are offspring of the human imagination against which rationality offers us only meager protection.
The Jewish-German philosopher Ernst Cassirer understood this very well. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, and desperately trying to comprehend the roots of the madness that had apparently seized his countrymen, Cassirer warned that
In all critical moments of man’s social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again. For myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated. It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity. The hour comes as soon as the other binding forces of man’s social life, for one reason or another, lose their strength and are no longer able to combat the demonic mythical powers.1
Cassirer’s characterization of the Nazi phenomenon was far closer to the truth than Hannah Arendt’s undeservedly reiterated comment about the banality of evil. Arendt used this phrase to describe Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of the logistics of the Final Solution, whom she held up as the prototypical Nazi bureaucrat. However, this slogan was singularly inapplicable to Eichmann, a deeply committed anti-Semite who once remarked “I shall laugh when I jump into the grave because of the feeling that I killed five million Jews. That gives me a lot of satisfaction and pleasure.”3 Eichmann and his colleagues weren’t moved by pale abstractions. Contrary to popular myth, genocide is never inspired by the thought that human beings are numbers, abstractions, or products on an assembly line. There was nothing banal about the narrative images at the heart of the Nazi project. They were dramatic, vivid, and apocalyptic. They were stories of salvation and destruction, of bloodsucking Jews defiling Aryan purity with their filth and corruption. More concretely still, they were stories of rats and lice, of blood-born infection, disease, and decay. These are images that strike a deep chord in the human psyche, for reasons that we will shortly be in a position to explain.
SHACKLED TO THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
What we often call the beginnings of human history are also the beginnings of bondage.
—KEVIN BALES, DISPOSABLE PEOPLE: NEW SLAVERY IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY4
In 1862, Frederick Law Olmsted (the designer of New York’s Central Park, as well as many other American landmarks) published a book entitled The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, which described his travels through the Southern states in the decade just before the Civil War. At one point in the book, Olmsted recounts an exchange with a plantation overseer—a man whose job it was to force slaves to work. Olmsted inquired of the man if he found it “disagreeable” to whip the slaves. “I think nothing of it,” he drawled in response. “Why, sir, I wouldn’t mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog.”5
Shortly afterward, while riding together across the plantation, the overseer spotted a black teenage girl hiding in the underbrush. After a few questions, he concluded that she was trying to avoid work. Dismounting from his horse, the overseer ordered her to get down on her knees. As Olmsted looked on:
The girl knelt on the ground; he got off his horse, and holding him with his left hand, struck her thirty or forty blows across the shoulders with his tough, flexible, “raw-hide” whip.… At every stroke the girl winced and exclaimed, “Yes, sir!” or “Ah, Sir!” or “Please, Sir!” not groaning or screaming.
He paused for a moment and ordered the young woman to tell him the truth.
“You have not got enough yet,” said he; “pull up your clothes—lie down.” The girl … drew closely all her garments under her shoulders, and lay down upon the ground with her face toward the overseer, who continued to flog her with the raw-hide, across her naked loins and thighs, with as much strength as before. She now shrunk away from him, not rising, but writhing, groveling, and screaming, “Oh, don’t, sir! oh, please stop, master! please, sir! please, sir! oh, that’s enough, master! oh, Lord! oh, master, master! oh, God, master, do stop! oh, God, master! oh, God, master!”
Olmsted rode on alone. “The screaming yells and the whip strokes had ceased when I reached the top of the bank,” he wrote. “Choking, sobbing, spasmodic groans only were heard.” The slave driver soon caught up with him, laughing, and said, “She meant to cheat me out of a day’s work, and she has done it, too.”6
Slavery is as old as civilization, and has been practiced all over the world. It was ubiquitous in antiquity, and is taken for granted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (you may recall that Paul enjoined slaves to obey their masters “in fear and trembling” as they would Christ), as well as in the Koran.7 It has proven to be so robust, so resilient to suppression, that even today there are many millions of men, women, and children who are slaves. The total number, worldwide, is estimated as somewhere between 12 and 30 million.
The institution of slavery seems to have begun around ten thousand years ago, when the discovery of agriculture led nomadic tribes to settle down and till the soil. For the first time, wealth and property became important features of social life, and the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer society gave way to rigid and oppressive systems of social stratification. Populations swelled, as a
large labor force was required to till and harvest, to construct and maintain settlements, and to build fortifications against the depredations of others. Civilization building required the muscle power of countless human and nonhuman animals. Roughly two thousand years prior to the invention of agriculture, nomadic tribes had begun to domesticate animals, starting with the dogs that helped them hunt game, and moving on to animals like sheep and goats, which, in a world without refrigeration, served as walking larders. With the advent of agriculture, domesticated animals became the first farm machines—the sinews of oxen and donkeys supplemented those of human laborers in the backbreaking work demanded by the new soil-based economies.
This was when human beings began waging wars of conquest. Kings and emperors, believed to be earthly avatars of divine beings, had armies at their command for robbing others of the fruits of their labor. These bloody exploits, which were aided by the manufacture of weapons specifically designed to kill humans, gave rise to a new method for replenishing and expanding the labor force. Instead of slaughtering all of their enemies, the victors brought some of them back as slaves. These human beasts of burden were recruited to work alongside oxen and donkeys, or, in the case of many captive women, to satisfy the victors’ sexual urges. The origin of slavery in warfare is preserved in the etymology of the word servant, which comes from the Latin servare (“save”). Servants were “saved” for forced labor instead of being summarily executed.8
There are unmistakable parallels between the treatment of slaves and the treatment of domestic animals. Brown University historian Karl Jacoby points out that that virtually all of the practices deployed for controlling livestock—practices such as “whipping, chaining, branding, castration, cropping ears”—have also been used to control slaves.
In medieval Europe, a new slave would place his head under his master’s arm, and have a strap placed around his neck, in imitation of a sheep or cow, and in eighteenth-century Britain, goldsmiths advertised silver padlocks “For blacks or dogs.”
But slavery confronted slave owners with a moral problem. How could the obvious humanity of slaves be reconciled with their status as livestock? “Slavery was an institution that treated humans like domestic animals,” writes Jacoby. “Yet clearly humans and livestock were not the same—or were they? The easiest solution … was to invent a lesser category of humans that supposedly differed little from brute beasts.” In light of this, it’s not surprising to learn that in ancient times slaves (and, equivalently, prisoners of war) were often sacrificed as offerings to the gods, along with sheep, cattle, and other kinds of livestock.9
Because slaves were spoils of war, they usually spoke a different language than that of their masters. Jacoby argues that this contributed to their dehumanization. “As the ability to communicate through speech is one of the most commonly made distinctions between humans and animals,” he remarks, “the captive’s lack of intelligible speech … most likely made them appear less than fully human.”10
Jacoby’s conjecture has an ancient pedigree. I mentioned in Chapter Two that the ancient Greeks divided people into two categories: themselves and barbarians. Over two thousand years ago, the Greek writer Strabo suggested that the word barbarian literally meant “the bar bar people”—people who utter sounds like “bar, bar” instead of intelligible speech (a contemporary American might say “the blah, blah people”).11 On this basis, classical scholar John Heath argues,
The barbarian Other … is primarily language deficient.… The close connection between speech and reason made it easy to assume that barbaroi—like slaves (and animals, I would add)—lacked both. With the loss of speech and reason, foreigners were in danger of losing all of their humanity.12
As intriguing as this theory is, it’s just not credible. The ancient world was a sea of linguistic diversity, so it’s ridiculous to think that a maritime trading people like the Greeks believed that those who spoke a foreign tongue had no language at all. Given their ethnocentric bias, it’s far more likely that the Greeks simply looked down upon and ridiculed the languages spoken by foreigners. The problem wasn’t that barbarians had no language: it was that their languages were inferior. Sneering references to the speech of a despised group is an effect, rather than a cause, of their dehumanization—and not just for the ancient Greeks. It is common for xenophobes to claim that the “lower” races are by their very nature incapable of mastering the “higher” languages. For example, German nationalists alleged that Jews were unable to master the German language, and thus resorted to the mongrel jargon of Yiddish (in one far-right tract published in the United States during the 1940s, Jews are described as uttering animal sounds— “wailing yelps and weird wails” and making “screech” noises—rather than communicating in a human fashion).13
There is ample evidence for rampant xenophobia in the ancient world. The ancient Egyptians referred to themselves, in grand ethnocentric style, as the “human beings” (remtu), implying that all others are nonhuman, a point which is made painfully explicit in texts like The Instruction of Ani, written around 1200 BCE, where the arduous task of teaching foreigners to speak Egyptian is compared to the practice of training nonhuman animals.
The savage lion abandons his wrath, and comes to resemble the timid donkey. The horse slips into his harness, obedient it goes outdoors. The dog obeys the word, and walks behind its master.… One teaches the Nubian to speak Egyptian, the Syrian and other foreigners too.14
In a typically grandiose description of the military exploits of Pharaoh Amenemhet I, who ruled Egypt from 1985 to 1956 BCE, the enemies of Egypt are represented as nonhuman predators. “I subdued lions, I captured crocodiles,” he boasted. “I repressed those of Wawat, I captured the Medjai, I made the Asiatics do the dog walk.”15
The Mesopotamians also denied the humanity of their neighbors. A three-thousand-year-old Babylonian text entitled The Curse of Agade presented the Gutians as “not classed among people … with human instinct but canine intelligence and monkeys’ features,” and elsewhere described them as “serpents of the mountains” and “dogs.” The Amorites were said to have “instincts like dogs or wolves,” and other groups were said to have “partridge bodies and raven faces.” Archaeologists believe that the images of warriors subduing wild animals that adorn cylinder seals from the fourth millennium BCE may depict Mesopotamian troops subduing their neighbors.16
Further east, the Chinese distinguished themselves from border and tribal people by assigning them labels with dehumanizing implications. The barbarian tribes living to the east were called “I-ti,” a name containing the Chinese character ch’uan, which means “dog,” and the barbarian tribes to the north were “I-man,” which includes the character ch’ung, meaning “insect.” The Rong-Di were called “wolves.” In the Shanhaijing or Classic of Mountains and Seas, an account of the geography of ancient China dating from the fourth century BCE, only the Chinese are referred to as human beings (ren). The distinguished sinologist E. G. Pulleyblank points out that prior to the middle of the eighth century BCE these barbarian groups were “looked on as not quite human.”17
These facts point to the likelihood that foreigners were dehumanized before being enslaved, and that slavery merely reinforced their subhuman status. To understand this more deeply, it’s essential to consider exactly what slavery is. We tend to think of slaves as people who are owned, and who can be bought and sold. But consider the fact that in today’s world, professional athletes are regularly bought and sold, and yet they are not slaves. “While the terms of the transaction differ,” remarks Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson in his classic Slavery and Social Death, “there is no substantive difference in the sale of a football idol … by his proprietors … and the sale of a slave by one proprietor to another.”18 Not convinced? What about the reserve clause in professional sports, which made it possible for owners to buy and sell athletes against their will? Patterson reminds us: “Many sportswriters directly compare the reserve clause to slavery, Alex B
en Block’s comment on the issue being typical: ‘After the Civil War settled the slavery issue, owning a ball club is the closest one could come to owning a plantation.’” The retain-and-transfer system in British soccer was similarly compared with slavery.19
Patterson argues that the defining characteristic of slavery is not ownership but social death. The slave is a nonperson. For example, among the Cherokee:
The slave acquired the same cultural significance … as the bear—a four-footed animal which nonetheless had the human habit of standing on its hind legs and grasping with its two front paws.… Similarly, the atsi nahsa’i, or slaves, were utterly anomalous; they had the shape of human beings, but no human essence whatever.20
The Greeks and Romans thought of their slaves as livestock. According to Notre Dame classicist Keith Bradley:
The ease of association between slave and animal … was a staple aspect of ancient mentality, and one that stretched back to a very early period: the common Greek term for “slave,” andrapodon, “man-footed creature,” was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely, tetrapodon, “four-footed creature.”21
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