Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  If there be various species of mankind, there must be a natural aristocracy among them, a dominant white species as opposed to the lower races who by their origin are destined to serve the nobility of mankind, and may be tamed, trained and used like domestic animals, or may, according to circumstances, be fattened or used for physiological experiments without any compunction. To endeavor to lead them to a higher morality would be as foolish as to expect that lime trees would, by cultivation, bear peaches, or the monkey would learn to speak by training.… All wars of extermination, whenever the lower species are in the way of the white man, are then not only excusable, but fully justifiable, since a physical existence only is destroyed, which, without any capacity for a higher moral development, may be doomed to extinction in order to afford space to higher organisms.40

  And he went on to add, with delicious irony, that:

  Such a theory has many advantages.… It flatters our self-esteem by the specific excellence of our moral and intellectual endowment, and saves us the trouble of inquiring for the causes of the differences existing in civilization. The theory has thus obtained many adherents; whilst there are some who consider this one of the reasons which render the assumption of a specifically higher mental endowment of the white race, improbable.41

  Polygenecism was sometimes dubbed the “American school” because of its popularity in the United States, especially among apologists for slavery. Many Americans fused the Bible with biology to underwrite their racial beliefs in an even more outlandish manner than their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors had done. Some religious polygenecists believed that Africans are not of Noah’s lineage, but were descended from animals that he took aboard the ark. Others believed that blacks were the progeny of the devil, or descendents of a subhuman race that God had fashioned prior to his creation of Adam. A book entitled The Negro a Beast, published at the turn of the twentieth century by the American Book and Bible House, offered a bizarre fusion of scriptural exegesis and biological fantasy. Its anonymous author informed his readers that the serpent of Eden was really a black man (obviously using the word man rather loosely) who had evolved from an ape, whereas Adam and Eve were white people created in God’s own image.42

  Waitz was a monogenecist—a person who held that human beings are a single species with a common origin. Monogenecists were more often opposed to slavery than their polygenecist colleagues. (Charles Darwin was a prominent monogenecist, as well as a passionate abolitionist.) However, it would be wrong to assume too tight a connection between views of human origins and views about slavery. There was an abundance of religious monogenecists who considered polygenecist views to be heretical, and clung to the time-honored “curse of Noah” theory.43

  Beliefs like these fueled the continued violence routinely directed at African Americans during the century or so following the Civil War. The story of Ota Benga, a Batwa (“pigmy”) tribesman, provides a heartbreaking illustration of the dehumanization of Africans during this period. Ota Benga lived with his wife and children in a village in the vast tract of land in central Africa then called the Congo Free State. King Leopold II of Belgium founded the Congo Free State, ostensibly to provide aid to the people living there. However, the Congo Free State was anything but free. Leopold ruthlessly exploited its land and its people, draining it of resources like rubber, copper, and ivory, and exterminating approximately eight million people in the process. The Force Publique—a corps of African mercenaries, enforced the reign of terror. They did their job with gratuitous cruelty. Men, women, and children who failed meet their quotas were flogged with hippopotamus-hide whips, or had their hands hacked off with a machete. The hands were then collected in baskets, and presented to colonial officials. One eyewitness reported, “A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean.… I saw soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a big net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river.… Soldiers made young men rape or kill their own mothers and sisters.”44

  Ota Benga’s village was one of those “swept clean” by the Force Publique, who murdered his wife and children and sold him to an African slave trader.

  It was at this point that Samuel Phillips Verner entered the picture. Verner, a missionary and entrepreneur, was in Africa on a mission—but not a religious one. He had recently signed a contract to bring exotic specimens of humanity to St. Louis for a “human zoo” at the 1904 World’s Fair. This was to be a grand ethnographic exhibit, giving visitors an opportunity to ogle at tribal people brought to Missouri from the four corners of the world. Even the old Apache warrior Goyathlay—better known by his Mexican nickname “Geronimo”—was going to be on display. Verner was shopping for Pygmies. When he discovered Ota Benga, he paid off the slave merchant and took the young man to the United States, along with seven other Batwa who agreed to join them.

  When the fair was over, Verner returned them all to their homeland, and remained in Africa for a year and a half collecting artifacts and animal specimens. During this time, he and Ota Benga became friends. Benga accompanied Verner on his collecting adventures, and eventually asked to return with him to the United States. Verner consented. After a brief stint in New York’s Museum of Natural History, Ota Benga was given a home at the newly opened Bronx Zoo, where he soon became an exhibit, sharing a cage with an orangutan. “Few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage with monkeys as companions,” The New York Times wrote the next day, “and there could be no doubt that to the majority the joint man-and-monkey exhibition was the most interesting sight in Bronx Park.”45

  Spokesmen for the African-American community protested. Rev. James H. Gordon pleaded, “Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls,” and a delegation of black clergymen led by Rev. R. S. MacArthur addressed the matter in a letter to the mayor of New York. “The person responsible for this exhibition,” he wrote, “degrades himself as much as he does the African. Instead of making a beast of this little fellow, he should be put in school for the development of such powers as God gave to him.… We send our missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people, and then we bring one here to brutalize him.”46 These protests did not focus entirely on the racially degrading character of the exhibit. They were also concerned that the exhibit supported Darwinism, which, then as now, was anathema to many Christians. Buckling under the pressure of controversy, zoo authorities released Ota Benga from his cage, and allowed him to wander freely around the zoo, where jeering crowds pursued him. The Times reported:

  There were 40,000 visitors to the park on Sunday, nearly every man, woman and child of this crowd made for the monkey house to see the star attraction in the park, the wild man from Africa. They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering, and yelling. Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.47

  What happened next is not entirely clear. One sultry summer day, Ota Benga decided to undress. Apparently, keepers tried to force him back into his clothes, and he responded by threatening them with a knife. He was promptly transferred to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. Ota Benga declined Verner’s offer to return him to Africa because, despite his bad experiences in New York, they were nowhere near as bad as the horrors unfolding in his homeland. After a sexual scandal involving a teenage girl, he was transferred to Long Island, and eventually to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he attended Lynchburg Seminary and was employed in a tobacco factory. Ten years after arriving in the United States, longing to return to his homeland but unable to afford a steamship ticket back, Ota Benga put a bullet through his heart.

  MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

  This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe

  —INSCRIPTION ON POSTCARD DEPICTING THE CHARRED REMAINS OF JESSE WASHINGTON, A LYNCHED BLACK FARM WORKER, WA
CO, TEXAS, 191648

  Let’s now return to the question raised earlier in this chapter. Why did the overseer think that killing a “nigger” was of no greater consequence than killing a dog?

  The great eighteenth-century economist and philosopher Adam Smith, taking a cue from his friend and countryman David Hume, argued that morality is built into human nature. It flows from our natural emotional resonance with others. “How selfish soever man may be supposed,” wrote Smith in the opening passage of his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

  Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.49

  Smith’s point was that morality is, at its core, a matter of gut feeling rather than rules and precepts. We naturally resonate with the feelings of those around us. But it’s important to bear in mind that we are not just creatures of feeling; we also make use of an impressive array of concepts.

  Concepts are like boxes into which we sort our perceptions. Take visual perception. When we look around us, we don’t see nondescript shapes and patches of color. Rather, we categorize these visual impressions as objects. Right now, as I gaze to my right I detect a vivid red shape in my visual field. I see this not as an oddly shaped configuration of color, but as a glass of merlot perched on the corner of my desk. To have this perception, my experience had to be diffracted through a conceptual prism—I need to have concepts like “wine,” “drink,” and “glass,” each of which presupposes a grasp of many others. Without all of this, I would know that something is there, but I wouldn’t know what that something is. Our concepts endow our experiences with form and meaning.

  The same principle holds true in the social world. To recognize someone as a person—a fellow human being—you need to have the concept of a human being. And once you categorize someone as human, this has an impact on how you respond to him. Of course, other animals can identify members of their own species, too; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to find mates. But there’s no reason to think that the vast majority of nonhuman animals have notions of “us” and “them”: they react to organisms as “other” without conceiving of them as such. (Chimpanzees appear to be an exception, as I will explain in Chapter Seven.)

  The capacity for conceptual thought has given our species great behavioral flexibility. We aren’t locked into rigid instinctual patterns the way other creatures are, because we’re able to sculpt our lives by designing and redesigning the frameworks that we use to make sense of the world. We are, to a very significant degree, architects of our own destiny.

  This isn’t to say that human malleability is limitless—far from it. Like any other, evolution equipped our species with certain inclinations, preferences, and cognitive capacities. We naturally enjoy certain tastes but not others, are startled by loud noises, form groups with dominance hierarchies, and feel joy, anger, and disgust, and so on as the situation demands. But the powerful intellect with which natural selection endowed us enabled our ancestors to make the momentous discovery that they could engineer their own behavior. The device that they invented for this purpose is what we call culture—the complex systems of ideas, symbols, and practices that structure and regulate our lives.

  Through culture, we defy nature. Although the body rebels against swallowing nasty-tasting medicine, recruiting the gag reflex installed in our mammalian ancestors to protect them from swallowing toxic substances, we can force ourselves to swallow it. No other animal, not even the clever chimpanzee, is able to swallow a substance to which it has an aversion. But we Homo sapiens can use the concept of “medicine” to overcome our biological impulses (as we do when we allow physicians to draw blood from our veins or slice into our bodies). Thanks to the potent force of culture, we can perform acts that are, on the face of it, irrelevant or contrary to our own biological interests: to embrace celibacy, to mortify the flesh, to build monuments and perform rituals, to create religious doctrines and political ideologies, to sacrifice others’ lives, and to sacrifice our lives for others. These are all results of our expertise at self-engineering.

  Adam Smith was right to say human beings are naturally empathic creatures. But he was also aware that moral feelings are anything but simple and straightforward. We don’t just empathize with people in pain, and seethe with anger at those who inflict needless pain; our feelings hang on the coattails of our interpretations of what’s going on. When it comes to emotion, concepts call the shots.

  Thanks to our empathic nature, most of us find it difficult to do violence to others. These inhibitions account for the powerful social bonds that unite human communities and explain the extraordinary success story of our species. But this generates a puzzle. From time immemorial men have banded together to kill and enslave their neighbors, rape their women, take over their hunting grounds, drink their water, or grow crops in their fertile soil. British philosopher A. C. Grayling calls this the war/peace paradox. “An anthropologist from another planet would infer from a modern city that its human occupants are rational and peaceable beings who work together for the common good in wonderfully sensible ways,” he notes. However:

  The alien anthropologist would be only half-right. Let the spaceship land on another day in another zone—a war zone—and the inference would be that mankind is lunatic, destructive and dangerous.… This, then, is the paradox: outside the peaceful and flourishing city is the barracks where the soldiers drill and the factory where the guns are made; far beyond the horizon is the smoke and din of battle, where humans kill each other in horrifying ways, ways that, in the past 100 years alone, have resulted in nearly 200 million violent deaths.50

  Given the highly developed social and cooperative nature of our species, how do we manage to perform these acts of atrocity? An important piece of the answer is clear. It’s by recruiting the power of our conceptual imagination to picture ethnic groups as nonhuman animals. It’s by doing this that we’re able to release destructive forces that are normally kept in check by fellow feeling.

  This insight isn’t original. Many scholars have remarked on the power of dehumanization to promote moral disengagement. One of the first was Herbert Kelman, whose work I briefly described in Chapter Two. Kelman was a survivor of the Holocaust, so he knew from bitter experience what happens when inhibitions against violence are lifted, and he wanted to understand the psychological and social mechanisms that cause this to happen.

  He concluded that there are three crucial factors at work. One is authorization. When persons in positions of authority endorse acts of violence, the perpetrator is less inclined to feel personally responsible, and therefore less guilty in performing them.

  Kelman’s hypothesis was dramatically supported by the famous obedience experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961. Milgram, who was also a Jew, was impressed by reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man who was responsible for the transport of millions of Jews to death camps. Eichmann evaded capture after the war, and with the help of a network of Catholic priests, escaped to Argentina in 1950 by way of Italy. He was captured by Israeli security agents in 1960, and was taken to Jerusalem to stand trial. During the trial, Eichmann repeatedly justified his actions by saying that he had only been following orders, just as his colleagues in the Nuremberg trial had done fifteen years before.51 Milgram was intrigued. How far could obedience go? To answer this question, he designed and implement
ed a series of experiments in which a subject was instructed to administer what he or she believed to be increasingly powerful electrical shocks to a person in an adjoining room (who was a confederate of the experimenter). As the voltage was increased, the “victim” would pound the walls and scream in pain, and if the subject showed reluctance to continue, they were first told “Please continue,” and then, if they were still hesitant, “The experiment requires that you continue,” “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and, finally, “You have no other choice, you must go on.” Milgram found that 65 percent of his subjects could be induced to deliver the maximal voltage to an innocent, suffering subject. He concluded that:

  [O]rdinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.52

  Eight years later, U.S. headlines were ablaze with news of the My Lai massacre. Men from the U.S. Army’s Charlie Company had mowed down more than five hundred Vietnamese civilians—mostly elderly men, women, and children—in the village of Son My. Time magazine reported that Sergeant Charles Hutto, one of the perpetrators of the carnage, told an army investigator, “It was murder. I wasn’t happy about shooting all the people anyway. I didn’t agree with all the killing, but we were doing it because we had been told.”53 These events inspired Kelman to conduct a survey of ordinary Americans, asking them what they would do if they were ordered to shoot all of the inhabitants of a village, including old men, women, and children. Would they comply with the order or refuse to obey? A shocking 51 percent of his respondents replied that they would follow the order, and only 33 percent said that they wouldn’t.54