At dawn, the women collected food, and arranged it in parcels for the outward-bound raiders to collect. And then the men emerged, painted black, for a final ritual assembly at the village center, before marching out of the village.12
There’s another noteworthy difference that reveals something important about an important difference between humans and chimpanzees. Cast your mind back to the “war” between the two groups of Gombe chimpanzees. Richard Wrangham, who watched the conflict take its deadly course, remarks that, “Horrifying though these events were, the most difficult aspect to accept was not the physical unpleasantness but the fact that the attackers knew their victims so well. They had been close companions before the community split.”
It was hard for the researchers to reconcile these episodes with the opposite but equally accurate observations of adult males sharing friendship and fun: lolling against each other on sleepy afternoons, laughing together in childish play, romping around a tree trunk while batting at each other’s feet, offering a handful of prized meat, making up after a squabble, grooming for long hours, staying with a sick friend. The new contrary episodes of violence bespoke huge emotions normally hidden, social attitudes that could switch with extraordinary and repulsive ease. We all found ourselves surprised, fascinated, and angry as the number of cases mounted. How could they kill their former friends like that?13
The fact that these apes turned against their old companions suggests that chimpanzees understand the concepts us and them, and that in the chimpanzee mind the division between the two is rigid, static, and biologically driven. As Goodall remarks:
Chimpanzees … show differential behavior toward group and non-group members. Their sense of group identity is strong and they clearly know who “belongs” and who does not: non-community members may be attacked so fiercely that they die from their wounds. And this is not simple “fear of strangers”—Members of the Kahama community were familiar with the Kasekela aggressors yet they were attacked brutally. By separating themselves, it was as though they forfeited their “right” to be treated as group members.14
To delve a little deeper into this, let’s set aside chimpanzees for a moment and think once again about ants. Ants are highly social, and extremely xenophobic. When an ant wanders into the wrong colony, the newcomer isn’t welcomed with open antennae. At best she’s tolerated and at worst she’s immediately killed. She may also be shunned, threatened, or physically harassed. What’s going on here? Do ants have the concepts us and them?
No, they don’t.
It turns out that ants’ behavior is controlled by hard-wired responses to chemical signals. Every ant colony has a distinctive scent, and when two ants meet, they sample each other’s scent. If a stranger to the colony has a strongly alien smell, this triggers attack behavior, but if she smells only slightly odd, she’s allowed to survive. If she’s allowed to hang around for a couple of weeks, and picks up enough of the colony’s scent, she’s then treated as an equal. Ant xenophobia is all about chemistry; concepts don’t come into it at all.15
For ants, being one of us is nothing above and beyond having a certain chemical property. With chimpanzees, things are completely different. When the Kahama chimps split off from Kasekela, these animals didn’t change in any way. They still looked the same and smelled the same. Their personalities remained the same, and their old Kasekela friends could still recognize them as individuals. But something changed. By changing their location, the Kahama chimpanzees crossed over an invisible boundary. This wasn’t just a geographical boundary, it was a conceptual boundary as well—a boundary in the minds of the Kasekela chimps.
Chimpanzees seem to distinguish between the troop and the individuals that compose it, but they have an inflexible notion of the difference between friend and foe: members of the troop, the local breeding group, fall into the former category, and all other chimpanzees fall into the latter. In the chimpanzee mind, us equals troop members, so when an individual leaves the troop it thereby leaves the category of us and becomes an object of hostility. One of the more striking characteristics about humans, which chimpanzees completely lack, is our capacity to form alliances between groups. This is made even more arresting by the fact that allies are often former enemies. Human beings have a unique ability to unite disparate groups under the conceptual umbrella of a more inclusive us. Shifting patterns of alliance and estrangement, of inclusion and exclusion, characterize human societies everywhere. We can make peace, whether transient or long-lasting, with our enemies. Chimpanzees can’t. Unlike chimpanzees—or any other nonhuman animal for that matter—humans live in what Cornell University sociologist Benedict Anderson has aptly named imagined communities—communities constituted and bounded by our concepts of them.16
Toting up the balance sheet, I think it’s clear that the differences between Yanomamö and chimpanzee raiding vastly outweigh their similarities. Given the gulf that exists between human and chimpanzee patterns of violence, it seems misleading to refer to the latter as war. But it’s also implausible to claim that there’s no connection between the two—and perverse to assert that the human propensity of intergroup violence has nothing to do with the xenophobic behavior of our primate cousins.
I think that the most balanced assessment is that our primate heritage has left human beings (especially human males) with a disposition for violent aggression against outsiders, and that this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for raiding, war, and other cruel and lethal cultural practices.
CRUELTY
This was a very innocent planet, before those great big brains.
—KURT VONNEGUT, GALÁPAGOS 17
There can be no doubt that the difference between the mind of the lowest man and the highest animal is immense.
—CHARLES DARWIN, THE DESCENT OF MAN 18
It’s tempting to think about nonhuman animals as though their minds are just simpler versions of our own. Beatrix the cat is busy stalking a mouse that’s nibbling bread crumbs on the dining-room floor. As she moves slowly forward, freezing like an elegant feline statue after every few steps, it’s tempting to suppose that she believes that there’s a mouse nibbling bread crumbs on the dining-room floor—tempting, but wrong. To have this belief, Beatrix would need to grasp the concepts mouse, dining room, bread crumb, and floor (you can’t conceive of a mouse on the floor unless you understand what a mouse is and what a floor is). Beatrix may have a belief about the animal on the dining-room floor as she creeps up on it (I think she probably does), but they can’t be anything like the human ones that we’re inclined to attribute to her.
Anthropomorphizing the animal mind can lead to a lot of confusion when talking about animal behavior and it doesn’t help that many of the terms that scientists use to describe animal behavior have different meanings in everyday discourse. Take the concept of a threat display. In everyday language, the word threat describes deliberate actions undertaken to intimidate another person. You can threaten someone by pointing a gun at them, shouting insults, or promising to do them harm. But in each of the cases, your intentions matter. Suppose you were visiting Romania and tried to order a cup of coffee in garbled Romanian, but ended up saying “I’m going to bite you” to the terrified waiter. This wouldn’t be a threat (even though the waiter would think it was) because it didn’t express an intention to intimidate. The concept of a threat display, as used by ethologists, has nothing to do with animals’ intentions. Threat displays are just stereotyped patterns of behavior that have the function of scaring other animals away or making them back down. But if you’re not careful, it’s easy to slip into thinking anthropomorphically about threat displays. For instance, you might assume that Beatrix makes her fur stand on end when she meets the neighbor’s cat because she believes that doing this will scare the neighbor’s cat away.
Psychological research suggests that the human brain is wired for anthropomorphic thinking, what Hume called “a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all things like themselve
s.”19 University of Arizona anthropologist Stewart Guthrie confirms that we are incorrigible anthropomorphizers. “Faces and other human forms seem to pop out at us from all sides,” he writes. “Chance images in the clouds, in landforms, and in inkblots present eyes, profiles, or whole figures. Voices murmur or whisper in wind or waves. We see the world not only as alive but also as humanlike.” The tendency to perceive human intentions everywhere is even more pervasive than illusions of the human form.
Nothing is so important to us as other humans. Because we are preoccupied with each other, we are sensitive to any possible human presence and have tolerant standards for detecting it. Mostly unconsciously, we fit the world first with diverse humanlike templates. Our preoccupation with a human prototype guides perception in daily life. We attend to what fits the humanlike templates and temporarily ignore what does not.20
Because chimpanzees are so obviously similar to us, it is extremely easy to attribute humanlike mental states to them. Earlier in this chapter, I quoted a remark by Wrangham and Peterson about “gratuitous cruelty” of raiding chimpanzees. I may be wrong, but I doubt very much that Wrangham and Peterson meant to say that chimpanzees are cruel in the same sense that human beings are cruel. I think that they used this phrase to engagingly express the idea, in a book written for a general audience, that when chimpanzees attack one another, they inflict more pain and damage than is necessary. But the phrase is ambiguous, and can be read as saying that chimpanzees are cruel in the same sense that humans are cruel.
This is something that Jane Goodall wondered about. Goodall confesses that prior to the discovery of the darker side of chimpanzee behavior, she “believed that chimpanzees … were rather ‘nicer’ than us.” She was deeply disturbed by the new revelations and it took a while for her to conclude that “although the basic aggressive patterns of the chimpanzees are remarkably similar to some of our own, their comprehension of the suffering they inflict on their victims is very different from ours.… But only humans, I believe, are capable of deliberate cruelty—acting with the intention of causing pain and suffering.”21
Although Goodall doesn’t explain how she reached this conclusion, I think that there are very good reasons to accept it, and that these reveal something important about dehumanization. To get at these reasons, we need to give some thought to the nature of cruelty.
Like many other writers on the subject, Goodall understands cruelty as the deliberate infliction of pain and suffering. It’s true that cruelty often involves deliberately inflicting pain and suffering, but it doesn’t always. Shooting a person in the head at point blank range is cruel, even though it kills them instantaneously and therefore causes them no pain. Deliberately breaking the fingers of a person in a permanent vegetative state is cruel. It can even be cruel to give someone what they want: persistently offering cookies to a morbidly obese person is cruel, even though it gives them pleasure. On the other side of the coin, it’s also possible to deliberately inflict pain and suffering on someone without thereby treating them cruelly. A physician who gives an injection to a child causes the child pain, but isn’t being cruel.
Rewording the definition to say that cruel acts are undertaken for the purpose of causing pain doesn’t help very much because it doesn’t cover cases of shooting a man in the head and breaking the fingers of the comatose patient. We’re going to have to look elsewhere to uncover the meaning of cruelty.
It seems more promising to think of cruelty as deliberately causing harm.* You can harm someone without causing them pain, and you can cause someone pain without harming them. Let’s adopt this as a working definition of cruelty, and see where it leads. Obviously, to deliberately harm someone, you’ve got to be conscious of what you’re doing; you’ve got to be aware that you want to harm someone, and also be aware that what you’re doing or planning is harmful to them. In short, you’ve got to be able to reflect on your own actions and psychological states. You’ve also got to have the relevant concepts—for instance, the concept of harm, and you’ve also got to be able to tell the difference between things that can be harmed and things that can’t (more about that in a moment). Now, chimps are very smart, but they’re not that smart. There’s no reason to suppose that they’re able to reflect on their own intentions or that they can grasp sophisticated concepts like harm. So it looks like Jane Goodall was right. Chimpanzees can’t be cruel.22
This isn’t the end of the story about harm. I want to take it further, to explore the nature of human cruelty. In doing so, we’ll not only come to appreciate part of what makes human nature unique, we’ll get a deeper understanding of what it is about us that makes us capable of dehumanization.
Human beings use an array of concepts to make sense of the world around us. Without them, the world would be, in William James’s famous words, a “buzzing, blooming confusion.”23 Our concepts come in several varieties. Some of them are descriptive—that is, they purport to represent objective features of the world. The concepts red, big, hairy, and liquid are all descriptive. Others are evaluative. Evaluative concepts pertain to the value that we give to things, and include notions like good, bad, beautiful, and disgusting. There’s also a third type of concept that’s both descriptive and evaluative. Philosophers call these “thick” concepts. Cruelty is a thick concept. When you say that an act is cruel, you’re describing it and disapproving of it in a single breath. Asking yourself whether a cruel act is morally right or wrong is otiose because the moment you decided that it was cruel you thereby committed yourself to the view that it was wrong.
There’s an important connection between evaluative judgments and motivation. When a person sincerely judges that an act is morally wrong, this entails that they want to avoid it, and that they believe everyone else should avoid it, too. We can say, very clumsily, that an act that’s judged to be wrong has an element of “to-be-avoided-ness” built into it. Of course, people often do things that they think are wrong. Sometimes, temptations pulling in the opposite direction are just too strong to resist. But even in these cases, there’s an inclination to avoid the morally offensive act. That’s why when we do something that we believe to be wrong, we end up feeling guilty and conflicted about what we’ve done.
In short, moral disapproval tends to inhibit action.
Given that wrongness is built in to the concept of cruelty, anyone who considers an act to be cruel must be motivated not to perform it. Most of us have fantasies about treating other people cruelly. Who hasn’t imagined paying someone back for a wrong they’ve done? Think about an occasion when you considered harming someone because you want to settle a score with them. You badly wanted to harm this person, but because you thought it would be wrong to turn your vengeful day dreams into reality, you didn’t go through with it. Or maybe you went through with it, but in a less florid fashion than you fantasized (you sent them a nasty e-mail message instead of gutting them with a machete). The amount of guilt that a person experiences when contemplating a cruel act is proportional to the degree of cruelty that they judge it to possess. And the degree of guilt is proportional to the degree of inhibition. That’s why acts of homicide and torture are very difficult to carry out, at least under normal circumstances. This may sound peculiar, given the catalog of horrors that I’ve documented in this book. But it’s true. The puzzle remains that people do perform extravagantly cruel acts and, as Daniel Goldhagen pointed out in a passage quoted in Chapter Five, “they do it with zeal, alacrity, and self-satisfaction, even enjoyment.”24 How can we reconcile these incongruous images of the human animal?
People readily indulge in horrendous acts if they don’t believe that what they’re doing is cruel. There are a couple of ways that this can happen. Some people lack a moral sense (in the awful jargon of psychiatry, they have an “antisocial personality disorder”). These people are morality-blind, just like some people are color-blind. Because of this, the notion of cruelty doesn’t make any sense to them. They are incapable of feeling guilt, and can do anything wi
th a clear conscience. These people are rare. Much more often, people are able to engage in spectacularly cruel actions because they’ve selectively decommissioned their moral inhibitions. This is where dehumanization enters the picture. To understand how and why, we need to examine the notion of harm.
What is harm? If you harm someone, you damage them. That’s clear. The damage might be physical or psychological, direct or indirect. Its medium might be a word, a silence, a glance, or the thrust of a knife into tender viscera. But harm and damage aren’t identical. It’s possible to do damage without doing harm, because the concept of harm applies only to certain sorts of things. Inanimate objects can be damaged, but it’s impossible to harm them. When you have an automobile accident you may damage your car, but you don’t harm it, and when you take it to the body shop, it’s to repair the damage to it, not the harm. But if someone had been injured in the accident they would be harmed rather than just damaged (even though they might sue you for damages). Right now, I’m writing these words in a fifth-floor apartment in Ithaca, New York. There’s a heat wave going on, so all the windows are open and there’s a fan buzzing away a few feet from my chair. I’m trying to concentrate on writing this chapter, and the noise from the fan is getting on my nerves. What if I got up and hurled the fan out of the window? This would irreparably damage the fan, but it wouldn’t harm it at all, because, obviously, fans aren’t the sort of things that can suffer harm. The Chihuahua in the next apartment is making an irritating yapping noise. What if I went over there and chucked it out of the window, too? This would definitely harm the dog, rather than merely damaging it, because unlike fans, dogs can be harmed.
Less Than Human Page 24