Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  He further observes that we are inclined to look upon the purveyors of violence as demonic, as monsters, or as vicious animals. So, although it stops short of atrocity, our attitude toward them is alarmingly like the attitude that they take toward their victims. But there is worse to come. Rorty argues that we are as prone to dehumanize the victims of brutality as we are the perpetrators. “We think of Serbs or Nazis as animals,” he observes, “because ravenous beasts of prey are animals. We think of Muslims or Jews being herded into concentration camps as animals, because cattle are animals. Neither sort of animal is very much like us, and there seems no point in human beings getting involved in quarrels between animals.”6 This, I think, is an important insight that may explain our tolerance for so-called collateral damage in foreign military interventions and our callousness in the face of human rights violations on foreign soil (or those perpetrated against immigrants, minorities, and the poor on our own soil). I am reminded of the widespread obliviousness to the seemingly endless civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the horrendous plague of rape that has accompanied it. In an article entitled “No, sexual violence is not ‘cultural,’” published in The New York Times on June 25, 2010, Lisa Shannon points out that many people in the developed world falsely and self-servingly assume that the epidemic of rape is a “traditional” feature of Congolese culture. “Describing the violence in Congo as ‘cultural,’” she notes, “is more than offensive. It is dangerous.”

  Appealing to the voice of reason is a time-honored response to such brutalities. This approach has been implicitly or explicitly advocated by most moral philosophers from Plato, through Kant, right up to their present-day heirs. According to this rationalistic view, dehumanization is a symptom of ignorance, and is to be cured by administering an appropriate dose of intellectual enlightenment. One is to convince the dehumanizer that there’s something about being human that makes all of us worthy of a kind of respect that’s incompatible with perpetrating atrocity. Human nature contains a special ingredient—variously described as rationality, sentience, a soul, and so on—that is absent in other animals, and it is this special ingredient that underwrites human rights. So, those who believe that doing violence to others is licensed by their race, religion, or nationality are simply failing to recognize a deep truth about what it is to be human.

  Rorty points out that this approach is both misguided and ineffectual because it begs the question of who should be counted as human. The merchants of horror discussed by Rieff might endorse the idea of human rights, while denying that Muslims are human. Suppose that you were confronted with a Serbian who believes that Muslims are less than human, and that you wanted to set him right. What line of reasoning could you use to convince him that Muslims are human? You might point out that Serbs and Muslims are members of the same species, and that Serbs are human, so Muslims must be human, too. But this relies on the blatantly false premise that two individuals who are members of the same species must be identical in every respect. Your interlocutor could point out that some people have blue eyes and others don’t. So, why can’t it be that some people are human and others are not? “Ah,” you might respond, “but this principle doesn’t apply to superficial characteristics like eye color. It’s about our essential nature.” But in saying this you’ve exposed the poverty of your argument, because the idea that all Homo sapiens are essentially human is precisely what’s at issue.

  As I mentioned in Chapter Three, science can’t be recruited to shore up the rationalist’s argument. Biologists tell us that we are all members of the same species, Homo sapiens, but it’s beyond their remit to say that all Homo sapiens are human. Human isn’t a scientific concept at all. It’s a folk-concept that means, roughly, one of us. As Rorty insightfully observes, such people “are morally offended … by the suggestion that they treat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human.”

  When utilitarians tell them that all pleasures and pains felt by members of our biological species are equally relevant to moral deliberation, or when Kantians tell them that the ability to engage in such deliberation is sufficient for membership in the moral community, they are incredulous. They rejoin that these philosophers seem oblivious to blatantly obvious moral distinctions, distinctions any decent person would draw.7

  Rorty thinks that advocates of the rationalistic approach have been barking up the wrong tree. Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren’t lying around waiting to be discovered. They’re made, not found. But how can this be accomplished? He suggests that we should take our cue from Hume. Morality is about feeling, so if we want people to treat one another humanely we ought to be appealing to their feelings instead of offering them dry theoretical arguments. We need to help people get to know one another by telling them “long, sad, sentimental stories.” “Such stories,” Rorty observes, “repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful people, to tolerate and even to cherish powerless people—people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation.” These stories, he thinks, will make people “less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human.” He explains, “The goal of this sort of manipulation of sentiment is to expand the reference of the terms ‘our kind of people’ and ‘people like us.’” In other words, its aim is to expand the reference of the term human to include everyone.8 I call this the sentimentalist approach.

  The sentimentalist strategy has a greater chance of being effective than the rationalistic one does. Hume was right; we’re moved by passion rather than reason, so it seems to follow that if we want to move others, we need to appeal to their passions to steer them in the right direction. The right direction? That word “right” points to a problem—actually, a danger—that inheres to the sentimentalist project. Dehumanizing stories are among the most powerful and moving ones. And they are often long, sad, sentimental stories that evoke floods of sympathy for those who suffer at the hands of animals in human form. Had Rorty looked behind the headlines he would have discovered that the brutalities that Rieff described were inspired by years of state-sponsored propaganda, propaganda that told stories about the sufferings of the Serbian people at the hands of their wicked Muslim enemy. The official Serbian narrative was that Muslims were perpetrating genocide on innocent Serbians, and all those who opposed Milosevic’s regime were complicit in that genocide. That’s why Milosevic responded to trade sanctions against Serbia by telling a long, sad, sentimental story:

  I do not know how you will explain to your children, on the day when they discover the truth, why you killed our children, why you led a war against three million of our children, and with what right you turned twelve million inhabitants of Europe into a test site for the application of what is, I hope, the last genocide of this century.9

  Hitler told a sentimental story about the sufferings of the Aryan race at the hands of the Jewish vermin; Rwandan Hutus told a sentimental story about their sufferings at the hands of the Tutsi cockroaches; and American white supremacists told a sentimental story (adapted for cinema as The Birth of a Nation) about the sufferings of white Southerners at the hands of their bestial former slaves. Furthermore, Rorty’s explanation of why people dehumanize one another is both oddly simplistic and transparently false. He writes that people who dehumanize others do so because they are deprived of “security and sympathy.”

  By “security” I mean conditions of life sufficiently risk-free to make one’s differences from others inessential to one’s self-respect, one’s sense of worth. These conditions have been enjoyed by North Americans and Europeans—the people who dreamed up the human rights culture—much more than they have been enjoyed by anyone else.… Security and sympathy go together, for the same re
asons that peace and economic productivity go together. The tougher things are, the more you have to be afraid of, the more dangerous your situation, the less you can afford the time or effort to think about what things might be like for people with whom you do not immediately identify.10

  Do Americans and Europeans really corner the market on sympathy? Tell that to the survivors of Auschwitz. Tell it to the descendants of American slaves and to Native Americans. Tell it to the Herero of Namibia and the millions butchered under King Leopold’s regime in the Congo Free State.

  Why this retreat into trite, self-congratulatory ethnocentrism? I think that it’s best explained by Rorty’s refusal to countenance the existence of human nature. “There is a growing willingness,” he remarks, with evident approval, “to neglect the question ‘What is our nature?’ and to substitute the question ‘What can we make of ourselves?’”

  We are much less inclined than our ancestors were to take ontology or history or ethology as a guide to life. We are much less inclined to pose the ontological question “What are we?” because we have come to see that the main lesson of both history and anthropology is our extraordinary malleability. We are coming to think of ourselves as the flexible, protean, self-shaping animal rather than as the rational animal or the cruel animal.11

  If you neglect the question “What is our nature?” then you can’t look for sources of dehumanization in our nature, and you have no alternative but to gravitate toward a shallow social determinism. I don’t deny that social conditions are vital for explaining particular instances of dehumanization. I’ve made the point repeatedly in the pages of this book. But social construction presents only a slice—and sometimes a very thin slice—of the truth. In opposing the question “What are we?” to the question “What can we make of ourselves?” Rorty offers up a false dichotomy. What we can make of ourselves is constrained by what we are for the same reason that what a sculptor can make out of a block of stone is constrained by the properties of the stone. To work the stone effectively the sculptor must understand its properties. He must know what to do at what point and with what tools. By the same token, we self-sculptors have to understand the properties of human nature if we are to have any hope of getting the results that we’re aiming at. Even if you believe, with Rorty, that creating a better world depends on telling better stories, the fact that certain kinds of stories reliably produce certain kinds of effects requires an explanation, and any adequate explanation must tell us why human animals are disposed to respond to that kind of story in that kind of way.

  To deal effectively with dehumanization, we need to understand its mechanics. There’s simply no viable alternative. To do this, we need to bring science to bear on those aspects of human nature that sustain the dehumanizing impulse. I’ve made a few suggestions in this book, but my efforts are only a start. The study of dehumanization needs to be made a priority. Universities, governments, and nongovernmental organizations need to put money, time, and talent into figuring out exactly how dehumanization works and what can be done to prevent it. Maybe then we can use this knowledge to build a future that is less hideous than our past: a future with no Rwandas, no Hiroshimas, and no Final Solutions.

  Can this be done? Nobody knows, because nobody’s ever tried.

  APPENDIX I

  PSYCHOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM

  1. Beliefs about essences are intuitive and need not be explicit.

  2. Essences are imagined to be shared by members of natural kinds—kinds that are discovered rather than invented, real rather than merely imagined, and rooted in nature.

  3. The contents of essentialist beliefs are sensitive to cultural norms.

  4. Essences give rise to the stereotypical features associated with a kind. Deviations from the stereotype indicate that something is preventing the essence from being expressed or distorting its expression.

  5. Essences are inherent and unalterable. An item can’t lose or change its essence while retaining its identity.

  6. Essences are absolute rather than incremental—there are no degrees of having an essence.

  7. Essences are transferred from parent to offspring or from host to client.

  8. Essences are not conserved—the transfer of an essence does not diminish the quantity of the essence remaining in the parent or donor.

  9. Essences remain stable across transformations. Changes in appearance do not correspond to changes in essence.

  APPENDIX II

  PAUL ROSCOE’S THEORY OF DEHUMANIZATION IN WAR

  My book The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War was published in August 2007. In its penultimate chapter, I proposed a crude version of the theory set out in the present book. A month later, University of Maine anthropologist Paul Roscoe published a paper in American Anthropologist advancing a theory that was amazingly similar to mine. Roscoe and I had been working on the same problem, and had independently reached very similar conclusions.1

  Roscoe begins with Richard Wrangham’s hypothesis that men have a disposition to seek out low-cost opportunities for killing outsiders. He then goes on to argue that we also have a strong aversion to taking human life, illustrating the point with examples from Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.2 Browning tells the story of how ordinary, middle-aged German men were drafted into Police Battalion 101 to perform mass executions of Jews in Poland. These “ordinary men” massacred at least 38,000 men, women, and children, and were involved in the deportation of another 45,000 to death camps. Roscoe comments, quoting Browning, that:

  If these men were motivated to seek out low-cost opportunities to kill, in sum, we should expect them to have participated eagerly in these massacres. Most of them appear to have experienced a marked aversion, at least to begin with.… But between 10 and 20 percent of the unit avoided killing by requesting that they be excused from execution details, by sidling to the back when execution squads were mustered, or by spreading the word that they were “too weak” for such work.… Of the remainder, most “did not seek opportunities to kill (and in some cases, refrained from killing, contrary to standing orders, when no one was monitoring their actions)”.… Of special note, “almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing.”3

  How, then, can we account for our propensity to kill our own kind? Roscoe argues that the evolution of intelligence made us capable of subverting our inhibitions. “Under this hypothesis,” he writes, “the stage was set for humans to become a killer species when they or their predecessors became sufficiently intelligent to recognize when it was advantageous to kill.”4 As our ancestors became more intelligent they devised strategies to “short-circuit” their inhibitions against killing. One method was to invent long-range weapons that insulate the killer from his own actions. Another is to ingest mind-altering drugs to distort realistic perception. Other strategies include shifting responsibility onto supernatural beings who supposedly command one to go to war, denigrating a group of people to legitimize acts of violence against them, and using drumming or chanting to induce altered states of consciousness. However:

  The most common way to overwhelm an aversion to killing … is to combine dehumanization of the enemy, which denies him or her conspecifics status, with an image that elicits killing responses appropriate toward nonhuman species.

  Frequently, war is depicted as hunting rather than murder, and the enemy as a game animal rather than a human.… Alternatively enemies are depicted as enraged or unreasoning micro- or macropredators—bacilli, parasites, disease-spreading vermin, snakes, large carnivores, or capricious demons—agents that represent an imminent threat to survival and so incite a lethal reaction.…5

  Paul Roscoe and I see eye to eye on almost every major point. Our main disagreement is about timing. Drawing on Jane Goodall’s observation (mentioned in Chapter Two) that chimpanzees seem to “dechimpize” other chimps when attacking them, he argues that the cap
acity for dehumanization may date from before the split between the chimpanzee and human lineages, whereas I believe that it emerged much later.

  NOTES

  PRELUDE: CREATURES OF A KIND SOMEWHAT INFERIOR

  1. For a penetrating discussion on the extension of “the human” in eighteenth-century thought, see C. W. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

  2. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” 3.

  3. J. Philmore, Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade (London: Waugh, 1760), 12.

  4. I know of only four books on the topic of dehumanization. They are Sam Keen’s Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (Minnetonka, MN: Olympic Marketing Corporation, 1986), William Brennan’s Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1995), Linda LeMoncheck’s Dehumanizing Women: Persons as Sex Objects (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), and Leonard Cassuto’s The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Keen’s book was a groundbreaking study of images of the enemy in propaganda. It includes a number of striking visual examples of dehumanization, but because of its restrictive purview, and its lack of engagement with the wider scientific and philosophical literature, it cannot be considered a scholarly analysis of dehumanization. Brennan is a Roman Catholic professor of social work, whose book analyzes the dehumanizing language legitimizing violence against seven populations (including human embryos—Brennan is an opponent of abortion), but the book contains very little analysis. LeMoncheck’s book is a substantial contribution to the feminist literature, but she means something quite different by “dehumanization” than I do. Cassuto’s book is a fine study of dehumanization and racism in American culture from the vantage point of a literary scholar.