Less Than Human

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Less Than Human Page 31

by Smith, David Livingstone


  5. I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989), 403.

  6. LeMoncheck, Dehumanizing Women: A. Cahill, Rethinking Rape (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); A. Dworkin, “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality,” in Oxford Readings in Feminism: Feminism and Pornography, ed. D. Cornell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); C. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). For critical responses, see M. Nussbaum, “Objectification,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 249–91 and A. Soble, Pornography, Sex, and Feminism (New York: Prometheus, 2002).

  7. R. M. Brown, “1492: Another Legacy: Bartolomé de Las Casas—God Over Gold in the Indies,” Christianity and Crisis 51 (1992): 415.

  1. LESS THAN HUMAN

  1. The nursery rhyme is from N. Nazzal & L. Nazzal, “The Politicization of Palestinian Children: An Analysis of Nursery Rhymes,” in Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism, ed. H. Schenker and Z. Abu-Zayad (Jerusalem: Palestine-Israel Journal, 2006), 161. The comment by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, which originally appeared in Haaretz (March 20, 2000), is from Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler and Eran Halperin, “Through the Squalls of Hate: Arabic-phobic Attitudes Among Extreme Right and Moderate Right in Israel,” in Schenker and Abu-Zayad, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism, 103.

  2. C. Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor, 2003), 94.

  3. Ibid., 95.

  4. C. McGreal, “Hamas Celebrates Victory of the Bomb as Power of Negotiation Falters,” The Guardian, September 12, 2005.

  5. Steven Erlanger, “In Gaza, Hamas Insults to Jews Complicate Peace,” New York Times, April 1, 2008. The Al-Jaubari excerpt is from “To Disclose the Fraudulence of the Jewish Men of Learning,” in The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, ed. A. B. Bostom (New York: Prometheus, 2008), 321.

  6. G. J. Annas and M. A. Grodin (eds.), The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 67.

  7. Quoted in J. Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 101. M. Domarus (ed.), Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945, vol. 2; Untergang, 1939–1945 (Neustadt: Schmidt, 1963), 1967; A. Margalit and G. Motzkin, “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25, no. 1 (1996): 65–83.

  8. M. R. Habeck, “The Modern and the Primitive: Barbarity and Warfare on the Eastern Front,” in The Barbarization of Warfare, ed. G. Kassimeris (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 95.

  9. P. Knightly, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002), 188, 269.

  10. I. Ehrenberg, “Kill,” quoted in A. Goldberg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Revolutionary, Novelist, Poet, War Correspondent, Propagandist. The Extraordinary Life of a Russian Survivor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 197.

  11. G. McDonough, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 26, 46, 50.

  12. J. W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 241.

  13. H. Katsuichi, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 119–121.

  14. D. C. Rees, Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (New York: DaCapo Press, 2002), 28.

  15. K. Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 94. A. Schmidt, Ianfu: The Comfort Women of the Japanese Imperial Army of the Pacific War: Broken Silence (Lewiston, UK: Mellen Press, 2000), 87.

  16. The remark about Nazis is cited in M. C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America in World War Two (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 98. R. Holmes, “Enemy, attitudes to,” in The Oxford Companion to Military History, ed. R. Holmes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 284.

  17. Dower, War Without Mercy, 1986. H. Wouk, The Caine Mutiny: A Novel (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1992), 27. E. Pyle, The Last Chapter (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1945), 5. Blamey is quoted in Dower, War Without Mercy, 71. E. Thomas, Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Naval Campaign, 1941–45 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

  18. C. A. Lindbergh, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). Dower, War Without Mercy, 66.

  19. J. G. Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 150.

  20. Leatherneck 28, no. 3 (March, 1945). Dower, War Without Mercy, 91, 40–41, 71, 77–78.

  21. S. M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” New York Times, May 10, 2004.

  22. V. E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 221.

  23. Unpublished speech, quoted in R. J. Lifton and N. Humphrey, In a Dark Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1984), 10.

  24. Knightly, The First Casualty. S. Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections on the Hostile Imagination (New York: HarperCollins, 1986).

  25. Quoted in H. Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Times of Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), x.

  26. Quoted in S. Kinzer and J. Rutenberg, “The Struggle for Iraq: American Voices,” New York Times, May 13, 2004. Quoted in D. Berreby, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2005), 239.

  27. Quoted in BBC News, “Iraq Abuse ‘Ordered from the Top,’” June 15, 2004. http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3806713.stm and quoted in D. Berreby, Us and Them. Keen, Faces of the Enemy.

  28. “Boortz: “Islam is a deadly virus” and “We’re going to wait far too long to develop a vaccine to find a way to fight this,” Media Matters for America, October 18, 2006 . “Savage nation: It’s not just Rush; talk radio host Michael Savage: ‘I commend’ prisoner abuse ‘we need more,’” May 14, 2004 . The above are mentioned in E. Steuter and D. Wills, At War with Metaphor: Media, Propaganda and Racism in the War on Terror (New York: Lexington, 2008), 131–155.

  29. M. Dowd, “Empire of Novices,” New York Times, December 3, 2003.

  30. E. Steuter and D. Wills, “Discourses of Dehumanization: Enemy Construction and Canadian Media Complicity in the Framing of the War on Terror,” presented at the Canadian Communication Association Annual Meeting, Ottawa, Canada, 2009. http://www.mta.ca/faculty/socsci/sociology/steuter/discourses_of_dehumanization.pdf

  31. Steuter and Wills, At War with Metaphor. Steuter and Wills, “Discourses of Dehumanization,” 2009, 69–99.

  2. STEPS TOWARD A THEORY OF DEHUMANIZATION

  1. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word was in 1818. A. Opsahl, “Technology Shouldn’t Dehumanize Customer Service,” Government Technology News, January 1, 2009. D. Holbrook, Sex and Dehumanization (London: Pitman, 1972). N. Dawidoff, “Triathalons Dehumanize,” Sports Illustrated, October 16, 1989, 71(16). J. P. Driscoll, “Dehumanize at Your Own Risk,” Educational Technology no. 18: 34–36. S. Hirsh, “Torture of Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2004. For many other examples, see A. Montague and F. Matson, The Dehumanization of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983) and N. Haslam, “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 3 (2006): 252–264.

  2. L. LeMoncheck, Dehumanizing Women: Treating Persons as Sex Objects (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985).

  3. A. Dworkin, “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality,” in Oxford Readings in Feminism: Feminism and Pornography, ed. D. Cornell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 30–31. C. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). For a subtle, critical analysis of the concept of objectification, see M. Nussbaum, “Objectification,” Philosophy a
nd Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 249–291.

  4. H. Holtzer, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete Unexpurgated Text (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 151.

  5. Ibid., 348.

  6. C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in Collected Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 18.

  7. B. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 506.

  8. H. Lloyd-Jones, Females of the Species: Semonides on Women (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes, 1975), 36.

  9. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, 197.

  10. Aesop, Fable 515, Aesop’s Fables, trans. L. Gibbs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 238.

  11. For a clear exposition of Aristotle’s thinking on this issue, see C. Shields, Aristotle (New York: Routledge, 2007). For a more successful, post-Darwinian philosophical account of function, see R. G. Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

  12. Strictly speaking, it’s more accurate to say that pure water consists of oxides of hydrogen in the relation 1:2. See I. Hacking, “Putnam’s Theory of Natural Kinds and Their Names Is Not the Same as Kripke’s,” Principia 1 (2007): 1–24.

  13. H. Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

  14. Although still young, the study of essentialistic thinking is a burgeoning nexus for interdisciplinary research, with a substantial literature. See, for example, W. K. Ahn, et al., “Why Essences Are Essential in the Psychology of Concepts,” Cognition 82 (2001): 59–69; S. Atran, et al. “Generic Species and Basic Levels: Essence and Appearance in Biology,” Journal of Ethnobiology, 17 (1997): 22–45; J. Bailinson, et al., “A Bird’s Eye View: Biological Categorization and Reasoning Within and Across Cultures,” Cognition, 84 (2002): 1–53; S. Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); L. Hirschfeld, Race in the Making (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

  15. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), I.6,1254b, 27–39. There are also other places in which he compares slaves with nonhuman animals. See A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and B. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

  16. Aristotle, Politics, 1256b, 23–26. Cited and translated by B. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, 178–179.

  17. For an excellent, succinct discussion of Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery see P. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a more technical treatment, see E. Garver, “Aristotle’s Natural Slaves: Incomplete Praxeis and Incomplete Human Beings,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 32, no. 2 (1994): 173–195. For its transmission to medieval Islam, see P-A Hardy, “Medieval Muslim Philosophers on Race,” in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, eds. J. K. Ward and T. L. Lott (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).

  18. Augustine, The City of God, 16.8.

  19. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. W. V. Cooper (London: J. M. Dent, 1902), 113–114. For the use of animal metaphors in classical literature, see J. Gottschall, “Homer’s Human Animal: Ritual Combat in the Iliad,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 278–294 and K. Bradley, “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,” The Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000): 110–125.

  20. A. Pope, Essay on Man and Satires (Teddington, UK: Echo Library, 1977), 8. For a twentieth-century defense of the great chain, see E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

  21. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). K. W. Luckert, Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).

  22. T. Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). This weird idea had considerable currency during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jefferson may have picked it up from various sources, including Sir Thomas Herbert, who claimed that African women “keep company” with baboons and Voltaire’s claim that “in the hot countries apes subjugated girls.” T. Herbert, A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile (London: Jacob Blome and Richard Bishop, 1637), 19. F. M. Voltaire, “Of the Different Races of Men,” in The Idea of Race, eds. R. Bernasconi and T. L. Lott (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 6.

  23. W. Shakespeare, Othello, 2.3: 262–264.

  24. The Koran, 8:55 (trans. M. H. Shakir).

  25. See also Sura 7:166: “When in their insolence they transgressed (all) prohibitions,We said to them: ‘Be ye apes, despised and rejected.’”

  26. Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 4, Book 54, No. 524; Vol. 7, Book 69, No. 494v; Vol. 4, Book 55, No. 569. Also Sahih Muslim, Book 042, Number 7135 and 7136; Book 033, Number 6438. The Koran contains references to various biblical figures, including Jesus, Mary, Abraham, Solomon, and David. Muslims believe that both Jewish and Christian scriptures were inspired by Allah.

  27. A. Al-Azmeh, Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies (Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1986).

  28. P. della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” trans. R. Hooker, http://www.wsu.edu:8001/~dee/REN/ORATION.HTM

  29. Quoted in R. C. Dales, “A Medieval View of Human Dignity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 4 (1977): 557–572.

  30. W. R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 217.

  31. T. Tryon, “Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies,” in Carribeana: English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777, ed., T. W. Krise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 62.

  32. E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  33. D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), University Press, 1998), 173–175.

  34. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 1985), 397–398.

  35. J. D. Frank, “Prenuclear-Age Leaders and the Nuclear Arms Race,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 52 (1982), 633.

  36. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government [2:11]. J. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  37. Hume, Treatise, 414, 492, 489. For the common point of view, see R. Cohen, “The Common Point of View in Hume’s Ethics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 4 (1997): 827–850, and K. Korsgaard, “The General Point of View: Love and Moral Approval in Hume’s Ethics,” Hume Studies 25 no. 1 & 2 (1999): 3–42.

  38. D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 88.

  39. Ibid., 88–89, emphasis added.

  40. D. Hume, Treatise, 273–274, 369. See also A. Waldow, “Hume’s Belief in Other Minds,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2009): 199–132.

  41. D. Hume, The Natural History of Religion (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 8. For more on the anthropomorphizing impulse, see S. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  42. For Hume’s views on imagination, see G. Streminger, “Hume’s Theory of Imagination,” Hume Studies 6, no. 2 (1980): 98–118. For extended discussion of the passage in question, see A. Kuflick, “Hume on Justice to Animals, Indians and Women,” Hume Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 53–70 and D. M. Levy and S. Peart, “Sympathy and Approbation in Hume and Smith: A Solution to the Other Rational Species Problem,” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 331–349. For Hume on women, see Enquiry, 89.

  43. D. Diderot, anonymous passage
in G. T. F. Raynal, L’ Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indies (1770), quoted in A. Fitzmaurice, “Anticolonialism in Western Political Thought: The Colonial Origins of the Concept of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. D. Moses (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 67.

 

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