Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  44. L. W. Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 1969).

  45. I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 3rd ed. trans. J. W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 30.

  46. I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. M. J. Gregor (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1974), 9, and Grounding, 428.

  47. I. Kant, “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nesbit, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 125. For a nuanced discussion of Kant’s views on nonhuman animals, see C. Korsgaard, “Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 25/26, ed. G. B. Peterson (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2005).

  48. L. Doyle, “‘A Dead Iraqi Is Just Another Dead Iraqi.’ You Know, So What?,” The Independent, July 12, 2007. Quoted in Steuter and Wills, At War with Metaphor, 85.

  49. W. G. Sumner, Folkways: The Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), 13.

  50. J. Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (London: Vintage, 1991), 267.

  51. Sumner, Folkways, 14.

  52. F. Boas, “Individual, Family, Population and Race,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87, no 2. (1943): 161.

  53. F. Roes, “An Interview with Napoleon Chagnon,” Human Ethology Bulletin 13, no. 4, 1998: 6.

  54. Sumner, Folkways, 14–15.

  55. W. Owen, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (New York: New Directions, 1965), 44.

  56. H. Banister and O. L. Zangwill, “John Thomson MacCurdy, 1886–1947,” British Journal of Psychology 40 (1949): 1–4; J. Forrester, “1919: Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge and London—Myers, Jones and MacCurdy,” Psychoanalysis and History 10, no. 1 (2008): 37–94.

  57. J. T. MacCurdy, The Psychology of War (Boston: John W. Luce and Company, 1918), 40.

  58. Ibid., 41. See also D. L. Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).

  59. MacCurdy, The Psychology of War, 38–39.

  60. Ibid., 53.

  61. L. Cohen, “The Story of Isaac,” in Stranger Music: The Poems and Songs of Leonard Cohen (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).

  62. Erikson introduced the concept of pseudospeciation in “Ontogeny of Ritualization in Man,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, series B, 251 (1966): 337–349. He discusses pseudospeciation in Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1994), Identity, Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), and in “The Galilian Sayings and the Sense of ‘I,’” in R. Coles (ed.), The Erik Erikson Reader (New York: Norton, 2001). His single paper on the subject was an address given at the American Psychiatric Association in May 1984 and published as “Pseudospeciation in the Nuclear Age,” Political Psychology 6, no. 2 (1984): 213–217. For Lorenz’s suggestion, see L. J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  63. E. H. Erikson, “Pseudospeciation in the Nuclear Age,” Political Psychology 6, no. 2 (1984): 214.

  64. Ibid.

  65. K. Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Bantam, 1966), 79.

  66. Quoted in B. Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others in Germany, 1933–1945 (Woodbury, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998), 14.

  67. K. N. Laland and B. G. Galef (eds.), The Question of Animal Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  68. R. Wrangham and D. Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence (New York: Matiner, 1997), 8–9.

  69. E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1975). I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of War and Peace: Men, Animals and Aggression (New York: Viking, 1979).

  70. E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 70.

  71. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of War and Peace, 123.

  72. Wrangham and Peterson, Demonic Males, 70.

  73. J. Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (New York: Mariner, 2000), 209–210, emphasis added. See also P. Roscoe, “Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 3 (2007): 485–495.

  74. I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989), 402.

  3. CALIBAN’S CHILDREN

  1. J-P. Sartre, preface to F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1968), 26.

  2. See A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  3. F. Retamar, “Caliban,” The Massachusetts Review 15 (1973–74): 24.

  4. Polybius, The Complete Histories of Polybius, trans. W. R. Paton (Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com, 2009), 48.

  5. Quoted in S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 8 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 135.

  6. H. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Review (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). D. Root, “Speaking Christian: Orthodoxy and Difference in 16th Century Spain,” Representations 23 (1988): 118–134. A. Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

  7. Bartholomew Senarega, quoted in D. E. Stannard, American Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 62.

  8. J. G. Varner and J. J. Varner, Dogs of the Conquest (Norman, OK: University of Oklahima Press, 1983).

  9. B. de Las Casas, History of the Indies, trans. A. Collard (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 94.

  10. H. R. Parish (ed.), Bartolomé de las Casas: The Only Way (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1992), 12.

  11. Las Casas, History of the Indies,

  12. Las Casas, quoted in T. Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 141.

  13. B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

  14. Quoted in Todorov, 141.

  15. Ibid., 139.

  16. P. Bakewell, A History of Latin America: Empires and Sequels 1450–1930 (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1997), 83.

  17. The remark from Mair’s In Secundum Sententiarum is quoted in Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 38. Aristotle, Physics, 199a: 20–25, in T. Irwin and G. Fine, Aristotle Selections (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995). M. R. Johnson, Aristotle on Teleology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  18. Tostado and pseudo-Thomas are quoted in W. R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 188–189, 192–193.

  19. Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 217, emphasis added.

  20. Paracelsus, De homunculis, quoted in Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 219. As an interesting aside, Newman remarks (vis-à-vis Paracelsus’s strange sexual preoccupations) that forensic examination of his skeleton suggests that “he” was either a pseudohermaphroditic genetic male, or a genetic female suffering from adrenogenital syndrome. For Paracelsus’s sexuality, see Newman, 196–197.

  21. J. G. de Sepúlveda, Tratado sobre las Justas Causas de la Guerra contra los Indios, trans. M. Menendez, P. Garcia-Pelayo, and M. Garcia-Pelayo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1941), 153. Todorov, 152; Stannard, American Holocaust, 210; Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 23, 104, 116, 118. H. Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975). See also Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 83 and P. Mason, Deconstructing America: Representation of the Other (New York: Routledge, 1990).

  22. Stannard, American Holocaust, 211. Paul III: Sublimis Deus, June 2, 1537, in H. R. Parish and H. E. Weidma
n, Las Casas en Mexico: Historia y obras desconocidas (Mexico City: Fondo De Cultura Economica, 1992). E. F. Fischer, Indigenous Peoples, Civil Society, and the Neo-Liberal State in Latin America (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009).

  23. G. Jahoda, Trail of Tears (New York: Random House, 1995), 135. Letter from Reverend Solomon Stoddard to Governor Joseph Dudley, in R. Demos, Remarkable Providences: Readings in Early American History (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 273.

  24. J. Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles (1624), quoted in M. J. Bowden, “The Invention of American Tradition,” Journal of Historical Geography 18, no. 1 1992:3–26. S. Purchas, 19, Hakluytus Postumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes 231 (1625), quoted in A. Tsesis, Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements (New York: New York University Press, 2002). C. Brooke, A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia, With Particular Mention of Those Men of Note That Suffered in That Disaster (London: G. Eld for Robert Myldbourne, 1622), 22–23. See also F. F. Fausz, “The First Act of Terrorism in English America,” History News Network, January 16, 2006 (http://hnn.us/articles/19085.html); A. T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  25. W. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 296.

  26. W. Winthrop, “Some Meditations” (1675), quoted in R. Drinnon, Facing West: Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (New York: Meridian, 1980), 54.

  27. Quoted in Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 24–25.

  28. R. F. Berkhoffer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979), 13. See also R. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment and Demonology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). James I is quoted in Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 12. Cotton Mather is quoted in Vaughan, page 24.

  29. The letter from Washington is quoted in R. Horseman, “American Indian Policy in the Old Northwest, 1783–1812,” in R. L. Nichols (ed.), The American Indian: Past and Present (New York: Random House, 1986), 139.

  30. C. D. Eby, “That Disgraceful Affair,” The Black Hawk War (New York: Norton, 1973), 259. H. H. Brackenridge, Indian Atrocities (New York: V. P. James, 1967), 62. The passage from The Oregon Trail is quoted in R. F. Berkhoffer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979), 96.

  31. D. E. Connor, Joseph Reddeford Walker and the Arizona Adventure (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 302–303. J. R. Brown, Adventures in the Apache Country: A Tour Through Arizona and Sonora (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1869), 100. These and many other examples of subhuman characterizations of Apaches are cited in K. Jacoby, “‘The Broad Platform of Extermination’: Nature and Violence in Nineteenth Century North American Borderlands,” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 2 (2008): 249–267.

  32. Jacoby, “‘The Broad Platform of Extermination,’” 258.

  33. Haslam, “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 3 (2006): 255.

  34. See, for example, R. E. Green et al., “Analysis of One Million Base Pairs of Neanderthal DNA,” Nature 444 (2006): 330–336; P. Forster, “Ice Ages and the Mitochondrial DNA Chronology of Human Dispersals: A Review,” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 359, no. 1442 (2004): 255–264; B. Wood and M. Collard, “The human genus,” Science 284 (1999): 64–71; M. Hasegawa, H. Kishino, and T. Yano, “Dating of the Human-Ape Splitting by a Molecular Clock of Mitochondrial DNA,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 22, no. 2 (1985): 160–174; A. S. Ryan and D. C. Johansen, “Anterior Dental Microwear in Australopithecus afarensis: Comparisons with Human and Nonhuman Primates,” Journal of Human Evolution 18, no. 3 (1989): 235–268.

  35. D. C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

  36. H. C. Kelman, “Violence Without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers,” Journal of Social Issues 29, no. 4 (1973): 24.

  37. Ibid., 48–49.

  38. Ibid., 49.

  39. L. Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 87.

  40. Sura 9:29. For a fascinating discussion of the historically close relationship between Muslims and Jews, see Majid, We Are All Moors.

  41. Al Ghazali, Kitab al-Wagiz fi Fiqh madhab al-imam al Safi’i. Quoted in A. G. Bostom (ed.), The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (London: Prometheus, 2008), 199.

  42. W. I. Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  43. C. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 173.

  44. G. Orwell, “Marrakech,” in George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920–1940 (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 388. E. Steuter and D. Wills, At War With Metaphor: Media Propaganda and Racism in the War on Terror (New York: Lexington, 2009), 27. O. Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 72. L. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922).

  45. Quoted in C. Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez, “United by Hate: The Uses of Anti-Semitism in Chávez’s Venezuela,” The Boston Review, July–August 2009, emphasis added. A. Barrioneuvo, “Inquiry on 1994 Blast at Argentina Jewish Center Gets New Life,” New York Times, July 17, 2009.

  46. P. J. Oakes et al., “Becoming an In-group: Reexamining the Impact of Familiarity on Perceptions of Group Homogeneity,” Social Psychology Quarterly 58, no. 1 (1995): 52-51. G. W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954).

  47. M. Heidegger, “Bekenntniss der Professoren,” quoted in C. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 46.

  48. N. Haslam, et. al., “Attributing and Denying Humanness to Others,” European Journal of Social Psychology 19 (2008): 58. Plato, Statesman, 267E. The anecdote about Diogenes of Sinope is from Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.40.

  49. See E. Ben-Ari, Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998).

  50. M. Sendivogius, “The New Chemical Light,” in A. E. Waite (ed.), The Hermetic Museum: Containing Twenty-Two Most Celebrated Chemical Tracts (London: James Elliot & Co., 1893), 106.

  51. J. W. Yolton (ed.), The Locke Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 55.

  52. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: William Tegg & Company, 1879), 518.

  53. Ibid., 302.

  54. See R. A. Wilson, M. N. Barker, and I. Brigant, “When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds,” Philosophical Topics 35 (102): 189–215.

  55. S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1972), 123–125. Given the sequence of themes here, I want to make it clear that I am not endorsing (or rejecting) John Mackie’s reading of Locke as a precursor of Kripke. See J. L. Mackie, “Locke’s Anticipation of Kripke,” Analysis 34 (1974): 177–180.

  56. See D. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and, for critique, D. Dennett, “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 4 (1995): 322–326.

  4. THE RHETORIC OF ENMITY

  1. N. J. O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 110.

  2. E. Cassirer, The Myth of the State (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 275.

  3. Quoted in D. J. Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 158.

  4. K. Bales, Disposable People: The New Slave
ry and the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 197.

  5. F. L. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States 2 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1862), 203.

  6. Ibid., 205–206.

  7. Ephesians, 5: 6.

  8. T. Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (London: Routledge,1981). This included the sexual enslavement of women. See G. Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For the origin of the term servant, see Florintinus, Digesta seu Pandectae, 1.5.4.2.