Less Than Human Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PREFACE: CREATURES OF A KIND SOMEWHAT INFERIOR

  CHAPTER 1. LESS THAN HUMAN

  CHAPTER 2. STEPS TOWARD A THEORY OF DEHUMANIZATION

  CHAPTER 3. CALIBAN’S CHILDREN

  CHAPTER 4. THE RHETORIC OF ENMITY

  CHAPTER 5. LEARNING FROM GENOCIDE

  CHAPTER 6. RACE

  CHAPTER 7. THE CRUEL ANIMAL

  CHAPTER 8. AMBIVALENCE AND TRANSGRESSION

  CHAPTER 9. QUESTIONS FOR A THEORY OF DEHUMANIZATION

  APPENDIX I: PSYCHOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM

  APPENDIX II: PAUL ROSCOE’S THEORY OF DEHUMANIZATION IN WAR

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ALSO BY DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK WAS DIFFICULT TO WRITE, and I couldn’t have completed it without the help of many people. I owe most to my wife, Subrena Smith, whose incisive comments and exacting intellectual standards kept bouts of intellectual enthusiasm from descending into sloppy reasoning. She has helped me avoid many errors and oversights, and her unflagging concern for my well-being gave me the mental and physical space to concentrate on research and writing.

  I wouldn’t have considered undertaking this project were it not for the urgings of my friend and colleague Anouar Majid, who insisted that I should devote my energies to investigating dehumanization at a time when I was considering various possible projects, and was uncertain which one to choose. “You’ve got to do it, David!” he said to me enthusiastically over dinner one evening. “Everyone talks about dehumanization, but hardly anyone theorizes it.” As I soon discovered, he was absolutely right.

  The book that you are reading now would have been nowhere near as readable had it not been for the efforts of Bruce Schneier, who carefully scrutinized and insightfully commented on the penultimate (or rather pen-penultimate) draft of the manuscript.

  I would also like to give heartfelt thanks to my literary agent Michael Psaltis, and my editor at St. Martin’s Press, Daniela Rapp, who displayed superhuman patience accommodating my trail of broken promises (“I’ll get the manuscript to you in three months, for certain”). Finally, I’d like to thank all the library staff at the University of New England, who promptly and efficiently responded to my seemingly interminable requests for books and journal articles.

  In addition to these individuals, there are many others who have contributed to the writing of this book by generously sharing their ideas, clarifying facts, and directing me to sources of information, including Zadie Beagle, Vahan Dadian, Raymond Evans, Daniel Gilbert, Chris Hedges, Karl Jacoby, Scott MacDonald, David Mandel, Laura Mueller, Paul Roscoe, Michael Sargent, Wolfgang Wagner, Adam Waytz, Charlotte Witt, and Richard Wrangham. Thanks to you all.

  I understand

  what you want your filthy slave to be. I am

  your barbarian, your terrorist;

  your monster.

  —ALI ALIZADEH, “YOUR TERRORIST”

  PREFACE

  CREATURES OF A KIND SOMEWHAT INFERIOR

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, UNITED STATES DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

  THESE THIRTY-FIVE WORDS ARE OFTEN QUOTED reverently. The ideal that they express—the principle that all men (that is, all human beings) have certain basic rights just because they are human—is easy to resonate with, and to applaud. But Jefferson’s words beg a vexing question: the question of who, exactly, should be counted as human.

  Jefferson’s contemporaries weren’t certain.1 The uneasy relationship between the economic attractions of slavery and the Enlightenment vision of human dignity was a long-standing one, and for those torn between the demands of conscience and the seductions of self-interest, there was a way out of the dilemma. They could deny that African slaves were human, and in this way they could square the moral circle. By dint of a sleight of mind, the very men who insisted on the God-given right of all humankind to liberty could, in good faith, countenance and participate in the brutal and degrading institution of slavery. Many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, who had championed the concept of individual human rights and defined the philosophical underpinnings of the great American experiment, routinely excluded nonwhites from the category of the human. The idea that the towering figures of the eighteenth century were champions of liberty for all is, in the words of Northwestern University philosopher Charles Mills, “profoundly misleading, deeply wrong.” It “radically mystifies the recent past, and … needs to be confronted and discredited if our sociopolitical categories are to be true to the world that they are supposed to be mapping.”2

  It wasn’t just the highbrows who thought of blacks as less than human. The theoretical views of the intellectuals—the philosophers, statesmen, and politicians—merged seamlessly with ideological beliefs which, however poorly articulated, had long been entrenched in the popular consciousness. Thus, the pseudonymous author of Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade, an abolitionist tract published in 1760, observed that:

  [T]hose who are concerned in the Man Trade have … a confused imagination, or half formed thought, in their minds, that the Blacks are hardly of the same Species with the white Men, but are Creatures of a Kind somewhat inferior …

  “I do not know how to think that any white Men could find it in their Hearts,” the author continued, “that the common Sentiments of Humanity would permit them to treat the black Men in that cruel, barbarous Manner in which they do treat them, did they think and consider that these have rational, immortal Souls.”3 Subhumans, it was believed, are beings that lack that special something that makes us human. Because of this deficit, they don’t command the respect that we, the truly human beings, are obliged to grant one another. They can be enslaved, tortured, or even exterminated—treated in ways in which we could not bring ourselves to treat those whom we regard as members of our own kind.

  This phenomenon is called dehumanization. It is the subject of this book.

  Before I began to investigate dehumanization, I assumed that there was substantial research literature devoted to it. The fact that dehumanization is mentioned so frequently, both in popular journalism and in academic writings, led me to believe (wrongly, it turned out) that it had already been extensively studied. Then, as I began to hunt for writings on dehumanization, it dawned on me that although scholars from a wide range of disciplines are convinced that dehumanization plays a crucial role in war, genocide, and other forms of brutality, writings on the subject are shockingly thin on the ground. I found that it’s usually mentioned only in passing—a page here, or a paragraph there. Apart from a few dozen articles by social psychologists, there is scarcely any literature on it at all.4 If dehumanization really has the significance that scholars claim, then untangling its dynamics ought to be among our most pressing priorities, and its neglect is as perplexing as it is grave. I wrote this book to bring dehumanization out of the shadows, and to jump-start a conversation that is centuries overdue. To do this, I’ve drawn from a rich palette of sources—including history, psychology, philosophy, biology, and anthropology—to paint a portrait of dehumanization and the forces and mechanisms that sustain it.

  It’s sometimes said that dehumanization is a social construction that’s at most a few centuries old. According to this story, dehumanization was, paradoxically, a child of the doctrine of universal human rights. This idea was the moral and political touchstone of the Enlightenment, but it conflicted with the brutal coloniali
sm perpetrated by Europeans. As the example with which I began this chapter suggests, the dissonance between theory and practice was resolved by denying the humanity of the oppressed.

  This story expresses a truth, but it is a partial truth that obfuscates the real nature, history, and extent of the dehumanizing impulse. Dehumanization is neither uniquely European nor uniquely modern. It is far more widespread, vastly more ancient, and more profoundly intertwined with the human experience than the constructionist view allows. To understand its workings, it’s not good enough to examine some contingent facts about a particular historical period. We must look much deeper.

  Of course, particular manifestations of dehumanization are social constructions, in the sense that they appear in a given culture and historical epoch which leave their distinctive stamp on it. Eighteenth-century Europeans embraced a certain type of dehumanization, but so did the Athenians during the fourth century before Christ, the Germans of the 1930s and ’40s, and the Eipo tribesmen of highland New Guinea, who refer to their enemies as dung flies, lizards, and worms.5

  In this book, I will argue that dehumanization is a joint creation of biology, culture, and the architecture of the human mind. Grasping its nature and dynamics requires that we attend to all three elements. Excluding any of them leaves us with a hopelessly distorted picture of what we are trying to comprehend.

  Dehumanization is too important a topic to be left to the experts, so I’ve tried to make this book appealing and accessible to a broad general readership while at the same time addressing the concerns of specialist scholars in several disciplines. In doing this, I’ve done my best to balance academic rigor with engaging prose, on the principle that anything worth explaining is worth explaining in a clear and interesting way. In general, I’ve avoided technical jargon as much as possible, and have included explanations on the occasions when its use was unavoidable. However, there are a couple of exceptions to this rule. There are two ordinary words that I sometimes use in out-of-the-ordinary ways. The words are person and human. This isn’t a self-indulgent plunge into academic obscurity. It’s motivated by the need for a vocabulary to capture ideas that are hard to put into ordinary speech.

  Let me explain …

  Think of the word dehumanization. It literally means something like “removing the human-ness.” Now, take someone and imagine that their humanity has been stripped away from them. What’s left? When the founding fathers dehumanized their slaves, what remained of them? When European colonists dehumanized Native Americans or Nazis dehumanized Jews, what remained? In their eyes, what was left was a creature that seemed human—had a human-looking form, walked on two legs, spoke human language, and acted in more-or-less human ways—but which was nonetheless not human. As I will explain in detail later on, dehumanization is the belief that some beings only appear human, but beneath the surface, where it really counts, they aren’t human at all. The Nazis labeled Jews as Untermenschen (“subhumans”) because they were convinced that, although Jews looked every bit as human as the average Aryan, this was a facade and that, concealed behind it, Jews were really filthy, parasitic vermin. Of course, Jews did not wear their subhumanity on their sleeves. They were regarded as insidiously subhuman. Their ostensible humanity was, at best, only skin deep.

  It’s clear from these considerations we need a vocabulary to express the conceptual distinction between appearing human and being human. In defiance of the norms of common speech as well as time-honored academic convention, I reserve the word person for any being that appears human. You, the reader, are a person in this sense, and if Dracula, the Terminator, or any other man-shaped monster existed, they would be persons, too. I use human for beings that are members of our own kind, irrespective of their appearance (although what’s meant by “our own kind” won’t become fully clear until Chapter Seven). You are human, but Dracula and the Terminator aren’t, even though they look human. John Merrick, the “Elephant Man” was human, in spite of his nonhuman appearance.*

  I also want to address what may seem like a major omission. I have little to say about the role of dehumanization in the oppression of women. This is because the particular form of dehumanization that typically has been directed against women is fundamentally different from the form of dehumanization that I explore in this book. Since the 1980s, a number of feminist scholars, including Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, and Linda LeMoncheck, have argued that women are dehumanized by being objectified. When men objectify women they perceive them as things rather than human beings, as desirable lumps of flesh rather than human subjects.6 In this book I am concerned with the kind of dehumanization associated with war, genocide, and other forms of mass violence. The objectification of women is produced by a different concatenation of forces, and its analysis demands a somewhat different set of conceptual tools. Apart from some dubious speculations by scholars working within a psychoanalytic framework, the psychological dynamics of objectification have been given short shrift in favor of its sociopolitical dimension. From time to time I gesture toward ways that a psychological analysis of dehumanization of women might be approached, but this is a large topic and requires a book of its own to do it justice.

  Another omission concerns certain groups—sexual minorities (notably gay people), immigrants, mentally and physically handicapped people, and various specific ethnic groups (for example, the Roma, the Italians, and the Irish)—all of whom have, at one time or another, been victims of dehumanization. I say little or nothing about them in this book, not because I minimize their importance, but rather because the sheer pervasiveness of dehumanization made it impossible to discuss all of its manifestations while keeping the book to a readable length. So, I’ve had to deliberately restrict my focus. I’ve chosen to concentrate largely (but not exclusively) on the dehumanization of Jews, sub-Saharan Africans, and Native Americans, for a couple of reasons. One is their immense historical significance. The human story is filled with pain and tragedy, but among the horrors that we have perpetrated on one another, the persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people, the brutal enslavement of Africans, and the destruction of Native American civilizations in many respects are unparalleled. The other reason is that they have been richly documented, which makes them excellent paradigm cases for discerning the core features of the dehumanizing process. What we learn from them can then be applied elsewhere.

  Having set the stage, and cleared up a few potential sources of misunderstanding, here is a preview of how the story will unfold.

  In Chapter One, I explain why investigating dehumanization is worthwhile. To do this, I make use of some examples from World War II. Although most educated people are aware that the Nazis dehumanized Jews, Gypsies, and others, it’s less commonly known that all the major players in the war, including the Allied forces, dehumanized their enemies. After delving into these historical examples, I talk about the role of dehumanization in the contemporary world, focusing on how it manifests in the mass media, particularly in coverage of the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and the battle against terrorist organizations.

  Most discussions of the history of the concept of dehumanization begin with the work of twentieth-century social psychologists. But these were latecomers: the story actually begins many centuries earlier. My mission in Chapter Two is to describe how the concept of dehumanization evolved over the centuries, starting with ancient authors such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius, then moving forward through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment right up to the present. This hitherto unwritten piece of history also gives me an opportunity to introduce a key theoretical idea that will play an important role later on in the book: the notion of essence.

  In Chapter Three, I tell the story of the colonization of the New World, and the dehumanization of its indigenous peoples. The question of whether Native Americans were human had been simmering ever since the Spanish arrived in the Caribbean. It came to a head in 1550, when campaigner for Indian rights Bartolomé de Las Casas clas
hed with Spanish humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in a debate that has been described as one of the most extraordinary events in Western political history.7 I use these events as a springboard to discuss and assess ideas about dehumanization that have been advanced by psychologists since the early 1970s, and finally round off the chapter with a brief discussion of the notions of essence and appearance introduced in Chapter Two.

  Chapter Four focuses on the role of dehumanization in slavery. I discuss the history of slavery, from ancient times onward, including both the trans-Saharan and the transatlantic slave trades, all the while focusing on how slaves were considered subhuman animals. I also touch on race and racism in this chapter (a subject to which I return in Chapter Six), and then turn to the issue of moral disengagement, looking at how dehumanization weakens our inhibitions against behaving cruelly toward our fellow human beings.

  Chapter Five takes up the role of dehumanization in genocide. I survey the part it played in six major genocides: the German genocide of the Herero in 1904, the Armenian genocide of 1915–16, the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and the recent genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. I then go on to examine a Nazi publication of the 1940s entitled The Subhuman, and use this text to identify some of the core features of the dehumanizing process.

  The next three chapters pull together many of the strands from the preceding chapters, and weave them into a theory of dehumanization that is sensitive to its cultural, psychological, and biological dimensions.