Dehumanization also raises many questions about the specifics of our psychology. What is it about human nature that enables us to conceive of one another as less than human? How, exactly, does dehumanization work, and why does it occur? Does it have a function, and if so, what is that function? Is the dehumanizing impulse universal, or is it culturally and historically specific? Is it a hard-wired product of our biological evolution, or is it learned? What are the typical patterns of the dehumanizing imagination, and why just these particular patterns?
A good theory of dehumanization should address all of these questions. I will do so in the chapters to follow, but I’m going to have to build up to them gradually. In this chapter I’ll make a start by telling the story of how the concept of dehumanization developed, from the time of the ancient Greeks to the twenty-first century. It’s a fascinating story, and one that’s never before been told.
CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY: MAINLY ARISTOTLE, AUGUSTINE, AND BOETHIUS
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
—CONSTANTINE CAVAFY, “WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS”6
The phenomenon of dehumanization is very ancient. However, the earliest attempts to explain it that have come down to us are only around 2,600 years old, and are found in the writings of the ancient Greeks. When the Greeks described people as subhuman animals, they often meant this to be taken at face value. Israeli classicist Benjamin H. Isaac points out that we find “a rich and varied literary tradition that uses animals as a literary device” in the ancient world, but we should not be tempted to regard this as just a rhetorical conceit. Isaac cautions us that “not all literary passages that represent people as animals should be interpreted as comparisons or metaphors.”
Some of them were intended quite literally.… [T]he animal comparison was part of an attitude of mind, a way of thinking about oneself as distinct from a foreigner, which formed the framework in which imperialism could flourish unfettered by moral inhibitions or restraints.7
A seventh-century poem by Semonides of Amorgos explicitly describes women as subhuman creatures. The poem presents a taxonomy of ten kinds of women, each of which is made from a different kind of animal. “In the beginning,” Semonides wrote, “the god made the female mind separately.”
One he made from a long-bristled sow. In her house, everything lies in disorder, smeared with mud and rolls about the floor; and she herself unwashed, in clothes unlaundered, sits by the dungheap and grows fat. Another he made from a bitch, vicious, own daughter of her mother, who wants to hear everything and know everything.…8
In addition to sows and bitches, he also describes women made from vixens, asses, ferrets, mares, and monkeys. Although this may sound like wordplay to twenty-first-century ears, Semonides probably had something else in mind. Isaac points out that Semonides “claims that the specific type of woman is literally made out of an animal … the woman made from a sow is a sow.”9 The poem thus supplies a primitive theory of dehumanization: some people are subhuman, and their subhumanity comes from the animal substance from which they are made, whereas the highest type of human beings were thought to be autochthonous—to have sprung from the soil of their homeland. A similar theory (this time not restricted to women) was advanced about a century later by Aesop, the Greek slave who authored Aesop’s Fables.
Following Zeus’ orders, Prometheus fashioned humans and animals. When Zeus saw that the animals far outnumbered the humans, he ordered Prometheus to reduce the number of animals by turning them into people. Prometheus did what he was told, and as a result those people who were originally animals have a human body but the soul of an animal.10
This may be the earliest written reference to the idea that it is possible to look just like a human being but have a subhuman soul.
As intriguing as these fragments are, the theory of dehumanization only came into its stride with the work of Aristotle during the fourth century BCE. The Greeks of Aristotle’s era divided people into two categories: themselves and everybody else. They considered themselves to be paragons of civilization, and labeled all foreigners as barbaroi (barbarians). Aristotle’s remarks on dehumanization lent grass-roots xenophobia a veneer of intellectual sophistication. He claimed that barbarians were slaves by nature.
Aristotle based his thesis on the idea that it’s rationality that makes us human. His argument was premised upon a particular conception of biological purpose. Aristotle recognized that there’s something that parts of organisms are for: they have a purpose. We all recognize that eyes are for seeing, hearts are for pumping blood, protective coloring is for evading predators, and wings are for flying. Notice that two things can have the same purpose even if they are quite dissimilar in other respects. Bird wings, insect wings, and bat wings are all very different. Birds’ wings and bats’ wings are modified forelimbs, but birds’ wings are relatively rigid whereas bats’ wings are modified hands that “grasp” the air. Butterfly wings aren’t forelimbs at all. Each kind of wing is anatomically distinct from the others, and each has a different evolutionary history (of course, Aristotle didn’t know anything about evolution; the example is mine, not his). So how come they’re all wings?
The Aristotelian answer is that they are all wings because they share a common purpose: they’re all for flying; oversimplifying somewhat, being for flying is what makes something a wing.11
Aristotle applied the same pattern of reasoning to human beings, arguing that there must be a purpose to being human—there’s something that we are for that defines what we are, just like being for flying defines what it is to be a wing. He concluded that rationality is the defining characteristic of the human. Living thoughtfully and deliberately is the proper aim of human life. Human beings are for being rational like wings are for flying, and just as being for flying makes something a wing, so being rational makes one human.
I now need to introduce a theoretical notion that will be central to the theory of dehumanization developed later in this book: the notion of essence.
The philosophical concept of essence is derived from Aristotle, who used the odd expressions “to ti ên einai” (“the what it was to be”) and “to ti esti” (“the what it is”) at various points in his writings. His Roman translators were stumped for a Latin synonym, so they coined the term essentia, which they derived from the Latin verb esse, “to be.” By the late fourteenth century, essentia had become anglicized as “essence.”
As Aristotle’s original terminology implies, the essence of a thing is that which makes it what it is. Essence contrasted with appearance (how things seem rather than what they are). Appearances are, so to speak, only skin deep, whereas essences cut to the core.
Philosophers often use the example of water to illustrate the distinction between essence and appearance. What exactly is water? You might be tempted to answer this question by reciting a description of water: “It’s a clear, colorless, tasteless liquid that freezes at 0 degree centigrade, boils at 100 degree centigrade (at sea level), flows in rivers, comes out of showers,” and so on. It’s perfectly true that anything that is water has all of these characteristics. But do they pin down what water actually is?
Chemists don’t define water in this way at all. In chemistry, water is defined by what it’s made from. Water is H2O.12 Some stuff might have all of the superficial properties of water but still not be water. Vodka is a clear, colorless liquid—but it certainly isn’t water! But what about the entire set of characteristics that we associate with water (all the characteristics mentioned in the preceding paragraph)? Don’t they add up to a definition of what water is? Not exactly. As far as we know, everything that fits the description of water is H2O, but there are circumstances in which the two could come apart. There could be a substance that’s just like water in all these superficial respects, but which doesn’t have the molecular structure of H2O. This is at least conceivable. But it is inconceivable that scientists might discover a substance that’s H2O but isn
’t water.
We owe this insight to Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam, who explained it by way of a famous thought experiment that’s become known as “Twin Earth.”13 Putnam invited his readers to imagine that there’s a planet just like Earth except for the fact that the stuff that flows in rivers and comes out of showers isn’t H2O, but XYZ (strange elements found in that galactic neighborhood). XYZ looks, tastes, smells, and behaves just like H2O does. In fact, the residents of Twin Earth (who have never encountered H2O) call it “water.” So, Earthlings and Twin-Earthlings use the very same word for substances that are superficially indistinguishable but made out of completely different stuff. Now, suppose you took a vacation on Twin Earth and, while soaking in a hot tub, you entertained the thought that you were soaking in hot water. According to Putnam, this thought would be mistaken, because although the liquid in which you were pleasantly immersed was superficially indistinguishable from water, it wasn’t water. It had the appearance of water (clear, colorless, tasteless, etc.) but lacked its essence. H2O is the essence of water because it makes something water, whereas being a clear, colorless, tasteless liquid only makes something resemble water. If your Twin Earth doppelganger were luxuriating in a hot tub on Earth, and had the same thought, she would likewise be wrong, because in Twin Earthspeak, water is XYZ.
The distinction between essence and appearance isn’t just an academic matter. It reflects the way we ordinarily think about things. It’s what philosophers call an intuition. In the vernacular, when people talk about intuitions, they usually mean something spooky like telepathy and clairvoyance, but philosophers (and increasingly, psychologists) mean something completely different by the word. A philosophical intuition is just how something seems to you. Right now, you’ve got an intuition that you are reading this book. You don’t need to figure out that you’re reading it; it just seems obvious—directly disclosed to your consciousness—that you are reading it; and it is doubtful that anybody could convince you otherwise. Likewise, there’s a growing body of psychological research (some of which I will explore in Chapter Six) showing that people intuit the dichotomy between essence and appearance. We spontaneously imagine that many things (for example, living things) have something “inside” them that makes them the kind of thing that they are, and that this isn’t always reflected in how they look. Even small children assume that there is some inner property, which, for want of a better word, we can call “tigerness,” that accounts for something’s being a tiger, and are aware that a tiger with only three legs, or that’s painted purple, or that has no tail—a tiger that lacks the stereotypical appearance of a tiger—is still a tiger.14
Thanks to our essentialistic proclivities, the idea that every human being is endowed with a human essence, an inner core (a soul, spirit, or distinctive genetic signature) is intuitively compelling. If you share this intuition, as most people seem to, then you will be open to the idea that someone can be human even though they don’t look human (think of John Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” whose physical deformities were so extreme that he looked like a creature belonging to a different species, even though he was a human being). On the flip side, you will probably find it credible that a creature could closely resemble a human being without being truly human. This is a popular theme in horror and science fiction, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. Both Dracula and the Terminator have human forms and behave in more or less human ways (apart from certain idiosyncrasies), but neither of them is human on the “inside,” where it counts.
Now, let’s get back to Aristotle.
If, as Aristotle claimed, the ability to reason is what makes us human, any being that is unable to reason must be less than human. Aristotle believed that barbarians had only a rudimentary ability to reason, and this assumption underpinned his view that barbarians are natural slaves. Unlike the beasts of the field, the barbaroi could understand and respond to rational discourse, but they lacked the wherewithal to actively pursue it.
We may thus conclude that all men who differ from others as much as the body differs from the soul, or an animal from a man (and this is the case with all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service)—all such are by nature slaves. In their case … it is better to be ruled by a master. Someone is … a slave by nature if … he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it in himself. Other animals do not apprehend reason but obey their instincts. Even so there is little divergence in the way they are used. Both of them (slaves and tame animals) provide bodily assistance in supplying essential needs.… It is thus clear that, just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.15
Aristotle didn’t quite assert that barbarians are subhuman, but he came uncomfortably close. He asserted that they are “incomplete” humans, rather than nonhuman animals. However, as is evident from the passage just quoted, he believed that barbarians had something in common with subhuman creatures, and also recommended war as a method for acquiring those natural slaves that stubbornly refuse to enter into the state of subjugation that is their proper destiny. In doing so, he chillingly compared warfare with hunting.
[W]arfare is by nature a form of acquisition—for the art of hunting is part of it—which is applied against wild animals and against those men who are not prepared to be ruled even though they are born for subjugation, in so far as this war is just by nature.16
In the Aristotelian scheme, barbarians are poised precariously on the cusp between humanity and subhumanity. Although a higher form of life than cattle, they are unable to reason. They are thus strangers to the civilized life of the polis, and can achieve human status only vicariously by submission to their fully human masters.
The theory of natural slavery had an immense impact on medieval thought, both in the Islamic world and in Christian Europe. The idea that certain people are naturally suited for slavery was to have tragic historical reverberations for many centuries after Aristotle’s death in 322 BCE. It was invoked by Muslim thinkers like the philosopher Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna) and the jurist al-Andalusī to justify the horrors of the trans-Saharan slave trade, and by the Spanish conquistadores and English colonists to justify the conquest and enslavement of Native Americans (I will explore these topics in Chapter Four).17
The distinction between essence and appearance was an important component of philosophical thought, and in conceptions of subhumanity, long after Aristotle’s death. Thus, the fifth-century philosopher and theologian Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, an Algerian Berber better known as Saint Augustine, assured his fellow Christians that a person’s physical appearance has no bearing at all on their human status and spiritual worth.
[W]homever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast. We can distinguish the common human nature from that which is peculiar, and therefore wonderful.
He continued in a vein that would do any twenty-first-century multiculturalist proud, asserting that “God … sees the similarities and diversities that can contribute to the beauty of the whole.”18
Aristotle and Augustine both denied that looking fully human is the same as being human, but they approached it from opposite directions. Aristotle urged that a being that is indistinguishable from a fully fledged human being may yet be less than fully human, whereas Augustine proposed that peculiarities of appearance have no bearing on one’s humanity. In spite of their differing emphases, these positions are two sides of a single coin. Both are derived from the distinction between appearance and essence.
The next important contribution to the theory of dehumanization came from Boethius, a Roman philosopher born into an aristocratic Christian family around the year AD 480, ab
out fifty years after Augustine’s death. While Boethius was still in his forties, and at the apex of a stellar career in government and scholarship, he was arrested, charged with treason, and sentenced to death. Sitting in a cell on death row, awaiting execution, Boethius wrote his masterpiece, The Consolation of Philosophy, which became one of the most widely read, and influential, works in European literature for the next millennium.
The Consolation unfolds as a conversation between Boethius and Lady Philosophy, a spiritual guide who leads him from ignorance to enlightenment, teaching him that misfortune is a blessing and that earthly happiness is ephemeral and illusory. At one point in their dialogue, Lady Philosophy explains to Boethius that wicked people lose their humanity. “All that falls away from the good,” she assures him, “ceases also to exist, wherefore evil men cease to be what they were.” She goes on to say that such men have “lost their human nature” and that “you cannot hold him to be a man who has been … transformed by his vices.”
Even though evil people resemble human beings, they have lost the inner spark that makes one human. But if wicked people aren’t really humans, then what sort of beings are they? Boethius approaches his answer obliquely, by way of a discussion of the role of animal imagery in everyday speech.
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