THE ENLIGHTENMENT: DAVID HUME AND IMMANUEL KANT
Many of the Christians do not esteem, not look at us any otherwise, than Dogs.… We are not Beasts as you count and use us, but rational souls.
—THOMAS TRYON, FRIENDLY ADVICE TO THE GENTLEMEN-PLANTERS OF THE EAST AND WEST INDIES31
It wasn’t until over a thousand years after Boethius’s death that anyone made a start at developing a psychological account of dehumanization. The first person to take up the challenge seems to have been the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Hume was a child of the Enlightenment. Born in 1711, he was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an attorney. To this end, he was bundled off to the prestigious University of Edinburgh at the age of twelve, which was precocious even by eighteenth-century standards (the normal university entrance age was fourteen). But Hume despised the study of law. He confessed in an autobiographical sketch that the prospect of becoming a lawyer made him “nauseous,” and that even as a child he was drawn to the life of a scholar and philosopher. After leaving school, and an ill-fated stint as a clerk for a sugar-importing business in Bristol, he suffered a nervous breakdown and retreated to the town of La Flèche in western France for rest and recuperation. While there, Hume wrote his masterpiece, a book that was poorly received during his lifetime but now stands as one of the greatest philosophical works in the English language. It was published in two installments in 1739 and 1740 under the title A Treatise of Human Nature.32
The philosophical thrust of the Treatise was to bring scientific methods to bear on the study of human nature. Science had made tremendous strides in the century or so before his birth, and the momentum of discovery was, if anything, accelerating during his lifetime. There were radical developments in physics, culminating in the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, which explained the variegated phenomenology of the physical world with breathtaking economy and precision (Newtonian theory was so formidable that it was not substantially improved until Albert Einstein came on the scene at the dawn of the twentieth century). Although there were as yet no methods for investigating the microstructure of the physical world, seventeenth-century physicists—or “natural philosophers” as they were then called—speculated that all material objects are composed of miniscule “corpuscles,” the character and arrangement of which determines all of their observable properties, and thus laid the conceptual foundations for particle physics. Practitioners of the new science of chemistry, which had only recently emerged from the hocus-pocus of alchemy, were beginning to understand the principles by which physical substances interact with one another. Advances in optics opened up hitherto undreamed of vistas, from microscopic forms of life to the distant moons of Jupiter. Knowledge was expanding at a vertiginous pace.
Not every discipline was swept along by this torrent of scientific progress. Psychology remained a backwater, virtually stagnant since the days of the ancient Greeks. While still in his teens, Hume recognized that the extraordinary power of science lay in its method, and was convinced that the scientific method is our only hope for unlocking the mysteries of human nature. In Hume’s day, psychology was based on claims that derived their authority either from Christian orthodoxy and the time-honored pronouncements of Plato and Aristotle (especially as viewed through the lens of medieval Christian thinkers), or else from speculative thought uninformed by empirical observation.
Hume thought that this approach was wrongheaded, and argued that psychology ought to free itself from both ancient tradition and armchair speculation. It should “reject every system … however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation,” and “hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience.”33
Hume’s earliest reference to dehumanization is found in a passage from the Treatise. His tantalizingly brief comments appear in a discussion of the origins of love and hate. Hume begins by pointing out that we tend to feel affection toward people who give us pleasure, and aversion toward people who cause us displeasure. “Nothing is more evident,” Hume assures us, in his delightful eighteenth-century English, “than that any person acquires our kindness, or is expos’d to our ill-will, in proportion to the pleasure or uneasiness receiv’d from him, and that the passions keep pace exactly with the sensations in all their changes and variations.” Having made this point, he focuses on a special case of “uneasiness receiv’d.”
When our own nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent: but always esteem ourselves and allies equitable, moderate and merciful. If the general of our enemies be successful, ’tis with difficulty we allow him the figure and character of a man. He is a sorcerer: he has a communication with daemons … he is bloody-minded and takes a pleasure in death and destruction. But if the success be on our side, our commander has all the opposite good qualities, and is a pattern of virtue, as well as of courage and conduct. His treachery we call policy: His cruelty is an evil inseparable from war. In short, every one of his faults we either endeavor to extenuate, or dignify it with the name of that virtue, which approaches it. ’Tis evident that the same method of thinking runs thro’ common life.34
This is an elegant description of what present-day social psychologists call outgroup bias—the tendency to favor members of one’s own community and discriminate against outsiders (otherwise known as the “us and them” mentality). We are more industrious, conscientious, attractive, and so on, than they are. When things go badly for one of us it’s an injustice, but when the same thing happens to one of them it’s because they brought it on themselves. On the flip side, when one of us experiences good fortune, it’s richly deserved, but when one of them benefits from a windfall it’s an undeserved stroke of good luck.
As the quoted passage shows, Hume thought that this principle applies to international relations just as much as it does to everyday life. And he was right. Jerome D. Frank’s 1982 essay “Prenuclear-Age Leaders and the Nuclear Arms Race” lets the facts speak for themselves.
Every so often [Gallup polls] ask their respondees to select from a list of adjectives the ten which best describe members of other nations.… Back in 1942, Germany and Japan were our bitter enemies, and Russia was our ally; and in 1942, among the first five adjectives chosen to characterize both the Germans and the Japanese were: “warlike,” “treacherous,” and “cruel.” None of these appeared in the list for the Russians at that time. In 1966, when Gallop surveyed responses to mainland China, the Chinese were seen as “warlike,” “treacherous,” and, being Orientals, “sly.” After President [Richard] Nixon’s visit to China, however, these adjectives disappeared about the Chinese, and they [were] … characterized as “hard-working,” “intelligent,” “artistic,” “progressive,” and “practical.”35
Hume takes the idea of outgroup bias even further by arguing that sometimes we are so strongly biased against others that we stop seeing them as human beings. He may have had in mind here a remark by his predecessor John Locke, who stated in his Two Treatises of Government (published in 1690, and certainly familiar to Hume) that tyrants “may be destroyed as a lion or tiger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom one can have no society or security.” (This passage is often incorrectly interpreted as a reference to the destruction of American Indians. In fact, Locke probably had the English despot Charles II in mind.) Whatever his source of inspiration, present-day studies of wartime propaganda confirm Hume’s observation. As we have already seen in Chapter One, wartime leaders are often portrayed as dangerous, nonhuman creatures—predators, demons, monsters, and the like. Oddly, Hume doesn’t claim that we perceive enemy leaders as subhuman. His examples seem to imply that we imagine them as diabolically superhuman.36
Sketchy though these comments are, we can see in them the first glimmerings of a psychological theory of dehumanization.
Hume picked up the thread again in his 1751 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. As its t
itle suggests, Enquiry is an analysis of the nature of moral judgment. What exactly goes on when we consider an act to be good or bad, right or wrong? Hume rejected the view that our moral attitudes are based on rules or principles. Instead, he believed that morality is primarily a matter of feeling. More specifically, he argued that our moral judgments flow from a psychological faculty that he called sympathy.
The word sympathy meant something quite different during the eighteenth century than it does today. In Hume’s writings (as well as those who were influenced by him, such as the economist Adam Smith) sympathy doesn’t mean commiseration. Rather, it refers to an inborn tendency to resonate with others’ feelings—to suffer from their sorrows and to be uplifted by their joys (as he colorfully put it in the Treatise, “the minds of men are mirrors to one another”). Our resonance with others evokes feelings of approval or disapproval in us, and these feelings are the basis of our moral judgments. Suppose you were to witness an adult cruelly beating a child, and feel a sense of moral outrage welling up in you. Hume would say that you are “tuning in” to the felt quality of the child’s experience, and that the feeling of moral disapproval is produced by the hurt evoked in you by witnessing the scene.
Our sympathies tend to be unevenly distributed. We care much more for certain people than we do for others. The odds are that a loved one suffering from the flu evokes vastly more sympathetic concern in you than the fact that millions of people live in abject poverty. Hume was well aware of how our sympathies become skewed, and he identified three powerful sources of bias, arguing that we naturally favor people who resemble us, who are related to us, or who are nearby. The people who are “different”—who are another color, or who speak a different language, or who practice a different religion—people who are not our blood relations or who live far away, are unlikely to spontaneously arouse the same degree of concern in you as members of your family or immediate community. But morality can’t play favorites—it has to apply across the board. So, we must bring our biases to heel by adopting what Hume called the “common point of view.” This, too, is accomplished by the power of imagination. We try to detach ourselves from our own limited perspective and, putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, imagine how they would respond to the situation. The resulting feeling of approval or disapproval fixes our moral verdict.
So, what’s the connection between sympathy and justice? First of all, it’s important to understand that when Hume talks about justice, he has quite a narrow purview. He’s concerned with property rights pure and simple, rather than justice in the broader sense of the word. He argues that the demand for justice arises from two facts—one about the world and the other about human nature. The first is that resources are limited: Many of the things that we need and want come in finite quantities, and this makes it impossible for everyone to have as much as they desire or require. The second is selfishness—the raw fact that we tend to favor ourselves over others, and our friends and family over strangers. Greed, writes Hume, is an “insatiable, perpetual, universal” socially destructive feature of human nature. Chaos would reign if we all were left to our own devices, so we adopt rules that “bestow stability on the possession … of external goods, and leave every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may acquire by his fortune and industry.” For in this way “everyone knows what he may safely possess; and the passions are restrained in their partial and contradictory motions.”
Justice becomes a moral issue, rather than simply a pragmatic one, when we take the common point of view and allow sympathy to go about its work. Morality enters the picture to the extent that we are able to emotionally resonate with the circumstances of others, and thereby experience their property rights as though they were our own.37
Having set out his theory of justice, Hume invites his readers to imagine that there is “a species of creatures, intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effect of their resentment.…” If this were the case, Hume asks, how would we behave toward these animals? His answer is disturbing. Although we might “give gentle usage to these creatures,” he says, we would not “lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property.”
Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality; but absolute command on the one side, and servile obedience on the other. Whatever we covet, they must instantly resign: Our permission is the only tenure by which they hold their possessions: Our compassion and kindness the only check, by which they curb our lawless will: and as no inconvenience ever results from the exercise of a power, so firmly established in nature, the restraints of justice and property, being totally useless, would never have place in so unequal a confederacy.38
The thrust of Hume’s reasoning is clear. The purpose of justice is to ensure social harmony. But the nonhuman creatures described in his conceit do not have the wherewithal to participate in human society, and this is why considerations of justice are irrelevant to our dealings with them. Hume next goes on to point out that this isn’t just a thought-experiment, but is “plainly the situation of men, with regard to animals.” Because nonhuman animals cannot participate in human society, the notion of justice is inapplicable to them. It is at this point that dehumanization enters the picture. Hume points out, “The great superiority of civilized Europeans, above barbarous Indians, tempted us to imagine ourselves on the same footing with regard to them, and made us throw off all restraints of justice, and even of humanity, in our treatment of them.”39
To make sense of this passage, we need to do some reading between the lines. The key is Hume’s view of the intimate connection between sympathy and imagination. Hume held that it is only because we can imagine that others are beings like us that we can “enter … into the opinions and affections of others, whenever we discover them.”
Think about this for a moment. As you go through your daily life, you interact with other people, and as you do so, you assume that they are conscious beings with beliefs and desires much like those with which you are acquainted. But what evidence do you have for this? Couldn’t it be that you are the only person in the world with a subjective mental life, while everyone else—including your nearest and dearest—are zombies or fancy automata? That possibility seems absurd; at best, the stuff of schizophrenia or science fiction. Although we don’t presume to know the intimate details of other people’s mental states, we are confident that their experiences, thoughts, feelings, and so on, are more or less the same as our own.
But what’s the source of our confidence? What entitles us to think that others have inner lives? We can’t perceive other people’s experiences, because they are beyond the range of our sense organs. Neither can we vouch for their existence through a process of logical inference. In Hume’s view, attributing mental states to others is the work of the imagination. We recognize that others are outwardly similar to us, and then take the imaginative leap of attributing mental states to them that are broadly similar to our own. This doesn’t have to be a deliberate process. It’s more plausibly seen as automatic. And once it happens, the stage is set for sympathy to kick in.40
However, imagination doesn’t always get things right. In this connection, there are two ways that it can err. One way is by producing anthropomorphic illusions. Hume remarked, “There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.”
We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. Hence … in poetry … trees, mountains, and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.41
<
br /> The second source of error is when imagination tricks us into believing that others aren’t really human, and thereby prevents us from sympathizing with them. Although Hume never propounds this explicitly, his brief discussion of European colonialism seems to imply it. As I understand him, Hume thought that disordered imagination interfered with the colonists’ ability to sympathize with Native Americans. They imagined Indians to be an alien species, and this dissolved their moral restraint.
Hume completes the discussion of colonialism with some remarks on the oppression of women by observing, “In many nations, the female sex are reduced to like slavery, and are rendered incapable of all property, in opposition of their lordly masters.” Women are deprived of justice, but not, it seems, of humanity.42
David Hume wasn’t the only intellectual of his era to condemn the brutalities of colonialism, nor was he unique in recognizing that dehumanization played a role in it. His friend, the French philosopher Denis Diderot, was far more outspoken. “Savage Europeans!” he raged. “You doubted at first whether the inhabitants of the regions you had just discovered were not animals which you might slay without remorse because they were black and you were white.… In order to repeople one part of the globe you have laid waste, you corrupt and depopulate another.”43 The difference between Hume and figures like Diderot is that although Hume condemned colonialism, he wasn’t content just to condemn it. He tried to identify the psychological processes responsible for the colonists’ behavior, and to situate this explanation in a comprehensive theory of human nature.
The next important contributor to the concept of dehumanization was Immanuel Kant, who was arguably the last of the great Enlightenment thinkers. Born in 1724, Kant was an intellectually conservative German academic until he began to read Hume at some point in his forties. This experience opened his eyes and, as he famously put it, “interrupted my dogmatic slumbers.”44
Less Than Human Page 6
