Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  Increased contact between tribes encouraged people to adopt markers to signal their ethnic affiliation. Archaeological deposits dating from the Upper Paleolithic onward contain beads and pendants made from shells, animal teeth, ivory, and ostrich eggshells, and carved figurines show hairstyles and body decoration (perhaps tattooing).35 University of Arizona archaeologists Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner observe that this “implies an expansion in the scales of human interaction,” and that people were “finding it necessary and advantageous to broadcast their identities to larger numbers of people spread across a more complex network of groups.”

  Increasing populations … changed the social landscape, putting nearly everyone in more frequent contact with strangers. This heightened level of interaction fostered heightened sensitivity to group boundaries as a means of delimiting and defending territories.… In an ever more complicated social landscape, there are many advantages to communicating one’s identity effectively and to as many other people as possible. Such conditions in turn encouraged the development of novel modes of communicating social information, including body ornamentation. Thus began the first stages of the information revolution.36

  Do you remember Francisco Gil-White’s theory of the origin of folk-sociology that I described in Chapter Six? Gil-White hypothesized that, as tribal groups began consolidating ethnic identities and adopted ethnic markers, this affected how they conceived of one another. Tribes now “looked” like biological species to the human brain, and people began thinking of tribal groups essentialistically. So, if Gil-White’s theory is correct, it looks like intuitive folk-sociology may have first got going during the Upper Paleolithic revolution.

  Let’s pause to recap the story before adding the final pieces. It begins six and a half million years ago with a chimpanzee-like progenitor—a violently xenophobic ape. This primate handed down its violent propensities to its descendents, including Homo sapiens. Thanks to the evolution of language, Homo sapiens became capable of second-order thought, and for the first time could wonder about what makes humans human. This led to the idea of a human essence that all people share. The idea that all people share an essence softened the line drawn between in-group and out-group. People began to develop friendly relations with other communities. This led to the invention of trade, which further accelerated the spread of culture. As population density increased, and contact between cultures became more and more frequent, tribes adopted ethnic markers—distinctive forms of dress, behavior, and adornment—to signal their ethnic identity. Finally, this led to the notion of ethnoraces—essentialized human groups—as the folk-biology module began to respond to ethnic groups as though they were biological species.

  This all sounds very nice, but there was a worm lurking in the apple. The dominance drive inherited from our primate progenitors didn’t simply vanish. Our Stone Age ancestors still had a deeply rooted tendency to treat outsiders with hostility, and to kill them when the opportunity arose. We know this from images of carnage in prehistoric art. Archaeologist Jean Guilaine and paleopathologist Jean Zammit explain that:

  A loose pebble from the Paglicci cave in the southeast of Italy was found to have been engraved with … a humanlike figure which has been struck by several spears from the head down to the pelvis.… In Cougnac (Lot, France), a decapitated body is shown, struck in the back by three projectiles, whilst another individual has been struck by seven spears all over his body. In the Pech-Merle cave in Cabrerets (Lot, France), one individual is shown having been hit by arrows all over his body, both from the front and from behind. In Combel, part of the same network of caves, a human-like figure with an animal-shaped posterior … can be seen collapsing, after having sustained several injuries. A carving upon a bone from Gourdon (France), showing only the pelvis and legs of a human figure … shows several arrows penetrating the victim’s legs and rear. Also of interest is a rock engraving discovered in the cave at Sous-Grand-Lac (France).… The engraving shows a figure injured in both the neck and back by a number of projectiles. Arrows appear to have struck this individual’s posterior and penis.37

  This is how our ambivalence toward violence began. The new fellow feeling born of a sense of a common humanity took its place alongside the older xenophobic sensibility. On one hand, we are disposed to carve the world into them and us and take a hostile stance toward outsiders. On the other hand, we think of all people as members of the human community and have a powerful aversion to harming them. Dehumanization offered an escape from this bind. By a feat of mental prestidigitation we discovered a method for counteracting inhibitions against lethal violence by excluding our victims from the human community.

  But there is still an ingredient missing from the mix. Dehumanization can’t occur without the concept of subhumanity, and it’s not clear that Paleolithic people had any such notion.

  There are some clues in Paleolithic art. Nonhuman animals are painted and carved naturalistically and with an exquisite attention to detail, while humans are usually portrayed in a highly stylized way. This stylistic contrast suggests that the people of the Upper Paleolithic set humans apart from other animals, but this tells us nothing about the relative value that they attributed to humans and nonhuman animals. Perhaps noting differences between how humans and animals were treated will give us something more to work with. Animals were routinely hunted, slaughtered, and eaten. Their pelts were used to make clothing, their hides were processed to make leather, and their bones and teeth were used for ornaments. Human beings weren’t treated in this way. Although cannibalism may have been practiced during the Upper Paleolithic, it wasn’t routine, and artifacts made from human bones are uncommon. Humans ceremonially buried their dead rather than leaving their carcasses to rot. These facts suggest that prehistoric people considered humans to have greater moral value than nonhuman creatures.

  It looks like human beings started to dehumanize one another at some point during or after the Upper Paleolithic period. This may have been quite recent, as the earliest unequivocal examples of dehumanization date from the second millennium BCE. If I am right, dehumanization caught on because it offered a means by which humans could overcome moral restraints against acts of violence. Because the folk-sociological thinking was already in place, ethnic groups were conceived as pseudospecies, each of which was imagined to have a unique essence that distinguished it from all the others. It was but a short step to imagine that some of these pseudospecies possessed a subhuman essence. This made members of the group seem like subhuman animals and therefore legitimate targets of violence. By selectively dehumanizing other communities, humans found a way to get around their ambivalence. They could selectively exclude ethnic groups from the charmed circle of a common humanity, slaughter them, and take their possessions, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of trade and affiliation with others.

  PREY, PREDATORS, AND UNCLEAN THINGS

  I mentioned near the end of Chapter Seven that nobody dehumanizes others by imagining them to be appealing animals. The animal has got to be one that elicits an aggressive response. In earlier chapters, I hinted that dehumanized people are often perceived either as predators or parasites. In the remainder of this chapter, I’m going to discuss the phenomenology of the main forms of dehumanization, and provide a few examples of each to underscore some of their salient characteristics.

  Sometimes dehumanized people are thought to be a despised or hated “animal” of no determinate kind. However, they are more often represented as any of three kinds of creature: dangerous predators, unclean animals, or prey. There are occasional departures from this pattern, but for the most part, it is surprisingly robust across both time and place.

  Let’s start with unclean animals—vermin, disease organisms, and parasites. If you are like most people the sight of a bowl seething with maggots is stomach-turning. The reaction of disgust is accompanied by a peculiar sense of threat. The fear isn’t that the animal itself can inflict harm—the fear of maggots isn’t like the fear of
poisonous snakes or snarling dogs. Rather, it’s the fear that they can contaminate one with something harmful. That’s why we are repelled by the prospect of “unclean” animals touching us, or even coming into contact with objects that we touch. Sometimes it feels like the mere sight of them can pollute us, as though their filth could enter our bodies through our eyes.

  Disgust appears to be a uniquely human trait. Other animals reject food that they do not like, but they don’t show signs of revulsion like humans do. Some think that this is because things that elicit disgust—things like bodily fluids, rotting carrion, and a variety of animals—do so because they are unpleasant reminders of our animal nature, but it seems more plausible that humans alone experience disgust because humans are the only animals able to reflect on their distasteful experiences. Coming into contact with something nasty is one thing—thinking of it as nasty is quite another.

  People have an intuitive theory of contamination. We not only conceive of certain things as revolting, we also attribute their foulness to pollutants that they contain—pollutants that can get inside us and damage or even kill us if we come into contact with them. Although the propensity for disgust is innate, culture plays a huge part in determining what sorts of things elicit it. Even though you would probably find it extremely difficult to eat a piece of food crawling with maggots, until quite recently, both Europeans and Americans savored maggoty cheese. The English writer Daniel Defoe, who lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recorded that a Stilton cheese from Huntingdonshire was brought to the table “with mites and maggots round it, so thick, that they bring the spoon with them for you to eat the mites with as you do the cheese.”38 The practice was still popular in 1940, when Yale zoologist Alpheus Hyatt Verrill was amused to observe that:

  Grasshoppers, crickets, grubs, caterpillars, are all eaten with gusto by some races, and although few of our people could be induced to much as taste such viands, yet we eat maggoty cheese and pay fancy prices for it. But the very same persons who like cheese fairly alive with “skippers”* would be nauseated at the thought of swallowing an apple worm, a corn-borer caterpillar, or eating a wormy chestnut or weevil-infested cereal.39

  Likewise, animals regarded in one culture as unclean may be seen very differently at other times and places. Take dogs. To contemporary Americans and Europeans, dogs are man’s best friend, but in some parts of the world they’re regarded as irredeemably disgusting. Dog ownership has been denounced as “depraved” by clerics in present-day Iran.40 The Bible contains a number of disparaging references to dogs. For example, Paul warns the Christian community in Philippi to “watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.”

  Dehumanized people are often seen as dangerous, unclean animals: creatures like rats, worms, lice, maggots, dogs, and bacilli. They evoke a feeling of horror (disgust mixed with fear), and arouse the urge to exterminate the offending creature. This form of dehumanization is often specifically linked to genocide. Recall Himmler’s speech at Poznan: “We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people to destroy this people.… We do not want, in the end, because we have destroyed a bacillus, to be infected by this bacillus and to die. I will never stand by and watch while even a small rotten spot develops or takes hold.” Think of the swarms of rats in The Eternal Jew, the characterization of Tutsis as cockroaches, and the image of Armenians as tubercular bacilli.

  Because the horror of unclean animals is linked to concerns about cleanliness and purity, and the concepts of cleanliness and purity have a powerful moral resonance, this variety of dehumanization often has a hefty moralistic component, as is exemplified in Himmler’s remark that the German people had “the moral right … the duty” to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The idea of mass killing as an act of moral cleansing is a common genocidal fantasy. The metaphorical connection between physical and moral filth also explains why this form of dehumanization is often associated with religiously motivated violence. An example can be found in the ferocious clashes between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth century, in which each side accused the other of spreading filth and pollution. Natalie Zemon Davis points out in her fine study of religious riots in sixteenth-century France that “The word ‘pollution’ is often on the lips of the violent, and the concept serves well to sum up the dangers which rioters saw in the dirty and diabolical enemy.… For Catholic zealots extermination of the heretical ‘vermin’ promised the restoration of unity to the body social.…”41

  Thinking of people as vermin isn’t limited to genocidal and religious violence. It’s also a feature of ordinary war, especially in situations where there is indiscriminate killing. Thus, J. Glenn Gray tells us that in war the enemy is often “considered to be a peculiarly noxious kind of animal toward whom one feels instinctive abhorrence.”42 The language of war contains many such examples. During the Gulf War, U.S. pilot Col. Richard Wright described the attack by U.S. aircraft on Iraqi supply lines using terms reminiscent of the Rwandan genocide. He said, “It’s almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying, and we’re killing them.” And just after the first battle of Fallujah, U.S. General Richard Myers described the Iraqi city as “a huge rat’s nest” that was “festering” and therefore needed to be “dealt with”—a discourse that conjured up disturbing images of exterminating filthy vermin.43

  Imagining dehumanized people as predators presents quite a different picture. Predators have haunted the human imagination since prehistoric times. That we find them both absorbing and terrifying is evidenced by the box office success of films like Jaws, Jurassic Park, and War of the Worlds. There is a powerful biological subtext to our fascination with these monsters. “Great and terrible flesh-eating beasts,” writes science journalist David Quammen, “have always shared landscape with humans.”

  They were part of the ecological matrix within which Homo sapiens evolved. They were part of the psychological context in which our sense of identity as a species arose. They were part of the spiritual systems that we invented for coping. The teeth of big predators, their claws, their ferocity and their hunger, were grim realities that could be eluded but not forgotten. Every once in a while, a monstrous carnivore emerged like doom from a forest or a river to kill someone and feed on the body.… Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.44

  Our ancestors lived in dread of creatures poised to devour them. The omnipresent possibility of being eaten alive colored their vision of the cosmos, and left an indelible stamp on their cultures. As Barbara Ehrenreich remarks:

  Probably the single most universal theme of mythology is that of the hero’s encounter with the monster that is ravaging the land or threatening the very foundations of the universe: Marduk battles the monster Tiamat; Perseus slays the sea monster before it can devour Andromeda; Beowulf takes on the loathsome, night-feeding Grendel. A psychiatrist might say that these beasts are projections of the human psyche, inadmissible hostilities deflected toward mythical targets. But it might be simpler, and humbler, on our part to take these monsters more literally: as exaggerated forms of a very real Other, the predator beast which would at times eat human flesh.45

  Because of the danger that they posed to human life, predators are traditionally associated with evil. Medieval Christians conceived of hell as a scene of rampant predation. Here’s how one twelfth-century Irish knight described the punishment of the damned.

  Fiery dragons were sitting on some of them and were gnawing them with iron teeth, to their inexpressible anguish. Others were the victims of fiery serpents, which, coiling round their necks, arms, and bodies, fixed iron fangs into their hearts. Toads, immense, and terrible, also sat on the breasts of some of them, and tried to tear out their hearts with their ugly beaks.46

  In medieval iconography the gates of hell are portrayed as an animal’s gaping maw down the souls of the damned (sometimes specifically as the jaws of a crocodile). Augustine
, after all, had proclaimed that “the sinner has been handed over as food for the Devil.”47 This is why when people are dehumanized in accord with the predatory trope they are seen as evil, demonic, bloodthirsty, and even cannibalistic. As we saw in Chapter Three, predatory images like these formed part of the stereotype of Native Americans as “wild Indians” and “bloodthirsty savages.” They were also crucial components of medieval Christians’ picture of Jews. In the art and literature of the Middle Ages, “Jews were given horns, tails, a goat’s beard (the goat was seen as Satan’s disguise), and a noxious odor revealing their descent from the devil.…”

  In passion plays Jews were portrayed as evil demons with horns and tails gleefully and sadistically torturing Jesus as he carried the cross and then mutilating his crucified body. In other plays Jews were shown wearing grotesque costumes, stabbing the Holy Communion, desecrating holy images, conspiring with the devil, and raving like mad dogs. To the medieval mind Jews were not just evil, they were also dangerous and fearful murderers and demons: They slew Christian children to obtain their blood for ancient rituals; armed by Satan with occult powers, they plotted to destroy Christendom and thwart the divine plan.48

  The response to predators is one of terror, rather than horror. The enemy is ferocious, relentless, formidable, and must be killed in self-defense. For example, in one of the earliest references to the use of dogs in warfare, Polyaenus, the second-century author of Stratagems in War, wrote: