When the monstrous and the bestial Cimmerians made an expedition against him, Alyattes brought out for battle his strongest dogs along with the rest of his force. The dogs set upon the barbarians as if they were wild animals, killed many and forced the rest to flee shamefully.49
When an anonymous eleventh-century Syrian poet wrote “I know not whether my native land be a grazing ground for wild beasts or yet my home!” with reference to the Christian army that reduced the city of Ma’arra to a heap of smoldering rubble and cannibalized its inhabitants, he voiced a sentiment that was felt by many of his compatriots. His contemporary, the Syrian poet-diplomat Usama Ibn Munqidh, confirmed that the view of the crusaders as animals was quite widespread. “All those who were well-informed about the Franj [crusaders],” he wrote, “saw them as beasts superior in courage and in fighting ardour but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.”50
If you are in any doubt about whether the conception of the enemy-as-predator is still relevant today, thumb through the pages of Sam Keen’s book Faces of the Enemy, which shows page after page of propaganda posters representing the enemy as a whole menagerie of carnivorous beasts including tigers, bears, wolves, gigantic spiders, and immense octopuses, or consider the newspaper headlines that I discussed in Chapter One.51 Whenever words like evil, wild, or bloodthirsty start to pepper political discourse, you can be sure that predatory dehumanization is lurking close by.
Finally, we come to the representation of dehumanized people as prey. The image of prey (and ourselves as predators) comes from our ancient legacy of hunting. There is much dispute about exactly when hunting became a feature of human life. In all likelihood, our common ancestor with the chimpanzee hunted, as chimpanzees do today, but the prey that they killed would have provided only a small pant of their diet. However, all parties agree that prehistoric Homo sapiens were accomplished hunters, and that hunting played a central role in their lives, as it does in the lives of many tribal people to this day. There is an obvious metaphorical resonance between warfare and hunting—and therefore a tendency to identify warriors with predatory animals and their enemies as prey. This relationship is displayed, for example, in the symbolic architecture of Homer’s Iliad, which describes how, when Hector entered the fray, “Foam appeared around his mouth and his eyes glowed under his shaggy brows.… He came against them like a destructive lion on cattle.” Likewise Achilles, the golden boy of the epic, is described as a predatory beast; he is a “raw meat eater” raging “against the flocks of men to make a feast.” In contrast, Spartan king Menelaus is depicted as a parasitic fly “beat him off of your skin as often as you like, he goes on biting, and human blood is his dainty dish,” while the Greek commanders are like wolves.
And like the wolves who eat raw flesh, in whose hearts the fury is boundless—who have killed a big-horned stag in the mountains and lap the dark surface of a deep and dark spring with their thin tongues, belching forth blood and gore, with the hearts in their chests dauntless and their bellies glutted—just so did the leaders and rulers of the Myrmidons rush out.…52
Among the Vikings, would-be elite warriors, or berserkers, had to identify with raging bears and go “berserk” (a word that means “dressed in bear-skin”) in battle, howling like animals and biting their shields, and Tahitian warriors were exhorted to mimic “the devouring wild dog.”53
However, dehumanizing the enemy as prey goes well beyond the metaphorical. White settlers in Australia and New Zealand considered the indigenous people as game. Eyewitness Augustus Cutlack described how, during the 1873 Australian gold rush, “Many were the shooting-parties formed and as there was no game to kill it consisted of making repeated attacks on the blacks.” Another eyewitness reported in 1889, “There are instances when the young men … have employed the Sunday in hunting the Blacks, not only for some definite purpose, but also for the sake of sport” (the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian politician King O’Malley argued in parliament that there is no scientific evidence that aborigines are human beings). Similarly, Sir Arthur Gordon, the governor of New Zealand, noted that he had heard “men of culture and refinement” talk of “the individual murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day’s sport, or of having to kill some troublesome animal.”54
Just as hunters preserve trophies of the animals they have killed, warriors have been known to take souvenirs from their human quarry. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Scythian warriors took the heads of the men they killed in battle and then scalped them. “The Scyth is proud of these scalps,” he remarks, “and hangs them from his bridal-rein; the greater the number of such napkins a man can show, the more highly he is esteemed among them.”
Many make themselves cloaks … by sewing a quantity of these scalps together. Others flay the right arms of their dead enemies, and make of the skin, which is stripped off with the nails hanging to it, a covering for their quivers.55
It was once thought that the practice of scalping was introduced to the New World by European colonists. But archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans took scalps and other trophies long before Columbus landed in the Caribbean.
The removal of heads, scalps, eyes, ears, teeth, cheekbones, mandibles, arms, fingers, legs, feet, and sometimes genitalia for use as trophies by Amerindians was an ancient and widespread practice in the New World. Some groups in Colombia and in the Andes kept the entire skins of dead enemies.56
In most cases, we don’t know whether dehumanization played a role in these grizzly practices, but we do have information about the role of dehumanization in the headhunting practices of some cultures, one of which is the Mundurucú of Brazil. The Mundurucú were once an extremely warlike tribe, who regarded all outsiders as enemies. Robert F. Murphy, an anthropologist who lived among them, has noted that “war was considered an essential and unquestionable part of their way of life, and foreign tribes were attacked because they were enemies by definition.” Attacks on other villages took the form of headhunting raids, and in these raids “the enemy was looked upon as game to be hunted, and the Mundurucú still speak of the pariwat (non-Mundurucú) in the same terms that they reserve for peccary and tapir.”57 Closer to home, it’s well known that during the Vietnam War, U.S. servicemen sometimes removed the ears from dead Vietnamese and kept them as trophies (sometimes stringing them to make necklaces). Vietnam veteran Jon Neely recounts how he approached a corpse and “reached down and cut one of the guy’s ears off and poked a hole in it and hung it on a chain.”
I had become, I don’t know, part animal I guess you could call it.… I was enjoying the firefights and enjoying the killing, and at one time I displayed as many as thirteen ears on this chain that I had hanging off my gear. I look back on it now and I wonder to myself, Jeeze, what the heck happened to me?58
I mentioned in Chapter One that similar atrocities were committed in the Pacific theater during World War II, and that they were probably related to Americans’ dehumanization of the Japanese, who were held to be “really subhuman, little yellow beasts.…”59 This happened often enough for the commander in chief of the Pacific fleet to issue an order that “No part of the enemy’s body may be used as a souvenir.”60 Paul Fussell recalls visiting an ex-marine who had fought on Guadalcanal. Upon hearing that Fussell was working on a book about World War II, the veteran produced a shoebox full of snapshots, some of which were pictures of Japanese trophy skulls. One showed a skull mounted on a pole, another showed one displayed on a ruined Japanese tank, and the third was “being boiled in a metal vat, and two marines were busy poking it and turning it with sticks.” One of the two marines was Fussell’s host.
My friend assured me that securing and preserving Japanese skulls was by no means a rare practice, and that it had started on Guadalcanal, at the virtual beginning of the ghastly fighting in the Pacific. Because the marines had not yet learned the full depths of Japanese ruthlessness, this early skull-taking seems to register less a sinking of the
U.S. Marine Corps to the Japanese level of brutality—that would come later—than a simple 1940s American racial contempt. Why have more respect for the skull of a Jap than for the skull of a weasel, a rat, or any other form of mad, soulless vermin?61
There’s something especially disturbing about people being hunted as game. The aversion to it stems from our awareness of the fact that this is killing for the sheer pleasure of it, without any element of self-defense. This is the sort of violent engagement that evokes the “combat high” described earlier in this chapter and explains the attraction of war porn. James Hebron, a U.S. Marine scout-sniper during the Vietnam War, expresses this atavistic impulse with chilling frankness.
That sense of power, of looking down the barrel of a rifle at somebody and saying, “Wow, I can drill this guy.” Doing it is something else too. You don’t necessarily feel bad; you feel proud, especially if it’s one on one. It’s the throw of the hat. It’s the thrill of the hunt.62
We’re now close to the end of the journey. In the next, concluding chapter, I’m going to summarize the major points that I have made throughout the book, and then address one last question.
9
QUESTIONS FOR A THEORY OF DEHUMANIZATION
Having reached the end of his journey, the author must ask his readers’ forgiveness for not being a more skillful guide and for not having spared them empty stretches of road and troublesome detours. There is no doubt that it could have been done better.
—SIGMUND FREUD, CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS 1
I’VE TRIED TO COVER A LOT of territory in this book, and I am left wondering how successful I’ve been at getting the most important points across. So, to bring the story to a conclusion, I’m going to revisit the questions that I raised in Chapter One—questions that I said any adequate theory of dehumanization should address. I’ve covered all but one of them in the intervening chapters, so what I say about them here will amount to a précis. However, there’s one question that I haven’t discussed at all. So, in the final part of this chapter, I’m going to offer some reflections on what is arguably the weightiest issue of them all—the question of what we can do about dehumanization.
What does it mean to think of someone as a human being, and what is it, exactly, that dehumanized people are supposed to lack? Thinking of someone as a human being is thinking of that person as a being with a human essence: an imaginary “something” that all humans are supposed to possess, and which makes them human. A dehumanized person is thought to lack this essence. They are thought of as humanoid or quasi-human beings—as human in appearance only.
What sorts of creatures are dehumanized people imagined to be? Dehumanized people are imagined as subhuman animals, because they are conceived as having a subhuman essence. Even though such people have a human form, this is deceptive, because “inside” they are really something else. They are imagined to have the essence of creatures that elicit negative responses, such as disgust, fear, hatred, and contempt, and are usually thought of as predators, unclean animals, or prey.
What is it about the human mind that enables us to conceive of people as less than human? Our ability to conceive of others as subhuman depends on five features of our psychology. We must have a domain-specific cognitive module for folk-biology, because this is what causes us to intuitively divide up the biological world into natural kinds that we call “species.” Second, we’ve got to have a domain-specific cognitive module for folk-sociology that carves up the human world into the natural kinds called “races.” Third, we’ve got to be capable of engaging in second-order thought, which enables us to reflect on our concepts of species and races. Fourth, we have to conceive of biological species and human races as having unique essences that make them what they are—essences that are distinct from how they appear, that are transmitted from parents to offspring, and so on. And fifth, we need to embrace the idea of a “thick” hierarchy of natural kinds—some version, however crude, of the idea of the great chain of being.
How does dehumanization work, why does it occur, and what function does it serve? Dehumanization is a response to conflicting motives. It occurs in situations where we want to harm a group of people, but are restrained by inhibitions against harming them. Dehumanization is a way of subverting those inhibitions. For a population to be dehumanized they have to be perceived as a race (a natural human kind) with a unique racial essence. The racial essence is then equated with a subhuman essence, leading to the belief that they are subhuman animals. The function of dehumanization is to override inhibitions against committing acts of violence.
Is the dehumanizing impulse universal, or is it culturally and historically specific? Is dehumanization a hard-wired product of our biological evolution, or is it acquired? Nobody knows if dehumanization is universal, but it is very widespread. Although it has a form that cuts across cultures, its content in any given case is culturally determined. Dehumanization is not a biological adaptation. It wasn’t put in place by natural selection and it’s not hard-wired. It’s an unconscious strategy for dealing with psychological conflict.
Now we come to the question that I have not addressed. What can be done about the problem of dehumanization? Given the historical role of dehumanization as the handmaiden to war, genocide, and slavery, it’s obvious that preventing it would be incalculably beneficial. The main problem confronting anyone wishing to address this question is that dehumanization has barely been studied, and consequently very little is known about it. So, we don’t yet have a knowledge base from which to derive practical policies and interventions for limiting or eliminating dehumanization. Given that we don’t now have answers to this pressing question, we need to take one step back and think about what sort of approach is likely to yield such answers. In this book I have assumed that a broadly scientific approach to the phenomenon of dehumanization is the only sensible one. However, there are people who believe that scientific knowledge is irrelevant to developing strategies for combating dehumanization (there are even those who believe that a scientific approach fosters dehumanization by turning human beings into objects of empirical scrutiny). Many such people hold that we know enough on the basis of common sense and that science has nothing to add to this picture, even in principle. In the remainder of this chapter, I’m going to discuss two nonscientific stances toward dealing with the problem of dehumanization, and will argue that neither of them is satisfactory.
My goal is to defend a broadly scientific approach to the problem of dehumanization because this is the only approach that has any chance of succeeding. I am not claiming that science can provide a “cure” for dehumanization, or that a scientific understanding of the dehumanizing process is bound to produce uniformly beneficial results. In fact, I think that any such knowledge is potentially hazardous. That this is more than a bare possibility is suggested by an anecdote in Peter Watson’s book War on the Mind. Watson describes a U.S. Navy project for preparing elite commando units to cope with the “stress of killing” in which an important part of the regimen was training recruits to dehumanize the enemy.
In this last phase [of the training] the idea is to get the men to think of the potential enemies that they will have to face as inferior forms of life. They are given lectures and films which portray personalities and customs in foreign countries whose interests may go against the USA. The films are biased to present the enemy as less than human: the stupidity of local customs is ridiculed, local personalities are presented as evil demigods rather than legitimate political figures.2
This is heavy-handed stuff, but it’s not difficult to imagine that a more sophisticated understanding of how dehumanization works could be exploited for indoctrinating more effective killers. Knowledge is a double-edged sword. If science can yield insights into methods for combating dehumanization, it may also suggest strategies for cultivating dehumanization more effectively. Knowledge is powerless to make people less destructive. However, it can provide the tools to help them become less destructive, if t
hat is what they desire.
Richard Rorty, the late distinguished American philosopher, was one of the very few thinkers to have directly addressed the problem of dehumanization. His essay, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” originally delivered as an Amnesty International lecture in 1993, provides a useful springboard for thinking about the options.3
The essay kicks off with an excerpt from an article by David Rieff published in The New Yorker in November 1992 about the horrific events that were unfolding in Bosnia. “To the Serbs, the Muslims are no longer human,” Rieff observes, “… Muslim prisoners, lying on the ground in rows, awaiting interrogation, were driven over by a Serb guard in a small delivery van.”
A Muslim man in Bosanski Petrovac … [was] forced to bite off the penis of a fellow-Muslim.… If you say that a man is not human, but the man looks like you and the only way to identify this devil is to make him drop his trousers—Muslim men are circumcised and Serb men are not—it is probably only a short step, psychologically, to cutting off his prick.… There has never been a campaign of ethnic cleansing from which sexual sadism has gone missing.4
The moral that Rorty extracts from this harrowing account is that “Serbian murderers and rapists do not think of themselves as violating human rights. For they are not doing these things to fellow human beings, but to Muslims.”
They are not being inhuman but rather are discriminating between true humans and pseudohumans. They are making the same sort of distinction that the Crusaders made between humans and infidel dogs, and Black Muslims make between humans and blue-eyed devils. The founder of my university was able both to own slaves and to think it self-evident that all men were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. He had convinced himself that the consciousness of Blacks, like that of animals, “participate[s] more of sensation than reflection.” Like the Serbs, Mr. Jefferson did not think of himself as violating human rights.5
Less Than Human Page 29
