Perpetrators of violence, we’re told, dehumanize their victims. The truth is worse.
The study of human cruelty has a core idea: that acts such as genocide happen when one fails to appreciate the humanity of others. Back in the 1600s missionary Morgan Godwyn observed that slave owners believed the Negroes, “through in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men ” but, rather “Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly.”
Google your favorite despised human group — Jews, blacks, Arabs, homosexuals, and so on — along with words like “vermin,” “roaches,” or “animals,” and it will all come spilling out. Some of this rhetoric is seen as inappropriate for mainstream discourse. But wait long enough and you will hear the word “animals” used even by respectable people, referring to terrorists, or to Israelis or Palestinians, or to undocumented immigrants, or to deporters of undocumented immigrants. Such rhetoric shows up in the speech of white supremacists — but also when the rest of us talk about white supremacists.
The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there is reason to think that it is almost the opposite of the truth.
The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not. Moral violence, whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human. The aggressions licensed by moral entitlement: those things are evident in a wide range of phenomena, from slaveholders’ religion-tinctured justifications to the Nazi bureaucrats’ squeamishness about naming the activity they were organizing, neither of which would have been necessary if the oppressors were really convinced that their victims were beasts.
Philosopher Kate Manne notes that seeing someone as a person makes it possible for that person to be a true friend or beloved spouse, but it also makes it possible for people to be “an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer , etc.” She goes on: “Moreover, in being capable of rationality, agency, autonomy, and judgment, they are also someone who could coerce, manipulate, humiliate, or shame you. In being capable of valuing, they may value what you abhor and abhor what you value. They may hence be a threat to all that you cherish.”
It is important how we think of ourselves as moral agents. We can resent someone, but we can also feel shame at how we treated him or her. Real moral progress may involve studying the forms of doubt and ambivalence that sometimes attend acts of brutality.
The dehumanization thesis has limitations and this is hardly good news. There has always been something optimistic about the idea that our worst acts of inhumanity are based on confusion. It suggests that we could make the world better simply by having a clearer grasp of reality. The truth may be harder to accept: that our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely form seeing others as human.
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Adapted from the article “Beastly,” by Paul Bloom, The New Yorker, November 27, 2017, pp. 74-77.