Less Than Human

"David Livingstone Smith’s Less than Human . Smith, a philosopher, makes the best case for what you might see as the received opinion, the view that evil most often stems from dehumanisation. He’s also keen to show that the worst atrocities are committed by ordinary human beings, not by people radically different from us. We’ve already mentioned the Nazi propaganda depicting Jews as rats, as somehow subhuman and parasitic, but the same mechanism was going on when the Hutus described the Tutsi as cockroaches as a prelude to the Rwandan genocide , and so on for countless other cases. “Without the distance of dehumanisation, real evil would be impossible for most of us. ” Part of what Smith argues is that it is very difficult for most of us to kill or torture another person, and that we need to get away from the other person’s humanity in order to do that. Without the distance of dehumanisation, real evil would be impossible for most of us. So dehumanisation is a way of overcoming those inhibitions, and that’s the path to genocide. Yes. And I agree with Smith that much evil does arise from this. But that’s not the whole story. As I’ve suggested, some violence and cruelty relies on actually recognising people’s humanity. For instance, in parts of Europe racist fans throw bananas at African footballers or call them monkeys. But they obviously don’t literally believe that they’re monkeys: they wouldn’t go after a monkey and shout ‘monkey’ at it. These racists might seem to be dehumanising the footballers, but a different way of seeing this is to recognise that the taunts would only work on the assumption that the footballers can feel shame and anger at being described that way. The taunts can only work as taunts because the racists recognise the players’ humanity."