A leading scholar explores what it means to dehumanize othersÑand how and why we do it. ÒI wouldnÕt have accepted that they were human beings. You would see an infant whoÕs just learning to smile, and it smiles at you, but you still kill it.Ó So a Hutu man explained to an incredulous researcher, when asked to recall how he felt slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Such statements are shocking, yet we recognize them; we hear their echoes in accounts of genocides, massacres, and pogroms throughout history. How do some people come to believe that their enemies are monsters, and therefore easy to kill? In Making Monsters David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isnÕt. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: we believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human. To call someone a monster, then, is not merely a resort to metaphorÑdehumanization really does happen in our minds. Turning to an abundance of historical examples, Smith explores the relationship between dehumanization and racism, the psychology of hierarchy, what it means to regard others as human beings, and why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed. Meticulous but highly readable, Making Monsters suggests that the process of dehumanization is deeply seated in our psychology. It is precisely because we are all human that we are vulnerable to the manipulations of those trading in the politics of demonization and violence.
Author(s): David Livingstone Smith
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
City: Cambridge, Mass
Copyright
Contents
Preface: Something Like a Darkness
1 What Is Dehumanization?
Strange Fruit
Choosing a Conception of Dehumanization
Dehumanization Is Not Just Derogation
Dehumanization Is Not Rhetorical
Animalistic Slurs Do Not Always Express Dehumanizing Attitudes
Dehumanization Is Not Just Metaphorical
Dehumanization Is Not Objectification
Dehumanization Is Not Degrading Treatment
Dehumanization Is Not Conceiving of Others as Inanimate Objects
Dehumanization Is Not a Kind of Harm
Dehumanization Is Not Conceiving of Others as Mindless or Less Human Than Oneself
Dehumanized People Need Not Be Considered as Globally Inferior
Dehumanization Is Not Necessary for Committing Atrocities
2 Dehumanization Is real
Passing Strange
Black Beasts
3 In the Blood
Juice of Very Special Kind
A Folk Theory of Race
4 Eessential Differences
From Soul to Genome and from Genome to Race
Passing
5 The logic of race
Some Methodological Issues
Race, Dehumanization, and Psychological Essentialism
6 Hierarchy
Higher and Lower
Verticality
The Idea of a Natural Hierarchy
The Moral Psychology of Hierarchy
7 The Order of Things
The Human Prejudice
The Hierarchical Mentality
Ultrasociality
Morality
The Politics of Metaphysics
8 Being human
What Are Human Beings?
Natural and Invented Kinds
What Kind of a Kind Is Humankind?
Philosophical Humanness
Psychological Humanness
Political Humanness
9 Ideology
Functional Conceptions of Ideology
Success-Aptness
Accidental Ideologies?
Against Intentionalism
How Ideologies Get Their Purposes
False Consciousness
Ultimate Explanation
Systems, Practices, and Social Ecologies
10 Dehumanization as Ideology
Teaching Contempt
The Turning Point
Racialization
Apparatuses of Reproduction
Thematic Persistence
Geographical Persistence
11 Ambivalence
Ultrasociality
Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress
Pollution
Disabling Inhibitions against Violence
12 Making Monsters
The Problem of Humanity
The Problem of Monstrosity
Ambivalence
Epistemic Deference
Uncanny Dehumanization
Solving the Problem of Monstrosity
13 Last Words and Loose Ends
Partial Humanity
Abortion
Superhumans
Managing Monsters
Notes
Preface
1. What Is Dehumanization?
2. Dehumanization Is Real
3. In the Blood
4. Essential Differences
5. The Logic of Race
6. Hierarchy
7. The Order of Things
8. Being Human
9. Ideology
10. Dehumanization as Ideology
11. Ambivalence
12. Making Monsters
13. Last Words and Loose Ends
Index
