I'm going to be speaking with David Livingstone Smith, who's a professor of philosophy at
the University of New England in Maine and also author of the book on Inhumanity, Dehumanization
and How to Resist That.
I really appreciate your time today.
Thank you, David.
So to set the stage for the conversation, when we talk about dehumanization and inhumanity,
there are a lot of ways that we could sort of define those ideas.
But what what do you mean when you talk about that?
Well, dehumanization is a word that's used in so many different ways.
I mean, even in the scholarly literature, what I mean by demonization is the attitude
of conceiving of other people as subhuman creatures.
And in history, there are so many different examples of when we can say that this dehumanization
took place.
There are times where it can take place by people who are trying to justify horrible
acts of violence.
There are times when dehumanization might even be a coping mechanism by someone exposed
to extremely harsh or difficult conditions in some way, shape or form.
What are some of the different ways that in human history this has manifested?
Well, almost always.
Demonization is the product of propaganda.
So it's not something that spontaneously rises in the human mind.
Rather, it's the result of people in positions of power who want us to do terrible things
to one another.
And the paradigmatic example of that is, is genocide.
So if those in power, those who are in positions of authority, can convince us that these others
that they wish us to harm are dangerous, toxic, subhuman creatures that we must destroy in
our own self defense, then that allows us to overcome a very natural resistance.
Human beings have to doing awful things to one another.
I'm thinking of so many of the books I've read about the Holocaust and concentration
camps and the way in which concentration camp guards, SS Nazi soldiers, et cetera, by by
propaganda.
I mean, quite literally, the story that Hitler was telling about, about Jews and and about
some others was about these people are not really human the way we are.
But there's also, interestingly, in some of the memoirs of survivors of concentration
camps, they said they also experienced the sort of dehumanization even of their peers,
which they saw almost as a survival instinct.
Which which is that a different mechanism?
Well, yes, we'd have to go into some detail about what they had in mind.
But certainly people who are the victims of dehumanization are quite aware generally that
they're seen as subhuman creatures.
I mean, we find this in the example of the Holocaust and the two examples that I use
most of my work are the Holocaust, which, by the way, has centuries old roots in European
anti-Semitism.
Jews had been dehumanized since the since the 12th century in Europe and also the brutal
oppression of black people in the United States, particularly in the aftermath of the American
Civil War.
And in both those instances, the victims of demonization.
We're well aware that they were seen as subhuman creatures, monsters, demons, vermin.
As a historical note, what is the is I'm curious whether you're aware of I know of of antisemitism
based on the idea of Jews bringing the plague.
And I'm I don't remember if that's 13th century or 14th century.
Is that the earliest example you're aware of or is there something prior to that?
Well, well, demonization of Jews, we find it sporadically earlier.
So in the Gospel of John, Jews are described as offspring of Satan.
Right.
So that's a very early Christian route of some anti-Semitic ideas.
Right.
So if you're the offspring of Satan, you're demonic.
Yes.
This idea of the demonic Jew persisted.
But it really took a terrible turn during the first crusade when Christians marched
off to to the Holy Land to win it back from the infidel.
And along the way, they decided to attack the infidel in their midst.
Remember, Jews were the only religious minority who were permitted to survive in Europe.
Right.
And it's from this point onward that Jews are racialized.
They're seen as an alien and inferior race and seen as demonic, devilish, biologically
different, even though it was believed that Jewish men menstruated, that Jews had horns
and tails and and so on.
And so it just picks up there.
And then after the bubonic plague of the mid 14th century, it gets really, really, really
bad when it comes to the I guess we would the dehumanizes, so to speak.
Sometimes words or terms like they are monsters, they are animals, et cetera, are applied,
which is in a sense is the dehumanization of the dehumanizes.
Is is that a is that something we should be concerned about doing?
Are the risks of doing that?
Yeah, absolutely.
We should be concerned about that.
Monsters are fictional.
No one is a monster.
Hitler was not a monster, I'm Jewish.
I can say that Hitler was not a monster.
Goebbels was not a monster.
These are human beings.
And it would really benefit us if we considered them as holding up a mirror to what is possible.
For any human being, you know, we are all vulnerable.
There is no vaccination against humanizing attitudes.
Is it is the term dehumanization relevant to I'm thinking back a few months now during
the coronavirus pandemic, the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, gave this viral interview,
I think it was on Fox News where he said something about, listen, I would be willing to sacrifice
myself, I think grandma or so to speak, something like that.
They're willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the economy by which he really
meant the stock market.
Is that a sort of dehumanization that we've seen during coronavirus of when you see a
number, 4000 died or 3000 died and you just sat in your house and worked from home?
It doesn't really feel that that difference of a thousand, you don't feel it in any real
way.
It seems like that's a form of dehumanization.
Some some people would call it demonization.
I prefer a very fine grained notion of what do you immunization is.
So there are a bunch of related attitudes.
But you see, I think if we're to understand what I consider the most toxic form of these
attitudes, which I reserve the term demonization for, we need to get a good understanding of
how it works.
Otherwise we don't have a chance in hell of dismantling it.
Right.
So I would call that callousness.
And of course, what he's saying, in fact, is he's willing to sacrifice the lives, the
life of grandma.
Right.
Grandma and speaking their.
Are are there things you've observed during the pandemic that you would apply the term
dehumanization to?
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
So what's gone on in this pandemic, as is typical, by the way, of earlier pandemics,
is xenophobia.
So the pandemic is blamed on others, racial others.
Race and humanization are very closely tied together.
And then when you start talking about people as disease, as dangerous outsiders, you are
either well on the way towards humanization or actually there.
You see, it's it's not regarded as especially acceptable to call people demons and monsters
anymore.
So we have substitute terms.
They're diseased, they're criminal, they're dangerous, they're bad to the bone.
And what we get in this pandemic and in previous pandemics is an upsurge in that kind of feeling,
which has historically led to all sorts of horrible things.
It seems as though dehumanizing the rhetoric of dehumanization probably has some specific
overlap with authoritarian regimes and authoritarian ism.
Is it can we can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, sure.
So there are two ways that I think the first question to to address is why do immunization
in the first place?
And the reason, I believe, is that human beings being highly social animals have difficulty.
Performing acts of lethal or even sublethal violence in one another, we're just equipped
with these inhibitions.
But those are very inconvenient if you want to oppress and exterminate others.
So.
As I said, people in positions of power of authority can tell us, you know, these others,
they might look like you and me, they might look like human beings.
But really deep down, where it counts on the inside, they're something else.
And that is absolutely typical of authoritarian going on fascist.
It seems almost like a tool that's necessary for such a regime to advance its its propaganda
tool.
And you talked about the role of propaganda and dehumanization early.
It seems that for for authoritarian regimes that dehumanization of the others is necessary
for them to advance their goals.
It's certainly extremely helpful.
I would say may maybe near necessary.
I hesitate to say anything is necessary, but it is certainly it is certainly helpful.
Sometimes the dehumanizing ideology is distributed through a community.
So I as I say, in the first chapter of Honored Humanity, I grew up in the Deep South in the
50s and 60s and there dehumanizing attitudes towards black people.
They were that was in the air.
You breathe, you need a Rush Limbaugh say to propagate these things.
What how casual was the dehumanization when you were growing up in the South?
Oh, it was just it just as you know, we would say the sky is up and the earth is down.
Black people who were not referred to by that word, sure, the winner were seen as filthy.
Subhuman animals, I mean, that was kids in my high school would brag about hunting black
kids with their B.B. guns on weekends for sport.
Hmm.
That's that's and do you was the was there a gradual transition out of that that aligned
with the civil rights era 1964 Civil Rights Act, did it lag that it was a gradual transition,
but also retrenchment?
I mean, these things have not gone away.
Still, we like to think about the new south.
But these are these things take a very, very, very long time to change.
They do not disappear quickly.
They can remain latent, relatively invisible.
For a long period of time, and then the social environment changes a little bit.
Someone in power like our former president gives permission for certain kinds of attitudes
and bang, you know, the Confederate flags are out.
What where where do things like eugenics and phrenology play into this, because on the
one hand, you know, stuff about measuring skull ratios and all this stuff, it in a sense,
it's very human in that we're looking at the minutia of of the characteristics of the human
form.
But it's its use seems to be dehumanizing.
Well, it's actually a bit worse than that.
So if we look at the history of scientific racism in the United States.
Yeah.
During the period when these practices were beginning to flourish, eugenics is a bit later.
But certainly the skull measurement work.
The premier scientific authorities in the country described black people as literally
another species.
They were learned papers on this and mixed race.
People were seen as literally as hybrids between different species.
So these see you see, they're the dehumanizing attitude is endorsed by scientific authority.
It could be scientific authority.
It could be political or it's anyone who has that kind of influence, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that that makes and I know you write about this in the book.
It brings me to the topic of climate change and climate science.
What do you say maybe to the audience?
It's not obvious the connection between dehumanization, the way we've talked about in authoritarian
regimes and so on, and the connection to climate change.
Yeah, well, the the aspect of climate change that's most salient for me and my work on
the organization is that I think catastrophic climate change, which I don't think anyone's
going to do anything about.
I think we're well, too late for that.
And there's insufficient motivation, despite the fine words that are said is going to create
a situation which is a perfect storm for really dangerous forms of demonization.
There will be refugee problems like the world has never known, you know, when when the population
of Bangladesh spills into India.
And resources run short and infrastructures break down.
This is going to generate intense xenophobia and I would put good money on demonizing rhetoric
of the worst, most genocidal sort is the only way to prevent it to prevent the climate refugees
from becoming refugees.
I mean, is there is if that happens, is there really any way to prevent what you're describing?
I'd like to know and I'd like to I'd like to think that there is yeah, we're human beings.
We can we can change our behavior, but we have to know about it.
We have to be aware of it.
We have to be vigilant and there have to be policies in place to help us.
And I just don't think we're awake enough to the possibilities to take the sorts of
steps which will be necessary.
That's one reason I wrote the book.
Demonization is an ongoing problem and.
To do something about it, we have to understand it, we have to understand how it works, why
we are all vulnerable to humanizing propaganda and what steps we might be able to take to
at least constrain it.
The book is on inhumanity, dehumanization and how to resist it.
We've been speaking with the book's author, Professor David Livingstone Smith.
An important topic.
And I appreciate you joining me to talk about it today.
I appreciate you inviting The David Pakman Show and David Pakman Dutkiewicz.