The hierarchical framework detailed in Chapter 6 is supposed to objectively represent the order of nature, rather than being merely a description of subjective perspectives and values. So, explicitly or implicitly buying into it, as virtually all of us cannot help doing, involves accepting that human beings really do have greater intrinsic value than mosquitos do—and not merely that we humans happen to be strongly prejudiced in favor of our own kind over mosquitos.
Given that the Great Chain of Being purports to describe the order of nature, it is important to be clear what is meant by the concepts “order” and “nature” to fully get the sense of it. The concept of the “order of nature” refers to the way that the universe is organized. In the hierarchical paradigm, this “order” can be mapped along two dimensions: a horizontal dimension and a vertical one. The horizontal dimension segments the world into an array of mutually exclusive natural kinds—plants, animals, humans, and so on. It is supposed to be complete, in that it encompasses—or is capable of encompassing—every existing natural kind. The vertical dimension intersects with it, and consists of the relations of superiority, equality, and inferiority that obtain between these horizontal categories. That the world includes humans and mosquitos has to do with its horizontal structure, while the idea that humans exist on a higher metaphysical plane than mosquitos do is an aspect of its vertical structure. In the passage from the book of Genesis I quoted in Chapter 6, God’s creation of “the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” represents the horizontal aspect of the order of nature. And God’s creation of humankind to “rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” refers to its vertical aspect.
What about the concept of “nature”? I have heard scientists and quasi-scientists ridicule the benightedness of humanistic scholars who say that “nature” is a social construction. But they are wrong to do this. They incorrectly assume that in making this claim, humanists are claiming that world of living things is a human invention. But that is not the point. The point is that nature is not a natural kind. It is not on a par with things like species, organs, or patterns of interaction between organisms, which are natural kinds. Rather, “nature” is part of a conceptual, interpretive scheme that is imposed on the world (rather like lines of latitude and longitude are imposed on the globe). It is a term that gets put to a variety of uses to organize our large-scale conceptions of the world and the place of human beings and other organisms within it. And importantly for the theory of dehumanization, it is often an ideologically loaded concept that is used to justify racialized and gendered relations of dominance.
There is not just one concept of nature. There are several of them, and they are easy to conflate. John Stuart Mill wrote about this issue in a posthumously published essay entitled “On Nature,” where he disentangled three distinct meanings of the term. Mill pointed out that sometimes “nature” is used as “a collective name for everything which is.” In this sense, everything is natural—not just birds and bees and butterflies, but also social constructions such as dollars and Thursdays. But, he observed, the concept of nature is also often used in a more restricted sense to refer to only those things that are untouched by what he called “voluntary human intervention.” In this sense, birds, bees, and butterflies are all natural, but dollars and Thursdays are not. Mill’s final distinction is a normative one—one that is concerned with how things should be rather than how they are (of course, this leaves open the possibility that some things are as they should be—but it is the element of “shouldness” that is important here). In this sense, Mill remarks, “Nature does not stand for what is, but for what ought to be, or for the rule or standard of what ought to be.”1
To appreciate what Mill was getting at, it is helpful to contrast each of these senses of what is natural with its corresponding conception of what is nonnatural. Starting with the first of Mill’s meanings, if nature consists of all that exists, it excludes only those things that do not exist; a line is drawn between the natural world—the real, existing world—and fictional worlds. Unicorns are nonnatural in this sense. This way of thinking about the natural lures us into the notion of “spooky” entities. To say that unicorns are nonnatural entities might suggest that they are entities with the property of not existing. After all, saying “unicorns do not exist” seems to be saying something true about unicorns—but to say something true about unicorns seems to require that there are unicorns to say something about! So maybe unicorns are real in a strange way: maybe they “subsist” rather than exist, or maybe they exist “in your consciousness” or supernaturally, or maybe they graze in meadows on some possible worlds but not on the actual one. There is been a river of philosophical ink spilled over the centuries teasing out exactly what confusions are at work in these putative solutions to what turns out to be a semantic problem.
Mill’s second meaning, that nature includes only those things that have not been created or modified by human hands, excludes all artifacts (using “artifacts” very broadly to include such things as dog breeds and anthropogenic climate change),2 so in this case the contrast is between the natural things and artificial things, rather than between real and fictional things. There are positively and negatively valenced versions of this idea. We find it in the notion of “raw nature”—the idea of the natural as crude, primitive, or unrefined (think of Hobbes’s “state of nature,” and Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw”). Used in this sense, it has often been used to characterize marginalized or colonized groups (for example, women, Black people, and Native Americans) as “closer to nature” in the sense of being savage, primitive, or driven by their impulses, emotions, or appetites. More positively, it is used to refer to things (or people) in their primal, uncorrupted state (think organic food, Mother Nature, and the notion of the noble savage).3
Finally, Mill’s third meaning is a normative conception that distinguishes between the natural and the unnatural. In this sense, the unnatural is that which should not be. This includes both things that should not be (the horizontal dimension of the natural order) and relations that should not obtain between existing things. The normative conception may at first be more difficult for readers to relate to than the other ones, because the very idea that there are ways that the world should be that are not dictated by human preferences and values is far removed from the picture of the world that is presented to us by science. But it is such an important component of the sort of hierarchical thinking that I am concerned with here that it will be useful to make sure that its meaning is clear.
One way to get a handle on the normative conception is to view it through a religious lens. Many religious people hold the view that a benevolent deity created the universe and therefore that the structure and workings of the cosmos manifest the Creator’s intentions. Many of the same people believe that God endowed human beings with freedom of the will, which empowers them to perversely turn their back on God’s intentions and to manage their lives and the world around them in ways that are contrary to His plan. From this perspective, such people are, in defying God’s laws, living unnatural lives. The taboos itemized in the book of Leviticus and the homophobic and transphobic beliefs of some present-day religious fundamentalists are inspired by such a conception of nature.
Although the normative conception of nature is tied historically to an explicitly theological conception of natural law, it is detachable from a religious worldview. There are plenty of examples of thoroughly secular versions of it. Consider attitudes to genetically modified organisms. There are reasonable scientific concerns about the effects of creating genetically modified organisms, but popular opposition to genetic engineering is very often not based on these. People often have a gut reaction of horror at the prospect of transgenic organisms that is rooted in the idea that there is something profoundly wrong, in a deeply moral sense, with efforts to “tamper” with nature. In the case of genetic engineering, transgenic organisms seem to violate the natural order by transgressing the boundaries between natural kinds. For example,
In a US survey, more than half of the respondents did not reject the idea that tomatoes of which the genome had been modified by insertion of catfish DNA would taste like fish. Apparently, people assumed that the fish’s essence had been introduced into these tomatoes, including a fishy taste. That people systematically prefer cisgenic over transgenic organisms provides another indication of an essentialist bias. In their campaigns, opponents of GMOs explicitly appeal to these essentialist intuitions by distributing edited images of tomatoes with fish tails or by claiming that biotech companies insert scorpion DNA elements into corn (Zea mays) to produce crispy cornflakes.… Indeed, genetic engineering is considered to be the opposite of ‘natural’. GMO opponents accuse scientists who produce transgenic plants of ‘playing God’ and condemn their acts as ‘against nature’.4
Similarly, the prospect of growing meat in a laboratory for human consumption, or of producing human / nonhuman chimeras, often elicits intense repugnance—for which no real reason other than “because it is unnatural” can be adduced. The examples that I have just given pertain to unnatural beings, but certain sorts of relations between natural beings can also fall under the shadow of unnaturalness. For instance, in rigidly segregated societies, interracial sex and marriage are seen as unnatural, and therefore as profoundly abhorrent. Systems of oppression are typically predicated on the idea that different kinds of human beings have their preordained place in the natural hierarchy of human kinds. There is an immensely destructive and politically loaded version of the normative conception of the natural that asserts that there are natural kinds of human beings, each with a distinctive nature, and that in order to lead productive and fulfilling lives, we should each live in accordance with our nature. This general normative principle was laid out by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago when he claimed, “What is by nature proper to each thing will be at once the best and the most pleasant for it.”5 We can see this idea at work in Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, described in Chapter 4, as well as in the subordination of racialized groups, and in the belief that women’s natural role is to be subordinate to men.
The conception of the natural order that undergirds the Great Chain of Being is a place where two of Mill’s meanings intersect. The natural order is not a human creation and cannot be modified by human hands (Mill’s second meaning of “natural”), and it is also a conception of how things should be (Mill’s third meaning of “natural”). Very importantly, it allows for there being natural and unnatural social constructions and practices by the principle that humans should strive to create societies that mirror the order of nature—societies that reflect and enforce an unchanging, transcendent set of categories and relations. The idea underpinning this imperative is that social institutions depend for their authority on something that is deeper than mere human artifice.6 As the anthropologist Mary Douglas points out, “Before it can perform its … work, the incipient institution needs some stabilizing principle to stop its premature demise. That stabilizing principle is the naturalization of social classifications. There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement.”7
Consider gender hierarchy. The idea that women are naturally inferior to men not only legitimates the social subordination of women, but also makes their oppression obligatory. The ideology works like this: if it is natural for women to be subservient to men, and if human beings can live harmonious and fulfilling lives only if they live in the way that nature intended, it follows that men and women can lead harmonious and fulfilling lives only if women are subservient to men. Seen from this perspective, any woman who rejects patriarchy misunderstands her true nature and will be unable to lead a fulfilling female life unless and until she comes to accept her natural destiny. And any man who likewise rejects patriarchal norms is a deviant being who will be doomed to a life of unhappiness.
Of course, given that the whole idea of a normative natural order is false, the assumption that societies are structured to reflect that order inverts the direction of the causal arrow. Rather than social arrangements being fashioned to reflect the transcendent cosmic order, beliefs about a transcendent order are fashioned in such a way as to mirror and thereby justify social and political structures. We project ideological formations onto the world, and then use this to legitimate the relations of domination in the societies in which we live, or sometimes to justify changing those societies so as to bring them into closer alignment with that imagined order.
An easy and rather hackneyed riposte to the claim that the social order should embody the order of nature is to invoke Hume’s law that how things are does not tell us how they should be. But this totally misses the mark, because the conceptions of the natural order that ground oppressive social arrangements are themselves normative. Those who, for example, try to justify the subordination of women by claiming that this is the natural state of affairs do not make the mistake of fallaciously deriving an “ought” from an “is.” Rather, they take themselves to be deriving a social “ought” from a deeper and more authoritative metaphysical “ought.” The real problem with this way of thinking is not the logical fallacy of thinking that “is” statements entail “ought” statements. The problem is that there is no justification for the claim that nonartificial hierarchies of the relevant sort exist, much less that such nonexistent hierarchies dictate how things should be.
Having laid all this out, I can now address the difficult question of why the hierarchical conception is so robust, pervasive, and psychologically compelling. Because psychologists have neglected this topic, I do not have an extensive empirical research literature on which to draw, and my story will of necessity be somewhat speculative—but it is also quite plausible in light of what we know about ourselves.
I begin with what the philosopher Bernard Williams called “the human prejudice,” which is a term that he used to describe our tendency to regard human beings as positively special and as inherently more valuable than other organisms. It is obvious that, were it not for the human prejudice, dehumanization could not get off the ground, because in that case conceiving of other human beings as rats or lice would not be conceiving of them as less than human. Williams referred to this attitude as a “prejudice,”8 but most people seem to think of human specialness as an unassailable fact and so obviously true that questioning it is more or less on the same intellectual footing as questioning that the earth is round. But of course, defenders of the view that it is objectively true that humans possess a special moral status must, if they are intellectually responsible, have some way of justifying their position. For centuries, this was done theologically: humans are special because God chose to make them special. But this theological story no longer carries as much weight in a secular age—which is why, ever since the Enlightenment, thinkers wanting to account for the specialness of human beings have tried to ground it in natural characteristics that all members of our kind possess, and that all other creatures lack or possess only to a lesser degree. Beginning in the ancient world, we find the idea that the special moral status of human beings is due to their unique moral sensibilities. Aristotle wrote in the Politics that “it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, just and unjust,”9 and he also emphasized rationality as demarcating human beings from all the other forms of life. Two centuries later, Cicero developed the theme further:
It is relevant to every aspect of obligation always to focus on the degree to which the nature of man transcends that of cattle and of other beasts. Whereas animals have no feeling except pleasure, and their every inclination is directed towards it, human minds are nurtured by learning and reflection; and enticed by delight in seeing and hearing, they are constantly investigating something or performing some action.… Moreover if we are willing to reflect on the high worth and dignity of our nature, we shall realise how degrading it is to wallow in decadence and to live a soft and effeminate life, and how honourable is a life of thrift, self-control, austerity and sobriety.10
Next, the torch passed to Medieval philosophers, who were saddled with the unenviable task of squaring classical Greek and Roman philosophy with Christian doctrine. They accounted for humans’ superior status in much the same way that Aristotle and Cicero (and other classical thinkers) had, but with the crucial addendum that we possess the rational faculty by virtue of having been created in God’s image. Thus, in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologicae, “Since man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature, he is the most perfectly like God according to that in which he can best imitate God in his intellectual nature.”11 The trend continued over the next four or five centuries. Then, during the Enlightenment, justifications for the elevated moral status of humans took a different turn. They were resecularized, and to this day rationality and freedom of the will—whether divinely implanted or not—have been the prime candidates for underwriting human exceptionalism.
Examined closely, all of these explanations sound like rationalizations for unwarranted convictions. It is true that humans are rational deliberators. We can use higher-order thought to weigh up the pros and cons of courses of action and decide which path to take, and we can evaluate the evidence for and against claims and decide what to believe on that basis. And it is also probably true that this ability is uniquely human, or at least possessed by other animals only to a very rudimentary degree. But there is a problem with arguing that a fancy kind of rationality is the sine qua non for human dignity, because of what philosophers call “the problem of marginal cases.” Not all human beings are blessed with the capacity to reason. Infants and severely cognitively impaired individuals do not have access to it (in fact, there are some chimpanzees that are more adept at practical reasoning than some humans are). So, either these people get excluded from the category of the human, or the criterion of rationality needs to be exchanged for something more promising. The first option is a dehumanizing one, and therefore should not be on the table, and the problem with the second one is that no matter what distinguishing characteristic or characteristics one might choose, there are always going to be some humans who slip through the definitional net, as well as some nonhumans that are captured by it.12 And it will not do to resort to grounding human exceptionalism in one’s “intuitions” and assert that our special status is self-evident. “Intuition” is just philosophical jargon for cognitive bias, and relying on one’s biases to lead one to the truth is a fool’s errand.
It is worth reflecting on the fact that, even if something close to a watertight justification for human exceptionalism were to be found by some clever philosopher (and believe me, there are many clever philosophers working hard to do just that), this would not provide any explanation for our anthropocentric prejudice. Instead, it would be a post hoc excuse for it. Williams’s characterization of our attitude as a “prejudice” is right on the money, and we need to turn to psychology, rather than philosophical speculation, to come to grips with it.
Why do we tend to think of human beings as superior to other organisms? The most obvious place to begin is with the suite of attitudes known as in-group / out-group biases. Psychological research confirms that people tend to be biased in favor of members of their in-group—the group that they identify with—and biased against members of out-groups. The idea of in-group / out-group bias goes back at least to the seventeenth-century writings of David Hume and was first applied to relations between ethnic groups by the Yale political scientist (and social Darwinist) William Graham Sumner. It was Sumner who popularized the term “ethnocentrism,” which he defined as “the technical name for the view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.”13 The tendency toward in-group favoritism certainly seems to be a robust component of human nature. It is found in many other social animals, too. Chimpanzees, for example, are notorious for attacking and killing members of neighboring groups that stray into their territory and sometimes conduct lethal incursions into the territory of other groups.14
However, in-group / out-group biases do not give us what we need for understanding the human prejudice, because citing these biases does not explain our tendency to place human beings in general high up on the natural hierarchy. The biases that are studied by social psychologists concern attitudes toward other human beings, rather than toward other kinds of organisms. In-groups and out-groups are human groups. So, although there is a tendency to think of in-group members as having greater intrinsic value than their out-group counterparts, this does not have any direct bearing on our evaluation of other creatures.
To grasp the nature of the human prejudice, we must turn to some facts about human sociality and their psychological ramifications. We humans are ultrasocial animals. No other mammal comes anywhere near to our extraordinary degree of sociality. Homo sapiens live in nested and interlocking social groups and depend upon high levels of mutual trust and cooperation to survive and flourish. And these bonds of cooperation are not just with members of immediate communities, but also with members of vastly wider networks, including, remarkably, complete strangers. Brian Hare and Vanessa Wood point out that our sociality does not only exceed that of other primates in degree. It is also different in kind.
What allowed us to thrive while other humans went extinct was a kind of cognitive superpower: a particular type of friendliness called cooperative communication. We are experts at working together with other people, even strangers. We can communicate with someone we’ve never met about a shared goal and work together to accomplish it. As you would expect, chimpanzees are cognitively sophisticated in many of the ways humans are. But despite our many similarities, they struggle to understand when communication is intended to help them accomplish a shared goal. This means that as smart as chimpanzees are, they have little ability to synchronize their behavior, coordinate different roles, pass on their innovations, or even communicate beyond a few rudimentary requests. We develop all of these skills before we can walk or talk, and they are the gateway to a sophisticated social and cultural world. They allow us to plug our minds into the minds of others and inherit the knowledge of generations. Homo sapiens were able to flourish where other smart human species didn’t because we excel at a particular kind of collaboration.15
Of all the great thinkers of the past, it was perhaps Thomas Hobbes who most effectively put a finger on the overwhelming significance of sociality in human life. In his 1651 masterpiece Leviathan, Hobbes presented an origin myth, the fable of a primal “state of nature” in which brutish human beings lived solitary lives and were unable to trust and cooperate with one another. He described this condition as one of perpetual conflict and danger, a “warre of all against all,” and famously conjectured: “In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”16
Hobbes offered this thought experiment to motivate and underpin his political philosophy. He used it to argue that any rational being would want to leave the state of nature behind, and would be prepared to sacrifice a portion of their liberty to escape from it. They would, he reasoned, willingly subordinate themselves to “a Common Power to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the Common Benefit” in exchange for security and the many benefits made possible by collective action.17
Whatever its virtues as a thought experiment for political philosophers, Hobbes’s fable does not work as an account of the origins of human social organization. We now know that this primeval state of nature never existed, and that prehistoric humans did not sign on to a social contract to leave it behind. Our remote ancestors were group-living primates since well before our species came into being. Bands of Homo erectus were already cooperatively hunting big game, crafting tools, and transmitting cultural knowledge across the generations two million years before Homo sapiens appeared, and they were descended from a long line of earlier, group-living primate species. But even though it is a fiction, Hobbes’s invitation to imagine a dystopian world where human beings do not cooperate is helpful because it highlights something that we normally take for granted: the degree to which human ways of life are built upon, and are utterly dependent upon, a platform of thoroughgoing sociality.
Given our gregarious nature, and the fact that we are descended from a lineage of social primates spanning many millions of years, it is more than reasonable to think that our minds are endowed with built-in psychological mechanisms that have the function of fostering “ultrasociality.” At a minimum, this entails that we are designed by evolution to regard other human beings as having a special status as compared to other creatures—a robust tendency to value other human beings just because they are human beings.
At this point, you might be wondering how this claim can be squared with the facts about in-group / out-group biases that I alluded to a few paragraphs ago. If other humans have a special value for us, how does this line up with our robust tendency to devalue outgroup members? How can it be reconciled with our ethnocentrism, our xenophobia, and the horrific episodes of mass atrocity that litter our species’ journey through time? How does it comport with the Georgia mob’s torture and execution of Sam Hose that I described in Chapter 1?
The answer to these questions is complex and goes to the heart of the dynamics of dehumanization. Consequently, I will have to defer answering them fully until I have laid down some more theoretical foundations. For now, simply bear two points in mind. First, I do not claim that the human prejudice explains the totality of our attitudes and behavior toward one another. That would be a ridiculous presumption. Second, our attitudes toward enemies and rivals involve recognition of their special status. Our attitudes toward them, however denigrating or antagonistic, are quite unlike our attitudes toward nonhuman animals. Their significance for us is both qualitatively distinct from and quantitatively greater than the significance that we grant to other kinds of living things.18
Human beings manage their social relations through systems of morality. Every human society creates and implements moral rules and norms that define what kinds of behaviors are good, bad, obligatory, permissible, impermissible, and so on. Although the details vary from one culture to the next, and from one historical epoch to another, and although it is not clear whether or not there are fundamental moral principles that are universally shared, it is undeniable that all human beings are born into, and structure their lives in the context of, moral frameworks.19
Morality is not just a matter of doing or failing to do the right thing. Rather, it involves accepting a system of values and beliefs about how one should or should not behave. This involves making distinctions. These are not limited to distinctions between permissible and impermissible acts per se, because in any moral system it is permissible to treat some kinds of entities and objects in ways that it is impermissible to treat others. When I was growing up in the Deep South, it was considered wrong to leave an American flag to fly in the rain. This wasn’t just because doing so violated the US Flag Code, which states, “The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all-weather flag is displayed.” Leaving the flag out in the rain was considered to be an act of disrespecting the flag and thus in violation of the rule that one should respect the flag as a sacred object. In contrast, the shrimp fishermen who lived in my neighborhood would regularly leave their nets out in the rain. The nets were useful and instrumentally valuable, and it was important to take good care of them, but they were not items that merited veneration.
Now consider this. Often, when I am preparing dinner, I go out to my herb garden to pluck some sprigs of thyme for seasoning. In doing so, I tear apart a living thing, and I consider this act of dismemberment to be morally inconsequential. But if one of my neighbors were to catch and dismember a living chipmunk, I would be appalled. Similarly, there are acts that I think are morally permissible, or even obligatory, with respect to chipmunks (for example, culling them) that I would find deeply objectionable if they were meted out to human beings, but—and this is crucially important—I do not think that there are any acts that are morally impermissible with respect to nonhuman animals that it is permissible to perform on human beings. In my eyes, and I am pretty sure in the eyes of most other people, our greatest moral obligations are to members of our own species.20
The same act may be morally acceptable when performed on one kind of thing, but morally unacceptable when performed on another kind of thing. You might quibble with the details of my examples. For instance, you might disagree with my view that culling nonhuman animals is ever morally permissible. Fair enough, but it is the general point rather than the details that matter. Even if you disagree with me about chipmunks, you will likely agree with me that for any sort of realistic moral framework—any moral framework that is actually implemented, as opposed to the conceptual fantasies that philosophers are prone to indulge in—morally significant distinctions must be made between kinds of things.
Compare this human distinction between how different kinds of things should be treated with how other social animals regulate one another’s behavior. Nonhuman organisms respond differentially to different kinds of things. Their survival depends on it. Animals must respond differently to predators and prey, to edible and inedible items, to members of their own species and members of other species, and so on. But for the vast majority of animals, it is implausible that they conceptualize these differentiations as falling under kinds (there is controversy about whether nonhuman primates and cetaceans, and perhaps other mammals, do this). When an owl treats a vole as prey, she does not classify it as prey. The fact that she treats voles differently than, say, rubber doorstoppers, has to do with her responsiveness to attributes that trigger her behavior rather than her determining that voles belong in the “prey” category.
If moral systems have got to involve conceptual distinctions between kinds of things, then only certain sorts of minds can operate within moral frameworks. For a person to believe that it is wrong to cull humans but that it is fine to cull chipmunks, they have got to have the concepts of “human” and “chipmunk.” Most concepts that we use to make moral distinctions are natural-kind concepts—the horizontal dimension of the Great Chain of Being—and the differential value that we impart to members of these kinds (for example, the idea that human lives matter more than chipmunk lives) gives us it is vertical dimension. In short, hierarchical rankings of natural kinds fall out of moral systems, with those that we attribute the greatest intrinsic value to at the top and those that we consider to have the least intrinsic value at the bottom. It is because we are moral animals that we cannot manage to expunge the Great Chain of Being from our conception of the world. Once morality was invented, hierarchy came along for the ride.
I have argued that historians of ideas, unduly influenced by Arthur Lovejoy’s work, have grossly underestimated the pervasiveness and intractability of the idea of natural hierarchy. But although the idea that nature is arranged as a hierarchy is very widespread across times and cultures, it is not universal. Looking carefully at which cultures endorse it and which ones do not reveals something important about the forces that shape the dehumanizing process.
Often, the members of hunter-gatherer societies regard other animals (and even plants) as beings that are very much like themselves. In such cultures, the human / animal difference is considered to be quite superficial, and the relationship between the hunter and the hunted is viewed as cooperative rather than adversarial.21 Often hunter-gatherer groups believe that animals offer themselves to the hunter. On this view, game animals allow themselves to be killed because they want to be killed. This view is often linked to more complex spiritual beliefs—for instance, that animals renew themselves by dying and being reborn in new bodies, or that they seek to join others in the afterlife. For Cree hunters, for example, “there is no radical division of nature from culture or society. The animal world is a part of the same kind of social world that humans inhabit, and in much conversation a social metaphor serves to talk about the whole world.… When asking why an animal went into a trap, or allowed itself to be caught, the Cree answer with similar kinds of reasons for why a human gives food away to another person. That is, because it appreciates the need of the other.”22
Anthropologist Helga Vierich notes, in an account of her fieldwork among the Kua of Botswana, that “a careful tracking, and quiet approach, followed by a swift stab to open an artery in the neck, was the preferred end to the hunt. A prayer of thanks followed, and I was always moved to tears at the quick ritual phrase that ended this tribute, biding the spirit of this creature to wait for the hunter in the unknown dimension where the two would dwell again as kinfolk.”23 This is in striking contrast to pastoral and agriculturally based societies, which tend to buy into the hierarchical ideology. Once plants are domesticated as food crops, and animals are domesticated as walking larders and beasts of burden, the relationship with them changes, becoming less reciprocal and more hierarchical. And this development mirrors the emergence of social stratification. For the most part, foraging societies are egalitarian, and what stratification there exists is based on competence and is collectively endorsed rather than imposed on a subjugated populace. Christopher Boehm explains in his fascinating book Hierarchy in the Forest that the egalitarian way of life is an upshot of a suite of political norms and practices that are aimed at keeping the propensity for despotism in check, but as societies become sedentary, and population pressure increases, there is a transition to hierarchical social arrangements in which the laboring many are subordinated to the rule of the few.24
It is tempting to conclude from this that the idea of a natural hierarchy is a way that stratified societies legitimate inequality. They project their own structure onto the cosmos and then propose that the hierarchical social order is underwritten by the hierarchical order of nature: societies ordered by rank—classes, castes, and other stable relations of domination—justify their existence by appealing to a cosmic framework in which natural kinds are similarly ranked. There is much to be said for this explanation, but it is not yet complete. I will return to it to supply what I believe to be the missing pieces.
We have covered a lot of territory so far, so, before concluding this chapter, I want to underscore six key points that are crucial to bear in mind as we drill down deeper into how dehumanization works the chapters to follow.
First, there are many different conceptions of what dehumanization is in the scholarly literature, and even more in popular, vernacular writings. To theorize dehumanization properly, it is vital not to conflate these various conceptions of it. “Dehumanization,” as used in this book, specifically refers the attitude of conceiving of others as subhuman entities.
Second, although some scholars doubt that dehumanization, in this sense, ever occurs, there is good evidence that people have sometimes thought of other people as less than human. There are explicit claims about the subhumanity of other members of our species that are clearly meant to be taken literally. So, in any particular case of ostensible dehumanization, we should therefore be open to the possibility that it is an episode of real dehumanization.
Third, dehumanization is closely tied to ideas about race. To properly understand the connection between racialization and dehumanization, it is important to have a sufficiently broad notion of what the idea of race involves. In this book, I take the idea of race to be the idea that there are natural human kinds the membership of which is transmitted biologically by descent. Dehumanization is tied to racism, both because racialization typically precedes and facilitates dehumanization, and because dehumanizing thinking has the same form as racial thinking.
Fourth, both dehumanization and racism are informed by psychological essentialism, the tendency to carve the world up into natural kinds and to attribute a unique causal essence to each of these kinds. The idea of causal essences is the idea that there are “deep” properties that are unobservable, possessed by only and all members of a kind, and are causally responsible for observable characteristics that are typical of the kind. Psychological essentialism allows that the appearance of a being can belie its essence.
Fifth, when we dehumanize others, we conceive of them as having a human appearance but a subhuman essence. Dehumanized people are thought of a subhumans passing as humans.
And sixth, the idea of subhumanity presupposes a hierarchical conception of the biosphere, which more perfect beings as “higher” and less perfect beings as “lower.” This idea is often referred to as the Great Chain of Being. Although most scholars think of the Great Chain of Being as an intellectual artefact that was fashioned by Western in late antiquity, evidence suggests that this is incorrect and that the hierarchical conception is an entrenched feature of human moral psychology. This hierarchical conception may be a consequence of morality. Any system of moral rules presupposes a value-infused hierarchical conception of the relation between natural kinds. When we dehumanize others, we conceive of them as having the essence of a biological kind that is ranked lower on the hierarchy than humans are.