I’ve said that our instinctive sociality accounts for powerful inhibitions against killing others that are intrinsic to human social life. This may sound strange to you, given the horrendous violence that litters our history. If human beings have inhibitions against killing, how come they manage to regularly prosecute wars and genocides?
Back in chapter three, I explained that there are many different views about exactly what dehumanization is—many concepts of dehumanization. Now I need to introduce a different wrinkle. There are also many views about how dehumanization works—many theories of dehumanization. Two people can have the same concept of dehumanization and yet have different theories of it. Put differently, two people might have exactly the same definition of what dehumanization is and yet have different and incompatible explanations of what causes it or what its function is.
Here’s one theory of dehumanization, one that’s popular but wrong: Some people think of dehumanization as the failure to recognize the humanity of others. Their story goes like this. We encounter people who are obviously very different from us—people who look differently, speak differently, dress differently, and so on, and then jump to the conclusion (based on these highly visible differences) that they belong to a different species. This account, if true, suggests that dehumanization should be fairly easy to eliminate. All that’s needed is to convince dehumanizers that superficial differences aren’t important and that they’re committing a cognitive error when they think that the color of people’s skin or the religion that they practice renders them so wholly other. The problem with this account is that dehumanization isn’t some sort of oversight or blind spot. It is a motivated state of mind. It has a function—a raison d’etre. When Hutu genocidaires hunted down the Tutsi “cockroaches” and “snakes” in the Rwandan bush, it was not because they hadn’t noticed that their victims were human beings. Hutu and Tutsi had lived and worked together for a very long time prior to the genocide. The genocidal killers viewed their victims as subhuman quarry precisely because they were motivated to exterminate them.
Another popular but incorrect theory is that when people conceive of other people as less than human, this is just an alibi to excuse their cruel and destructive acts. But the historical record shows that dehumanization has motivational force. It’s not just a story that people tell to others to let themselves off the hook. It’s an attitude that liberates ferocious aggression, and it only has this effect because perpetrators really do believe that they’re battling subhumans. They often say so, sometimes quite explicitly, and I think that we should take them at their word.
Here’s another misleading assumption. Academics who study dehumanization often claim that dehumanization promotes “moral disengagement”—a kind of distancing that casts others out from what the genocide scholar Helen Fein calls the “universe of moral obligation.”1 Moral disengagement is supposed to be what ties dehumanization to violence. The idea is that when we think of other human beings as creatures of an inferior rank, we value them less. Their lives and suffering count for less to us, and this makes it psychologically easier for us to treat them badly. This explanation is inaccurate. Dehumanization isn’t based on differences in appearance, language, religion, and so on. In fact, dehumanizers typically seek out or invent differences to support their projects. As I’ve already mentioned, during the Nazi era, German Jews were often indistinguishable from other Germans. But that didn’t matter to the Nazis. The regime tried to discover differences between Jewish and German blood, and had to make Jews visibly different by forcing them to wear the yellow star.
Another problem with this approach is that it misrepresents the character of our attitudes toward animals. Regarding a being as an animal isn’t enough to make you want to harm it. That only happens if there’s something about the animal that elicits this sort of response. Seeing a mosquito buzzing around your head will probably result in you trying to swat it, but noticing a group of sparrows on the lawn isn’t likely to inspire you to go on a killing spree. If assigning a creature to a subhuman rank doesn’t in itself motivate violence, then the bare fact of moral disengagement isn’t enough to explain the connection between dehumanization and atrocity. That’s why Fein insists that excluding others from the universe of moral obligation is necessary but not sufficient for genocidal violence. In Rwanda, the references to Tutsis as cockroaches and snakes represented them as dirty or dangerous subhuman beings—animals that should be killed.
Here’s a better story. The desire to harm others leads to their dehumanization, rather than the other way around. It liberates antagonisms that are already there, simmering in the background and just waiting to burst out, or ratchets up violence that’s already being done. On this view, dehumanization happens when one group of people sees some advantage in doing violence to another, but members of the first group can’t square this with their moral values. Morally disengaging from the second group through thinking of them as less than human solves the problem, because it makes their actions ethically allowable. This certainly applies to the Rwanda genocide, where long-standing ethnic hostility set the stage for the outbreak of dehumanization and mayhem. In this case, as in many others, dehumanization helped transform preexisting antagonism into outright slaughter.
Although this account of how dehumanization works is more accurate than the first one that I mentioned, it’s not exactly on target either. The reason why has to do with the notion that genocide promotes moral disengagement. “Moral disengagement” is a term from the vocabulary of social psychology. It refers to the process of disabling mechanisms of self-condemnation, so that a person doesn’t feel guilt or shame when violating their own moral standards. But this phrase is misleading. To say that someone is morally disengaged from others implies that they’re indifferent to the others’ well-being. The attitude of dehumanizers toward those whom they dehumanize is anything but indifferent—it’s typically highly moralistic. Take genocidal violence. It’s almost always aimed at ridding the world of what the perpetrators believe to be some terrible evil. Consequently, those who enact even the most hideous genocidal atrocities often regard these acts as virtuous. As historian Claudia Koonz succinctly put it, “The road to Auschwitz was paved with righteousness.”2
Rather than being morally disengaged, dehumanizers are usually highly—indeed, obsessively—morally engaged with the people whom they dehumanize, and it’s this punitive and predatory form of moral engagement that stokes the fires of atrocity, fueled by moral fury.
Another reason why the concept of moral disengagement doesn’t illuminate how dehumanization works concerns the important but frequently overlooked distinction between moral taboos and nonmoral inhibitions. It’s not the case that we’re reluctant to do violence to other human beings because we feel that it’s morally wrong to do so, and that dehumanization unleashes violence because it liberates us from the burden of our moral scruples. When we see another being as human, we don’t automatically think that harming them is immoral. In fact, many believe that humans are the only beings that sometimes deserve to be hurt or killed (for example, by beating, incarceration, or capital punishment), because they’re the only beings who are morally responsible for their actions. Furthermore, even when a person believes that it’s their moral duty to kill others (for example, in combat), it’s often difficult for them to do the killing. They freeze, but not always because the act of killing conflicts with their deep moral beliefs. They freeze because of something quite different that’s going on inside their minds—something that’s nonmoral. The philosopher Richard Joyce describes this difference as the difference between prohibitions and inhibitions:
To do something because you want to do it is very different from doing it because you judge that you ought to do it. We can easily imagine a community of people all of whom have the same desires: they all want to live in peace and harmony and violence is unheard of. . . . However, there is no reason to think that there is a moral judgment in sight. These imaginary beings have inhibitions against killing, stealing, etc. They wouldn’t dream of doing those things; they just don’t want to do them. But we need not credit them with the conception of a prohibition: the idea that one shouldn’t kill or steal because to do so is wrong.3
The resistance to performing acts of violence that I’ve been discussing in this book is an inhibition, not a prohibition. It isn’t grounded in morality any more than social insects’ chemically mediated inhibitions against intra-colony violence are. The fact that ants don’t attack other members of their own colony isn’t due to any moral considerations on their part. Ants don’t have views about the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong; the restraint with which they treat their colony members is an automatic, modular, instinctive response to a chemical signal. Likewise, our inhibition against killing other human beings gets switched on automatically when we recognize another person as a human being. And when this mechanism gets overridden, dampened down, or switched off entirely—whether by dehumanization or some other process—this clears the way for viciously destructive moral fury.
The renowned political philosopher Hannah Arendt came close to articulating this in her book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann when she drew a contrast between “instinctive” (that is, automatic) recoiling from acts of lethal violence and disapproving of the same act on moral grounds. In a discussion of the Einsatzgruppen—the mobile killing units whose task it was to kill communists and Jews en masse in the wake of the German army’s incursion into Poland and the Soviet Union—she remarked that “the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering.”4 This was a problem for Nazi mass murderers. Although they are portrayed as cold-hearted killers who followed orders robotically, or as diabolically sadistic, most of the men and women who participated in the genocide had to defy their aversion to inflicting harm on others. Thirty years after Arendt’s comments, the historian Christopher Browning confirmed her insight. Here’s his description of the aftermath of one unit’s first mass shooting, the killing of around fifteen hundred Jews near the Polish village of Józefów:
They ate little but drank heavily. . . . Major Trapp made the rounds, trying to console and reassure them, and again placing responsibility on higher authorities. But neither the drink nor Trapp’s consolation could wash away the sense of shame and horror that pervaded the barracks. Trapp asked the men not to talk about it. . . . But repression during waking hours could not stop the nightmares.5
Because dehumanization isn’t some sort of oversight, it can’t be stopped or prevented by reminders that we’re all human. Dehumanization is motivated by the desire to do violence to others, and has the function of disinhibiting our worst impulses. That said, dehumanization is not, as many people claim, a mechanism of moral disengagement. The inhibitions that it undermines aren’t moral ones, and the violence that it unleashes often has an intensely moralistic tone. Focusing on what’s morally right will never put a stop to dehumanization, and well-meaning injunctions to see all members of our species as human beings won’t get us there either. Instead, we must block the processes—both psychological and political—that subvert our automatic perception of the humanness of others.