So far, I’ve concentrated on what goes on in people’s heads when they dehumanize others. But that’s only half the story. It’s a mistake to analyze dehumanization as a purely psychological phenomenon—something that arises unbidden from within. Dehumanization is a psychological response to political forces. More specifically, dehumanizing beliefs are ideological beliefs. So, to understand how dehumanization works, and to resist it effectively, we’ve got to have a clear conception of ideology.
Explaining the nature of ideology isn’t straightforward, because even though the concept is very popular, both inside and outside the academy, it has many different meanings. Sometimes it’s used in a disparaging way, to say that a belief is more a person’s political “agenda” then it is based on facts (this often gets framed as “ideology versus science”). At other times, or in other mouths, it’s used in a neutral or even a positive way to refer to a set of beliefs to which a person is committed. And there are even finer distinctions made in the scholarly literatures of political science and philosophy. Because there are so many different views about what ideology amounts to, anyone discussing it needs to be explicit about what they mean.
One conception of ideology that’s popular among philosophers these days is that ideologies are beliefs that have the function of fostering oppression. I think that this is a very useful notion of ideology, because it homes in on something important that we don’t have another term for, so I’ve adopted it. But to be really clear about what ideology is, we’ve got to push the analysis further and look closely at the two core elements of the definition: the concepts of oppression and function.
“Oppression” is a word for situations in which one group of people gets some real or imagined benefit by subjugating another group of people. It’s an intrinsically political concept, because it pertains to the distribution and deployment of power among whole groups of people rather than between individuals. People are never oppressed as individuals. They’re oppressed because of their real or imagined group identity (race, gender, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or any number of other things).
It’s tempting to think of oppression in conspiratorial terms—for example, the 1 percent plotting against the 99 percent, or men conspiring against women. But this is very often a misleading assumption. Of course, sometimes cabals do conspire to harm or exploit others, but this isn’t a necessary feature of oppression. In fact, the people who benefit from oppression need not intend to oppress others and may not even be aware they are cogs in an oppressive political, social, or economic machine.
Here’s an example. Most of the commercial chocolate that’s consumed in first-world nations is produced in West Africa, where child slaves work on cacao farms under terrible conditions. They are beaten, abused, deprived of education, and forced into long hours of dangerous and backbreaking labor. The exploitation of child labor helps the 60-billion-dollar chocolate industry to sell chocolate inexpensively and still reap large profits. So, by consuming inexpensive chocolate, we benefit from and sustain the oppression of children. It’s not just the owners of the cacao farms and the big chocolate producers who oppress African children. It’s the parents who buy their kids chocolate bunnies for Easter, and those of us who dig into the aptly named “death by chocolate” for dessert.
Now, what about the concept of function? There are several different conceptions of what functions are, but the one that’s most relevant to the notion of ideology is that the function of a thing is what that thing is for. So, the “function” of a thing could equally well be described as its “purpose,” or as what it’s “supposed to do.” Consider washing machines. The function of washing machines is to wash laundry. We could equally well express this idea by saying that washing laundry is what they’re for, or is their purpose, or is what they’re supposed to do. One important spin-off of this way of understanding function is that a thing retains its function even if it can’t perform it. A washing machine that’s broken still has the function of washing laundry. In fact, it’s because the machine doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do that we can say that it’s broken or malfunctioning (or not in the right sort of environment—for example, if it’s not plugged in).
Humanly crafted devices such as washing machines get their function from their designers’ intentions. Their functions are what their designers designed them to do. But artifacts aren’t the only kinds of things that have functions. Parts of organisms have functions too. People used to think (religious fundamentalists still think) that parts of organisms get their functions from what their designer—God—had in mind when he created them, but science gives us a better explanation. Parts of organisms have functions because evolution, not God, made them that way. Birds’ wings have the function of flight because those ancestors of modern birds that were able to fly survived longer and reproduced more effectively than their wingless conspecifics, perhaps because they were better able to avoid earthbound predators. And when the winged birds reproduced, they produced chicks with wings, and they did so much better that they gradually replaced the wingless ones. This story, or one very much like it, explains why bird wings have the function that they do (and why some birds, such as kiwis, penguins, and ostriches, evolved to be flightless).1
In a nutshell, then, the biological function of a thing is whatever effect that thing did that enabled individuals in past generations to reproduce more successfully than those without the thing. Because more individuals with that given thing made it on to the next generation, and then to the next, they became typical of their type of creature. Biological functions are “backward looking” in that they’re a consequence of a thing’s evolutionary history rather than necessarily what the thing does in the present. And just like human artifacts, parts of organisms keep their functions even when they can’t exercise them (a bird with a broken wing can’t fly, but the wing nevertheless has the function of flight).
Ideologies acquire their oppressive function in a way that’s very much like how biological items get theirs. They consist of beliefs that get reproduced and thereby spread through a population. But they aren’t reproduced biologically through the replication of genes. They’re reproduced culturally. And they’re reproduced because they promote the oppression of some group of people while benefiting another group. Ideologies are for oppression—not because they are intentionally designed that way, but rather because of the history of how and why they proliferated. Something that makes ideologies especially insidious is that they are not promoted because they are deemed to be advantageous. We don’t choose our ideologies any more than we choose our viral infections. The spread of ideologies should be seen as something akin to cognitive epidemics.
White supremacism is a clear and vivid example. White supremacism as we know it today had its roots in the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism. It emerged and spread as a result of the rise of a capitalist economy that allowed Whites to accumulate vast wealth by exploiting the labor of Blacks and indigenous Americans, and its function was to oppress these people by justifying their enslavement and abuse. Because the circumstances of Africans and Native Americans were importantly different in key respects, I’ll confine myself here to discussing the oppression of the former.
To say that slavery was big business is a vast understatement. Its scale was enormous. By the year 1820, more than 10 million enslaved Africans had survived the journey to the New World (80 percent of those who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas at the time were Africans). The slave-driven economy was, in the words of the historian David Brion Davis, “the world’s first system of multinational production for what emerged as a mass market—a market for slave-produced sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, dye-stuffs, rice, hemp, and cotton.”2 Many of Britain’s opulent and stately homes were built on the backs and blood of these enslaved people laboring, and often being worked to death, in the hellish colonies of the New World. Likewise, the economic powerhouse of antebellum America depended on the labor of enslaved people. In 1861 the state of Mississippi—now the most impoverished of states—had more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else in the nation; taken together, the Confederate states had the third largest economy in the world, and were home to around 4 million enslaved human beings.
It’s a mistake to think that wealthy people living in opulent homes were the sole beneficiaries of the trade in human flesh. Business boomed for merchants, shipbuilders, insurers, blacksmiths, distributors, and many others. Transatlantic slavery was a child of unfettered capitalism. Its ramifications seeped into every corner of life, and did not disappear in 1865. American slavery, and the dehumanizing attitudes that sustained it, gave rise to the brutal institutions of Jim Crow—in effect, the re-enslavement of Black Americans. This is a hideous legacy that White Americans have yet to honestly face, as is evidenced by their consistent refusal to seriously examine the issue of reparations—not just for slavery—but for the generations of oppression that Black citizens have endured.
Most of the people who benefitted from slavery weren’t moral monsters. In fact, paradoxically, it was precisely because they weren’t moral monsters that they performed or were complicit in morally monstrous acts. Let me dissolve the appearance of contradiction. Most of the people who benefitted from slavery were ordinary people with normal moral sensibilities who lived in an era that celebrated ideals of liberty, autonomy, and universal human rights. But their moral sensibilities created a problem for them. If Africans were human beings, enslaving them would be immorally intolerable. But if Black people weren’t enslaved, the mighty economic engine that slavery fed would slow down and grind to a halt. This conflict between fellow feeling and the love of money was an ideal incubator for the belief that Black people were primitive, subhuman beings that could be exploited with impunity.
The ideology of White supremacy wasn’t deliberately crafted as a strategy for oppressing Black people. Rather, the belief in Black inferiority spread among Whites because it benefitted them, and therefore became attractive and easy for them to believe. And as colonialism surged, the belief in Black inferiority—which in its most extreme forms descended to grotesque and blatant forms of dehumanization—proliferated like a virus, reproducing again and again, and spreading through the population.
Like all other ideological beliefs, dehumanization plays the political role of fostering oppression, but this is only possible because political forces mesh with our propensity for psychological essentialism and hierarchical thinking. Like all ideologies, it’s a product of social contagion. Powerful social forces, interacting with equally powerful psychological ones, produce altered states of consciousness in those affected by them—states of consciousness that cause them to see other human beings, often very vulnerable ones, as less than human. Once they’ve taken root, we are liable to perform acts of atrocity that we would never have imagined ourselves capable of performing.
I mean this seriously. It’s easy to imagine that you would be immune from such influences. You might think that, had you been a German in 1938, you would have resisted the regime, or that if you were a wealthy Southerner in 1850, you would have renounced owning slaves. You very probably believe that if you had lived as a White person in the Jim Crow South, you would never have wanted to watch a Black man being tortured, mutilated, and burned to death, or that if you had been a Rwandan Hutu in 1994, you would have never raised a machete against your Tutsi neighbors.
If you harbor thoughts like these, it’s possible that they are true, but it’s far more likely that they are false. It’s easy to be moral heroes in our fantasies. Dehumanization isn’t something that’s a choice. Imagining that it’s something that’s within our conscious control is to greatly underestimate its danger. There’s a lesson here that needs to be taken to heart by anyone who wants to resist dehumanization. The more confident you are of your ability to resist dehumanization, the more vulnerable you are likely to be to its uncanny power.